50 Years in Polygamy: Big Secrets and Little White Lies Page 28

  “He deserved everything he got, Sophia! He doesn’t have a right to talk to you like that,” Mark exclaimed.

  I knew better than to try, as nothing I ever proposed seemed to make much difference. Mark justified all of his negative behaviors by blaming Diane, our kids, and me for our inadequacies. “If you two weren’t so passive, I wouldn’t have to be so aggressive! If he or she wouldn’t have made me mad, then I wouldn’t have had to . . .”

  Though many of life’s ordeals are tragic, it’s always rewarding when we can discover blessings among those disasters. I knew I could no longer make up excuses or reasons for Mark’s, my own, or anyone else’s mean, unkind, or abusive behaviors toward our children. There was no excuse! I wouldn’t accept one, or make up one ever again. I had to do something different! The scary part was this was a concept and undertaking I knew nothing about.

  CHAPTER 30

  Birth, Deaths, and Suicide

  1984

  For three months I felt an urgency to get to Park City to spend some time with Mark’s sister, my precious friend Ann. She had invited us to come up many times since her husband moved her into a beautiful new home next to his first wife’s new home in the canyon. We met when we were eleven, at her mom’s home where Mark teased us about using his game. The next time we met, she was skating with Royce, my first love, just before he asked me to skate. Four years later, I married her brother. Since Mark and I first started dating, my friendship with Ann had been solid and comfortable. No matter our visits were far apart and way too few, we were like best buddies whose love and respect took off right where it was before.

  Near the end of February, I told Mark I was going to take the kids the following weekend and go see his sister. For the past two years he and I would plan to visit Ann, just an hour away, but for one reason or another, he would end up canceling.

  “Ann and I both want you to come up, Mark, but if you decide not to, I’m going anyway,” I said.

  “Maybe next weekend,” he replied. “My check should get here by then, and I’ll be more relaxed. I just got home. I want to stick around a while before I go anywhere. I’ll be here a few months, so we can go later.”

  “You’ve already put this visit off too many times,” I said. “If you want to go up there later, you can, but I’m going to take the kids and go this coming weekend.”

  Minutes before we were ready to pull out of the driveway, Mark decided he would go with us. We met Ann and her two eldest sons at a gas station just off the highway. They piled our things in a small trailer. Our five kids, Mark, and I (with my nine-months-pregnant belly) climbed onto the back of three snowmobiles and hung on for dear life. Ann and her sons drove us up the snow-packed roads that wound around the hillsides. At the top, our boys begged them for more fun.

  The three-day weekend with Ann and her family was the most pleasant event we’d enjoyed with our kids for a long, long time. I was more grateful than words could express for the wonderful time we spent together.

  On our way home, Mark, the kids, and I talked about our deep love for Ann, and what a perfect person she was to us. “She’s one of those perfect spirits who seems to be too good to be here among all us wicked ones.” I said.

  On Monday morning, the day after we returned from our visit with Ann and her family, I woke up to a warning voice in my head. “Get your things to your mother’s house now—today.”

  As I had done a zillion times before, I debated with my soul. I’m only one week overdue. I’ve got at least two more weeks to go.

  All of my babies but Jake had been born late by two or more weeks. To avoid further disappointment I added three weeks to this one, also. Still, I’d had plenty of occasions in my life to know, if I paid attention to and followed my sixth sense, I’d be grateful. If I didn’t, I was usually in some kind of trouble.

  The sterilizing process and list of things to gather for the delivery was almost memorized by now. I gathered the clean white bed sheets, the four large white bed pads I’d previously sewn together, a set of boy baby clothes and a set of girl baby clothes, cloth diapers, and sleepers, and tied them all in brown paper bags. Then I set the oven at two hundred degrees and baked them for one hour.

  After lunch, I took Schuyler, Jack, Karleen, and my pre-natal packages to Mom’s basement apartment and spent the rest of the day there.

