Shattered Dreams

by Irene Spencer

  One particular Saturday morning, seven of Dad’s kids took off running to Murray Park, with eight of the Kelsch kids trailing our heels. We wanted to be first in line for free swimming lessons, so we got there early and waited almost an hour for the swimming pool to open.

  Finally, a slim, severe-looking woman in a blue one-piece bathing suit unlocked the gate. She instructed us to stay in line and keep the noise down.

  Joseph, Mary, and I signed up first. The three of us were now ten years old. Next was my sister Rula, who was twelve, sisters Nan and Norma, who were both eight, and Millie, seven. We seven gave the woman our same address.

  This went along pretty well and without incident until the eight Kelsch kids started signing up. Two were six, two were eight, two were ten, and two were twelve. It was then the swimming teacher realized all fifteen kids had only two last names and two addresses. She threw her pen down with an air of authority and said, “Somebody here is trying to be funny. I’ll send every one of you home, and you can’t swim unless you tell me the truth.”

  The air went dead. We’d been cautioned never to tell anyone we were polygamists unless it was an emergency. I reasoned instantly that since Mother and Dad couldn’t pay for swimming lessons and these were free, the truth had to be told. As far as I could see, this was an emergency.

  Acting as spokesperson, I stepped closer to the table. I lowered my voice, trying to avert any more of the uncalled-for attention we’d already received. “L-L-Lady,” I stuttered, hoping she was smart enough to understand, “we all have different mothers, but we have the same dad.” To avoid further complication, I added, “We really do have the same address. It’s the same with these Kelsch kids, and . . .”

  She looked more dumfounded with each word I spoke. Picking up her pen, she tilted her head at a quizzical angle and interrupted me midsentence. She pointed to the two ten-year-old Kelsch kids. “You’re half brothers?” she asked, astounded. They nodded.

  “Now, you two are half brothers, right?” she asked the twelve year olds. They, too, nodded.

  She got excited, clearly thinking she’d finally figured this mess out. She thrust her pen at each age group in rapid succession, using it to separate them as she went along. “Now, you’re half ?” They nodded. “You’re full and you’re half?” Her pen went back and forth. Finally, she yelled at little eight-year-old Dale Kelsch, whose mind by this time had wandered onto other things. “Hey, kid, are you full?”

  He looked up at her in total earnestness and said in a timid voice, “No, ma’am, I’m hungry.”

  We all broke up laughing as the lady sat there with a dazed look on her face. Finally, in disgust, she waved her arms, giving us all permission to go into the pool.

  After that confusion, I realized why Dad always refused to allow us to call one another half brothers or half sisters. To him, and eventually to us as well, all his children were simply brothers and sisters.

  AS I GOT OLDER, I began to stew about some of our fundamentalist doctrines. If Adam was God, for example, whom did he disobey? I was told such questions showed disrespect and a lack of faith. “Be quiet and believe,” I would hear from my older brothers and my devout aunt Rhea.

  Another time I actually raised my hand in a Sunday school class and asked how it could be that the godly brethren we knew—all of whom were someone’s sons—could one day receive their own worlds to populate and rule and at the same time be required to help their fathers to populate theirs.

  The question was disallowed, and I learned quickly that our faith had a lot more to do with righteous practice than understanding. My worries turned from the beliefs themselves to how well we were living them. Were we succeeding? And when my turn came, would I know what to do and be able to do it?

  CHAPTER TWO

  A teaching that was to have a grave impact on how I lived my life can be summed up quite simply as follows: people fail the Principle, but the Principle itself never fails. The way it was put to us was really more like a challenge, even a dare: plural marriage will damn more people than it saves precisely because so few who attempt it will be able to live up to such a high calling. When families splintered, when spouses delved into unrighteousness, when children of the covenant lacked the courage to live polygamy for themselves, it was always the fault of human weakness and sin, never a problem with the Principle.

  Over the years, in a great variety of ways, we saw so many of our number fail—some of them our own parents, or worse still, our leaders. The odd effect on me and on many others was to make us resolve all the harder to be among those who prevailed. If glory was that hard to attain, it must be well worth having. Besides, what was our alternative?

