Shattered Dreams

by Irene Spencer

  For a few months during the construction of the fourplex, my mother, brothers, sisters, and I lived in our neighbor’s chicken coop. I was only four years old the night lightning flashes from a threatening line of thunderstorms woke me. Soon the rain was seeping through the coop’s torn, tar-papered roof, soaking me to the skin. The next day we moved into our house, though its rooms still lacked even partitions or plaster. We used blankets for dividers, but at least Dad had his whole family under one roof. Aunt Rhea and Mother lived upstairs, while wives three and four lived below. Eventually, each would have her own all-important and much-utilized kitchen. We thought our fourplex a fairly comfortable arrangement for everyone concerned. Still, my four “mothers” suffered in ways I was too young to understand.

  It took just one night for us to discover that our old mattresses had been contaminated while we’d been sleeping in the chicken coop. When we moved into the house, the bedbugs came right along with us. We children cried, thrashing around all night, scratching our bites until they bled. Mother turned on the lights and killed the vermin as we squirmed beneath the covers. (I can still remember the unique stench of squashed bedbugs.) The next morning, Mother hauled the mattresses into the August sun and searched each one individually. She stretched the seams where the creatures hid and multiplied, and then she poured hot, scalding water from her teakettle down the folds on the mattresses’ sides. After the hot sun dried them, Mother returned them to our bedroom, but the pesky bugs kept snacking on us, and she finally realized they had migrated into the framed walls, hiding where the two-by-fours were nailed together. She fought them continually until the day we moved away.

  DESPITE THE LONG HOURS he put in, Dad’s modest income always fell far short of our needs. To make up for it, Mother and her sister wives had to be on their toes and working as a team. Creativity and compassion also came in pretty handy. On many occasions, they had to pull together for mere survival.

  One opportunity for some major pulling together came in 1942—a year in which the winter arrived early and set in heavy along the Wasatch Mountains. A late-September snow that year caught three pregnant wives unexpectedly. Rachel, Ellen, and Rhea were all with child and couldn’t work outside in the cold. This left my mother to do all the harshest chores for the ever-growing family.

  In this bitter cold, Mother gathered fuel for the stove. She recruited three of the older children from Rhea and Ellen’s families and two of her own. Though they lacked rubber boots for their feet or hats for their bare heads, their mothers tried to bundle the workers up, pulling odd stockings over their hands for gloves. These stretched up to their elbows and were held in place by their tattered, secondhand coats.

  Thus attired, the ragtag work team emerged from our fourplex and traipsed along silently in the fresh-fallen snow, each member carrying a gunnysack. They snuck into a neighbor’s orchard, lured there by its stark, bare trees, and then scoured the white fields for already fallen, more flammable plunder. Breaking branches into small enough lengths to fit into the cloth sacks, they worked for over an hour as the small children’s hands became numb. Mother spurred them to hold their sacks open wide so she could fill each one, shoving in just the amount each child could carry home. When I saw the red faces and stiff, cold hands of the work crew as it returned home, I was glad my mother ignored my tearful pleas to go along.

  Each morning, Mother would repeat her foray. Gunnysacks in hand, she’d take a few of us on a “walk,” and we’d pick up old shoes, pieces of crates, and broken branches along the way, always trying to gather enough fuel for the day’s needs. When we were lucky, the scavenged odds and ends would burn long enough in one stove for each wife to have a turn cooking. Sometimes there wasn’t enough for them to light four separate fires in their kitchens. This was just as well. The warmth from that one woodstove generally took the chill off the room in which we huddled together for comfort during those cold winter months.

