Shattered Dreams Read online

  Copyright © 2007 Irene Spencer

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Center Street

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The Center Street name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: August 2007

  ISBN: 978-1-599-95031-0

  Contents

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Humor enables one to live in the midst of tragic events without being a tragic figure.

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE: CALLED TO BE A GODDESS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BOOK TWO: STANDING ON PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  BOOK THREE: NO MORE TURNS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To my precious children, who made

  all my sacrifices worthwhile:

  Donna, André, Steven, Brent, Kaylen, Barbara, Margaret, Connie, LaSalle, Verlana, Seth, Lothair, and my little angel, Leah, and my special gift from God, Sandra, who are both now in Heaven but live also in my heart.

  To my husband,

  Hector J. Spencer, for allowing me to pursue my dreams, for loving all my children, and for always displaying a servant’s heart. Thank you for making me not only your favorite wife but your only wife.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A special thanks to:

  God—who drew me to himself through my suffering, heard my prayers, and rescued me from the years the locusts had eaten.

  Donna Goldberg—my beautiful, faithful daughter without whose love and support I might not have lived to tell my story. God gave her to me to be my strength when I was weak, to need me when I felt unneeded. Without her persistent dedication and passion, this book never would have happened. I owe it all to her and her wonderful spirit. She truly is an angel.

  Thomas J. Winters—my incredible literary agent. Praise God for delivering him right out of the heavens and landing him into my life (via sitting next to my precious granddaughter, Margaret LeBaron Tucker, on an airplane).

  Debby Boyd—an earthly angel, for using her wings of expertise and helping my dreams take flight.

  Rolf Zettersten—of Hachette Book Group USA, and the staff, for seeing value in my manuscript.

  Gary Terashita—for letting my story touch his heart and for making it all happen so perfectly.

  Susan Kahler—for her invaluable input and editing skills.

  Maxine Hanks and Duane Newcomb—for being the first to read my manuscript and for giving me valuable help and encouragement.

  Bud Gardner—for validating me as a writer and inspiring me to reach for the stars.

  Marilyn Tucker Beesemyer—who has been a dear friend and a pillar of strength I’ve admired throughout my journey. Seeing my potential years ago, she planted seeds of encouragement in me to write my own story.

  Rhonita Tucker—who has compassion for those whose ideas and ideals differ from her own. Her light extinguished the shadows, and her smile created a warm atmosphere in which I could grow.

  Linda Craig—my best friend for over forty-five years, who promised she would never, ever marry my husband, no matter what. I appreciate such loyalty. I’ll never have a more faithful friend who has walked my walk.

  Rebecca Kimbel—my dear sister, who was always there to rescue and encourage me. I’ve appreciated her wisdom, love, and willingness to think outside the box.

  Brandy Goldberg—my gorgeous granddaughter, for faithfully and tirelessly typing and retyping my manuscript. I’ve enjoyed the wonderful time of bonding and the laughter we’ve shared. You’re the best!

  Humor enables one to live in the midst of tragic

  events without being a tragic figure.

  —E. T. “CY” EBERHART

  PROLOGUE

  I edged sideways down the aisle of the crowded Greyhound, careful not to bump anyone with the bulky brown suitcase, which held my every possession: two or three plain cotton dresses, my undergarments, and toiletries—the sparse but precious contents of my hope chest. It may have been no great wonder, back in 1953, that a sixteen-year-old could stuff all she owned into one bag. But the fact that I was transporting my entire life to a new and faraway place felt momentous indeed.

  Checking my ticket for the correct seat number, I stopped at 12D, raised myself up on my toes, and pushed the case onto the luggage rack above a heavyset woman who smiled apologetically as she half stood and let me take the empty window seat next to her. I nodded and started to squeeze past, halting for one last look out the window opposite, where my brother, Richard, and his pretty wife, Jan, stood in the docking bay, still waving me a halfhearted good-bye. I tried to smile back, may have smiled back. But when they dropped their hands to close comforting arms around one other, I turned away for good and let the tears streaking my cheeks fall toward my own window. How I hoped it would show me a future beautiful and dependable and worth all the sacrifice.

  With a loud snort of exhaust, the bus eased out of the station and turned down State Street toward the main highway heading south out of Salt Lake City. South to Texas, then to Mexico. South to the ranch that would become my home. And south to my new husband, Verlan LeBaron—twenty-three, tall, blond, and handsome (even if his hairline had begun its retreat prematurely). With him, thus far, I’d spent exactly three nights, all of them covert, and those memories were now weeks old. Yet here I was, smuggling myself out of Utah, out of the country in fact, and entrusting myself entirely to his hands with nothing but a few vague and breathy promises of a better life to spur me on.

