“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (10 page)

There was no time to rue the Lord’s last-minute switcheroo
at Adam-Ondi-Ahman or, for that matter, to dwell upon my other doubts.
Something big was coming, Harmston told us. Harmston always managed to have one
more big thing on the horizon, always bigger than the last big thing. It tended
to keep us too busy to reflect on current failures.

This time, the big thing was the “endowment,” a secret
temple ceremony like that practiced by the Mormons, which, if you have a
computer and a search engine, you’ll find isn’t all that secret. Over the
years, the Mormons abbreviated and edited their version to about 90 minutes.
We, of course, felt compelled to reinstate the painfully long original, which
lasted over two hours.

The endowment ceremony consisted of a few of us acting out
for the others a skit about the creation of the world and the fall of Adam. The
oaths, secret handshakes, and self-butchering pantomimes that Jeff and his
fellow apostles performed when cursing the state capitols were part of it.
Every now and then we would stop the play and invite everyone to do a
handshake, swear an oath, and act out a pantomime. The pantomime had to do with
promising not to reveal the ceremony to the unworthy, even under threat of
death. We instructed participants to don their ceremonial robes and white
aprons, in progress, as part of the proceeding. At the ceremony’s end, we led
participants through a slit in a curtain, symbolizing crossing beyond the veil
and into heaven.

What, exactly, did that endow us with? Brigham Young put it
this way: “Your endowment is to receive all those ordinances in the house of
the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to
enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who
stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and
tokens, pertaining to the holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in
spite of earth and hell.”

There. Hopefully that clears up any confusion.

Once you received your endowment and had your calling and
election made sure, you had arrived. You were part of the Church of the
Firstborn. You were the elect of the Elect, the Who’s Who of The True and
Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days.

Not that there was time to sit back and relax. Remember all
those baptisms for the dead? Well, the baptized dead wanted to be in the Church
of the Firstborn, too. After receiving your own endowment, it was your sacred
duty to go back, over and over, to sit through the whole ceremony
again—and again—on behalf of one dead person after another.

I don’t blame the Mormons for shortening the ceremony.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord, prepare ye the supper of
the Lamb, make ready for the Bridegroom.

—Doctrine and Covenants 65:3

You may recall that one of the reasons for having lots of
wives was to speed up that multiplying and replenishing the earth thing that
God laid on Adam and Eve.

Multiplying and replenishing can be a bit of a problem if
you’re a plural wife whose husband had a vasectomy before deciding to become a
polygamist. As I mentioned earlier, Jeff underwent two surgical attempts to
reverse his vasectomy, but to no avail. When Judith was 17, she wasn’t
concerned about Jeff’s lack of swimmers. She may even have been a little
relieved. But that was then. Now it was 1999, and Judith was 22. With other
plural wives around town popping out babies, Judith became acutely aware that
she would not be popping out any of her own unless God reached out and touched
Jeff’s vas deferens, which, so far, God showed no interest in reaching out and
touching. Not even if Jeff washed.

You may also recall Harmston’s Doctrine of Rescue: an
unhappy plural wife could trade in her current husband on a new one, provided
the new one had the same or a higher priesthood than the old one. That was how
we got rid of Ginger. I mean, that was how we lovingly helped her move on.

Judith wondered if it wasn’t time for the Doctrine of Rescue
to get her a fertile husband.

I may have helped push her along.

During a Prayer Session, a woman in our clan named Esther
learned that in a prior life she was Emily Partridge, one of Joseph Smith’s
plural wives. She was displeased because her husband hadn’t succeeded in impregnating
her. Since Harmston was Joseph Smith at about the same time Esther as Emily
Partridge was one of Joseph Smith’s wives, Harmston and Esther had already been
married to each other once before. It seemed only fitting that they should be
married this time around, too. The fact that Esther was young and hot was
beside the point. Surely Harmston hadn’t even noticed.

