I kept my head bowed through Verlan’s prayer but shuddered at its conclusion. Here he was asking God, God’s angels, and all the sublime hosts of heaven to watch us. With that sort of audience, I could hardly bear Verlan’s touch, let alone doing the deed for the first time. I snapped off the light.
It was all over so quickly that, but for the pain, I wasn’t even sure I’d been there for it. Was that what all the fuss was about, what I’d waited sixteen years for? If so, I wondered if I’d be able to tolerate it well enough to conceive my annual child.
Seeming to sense my disappointment, Verlan asked if I knew about the law of purity.
“Yes, I do,” I answered, thinking what a very good law it was.
“My father lived it,” Verlan said, “and I wonder if you intend to.”
“Absolutely,” I assured him.
Clearly pleased, he nodded his agreement and then rolled over on his side. Within minutes, he was snoring softly. All I could do was lie there in confusion.
The next day, when Verlan took me for a walk, I finally became acquainted with his version of romance. The midday sun filtered through the tall, leafy trees as we strolled along, hand in hand, looking for the spot in Memory Grove where we’d been married two days before. Standing there on that same piece of ground, hidden by the same trees, Verlan wrapped me in his arms, kissed me warmly, and said, “Thanks for being so wonderful.” Then, for the first time, he said, “I love you, Irene.”
Our interesting time together was drawing to an end as we headed back to Murray. Verlan would soon be on his way home to Provo and to Charlotte. Before he dropped me off at Aunt Beth’s, he handed me an eleven-dollar check, insisting I give it to her and confide in her that we’d married. He asked me to tell her to please keep it a secret from anyone else. “Tell her the money is for your living expenses, and I’ll send her some more later. If she prefers you not stay with her now that you’re married, I’ll figure something else out.” Then he checked his rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind us, reached across the seat, and briefly kissed me good-bye. We drove the remaining blocks in silence.
In front of Aunt Beth’s house, Verlan kept the car running, stopping just long enough for me to grab the paper sack that contained my now-soiled nightgown and jump out. He waved a friendly smile and drove away.
My unforgettable honeymoon was over.
I dreaded seeing my aunt after basically lying to her when I supposedly went off to the movies two days before. If I’d lost her trust with that action, I’d have no havens left and would be forced to move in with Charlotte.
All was quiet as I tiptoed into the house and up to the bedroom I shared with sixteen-year-old Evelyn. I assumed my aunt and her dozen children were at Sunday meeting. I immediately took off my gold wedding band and put it in a stationery box I tucked under my panties in the bottom of my dresser drawer. Then I hid my nightgown in a safe corner of the cluttered closet.
Without warning, Evelyn opened the door and came into the room. Looking at me smugly, she asked, “Well, did he give you a ring?”
From the outside, this was how a polygamous union looked: people you knew and loved simply disappeared for a while, and then they showed back up a few days later, scrambling to hide the evidence while you were free to suspect all you wanted without knowing anything for sure. I’d seen it many times, but I’d been foolish enough to think that no one would notice when I did it myself. I was shocked that Evelyn was onto us.
“If you’re asking if I married him . . . um . . . well . . . yes,” I said, knowing I shouldn’t. “But please don’t tell anyone. What does your mom think about me running off like I did?”
“Mostly she feels bad ’cause you didn’t trust her enough to confide in her.”
“I figured your mother would understand when I was finally able to tell her. After all, she entered polygamy as your dad’s third wife. I can tell her now, but no one else is supposed to know. It has to be kept a secret for Verlan’s sake.”
As soon as Aunt Beth returned from Sunday school, I gave her Verlan’s check and told her all about my marriage. She was very understanding, though she worried about our hiding such a special occasion from my mother.