  The four wives humbled themselves before God daily, asking and waiting for him to supply their needs as it became more apparent that Dad could not. At some point, we were left with cornmeal as our only staple, though once each week, we could get a two-day supply of watered-down milk. Mother finally decided that it just wasn’t good enough. One day she announced she was taking three of the older kids with her, and they would return only after they’d found something with which to feed the family. Aunt Rhea took her aside and scolded her for building up our hopes falsely, but Mother was determined to procure anything she could to nourish the famished tribe. Having done God’s bidding for eleven years now, she expected him to come through for her in this dark hour. Tucking three heavy paper grocery bags under her arm, she led the way out the door and headed toward the nearby fields, where new houses were fast going up.

  Mother sang praises to the Almighty as they marched along. She recited a Bible verse, asserting “ye have not, because ye ask not.” With what little personal experience in prayer the children had, they implored their maker to send them some rations.

  As they approached the construction area, Mother saw a man with a wheelbarrow coming in their direction. She received a premonition and exclaimed to the kids, “I know that whatever that man is dumping on the ground is the answer to our prayers!” My siblings waited quietly while the man returned to his garage, then came back out with his wheelbarrow full a second time. He dumped the contents on top of the first load and then went back inside. He hadn’t seemed to notice the little clan standing by, stomping their feet and eyeing his debris. Mother waited about ten minutes, until she was satisfied the man had completed his job. She had no clue what he had deposited, but she knew it would soon be hers.

  When she thought it safe, they made a run for it. Mother wanted to cry with joy as she knelt before the heap. Sure enough, God gave us heavenly manna—a magnificent pile of dirty, sprouting potatoes. If she managed it right, this windfall would feed Dad’s family for two full weeks. The gleeful kids loaded up their paper bags. Mother instructed them to walk the potatoes home slowly so the bags wouldn’t tear open and scatter our treasure down the street. They should then return to the potato pile with our empty wicker baby buggy and two strong gunnysacks, being extra quiet on the way back so as not to draw the attention of any of our nosey, monogamous Mormon neighbors. Mother couldn’t bear letting those disapproving tongue-waggers see us scrounging out such a minimal existence.

  But the emotions of the three hungry children ran high. They made a clatter probably heard for a block as they raced along behind the ragged buggy, preoccupied with tantalizing visions of hot potato soup.

  THE MORMON CHURCH SLOUGHED off many of its basic beliefs beginning late in the nineteenth century, largely under pressure from the civil authorities who outlawed the practice of polygamy, which many Mormons considered integral to their faith. For a brief time after 1890, when they issued the first manifesto renouncing plural marriage, even some of the church leaders continued to privately profess and practice the Principle. They had sent believers to form polygamist colonies across the western United States and as far away as Mexico with orders to safeguard the faith. But political pressures eventually prevailed. A second manifesto, in 1904, ended the practice of polygamy within the Mormon Church, now called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or just Latter Day Saints (LDS). The command to live plural marriage was suspended; LDS men were to have only one wife.

  Torn between God’s law and man’s law, those who refused to give up plural marriage had to go into hiding. Some of them fled to Mexico; others went underground within their own communities. Despite the transformed doctrines of the LDS Church, these spiritual refugees considered themselves the true Mormons, the faithful followers of Joseph Smith and his initial converts. Their mission now was urgent—to preserve the faith in a time of dark apostasy. More than ever, they believed, the Principle must be lived and lived strictly. Known as fundamentalists, we were their descendents.

  By the time I came along, fundamentalist Mormons were
a huge embarrassment to the LDS Church. And the fundamentalists, in turn, both resented and envied the LDS. We considered ourselves the chosen ones, the pure in heart, the true “Zion.” And the LDS, having abandoned the Principle, were merely worldly. In a way they were worse than the world, since they’d once known the light and gave it up. We prayed for their return.

  In the meantime, we hid. And while we hid, we had to eat and breathe the Principle, continually pumping ourselves up in it so we could withstand the world and the church thinking it wrong. We shielded ourselves from outside influences and tried hard to value persecution as proof of our righteousness. One form persecution took was exclusion from our own temple, the temple the prophet Brigham Young (successor to Joseph Smith) longed to see finished throughout the years he’d faithfully lived and taught plural marriage. The only polygamists ever allowed in now were those masquerading as LDS members or who had not yet personally acted on the Principle.

