Read: 2025-07-25
Recommend: 10/10
It was heartbreaking to witness her mother’s poor choices in relationships and how these decisions impacted the children’s wellbeing. Despite these difficult circumstances, Ruth’s resilience and ability to overcome adversity to create a better life for herself and her siblings was truly inspiring.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Lots of women like my mom—the American wives of polygamists raising their kids in Mexico—would travel north and collect government assistance checks. Many of the men in our colony did construction work in border states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, which provided plenty of addresses for the women to use when it came time to pick up welfare checks, and lots of places to stay too. Mom said that we had to learn to live modestly; that we might be poor, but we were rich in spirit. Being faithful sometimes meant doing without. And we were doing the Lord’s work, so why shouldn’t US taxpayers fund our efforts? Which is how we found ourselves waiting for a bus back to LeBaron from Juárez on a cold, rainy morning in late December.
The words blurred together in fast-paced sentences. I never even caught my teacher’s name; it was forever lost in the torrent of her opening speech. My body went stiff and the blood rushed to my face as I looked at my classmates and watched wide-eyed as they reached down into their plastic schoolbags almost in unison. I followed their lead and took out my new spiral notebook, which Mom had given me as a special present for starting school. Meanwhile, the teacher walked the aisles and made marks in her notebook with a sharp, yellow pencil, smiling and greeting each child individually.
He was a good man till he and your dad disagreed about how to run the church, and your dad removed him from being patriarch.” “But if he was good, then why—” “It wasn’t an easy decision for your dad to make. He let things go on for a lot longer than he would have if Ervil hadn’t been his brother. People in the church started noticin’ that Ervil was spendin’ lots of money on himself, wearin’ nice clothes and drivin’ nice cars even though he had thirteen wives and all his kids to support. There was no way he could afford those things on the money he was makin’. Everyone knew that.” “He was takin’ money from the church?”
I listened, confused and stunned, as my deeply religious mother told the men from HUD that she didn’t know who the fathers of her children were. Mom would rail against us kids’ lying, telling us what a horrible sin it was, but it was clear from her performance that she was good at it herself. She spoke to the inspectors with a straight face and made full eye contact. I don’t think they ever suspected.
I grab for the truck’s back bumper and hold on like a flag waving in the wind, the tips of my toes scraping against the road whenever we change direction.
The cashier twisted her chin down at me until it doubled. “Sweetheart, I cain’t exchange cash for food stamps,” she said in her thick Texas accent. “It’s against the law.” Something about the way she’d emphasized those two words, food stamps, made me feel as if every eye in the store were watching me. My face went hot with shame, and I was suddenly angry at Matt. He knew it would be embarrassing to pay with food stamps. I lowered my head, took the brown-paper sacks of groceries, and walked out of the store as fast as I could.
To ensure that didn’t happen, they had placed her on probation for the next two years, during which time we would not be allowed to move out of the El Paso area and could expect unannounced visits from the department at any time. Mom was incensed. “People in this country think they’re free, but they’re not. The government has their fingers in all our business. I just can’t believe this.” Mom was angry, but as a result of her probation we were forced to live in one place for a longer period than we ever had before. I found a new kind of peace in being settled, in not being abruptly taken out of school or being forced to get used to new surroundings every few months. For that, I was grateful to the US government and its tyranny, even if the peace didn’t last much beyond the probation.
Linda, one of my Mom’s friends, stepped forward to give a long eulogy. She told the crowd that God had sent Meri to our family as a gift to teach us unconditional love and generosity, even as we struggled to take care of the little girl who, in her few short years on earth, never learned to take care of herself.
I did everything I could to avoid him, but in our three families’ cramped space, there was no place to hide. Mom was distracted with the baby and my younger siblings and didn’t even notice the extra attention our stepfather paid to me. Each morning I’d wake up and vow that today would be the day I’d tell Mom what Lane was doing to me, but each day I’d find a reason why I couldn’t share my secret: Mom was too tired, the babies had been up all night. Every time I came close to saying something, a small voice in my head would tell me to keep silent, that it would only make things worse if I told the truth, and what if Mom didn’t believe me? But I was starting to feel desperate. Whenever Lane touched me, I felt he left fingerprints that stained my skin. His marks were everywhere, on my arms and chest and legs and private parts, and to see myself naked was to see a body covered from head to toe with these welts. I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, even when I was fully clothed, a strategy that helped me live with my shame, for a while at least. When the mirror was unavoidable, I would become so nauseated I had to look away. I could hardly keep from retching every time I combed my hair, so vivid were the stains of my stepfather’s desire. As I hid from mirrors, I hid from Lane too. I slept with the covers over my head and hoped against hope that a blanket could protect me. I thanked God for my brothers, who had been forced by circumstance to sleep sandwiched next to me in the same bed, which made Lane’s nighttime advances impossible.
