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church finally cleared Lee’s name and reinstated him to full membership, with restoration of his former blessings.)
    After Mountain Meadows, Mormons had to face that murder was everywhere in God’s promised lands—in the America forsaken, and the kingdom to come. The blood would not stop spilling, and now the chosen people found its stain on their own hands.

T HESE WERE THE LEGENDS THAT MY MOTHER HEARD growing up in Mormon Utah, and they were part of the inheritance that she passed along to us. And then there were the stories of her own family.
    M Y MOTHER’S MOTHER , M ELISSA K ERBY, WAS THE GRANDDAUGHTER of Francis Kerby and the great-granddaughter of Emanuel Masters Murphy. By the time of Melissa’s generation, both the Murphy and Kerby clans had settled into the Provo region of Utah, about fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. Provo was the second city that Brigham Young ordered organized in the region in the late 1840s and, more than most Mormon Utah colonies, it had a violent history. It was named after a man namedEtienne Provost, whose exploration party had been slaughtered by the Snake Indians on the Jordan River, many years before. In its first decade or so, Provo saw a fair amount of battles with local Indians over land use and cattle grazing—though it was the Indians, more often than not, who paid with their lives for these skirmishes.
    Utah’s first recorded execution—an unofficial one—took place in the Provo area. A bold and nasty-tempered Ute Indian named Patsowits (or Pat Souette, as the Mormons spelled it) had killed a local settler in 1850 and then went on to kill several of the Mormons’ cattle and horses. He also threatened to kill a local chief for acquiescing to the Mormons’ land-grab. He was captured by two Ute Indians. Anxious to improve relations with the new settlers, the Utes turned Patsowits over to local Mormon authorities, who, in a particularly novel twist on Blood Atonement and frontier justice, disemboweled the Indian, then filled his abdomen with rocks and tossed him into a lake.
    Between all the Mormon superstitions and various Indian tales, Provo came to be known as a haunted place. There were stories about ghosts who moved through the hills and around the farms at night: the spirits of men who had lost their land and their lives to the Mormons and their strange new rituals.
    This is the area where my grandparents were born and where my mother and her brothers and sisters were born and raised. My grandmother Melissa Kerby came from nearby Wallsburg in 1880, the daughter of Joseph Kerby and Mary Ellen Murphy. Joseph Kerby was a talented artist—he was best known for taking his canvas and tools and isolating himself in one of Utah’s canyons for days at a time, painting majestic mountain views. He was also a man given to frequent depression and abrupt mood changes, and his need for solitude was often hard on his family. When Melissa was nine, her father sent her to nearby Heber, to cook and keep house for three men who worked for him. She later said that she was lonely and homesick the whole time, and it was in one of these periods of isolation that Melissa began to write as a way to stave off the boredom. It was a habit she would never give up; she wrote an incessant outpouring of poems, plays, letters, stories, and journals, and she committed herself to daily writing of one sort or another until the last day of her life.
    While Melissa’s poems and church-aimed writings were full of typical Mormon pieties, her short stories were something else. Sometimes she wrote first-person accounts about a young woman whose father was lonely and tormented—a man who forced his daughter to stay home, tolook after him and keep the world out, while he drank himself into deeper shame and unconscious violence. He would beat his daughter and wreck his house, but the anguish he showed afterward always won his daughter’s pity and her pledge never to abandon him to himself. Some of her other