Longshot

by Lance Allred

  The final month of school in Montana, Pax decided to take a second wife and got engaged to another woman, Sarah Stoker, the sister of Aunt Audra’s husband, Shawn Stoker. Pax was more or less pressured by his father and uncles to pursue Sarah as a wife. It had become the elephant in the house: Sarah came over, and Sam knew things would be changing, that her husband would be marrying her friend.

  I saw Aunt Sam silently crying in bed when Pax was gone on his honeymoon with Sarah. She was already alone and missing him. She was having to face the fact that she now shared her husband with another woman and would get to sleep with him only every other night from then on.

  But it was the life we knew. And that was part of the deal. We lived the celestial law of plural marriage, and that was the price we—or rather the women—had to pay. They had to sacrifice. And Aunt Sam couldn’t object or voice displeasure; she had to take it and accept it as part of life while living the higher law.

  The year couldn’t last forever, and the time flew by. I hugged Pax and Sam good-bye and went back to Utah with Dad when he came to pick me up at the end of the school year. I won’t say that I returned from Montana as a shining beacon of manhood—I still had a lot of growing up to do—but I was better for the time I had spent with Pax and Sam.

  6

  While I was in Montana, Mom and Dad had declared bankruptcy and been forced to move in with Dad’s brother Uncle Saul. We now lived on the secluded two-acre lot known as the property, which contained three homes: the fourplex that had been built by Rulon but now was owned and rented out by the AUB and was where we held Sunday school; the duplex my dad had built, which was shared by Uncle Saul and Aunt Susan with Uncle Mel, Aunt Laurie, and Aunt Margaret—and now us; and the duplex that Grammy shared with Uncle Saul and Aunt Ruthann. I personally was happy with the turn of events. At least now I was back in a safe little commune of people who believed the same things we did. I didn’t have to constantly be trying to remember what I had to lie about and what I didn’t.

  Uncle Saul had been a wonderful older brother to my father when they were growing up in Salt Lake City, carrying my dad to his baseball games and practices on his bike, with my father sitting on the crossbar. The neighborhood kids thought they did this because Saul and Dad were poor, not because my father, who was a baseball prodigy, couldn’t ride a bike.

  When Saul left for Vietnam, there was no one there to encourage my father to pursue his dream of baseball. My grandmother told my father it was just a game and that he had more important things to attend to, like God’s work and getting a real job where he could earn money and contribute to the family. He gave up baseball and dedicated his life to God’s work, unable to resume baseball when Uncle Saul came back home from Vietnam.

  Uncle Saul became very successful, owning a car dealership in the Salt Lake Valley during the 1980s. As a child, I thought it odd how Uncle Saul was smiled upon for having achieved his wealth while my father was told he needed to dedicate his life to furthering the work of the Lord.

  Uncle Saul had two beautiful but very different wives. His first wife, Ruthann, gave him six kids. Uncle Saul adored her.

  One of his sons, Steven, was a year older than Court. Steven could easily have been mistaken as the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible, the brutal Russian czar of the 1500s who as a child liked to have his guards stand with their pikes upright beneath the ramparts so he could drop little puppies down and see them impaled. This isn’t to say that Steven killed puppies. He did, however, have a macabre shrine of disfigured clay men. He created awesome men out of blocks of colored modeling clay, which he then tortured and mangled. Steven was the head honcho of the little clique of cousins our age on the property.

  Aunt Susan was Uncle Saul’s second wife. She was also very beautiful, but in a very calm, aristocratic kind of way, very sophisticated and properly mannered, as her mother was a first-generation German who immigrated to the United States. Danielle and Levi were Susan’s only two children at the time. Danielle was a year older than me, and Levi was two years younger. Levi was a conundrum. He loved sports and could play any sport and was naturally good at them, yet for the life of him he couldn’t put a spoonful of cereal into his mouth in the morning without leaving soggy frosted flakes on the chair and table where he ate. You always made sure to eat before Levi did, lest you lose your appetite.

