There were other times Dad’s public life came up against his private one, like when he brought clients to our home to wine and dine them. Upstairs, Irene and her children would be decked out in their finest for a delectable meal. His worldly clients never knew that downstairs, his other family was huddled in the murky shadows, munching crackers.
Mom used those times in the dark to whisper to us her most dramatic childhood memories as we hung on to every word. On one of these nights, she recounted how Governor John Howard Pyle of Arizona instigated a raid in 1953 on our forebears in Short Creek (which later became the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona).
“Since our family was well-known among the people for our musical talent,” she murmured, “we all came into town to provide entertainment for the 24th of July celebration of 1953. We spent a few days in our Short Creek home, and had so much fun! My father let us relax before going back to the ranch—a rare luxury for us. We were happy we were going to share the Sabbath with our friends and family.
“I was only three years old… but I remember being woken up in the wee hours of that Sunday morning. My father had received a tip-off that authorities were closing in, and we quietly slipped out of town in our nightclothes, minutes before the authorities raided!” I imagined myself having to flee from police in my long nightgown. Every time a chair creaked upstairs, I jumped.
“That day, just before dawn on July 26, 1953, over one hundred Arizona state police officers and soldiers from the Arizona National Guard came into the tiny town. They took every man, woman, and child into custody. They literally ripped children away from weeping mothers and fathers.” I gasped.
“We were so lucky Daddy had made us hightail it back to our ranch, more than two and a half hours away. At first, they didn’t try to come after us, though we were watching for them. Heartbreaking stories poured in of young believers who were forced into foster homes in Phoenix—far from anything and anyone they had ever known. Then we got word that the raid was broadening to surrounding communities.
“Daddy and all of my mothers told us it was 1944 all over again, with raids to stop the Work from progressing and to scare the families into submission to the law. Nineteen forty-four was the year your grandpa was excommunicated from the Mormon Church for believing in the Principle and marrying Mama Olive, Mama Vilate, and Mama Kloe. That’s when he became a target for the smaller raids, all the way up until 1953. But my father promised he wouldn’t let us get taken by a lawman.
“My brothers were like sentinels. They watched main roads and fields like hawks. One early-warning signal was dust rising from the roads, which gave us plenty of time to hide! We had practiced drills, so we knew what to do. It was our duty to take cover in the rafters of our attic, to be quiet and still so that our father wouldn’t get caught, and no one would know how many children he had.” Suddenly my mother’s voice became small, as if she was three again. I swore I could feel her body trembling.
“When our mothers sent us up there, we were compelled to be as still as death. I was terrified my little foot would break through the ceiling or, worse, that lawmen would arrest my father on bigamy, and take every one of us sixty children to Gentile foster homes far away.”
“Mama?” inquired little Trevor, his whisper filled with fear. “Why did the ’thorities want to take you away?” He began to howl. “Why do they want to take us away?”
Mom shushed him quickly and held him in her arms for a long moment, until Amelia whined and pushed her way back into place. The lines in my mother’s face etched a little deeper.
“The people upstairs are not the authorities; they are Gentiles,” she whispered gently. “We can’t take the chance that they wouldn’t tell if they knew. Just as it was important for me to be so quiet in our attic, you must be as quiet as a mouse down here. Daddy is counting on us, just as my father counted on us back then. The Work has a lot of enemies, Trevor. As God’s people we must face persecution. It’s our test, to see if we can remain faithful.” She looked around at each of us. “We have the truth, and the devil will inspire the Gentiles and the government to try to destroy us. But Heavenly Father won’t let that happen if we stay the course. As long as we remain true to the Work, God has promised we will survive the destructions, and all the bad people out there will be destroyed.”
We sat huddled in somber silence. Uncle Roy talked about the destructions in church nearly every Sunday. People would whisper about the things Gentiles would do to us if they caught us. That was why it was safest to play in the backyard, surrounded by the camouflage of trees. That was also why we had to put up with Aunt Irene, and the ugliness that pervaded our home. The destructions were upon us, and we had to hold together so we wouldn’t be destroyed.
