LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

private health insurance. My dad didn’t believe in living off the government, so instead of getting Medicaid or food stamps like many members did, we went without coverage. My mother was an herbalist who believed you should use God’s natural remedies before turning to the medical community. Her skeptical view of conventional medicine was shared by most FLDS members, who were quite suspicious of the professional medical community because they were afraid the government was using medicine to spy on people. For this reason, we were also not fully immunized because a suspicion circulated around the community that the government was putting tracking devices in the vaccines, or that they were making the vaccines bad to hurt the people. I rarely went to a doctor or an emergency room as a child, and when I had an ear infection I usually did not have access to antibiotics or other pharmaceuticals. I remember nights when I would cry myself to sleep because my ears hurt so badly.

      By the time I turned five, the financial crunch from the sale of Hydropac was beginning to ease. Dad had found good work as a mining consultant, but the job unfortunately took him away from home to remote mining sites throughout the West.

      My father was somewhat strict and expected a lot from us, but he loved us and we knew it. He would tell us that we could do anything with hard work. Seeing him in the evening was the highlight of our day. We didn’t get to leave the house much, except to attend church on Sundays, so when we heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway, we all raced to greet him in the carport, hoping he would have a stick of gum for us. Dad kept his stash of Big Red cinnamon gum in his Buick Le Sabre and we were crazy about that gum. If we were lucky, sometimes he’d invite us along to the supermarket, where he did all the grocery shopping from a list that his wives would compile.

      Since Dad was often away on business during the week, it was important to him that we spend time as a family on weekends. We would sometimes share quiet evenings in front of the TV, watching Little House on the Prairie or a National Geographic special that Dad deemed appropriate. All the kids would crowd around the TV in the living room to enjoy Saturday-morning cartoons. In college Dad had played football, and he passed his love for the game on to us. On some Saturday mornings, he would take the older children to see his alma mater, Brigham Young University, play football, and when they returned he would recount the game’s best plays to me. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go with them. Sadly, religious pressures and new priesthood teachings began to restrict these trips to outside sporting events, labeling them as “worldly” entertainment. By the time I was old enough to attend, our family no longer went. The priesthood expected the members to dedicate their Saturdays to donating labor for the church work projects instead of partaking in family fun. I never got to have my own experience with my dad watching his favorite team play.

      Every summer we enjoyed a one-week vacation in the Uinta Mountains. The endless expanses and quiet solitude gave us a reprieve from our hectic and often chaotic existence. Somehow when we were in the mountains, our problems seemed to dissolve. With room to breathe, we all put our anger aside and remembered what it means to be with family. We had a special campsite there, a big meadow with lots of privacy. Being in the wilderness was the best part of our summers. Since he was a geologist, Dad would teach us about rocks, fossils, plants, and how to be smart in the wild.

      Dad was amazing with a Dutch oven and liked to prepare large breakfasts of pancakes, bacon and eggs, and hot chocolate with mini- marshmallows. After a day enjoying the great outdoors we would have the treat of Dad’s special roast and potatoes for dinner. At night, under a blanket of stars, we’d have big campfires and sing hymns or family songs. My mother has a beautiful voice and my sisters all played violin. Together, they would end the day with the sweet harmony of “Danny Boy,” my Dad’s favorite song. Oftentimes, my dad’s father and stepmother, who were not members of the FLDS, would come on our camping trips. Even though they did not share our lifestyle, Grandma and Grandpa Wall loved us just the same. Mom slept with us in a little pop-up camper, and Dad shared a tent with Mother Audrey. I never thought to question why Dad had two wives and Grandpa Wall didn’t. It was all I knew. Mother Audrey was the “other” mother and that was that. It was never explained. That was just how it was.

      When I was six years old in the fall of 1992, I started the first grade at Alta Academy. My turn had finally come to leave the house for a few hours each day, and I was looking forward to being among my older siblings.

      Alta Academy was a combination school, place of worship, and birthing center for the FLDS people who lived in the Salt Lake Valley. In 1972, with many of his children grown and no longer living at home, Rulon Jeffs had converted his twenty-plus-bedroom white brick residence into a school for FLDS children, moving himself and his wives into a smaller, more elegant Colonial-style house that the people built for him just next door. The school would be called Alta Academy, and it became the center of church life in the Salt Lake Valley. Rulon’s son Warren had just graduated with honors from the local public high school, and Uncle Rulon directed him to serve as Alta Academy’s first principal. To many church members, Warren seemed intelligent and knowledgeable about the church’s religious teachings—the ideal candidate to help mold the young minds of Salt Lake’s FLDS community.

      Uncle Rulon used church donations to fund the conversion of the drafty old house into a school, but much of the building remained as it was when he lived there. It was littered with secret cubbyholes built into the walls and hidden doors that blended in with the décor—hiding places that may have been used for plural wives and children in case of an unexpected raid by the police or other authorities. They could be locked from the inside to protect those in hiding from being discovered. There were also locks on the outside, and rumors circulated, but were never substantiated, that the hidden crawlspaces were used to correct a disobedient child or wife.

      In two of the converted bedrooms on the second floor, Uncle Rulon opened a birthing center that was staffed by his wife Sharon, who became the midwife for the Salt Lake Valley’s FLDS community. The delivery room was makeshift and had barely changed since it had been a bedroom in the original house. With blue shag carpeting on the floor and the lower half of the walls, it was wholly unlike anything you’d expect to see in a regular hospital. There was no sink or other running water in the room, and the midwife had to use an elongated sink in a nearby bathroom to wash the newborns. An adjacent bedroom was used as a recovery room for the mothers and their babies.

      Though the birthing center provided only basic medical equipment and services, it offered members one distinct advantage over hospitals: husbands could be present when their plural wives gave birth. Before the birthing center, men could not accompany their plural wives to give birth because it risked attracting attention from outsiders. Such was the case when my mother gave birth to her first daughter, Rachel. Mother Audrey had accompanied Mom to the hospital, with Dad relegated to the waiting room.

      Before Alta Academy opened its doors, children in the Salt Lake area had attended the public schools. My older brothers and sisters who grew up then had gone to the elementary school just up the road. Mothers enrolled their children under fictitious names to hide their status as plural wives.

      On that first day of school I was incredibly excited, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that the drive to school was fraught with the same tension that permeated my home life. Since Mother Audrey worked as a teacher at Alta Academy, it was her responsibility to get us into Dad’s big blue Chevy Suburban, which we all called “Big Blue,” and shepherd us to class on time. Of course, rounding up nearly a dozen kids was no easy task. My sister Teressa was always ready first. Eager to get a move on, she’d go outside to the car and wait for the rest of us to file out. After about ten minutes she was back in the house, screaming at everyone to hurry up. Then she was back at the car, where she’d honk the horn wildly to let us know that she meant business.

      Inside the house chaos reigned as we shoveled oatmeal into our mouths and scrambled to get dressed. The drive to Alta Academy took about twenty minutes in good weather, but there was often fog and snow. On some days, the ride felt like an eternity to me, sitting squished between my brothers in the third row of Big Blue. There was usually a lot of commotion in the truck, with everybody trying to talk over everybody else. At times, fights would break out and Mother Audrey would step in to take charge. She didn’t like us horsing around when she was trying to concentrate on

Скачать книгу