  Uncle Saul loved having people together and was thrilled when we moved in with them. He loved being the host and treating people, and he took us kids to Murray Park on Sunday afternoons in his most recent demo model. He always took us afterward to 7-Eleven and bought us Slurpees. I’d take my time with my Slurpee as we drove back home with the windows rolled down, Levi falling asleep on my shoulder, his Slurpee spilling all over him.

  Court and I were young enough to simply enjoy the close proximity we had with our cousins. That summer was a fun one for us boys,* as we played football in the open lawn between the houses. And Szen loved all the open space he could patrol and lounge about on.

  I’m sure by now many readers are wondering when I start talking basketball. Well, I wasn’t much of an athlete in my budding years, to be honest. I was more of a Nintendo and Dungeons & Dragons type of kid. Sure, I’d play basketball with the guys, but I was terrible. I had no gross motor skills. I couldn’t make a layup to save my life. I didn’t know how to time a basic two-step stride to do a simple one-handed layup. But my fine motor skills were excellent!

  We had fun playing on the huge lawn, with the horse pastures at our backs in the setting sun. Steven always manhandled us, as he was undergoing puberty at the age of thirteen and was just so much stronger. When we grew bored of Steven mauling us, we spent hours playing Nintendo together, which usually meant gathering around Steven while he played his single-player games.

  It was nice to have a tight circle of cousins about me to protect me from bullying and ridicule at school. Allreds were healthy kids. You didn’t mess with them as a group.

  When I was in the fifth grade, Uncle Owen called upon Dad to become the teacher of the Priesthood meeting, which was held every other Wednesday evening. This was a huge responsibility and was Owen’s way of anointing Dad his heir apparent as best he could. The Priesthood meeting was exclusively for men. Women were not allowed. Period. It was a very important meeting where the men gathered to hear the words and promptings of men on the Council.

  Torn between his desires to get out of the financial bind he now found himself in and the burden of carrying on his father’s legacy, Dad ultimately chose to commit to his new calling in the Group. He couldn’t let his father’s legacy go. He still believed that his father had been a prophet, and he still believed in the dream. He became Owen’s right-hand man and confidant, much to the chagrin of the Council.

  Dad spent that summer writing various sermons while crammed into a small laundry area in Aunt Laurie’s unit, publishing theories and hypotheses and discussions regarding the “principle” and “true” interpretation of scripture. He became Owen’s right-hand man, producing many volumes and manuscripts that he sold dirt cheap as a part of his lectures and discussions at Priesthood meetings. My father now refers to those written documents as a pile of crap and cannot believe he actually wrote them. As an historian, he is embarrassed.

  One day, my father came home with a concerned look on his face. “Owen came up to me,” he told us, “and asked for my help. He took me over to his closet and showed me shoeboxes full of money. He told me he had over a million dollars there in his closet. He asked me to help him get rid of it and put it somewhere safe.”

  “What did you tell him?” My mom asked.

  “That since I wasn’t on the Council, I couldn’t help him. That it was a matter for the Council.”

  One day that next spring, 1992, Dad came home with starry eyes. He gathered us all in his little bedroom in Aunt Susan’s basement and told us, “Uncle Owen is going to let us move into the fourplex. And…” He paused, still unable to believe what had just happened. “�
�Owen is going to give us the deed to full ownership of the house.”

  “You mean let us live in it, right? Not own it really?” Mom asked, unsure of what she had just heard.

  “Full ownership,” Dad said.

  The Allred Group owned hundreds of homes throughout the intermountain West under its official business title—the AUB—and they never let go of the deeds. They always held their believers hostage, so to speak, in that they held the rights to the land on which the believers lived. It was a subtle reminder that they could evict anyone from their home at a moment’s notice. In a fit of peculiarity, Owen was ceding the land and house entirely to my father, removing the title and deed from the AUB and putting them into my father’s name. No one could make sense of it, not even Owen when members of the Council berated him for his impulsive action.

