Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [25]
“The prophet has lost confidence in you as a priesthood man and is taking Sharon and her children away,” he blurted out.
The words were an assault and Dad was too overcome by emotion to respond. It seemed like only yesterday that he had been honored with the addition of a third wife. Now, as Warren had bluntly put it, Dad was losing Sharon and all of her children. He sat there listening to Warren speak, and the reality of the situation began to sink in: Dad had been stripped of his priesthood duties as they pertained to Mother Sharon and her children, but Mothers Audrey and Laura would remain under his control. As he sat listening, he wondered how everything could have slipped through his fingers so quickly. Rising to leave, he was too besieged by emotion to speak and left in bewilderment. My father later explained that he’d felt as if he’d become detached from his body as he heard the prophet’s revelation that day. The words had been spoken, but Dad just couldn’t make them feel real inside.
When he returned home, he found the belongings of Mother Sharon and her children had already been taken away. Mothers Audrey and Laura were shocked by the news. They too had been unhappy, but they’d never thought it would come to this. In the weeks ahead, Mother Audrey felt a devastating loss. While things had not been working in the house for quite some time, losing Mother Sharon and her children was much more upsetting than she ever imagined.
When our two vans arrived at the prophet’s Hildale home, my mother’s brother Robert was waiting for us. He’d been instructed to take us to the Steed family ranch, some 150 miles outside of Short Creek near Widtsoe, Utah. My heart was momentarily warmed as I watched his hug seem to give my mother strength. It had been a long time since she’d lived there, but I sensed that she felt a certain relief to be going home.
Since Grandpa Newel’s death at the age of eighty-six, many of his sons had cared for the ranch where he had raised his large family. Uncle Robert and his family lived in the main house and had started a home school for their children on the sprawling grounds. The ranch had been in the Steed family for about eighty years, ever since Grandpa Newel settled it in 1916 at the tender age of fourteen. Despite his youth, Grandpa Newel had traveled alone with sixty head of cattle to the remote and barren land in southern Utah that his father had homesteaded, and it was there that he made good on his promise to his father that he would establish a fully functioning ranch. He spent hours alone caring for the stock, milking the cows, and churning fresh butter, barely making it through that first long, hard winter. But even as the isolating snow and ice cut through the valley, Newel Steed endured it all in the name of his dream: living a life where he could practice Mormonism as it was originally envisioned by Joseph Smith, a life where he was free to practice plural marriage.
Grandpa Newel’s belief in the principle of plural marriage first took root when, at the age of ten, he accompanied his father to a clandestine meeting of men still in the Mormon Church who continued to embrace the practice in secret. This was in the early days of “The Work,” decades before it was known as the FLDS Church. In time, Grandpa Newel was not only free to practice his religion, he also became one of the most respected members of the FLDS in southern Utah. When the Steed family arrived at a community event, all eyes were on their perfectly styled hair and their attractive homemade clothes. The Steeds were known for their taste in fabrics and their unique, trendsetting interpretation of the church-mandated dress code.
Although there was this rich tapestry of family history at the ranch, I had not spent much time with