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himself and his wives into a smaller, more elegant Colonial-style house that the people built for him just next door. The school would be called Alta Academy, and it became the center of church life in the Salt Lake Valley. Rulon’s son Warren had just graduated with honors from the local public high school, and Uncle Rulon directed him to serve as Alta Academy’s first principal. To many church members, Warren seemed intelligent and knowledgeable about the church’s religious teachings—the ideal candidate to help mold the young minds of Salt Lake’s FLDS community.
    Uncle Rulon used church donations to fund the conversion of the drafty old house into a school, but much of the building remained as it was when he lived there. It was littered with secret cubbyholes built into the walls and hidden doors that blended in with the décor—hiding places that may have been used for plural wives and children in case of an unexpected raid by the police or other authorities. They could be locked from the inside to protect those in hiding from being discovered. There were also locks on the outside, and rumors circulated, but were never substantiated, that the hidden crawlspaces were used to correct a disobedient child or wife.
    In two of the converted bedrooms on the second floor, Uncle Rulon opened a birthing center that was staffed by his wife Sharon, who became the midwife for the Salt Lake Valley’s FLDS community. The delivery room was makeshift and had barely changed since it had been a bedroom in the original house. With blue shag carpeting on the floor and the lower half of the walls, it was wholly unlike anything you’d expect to see in a regular hospital. There was no sink or other running water in the room, and the midwife had to use an elongated sink in a nearby bathroom to wash the newborns. An adjacent bedroom was used as a recovery room for the mothers and their babies.
    Though the birthing center provided only basic medical equipment and services, it offered members one distinct advantage over hospitals: husbands could be present when their plural wives gave birth. Before the birthing center, men could not accompany their plural wives to give birth because it risked attracting attention from outsiders. Such was the case when my mother gave birth to her first daughter, Rachel. Mother Audrey had accompanied Mom to the hospital, with Dad relegated to the waiting room.
    Before Alta Academy opened its doors, children in the Salt Lake area had attended the public schools. My older brothers and sisters who grew up then had gone to the elementary school just up the road. Mothers enrolled their children under fictitious names to hide their status as plural wives.
    On that first day of school I was incredibly excited, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that the drive to school was fraught with the same tension that permeated my home life. Since Mother Audrey worked as a teacher at Alta Academy, it was her responsibility to get us into Dad’s big blue Chevy Suburban, which we all called “Big Blue,” and shepherd us to class on time. Of course, rounding up nearly a dozen kids was no easy task. My sister Teressa was always ready first. Eager to get a move on, she’d go outside to the car and wait for the rest of us to file out. After about ten minutes she was back in the house, screaming at everyone to hurry up. Then she was back at the car, where she’d honk the horn wildly to let us know that she meant business.
    Inside the house chaos reigned as we shoveled oatmeal into our mouths and scrambled to get dressed. The drive to Alta Academy took about twenty minutes in good weather, but there was often fog and snow. On some days, the ride felt like an eternity to me, sitting squished between my brothers in the third row of Big Blue. There was usually a lot of commotion in the truck, with everybody trying to talk over everybody else. At times, fights would break out and Mother Audrey would step in to take charge.