I felt that my skin had betrayed me. Something on it must have been different that invited Lane’s touches, something that indicated I wanted him, regardless of whatever I said otherwise. I had goodness and virtue in me, but it was wrapped in a skin that was evil. Because my skin was all the world knew of me, it gained the upper hand. The tug of suicide grew stronger each day, and as it did, I started thinking about what might be waiting for me in the afterlife. The afterlife, as had been explained to me in Sunday school and by my mother, was run by men who had been polygamous on earth, men like my father and Lane. “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become,” the church elders would remind us. Women who had been faithful and loyal wives would become goddesses—heavenly servants to the men who ruled over them. But no one had ever explained what would become of girls like me. When I asked Mom what would happen to dead girls who hadn’t been anyone’s wife, she said my soul was sealed to my father, and if I died before I married, I would go to my dad’s kingdom, not Lane’s. This should have been comforting, and for a while it was, though gradually I began to doubt Mom’s certitude. After all, I had already been born into my dad’s kingdom, but that hadn’t protected me from slipping into another one. How did I know that the same thing wouldn’t happen in heaven? That I wouldn’t slip into Lane’s kingdom again and be stuck there for all of eternity? Or perhaps I would end up in hell. The thought of spending all eternity with Satan terrified me almost as much as the prospect of spending it with my stepfather.
Mom opened her eyes to check on Elena’s nursing, still without looking at me. “He promises he’ll never do anything like that again.” I watched her draw in a breath and blow it out slowly. “And I believe him. I know in my heart that he’s ready to repent, and”—at last she looked at me with watery eyes, her lips lowered at the corners—“I think he deserves another chance.” She broke out in sobs but collected herself when she registered the shock and fury on my face. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but, Ruthie, I want you to listen to me real well because you need to understand that Lane is a good man. He has some problems, but God can help him get over them. Jesus talks so much about forgiveness in the Bible. He says that we should forgive seventy times seven times, and your dad always talked about how important it is to give people another chance.” She continued for a bit longer, but I had drifted away, realizing that my earlier suspicions had been correct: Mom seemed perfectly willing to sacrifice me for Lane. This can’t be, I told myself. I must be misunderstanding.
I wondered how it didn’t occur to Mom that I’d cried too, countless times over the years—tears of pain, tears of anger, tears of shame. But that morning, I couldn’t cry. I was beyond tears. Finally realizing that Mom couldn’t protect me from my stepfather made me feel too sad to cry. It was as though something in me just closed up.
“I want you to know, Ruthie, that if it happens again—if it ever happens again—you tell me right away, and I will leave him for sure.” Mom tapped her forefinger hard on the tabletop as she spoke those last words, and I knew that they were no more sincere or true than the nonapology Lane had given me so many years ago in El Paso, when he had promised he would never touch me that way again. Apparently my mom could lie to her own daughter with as much ease and confidence as she had when she lied to the social workers and border patrolmen. The only difference was that this time, it seemed as if she had actually convinced herself that she was telling the truth.
That night, as she and I raced to ready the camper for the trip back to LeBaron, I caught her occasionally wiping her eyes and sniffling. She shed many tears that day, but I didn’t think a single one of them was for me.
Once I got in bed at my cousin’s house, I lay awake for a few hours imagining what Mom’s face would look like in the morning when she’d wake and find the hide-a-bed empty. Then the thought made me feel guilty. My stomach grew tight with knots. I felt justified in my actions, but I didn’t want Mom to worry. I was angry with her, but also desperate for her approval. I stared at the wooden ceiling until I was finally able to fall asleep.
Thus began a community tribunal about Lane, and one I thought would be much fairer than our family conversations in the Chevette, although neither my stepsisters nor I were ever called to testify. We stayed home and babysat. I spent those nights playing cards with my siblings, doing anything I could to keep my mind off what was being said in the meetings. I’d lie awake in bed, embarrassed at the thought of what Lane might be saying to the church elders, who were also my family. It nauseated me to think that he was telling them that his stepdaughters had enjoyed his advances. I thought about asking to attend a meeting myself to tell the other side of the story, but I doubted anyone would listen to me. What chance did I have of being heard by the leaders of a church who believed its men were training to be gods? Plus, I was too embarrassed and ashamed to discuss the details of what had happened in front of all of them.
The church leaders had decided to ban Lane from the colony for two years, after which they would reconvene to decide whether he should be allowed to return to his families. Mom sobbed as she recounted the events of the evening. “In the meantime, the wives have to take turns visiting him out of town or in the States, so you’ll have to be here to watch your brothers and sister.” She said it as if she wanted me to respond sympathetically. She buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Ruthie, what am I going to do? God, how am I going to handle all of this? Why couldn’t we just keep this within our own family? Why does the whole town have to know about it?” The weight of her questions felt heavy on me as I sank deeper into the mattress and tried to think of something to say.