  For the first time ever, I fell asleep on Mom’s couch instead of cleaning for her while we visited. She took my kids to play outside on the huge swing set Dad had built for his grandchildren. When she saw I was still sleeping, she took them to visit with their grandpa in his office upstairs.

  When I found them after waking up, Mom said, “You must have really needed the rest, Sophia. You slept through every noise we made. As far as I know, you’ve never done that before.”

  In the late afternoon I rushed home. I wanted to spend a few minutes with Mark before he disappeared into the basement with Diane.

  I had no sooner entered my kitchen from the garage, when I had a long, agonizing contraction. When the kids saw my white-knuckled grip on the countertop, I told them, “Your baby sister wants to get out of here right now!”

  My infant’s demands were more evident with each close, strong, and lingering contraction. I called Amy to let her know I was in labor. In the nice warm shower between the staggering pains, I smiled with gratitude. I was finally going to have an early baby, instead of three to four weeks late.

  Amy arrived in time to coach me for forty-five minutes and then cut the baby’s umbilical cord. While Mark, Mom, and Amy were busy fussing over Anne’s beautiful skin color and face, I felt an uncanny separation between them and me. Barely above my newborn, I could sense and hear a young male voice. “I’ll see you in a couple years! I love you! Goodbye, Sister.”

  “No,” my soul told that little spirit. “You don’t want to be here with us. I can’t handle the children I already have! I can’t be the kind of mother you deserve.”

  Again he tenderly declared his intentions. “I’ll be with you in a few years, Sister. I love you . . . I love you . . . goodbye . . .” His soft words faded like the volume of a radio slowly turned down, down, and then off.

  Because of my constant feelings of inadequacy, our family dysfunctions, and our lack of money, we had decided not to have another child we felt we could not do justice to. But I knew the unborn spirit talking to Anne would be the fifth son Mark and I always knew we would have. His little spirit’s words were the motivation I needed to change my mind.

  *****

  The horrible news that my Uncle Rulon’s son, my cousin Louis, had shot himself in the head, spread like a tornado, leaving nearly everyone in The Group in a muddled frenzy.

  I had thought of suicide on occasion, but the reality of it was vastly different than I could ever have imagined. Everyone’s prayers and condolences went out to Louis’s large plural families and his innumerable friends and relatives. Most of us were confused and horrified Louis would commit such a deed. After all, he was considered by many to be a perfect spiritual man, just like his father.

  We always understood suicide to be a sin, equal to the murder of another human being. Still, in my own bewilderment I was infuriated by the know-it-alls who had already condemned Louis to hell for his “heinous crime.” I was also frustrated with those who instantly forgave and justified him because he was Uncle Rulon’s son, who had been such a “wonderful and righteous man.” It made me consider all of the not-so-fortunate people who had taken their lives—the suicide victims who were never given the time of day, by those who exonerated Louis. “Oh, yes, they will be damned for sure, they’d insist.”

  Once again, when we needed to hear some consoling and uplifting words, many of us found solace from the pulpit. My father counseled us to show unconditional love for Louis, even in his self-inflicted death. “None of us know or will ever understand the turmoil or state of mind Louis was in when he took his own life,” he said. “We should thank God we don’t have to make any dec
isions concerning Louis’s salvation. That is up to our almighty, all-knowing, ever-present God.”

  With all the pandemonium about Louis’s suicide, more issues surfaced. Rumors of atrocities that had previously taken place on The Group’s Pinesdale Ranch, started to recirculate. Six years before Louis’s suicide, his stepson Adam had stabbed him. We heard only snippets of the repercussions of Adam’s behavior, but apparently three men had “punished” (tortured) the young man for his “sins.” We also heard a whole gamut of denials and justifications for their crimes.

  The things I’d heard before troubled me back then, but now I felt the need to hear the other side of the story, “right from the horse’s mouth,” as the old folk used to say.