VERLAN HAD TOLD ME to go see him the following Friday. As instructed, I took the bus to Provo, wondering all the way how Charlotte would feel about seeing me again now that I’d slept with her husband. I was certain she wouldn’t want me hanging around her house, interrupting her life. And, though I wanted to see Verlan again, I thought a hotel, or perhaps Aunt Beth’s home, would be a far more appropriate venue for a visit than the home he shared with Charlotte. How would I ever get to know him in another wife’s presence?
The whole situation made me feel sick to my stomach. Verlan had told me to relax and leave it up to him. He’d know how to handle it, he said, assuring me he understood women. I had my doubts.
I arrived after dark, and Verlan wanted to get us all settled immediately for the night. So he pulled the heavy mattress off his and Charlotte’s bed, carried it four feet away, and dropped it roughly on the floor. Then he told Charlotte to sleep on it right there in the same room with us while he and I took the box spring still on the bed frame. Incredulous and humiliated, we both complied, because that’s what fundamentalist polygamous wives did—comply with whatever absurd, insensitive things their husbands came up with.
Lying there on the box spring next to Verlan, my discomfort was indescribable. If I so much as breathed deeply, the bed squeaked. Verlan and I didn’t talk, touch, or even move. Down on the ground, Charlotte also made no sound, though I couldn’t imagine how she could keep from bawling. I thought I might be about to bawl myself when Verlan said suddenly, “Well, I can see this won’t work.” He jumped out of bed in his pajamas and ordered Charlotte off the mattress. Then he dragged it all the way down the hall to the living room, while Charlotte stood meekly by with a bewildered look on her face.
Completely disgusted, I followed him. “Please, Verlan,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice calm. “I don’t like to share her home with you this way. I’ll wait until I can have a place of my own. Please, go sleep with her.”
“No!” he retorted in a loud whisper. “I haven’t seen you for a week, and I intend to be fair.”
“This isn’t fair to any of us,” I pointed out.
“Look, Irene, we’re all new at this,” he said. “But we’ll figure things out as we go along.”
Verlan went in and reassigned Charlotte to the box spring, then returned to me in the living room. He peered briefly through the part in the drapes and checked the door lock before he crawled onto the mattress beside me. “There’ve been rumors going around that the government is planning raids on polygamists,” he warned, “so I have to be extra careful, especially with you being underage and all.”
That was all very interesting, but I had a few more pressing matters to settle at the moment. “Where am I going to live, Verlan?” I asked him.
“Oh, God will take care of that. Let’s just take things one day at a time and trust in him.” He patted my hip and gave me a brief kiss. Then he turned over on his side to go to sleep.
I hadn’t finished. “Verlan, I need to figure out my life! What are our plans? I can’t live like this. I want a home and some privacy.” He said nothing, but I still wasn’t done with him. “I won’t ever come here again and be made to feel like a complete fool in my sister’s house,” I warned.
“Shh, shh . . . that’s enough. Now go to sleep,” he mumbled.
I’d have felt more validated if he’d slapped me. Unheard and untouched, I cried myself to sleep. Later Verlan told me Charlotte cried all night in the other room, visualizing us making love.
I’D BEEN MARRIED NOW for two whole weeks. This time, Verlan promised to come to Aunt Beth’s house to see me. He’d be there around 7:00 P.M. Fortunately, he believed me when I told him I wouldn’t go see him again at Charlotte’s. Or maybe she forbade it. Either way, I thought this a superior arra
ngement until we got a place of my own.
When Verlan finally showed up, he insisted we go to a drive-in movie. I begged him to stay home so we could retire early and get to know each other a little better. Didn’t he want us to spend some time together without a crowd around? But in the name of obedience, I gave in again.
Returning from the movie, we crept upstairs, hoping not to wake anyone. Cousin Evelyn, who’d thoughtfully decided to sleep somewhere else, made up the bed with clean sheets and even left a vase on the nightstand with two beautiful red roses in it. Verlan quickly undressed in the dark and crawled into bed. Still shy, I followed suit. I don’t recall Verlan inviting a celestial audience to watch, bless, or forgive us that second time.
