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  If she could’ve taken me to school with her every day, she would’ve had me sit right at her feet and color while she learned algebra.

  When I was old enough to enroll in the afternoon kindergarten program, I was able to take the bus home with all my siblings. The bus driver, George, was a scary man with a crow’s nose and a perma-sunburned neck who yelled and barked orders from the front of the bus, eyeing us all from his rearview mirror. No one said a word on the bus, let alone moved or, heaven forbid, stood up. If there was a hint of movement in the mirror, George looked up to eye you and the hand that was scratching your nose. I’d freeze in terror, telling myself, “If I don’t move, he can’t see me.”

  If anyone acted up, George had no qualms about dropping them off and letting them walk the rest of the way home. I love Montana. George was Montanan to the core: he spent all day shoveling shit on his own yard; he had no time for anyone else’s.

  One day I climbed on the bus, melancholy from a long afternoon of stares and brutally honest questions from brutally honest five-year-olds who’d ask, “What are those things around your ears?” or comment, “You look funny” or “You talk weird.” George said something to me that I didn’t hear. He then barked, “What are you, deaf? I’m talking to you!”

  Vanessa, right behind me, turned around with her fists on her hips and stared George down: “Yes, he is, as a matter of fact. Do you have a problem with that?” It was the only time I had ever seen a sheepish George. All the kids sat with their jaws dropped, amazed that my sister had stood up to George. Vanessa would’ve stood up to Satan himself to defend me.

  Raphael and Vanessa were always regarded as “the girls” and allowed different privileges as the elder. Poor Tara, also a girl, was always regarded as one of the kids along with us boys. There was an incident where Tara called for my father while he was taking a shower and he kindly, unknowingly replied, “Yes, son?” Tara ran off screaming in trauma.

  Tara was my enemy.

  The poor middle child had some issues, mostly about wanting to be regarded as one of the girls and respected by her younger brothers. If I didn’t listen to her or obey her every command, she’d hit me, as though Days of Our Lives, a massive hit in our estrogen-dominant, pant-wearing family, was a true rendition of life.

  Mom and Dad bought Tara Care Bears to remind her to be nice to her younger brothers. They also got her a bunny—a live one. One Sunday morning, Mom thought it would be fun for Szen and the bunny to play and be friends while we left for church. We came back home a few hours later to find the animals still playing, albeit the bunny in a macabre state, being flung lifelessly up in the air by a very happy Szen-the-Dog. I don’t think he meant to break the bunny’s neck, but he did.

  Tara ran into the house, screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs, while the rest of the women stood in horror, covering their mouths, and I admired my dog’s great prowess and killer instinct. But don’t get me wrong: I was sad about the bunny.

  Dad dug the rabbit a grave, and in the evening the family held a burial service that we all attended to pay our respects, except of course Tara, who had chosen to behave like a wife of Henry VIII. Her idea of mourning was screeching and spitting sobs of loss and sorrow from within her bedroom, leaving her window open so we could all hear her mournful wails. From time to time, just for good measure, she popped her head out of the window to make sure we all heard her refrain: “My rabbit’s dead!”

  To ease her sorrows, but mostly to get her to pipe down, Dad bought Tara a Cabbage Patch doll. Our lives of peace and tranquillity resumed.

  Two days later Szen dug up the corpse and renewed his play.

  My brother, Court, was a wonderful big brother to me. He was patient and accepting and always let me tag along with him and his friends. Court was the local tough kid. This was a truth undisputed by any of the kids in town our age, as Court had a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet going on that silenced any critics.

  It’s a wonder he put up with me and my pettiness for so long, as I was the type of younger brother that didn’t want a toy until his older brother wanted it. There was a Christmas when Mom and Dad got Court a big fire truck, but he could never play with it because I’d always race to it if I saw him eyeing it. From then on, Mom and Dad bought duplicate toys for us every Christmas, and on Court’s birthdays as well.

  Court has always had a sense of right and wrong and what is fair and what isn’t. He saw and still sees things only in black and white. There was a boy named Tyler Johnson who was the local bully. One day, Tyler stole Court’s Big Wheel trike and threw it in the pine-needle-foliage bonfire.

