The 19th Wife (8 page)

Their hope of finding a peaceful home faded quickly. By the summer of 1838 tensions were high between the Mormons and the surrounding non-Mormon communities. The non-Mormons feared the Mormons for three reasons:

1) The Mormons voted in block and thus had quickly become a powerful political force in their new land.

2) The Mormons had swiftly, and some say surreptitiously, bought up large tracts of land.

3) Most controversially, rumors of polygamy had followed the Mormons from Ohio. Joseph and Brigham repeatedly denied the accusations, but many Missourians were suspicious of their new neighbors’ marital customs.

MASSACRE

On October 27, 1838, Missouri governor
Lilburn W. Boggs
signed an Extermination Order, which told the Mormons to leave the state or face extermination. The Mormons took the order seriously, but rather than fleeing they chose to fight, making plans for a military defense. Three days later, around four o’clock in the afternoon of October 30, between 200 and 250 members of the Missouri Militia rode into Haun’s Mill. The women and children escaped across the shallow creek into the forest, fleeing with naked babies and frying pans. The men and a number of boys who refused to leave their fathers took up a defensive position in the blacksmith shop. The militia surrounded the building and shot at the huddled Mormons at close range through the loose chinking. Before nightfall, seventeen Mormons were murdered, along with one sympathetic non-Mormon, who had been there on business. Among those in the blacksmith shop, only one survived, the wainwright
Chauncey G. Webb.
Chauncey’s wife, Elizabeth, and stepson, Gilbert, heard the nearly one hundred rifle shots from behind the mill’s waterwheel, where they were hiding in shoulder-high water. During the battle, Elizabeth prayed for her husband’s survival. When he was found alive, she, and many others, deemed it a miracle and long after spoke of it as one.

The close-range murders were particularly gruesome. Simon Cox was shot in the side, bits of his kidney splattering his fellow Mormons. Using a corn knife, one member of the militia chopped Thomas McBride, who was nearly eighty, into pieces. Another shot the top off the head of ten-year-old
Sardius Smith,
who was discovered beneath the bellows. But most offensive to the Mormons, and many non-Mormons, too, when word of the massacre got out, was that the governor had sanctioned the murders and thus they were legitimate in the eyes of the state’s law.

CONSEQUENCES

After the Haun’s Mill massacre, the Mormons began to flee Missouri, eventually settling on the Illinois side of the Mississippi at a swampy outpost then known as Commerce. Here they built the proud city of
Nauvoo,
which in five years would become the second largest in Illinois. Chauncey Webb, the massacre’s lone survivor, moved his family to Nauvoo around 1840 or 1841, becoming the city’s leading wagon builder. In Nauvoo, also known as Beautiful City, Joseph Smith and the Saints would experience their golden age.

The murders were never officially investigated, and no one was ever brought to justice. The massacre remains an important turning point in LDS history and is remembered annually through memorials, reenactments, and special prayers. The mill’s original red millstone has been erected as a memorial to the victims. For many Mormons in the 19th century, Chauncey Webb’s survival came to symbolize their resolve. Records show, however, that Chauncey Webb was a reluctant hero and disagreed with his wife’s assessment that he had survived because of divine intervention.

REFERENCES

1.
History of the Church,
Vol. III

2.
Mormon Polygamy: A Historical Perspective
by Charles Green

3. “The Women of Haun’s Mill” by Mary P. Sprague

4.
The 19th Wife
by Ann Eliza Young

I’M NOT AN EXPERT OR ANYTHING

The next morning I drove out to the Mesadale Post Office. Mailing labels, a poster of wildflower stamps, the FBI’s Most Wanted—you might forget you were in an outlaw town until you met the postmistress, Sister Karen, in her Utah burka (think Laura Ingalls) and forty years of hair.

“I know I know you. Give me a second and I’ll figure it out. I never forget a face.” Sister Karen tapped her temple with a pencil. “Jordan Scott! My goodness, what brings you back here?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“You came to the right place.”

“One of my sisters. Stepsister, really. Her name’s Elizabeth the Second. Blond hair, blue-gray eyes. You know her?”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that.” Sister Karen wasn’t being flip. In Mesadale the limited gene pool produced a common look—white-gold hair and fair, almost translucent skin that doesn’t do well in the sun.

“She’s pretty tall,” I said. “Originally from Idaho.”

“Originally from Idaho,” Sister Karen said to herself while sorting the welfare checks. The Prophet used to preach about welfare, claiming it was our religious duty to cheat the government. “The Devil’s people are meant to support God’s people,” he’d say. The sister wives passed around a cassette of him teaching how to lie on a single-mother form. The checks arrived so frequently you had to wonder who in Salt Lake and Washington had been paid off.

“I don’t know if this will help,” I said, “but I used to call her Queenie.”

“Queenie! Why didn’t you say so? Brother Hiram’s wife.”

“So she’s married?”

