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potential parallel was not lost on the libidos of the
Manti males. They speculated that marriage to Judith might a few years hence
provide an opportunity to marry Katie and Lisa. Knees wobbled at the thought.
Enduring a few years of intimate relations with a not unappealing older sister
did not seem too steep a price.
    In the Old Testament, it’s clear that the older sister
wasn’t thrilled at being the price for marrying Rachel. Judith was no more
thrilled at the prospect of being the price for her own younger, hotter
sisters. She once asked me if Jeff’s interest in her had anything to do with
hopes of someday adding Lisa and Katie to his harem. “He might have thought
that at first, but he doesn’t now,” I lied. Judith nodded as if she believed
me.
    Kenneth was receptive to our interest in Judith. On the day
we arrived in New Mexico to help the family move to Manti, Kenneth broached the
subject with her. A high school senior, Judith had just arrived home from
school. The proposal was hardly news, as Jeff and I had made overtures in her
presence for some time. But now it was official and out in the open.
    Judith was all for it. She had been raised with the idea of
polygamy, so instead of thinking “This is gross,” she reacted like any giddy
bride-to-be: “Whee! I’m going to be married!”
Throwing a wedding bash for my husband
    As we drove back to Manti, Jeff asked, “What do you think?
Should we go through with it?”
    “I guess so,” I said. We worried about how young Judith was.
But then, someone had to marry her.
She was a whopping 17 years old, not too many years from becoming an old maid.
Her height ruled out all but the cult’s tallest men. No one thought to ask why
a husband had to be taller than his wife; we took it as a given. Jeff was 6
feet, 6 inches tall, making him a good candidate. Jeff worried that none of the
other tall men in the cult would want her because of her few extra pounds. We
began to look upon marrying her as an act of duty and compassion.
    With Kenneth, Eleanor, and their daughters newly installed
in Manti, Jeff began officially courting Judith. Except for the minor detail
that Jeff was already married to me, it was not unlike an old-fashioned
courtship. Jeff spent hours calling on her at Kenneth’s home. He and Judith
were rarely together alone. They were usually in the company of other family
members and neighbors.
    I panicked one night when Jeff returned unduly late. I told
myself that I wasn’t jealous. Rather, I was afraid that he and Judith might
have gone “too far” and sinned. Our agreement was that Jeff would behave
himself until he and Judith were married in the sight of God. If they messed around
before that, it would be an affront to my rights as a First Wife. Which meant,
when you come right down to it, that I was jealous. As it turned out, Jeff had
been up late that night talking with Kenneth.
    The time came for Jeff to make a formal proposal, engagement
ring and all. Kenneth approved and Judith accepted. Giddy with excitement,
Eleanor, Lisa, Katie, Judith, and I set to work planning a big wedding.
Outnumbered by Judith’s family, I felt overwhelmed and left out. We were
planning a party—and who doesn’t love a party?—and besides, I was
the First Wife, dammit. But First Wife or not, I was also a fifth wheel.
    At last, on a sunny June day in 1994, our wedding party of
about 50 souls entered a barn and walked past the sheep and chickens to a door
hidden in the back. Behind the door, a stairway led upstairs to a large room we
had converted into what we called the Endowment House. The room sported
powder-blue carpet and a pine altar I had painted to look like marble. It was a
place set aside for rites too sacred to hold in an ordinary church building. It
was not, however, too sacred for occasional infestations of weevils from the
grain stored in the barn below.
    Jeff and Judith kneeled at the altar facing one another and
joined hands. Then I kneeled next to