  Court came home in a fit of rage: “Mom, I hope Jesus comes and takes Tyler Johnson’s body away.” Jesus was omnipresent and broody, or at least our young minds believed him to be so. That Big Wheel tri-cycle meant a lot to us. We had long since worn out the treads on the plastic wheels that we peeled out on, and some parts of the wheels were so badly torn that a smooth ride was no longer an option, but still, we loved those wheels. Loved them enough to wish hellfire on someone else’s soul.

  3

  There was a grumpy, redheaded lady who ran the local mercantile in Pinesdale. It was a thriving business, even though she made no profit off it, as it was the property of the utopian cause, belonging to the Council or, officially, the AUB (Apostolic United Brethren). The lady was big and strong, standing at six feet, with flaming auburn hair. The children of the town were terrified of her. Even I was terrified of her, and she was my maternal grandmother, Edith Mosier. We grandkids called her Yaya.

  She was stern, blunt, and a no-nonsense type of lady. Yaya was the incarnation of a Norman Rockwell painting. Whether it was her baking goodies, making chocolates and homemade turtles for her grandchildren, giving piano lessons, managing the town mercantile, or doing hard labor out in her garden in the rough Montana soil, every memory of her I have as a child could be frozen in a Norman Rockwell moment.

  She frightened children. If a child came into the store not knowing exactly what they were looking for and instead moseyed about indecisively, Yaya would lean toward them over the glass cabinet that sheltered all of her candy, casting a shadow only Paul Bunyan could match: “I don’t have all day.”

  She never seemed to get the fact that her standing there made the kids more nervous. “If you don’t know what you want,” she’d say, “then get out of the store and stop wasting my time. Come back when you know what you want.” The customer always came first for Yaya.

  She gargled hard liquor for cough syrup and was big on tough love. “Watch where you’re going, ya’ big dummy!” she would chide me, as I often tripped over things since my inner-ear imbalance lent me the gross motor skills of an alcoholic.

  I was her youngest grandchild for six years. I had it made. She spoiled me rotten and loved me, but she showed it in an odd way: “What did I tell you? Go put it back in the kitchen. What are you, deaf?”

  Yaya lived around the corner from us, but her place was even closer if we cut through the forest into her back lawn. If she wasn’t home, she was at the store, a ten-minute walk.

  I loved to go to the store and sniff around her office, which smelled of unfinished Butterfingers and pencil shavings. When no one was looking I’d lift Sour Patch Kids and Swedish fish, thinking I was being sneaky, stuffing as many as I could in my mouth and then a good sum in my pockets. Yaya always knew my game and placed pennies in the cash register later to make up for the losses. She also had a toy stand and from time to time would reward me with a fresh batch of ammo for my cap-gun revolver if I was a good boy and took a nap behind the iron bars of the post office, which was conjoined to the store, letting her get some work done.

  It was a perfect life for a little boy.

  I was and still am Yaya’s favorite grandchild. While I mostly say this with an arrogant flair to get a rise out of my siblings and cousins, they have, one by one, collectively come to terms with this truth. Just as they now know that the snow falls in December, they kn
ow that Lance is Yaya’s most cherished descendant.

  In Pinesdale we had our own set of rules; we were above the laws of the secular world. We adhered to the laws of God, or at least the laws of those who were anointed to interpret the word of God for us. Those anointed men were our prophet and his Council. Most of those men were Allreds or Jessops.

  In the Allred Group, the two main families were the Allreds and the Jessops. In Utah, the Allreds were unquestionably dominant. But in Montana, the Jessops reigned supreme. They outnumbered everyone else, not only in population, but in influence and privilege as well. Marvin and Morris were on the Council, and they, their six brothers, and numerous offspring granted themselves certain entitlements. Nothing was beyond their overreaching grasp: political or bureaucratic positions, church callings, or homes—vacant or not. Not even the Allreds in Salt Lake had that sort of clout.

