LITMIR.BIZ

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       REASSIGNMENT

      For time and all eternity.

      —FLDS WEDDING VOW

      I have no recollection of how we got to Hildale or who drove us there. Instead, what I remember is the painful silence of the long car ride and Brad’s overwhelming guilt. Even though the altercation with my father hadn’t been his fault, he was horribly distraught over it and blamed himself for what was happening to our family. If he hadn’t become so entangled with Dad the previous day, our lives might have remained as they were. While things were far from perfect, they were what we knew. Now, once again, we were uprooted and facing an uncertain future.

      The next morning, Mom assembled her kids and prepared to bring us to the home of the church elder in the Salt Lake Valley. We didn’t know anything except that we were leaving. As Mom was trying to herd us into the Suburban, Justin and Jacob refused, informing her they wouldn’t go until they knew where we were being taken. They had urged Mom not to leave, assuring her things would change, but I knew in her heart she was committed to carrying out the will of the prophet. It seemed like all that mattered was what Warren had told her, and blinded by what she thought was the will of the prophet, I suppose she did the only thing she knew and chose to leave her sons in the name of her religion. In a flurry of emotion, we left the twins at the house, with my mother telling us that someone in the church would make sure they joined us later. That never happened.

      Without the twins, only five of us, Brad, Caleb, Sherrie, Ally, and me, drove out of town with Mom that day. I was too young to draw any conclusions on my own, and I felt helpless as I watched the busy city streets of Salt Lake give way to the parched, red earth of southern Utah. Even for Brad our departure was bitter. Over the last months, Dad had been trying to work on his relationship with the boys. He’d bought four-wheelers and had been taking them into the mountains to ride on weekends. Growing up, Dad had forbidden such things, even bicycles, because they would take us off the property, but riding in the mountains with the boys had started to bring them closer together.

      What none of us realized that day was that we had been taken from Dad not because of his abuse. In the FLDS, physical abuse is not nearly the taboo that it is in the outside world, and kids often suffer harsh punishments at the hands of their parents. What had happened to Brad was tragic but would not ordinarily be grounds for an FLDS man to lose the priesthood. Perhaps the reason that Warren and his father felt such a drastic step was necessary was that my father had lost control over his house, and it seemed clear that he would never get it back. With each group of younger kids falling under the influence of the older ones, my father’s family was growing up doubting and sometimes defiant toward him and to the church. If the priesthood allowed this trend to continue, it might spread to other kids and other families. That was too great a risk for a religion that relied on absolute control over its members. The only solution to this was to remove the rest of the family from that environment in the hope that a new home and a new priesthood father would mold us into ideal church members.

      “Let us go back, Mom,” I begged, overcome by a sudden urge to cuddle up to my mother and hold on to her skirt as if I was a toddler. “Please, let us go home.”

      Her face was drawn and her eyes had lost their glow, and behind them I sensed the same fear that we were all feeling. Turning toward me, she could muster no other response than “Just pray, Lesie.”

      Brilliant hues of orange and red illuminated the late-afternoon sky as we pulled up to the home of Uncle Fred Jessop, the local bishop. It would have been difficult for me to find any source of comfort at the time, but at least we were at the home of Uncle Fred. Because of his important role in the community, he commanded respect, and even though I had never known Uncle Fred myself, I looked up to him. Still, dread gripped my stomach as we approached his doorstep with the small bags that contained the few items we’d had time to gather: a few changes of clothing and a single pair of pajamas.

      The stark contrast between Uncle Fred’s house and the house I grew up in was undeniable. His expansive L-shaped residence was one of the largest in the community, with more than forty-five rooms spread over two floors and three large wings connected at the center to the original home. Fifteen of Uncle Fred’s living wives and more than thirty of his children lived there when we arrived in late July. While I’d long seen his sprawling compound from the playground several blocks away, I’d never actually been inside.

      The front door opened onto the huge dining room, where the Jessop family was seated at two long tables holding about eighteen on each side as well as four shorter tables. Although I had been raised in what many would consider a very large family, there had never been anywhere near this many people seated in our dining room. I immediately spotted Uncle Fred at the head of one of the two long tables. The air was full of chatter and the inevitable clanging of a dish or squeal of a baby.

      When we stepped inside, it was like something out of a movie: a hush fell over the noisy room and everyone stopped eating to look at us. The arrival of a family in trouble was nothing new to them. Indeed, many such women and children like us had found themselves here. Still, I felt terribly awkward and ashamed as I followed my mother to an enormous living room packed with couches and chairs arranged in rows. Like all FLDS families, the Jessops held prayer services in their home, and the sheer number of people in the house required the space to be large and specialized. Upon entering the huge oblong room, I was overcome by the strangeness of the place.

      Weary from the emotional turmoil of the last several days, I took a seat close to my mother. A commotion drew my attention to the doorway, where some of Fred’s children were peeking in at us as if we were on display. Everyone was curious, and in the days ahead I would discover that many of Fred’s children had stories much like mine, but people hardly ever talked about them. In many ways, it felt like we were all a bunch of outcasts forced to put our pasts behind us and find our niche in this large mixed family.

      During the ten minutes that it took for Uncle Fred to finish up his dinner, I soaked up my surroundings. Like many members of the FLDS, Uncle Fred had added to his home a number of times over the years as his family grew. The room that we were in was part of his original home, but I could tell that it had been recently updated with new carpet and a fresh coat of paint. Vaulted ceilings and large windows lent the room an open feel, much like the Claybourne house that Dad had remodeled for us. In the center was a big, comfy-looking LaZ- Boy chair that I was certain belonged to Uncle Fred.

      Sure enough, when he shuffled in, he made himself at home in that very seat. Out of respect, we all rose and one by one shook his hand. I was initially intimidated by the way he stared at us, and I didn’t speak a word. Finally, a grin formed on his face and in a jovial tone, shaking his head, he mused to all of us, “What am I going to do with you?”

      Even though his manner was kind, I was intimidated by him. This was the typical dynamic between women and children and church elders, especially men in a position of leadership. Fred Jessop had been assigned to be our caretaker until the prophet could decide where we belonged, and it was clear that he took the role seriously from his effort to set us at ease. Motioning one of his wives to join us, he instructed her to check on our accommodations and make sure things were ready. Then he invited a handful of his young daughters to gather around us and introduce themselves. We sat among them as Uncle Fred regaled us with a few stories of his youth before sending us to the second floor to settle in for the night. He’d graciously offered us a meal, but we were all too numb to eat and went to bed that night with empty stomachs and heavy hearts.

      We were given two rooms in the south wing. Brad and Caleb shared one room, while Mom, my younger sisters Sherrie and Ally, and I moved into the larger room, which had a queen bed for them and a small pullout chair for me. Both rooms were at the end of a long hallway with a door leading to a small terrace where we could sit outside and enjoy dramatic views of the Vermilion Cliffs encircling the community like fortress walls. At first I found the scorched red landscape too grating to enjoy, but with time, I came to appreciate the raw beauty of the rugged crimson mountains that surrounded us.

      I was miserable

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