“Of course. To Brother Caleb’s son, Hiram. Real nice man. A police officer. They live up Red Creek, across from the canyon.”

In a flash I imagined my old friend’s life: the big barn of a house, the chicken-scratched yard, the softball team of wives. I saw Queenie mending her husband’s night-blue uniform, letting out the waist. I heard the stampede of children on the stairs. “How many wives?” I said.

“Actually, it’s just Queenie. Brother Hiram really loves that girl. The Prophet keeps pressing him to take another and he keeps telling the Prophet he doesn’t want anyone else.”

I thanked Sister Karen for her help. “I know you’re not supposed to talk to me.”

“I love the Prophet, but honest to goodness you can’t go around in life not
talking
to people. You going up to Queenie’s now? Do me a favor and tell her she’s got a package down here.”

I drove up the road next to Red Creek. It was midmorning and the streets were quiet. You might think, well, that’s normal: the kids at school, the men at work, the women either at home or out at a job. Except that’s not exactly how it was. Any kid older than eight was in school. The younger kids, I’m talking like five to seven, were looking after the babies or doing housework. Most of the wives were working, on the farms or in the few shops. Many worked in the church’s sewing plant, making eyeglass cords. Some upholstered chairs and sofas in a furniture shop. A lot worked as secretaries over in church headquarters—doing who knows what, but I guess there’s a ton of paperwork when you’re planning for the end of time. Some women were nurses or midwives in St. George or Cedar City, usually the ones who couldn’t have children. My mom used to work part-time at the co-op as a cashier. When I was little sometimes I’d go to work with her, standing at her side as she rung up the groceries. The only customers were other Firsts, usually three or four sister wives out doing the marketing. They’d fill five or six baskets with cartons of cereal and sides of bacon and cases of fruit cocktail. Sometimes they’d fight over apple or grape juice, and sometimes they never even spoke. I remember once a guy came in who obviously wasn’t a First. He was in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up into the sleeve. He walked up and down the aisles like he didn’t know what he was looking for. When he passed a cluster of sister wives, they stepped aside and looked the other way. The guy chose my mom’s aisle to buy a chocolate bar. He was staring at us, and my mom drew me close to her side. “Is there a restaurant or a café around here?” the guy said. My mom shook her head. She rang up his candy and handed him his change. I watched the guy walk back to his car. I watched the car back out of the lot. I watched my mom reassure herself that she’d done nothing wrong in taking the guy’s money and touching his flesh when she gave him his two dimes.

And the men? What do they do in Mesadale? Some worked construction out on jobs in Kanab and St. George, where the wages were good. The boys did a lot of the construction in town, putting up more houses for wives and kids and more and more church admin buildings. During my last year in Mesadale I helped reroof the church. I spent like half a year nailing down shingles. You know what Roland said when I told him that? “Oh honey, talk about an angel on the roof!”

But a lot of the men in the church don’t work at all. Especially the Apostles, the band of loyalists who keep an eye on everything for the Prophet. My dad was an Apostle, and in exchange he got to marry as many women as he wanted. At this hour in the morning a lot of these guys were passed out, sleeping off a hangover or a high. I’ll guesstimate half the men had a whiskey and/or meth problem, and maybe half of those played with vicodin and oxy cotton, which is easy to score in Hurricane and St. George. There’s no point in telling you the Prophet officially bans alcohol and drugs, or that I’m pretty sure he deals.

Queenie’s house was easy to spot: a small stucco ranch, probably two bedrooms and a bath. The other thing that gave it away: her husband’s patrol car parked at an angle in the drive.

Across the street I turned up a dry gulley and drove into the canyon. The van picked its way up the wash, the tires grinding in the sand, until we were behind a bend where no one could see us. The canyon walls cast a long shadow that would keep Elektra cool. I poured a bowl of water and cracked the windows. I told her she was a good girl, but she knew what was coming: her tail fell limp off her ass. When I got out she started barking, howling like I’d eaten her young. It echoed up the canyon. When I shhhhhed her, that echoed too. This wasn’t going to work.

“Oh, come on,” I said, leashing her up. “You big baby.” Her tail flicked back to life.

The canyon walls were cold and gritty and almost blue from the shadow. At the mouth of the canyon we stepped into a world of white sunlight. The difference in temperatures must have been thirty degrees. We ran across the road to Queenie’s door and it opened before I could knock.

“Jordan, what are you doing here?”

“Good to see you too.”

“Shhh, Hiram’s sleeping. Come on, let’s talk in the garage.” She led Elektra and me across a dark living room, down a path worn in the carpet. In the garage she turned on a painter’s lamp. A thick beery light illuminated a workbench and a gun rack mounted with rifles and shotguns. “What are you up to?” she said.

“I guess you heard about my mom.”

“Of course I did.”

“Well, I’m looking into a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like what really happened.”