  I WAS TOO YOUNG to comprehend the problems among my father and his four wives, but soon after I started kindergarten, my mother moved out of the fourplex. A short time later, both Aunt Rhea and Aunt Rachel also left Dad. Yes, even Aunt Rhea. At my age, it was baffling to me why three of our four mothers suddenly left.

  Years later, when I tried to find out why, Mother admitted to me that Dad had a drinking problem. This, along with his inability to support them financially or meet any of their emotional or physical needs, forced Rachel, Rhea, and Mother to move out and struggle on alone.

  After that conversation with Mother, she never talked much about Dad to me, except to make sure I remembered about his drinking problem and also that I knew he swore and smoked. “If he couldn’t even keep the Word of Wisdom, how could he expect to become a god?” Mother said. My father had violated those relatively minor rules, even while living the higher and harder law of polygamy.

  I regretted that I never got to know my father any better. It was terribly lonely to be raised without him. I needed his love and acceptance. When my mother left him, I was torn between him and my loyalty to her. After that, I didn’t get to see him very often, and when I did, I was afraid of him.

  The most vivid recollection I have of my father was the time he picked me up at our little rented house after work and took me to spend the night with him and Ellen. (Of his wives, she alone had elected to stay with him.) I was barely six, and without Mother there, I was too frightened to eat much supper. Dad must have sensed my discomfort because he allowed me to sleep in his big brass bed with him and Aunt Ellen. He hugged me, telling me how special I was. “Don’t ever forget me, Renski. I know your name’s Irene, but you’ll always be Renski to me. Come visit your ol’ man whenever you can.” He held me close as I fell asleep in his arms.

  I’ll never forget that night. I came halfway out of a deep sleep, sensing something warm and wet. Then I heard Dad’s angry shouts. “Damn it, Ellen, get this kid out of here. She’s pissed all over me!” He shoved me out of bed. “Hell sakes, Ellen, put this kid on the damn pot,” he yelled as he jumped up and went to the kitchen to heat some water so he could take a bath. I could still hear him grumbling. “I’ve got to leave for work by five o’clock!”

  Aunt Ellen wearily slipped off the wet panties that clung to my bottom. I was groggy and could hardly move, but I hoped to escape Dad’s further wrath by letting her place me on the chamber pot. (We still didn’t have an operational indoor toilet.) I had to hold myself carefully over the two-gallon “chamber” so the stifling stuff inside wouldn’t touch my bum. I tried hard to balance myself, but somehow the whole stinkin’ pot tipped over and spilled in all directions. I could do nothing but sprawl right in the middle of the awful mess. I was horrified.

  “Good hell, Ellen, get that damn kid in here! Wash her off in my bath water so I can take her home before I’m late for work.”

  On the way back to my mother’s, I hardly said a word. I couldn’t even look at him. I thought Dad didn’t like me anymore. He must have noticed my quivering lip, because he reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. My deep longings for a father soon began to fade.

  AFTER ALL THE COVENANTS my mother and dad made to one another before God and angels, plus one or two witnesses, it was dire poverty that finally eroded their com
mitment. That, and Dad’s inability to meet Mother’s most profound needs as a woman. According to a journal I found many years later, after her death, this failure broke my mother’s heart.

  She tried to live polygamy, but found her life joyless in it. Waiting for her turn alongside Dad’s other three young wives, Mother found her time with him was too limited. His passions were spent by the time he came to her door. His emotions were consumed by alcohol before he came to see any of them. Mother was afraid of him even while she yearned for him. Sometimes she wondered why God didn’t want women and children to be happy, too.

  My mother lived in a religious no-win situation. She was devoted to a tradition that defeated her. And she passed this dilemma along to us. Though she loved the Mormon Church, “it was out of order,” she said. It ceased to proclaim God’s law of polygamy, and this not only confused people about God’s requirements for exaltation but it also left the faithful in the lurch. Perhaps the church’s failure even contributed to the downfall of some, like her and Dad, who couldn’t quite get to the polygamy finish line despite years of sacrifice and struggle.

