Читать книгу Stolen Innocence: My story of growing up in a polygamous sect, becoming a teenage bride, and breaking free - Elissa Wall - Страница 11

Your family must be united.

—RULON JEFFS

In the weeks immediately following Mother Laura’s arrival in October 1995, the tension in the house had, for the most part, subsided. We’d cleared one of my sisters’ bedrooms on the lower level to make room for our new mother, and at the start we were all on our best behavior.

Mother Laura’s entry into our lives came at a time when many things in the Wall house were changing. In the span of a few months, my sisters Kassandra, Sabrina, and Michelle were all married according to the prophet’s revelation. Kassandra, at nineteen years old, joined Rachel as one of the many wives of Rulon Jeffs, who by that point was eighty-three, while Sabrina was married to a member of the FLDS community in Canada. Michelle stayed closer to home, marrying Uncle Rulon’s son Seth. All of my sisters had been over the age of eighteen at the time of their marriages, and Dad had been chastised for keeping them in the home so long. But my father just wanted to give his girls the opportunity to grow up.

Of these departures, Michelle’s hit me the hardest. She had the gentlest soul of anyone in my family and had always looked out for me—comforting me when I was sick, making sure that my hair was combed, and that I was dressed neatly and appropriately. There were so many children in the Wall house hold, and as the nineteenth, I sometimes fell through the cracks. But Michelle made every effort to ensure that didn’t happen; she was like a second mother to me. For the eldest sisters in the home to help with the care of the little ones was a common practice for families of the FLDS. Mom had thirteen children of her own still living in the home, and with Audrey up and out early to teach at Alta Academy, leaving most of the domestic duties falling on Mom’s shoulders, she’d needed to have Michelle, Kassandra, and Sabrina around to provide us extra attention. Of course, nothing compared to Mom’s healing touch, but in many ways Michelle had become another anchor for me. Losing her was unthinkable. I cried right up until the day of the wedding, begging her not to go away.

With all these changes in the family, it was beginning to feel like our house had a revolving door with people constantly coming in and going out. However, though we lost many of my older sisters that year, we had gained a mother and there was hope in that new relationship. I looked to Mom for advice on how to welcome Mother Laura. She had grown up knowing and wanting this lifestyle, but I now understand that our years of turmoil had made many of us skeptical about what her arrival would do to the already touchy atmosphere in our house hold.

Mom had endured years of compromising as she’d tried to pattern this home after the one she’d grown up in. I know that she had obeyed her priesthood head as she was directed, but over the years she’d grown increasingly disheartened at the way her relationship with her sister wife and husband had affected her children.

Mom’s firm religious convictions reminded her to hold her tongue and keep sweet. I admired how she welcomed Mother Laura with open arms. Seeing her embrace our new mother made me hopeful that this new element in the equation would balance our home out. Because Laura’s age was close to that of my older sisters, I felt optimistic about the prospect of forming a bond with her like the one that I shared with them. At first this seemed possible. Mother Laura and I had lots of fun, playing games with some of my other siblings. Her presence helped to alleviate some of the emptiness I’d felt since my sisters’ departures. But I watched helplessly as it soon became worse than before. Mom’s gentle personality and unwavering commitment to her faith were no match for the others in the home. It distressed me to see the lonely look in her eyes as she tried to keep the pieces together and shield her younger children from a repeat of the past.

But by the end of that first month, the newness of having Mother Laura in the house had begun to wear off. It was quickly becoming clear that Dad’s third wife had her own unique set of expectations and would present certain challenges. She was yet another person who wanted things done her way. We’d seen glimmers of that stubborn side during family get-togethers, but her desire to take charge held a different significance now that she was part of our house hold.

While Laura’s presence was problematic in itself, it served to aggravate another long-simmering tension in the family, involving my twenty- one-year-old brother, Craig. As he came of age, my oldest brother from my mother had finally been able to quiet some of the tension between the mothers and the children in our home. But adding Laura to the family had again made the equation unbalanced. It was not long after she arrived that old feuds were rekindled. She and Mother Audrey quickly became friends and their newly formed bond seemed to have the two women pitted against Mom and her children. Seeing his mother and younger siblings being improperly treated as he’d once been forced Craig to step in and do what he could. We were still recovering from losing three of our sisters and it had been hard for my mother’s children, especially Craig.

In conversations with Craig since, I have come to see that my brother, like most young men his age, had long been contemplating what he had been taught growing up. He found that many aspects of our religion had glaring discrepancies and didn’t make sense or feel right.

Craig possessed a fiery intelligence and a quick mind. When he was still a high school student at Alta Academy, he had begun to examine aspects of our religion in his quest to gain a deeper understanding of our faith. Uncle Warren didn’t seem to like Craig because he wasn’t just another sheep willing to follow the flock. He was an enthusiastic student, and in priesthood history, he often asked pointed questions that would back Warren into a corner in front of the whole class. While he was eagerly trying to understand how the teachings and our culture all fit together, Warren was threatened by my brother’s inquisitiveness and labeled him as trouble. The two often clashed.

