The 19th Wife (18 page)

“You cannot wear that,” my mother advised when he put on a dirty shirt. Aaron shrugged that she could not tell him what to do. The women among my Dear Readers will recognize this confrontation between mother and son. After several repetitions of these seemingly irreconcilable positions, my mother relented, as every mother learns to do. “Go as you please,” she sighed.

She turned to find me plaiting my hair. Since my apostasy from the Mormon Church I have been accused of many things, most of them wholly untrue. However, the accusations that I have always appreciated a pretty dress and other womanly finery, and have been known to spend a minute too long at the looking glass, is, I must confess, deserved and true. So be it: I am guilty!

The Meeting House was hot and unpleasant from all the people crowded into it. Many I had never seen before. Judging by the plainness of cloth and the dirt in their seams, they were settlers who had journeyed a day or more to hear the preacher. Such a setting, I will note, is a valuable scene to record the demographic peculiarities of plural marriage. Allow me to take one bench as an example: Near where my mother and I stood along the wall (while Aaron fidgeted with his pocket knife!) was a long bench that in most Christian congregations could hold two or three families. But here, on this portentous evening, I shall describe who sat there: First the father (always the father first!), a farmer in his patched shirt; then his lovely young wife, slender in her bodice; then the next wife, older than the first, yellowish hair with worrisome streaks of gray; in her lap was a boy of seven or eight in need of wiping his nose and his three little brothers and sisters squeezed in at her side; next to them, an older woman even still, her hair a dull drained buff, and a general emaciation that suggests the difficulty of her days; next to her were two lads about Aaron’s age, their Adam’s apples the size of rocks. And, because this is the way, next to her, an even older woman, hair too wiry to hold neatly in a bun; her head sat upright with dignity and grace upon a thick, tired neck. She had one daughter, full grown, portly, and unmarried; I can only presume they shared a bed in this man’s house. I will make the presumptuous leap to state that the father at the opposite end of the bench had not visited his first wife’s bed in a decade. So I present your average Payson family, in its full relief.

Finally, at a quarter past eight, Elder Hovey stood before the gathered lot. “Brothers and Sisters, I’m here to tell you that each of you, both man and woman, child and parent, is a sinner. Yet you have taken the first step toward redemption by being here tonight.” The man carried on like this for nearly twenty minutes, accusing everyone gathered of sin. He assured us we were damned unless we cleansed our souls through confession. “Now who will be the first to confess his thievery, his deception, his lustful heart, his treachery and fraud, his perfidy, and—may the Heavenly Father forgive you—his lack of fervor in religion?”

The man was in possession of a fair, angelic complexion set off by dark, wavy hair. His touching, boyish appearance contrasted with his bullying sermon in a way that made his audience listen even more intently.

“Do you believe I am up here merely for the sake of rhetoric? Do you think I ask this question as a speaker’s gesture? These are not the preacher’s questions, left to be answered in the privacy of your heart. These are the questions of the reformer and savior of the soul. I ask you here and now: Who is prepared to repent? There is but one path to salvation: Repent, reveal your sins and allow yourself to be baptized anew! And so it has come to pass that now is the time for you to open your hearts and repent!”

He stared out at his audience, making each of us feel as if he were glaring into our individual souls and could see the lies and deceit. My heart was racing, so terrified was I of his power to know my most secret truths. I began to feel the urge to speak. I sensed that he wanted me, among the hundreds of people gathered, to confess as example. But what would I confess? True, I had coveted Missy Horman’s velvet-trimmed cloak. I had prayed my father would return early from his Mission, even if it meant leaving souls unsaved. Once, I called Brother Brigham plump as a pig (not to his face, of course). Was this what Elder Hovey wanted to hear?

Upon the stage he paced back and forth repeating his calls until finally Mrs. Myton, our neighbor, shot up in her seat. “I can’t stay quiet any longer.”

“Sister, what have you done?”

“I have sinned.” Gasps and clucks filled the hall.

“Tell us, what are your transgressions?”

“It’s difficult to say.”

“Yet you’ve already stood. We know for certain you’re guilty. Now you must tell us your errors and we shall help you atone.”

“I can’t. They’ll hate me for it.”

“Who?”

Mrs. Myton wrung her handkerchief. She was a widow and had come to the Meeting House alone but for her spinster daughter, Connie, who had trouble seeing at night. Elder Hovey prodded Mrs. Myton: “Have you lied?”

“Well—”

“Have you stolen?”

“Well—”

“Speak, Sister. Hundreds are waiting for you.”

“All right. I’ll say it. I took her hen.”

“Whose hen?”

