When I saw my sister Becky, I took her in my arms and cried. Just being together in our own home was heaven. We were six hours west of Salt Lake City, in the middle of nowhere, and I was ready to be a family again. I missed my three older brothers, but at least I had Becky and Erma and Mother. Still just thirteen, I yearned for the comfort and security of some togetherness after all the ways our family had been torn apart over the years.
That first night, I helped out with the chores until the warm autumn sun went down, and then I retired to gab with my sisters. Becky begged me to sleep outside with her, where we could talk and have our privacy, and Mother happily gave her consent. Since seven-year-old Erma was still rather shy around me, I insisted she be included. Snuggling up close together while we slept would give us a chance to express the sisterly love we felt for each other.
Becky helped me pull the old blue and white striped mattress off the metal bed in our room. We puffed along dramatically as we dragged the unwieldy thing across the yard, stopping often to rest, and then we giggled like idiots when we finally dropped it in among the sagebrush about thirty yards from the house. The sagebrush might at least muffle our voices and laughter. We slipped into our nighties and tucked our clothes under the foot of the mattress, settling in for bed. Soon it was pitch black except for a dazzling spray of stars across the desert sky.
One thing kept nagging at me and preventing me from sleeping. Earlier in the evening, a neighbor from a nearby ranch showed up for a visit. I took an instant disliking to him, mostly because of how he kept his eyes glued on my mother. I just knew his supposed friendship with her was really about what the Bible calls lust. He also laughed too loud, with an awful bray, was ugly and unkept, and when he wasn’t looking hungrily at Mother, he flitted his eyes about the room in a manner I found, well, shifty. Furthermore, when I gave him blatant hints to leave, he’d ignored them, showing a total lack of manners. He was still inside with Mother when we gathered on the mattress outside.
I felt uneasy about the whole thing. Yes, Mother was forty years old, but could she keep this fellow in line? I well knew no man could be fully trusted except for the brethren who held the priesthood and made a covenant with God to live plural marriage. Horace Nielson, still a bachelor at forty-eight, couldn’t possibly qualify. He wasn’t even a fundamentalist.
According to Brigham Young, who had at least twenty-seven wives, “Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty-one is a menace to the community.” A man had to be responsible and get married, taking many wives in order to bring God’s “special spirits” into the world. If Horace loved the Lord, why didn’t he have at least six wives and thirty or more kids by now?
I lay on my stomach, talking to Becky. Every once in a while, I’d raise up and squint into the darkness to try and see if Horace’s old green Chevy was still in our yard. Becky tried to convince me it was gone, but I sure hadn’t heard it leave. I got more indignant by the minute. Mother was going to have to take a few cues from me. From now on, she’d have to put her foot down and tell Horace to stay away. After all, the scriptures said to avoid the very “appearance of evil.”
Getting drowsy, I surrendered the whole matter after awhile, but I bolted wide awake when I heard coyotes howling in the distance. Becky and Erma assured me we were safe, that they heard the howling all the time, and I finally dozed off into a dreamless sleep.
I awoke to the biting chill of the morning air. Slipping into my sandals, I headed for the outhouse while my sisters still slept. Parked on the cold, unplaned seat, I wondered how many people left this privy with slivers in their butts. I giggled, then caught myself. I was being silly and light-minded again. Many a well-meaning friend or relation brought this fault to my attention. I’d tried to overcome it, asking God many times to forgive me, but somehow he’d never cured me. Shivering, I ran back to bed and crawled in between the girls.
When I saw smoke rising from the tin pipes of the kitchen stove, I grabbed my bundle of wrinkled clothes from under the mattress and slipped into my blouse and jeans. Then I started toward the house. Unable to talk me into staying outside with them, Becky and Erma, still in their nightgowns, raced behind me.
As I approached the kitchen, the familiar aroma of Mother’s hotcakes made my mouth water. I burst through the door, yelling, “I get the first ones before the stove gets too hot!”