On those weekends I was left in charge, I’d put dinner on the table and sit with my siblings as they ate. Once I was sure that no one had shocked him- or herself in the shower, I’d sometimes go out for the evening, putting Aaron in charge. I was fourteen years old and wanted nights out with my friends. Like Mom, I often felt the need to escape motherhood’s heavy responsibilities and uncertainties.
Thunder roared through the sky again that night and rain dripped from the kitchen ceiling. Micah ran to me, threw his arms around my legs, and almost knocked me down. “P-P-please.” “Come on.” I scooped Micah up and carried him into Mom’s bed with me. “I’m scared too.” As I pulled the covers up and let Micah settle in next to me, I heard Mom’s voice in my ears: Children need to get used to being in the dark. She’d repeated that countless times throughout my childhood. No, I thought, they don’t.
She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a tissue. “And I’m sorry too for everything that you’ve gone through, for everything—everything—Lane has done to you.” She took a deep breath, desperate to calm herself. “I do feel like things have gotten better. Don’t you think so?” A thousand responses ran through my head, but none of them were right for the moment. “Well, yeah. At least I don’t have to see him anymore.” Mom took my hands in hers. “I didn’t know what to do.” She started crying heavily, making me wonder how long she’d been holding this in. “I know he is very sorry for what he did. He’s very, very sorry.” Was she repeating this on purpose? Once for my sake, once for hers?
Mom pulled away from me and smiled, patting my back and kissing my wet cheek before grasping the bed frame and pushing herself to her feet. She murmured, “Good night,” disappeared into the blackness, and left as mysteriously and abruptly as she’d come. But I didn’t mind. I had become used to the dark.
The day of Alejandra’s party, Mom was tweezing her eyebrows in the mirror when she confided that she had gone to the doctor the day before. She’d missed her period. I was stunned. She was thirty-eight. Holly was just five months old. “Mom, don’t you think you should wait until you stop nursing before you get pregnant again?” I said the words as gently as I could, but my irritation was obvious. “We can barely afford to feed everyone in the family now.” She put down the tweezers, gazed at me, and calmly and matter-of-factly said, “Ruthie, you just have to have faith.” No, you don’t, I thought. You also need money and a husband who’s not a deadbeat. But I didn’t say anything. “When you’re doing what God wants you to do, life will always work out for the best. Don’t worry. He will always take care of us.” She smiled warmly and turned back to her reflection. I smiled too, politely, as if I were in the presence of a woman whose cockamamy notions were too charming to be challenged. “God wouldn’t send us another baby if we weren’t ready to take care of it.” She adjusted her hair. “I’m ready. Let’s get the kids in the truck.”
“Kathy—” He paused and scanned the kitchen, looking at everyone but me, everyone completely silent. “Kathy didn’t make it.” He took in a deep breath and looked away from the eyes that watched him. “We took her to that first-aid center in Lagunitas, but they didn’t have what they needed to save her.” Now his voice was barely audible and he stared at the doorknob. “She died right after we laid her on the stretcher.” Died. As I heard Lane say it, the word felt like a sharp needle scratching over the record of my mind, stuck repeating the same thought over and over: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I wanted to go back, start the record over again to see if it might play out differently. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end. I was sure of it. I looked around the room at my brother and sisters, who all stood completely still around the kitchen table, their mouths agape and eyes darting between Lane and me as if they weren’t quite sure what to do. I started to feel dizzy until I realized I’d stopped breathing, then I sucked in a big gulp of air. The rest of the morning felt as if I were living in a series of photographs.
Behind them, off in the distance, our house—our home—was getting smaller and smaller in the rear windshield. The kitchen door was wide-open, the adobe bricks peeking through jagged pieces of cement that barely clung to the walls. The house looked empty and broken—as if it too had touched a buried wire and been electrocuted, as if its heart had also stopped beating.
But just as I was at the point of giving up, a tiny drop of liquid dripped onto Holly’s tongue. Either she no longer found the taste of formula offensive or she was too hungry to care. Soon, she was sucking with abandon, closing her eyes and relaxing her body. I sighed as my sister’s warmth began to flow into my arms. It was as if she were melting into me.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Micah, but I’d brought along something that I wanted him to have: my most treasured stuffed animal, a Rainbow Brite Care Bear. Just as it had once done for me, I hoped the bear would help Micah get used to the dark. As I made my way to the little coffin, I saw that his arms had sprung up and returned to the position they’d been in on the fence, and from a distance he looked as if he were climbing out of the coffin, his arms reaching toward heaven. I forced myself forward. His head was arched back too, as it had been on the fence. I placed the bear on his chest and quickly walked away. My nose burned from the stench, and the crowd of people made me so claustrophobic I began to have trouble breathing. But just as I felt I would pass out, I heard my grandmother’s voice behind me. “Would someone please close the coffins?” she said weakly, shaking her head and turning toward the door. “Do the kids need to see bodies disintegrating?”