“My neighbor’s, Mrs. Webb’s. When she moved in, her hen wandered into my yard and it was Connie’s twentieth birthday and I just picked it up and before I’d known what I’d done it was boiling in my pot. I’ll replace the bird, I promise.”

The crowd twittered with shock. Many turned to look at my mother in order to offer pity and compassion, although a few, it seemed, appeared to suggest that she was somehow equally to blame. My mother had long wondered about that hen, which, truth be told, had never been much of a layer. Now, made aware of her status as victim of a larceny, she held me tight, uncertain of how to react. Was this a test of her as well?

“Was it one hen, Sister?” asked the Elder.

“Just one,” said Mrs. Myton. “And I haven’t slept well since.” (This I would label a half truth, for just the day before I passed Mrs. Myton’s window and heard a snoring equal to the clatter of picks in the quarry.)

“Mrs. Webb, tell us, can you forgive this wretched soul?”

“If the Lord can,” said my mother, “then so can I.”

“Very good,” said the Elder. He stood contentedly before us, eyeing the gathered with an admixture of compassion and dignity. “Now who’s next?”

Mrs. Myton had been the chink in the dam. What followed was a flood of confession. Brothers and Sisters raced each other to stand before their community and confess their sins: a stolen fence; a ladder borrowed but not returned; a hand-saw pilfered from the mill. One dear woman, whose husband was up in Great Salt Lake with his second and third wives, pressed hard against her conscience to find a moral error in her past; all she could produce was this: “I once stole a rose from a bush that was not mine,” she admitted in minor triumph. “To make matters worse, I pressed it in my Bible and have it to this day.”

The admissions of thievery and deceit continued for three hours, reaching such fervor that it became almost a contest of who could admit to the greater sin. When one Brother stood and confessed mere doubt in his heart, he was nearly booed from the Meeting House. “What else have you done!” someone called. “Tell the truth!”

Then something unexpected occurred: Aaron stood up. “I’ve got something to say.”

Elder Hovey stopped. “Tell me, Brother, what have you done?”

“I’ve been wrong to a girl.”

“Go on.” Clearly this was the type of confession Elder Hovey had been fishing for all night. Now that the topic had moved from larceny to true impropriety, the crowd of Saints was freshly enraptured.

“I promised I would marry her and I haven’t.”

“What will you do about it?”

“I’ll marry her, if she’ll have me.”

Aaron had been such an undistinguished boy his entire life that many who knew my family did not know of his existence. He was average in every way: a plain appearance, a plain mind, a plain and guileless sense of purpose in life. I do not write this with judgment but simply as a matter of recording the truth—and in effort for the Reader to understand how exceptional his confession was.

“Is she here tonight?” asked Elder Hovey.

“She is.”

“Will you make amends to her now? In front of your gathered Brothers and Sisters and before God?”

Every eye was on Aaron. He stepped forward, moving around the crowded pews. There was a great anticipation as he walked, everyone wondering at whose feet he would stop. When he had to step over a family seated on the floor, people stirred as if one of these girls—freckled like the leopard, all of them—had submitted to his will. But no, he was only passing. He paused before a black-laced widow whose husband had been lost in Missouri. Had she had her way with my brother? No, he was only hesitating before moving to, of all people, Connie, our dear, dull neighbor, who had celebrated her twentieth birthday unknowingly feasting on my mother’s hen.

Imagine the stir when my brother took Connie’s plump hand and asked her to become Mrs. Aaron Webb! His voice was so soft and timid that two older Sisters squawked, “What’d he say?” People began stomping their feet and a small section broke into a spontaneous hymn about atonement and the path to Heaven.

“And so this fine couple shall be sealed,” announced Elder Hovey. “With their confessions, we can now forgive.”

If Mrs. Myton had let loose a flood of stories of theft, my brother released a tidal wave of perversion too graphic to print. Suffice it to say: at least half the population of Saintly Brothers had a confession of the heart or, I should say, loins. The revelations continued for more than an hour, men rising to admit relations with women who were not their wives. The only resolution was marriage, even if the men were already wed. Elder Hovey asked several women on the spot, “Will you forgive your husband and permit him to marry the woman he has wronged in order to prevent his eternal damnation and hers?” Tell me, does a woman put to such a question have any option in her reply?

It will be noted that in this litany of intercoursal relations there were no confessions of liaisons between a man and a previously married woman. No man was stupid enough to admit to that. It is not for me to say whether such sins had been committed but not confessed, or if Payson was somehow spared from such unforgivable acts. In any event, after five hours of confession, we had heard enough. We left exhausted, my mother and Mrs. Myton forced to walk home amicably, newly united by crime.