There sat bald-headed, disheveled Horace in front of a half-eaten stack of Mother’s prime pancakes, smothered with butter and her homemade syrup. And there sat Mother right beside him. As if that weren’t enough, Horace had the nerve to invite me to sit down and have breakfast in my own home. I was undone. I hated him. Horace, that horse’s ass, had gone too far.
I looked him in the eye like a snake about to strike. I usually tried not to be mean to anybody, but at Horace that morning I let swear words fly out of my mouth that I’m ashamed now to repeat.
He got the message. He looked at Mother as though he expected her to stick up for him, but she wasn’t prepared to take sides. Then he got up slowly and went out to his car without a word.
Mother looked like she wanted to cry, but she scolded me instead. “I can’t believe a daughter of mine would talk like that!”
Horace’s motor revved a few times out in front of the house. Mother took the cue. She ran out the door and climbed in beside him. As they pulled away, she called out, “I’m going to Nielson’s Ranch. I’ll be back later.” Horace and his siblings owned the ranch, such as it was.
After they left, neither Becky nor Erma said a thing. Though too angry to eat, I did cook up the remaining batter for my sisters. After that, I put a bucket of water on the stove to heat for the dishes, stripped everything from the cupboards, and scrubbed all the shelves. Then I rearranged the dishes in an orderly fashion, all the while seething.
As Becky and Erma wisely stayed out of my way, I accomplished even more over the next two hours. I swept the ever-present sand out of the kitchen and living room and mopped the gold and white linoleum beneath to a perfect shine. Then I shook out the two shag throw rugs and placed them back in front of each door so we could at least wipe our feet before tracking the sand and dust inside.
I took two galvanized pails out to the well, where an old, leaky bucket with a big metal bolt wired onto one side was tied by a rope to a round wooden winch. I lowered the antique contraption into the well six times in order to fill my two pails. Back in the house, I carefully placed the pails of clean, fresh water side by side on the counter next to the sink. I’d done a lot more work than I’d started out to do.
Finally, I heard a car drive up. I glanced out the kitchen window and saw Mother getting out of Horace’s Chevy. Still furious, I worried about facing him again, about what I might say.
Through the open screen, I heard Mother ask plaintively, “Should I just tell her?”
“Well, use your own judgment, Olive.”
By the time they got to the kitchen door, I’d jerked it open and squared off against the both of them. “TELL . . . ME . . . WHAT?” I demanded. I was already pretty headstrong back then, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
Mother whispered apologetically, “Irene, don’t be so angry . . . please . . . I wanted to tell you last night . . .” She faltered. “But . . . I didn’t know how. Horace and I are married!”
I saw it all in an instant. They deceived me, every one of them—not just Mother and Horace, but Becky and Erma, too. So much for our private little slumber party under the stars. It was Mother and Horace who’d needed the privacy, and they’d needed it from me. My sisters had simply been their pawns. Whom could I trust now?
My eyes burned, and my vision blurred. I whirled around, bolted out the door, and took off running through the fields, through the mesquites and sage, running faster and faster, trying to gain momentum to escape. My grand homecoming, the fresh start we’d waited and worked for, was a mirage. Mother had gone off and married a monogamist, and a creepy one at that.
I kept right
on running. I was gasping for breath and my legs ached, but I pushed myself further until I found a large mesquite tree growing out of a sand dune. I prostrated myself facedown in the shade of its branches and sobbed. I howled and I cursed. Finally, I begged God to be kind and let me die.
For hours, I lay there in the sand. As the shade disappeared, the midday sun beat down on me and drenched my blouse with sweat. Perversely, I enjoyed the discomfort.
During my long repose, I thought about my whole life. I didn’t like the sad, lonely childhood I saw as I reflected. Now I couldn’t wait to be grown up. If God wouldn’t let me die, perhaps he’d bring along a worthy man one day who would take me out of this mess. He’d have to be a man who would love me the way a woman ought to be loved, the way my mother should have been but never was and probably never would be. Maybe with such a man, I would finally feel secure.
I’d lost my mother, and I was even confused about the Principle. Thirteen years old has never been so lonely.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, I was glad to get away from Trout Creek and work again for Chet and Nelda Young at their ranch near Milford, Utah. Over the three summers I eventually spent with them, the Youngs were always wonderful to me. They offered a family atmosphere in which I felt loved.