That was the night I discovered what the fuss was all about.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On our first trip together as a threesome, we went to visit Aunt Rhea in Hurricane. Everything was going along fairly well until Horace Knowlton, a polygamist friend and lawyer in Salt Lake City, came by and gave us some alarming news. He told us the same thing Verlan told me that night in Provo—the government authorities were gearing up to go after polygamists. But our friend knew details Verlan didn’t, and these details would very much change the immediate course of our lives. He’d heard from reliable sources that a raid was planned for the very next day against the polygamist settlement of Short Creek, less than thirty miles south of where we were visiting. Short Creek was where Aunt Rhea’s daughters, Donna and Myra, lived with their husband, Clyde.
For a decade, the little town of Short Creek served as a refuge for polygamists who desired to practice their conspicuous lifestyle in a secluded community uncorrupted by the worldly, secular society of the Latter Day Saints and others. It was a place where fundamentalists controlled practically everything, instead of being at the mercy of those who opposed them. This refuge had grown to house about four hundred people, including men, women, and swarms of children. The population varied considerably, as polygamous families constantly moved in and out according to their various needs or sometimes due to “orders from above” coming to them through the colony’s prophet.
The elders of Short Creek knew the community’s practices were in flagrant violation of state and federal bigamy laws, but they’d so far escaped enforcement of those laws by keeping to themselves and by locating the town exactly on the Utah-Arizona border. This made it strategically convenient for slipping back and forth from one state to the other whenever the need arose. By spreading themselves across two states, moreover, the polygamists living in Short Creek avoided being exclusively subject to either state’s laws. The clear responsibility of neither state, then, the Creekers had thus far been left alone by both.
But disturbing rumors like the ones Verlan heard recently began to circulate. Polygamists always speculated that raids like the one in 1944 and the one now planned for Short Creek were launched whenever the LDS Church and the State of Utah got particularly embarrassed about our escalating numbers. We were prolific if nothing else. And our population increase did have very real and negative implications for state governments, mostly in the form of welfare costs, since polygamist husbands, like my father, were rarely able to support all their wives and children. It was common for subsequent wives like my mother to draw welfare as supposed single moms while they continued to produce a child each year or so with a husband who circulated constantly from wife to wife. (When I was growing up, my mother had a hiding place inside a haystack near our home for when the welfare authorities came around, checking for fraud.) Then there were the rampant charges of child abuse, both in the form of giant families full of neglected children and teen and preteen girls being taken as wives.
When they got word that this new raid was in the works, most of the settlers at Short Creek decided to stand firm. We feared for them terribly. All of us well remembered the 1944 raid that resulted in the imprisonment of my father, Uncle Rulon, and so many others. Though I’d only been a child of seven at the time, I doubted I’d ever be able to forget the terror and sadness I felt when I thought they were going to take me from my mother and put me into foster care. The officials conducting the raid had in fact interrogated her, but they didn’t bother her once she assured them she’d left my father.
The next morning, Sunday, July 26, 1953, the long-dreaded raid at Short Creek took place. In the wee hours just before daylight, we watched from Aunt Rhea’s upstairs bedroom window as convoys of police cars and government vehicles snaked along the highway south out of Hurricane. Like a midnight funeral procession, they quietly ascended Hurricane Hill, headed for Short Creek. We lost sight of them after that.
Subsequent newspaper accounts of the raid informed us that Governor Howard Pyle of Arizona—under strong public pressure to enforce the antipolygamy laws and thereby blot out “a community dedicated to the production of white slaves”—worked for months to mobilize a number of government agencies and officials, including the FBI, the National Guard, state troopers, the highway patrol, sheriffs, and judges, among others. Even some Utah authorities took part in this all-out effort to correct what was variously labeled “an insurrection,” “a conspiracy,” and a “monstrous and evil growth.”