In this light Queenie’s face looked yellow and cold. She hadn’t changed much, still beautiful, still a rebel gleam in her eyes. Her mother married my father not long before I was kicked out. She was his 23rd or 24th wife, I think, a bucktoothed woman who ate her nails. They met through this polygamy personals website (
www.2wives.com
; check it out). She showed up at the house with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. My father started calling the girl Elizabeth the Second to avoid confusion with another girl. I remember how shocked she looked those first few weeks in the house: the livid brow, the sense of betrayal in her eyes whenever her mother called her Elizabeth the Second. She knew she had landed in a very strange place. As for me, I took to her because she seemed, well, kinda fabulous, although this was of course before I had ever used that word. One night she told me she hated everyone calling her Elizabeth the Second. “It makes me feel like the fucking queen,” she said. The what? She gave me a brief tutorial on British royalty. At first I didn’t believe her. The Prophet had said on one of his tapes that although England had managed to avoid total destruction in the last war, there was nothing there now other than a ruined people living in huts and sheds. “He’s lying,” she said. I told her she was the one who was lying, but this wasn’t long after I had refused to slaughter the dogs and the sheep. These two events rubbed together, shaping a baby pearl of doubt. Six weeks later my dad caught us holding hands. You know the rest.

In the garage I asked Queenie what had happened after I left. “It was no big deal,” she said. “Your punishment was excommunication. Mine was marriage. The Prophet chose Hiram for me. Or I guess I should say he chose me for Hiram. Hiram was twenty at the time, so not really that old. We were sealed the next day. You know how it goes, you’ve heard the story a million times. But you know what—and this is the insane part—we fell in love. He’s a good man. He loves me. He loves our little girl. Jordan—stop making that face.”

“What face?”

“You think I’m out of my mind.”

“No, no, it’s great,” I lied. “He sounds great.”

Was she kidding? Love? In Mesadale? “I’m just surprised,” I said. “Monogamy is sort of a no-no out here.”

“I know. Lately the Prophet’s been putting pressure on Hiram. But so far we’ve resisted.”

I asked how her mom was. She looked down to Elektra, then back up. A gray storm had moved across her eyes. “She’s dead.”

“What? How?”

“She got sick a few years ago. Her kidneys.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But that wasn’t it,” she said. “About six months ago she started having doubts about everything. She wanted to leave your dad. She wanted out of here. So they murdered her.”

“Excuse me?”

“They put salt in her dialysis machine. It crystallized her heart. She went into the clinic for a treatment and never came home.”

OK, let me stop for a second. I know what you’re thinking. And I’d be thinking it too. But in Mesadale it’s not as unlikely as it sounds.

“Who do you think it was?”

“The Prophet. Well, not him himself, but a couple of his men. He wanted to show everyone what happens if you try to leave.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“No, but I know it’s true.”

I think one of the reasons Mesadale’s been ignored for so long are the stories like these. When they seep out, when people hear them, they think, Oh please. Salt in the dialysis machine? A crystallized heart? It sounds like a bad movie. And so the stories are dismissed, and the Prophet and his disciples have been left alone. Mr. Heber was totally wrong to think anything out here had changed.

“Anyway,” said Queenie. “So you’re like, what, snooping around?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“You don’t think your mom did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. There isn’t anyone more devout than your mom.”

“I know, that’s why I want to find out a little more.”

“Did you talk to his latest wives? If I were you, I’d start with them.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I have. Everything started to change with the last couple of wives.”

“What are their names?”

“Let’s see, Sister Kimberly is the newest. She lives behind the big house in a log cabin your dad built. Maybe start with her.”

Then a little girl started crying on the other side of the house. “That’s Angela, I need to go. You really have to get out of here before anyone sees you.”

“Queenie, can I come back?”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Then she softened up. “If you have to, yes, of course. Jordan, I don’t want to turn all mushy on you, but after you were gone I never stopped thinking about you. I prayed a lot that you were OK.”

“Me too. But I guess we’re both doing fine, given the circumstances.”

“I guess,” she said. “You should go. And be careful.” She pressed a button and the garage door opened to a wall of blinding light.

“I almost forgot. Sister Karen has a package for you.”

“Oh really? I wonder what.”

But the sunlight made it impossible to read her eyes.

From there I drove out to Kanab, a high-desert town that’s one part granola-hiker-ecotourist, two parts LDS. It’s about forty miles beyond Mesadale, and arriving there is like time travel,
whoosh
ing in from the nineteenth century and landing in the twenty-first. I stopped at a sandwich shop called the Mega Bite and ordered a tuna fish from a girl whose name tag said
5.

“This is so weird,” she said when she brought me my order. “I know you.”

“You do?”

“You’re only like my brother.”

I was less astonished by this statement than you might think. The only remarkable part of this encounter was that she was a pretty teenage girl who had managed to escape Mesadale. The pretty ones never got out.

“My mom married your dad after you left. He used to talk about you. He said you fucked your sister. That chick, what’s her name.”