Nelda taught me the things my mother neglected, partly because Mother didn’t do them herself. Mother was a terrible housekeeper and cook. But Nelda showed me how to make homemade bread and butter, cook, mend, hand stitch, and darn stockings. She even taught me how to separate dirty clothes into light and dark batches in order to keep the whites bright—a finer point of laundering with which Mother never bothered.
At first, it seemed Nelda constantly had to make me redo things I’d messed up. But she patiently trained me that first year, and then they invited me back again for two more summer stints. In the end, I must have done something right. Mostly it was Nelda, though. I couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. The education she gave me prepared me for raising my own family.
While we worked, Nelda helped me memorize hymns. I gained new confidence in my singing. They didn’t ostracize me for my fundamentalism, but their example of another way was just one more factor contributing to my religious questioning around this time.
Back at Trout Creek, my mother was just as glad I was gone for the summer. She figured it would solve a lot of her problems. I knew before she did that her marriage was a big mistake. Horace was what we called a “jack Mormon”—one only in name. He practiced no religion, was completely unspiritual. It showed in his life.
As it turns out, the reason Mother married Horace was not love, but cancer. She’d been feeling bad for a long time, and the doctors who finally diagnosed her told her she didn’t have long to live. She kept this from everyone. Desperate not to leave her children in the hands of any welfare agency, however, she married Horace. Trapped out on his family ranch with nothing but brothers and sisters and crops for company, he homed in on her the moment she arrived in Trout Creek. She’d accepted his pushy marriage proposal without really knowing him, hoping that when the time came, he’d at least prove superior to foster care. She didn’t tell her children about her cancer until much later, after she’d miraculously conquered the disease.
In the meantime, Horace proved an even lousier parent than he was a husband. He resented Mother’s kids, and we resented him. His childish, hurtful antics shock me even now. For example, he put all sorts of silly restrictions on the food we could eat, though he served himself royally. He also wouldn’t let Mother buy us clothes we needed, even with her own money. And when Mother got her certification through a correspondence course and began teaching school, he suffered so from the loss of her constant attention that he apparently determined he wouldn’t share her with us at all. That’s when he went from childish to abusive.
Once during this time, little Erma was burning up with a fever. Horace came in and found Mother rocking her gently in our old wooden rocker. With no warning at all, he jerked Erma out of Mother’s arms and shoved her, sending her sprawling across the sandy floor.
“You leave my woman alone, ya hear?” he bellowed. “She’s mine!”
For the first time, hate filled Mother’s eyes.
After that, Horace frequently sent my sisters outside so he could get Mother all to himself. She began to realize why I’d instinctively hated the man. Turns out, she traded polygamy for a lethal possessiveness.
Horace worked many miles away on an assembly line at the Tooele Ordnance Depot. He would wear his steel-toed work shoes home. Once when he came in and found little Erma hugging Mother, he knocked her away and commenced kicking her with those awful shoes until Mother finally fought him off. He liked to pick on Erma because she was the easiest target.
Once when I was there, Horace tried pulling the same sort of tantrum on me. It wasn’t long before he ordered me out of “his” house. But I stood my ground, as always.
“Your house?” I yelled. “Hell, this is our house! Mother built this house. If you were any kind of man, you’d build your own house.”
“You’re all just bastards!” he screamed, starting to get up out of his chair to come at me.
I was at the stove stirring the coals with a poker at the time. I whirled around, brandishing my red-hot sword in his face. “You better take that back!” I yelled.
He went ashen. He flailed his arms about, almost falling off the chair as it tipped back against the wall. “Don’t . . .” he pleaded. Then he yelled, “Olive! Olive!”
Luckily for him, Mother came running. “Irene, stop it. That’s enough,” she ordered. Mother was even more afraid of Horace than she’d been of my father.
Some nights, Becky and I could hear him through the wall, beating her. She’d cry out, begging him to stop, but he went right on hurting her. I’d see her bruises the next morning, and I’d plead with her to leave him, to no avail. For the time being, Mother was determined to live with her mistake.
