Free Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall Page B

though everyone was willing to adopt us into the family, life was still not easy—especially for Teressa and my brothers. I was young enough not to understand everything that was going on, but they were fully aware of our situation’s harsh realities. As we tried to process complex emotions, we couldn’t help but feel that Dad had been unjustly dealt with. While those outside our family may have thought that the prophet and Warren were saving us from a father who could not control his family, I never saw it that way. Things were not perfect at home and something did need to change, but breaking the family apart would not solve the problem. It was just another wound from which our family would never recover.
    We’d been at the ranch for a few weeks when Mom suddenly went away, leaving us in the care of Kassandra and Teressa. While I trusted my older sisters, I was worried about my mother’s unexpected and secretive departure. We were told only that she’d gone to Hildale to see the prophet. During her absence, I became so ill I nearly collapsed. Perhaps it was the change of climate or the stress of losing my dad that had me fighting off constant colds and spells of the flu. I’d never really gotten over the Lyme disease I’d contracted the previous summer during our camping trip to the mountains, and I often felt weak and tired. Fevers plagued me during repeated bouts of illness, and as the snow and cold of winter set in, I found it impossible to get warm. I walked around much of the time with inflamed tonsils and a general feeling of ill health.
    Kassandra and Teressa took care of me as best they could, but the homeopathic remedies of cayenne pepper, garlic, and echinacea could not prevent my deterioration. There were moments when my throat seemed to almost completely close up, and my tonsils became severely infected. Even if my mother had been there to take care of me, with no health insurance and no doctors nearby, there was not much more she could have done to help. Nevertheless, I longed for her comfort and presence at my side.
    At the ranch, we were expected to share in the workload. Our names were placed on the job chart and we worked alongside everyone else, but because I was so sick, it was difficult for me to do my share. We were also required to attend morning lessons with our family members, where we would listen to the taped sermons and teachings of Warren Jeffs. There were days when I felt well enough to ice-skate and sled, and I was able to enjoy the big New Year’s Eve party when we made homemade candy and played games with our many young cousins.
    In addition to Uncle Robert’s family, my uncle Lee and his wife, Debbie, were living at the ranch in a smaller home. Some of my older male cousins shared a “bunkhouse” just behind the main house, where they had been sent from Hildale by their fathers to help care for the ranch. One of these was my fifteen-year-old first cousin Allen Glade Steed.
    From our first contact that winter, I didn’t like Allen one bit. He was gangly and awkward, but that didn’t stop him from teasing my younger siblings and me because we didn’t have a father. Though he probably knew that his words stung, he would remind us with a gleeful smile that we didn’t have a “priesthood father.” We were quick to defend Dad’s honor, and it led to many arguments. As a ten-year-old girl, I was very self-conscious and insecure. For most of my childhood, I had kept some baby fat, and even though Allen seemed to know it scorched my feelings, he took to calling me “Tubba-Tubba.”
    He seemed to enjoy embarrassing me. One day, I had been ecstatic about going ice-skating because illnesses had kept me from many other skating trips. The reservoir on the Steed ranch was too far from the house to walk, so we would usually drive over. I waited patiently for my brothers and sisters to get ready, and we all rushed outside to pile into the trailer attached to Allen’s four-wheeler. They