After Dad had quit working for Morton Thiokol under Uncle Roy’s orders, his new business began to thrive. He often had to travel far from home, which made us daily victims of Irene’s demonic rages. Some of her children refused to participate in the abuse, but others realized what they could get away with during Dad’s absences.
Uncle Roy taught the women straight from the pulpit to put away their jealousies and criticisms. He admonished wives to “treat each other’s children as if they were your own.” Irene took that to a whole new level, and she would come down and snatch any one of us she wanted for a beating, especially when Mom was at work. The older children devised an ingenious way to prevent entrance, by wedging our small jogging trampoline against the door. Diligently we kept an ear out for that first telltale screech or slammed door. Christine would send scouts to grab those playing in the backyard. When they rushed in, we locked the door and hunkered down together. Our only safety was in numbers, but even then, we each experienced times when we were just not that lucky.
How I wanted to forget the stormy day I had been playing with my tattered dolls on the hard wooden floor. I was dressed in my favorite blue gingham dress. The skirt had ruffles on the bottom, and the yoke on the top had beautiful white eyelet lace with black ribbon woven through it. I pretended I was a beautiful mommy, and my dolls were my babies.
That day, Irene had gone food shopping, which meant there was a more easygoing feeling throughout the house. Two of her children, Victoria and Timothy, came downstairs to play, but the others were outside. Christine and Savannah were busy taking care of the youngest ones. My half brother Sterling sauntered down the carpeted steps and into the area where I sat with my dolls.
Sterling, a heavyset blond with greasy hair who had never paid me much attention, was one of Irene’s favorite children. He could do no wrong in her eyes. More than once, however, I had seen Irene beat another son, Samuel, to a pulp, almost as if he were one of us. Similarly, she gushed over her daughter Janet but would beat Cindy nearly senseless if one of my full siblings wasn’t within reach.
“Becky,” Sterling said quietly, as if letting me in on a secret, “how would you like to play with Lillian’s new doll?” My eyes lit up. Lillian was younger than me, but she had beautiful dolls that she played with in front of me on purpose. Sterling smiled and held his hand out to me. I reached for it, a bit puzzled, and he led me up the stairs. Fearfully, I peeked around the door at the top. Except as a baby, I had only ever been allowed to go upstairs during family Sunday School. I glanced out the window to see that Irene’s car was still gone, and finally exhaled.
Sterling led me past the Formica kitchen table and chairs down the hall, and into what I suddenly realized must be his bedroom. Why did Sterling have Lillian’s doll in his room? I turned in time to watch Sterling close and lock his door, his eyes glazed over. He grabbed my wrists roughly, binding them easily with one of his hands, leaving the other to travel beneath my dress and tug on my underpants. I squirmed and twisted for what felt like an eternity, but I could not escape his clutches. I couldn’t understand why he was doing this to me. All I knew was that it hurt. Tears streamed down my cheeks, but he paid no attention. At one point he finally released my wrists to free up both of his
hands, and I rushed past him and fled to the door, barely unlocking it before he could get to me. Racing down the hall, I ran straight into something solid.
I looked up into Irene’s face.
My stepmother looked down at me in surprise, her dyed black hair perfectly coiffed as usual, with a French twist in the back. She took in the terrified expression on my face and then glanced up to see Sterling slowly closing the door to his room. When she peered back down at me, she glared with a hatred she usually reserved for my mother.
“You little whore!” she snarled. With one hand she picked me up by the neck of my dress and dragged me into her room. Seeing another door locked behind me, I began to panic, but I didn’t dare move. She stood me up brutally against the bed and tugged my underwear again, but this time up into its rightful place. Then she grabbed my braids with vicious cruelty, to hold me while she slapped me over and over.
“It’s your fault!” she shrieked. “It’s all your fault that Sterling did this to you… you did this to Sterling. You made Sterling do this. You’re such a little flirt! You’re just a whore like your mother, you piece of shit!”