  I knew who Adam was, and he knew me. He was under ten years old when his parents were first converted to The Group. His charismatic, intellectual, Hispanic father was on my list of short-lived crushes. A few years after I got married, Adam’s father moved his rapidly growing plural family to the Pinesdale Ranch.

  In 1973, Adam’s father was killed in a freak tractor rollover some considered suspicious. Much too soon, according to Adam, his mother married Louis as a plural wife.

  After Adam stabbed his stepfather, Louis, he was kicked off the ranch and warned to never return. He moved back to Salt Lake, where he worked for Mark for quite some time, making it fairly easy to look him up, which I did.

  Clear back in 2003, when Adam and I met to talk, I told him I wanted to write his story in my book. I asked him if he would be willing to tell me the details about what had happened between him and his stepfather. Adam said he and Louis had battled for a long time over his long black hair and his assumed rebellion, which Louis described as “embarrassing to the family.” To Louis, Adam’s hair had to be cut because he said so. To Adam the fight was a matter of preserving his rights and his own self-will.

  One freezing-cold day in January 1974, fourteen-year-old Adam returned from a campout in the mountains with his hunting knife on one side of his belt and his gun on the other. As he entered the house, Louis attempted to force him into a chair and tie his hands behind his back and to a chair, so he could chop off Adam’s long, “wild” hair. In the heat of the skirmish Adam got his right hand free, grabbed the knife from his side, and swung it behind him. When it went into Louis’s side, Adam bolted.

  While Louis was still in the hospital in critical condition, as the knife had punctured his liver and kidney, Adam watched as three men stalked him for weeks. They watched his every move: what he did, where he went, and to whom he talked. Whenever Adam would look in their direction, they would duck down and pretend they were busy with another task. Adam said he was terrified they would kill him.

  Just after Adam returned from a high school basketball game, the same three men kidnapped him, tied his hands behind his back, and chloroformed him. The men hauled him from the back of their truck, dropped him on the cold floor of a vacant home nearby, and left him there for hours. When the vigilantes returned, they stripped him. Two men held him down while one of them sliced three-inch long gashes into each of his forearms. After his head was shaved, they painted it and his face with Gentian Violet; a dark purple disinfectant that can permanently stain everything it touches. Adam said, “When those sadists attempted to circumcise me and found out it had already been done, they sliced me around the glans where the foreskin would have been attached!”

  Then the men tossed Adam’s nude body into the back of a truck and drove him into the hills. With a large safety pin, they secured a patchwork note to his bare chest. Like some ransom notes, the letters were cut from a newspaper and glued together. Adam said, “I believe the note said, ‘Evil boy, bad blood.’” Lastly, the three self-proclaimed “Danites” rolled him off a fifteen-foot cliff and left him in the snow to die.

  Adam said when he regained consciousness at the bottom of the cliff, it was his rage that forced him up. Ignoring the excruciating pain from his wounds and from the exposure to the cold, he made his way home, dressed himself, and retrieved his gun to go after his tormentors.

  “Yes, I probably would have shot them,” he told me, “but I was held down again by family members before I could get past my front yard.”

  “What did your mother do or say about all of this?” I asked. “Did you or she ever go to police authorities outside of Pinesdale?”

  Adam blinked a few times to halt the rising tears. “She didn’t do one thing to protect me, then or ever. Most of the time, I don’t think she even knew what was going on all around her. All of her heart and love was given to Louis, not to the three of us kids, and I was too young to know what else to do.”

  I started to cry. “Did you get any medical attention?”

  “A nurse on the ranch came over to stitch and bandage me up, but she said hardly one word to me. That was it. I stayed all alone in my room for days. I hardly saw anyone. And that wasn’t the only time I was beat,” Adam said sadly. “Many times I was smacked with a stick or thrashed with a willow and didn’t have a clue what I’d done to make Louis or any of the other men on the ranch so angry. One time I got a beating for throwing rocks off the church’s parking lot into the trees. At least, I thought that’s what the beating was for.”