Judith and Esther were close friends. So close that it was
hardly a surprise when in another Prayer Session God revealed that Judith,
besides being Queen Elizabeth I and Josephine Bonaparte, was also Eliza
Partridge, Emily Partridge’s older sister. Who, incidentally, was also one of
Smith’s multiple wives.

I just happened to accidentally casually mention to Judith
one day that Harmston was going to rescue Esther from her current husband who
couldn’t get her pregnant. And that Harmston was starting to teach that as
Joseph Smith he needed all of his wives back before Jesus could return. And
that since Judith was Eliza Partridge, “all of his wives” arguably included
her. I might even have sort of mentioned that if she felt she should be rescued
by Harmston, it was OK by us and to get on with it.

Not that my doubts were growing or that I was ready for
Judith to move on or anything, you understand.

It worked. That is, had I been trying to nudge Judith out of
our nest, which I wasn’t, you could say it worked. Judith prayed and got
herself a revelation that God wanted her to trade in Jeff on Harmston. Being on
the timid side, she wrote down and hid the revelation. Finding her courage a
few weeks later, she retrieved the written revelation and shared it with
Harmston.

One good written revelation deserves another, so Harmston
talked over the matter with God and afterward wrote down both sides of the
conversation. God confirmed that it was Harmston’s duty to take Judith and to
be for her what Jeff had failed to be. “What am I,” Harmston lamented, “a
celestial stud service?” God said that he was. It was poor Harmston’s burden
and calling to make up for lesser men.

Harmston had no more tact than to read his conversation with
God aloud in church, including every one of his and God’s slights directed at
Jeff’s manhood. He and Judith seemed to gloat at us with every shortcoming he
cited. He seemed to vocally underscore each one. Jeff and I burned with
humiliation. And with hurt. Even though we were ready for Judith to move on, we
cared about her. She had been part of our family for six years. Losing her felt
like a failure. This “revelation” only rubbed our noses in it. All of this was
happening in front of the very people we had been called to help lead.

Harmston’s First Wife Elaine didn’t much care for hearing
her husband-prophet proclaim himself a “celestial stud service.” Her dismay may
have had something to do with the fact that Harmston hadn’t touched her in
years. Nor was she alone in not receiving his attention. She lived with five of
his other wives, who, like her, were older, willing, and angry, for Harmston
never touched them either. Elaine referred to herself and her roommates as
“cows put out to pasture.” To the casual observer who didn’t know better, it
would have looked as if Harmston liked sexy young women better than wrinkled
old ones. Perish the thought. As I’m sure you understand by now, polygamy isn’t
about the sex.

In January 2000, Judith was officially numbered among
Harmston’s ever-growing collection of wives.

One month later, Harmston announced—yet
again—that something big was coming.

Sorry if that sounded cynical. Actually, this one was pretty
big. God had just told Harmston to mark Saturday, March 25, on the calendar.
That was to be the day of the Second Coming of Christ.

Thank goodness God chose a Saturday. More people would have
the day off.

With the Second Coming all but upon us, the time of warning
had passed. Now it was time to prepare, at home, for the coming of Jesus. As
the chief apostle in The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of
the Last Days, Jeff’s principal calling had been to preach to the world, to
warn the world to repent. The switch from “warn the world” to “prepare at home”
made Jeff an apostle without much to do. He was suddenly less important in the
overall scheme of things.

Worse, Jeff was no longer a practicing polygamist. With
Ginger and now Judith gone, all Jeff had was me. As I said earlier, polygamists
are competitive. How many wives you have, or how many wives your husband has,
is a big deal. Along with Harmston’s pseudo-complaint about having to make up
for Jeff’s inadequacies, another clear message was beginning to emerge:
What kind of head apostle has just one wife?