Warren seemed to single out Craig and watch for any misstep he made. He was always ready to chastise him and often made an example of him in front of his classmates. One particularly shame-inducing consequence for acting out in school was to have your father called in, and Warren was not afraid to subject the students to that humiliation.

Warren’s attitude toward Craig and many of my siblings seemed to come not just from dis pleasure with their behavior but from a larger, more fundamental problem with the Wall family. It was almost as though he felt threatened by us. The fact that many in my family were smart, strong-willed, and unafraid to ask questions when things did not feel right made it hard to keep a tight hold on us. Warren didn’t like having to deal with disobedience and questions concerning the priesthood. Our religion left no room for logical reasoning and honest questioning. Warren made no attempt to understand or tolerate any of this, deeming it as absolute rebellion.

By the time Craig was twenty-one, doors had been opened and he began to objectively examine our culture. He was still a believer, but was growing skeptical. He had lost trust and faith in the church and its leaders because he was having trouble reconciling the way they were teaching to the way in which they were conducting their actual lives. Seeing our sisters get placed for marriage to men who were so much older than they were only confirmed for Craig that there were many unjust and illogical elements to the FLDS belief system. In particular, the marriage of our half-sister Andrea disturbed him.

Andrea had wed Larry Steed, who was also married to Mother Audrey’s daughter, Jean. Because Jean was one of the oldest girls in our family, the younger children were not close to her, and Andrea feared that life in the new home would be difficult. Before her marriage, we all worried about the prophet’s revelation that she should marry Larry. We were skeptical that the union would make her happy, and doubt began to swirl that the placement had truly been God’s will.

Though Craig had been raised to see Andrea’s placement as a revelation from God, he questioned more than ever the arrangement. At the time, he worried that Larry and others had contrived the marriage and suspected it had little to do with any divine inspiration. He was coming to question the most fundamental aspect of our way of life: divine revelation from God regarding placement marriage. A thought like this went against everything we knew, but with no outlet for his questions, Craig continued to struggle inwardly.

When Mother Laura moved in, his internal debate began to bubble over in noticeable ways, and he was sometimes confrontational. It wasn’t just about how Mother Laura behaved; her presence was a constant reminder that the church’s values were flawed and that plural marriage was not working in our home. Laura had a forceful personality, a trait that combined with Audrey’s similar personality seemed to drown out our mother. I was too young to really know what was going on or see the dynamic, but I could tell that Craig’s concern only grew as he came to feel that Mom was not being treated properly.

Looking back, I wonder if a lot of the fights may have arisen because neither Dad nor Audrey knew how to live in plural marriage. Even if you’re raised in plural marriage and have a model for it, it’s difficult to make it work—to know when to compromise, when to complain, and when to involve the father. If you’re not careful, minor scuffles can snowball into ugly conflicts. Since Audrey grew up in a monogamous family, it seemed hard for her to take a conciliatory tone, and with the addition of Laura’s assertiveness, my mother’s needs frequently got lost in the fray.

My mother’s background only made things more complicated, because she knew all too well that plural marriage, with all its intricacies, could work under the right circumstances. Mom had been raised in a house hold that was held up as the ideal plural family, where the mothers got along and all the kids truly saw one another as siblings. Mom embraced her faith and the FLDS teaching in regard to women, and desired a peaceful house hold. As it wasn’t Mom’s way to engage in fights with the other women in the house, she would often retreat instead of getting in the middle and making things worse. Everyone on Mom’s side felt that Dad should stand up for her more, and we were upset when he allowed the more forceful wives to take charge.

The situation failed to improve with time. Craig, being my mother’s oldest son, took on the responsibility of advocating for her and her children when no one else would. When his conflicts with Mothers Audrey and Laura escalated, my father was often pulled in, leading to contention between him and Craig. Some fights got so heated that they turned physical. I had always seen my dad as an even-tempered and reasonable man, but now it was slowly beginning to show that he was consumed by the situation and having trouble controlling his feelings. It appeared that in Dad’s mind, Craig was affecting the other boys in the home and tainting their beliefs, and in trying to solve this problem, he was losing his grip on our family and on himself.

Dad tried to address the family’s dissension during our regular Sunday-school lessons in the living room. As our priesthood head, he was in charge of educating his children on our religion and its principles. Everyone, even the mothers, was expected to attend Sunday lessons. Typically, the kids fought for a seat on one of the two couches. Whoever didn’t get a seat on the couch got relegated to the floor.

Dad was a stickler for punctuality, and the lesson began promptly at 10 A.M., usually with a reading from the Book of Mormon or the Bible. The lesson usually lasted about an hour, during which Dad would select one or two of us to stand and bear witness, while he sat on the couch in front of the big windows. I could always tell when he was about to raise the family issues because he’d begin talking about the “United Order,” a teaching that stressed the importance of oneness and reinforced the other teachings we’d been hearing our entire lives. He said we couldn’t attain it in our home without complete harmony in the family. Ideal FLDS children were expected to be “humble, faithful servants” of their priesthood head and the prophet. That meant the daughters needed to “quit arguing,” the mothers needed to “stop fighting,” and we all needed to “keep sweet and keep the spirit of God.” Unfortunately for him, his words seemed to be falling on deaf ears, and they did little to quell the growing unrest. While I believe my father tried not to point fingers, by my perception it appeared that Dad was singling Craig out as the cause of our family’s problems.