  It seemed that karma, God, or whatever had finally taken a turn and rewarded my father for all the homes he had built for the AUB over the years.

  As a family, we could make sense of Owen’s decision only by concluding that God, in some way, led Owen to have a moment of uncharacteristic good judgment. Why else would Owen give my father the house when everyone else, even members of the Council, lived on land owned by the AUB? It’s the only thing that made sense. And we’d later see that God was drawing a path for us to leave the Group. Sounds superstitious, I know, but nothing else explains it.

  We, as a family, moved into half of the fourplex. It was rundown and filthy, but it was ours. Dad got to work repairing and remodeling, combining two units into one, allowing each of us to have our own room and allowing Aunt Susan to have her house back to herself.

  During my sixth-grade year, Aunt Ruthann kicked Uncle Saul out of the house. It was shattering to our little world, our paradigm, to see that our parents were fallible. The idea that Aunt Ruthann was leaving Uncle Saul brought about serious internal questions: If we’re God’s people, why would Aunt Ruthann leave? Will Aunt Ruthann not go to heaven? What will happen to the family in heaven? Is Aunt Ruthann going to hell?

  Ruthann’s son Steven was crushed. He moved out and into Ruthann’s sister-wife Susan’s basement. Steven was so angry that he wouldn’t speak to his mother for years. He wouldn’t even talk about her. His mind was in torment. Even though I was only eleven, I could see that Steven was in pain.

  Aunt Ruthann’s departure was a foreshadowing of things to come. Our little heaven on the property was beginning to crumble. The shock of Aunt Ruthann’s leaving was just a precursor to haunting truths and secrets that were about to be unveiled.

  The summer after sixth grade, 1993, Mom and Dad ran Youth Conference for the Group, which was held for three days over the Fourth of July weekend. Hundreds of teenagers raised in the Group gathered together. It was a successful weekend, one that Dad would cap off with a slide show that ended with a giant picture of Jesus accompanied by Garth Brooks’s song “The River.” “Jesus loves each and everyone of you,” Dad said.

  Everyone in the audience was crying as they began to realize that love should be unconditional. “There isn’t anything you could do that would make Jesus love you any more or less than He already does,” Dad told them. This was a truth my mother helped my father realize over their years together, as my father had been raised on conditional love.

  Many men in the AUB, especially those on the Council, didn’t appreciate Dad telling their kids that they could have a relationship with Jesus when they themselves believed that their children needed to rely on and trust the men of the Council to get them to heaven. Jesus was just a side note. They didn’t like Dad teaching their kids that they deserved to be happy and that they were loved no matter what, no matter their sins.

  Three weeks later we all migrated up to Montana for Conference. Conference was an annual three-day event during which Uncle Owen and members of the Council would address the Group as a whole. It was basically an annual reunion for members of the Group.

  Dad, Court, and I drove up through the night with Szen and with Court’s new Dalmatian, Pongo. We found ourselves stopped at 4 a.m. at the top of Lost Trail Pass, over the Montana/Idaho border. Construction held up traffic, and I woke up at the crack of dawn in the high peaks of the Montana mountains. Once traffic cleared, we continued on, and just as the sun was rising, Garth Brooks’s song “The Dance” played on the radio. It was a powerful memory, and I remember how it seemed to be a warning. It was a foretelling of how life, as I knew it, was going to change forever the very next day.

  I was twelve years old.

  It was good to see everyone. Pax, Sam, and Sarah were doing well with their two babies, Kjes and Bud; Aunt Audra had recently given birth to her third child. Mom and the girls got there a bit later than we did, and there was tons of commotion while all the oohs and ahs were shared.

  The next morning Dad called for a family meeting of Yaya’s kids and grandkids. We all gathered in Aunt Sam’s living room, some of us sitting on the floor as there wasn’t enough furniture to accommodate all of us. A tearful Dad, who was in the know as Owen’s confidant, came out and told us the names of men—men on the Council, men whom we believed to be men of God—whose daughters had just come out to say that their fathers had molested and raped them, repeatedly, for years.