At the appointed predawn hour, they approached the little town of Short Creek from both the Arizona and Utah sides, expecting to surprise everyone. Instead, the loud boom of a dynamite explosion greeted them while they were still some distance away. To those in the convoy, of course, this could only mean trouble; to the Creekers, it was a signal from loyal lookouts telling them the raid was imminent. Because of the warning, those who wanted to hide had the time to do so. But the majority of townspeople took it as their cue to gather for final instructions on how to receive the invaders.
Cautiously, the heavily armed patrols descended on Short Creek, expecting militant hostilities. They’d been warned the fundamentalist lawbreakers were desperate, as well as armed and dangerous. To their surprise, they found most of the saints gathered in front of the church, unarmed, praising God and singing, “My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty . . .” The Creekers surrendered without a fight, martyrs for their faith. The real drama was caused by all the hysterical children afraid of losing their parents.
During the next few days, the saints were held captive. Under strict surveillance, they were fed National Guard rations and escorted back and forth to the outhouse. Stragglers who hid or tried to flee across state lines were gathered up, while the judges and other officials began sorting out the preliminary fates of the various categories of perpetrators and victims they’d found within the settlement. These included nonpolygamous adults or those who still had only one spouse, polygamous husbands, adult polygamous wives, underage polygamous wives, and 263 children, some of whom clung to their mothers, wailing in fear of being separated and carted off to foster homes. Impossible decisions had to be made, and many mistakes were committed in the process. Some of the adults who were participants in plural marriages were freed to go home with their children, while some who were suspected to be polygamists but weren’t remained in custody.
It was a disagreeable situation for all concerned, especially the mothers and children. Seeing their sad plight, some of the officers felt so bad, they apologized and expressed sympathy. But they had their orders, after all. They arrested most of the settlers as bigamists.
The men and a few of the women were taken to Kingman, Arizona, for incarceration, while approximately 40 women and 166 children were loaded into chartered buses and transported farther south to Phoenix, where they were put into temporary shelters until their relocation could be arranged. Naturally, they all wondered if they would ever see their families reunited again.
Fear struck the hearts of Mormon fundamentalists everywhere. There were an estimated thirty to forty thousand polygamists scattered across the West in Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and other states, along with Canada and Mexico. All now felt vulnerable. Money was scarce; supplies were short. Many families were so
large that going into hiding was next to impossible. Groups of saints began moving quietly out of big cities in the dead of night onto farms and ranches. Hoping to escape persecution, they went into Montana and California for concealment.
But the government’s aggression did nothing to curb the fundamentalist fervor for plural marriage. Instead, it bonded families even closer together, strengthening their will to be loyal to God and valiant in living their revered Principle. Fundamentalist leaders simply directed all their followers to lay low until the storm subsided. Members were praised for their self-control and nonviolence. Instilled with a righteous pride, they actually welcomed the persecution, vowing to advance God’s cause at all costs. Women were even counseled to relinquish their children rather than their religious freedom to obey God’s commandments. The Short Creek settlers who’d been jailed did their part, too. Seeing themselves something like Paul in biblical times, they held prayer meetings asking for deliverance and sang praises to their maker. Now that liberty was on the line, the fundamentalists were demonstrating that they were willing to give their all for polygamy.
As for Verlan and Charlotte and me, we were so fully involved with the polygamist clans around the area, we considered ourselves to be in the same serious danger. We held a family council and decided Verlan should immediately quit school at BYU and move back to his family’s ranch in Chihuahua, Mexico, taking Charlotte and her baby with him. I would join them in a month or so. Obediently, I agreed, wishing God’s blessings on them as I saw them off. Somehow, on the other side of this crisis, I hoped to find stability and some freedom from all the hiding.
My brother and sister-in-law let me stay with them in Salt Lake City until Verlan sent instructions and bus fare for me to come to them. When it was time, I asked Richard to take me to the bus depot. He pleaded with me not to go, assuring me my life with the LeBarons would be misery. He begged me instead to stay in Utah with him or Mother.
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