  Afraid this might be my last glimpse of home, I took tearful pains to register the landmarks streaming past—the Hotel Utah, the tall brownstones, the Mormon owned and run ZCMI department store, and Temple Square, with its giant, gray granite buildings, secretive walls, lush gardens, and the gold-leafed statue of the trumpet-blowing angel Moroni—the divine messenger who’d revealed the location of the Book of Mormon to our prophet Joseph Smith back in 1823. Most beloved of all was the majestic backdrop the Wasatch Mountains formed as their gigantic cliffs rung the valley in which Brigham Young and his companions nestled our city. The ache in my heart became a sharp hurt as this symbol of steadfastness and strength, which had long anchored my horizon, eventually drifted out of sight. I offered
a silent prayer: God, give me the courage to stand as firm as my Mormon forefathers.

  Leaning back in the swaying seat, I closed my eyes, hoping to ward off the surge of homesickness already enveloping me. My mother, along with most everyone else I loved, didn’t even know of my marriage. I’d told even fewer I was moving to the LeBarons’ Mexico homestead. We—Verlan and Charlotte and I—didn’t consider it safe to tell. Besides, by keeping it secret, I avoided all the subversive “I told you so’s” I was sure would have greeted my news. Still, how would I fare in such a strange place with only these two to care about me? That in itself was no given at this point—that either of them would really care. One was the husband I barely knew; the other was the wife who had him first.

  As the gloom crept over me, I pressed a hand against my fluttering stomach and tried massaging the knotted fear within. I determined to concentrate on truly pertinent worries, like making it through the next twenty-four hours, until I arrived in El Paso and crossed over the border into Mexico. Since my every step now was an act of sheer obedience to God, perhaps I could presume he’d protect me through it all. In the meantime, I’d have hours to pray for the strength I’d need to take the next steps: Oh God, help me to be unflinching in this sacred commitment I’ve made . . .

  The din of the vibrating bus motor eventually lulled me calm enough to look at my fears a bit more objectively. I’d been trying hard to be brave, and in that I’d largely succeeded so far. (I never much lacked for courage.) But my fundamentalist Mormon faith taught wives to be sweet, patient, and above all, never, ever jealous. I had to be honest. It was not simply the prospect of seeing my new husband again that spawned my dark cloud of worry. More than anything else, I dreaded moving in on the wife who’d staked her claim to him two years prior to mine. In truth, I’d barely claimed him yet at all. And, though I was livelier than she was and quite determined to fulfill him, just how was I going to get my fair share of him with her always around? . . . and help me to be sweet, patient, never, ever jealous . . .

  I told myself I should be thankful she was no stranger to me. She was my half sister, after all. Somehow, this didn’t help. I still felt like being selfish, and I felt plenty bad about feeling it. God commanded our people to live “plural marriage” or be damned forever. The revelation came directly through the prophet Joseph Smith in 1843: “I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.” (Doctrine and Covenants, 132:4) Polygamy was a necessary sacrifice we all had to make in order to attain Godhood and avoid Hell. So I’d been told.

  Yes, I’d been told it and told it and told it.

  As the bus wandered past still-familiar fields of brown and green, I wandered back through my childhood in search of the words so persuasive to me. Perhaps they would persuade me now.

  BOOK ONE

  CALLED

  TO BE A

  GODDESS

  CHAPTER ONE

  As we were growing up, polygamy was the ruling tenet of our lives. This “Celestial Law” was so integral to who we were and what we were trying to accomplish that most often, we referred to it simply as “the Principle.” Everything else we were to do or not do, be or not be (a great deal, as it turns out) was ancillary to this: men were to have as many wives and as many children as they possibly could during the few years they walked this Earth. It was upon the conclusion of those trying, earthly years that we would all reap the divine rewards for our obedience to the Principle.

  As children, we were not just taught to honor the Principle, we were taught to claim it as our birthright. We were born into it; no conversion was necessary. “You are God’s chosen ones, his special children of the covenant” we were told at home and at Sunday meeting, during visits to and from friends, and in all the literature we were allowed to read. We consequently viewed with great suspicion the few strange souls who occasionally tried to join our ranks from the outside. More likely than not they were mere deviants, men who got off on the idea of God-sanctioned sex with multiple women who were bound by oath to endure it. These were not children of the Principle. Children of the Principle understood that polygamy was all about future glory.

  I WAS BORN INTO a fourth-generation polygamous family on February 1, 1937, a day that lay frozen under the white shroud of a typical Utah winter. I ended up a middle kid—thirteenth of the thirty-one born to my father, fourth of the six born to my mother. I was Mother’s long-awaited first daughter. After me, she had two more.

