Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [24]
Once we gathered our things from our classrooms, we went to the meeting room on the main floor and were unceremoniously escorted across the blacktop driveway and through the gate that led to the prophet’s home. We were told that we would spend the night there and that in the morning we would leave for southern Utah, where my mother had grown up. Staying overnight at the home of the prophet made me feel safe and comforted, if only for the moment. I had always dearly loved my visits there. Many of Uncle Rulon’s wives had been kind to me, and I loved and looked up to my elder sisters.
The drive down to southern Utah the next morning was a blur, and I remember it now more as a collection of images and feelings than actual events. The crunch of the tires on freshly fallen snow as we left. The thought that my brothers and I should have been making snowmen in our backyard instead of being packed into the back of a van. Wiping the fog off the inside of the van’s window and watching our school disappear around the corner. Even if we had been scrambling to get to school on time in our traditional morning rush, I would have felt infinitely happier. None of us knew if we were ever coming back or going to see my dad again. I was a child faced with unspeakable loss, completely confused, with no one giving any answers.
Rachel and Kassandra had joined us in two of Uncle Rulon’s family vans for the four-hour drive to the prophet’s other home in Hildale. They were there to help pass the time and keep the younger kids entertained. I didn’t know then, but Rachel had played a role in Mom’s decision to involve the prophet in our domestic problems. Over time, I learned that both Rachel and Mom believed that our home had become a battleground, with innocent children caught in the crossfire. For some time, Mom had been confiding in Rachel her fears about losing more of her sons and had sought her help drafting a letter to the prophet. Meanwhile, Rachel had independently gone to Uncle Rulon for advice. She and Kassandra knew that the previous morning Mom had gone to see Warren, who’d been acting for his father. To ease the severity of our situation, it had been arranged that my two sisters would accompany us on the long drive south. They tried to play games with us to lighten the mood, but I was too old and too aware to be distracted.
During the ride I searched my mother’s face for answers, but not surprisingly, it offered none. I knew I wasn’t to question the prophet—or God—but I was desperate. “Will we ever see Dad again?” I asked Mom.
“I don’t know, Lesie,” she replied, using the nickname, pronounced “Lee-see,” that I’d had since I was very young. “Put it on a shelf and pray about it.”
This was Mom’s and the FLDS’s standard response to questions that had no easy answers. Between Craig’s departure and the troubles at home, my shelf was already full. Now I worried it would tip over.
At the time I was so focused on my own experience that I didn’t stop to think about how that day affected my father, and it was not until years later that we had a chance to talk about it. In the hours before we were gathered in Uncle Warren’s office, Dad had been summoned to see the prophet at his home in Salt Lake. He was immediately shown to the prophet’s private office, where he found Uncle Rulon and his son Warren. As had become the case in recent years, Warren was there to speak on behalf of his father. Although Uncle Rulon was still officially the prophet, he was in his mid-eighties and not as active as he once had been. Warren had taken on many of the traditional responsibilities of the prophet. A year earlier, it had been Warren who performed Dad