I don’t know how many times the flat of her rigid palm lay into me, but I didn’t dare look up. I noticed blood splatter against the white, lace-yoked collar of my dress, but even then she did not stop. Rage had overcome her. A torrent of blood poured from my nose and mouth onto the collar and down to the ruffle of my skirt, which was now no longer white. I felt numb and could not cry.
Then unexpectedly, as if a switch had been flipped, Irene collected herself and looked at me, as if for the first time. With dead calm she gripped me again by one of my long braids and dragged me into her bathroom. There she began to scrub my dress roughly with icy cold water. She scrubbed my swollen face and cleaned the blood from it, and finally scoured the collar and ruffle of my dress with a bar of soap until they were white again. Then she bent down to meet my eyes with that same calibrated look of hatred.
“This is all your fault, you whore, you hear me?” she threatened. “If you ever tell anyone, I will kill your mother.”
Drenched and trembling with buried sobs, I could barely breathe as Irene thrust me down to the stairwell. I opened the door and Christine’s tender eyes and warm smile greeted me from across the room.
“There you are!” she said in surprise. “We’ve been looking for you!” She looked at me a little more carefully. “Are you all right?” I wanted to run to her, to be enfolded in her arms, to tell her everything that had just happened.
Rooted at the spot, I wondered how I could answer that question. I glanced over my shoulder, into the gloom of the stairwell, where the door was opened four or five inches. Irene’s eyes stared back at me. I couldn’t unburden myself. Not now. Not ever.
“I’m… okay,” I lied, and walked toward Christine, letting her lead me away from Irene’s sight line. I heard the door shut quietly behind me. I took off my dress and never wore it again, complaining it was too tight in the arms. In a way, it was. I never said a word, not wanting to put my mother at risk. But I did promise myself that I would never be that vulnerable again. I learned to run fast—faster than any of my classmates. I could outrun any of my brothers, and especially any of my half brothers. By the time I was in first grade, I made sure I was so fast that no one could ever catch me again.
CHAPTER 2
The Devil You Know
In her last trimester with the twins, Mom’s belly seemed gigantic, and exhaustion was etched into her beautiful face. Aunt Lydia, the midwife in Hildale, told Mom to take it easy so that she wouldn’t deliver prematurely. Mom felt it necessary to continue at HydraPak as long as she could—to please my father and support our growing family.
Everyone seemed eager for the twins to arrive, except Irene. Their birth would mean that Mom and Irene would have an equal number of children, so Irene could no longer hold that over my mother’s head. In addition, Irene had stopped bearing children, while our mother, who was much younger, wasn’t slowing down. I did not know how my father treated Irene behind closed doors, but he continued to stay with her on her allotted nights. Nevertheless, jealousy seemed to well within her like a deadly sickness.
Mom didn’t work every day after Amelia was born, but on the days she left for HydraPak, the preventions we put into place just weren’t enough. One day, Irene caught Cole alone. I found out much later she had almost beat him to death, rupturing one kidney and causing massive internal bleeding. He had gone to school the next day but began urinating blood. Mom and Dad rushed him to the emergency room, and that night, Irene invited the rest of my siblings upstairs for dinner. We slowly emerged from the basement stairwell, anxious and disoriented by our stepmother’s unfamiliar sweetness. Once we were seated, she told us that Cole had gotten very sick and had to be hospitalized from drinking too much water.
I pushed my glass away as if it were poison. Our people rarely went to doctors. We distrusted the medical industry—their meticulous, damning records and connections to the government. Once I had to get stitches in my forehead, and I was more afraid of the Gentile doctor than of the stitches themselves. I was relieved to have my father remove them ten days later. Not long after that, I had been playing on the porch on a hand-me-down bicycle. It had no seat and a rusted-out frame and was way too tall for me. When I went over a step and lost control, I gouged myself in my privates and felt the most painful burning sensation before passing out. Mom and Grandma Wall found me and carried me into the house. When I awoke, despite the severe bleeding, my mother doctored me up at home, using a baby medicine dropper to remove blood, and cutting some loose membrane with scissors. We knew that if our parents had taken Cole to see a doctor—especially to the hospital, it could only be for something exceptionally serious. As I glanced around the table I noticed not one of us touched our water.