I was just a couple of months into school’s fall session when Dad made a fateful pronouncement: Craig was to be out of the house by November 1, 1996. Since he was over eighteen, it was considered too late to send him away to reform, as was customarily done in cases such as this. Instead, Dad just wanted him to leave.

I will never forget the day that Craig asked Mom if she could drive him to the highway, where he would hitchhike out of the area. Some of us younger kids piled into Mom’s little brown Buick sedan to join her for the ride and say good-bye to our older brother. The hour-long drive was mostly quiet, and our silence said everything about the sadness and fear we all felt. My sister Teressa was taking it the hardest. She had become very close to Craig, and now he was one more person leaving our lives. With little money in his pocket and raw emotional wounds, Craig set off to find his own answers to his many questions.

I could barely watch him get out of our car and walk away. The final image I had of my brother Craig is with a backpack strapped to him and a sign reading denver in his hand. Years later, my mother would tell me that leaving Craig by the side of the road that day was one of the most painful things she ever had to do. At the time, though, she was as silent as any perfect FLDS wife should be. Casting out her son was her duty. She could not object, and even if she did, her opinion would not matter. She had to follow the orders of her husband; that was the command of the church, and she obeyed it no matter how much pain it caused her.

Even so, it took her several minutes to find the strength to shift the car into drive. As we wound down the gray asphalt of the highway heading home, I watched tears trace the soft skin of my mother’s face. She was still beautiful, but in that moment she became a shadow of her former self. She had lost her eldest son, her protector. It was a wound that would never completely heal. I saw Teressa beside her, hands folded stiffly in her lap and her pained eyes staring into space. She had just watched her dear friend and brother walk away and did not know if she would ever see him again. I wanted so badly to reach up from the backseat and hug both of them, to offer the only form of consolation that I as a ten year old child could provide, but I knew better. The best and only option was to keep my mouth closed.

It was not until many years later that any of us heard from Craig. He purposely avoided reaching out to our family for fear of further affecting his younger brothers and sisters. Over time I came to understand his choice to put distance between himself and our family, but back then I thought of him frequently, which would always make me feel a bit sad and discouraged. I didn’t really understand the concept of questioning, but I felt sympathy for the way things had turned out between Craig and my dad. I was not alone in my concern for him, but I kept my pain to myself; it was not something to be spoken of. At home, I noticed a marked change in my mother. She seldom sang or hummed around the house anymore, and she began to look drained, somehow older. A general sadness permeated the house hold and made me miss Michelle all the more. I wished so dearly that I could hold on to my mother as I had once done with Michelle. Without my nurturing older sister around, I had no one to make me feel safe in the unrest that had taken over our home and irrevocably changed our lives.

In the weeks after Craig’s departure, a pall set over the house, and even Mother Laura’s pregnancy and impending delivery didn’t lift the mood. Having Craig leave was even hard for Dad, but he hoped it would bring our family’s turbulence to an end. Dad had been optimistic that without their older brother’s brooding influence, the younger children would fall back into line. Instead, some of them began to exhibit their anger at having lost so many older siblings.

The summer before Craig left, my brother Travis, four years Craig’s junior, had begun to question his faith in much the same way that Craig had. The church leaders decided to send Travis to Short Creek to reform so that he would become more faithful. Sending children to reform was the church’s way of dealing with those who got out of line. Because Travis was younger than Craig there was still “hope” for him in the eyes of the priesthood, and this retreat was supposed to bring him back into compliance. On a reform retreat, the boys do manual labor for the priesthood, while immersed in the teachings of the church and isolated from their families. At the end of their time, they are supposed to return to their homes behaving and thinking properly.

Travis was placed with a family in southern Utah known for its good priesthood children. The hope was that being in their house hold would remind him of his role as an obedient and active member of the church, but the reality was that reform was a harsh environment. Shut off from communication with his family, Travis was mistreated by those in charge of his attitude adjustment.

Even without Travis in the house, his doubts began to trickle down to the twins, Justin and Jacob, and Brad, all of whom adored their older brothers and used them as examples. The younger boys now displayed their own doubts about the church’s role in our family, and Mom was powerless as she watched the same fights that Craig and Travis had with our father and mothers happen all over again. The departure of Travis and Craig had done little to change Dad’s manner or the feeling in the house. Desperate not to lose yet another son, I later learned that Mom had begun confiding her fears to my sister Rachel. She was worried that my father had lost his ability to control and unite our family, and she believed we needed outside help.

Though we knew things were bad, none of us were aware that Mom was losing faith in our father. All we knew was that every day the problems seemed to get worse and the options seemed to grow fewer.