  Yes, the LDS apostates chose the easy path, leaving us to slink about in the shadows. And then they had the nerve to treat us as undesirables.

  HOW WELL I STILL remember my first day of school. Before that morning, I’d only left the Farm to visit the homes of family friends, to go to Sunday meetings (also at friends’ homes), and on one very special occasion, to attend a family picnic at Murray Park. The expedition to Lincoln Elementary School would be my debut into the world—an event mandated by the state, anticipated by me, and feared by my family. The adults in our household worked hard to prepare us.

  “You are the special, chosen ones,” they told us even more often than usual. “Very few of your classmates will be children of the covenant, so you’ll have to be careful of them. Don’t let them influence you. Don’t listen to their talk or play their games or read their books. Remember, you are chosen; you must keep yourselves pure.

  “Now, don’t feel bad if they call you names. We have to welcome persecution. It just proves you’re the chosen ones, not them.

  “Oh, and don’t talk to anyone about the Principle.”

  When the time came, we—the eldest thirteen of the twenty-one children born to my father thus far—left our fourplex in a pack and began the trek to the school. I walked between Joseph and Mary, holding their hands, as excited as we were united. The three of us had all turned five and were going to begin kindergarten. I had on my new, blue and white checkered dress (homemade from printed flour sack material), my brother Richard’s worn tennis shoes that were a size too big, and ribbons in my braided hair.

  Our older siblings told us younger ones to walk fast and ignore the insults from the teenage kids who ran past, throwing rocks at us and yelling, “Ha, ha, there go the pligs!” I didn’t understand what “plig” meant (it was short for “polygamist”), but by the way my brothers and sisters acted, I knew it must be a dirty word. It was a label I’d be branded with for years to come. Knowing myself to be a “special child of God,” I was always left to wonder why these kids would be so cruel to me.

  My ten-year-old brother, Roger, escorted Joseph, Mary, and me to the unfamiliar kindergarten classroom. It was the teacher’s first year at that school. Roger gave her our birth certificates and a paper with our address and phone number on it. After he left for his own class, the teacher smiled, looking at our papers, and asked, “You’re triplets, aren’t you?”

  I, being the bravest of the three, answered, “No, ma’am.”

  “Are any of you twins?” I shook my head no. A bewildered look crossed her face. “How can you be brothers and sisters and all be five?”

  I wondered how the teacher could be so stupid. “We’ve all got the same father. We live in the same house. But Mary’s mom is Ellen, Joseph’s mom is Rachel, and my mom is Olive.”

  I’ll never forget her horror. She stammered, “You—you—you mean your father has . . . three different wives?” She looked shocked.

  I answered obediently, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Gasping, she continued, “You mean to tell me he lives with all three wives . . . in the same house?”

  I thought maybe she was slighting my dad’s first wife, Aunt Rhea, so I clarified. “Oh no, my dad has four wives.” Then I added, bragging, “But tonight it’s his turn to sleep with Mom.”

  The new teacher got up from her desk and curtly left the room to confer with the school principal, who it turned out was familiar with polygamist children because they’d infiltrated his school in the past. While we waited for the teacher’s return, the whole class kept staring at the three of us. Young as I was, I felt something was amiss. I began to suspect we weren’t being given the respect “chosen children of God” deserved. By lunchtime, my classmates had poked such fun at me—about my floppy tennis shoes and our many mothers—that I was finally reduced to tears.

  Later that same year, I was kneeling down and accidentally stepped on my fading flour-sack dress, tearing the seam at the waist and revealing my flour-sack panties. I was sick about being seen that way by the other children. My teacher supplied a couple of safety pins to hold the torn skirt in place, but the damage had been done.