Nor did it help matters that Harmston now harbored a grudge
against Jeff’s one remaining wife. You’ll recall that as the reincarnated
Joseph Smith, Harmston felt that all of Smith’s reincarnated wives needed to
join his harem. You’ll also recall that I was one of Smith’s reincarnated
wives. But at the suggestion that I leave Jeff and become a Harmston wife, not
only did I dismiss the proposal, I dismissed it out of hand, without even
taking time to prayerfully consider, and quite possibly with a
you’ve-got-to-be-kidding laugh. Hell hath no fury like a prophet scorned.

Something else about Harmston’s trying to recruit me
troubled us. It wasn’t lost on us that it wasn’t lost on Harmston that Jeff was
now down to just one helpmeet. Since a man needed helpmeets, lots of them, to
prepare to meet God, recruiting me would have left Jeff up a creek when Jesus
came. Was Harmston trying to sabotage Jeff’s eternal salvation?

It was unmistakable. Harmston had begun to disdain us in
general. In fact, he was acting like a leader who had just found out that one
of his trusted lieutenants had been speaking ill of him behind his back.

Which reminds me of something that I may have neglected to
tell you. Jeff and I had been speaking ill of Harmston behind his back.

Harmston was pushing 60. Still in our late 30s, Jeff and I
were popular with the younger, hipper Manti set. (Go with me on that
one—that there could be such a thing.) People looked up to Jeff, and I
could cook. We threw frequent dinner parties for the younger set, which usually
meant not inviting Harmston or any of his wives. The grapevine informed us that
Harmston was a little jealous and just insecure enough to imagine that sometimes
we were talking about him. How pathetic. It was the kind of thing I would have
expected junior high school kids to obsess over, not a grown adult—even
though he was right. Not all the time, but on occasion, the opportunity to poke
fun at the old guy was simply too good to pass up.
Sometimes Harmston is cranky,
one of us might have said.
He is hogging all of the “good wives” to
himself,
another might have added.
He
treats his second wife better than all the others,
someone else, namely me,
might have said.

These and other jabs eventually found their way back to
Harmston. It wasn’t his style to confront us. Rather, he simply let it get back
to us that he felt this was no way to talk about the Lord’s anointed.

Still, the whole poking-fun-at-Harmston thing might have
blown over had it not been for a particular pair of breasts.

TLC members tithed. That is, we handed over 10 percent of
our gross earnings to Harmston. Some of the tithing dollars went toward
purchasing and maintaining meeting places. Some went to help out fellow TLC
members in need. And much went to Harmston’s support. Being a full-time prophet
leaves little time to earn a legitimate living, after all, and all of those
wives don’t eat for free. But that was understood, and we were fine with it.
Besides, we knew that Harmston was frugal. He often preached against spending
on worldly things.

So perhaps you can understand our bafflement when Harmston’s
second wife—the one I’d said he treated best—returned from visiting
an ailing relative in Salt Lake City. Unless visiting an ailing relative
naturally causes a woman in her early 50s to sprout D cups and magically
acquire a new, tight, show-’em-off wardrobe, she and Harmston had lied about
the purpose of her trip. And—at the risk of sounding snarky—this
struck us as an example of spending on worldly things.

The woman wasn’t even attractive. Far from it. It was a
waste of a perfectly good boob job.
I
could have used those implants.

I wasn’t terribly subtle in my criticism of the new pair
that had come to dwell in Manti. These remarks, too, found their way back to
Harmston. He did not find them pleasing. (The remarks, not the breasts.)

Not long after, a seemingly small change at the next holy
meeting confirmed our sense of diminished importance. Since Jeff was the head
apostle, we had always sat in the first row at holy meetings. Now, for the
first time, we were directed to the second row. The first row was suddenly
reserved for Harmston, his wives, and some less senior apostles. Judith, now
outranking me as a Harmston wife and thus no longer just literally big for her
britches, shot me a smug smile from what had been my perch. Harmston shot a
smug smile at Jeff.

Jeff and I were not, of course, the kind of people to notice
that sort of thing, much less take it personally.

OK, yes we were.

We felt humiliated.

This is bullshit,
came that voice from deep inside.
Get
thee… oh never mind.