Once I found her crying on her bed, and she told me it was because she failed so miserably at the beautiful principle of polygamy. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell Aunt Rhea what she’d done—marrying Horace. How could I possibly refuse her?
It was so awful living there with him that Becky and I often ran away from home. Neighbors would take us in for weeks at a stretch. Most of them had known our stepfather a long time. They understood. But Mother always found us eventually and brought us back, probably telling herself it was the best thing for us.
I began to yearn for a different home.
CHAPTER THREE
I finally got Mother’s permission to move to Hurricane, Utah, where Aunt Rhea now taught school and lived with the four of her children who weren’t already off pursuing plural marriages themselves. Without telling my aunt I was coming, I caught a ride to Salt Lake City with some friends, then rode a Greyhound bus all by myself the whole six hours to Hurricane—a dusty, windblown town below the climbing plateau to Zion’s Canyon. At fourteen now, I overcame my fears and made that scary, grown-up trip because I was desperate for some kindness and stability—commodities Aunt Rhea always seemed to have in extra measure. Despite my surprising her, she seemed pleased to see me, and she allowed me to spend the year with her while I attended the ninth grade. I felt some lingering guilt about leaving my sisters back in Trout Creek, where Horace could torment them, but I had to live my life. Besides, he and I fought so much, I thought they might all be better off without me there.
I don’t think Aunt Rhea knew about Mother’s marriage to Horace at this point, but she knew things were not as they should be with her sister in Trout Creek. She took it as her personal duty to set an example and to help Olive’s spiritually undernourished kids to embrace polygamy. So, once I got to Hurricane, she poured it on, mostly just by being herself—getting up early to study the scripture, praying continually, always talking up the gospel (relative to exaltation through plural marriage), relating her many dreams and visions of things that were sure to happen in the futur
e. I thought she went a little overboard at times, but she cared about me and took me in, so I listened. To this day, I wonder if she really understood how messed up I was that ninth-grade year. Probably so, because she put energy into straightening me out.
It seemed there were certain aspects of the Principle I had yet to learn or that I’d simply never focused on before, and Aunt Rhea meant to fill me in, help me focus. After all, I was getting to the age at which I might sorely need to know these things.
Part of the beauty of polygamy, she claimed, was the advantage it gave women who wanted to marry (all right-thinking women, in her opinion). Within the Principle, girls generally got to choose their husbands, not the other way around. Indeed, it really eliminated all the competition among the fairer sex. If a girl wanted a man who was already married, no problem. She could just make her desires known, and the other wives were supposed to welcome her into the fold. The bigger the family here, the bigger the kingdom there, so everyone was supposed to rejoice when the family expanded, whether with wife or with child. Since each new wife was supposed to contribute several new children, perhaps they were even the greater asset. And to the gentlemen, the brethren who were looking toward godhood, more wives of course meant more celestial prestige. Why would they ever turn anyone down? The proverbial wisdom floating around polygamous circles stated it bluntly: if a man didn’t love or desire a particular girl who wanted him, he should marry her anyway and just hope for love the next time around. One of the many brethren waiting in the wings would surely snap up any available woman he did not.
Next, Aunt Rhea said, I must understand the role of a plural wife. It was singular—to have children. The reasons were many: to obey God’s commandment, to make our husbands more deserving of exaltation, to thereby attain exaltation for ourselves, and to help populate the worlds we would rule throughout eternity. The prophet Brigham Young had given it yet another emphasis: “There are multitudes of pure and holy spirits waiting to take tabernacles [bodies]. Now what is our duty? To prepare tabernacles for them; to take a course that will not tend to drive those spirits into families of the wicked, where they will be trained in wickedness, debauchery, and every species of crime. It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can. . . . This is the reason why the doctrine of plurality of wives was revealed, that the noble spirits which are waiting for tabernacles might be brought forth.” To these ends, polygamous wives were encouraged to have a child every year for as long as they could. I was young and strong, and my prime years for childbearing were fast approaching.
Shattered Dreams Page 4