  Mother was the second of Dad’s four wives. Rhea Allred, his first wife (a powerful position within many polygamous families), was a smashing brunette with beautiful brown eyes who believed heartily in the Principle and was determined to live it. My grandfather Harvey, who fathered both Rhea and Mother by different wives, wouldn’t let Dad marry Rhea until he promised just one thing: to live plural marriage. Outside our Mormon fundamentalist circle, this would have been an unthinkable stipulation to put on a prospective groom, particularly one wanting to marry your daughter. But among children of the covenant, a commitment to polygamy had to come first. Dad complied, initially by word and later by action.

  So my mother, Olive, was my aunt Rhea’s half sister. In obedience to the Principle, Aunt Rhea urged and ultimately persuaded Mother to marry her husband—my father, Morris Q. Kunz. This was one of the more vexing contributions polygamous women were called on to make: the recruitment of new wives into their husband’s households. After all, only so many women were born into the Principle, and each man was commanded to wed as many of them as he could. There was terrible competition. Weary husbands needed assistance, particularly as they aged and grew thicker in the middle as well as thinner in the wallet. A righteous woman who mastered the sin of jealousy and could effectively court others on her husband’s behalf was a prize worth having. Generally, she could accomplish it only with her eternal rewards square in her sights. Devout Aunt Rhea managed to do her part. So Mother and Rhea were half sisters who then became sister wives.

  Twenty-one on her wedding day (relatively old by polygamist standards), Mother was a lovely, blue-eyed blonde. One might think two beautiful wives would be enough for any man, but in polygamy, nothing is ever enough. A couple years after he married Mother, Dad married Ellen Halliday, who he’d met only days earlier. And another two years after that, while Ellen was still taken up with the birth of their second child, Dad married fifteen-year-old Rachel Jessop, his fourth wife. He was two months shy of twenty-eight at the time.

  THE PRINCIPLE WAS NEITHER a license for male promiscuity (though it sometimes felt like it) nor a gratuitous call to suffering (though it quite often felt like that). In harmony with our teaching that “as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become,” the Principle was, quite simply, the way of God.

  Many early Mormons believed this planet was given to Adam as a reward for his own obedience to the Celestial Law on some other world. Adam, known prior to his earthly incarnation as Michael the Archangel, was granted the status of a god because of his righteous life. Earth was to be his domain, and the wives and children he acquired on that other world were to help him populate this one, which he would then rule over as God the Father, spoken of in the Christian scriptures. Adam came to Earth with one of his celestial wives to begin mortal life for their spirit children. Their primary mission was to procreate and populate their world, providing bodies to all their spirit children so those children would have the opportunity to work out their own salvation.

  Adam chose Jesus, the firstborn of his innumerable offspring in the preexistence, to be the second member of the Trinity (the third being the Holy Spirit). While here on Earth, before he was sacrificed for the sins of humanity, Jesus himself had at least two wives, Mary Magdalene being one of them. When Jesus returns to resurrect the dead, he will exalt to the highest level of celestial glory all male children of the covenant who have succeeded well in living the Principle.
They will become gods of their own worlds.

  A man who acquires at least two wives in this life is thought worthy of being such a god, and one with seven or more (called a quorum) is practically assured of it. The wives and children sealed to a deserving man while on Earth will assist him in populating the world he is given to rule over in the next link of this godhood chain. The larger his family here, the better head start they’ll have there. (There were even mechanisms in place for marrying off dead women by proxy. This was thought to add to the prestige of the polygamist men to whom these women were married.)

  Women cannot become gods in their own right. A woman’s hope lay solely in being a wife and mother—one of many wives to her husband; mother of many, many children. She thereby contributes to her husband’s future kingdom and will ultimately share in his glory as a goddess, an immortal being who will rule under him and alongside her sister wives for eternity. A woman is dependent on her husband god to “pull her through the veil” of death into heaven and divinity. Polygamous women whose husbands for some reason do not merit becoming gods can be sealed to other worthy men. Unmarried women and monogamous women can look forward to being angels in the next life. Angels are forever single and childless, ministering servants to the gods, and part of the celestial audience attendant at others’ earthly weddings.

  This was the “gospel” of the early Mormons as we were taught it.

  DAD WAS A FIREMAN whose family, understandably, grew much faster than his paycheck—an almost universal problem among polygamists. On Dad’s salary, there was no way he could afford separate households for each of his wives. This also was common. Wives always needed, wanted, and at times demanded privacy for themselves and their own broods, but polygamous husbands could rarely afford that for very long, especially as they got deeper into living out the Principle. Different compromises were struck in different households. In ours, for a time, the solution was a half-finished fourplex that accommodated all Dad’s wives. He built it himself with the help of a few friends on some acreage he bought in the small Mormon community of Murray, Utah, just outside Salt Lake—a spot his four families came to call “the Farm.”