THE
19
TH WIFE

CHAPTER SIX

The Utah Reformation

The subsequent weeks brought great change and confusion to my depleted little family in Payson. The confessional meeting was followed by several more, some lasting all day, wherein every last sin imaginable and many never before deemed possible were confessed. There was never a more devout Saint than my mother, but she worried over the upheaval these meetings caused. “I don’t understand it. People are lying about lying,” she observed. “You can’t impress the Lord with extra sins.”

She was under a new duress, for Aaron had kept his promise and was sealed to Connie Myton in the Endowment House. It was a joyless ceremony, attended by but a few, myself excluded for I was too young to enter. Afterward, my mother served a custard cake to her new daughter and Mrs. Myton, who ate more than her share and left my mother with but a spoonful. (Why this sticks in my memory, I cannot say, but there it is once again: the truth!) After supper Aaron set about hanging a blanket along a wire run across the hut. Connie was to replace me in his bed, and I would sleep next to my mother. It was only that first night, as I tossed uncomfortably and plugged my ears against the strange noises from the other side of the blanket, that I learned that my mother’s ticking was no more comfortable or soft than a dry river bed. She had given her children the finer mattress without once complaining of her sacrifice. This is the sort of woman my mother has always been, I shall note plainly here.

Newly married, and awakened to the omnipresence of sin in our community, Aaron joined up with a gang of men who had taken it upon themselves to enforce atonement. These were frightening days in Payson. Although distracted by the vagaries of girlhood, I took full notice of the change of climate, and I am not referring to winter’s end and the arrival of spring. During the first months of 1855, the confessions continued. Those who refused to confess, or confessed they had nothing to confess, were dragged to meetings by young men, my brother included, and put before a hall of peers and shouted at to repent. “You’re no better than the rest of us!” It did not occur to these mobs that a man or woman could in fact live righteously and therefore have no sins to offer up. The Church had been guiding all of us for years, long before Elder Hovey’s arrival, to live sinlessly. I shall not bother to point out the broken logic herein.

In the evenings Aaron took down my father’s rifle and went out to round up sinners. Connie, I am sorry to report, was a meek, twitching-nosed creature who squeaked from the corner of our hut. “When will you be back?” seemed to be her favorite phrase. When Aaron was out, I invited her to sit with my mother and me at the fire, but she preferred to stay on her side of the blanket, passing her time I do not know how, although every now and then a small sniffle would emerge from her and my mother and I would lift our eyes from our needlework.

Once I asked Aaron, when he came through the door flushed and excited, where he had gone off to. He hung up his gun like a hunter home from the kill and said, “Making sure all are saved.” A noble endeavor, I am sure, but coming from a boy of seventeen who only a few months before feigned illness on Sunday mornings, it sounded, to my youthful and inexperienced ears, at least, insincere.

It does not take long, I do not need to tell you, for such an environment of confession to turn on itself. Soon not only were souls being cleansed, but neighbors were realizing they lived next to adulterers and thieves. Nearly everyone in Payson was told at some point he had been a victim by he who was previously deemed friend. This was enough to cast a long cloud of suspicion over the village. While the sinners were being re-baptized in the creek their minds were preoccupied with their belongings left on the shore.

“It isn’t right,” my mother concluded in her admirably succinct way.

She wrote the Prophet, alerting Brigham to the hypocrisy Elder Hovey had unleashed in Payson. She was certain her old friend and counselor would not approve of such behavior, for where in the Book of Mormon were the tales of mass confession and repentance? (Well, maybe they are in there somewhere, because I might as well admit, as a child I read the book a dozen times but always its meaning escaped me. If you find hypocrisy in this confession, so be it, but I ask you, Dear Reader, pick up a copy yourself and tell me how long you last.)

Brother Brigham replied to my mother in a brief letter. “If they are sinful,” he wrote, “then they should admit to their sins. If they are innocent, thus they are, and I pray, shall be.” It would be incorrect to state this reply did not confuse my mother. She could have dismissed its ambiguity from any other Saint but Brigham, the man who had personally saved her with baptism in that cold creek all those years before. At the time she of course did not reveal the Prophet’s response to me directly, yet in reconstructing these events for this publication more than one person has assured me he never clearly denounced Elder Hovey.