  Mormons who rejected the LDS’s manifestos of 1890 and 1904 were instructed to bear all the children they could and thereby multiply the numbers of the faithful, but no one seemed to much consider who would support these abundant offspring. Each man married whomever he could persuade to become a producing member of his “family kingdom,” and each wife then set about fulfilling her maternal role. Not to worry, “God would provide.” But far too often, God came in the form of county and state welfare. With six young children to raise, my mother was forced to live on welfare for eight years after leaving Dad. Her heart ached that she could never give us the things she thought we needed.

  Mother tried unsuccessfully for several years to get an official “release” (divorce) from Dad, but this could only be done by the “priesthood holder” who married them in the first place. This man told Mother he’d gladly release her, but only on the condition she marry him instead. It didn’t take her two seconds to realize she’d rather be single forever (forever, because in heaven she’d be an angel instead of a goddess) than marry this disgusting, obese old man. It had been unbearable enough being wife number two. Why now stoop to being the seventh wife of a high priest?

  Soon after she first left him, Dad came and pled with Mother to take him back. She was so painfully lonely that in a moment of weakness, she finally agreed, and she returned to the fourplex. This lasted for only a short time. Not many months later, Mother was alone again, now pregnant with her sixth child.

  All of my mother’s pregnancies were rough. She’d often spent a month or more confined to her bed, trying to not miscarry. As every delivery approached, she feared she would die. Aunt Rhea was the one whose nurturing and gentle coaching helped Mother pull through each painful ordeal. Afterward, while Mother recuperated (the custom then was for women to lie in bed for ten days after giving birth), Aunt Rhea would bathe her and rub lotion on her arms and legs. The tender treatment she received from Aunt Rhea gave her license at times to pretend she was weaker than she was and incapable of resuming her duties—a situation Dad generally responded to with impatience, which made Mother feel even more alone and more rejected by him. Soaking in the loving attention Aunt Rhea showered on her, she resented the fact that her own husband never rubbed or caressed her and rarely touched her at all. Mother often felt her sister Rhea was the only person who really loved her.

  With no Aunt Rhea down the hall, no vitamins, and what little nourishment she could get after her welfare checks were spent on us, Mother’s final pregnancy thoroughly taxed her naturally thin, frail frame. Still, she somehow carried my sister Erma to term. The baby was delivered by cesarean section at the county hospital in May 1943. It had been four years since Mother delivered her last child. Erma was a cute, red-faced doll who won her heart instantly. Mother doted on her and immediately repented of ever thinking the pregnancy had been a mistake. But when she thought about caring for her new daughter, desperation enveloped her.

  Mother was a dreamer who never made peace with her life. I remember her as multitalented—a singer, typist, seamstress, poet, and teacher. And I remember her as a servant, always doing for others when she had any energy at all to spare. But to her own children she was distant and inaccessible, caught up with regrets about how things might have been, caught up with her poverty and isolation and need. At times she got depressed, and then we had her even less. My brothers and sisters and I felt she’d abandoned us, perhaps not as much as Dad had, but she’d emotionally abandoned us just the same.

  IN JULY 1944, state and federal authorities arrested nineteen men throughout Utah for the practice of plural marriage. My father was one of them. The raid was intended to stop polygamy by making an example of these men. This was the biggest crackdown on polygamists in a decade, and the State of Utah said its actions were necessary to curb abuses of women, children, and welfare agencies. Soaring numbers of applications for government aid came in from women claiming to be single moms, but who continually turned up pregnant. Girls as young as fourteen were bearing children by men old enough to be their fathers. Polygamy was on the rise, and something needed to be done.

  At the tender age of seven, I appeared with a large group of polygamist families in a double-page photo spread in LIFE magazine. The story was so unusual, the editors gave it prime placement. Not since the 1890s, as far as anyone could remember, had a national publication addressed the oddity of American polygamy.