  I learned first-hand living in a socialist commune within a capitalistic country, why socialism does not work: different people have different senses of entitlement and work ethic. Someone like my father, who built four houses for the good of the cause without receiving a dime, feeling he could never give or do enough, would be exploited by those who felt they deserved more for less. Entitlement is a vicious disease. For all the masses of people who strive for a communal dream, it takes only one to destroy it with greed and entitlement, grasping for their piece of the pie, as the system will then collapse under its own weight.

  In Pinesdale, my parents were protectors of the little people, those who didn’t carry the last name of Allred or Jessop. People loved them because they treated everyone equally. They let each person know they were a child of God and were special in their own right. Morris and Marvin Jessop hated this.* After all, they had several wives and dozens of kids and were members of the Council, and though my father had none of those redeeming traits, everyone loved and listened to him.

  Many expected, but never publicly acknowledged, my father to be the successor of the Allred Group. But he couldn’t do so until he gained a second wife. My father was a scripture fiend who fanatically studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon and knew more about doctrine than the men on the Council. But alas, with only one wife, my father was ineligible to be on the Council. What was so remarkable about my father was that even though he could embarrass these “men of god” at any moment with scripture, he never did. He raised me to know that when we argue scripture, we lose its meaning and purpose and the spirit of Christ.

  In my parent’s world there was no hierarchy, no Allred or Jessop nobility. It was hard for me to reconcile the world inside my parent’s home with that of the larger culture in which I was raised. Hypocrisies and inconsistencies occurred in our little utopian society, in that, although everyone was supposed to be equal, all of us children of God, we were, in fact, not treated equally at all.

  Yaya’s two youngest daughters, Sam and Audra, were a lively pair of girls. As they were teenagers in the 1980s, they wore curlers in their hair to bed, and kept beer in the fridge, not to drink but to add more life and shine to their hair. They had a collection of vinyl that any fan of the eighties would crave: Bryan Adams, U2, Jackson Browne, Heart, Air Supply, the Top Gun soundtrack, and the likes.

  In high school, Aunt Audra began dating Shawn Stoker. The Stokers were a rising, up-and-coming family in Pinesdale. One of the daughters of Marvin Jessop was married to Clyde Stoker, the patriarch of the family.

  Life being what it is, Shawn and Audra replicated the Bruce Springsteen song “The River” almost to a T: they got pregnant. And back in 1986, in fundamentalist-Mormon Pinesdale: oh, the horror. It’s not a far stretch to compare it to The Scarlet Letter. How people reacted, gossiped, hissed, and snarled. Clyde Stoker went into a rage, saying Audra had defiled and seduced his son and gotten him pregnant. He asked Marvin Jessop, his father-in-law, peer in age and superior in Priesthood authority, to step in and protect his family’s honor. Marvin then told Shawn that he needed to take Audra off and marry her, to elope, for she was now his property as she had given herself to him.

  My father came home late one night to see Yaya trying to pull Audra from a car while Shawn was trying to keep her in. My father got into the car with Shawn and Audra and drove away. He had Shawn drive to a quiet spot, stop the car, and calm down. Shawn admitted that he was following Marvin Jessop’s instructions.

  My father tried to explain that this wasn’t the right way to handle the situation: the fact that a member of the Council said to do something didn’t mean that it was right. Shawn respected my father, for although my father wasn’t on the Council, he was the son of Rulon Allred. More important, Dad was an expert on the Mosier women and told Shawn that dragging Audra away in the middle of the night wasn’t a good way to start a marriage.

  Shawn answered, “But the Priesthood told me to come take Audra.”

  Dad replied, “Shawn, in five years the Priesthood isn’t going to care whether or not you drag Audra away, and they won’t accept any responsibility for the situation in which you’ll find yourself. But Audra and all of our family will never forget, and you alone will pay the price. Is that how you want to start a marriage?”

  Shawn went home alone that night instead of obeying Marvin Jessop.

  When Marvin found out about Dad’s intervention, there was hell to pay, for my father had undermined his authority. It got ugly. But where my father was concerned, it wasn’t about egos and who was right and wrong: it was about Audra and doing what was best for her. For Marvin, it was the opposite: the charismatic son of Rulon Allred, whom everyone loved, had challenged his power. So Dad had to be taught a lesson, and Yaya needed to be punished.