Had the events in Payson remained in Payson, this would be but a quaint story of provincial religious fervor. Yet, as History now knows, the mood of inquisition that struck our village was but a precursor for what would become known as the Utah Reformation. By the following winter of 1856, Brother Brigham and the other Church leaders instituted a likeminded reform throughout the Utah Territory. “All are guilty! None is clean until he has been cleansed!” So the charge went against Saints everywhere, even those who had never transgressed. The Utah Reformation showed far better organization than the little version originated in Payson. Brigham ran it like a General leading a War, commanding his Bishops, Elders, and others as if they were foot soldiers in a fierce battle for the soul. Among its many tactics in the campaign, the Church created a secret police disguised as local proselytizers called the Home Missionaries. Their function was to spy on Brigham’s followers and carry out his will.

One afternoon my brother returned to the hut in such a somber mood, I feared he was bearing fateful news about our father. “I’ve been named a Home Missionary,” he announced.

“What’s that?” I asked in that way only an eleven-year-old can.

“We visit people in their homes, ensuring everyone’s living righteously.” Next he told my mother and me, and his wife in her corner, that he must put us each through a catechism. “That’s how I’ll know if your souls are pure.”

“Child, sit down,” my mother said. “You sound like a fool.”

“Anyone who refuses the catechism must be reported to the Bishop.” My mother told Aaron to stop his nonsense.

“I’ll do it,” squeaked Connie.

“You see,” said Aaron. “My wife has nothing to hide.”

He shooed my mother and me out the door into the garden. It was a fine spring day with a breeze rippling the grass. We waited upon a log beneath the cottonwood. Mrs. Myton spotted us from her window. “He promised he’d come over and do me when he’s through with you!” she called.

“It didn’t used to be like this,” my mother said.

“Why is Brigham doing this?” I asked.

“It’s the men around him. They tell him lies. There is no finer man on Earth than Brigham Young.”

Imagine, if you will, the effect such a declaration can have on a young girl’s heart. I was on the threshold of maturity, and acutely sensitive to how women responded to men. I loved no one more in this world than my mother. If she could love Brigham, even as his words and deeds created animosity in her own house, then my heart naturally followed course.

After nearly an hour, Aaron and Connie appeared in the kitchen yard. She had a confused, far-off expression, as if recovering from a sharp but temporary pain. “Is she all right?”

“She’ll wait at her mother’s while we continue. All right, Ann Eliza, you’re next.”

My mother told Aaron he could not interview me unless she was present. Aaron whined, an impetuous noise that reminded us he was not far from boyhood. “The Elders insist that each catechism be performed alone. Those are the rules.”

“I won’t let you talk to her without me.” My mother folded her arms across her breasts—the universal maternal gesture that tells all children everywhere, This matter is settled.

Aaron relented with a huff and a stomp. We followed him into the hut. He had set two chairs opposite each other and he nervously indicated us to sit down while he perched on the bed. “Now I must ask you some very important questions. You must swear to the Lord you will answer honestly and truthfully.”

I told him I would.

“All right, let’s begin.” He flipped through a pamphlet provided to him by our Bishop. “The first question is, Have you ever killed a man, woman, or child?”

“This is crazy,” my mother snapped. “I’ve never thought about killing anyone until this very moment.”

“Ma, I need to ask the questions in the order they’re printed. Ann Eliza, yes or no?”

I could not help myself from laughing. “Who would I kill?”

“Answer the question straightforward and truthfully.”

“No.”

And so the inquisition continued. My brother, in earnest voice, asked the most ridiculous questions I have ever encountered, at least until my lawsuit against Brigham Young. He inquired if I had committed adultery. (This to an eleven-year-old!) He asked if I had drunk ale, whiskey, or wine.

“Are you finished?” said my mother.

“One more question. Do you accept plural marriage as true?”

“Are you asking me or Ann Eliza?”

“Both.”

“My husband has a second wife. I think that clarifies my belief.”

“Ann Eliza? What about you?”

“I think so.” Oh, if I could take back that response!

The interview ended, as Aaron had been taught to do so, with instruction to observe the wishes of my mother and father (though absent) and to rightfully enter a plural marriage when I was of the age. “There,” he said, reverting to his more accustomed role of son and brother. “How’d I do?”

“You’ll be real good at this miserable task,” my mother said.

Aaron, never exceedingly swift, took this as a compliment until he felt its underlying sting.

From thence Aaron, and many others like him, visited the houses of neighbor and friend, subjecting good men and women to a humiliating volley of questions. Most were afraid to turn the Home Missionaries away, for doing so would set off suspicion of being guilty of some great and yet unknown sin. During this time every Saint in the Territory underwent a re-baptismal, shivering in the fonts while their sins, no matter how trivial, were supposedly washed away. Within a few months, the people of Utah believed themselves the cleanest body of souls ever to grace the Earth. Despite my mother’s denial, in truth all of this was done, we now know, at the behest of Brigham Young.