  Owen also told my father that there had been other claims by other daughters of the same men, but the Council had managed to keep those claims quiet. It completely shook my father’s world, his paradigm. He had watched as the Group, after his father’s death, became less about scripture and more about their own interpretation. He had seen power-hungry men gravitate to the Group, seeking weak people who would follow them, people who wanted to have someone to follow and hold their hands and guide them through life. He had seen many men abuse their power of authority to blackmail, to extort and intimidate so many. For a time Dad had been able to ignore the situation and tell himself it would get better, that good would prevail and the weeds would be rooted out.

  My father had invested many years in the Group after his father’s death, believing in his father’s legacy, and believing that the sanctity of their cause would work itself out. But when he learned of the rapes and molestation, he could hold on no longer. He could no longer fight the tingling in his conscience that told him of the wrongs and the ills that had corrupted the Group. He could no longer ignore the elephant in the room that was hypocrisy and contradiction hiding behind piety. He could no longer disregard the spiritual torment and captivity in which the men on the Council kept their people, holding them hostage to the idea that they, and they alone, would determine if the people could get into Heaven.

  Dad told us that he was no longer attending church and was leaving the Group, that we were all free to choose for ourselves, but as for him, he was done. He told Owen that he would give him one year to make significant changes, and that he would require signs of progress that showed the return of his father’s family and his father’s people to the correct and simple ways that Rulon had envisioned. He needed to see a return to the dream. If Owen didn’t answer the ultimatum, Dad would move on. The changes, of course, never came.

  Dad invested forty-three years of his life in his father’s dream. He wasn’t going to blindly give anymore. As Dad had only one wife, it was easy for him to make such a declaration.

  But what about Pax and Sam? Were they supposed to say to Sarah, “See ya. Thanks for giving us Bud. You can either take him when you go or leave him with us, and you’re on your own with the baby you’re about to give birth to.” It wasn’t so simple. Not so black and white. Just like life in general.

  Shawn and Audra were in the same boat, as two years earlier Shawn had taken a second wife, who had already given him a child. What were they to do? And what was Yaya to do? She was the one who had packed up her children and left Utah, bringing them to this polygamist culture, uprooting them from all they knew. Was she just to say good-bye to her daughters, whom she was responsible for bringing to the Group, and simply leave them behind?

  The
divide came, and the pain of separation was inevitable.

  Over the years people have asked me if I witnessed any of the perversion. Luckily, I didn’t, but I know of many who suffered. They then ask why it happens so often. Are all of the men sex fiends? No. Some men in plural marriages actually practice abstinence, having sex with their wives only for the purpose of reproduction, and thus get less action with seven wives than most average American men get with one.

  When a man rapes a woman, it’s for dominance. When an adult rapes a child, it’s for dominance. Dominance is a natural tendency, an impulse that we have learned to curb through laws and the mores of our advancing societies. The reason child molestation seems to be so common in polygamist communes is that they’re set in prime locations for molestation and incest—isolated areas with very little outside interference. Their own laws reign supreme.

  In Pinesdale, and other communities like it, many men set their own laws, or claim to put God’s laws above the laws of the land. Thus they no longer have to adhere to government expectations. Over time, without mainstream society’s laws to restrain basic animal instincts, and without public schools to monitor children, molestation and incest creep in. Some might even wonder if people who have these tendencies seek out societies like Pinesdale, knowing they are flourishing grounds for molestation: parents can choose to keep their children at home and home-school them because it’s a common practice and no one will blink twice. A man with the power of the priesthood is trusted to run his own home in the manner he sees fit; no one will challenge him.

  We packed up our car that day and drove home to Utah, no longer members of the Group, no longer disciples of Rulon Allred. The break from the Group was ugly. There were to be many angry and tearful arguments with our extended family. These arguments were mostly with my mother’s side, as my father’s side completely disowned us.