  Our polygamy and our poverty made us different, but it also bonded us to each other, especially as our sense of conspicuousness and persecution heightened. We got by on bare necessities, sometimes wanting even for those, while the other kids routinely enjoyed what we knew were great blessings: a new pair of shoes to start each school year, store-bought clothes now and then, and the acceptance of our teachers, administrators, and one another.

  I began to hate school and to long for the safety of home.

  WE HAD ONLY ONE CAR, which Dad took every day to work. His wives rode the bus when they had to go shopping or do other errands, and the rest of us rarely went anywhere except to school and to meet or visit with other fundamentalists. Extracurricular school activities were generally off-limits as well.

  All we were allowed to read, aside from what we were assigned by our teachers, were the Mormon scriptures and a running exposition of those scriptures titled Truth Magazine, published monthly by one of our dear fundamentalist brethren. By Mormon scriptures, I refer loosely to the Book of Mormon, divinely received, translated, and passed down by our prophet Joseph Smith; the Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of literature on the Mormon faith and revelations on church governance; the Christian Bible, as corrected by Smith in the Inspired Version; and other Mormon books, such as the Pearl of Great Price, the Journal of Discourses, and later The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. These formed the inventory of our indoctrination.

  My aunt Rhea was the spiritual engine within our household. She was pious, serious, and devoted to the Principle. Sure it was the only way to please God and attain glory, she meant for the rest of us to be pious, serious, and devoted to the Principle as well. Whenever I got up early enough in the morning, I could find Aunt Rhea still poring over her scriptures or the newest Truth Magazine, steeling herself on the proper ends and means for living plural marriage.

  These truths, moreover, were the topic of most every conversation I was privy to whenever friends came by for visits or when we went visiting. The adults discussed the Principle while they cooked and while they sewed, and we prayed about it daily as a family. At Sunday meetings, we children were divided and taught the Principle in age-appropriate doses and concentrations, while in the main room the grown-ups were reminded weekly why they were doing what they were doing and how to do it better. Every precept at every level of our comprehension seemed to support that central call on our lives—to live polygamy. Here is just a sampling of the truths that, over time, became even more real to us than our hunger or our jealousy or the disdain of our neighbors:

  1. As chosen vessels of God, we were held in Heaven to come forth in these latter days to live the Celestial Law. In fact, while our spirits were still with God in the preexistence, we chose to be born at this precise time for the very purpose of living polygamy.

  2. We were to stay separate from the world, keeping ourselves innocent of its cul
ture, values, and various entanglements.

  3. We were to obey God at all times and costs, even if we had to break the laws of the land to do it. The prophet Brigham Young emphasized that we should welcome persecution, for if it ceased, we could be sure we had fallen from God’s favor.

  4. All men who reached the age of eighteen were to be received into the higher priesthood if they also believed the Mormon scriptures, prayed faithfully, obeyed the Word of Wisdom (did not smoke or drink coffee, tea, or alcohol), and pledged to practice plural marriage. These men (also referred to as brethren) were thereby competent to participate in priesthood activities and to get married, lead their families, and receive God’s divine revelations.

  5. Women were only to marry men who held the priesthood, because no one else could pull them through the veil. Once married, wives had to obey their husbands strictly.

  6. The brethren were to be respected and obeyed, their wisdom and dictates never questioned. (After all, they were the vehicles of God’s priesthood and served as his mouthpieces.)

  7. We were to be loyal to the brethren and protect them from the scrutiny and interference of outsiders at all times. In short, we were never to talk about our fundamentalist brothers and sisters to anyone.

  These various components of our gospel may not have been set out for us quite so bluntly, but this was their gist. It was a handy bunch of mandates for safeguarding such a countercultural lifestyle. But sometimes it was an awful lot to put on children.

  WHEN I GOT OLDER, my father and four of his wives lived near another large, polygamous family named Kelsch. My association with these kids was mostly on Sundays, when both families met together in the Kelsch home to be taught the gospel.