“I’m delivering a message from the prophet,” Warren began in an icy tone. “The prophet has lost confidence in your father. He is no longer worthy to hold the priesthood or have a family.”
Shocked and confused, one of my brothers asked for an explanation. “How can that be?”
After a momentary pause, Uncle Warren glared down at him, his irritation visible from behind his thick eyeglasses. “Are you questioning the prophet and his will?”
No one—especially not a child—could argue with that. Still, we Wall kids had trouble accepting things when they didn’t seem fair. Just like my brother Craig, we all looked for the truth in any given situation.
My brother Brad spoke next. “Where will we go?” he asked timidly.
“It’s up to the prophet to decide,” Warren told him. “You will no longer be attending school.”
The silence was deafening as he told us to return to our classrooms and gather our things. Looking at my mother, I saw pain and sadness on her face. We would not be returning to our home or to school. Confusion took over my mind. In a daze my brothers and I filed quietly out of the room, leaving my mother and my older sister Teressa behind with Warren.
I felt so ashamed knowing that my classmates were watching me as I collected my belongings. We hadn’t been given a clear explanation as to why Dad had lost the priesthood or what had led to this life-altering declaration. We were just to follow the prophet’s direction. I was still gaining an understanding of the world I was raised in and the workings of the priesthood. Even though we had always lived to please the prophet and do his will, everything still felt so wrong. How could our father just be taken away from us? Why were they breaking up our family? What about Mother Audrey, Mother Laura, and their kids? Would Dad lose them as well? The questions burning in my mind would go unanswered, and I kept my mouth shut out of fear.
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’s marriage ceremony to Mother Laura, and here he was, once again, delivering his father’s directives. Taking a seat across from the men on one of the chairs, my father didn’t know what to expect as he adjusted himself and waited to be addressed. Warren did not waste any time getting to the point.
“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