  Among those arrested, fifteen signed a statement promising to abandon their plural wives and the practice of polygamy, and these men were released. My father and three other staunch believers refused, determined to sit in jail forever, if necessary, rather than make bastards of most their children. Dad, with only one wife still willing to live with him, said he remained committed to the laws of God, including polygamy.

  The polygamists who signed the statements mostly went right on practicing polygamy, apparently undaunted by the arrests and their own disavowals, though perhaps a little less esteemed by the surprised rest of us. But Dad and his three steadfast friends who did exactly what we all expected them to do spent two and a half years in the Utah State Prison. He called it “Crowbar College.”

  Mother was never allowed to visit Dad inside the prison, because she wasn’t legally married to him. Only Aunt Rhea, his legal wife, could go in. But Mother once took her children to see him anyway. Hoping for a miracle that would gain us entrance, she persuaded a friend to drive us to the prison grounds on visitors’ day. Once there, while other families went in and out, she waited with all six of us in the crowded parking lot. When Dad finally came into the prison yard with the other convicts, we watched as she led little Erma over to the fence to meet her dad for the very first time.

  I remember him stooping down with tears streaming down his anguished face and putting a quarter through the squares in the wire to coax little Erma to let him kiss her. Mother then scooped Erma up in her arms and walked rapidly toward the car before Dad could see that she was crying, too. He was the only love she’d ever known, but in order to survive, she needed to quit loving him and move on with her life. She learned that desire brings pain with it, so she vowed never to desire a man again.

  The long ride home that afternoon seemed to take forever. None of us frightened kids said a word as Mother sat beside us, weeping silently all the way.

  I WAS TWELVE when Mother applied for homestead rights in an arid, sparsely settled region near the Utah-Nevada border called Trout Creek. The homesteading program involved the receipt of 150 undeveloped acres in the Utah sticks in exchange for nothing but a commitment to improve them. Mother planned to farm on her homestead, though we later discovered it was too sandy to sustain much in the way of vegetation. All the water with which we tried to irrigate disappeared instantly into the deep sand, sinking too quickly to be grabbed up by seeds or roots near the surface. Our farm was like a giant sieve. But Mother, w
ho had by this time settled for a civil divorce from Dad (granted on the basis of her being a common-law wife), felt she finally had to get away from Salt Lake City and focus her attention on her neglected children. At first, Trout Creek seemed the place to do it.

  Aunt Rhea, always worried that my mother was relying on me too heavily around the house and yet depriving me of proper religious instruction and example, insisted I come live with her and her seven children for the school year. Having obtained the official release from my father that my mother had been unable to get (two different elders married the two sisters to my father), Rhea was now living in Farmington, Utah, a little north of Salt Lake. I was there when Mother moved to Trout Creek with my sisters, Becky and Erma. (My brothers had already left home. Roger was married and living in Salt Lake City; Douglas and Richard worked as hired hands on a ranch some thirty miles away.) During the Christmas holidays that year, Mother came to see me. I was so homesick, I prevailed upon her to let me go back with her to Trout Creek so I could be a part of her fresh start in life.

  A Mr. Walter Faber began building Mother a two-bedroom frame home on her sandy property. He was a former Mormon who brought his family to Trout Creek to found some sort of new religious sect, though not a polygamist one. My mother accepted his tremendous generosity as a neighborly kindness. As for her land, Mother was determined to clear a piece of it herself with a borrowed tractor and at least plant a large vegetable garden. By the time I arrived, she and my eleven-year-old sister Becky had already dug a well to supply the new homestead. They had to excavate fourteen feet before finally reaching water.

  While Mother’s house was being built, we moved in with the Faber family, and I enrolled in Partoun School—the only seventh grader in a one-room secondary school. When summer came, I was able to get work at a ranch owned by Chet and Nelda Young, acquaintances of my brothers’. I tended the Youngs’ five children and helped with the housecleaning. Their ranch was about ninety miles from Trout Creek, so I didn’t see any of my family the entire summer. At the end of it, I came home with a hundred dollars in my pocket, and I finally got to move into our brand-new house.