I slowly walked toward my mother’s grave. I picked up a large handful of gravel and rolled the hot pieces of stone and sand in my hand, thinking about this place: the dry, dusty Mexican countryside, our small, dilapidated home, the dangers buried underground, my family’s violent past, and the tragedy that had just fatefully made its power and presence known. Despite it all, Mom had loved this place, but without her, did I belong here? I stared at her coffin. I could have said so many things to her at that moment, but the only words that came to mind were I want you to know that I always loved you. Always, Mom. I was transfixed by the idea that she was contained in that white box. I’m not mad anymore, Mom. I looked at the fistful of gravel. I promise you, I will take care of the girls, Mom. I promise. I said the words quietly, but I meant them. Then I opened my hand and released the warm earth and rock, the sound of gravel, empty and hollow, echoing up from the hole as it struck my mother’s wooden coffin.
“Hey”—Lane raised his palms as if to indicate the subject was closed—“did you ever think that maybe our Heavenly Father knows what He’s doin’? He’s the one who chose this time to take your mom and your brothers, not me. Now, do I understand why He did that?” Lane shrugged again. “Well, of course I don’t.” God didn’t put those wires there. You did, you miserable son of a bitch. I felt the words form in my mouth, but the air necessary to speak them caught in my throat when I remembered that a more pressing issue needed resolution—one that Lane’s anger would only further complicate.
He rested his chin in his palm and wrapped the other arm around his stomach. “Look, thanks for the offer, but there’s no way I’m letting all of these kids go back to the States with you.” He looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t trust you to bring them back to LeBaron, and I don’t want my kids being raised there, away from all my beliefs and what I want them to learn in life.” He moved his hand onto his hip. “And I know Kathy wouldn’t have wanted that for the kids either.” Grandma gave him a look of anger such as I’d never seen. It was as if all the big and small stupidities she’d put up with over the years in the name of my father’s religion, all the injustices that she’d seen perpetrated against innocent children, all the starvation and suffering and now death—all of it was boiling over in her head. But she held her tongue.
All the words I’d ever heard in church, and at all the conferences and Sunday-school classes, seemed to be taunting me now: honor thy father, honor thy mother, be like Christ, be good, count your blessings, do what you’re told, prophets, men, husbands, gods, visions, dreams, destruction, forgiveness, sacrifice, submission, faith, Babylon, heaven and all the blessed little children … I realized that all those words, words that had held such power throughout my childhood, words that had characterized our way of life, words that had defined me, my siblings, our mom—they meant nothing to me. All the preaching, all the hours in church memorizing scriptures, how could that mean anything when the community supporting it wouldn’t defend the innocence and safety of a child? With a certainty that took my breath away, I decided I had to get away from LeBaron, and I had to bring my siblings with me. I vowed that my siblings would not suffer the way I had.
I turned to look out my window. A full desert moon lit the road ahead and shone brightly on the mountainside with the giant L. I couldn’t help thinking of all the wonderful moments of my childhood that had happened in those hills: the afternoon hikes with my half sisters and friends, scrambling over hot rocks, stickers and sharp weeds scratching my ankles. The hours we spent sitting around the big white L, eating Mom’s round, dry peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. I knew I had no choice but to leave. I would not live to inherit my father’s town, just as I hadn’t inherited his name when he chose not to place LeBaron on my birth certificate.
Now that I have finished college and graduate school and have worked for eight years as a high school teacher, I can’t help wishing that my sisters were little girls again. I could give them so much more now than I could when I was a young, struggling student supporting all of us on part-time jobs, welfare, and student loans. It was all so overwhelming. No matter what I did or how hard I worked, there was never enough, never enough to give them what they deserved, never enough to pay our bills on time, never enough to fill the emptiness that any parentless family feels. I was nineteen when we moved out of my grandma’s house. I wanted nothing more out of life than I did to keep my family together and make sure they were safe. The memory of those days reminds me of how exhausted I had been, but my siblings gave my life purpose, they were the bridge from pain to healing, from past to future. They are as much the authors of my survival as I am of theirs. My throat tightens and my eyes fill with tears.
And finally, thank you, Mom, for blessing me with love, strength, and kindness. I miss you every day and would give anything to sit beside you and have a woman-to-woman conversation about this book. I wish I had been able to discuss all of this with you, to understand why you stayed. Now I realize that you did the best you could. My biggest regret has been not being able to say a proper farewell. I love you, Mom. Thank you.