  My parents struggled to reconcile their understanding of what their religion was based on with this petty, arbitrary, and frightening position taken by these men who claimed to speak for God, these men into whose hands they had placed their lives. Morris Jessop adamantly told Mom, “If Vance ever wants the Priesthood to have any confidence in him, he simply needs to learn to do as he is told.”

  Suddenly, Mom and Dad felt as though their world was tilting drastically. Everything they owned was controlled by these men. More important, once it was clear that the Council had no confidence in Dad, Mom and Dad didn’t feel that they could have confidence in the Council. If standing up for a young woman’s right not to be dragged away from her mother was cause for Dad to be excluded from Heaven, something was surely not right in Pinesdale.

  What had been a private family issue now became a public matter: Marvin had the power of the pulpit and used it to call my father down publicly, warning that no one—not even the son of a former prophet—could interfere with the power of the Council without incurring the displeasure of God. Dad was so troubled by the turn of events that he wrote an appeal to his uncle Owen, my grandfather’s successor and the recognized prophet of the Group.

  My parents drove to Salt Lake and presented their written appeal to Uncle Owen, who, rather than looking at the issues, also became angry with Dad for challenging the authority of the Council. Dad tried to explain to Owen that he no longer felt safe in Pinesdale: “If anyone has to be punished because Audra became pregnant, why is it Edith?”

  “Because she’s a woman,” Owen said dryly.

  When Dad tried to reason with Owen, it became very clear that Morris and Marvin had told a very convincing story, painting my dad as a meddlesome usurper. When Dad began quoting scripture and citing the teachings of Mormon prophets, Owen cut him off: “You’re not in charge. The Council is.”

  My parents came home devastated, knowing that everything they had believed Pinesdale to be was now a sham. Rather than a safe haven for the people of God, it was a place where women were not safe in their homes. Rather than being ruled by the teachings of Jesus Christ, it was ruled by the whims and tempers of men. This was no utopian society, for those who wanted power had finally worked their way to the top. The dream was no more.

  Dad became painfully aware that he had built our beauti
ful house on land he didn’t own. When he heard the rumors that Morris wanted our house for one of his wives, Dad could see the writing on the wall. The many friends who had loved Mom and Dad began to separate themselves, fearing that the displeasure Morris and Marvin poured on Mom and Dad would spill over into their lives.

  Marvin continued to battle my father from the pulpit in church and early-morning Priesthood meetings. He put forth some interesting ideas in his sermons, one being that through the plan of eternal salvation, God and Jesus could fail. Although God could fail, Satan would be redeemed and live with us in Heaven for fulfilling his role in the plan. We couldn’t depend on Jesus, so we had to have faith in the Council and should never question its authority. Also, without much tact, Marvin spoke at the funeral of my uncle Louis, who had committed suicide. My father, who loved Louis, recalls that as the saddest day of his life. At Louis’s funeral, Marvin said, “Because he was weak and took his own life, Louis will be in hell.”

  Through all of this and Marvin’s other absurd preachings, my father never spoke up or interrupted Marvin, which made Marvin all the more hostile to him. Dad sat there in silence until the day came when he stood up in church, walked home, and told us, “We’re moving to Utah.”

  Moving to Utah would mean more for my parents than just surrendering all of their utopian faith and dreams. It meant losing a beautiful house that was all paid for, one that Dad had built with his own hands and Mom had turned into a loving home. It meant that Mom, who had never worked, would have to become a working mom. It meant that our lives would change, for we would leave with nothing but memories of all that we had loved.

  Some ask why we didn’t leave the Group altogether at this point. And Dad, of course, looks back and thinks that if he could’ve just moved us to Missoula, where he used to teach school every day and had a good salary, my parents might not have had to endure the financial struggles that plagued them for the next twenty years. Why couldn’t Dad have just said that he had had enough and thrown caution to the wind, hellfire and brimstone be damned?