Irene’s behavior remained sickly sweet for several days, but it didn’t last. Less than a month after Cole’s hospitalization, rumors made their way to our father that Uncle Roy was attending church that Sunday. The Prophet had been in poor health, and we hadn’t seen much of him lately. Dad decided it was important to make a showing—and that our mother should finally accompany him. Christine and Savannah were old enough to stay home to watch Trevor and Amelia, so the rest of us kids could go. Our family piled into the backseat of Dad’s brown Buick, while Mom sat next to him in the passenger seat, radiant with appreciation for her husband. Irene was conspicuously absent, having thrown a loud tantrum all morning.
Just as he took his foot off the brake, Irene dashed out of the house brandishing a heavy iron frying pan. Her voice shattered the air as she shrieked, “I will kill those little shits!” The ugly snarl on her face suddenly contorted in surprise as Dad stared at her and, with great deliberation, put the car in reverse. He backed slowly out of the short driveway and whipped the car forward up Cascade Way, where we could still hear her threats. He did not slow until he got to the corner, where I noticed him hesitate, checking his rearview mirror. I glanced back to see Irene on the edge of the drive, still brandishing her weapon.
Would the victim be Trevor, who needed constant attention for illnesses, or tiny, towheaded Amelia, still a toddler? Neither of them was a match for a lunatic with a frying pan. Still, I was most afraid for tender, nurturing Savannah. Six years older than me, Savannah was almost ethereally beautiful, and she seemed to incite Irene’s foulest abuse—more so than Samuel and Cole combined. Dad turned on the blinker, ready to round the corner. He hesitated again and glanced at my mother.
“I’m afraid she’ll really do it this time, Sharon.” He breathed in defeat, as he turned the car around. I felt a great sense of relief until I looked at my mom’s crestfallen face. Once again, my father caved in to his first wife’s manipulations.
As Mom got nearer to her term, my siblings and I prepared to visit Short Creek, where we would go whenever she was ready to deliver a new baby or when there was a special celebration taking place among our people. Short Cr
eek, or the Creek (pronounced “Crick”) as it was known by locals, was nestled among the stunning, crimson-faced cliffs and vistas of southern Utah. Short Creek’s dusty, red-dirt streets in the twin cities of Hildale and Colorado City allowed us to walk freely among hundreds of our own kind without hiding. Our family was shown great deference by the locals. Even though Steed blood was relatively “fresh” among the people, Grandfather’s very large family meant we were related to almost every single person in the town and outlying areas, if not by blood, then by marriage. Grandfather Steed was a well-respected polygamist who had survived the raids with both his family and his pride intact.
Most often we stayed at Grandpa Steed’s Short Creek residence, a unique building that had been added onto a bit at a time as the family flourished and grew. While the rusty, dirt-stained stucco home wasn’t even remotely dazzling by worldly standards, it was beautiful to me. I loved all of Grandfather Steed’s wives, and most of them treated us with great affection. I hadn’t always known that Mama Alice was my mother’s mother—they all treated her as one of their own. There was always a loving lap to sit on and a delicious smell coming from the large kitchen.
The twins, Joshua Roy Wall and Jordan Roy Wall, were born on the Prophet’s birthday, June 12, 1982. With the naming, Uncle Roy was being doubly honored on his birthday. Their birth was an occasion for a glorious celebration among the whole community. Aunt Lydia, the midwife, happened to be a wife of Hildale’s bishop, Fred Jessop. While she had never gone to medical school or had babies of her own, Aunt Lydia had a special gift for delivering them. She had exceptional skills that local doctors and nurses respected—and we could keep the births hidden from the government.
The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice Page 2