Chapter One : Part 2

Shattered Dreams; My Life as a Polygamist's Wife
by Irene Spencer

(Page 2 of 5)

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."

For a few months during the construction of the fourplex, my mother, brothers, sisters, and I lived in our neighbor's chicken coop. I was only four years old the night lightning flashes from a threatening line of thunderstorms woke me. Soon the rain was seeping through the coop's torn, tar-papered roof, soaking me to the skin. The next day we moved into our house, though its rooms still lacked even partitions or plaster. We used blankets for dividers, but at least Dad had his whole family under one roof. Aunt Rhea and Mother lived upstairs, while wives three and four lived below. Eventually, each would have her own all-important and much-utilized kitchen. We thought our fourplex a fairly comfortable arrangement for everyone concerned. Still, my four "mothers" suffered in ways I was too young to understand.

It took just one night for us to discover that our old mattresses had been contaminated while we'd been sleeping in the chicken coop. When we moved into the house, the bedbugs came right along with us. We children cried, thrashing around all night, scratching our bites until they bled. Mother turned on the lights and killed the vermin as we squirmed beneath the covers. (I can still remember the unique stench of squashed bedbugs.) The next morning, Mother hauled the mattresses into the August sun and searched each one individually. She stretched the seams where the creatures hid and multiplied, and then she poured hot, scalding water from her teakettle down the folds on the mattresses' sides. After the hot sun dried them, Mother returned them to our bedroom, but the pesky bugs kept snacking on us, and she finally realized they had migrated into the framed walls, hiding where the two-by-fours were nailed together. She fought them continually until the day we moved away.

DESPITE THE LONG HOURS he put in, Dad's modest income always fell far short of our needs. To make up for it, Mother and her sister wives had to be on their toes and working as a team. Creativity and compassion also came in pretty handy. On many occasions, they had to pull together for mere survival.

One opportunity for some major pulling together came in 1942 - a year in which the winter arrived early and set in heavy along the Wasatch Mountains. A late-September snow that year caught three pregnant wives unexpectedly. Rachel, Ellen, and Rhea were all with child and couldn't work outside in the cold. This left my mother to do all the harshest chores for the ever-growing family.

In this bitter cold, Mother gathered fuel for the stove. She recruited three of the older children from Rhea and Ellen's families and two of her own. Though they lacked rubber boots for their feet or hats for their bare heads, their mothers tried to bundle the workers up, pulling odd stockings over their hands for gloves. These stretched up to their elbows and were held in place by their tattered, secondhand coats.

Thus attired, the ragtag work team emerged from our fourplex and traipsed along silently in the fresh-fallen snow, each member carrying a gunnysack. They snuck into a neighbor's orchard, lured there by its stark, bare trees, and then scoured the white fields for already fallen, more flammable plunder. Breaking branches into small enough lengths to fit into the cloth sacks, they worked for over an hour as the small children's hands became numb. Mother spurred them to hold their sacks open wide so she could fill each one, shoving in just the amount each child could carry home. When I saw the red faces and stiff, cold hands of the work crew as it returned home, I was glad my mother ignored my tearful pleas to go along.

Each morning, Mother would repeat her foray. Gunnysacks in hand, she'd take a few of us on a "walk," and we'd pick up old shoes, pieces of crates, and broken branches along the way, always trying to gather enough fuel for the day's needs. When we were lucky, the scavenged odds and ends would burn long enough in one stove for each wife to have a turn cooking. Sometimes there wasn't enough for them to light four separate fires in their kitchens. This was just as well. The warmth from that one woodstove generally took the chill off the room in which we huddled together for comfort during those cold winter months.

The four wives humbled themselves before God daily, asking and waiting for him to supply their needs as it became more apparent that Dad could not. At some point, we were left with cornmeal as our only staple, though once each week, we could get a two-day supply of watered-down milk. Mother finally decided that it just wasn't good enough. One day she announced she was taking three of the older kids with her, and they would return only after they'd found something with which to feed the family. Aunt Rhea took her aside and scolded her for building up our hopes falsely, but Mother was determined to procure anything she could to nourish the famished tribe. Having done God's bidding for eleven years now, she expected him to come through for her in this dark hour. Tucking three heavy paper grocery bags under her arm, she led the way out the door and headed toward the nearby fields, where new houses were fast going up.

Mother sang praises to the Almighty as they marched along. She recited a Bible verse, asserting "ye have not, because ye ask not." With what little personal experience in prayer the children had, they implored their maker to send them some rations.

Copyright © 2007 Irene Spencer

About the Author

Irene Spencer came from four generations of polygamy. As the second of ten wives, she was the mother of 14 of her husband's 58 children. Her captivating story provides an intimate look at the daily struggles Irene faced as a plural wife.