  Adam told me on another occasion Louis checked him out of class and told him to wait in the car all day until he finished work. Then, in front of his coworkers, Louis lashed Adam’s bare behind with a willow. Again, Adam was not given a reason for the beating.

  “The only consolation I feel in my heart for those kinds of evil deeds,” Adam told me, “is about a month before Louis shot himself, he came to Salt Lake and apologized to me for all the beatings and trauma he’d caused in my life.”

  From the feelings Louis divulged to him on that visit, Adam reasoned Louis had decided his life had no more value—since it had been full of pretense and fraud. Adam said, “I think Louis felt he’d been deceived by dishonorable men and could no longer deal with his own mistakes and all of the wickedness around him.”

  Adam’s stories solidified my own suspicions of corruption in The Group. At what point, I questioned, had “our” men started asserting such cruel and unlawful authority over others? They justified and hid their iniquities in the name of their earlier day prophets and God. How long will those men get away with such self-righteous, terrible deeds?

  Was it really the “wrongdoings” of evil men that made the gospel look bad, as Mom had always said? I wanted to believe her. However, it started feeling more and more the other way around. Isn’t it our gospel and religion, I wondered, that justifies and protects the nefarious under the guise of male supremacy, holiness, power, and priesthood?

  To this day, no one has paid a penalty for the crimes against fourteen year old Adam. Then and after all these years, we can imagine the rest of the actions, lies and cover-ups that have been condoned and covered by some of those “holy men” in that little “kingdom of God.”

  *****

  Six-month-old Anne was snuggled tightly against my breast when we were startled by an early morning telephone call.

  Mark was calling from Diane’s house.

  “I have some really sad news to tell you,” he said somberly. He swallowed, and I could tell he was holding back his emotions. “My sister Ann died last night.”

  “No!” I screamed. “That’s not true! She’s way too young to die. She’s got eight kids. She’s seven months pregnant. It’s not true, Mark! You heard it wrong. It’s not Ann, it’s a mistake!”

  “I am so sorry I had to tell you like this. I wish I were there so we could hold and console each other. I am so sorry,” Mark said while we both cried on the opposite ends of the phone.

  I couldn’t quit crying. All day long, I envisioned the ghastly scene and the horror Ann’s fifteen-year-old son must have felt while watching his mother die. Ann was lying on her bed when she choked on some antibiotics that had come back up and lodged in her esophagus. Her son tried in every way he could to help. By the time h
er husband got there from his first wife’s house across the way, and paramedics arrived, it was too late!

  The funeral was extremely difficult for all of us. Our only consolation was our belief that Ann was just too good to be in this world. “But what about her children?” I asked God. “Why was she meant to have so many just to die and leave them all?”

  *****

  Swede was ill again. I visited him the morning after Ann’s death and didn’t say a word about her. He seemed unfriendly and distant, which just wasn’t like him, and I couldn’t get him to tell me what was wrong. He was wearing thick navy blue overalls, and I poked him in the gut with the end of my spoon a few times. Then I fluffed his short gray hair with my fingers. Like I’d done before, I teased, we needed to find him a cute wife to keep him company. Still he wouldn’t say a word. I gave in, sat quietly, and waited.

  Just as I was thinking I should go home, he pushed a cup of hot water, the jar of instant Folgers coffee, and the powdered creamer in front of me. He finally sat down at his small, round kitchen table where he, his brother Merrill, Mark, me, and other guests always sat to visit and play cards. Swede lit up another Camel, took a few sips of his own mud-thick coffee, and inhaled a few more long drags of smoke. When he looked in my eyes, the first time that day, I saw the apprehension and sadness in his eyes. I decided I didn’t want to know what he was concerned about. He’s probably terminal and going to die from some awful disease, I thought.

  “My brother Merrill died sometime in the middle of the night.” Swede said. “His kid found him this morning, still in the chair with his television blasting.”