A Crazy Mormon Family: Mr. and Mrs. P

I come from a family of six children, and my father also came from a family of six children. Six might strike the average American today as a large number of children, but when I was growing up six was a fairly average number in our community. A few of my classmates in school came from families with ten children, and one boy was somewhere in the middle of twelve. Twelve seemed large, even to us. But then, some of our parents had come from even larger families. The matriarch of one epic family that had homesteaded a lot of property in that rural area had given birth twenty times. People often pointed out that there was a set of twins in there. I guess the thinking was that nineteen pregnancies sounded more reasonable (or at least less noteworthy) than twenty. However you counted them, a lot of the children turned out to be trouble, and the children's children (who were my age) were generally feared at school. The patriarch and matriarch of this brood, which I'll call the P's, were thought by most people there to be crazy. And they were, as I learned personally.

The old couple, Mr. and Mrs. P, must have been in their sixties when I was a child, but they looked more like centenarians. They were nominally Mormon (they were members, and they made sure to have all of their children and grandchildren baptized at age eight), but they never attended church, and nobody went out of the way to try to encourage them to attend. They had built a tiny house on the opposite side of the valley from my parents' house, and I and all of the children in the area knew who they were even without seeing them at church. We knew because the family raised vast numbers of sheep, and they'd run their sheep on the road through town twice a year when they moved them up to the mountains for the summer and down to the river bottoms for the the winter. We also knew about Mr. P specifically because he would often drive around with a horse in the back of his pickup truck.

In case you aren't familiar with the regular transporting of horses, you should know that horses are pretty much never hauled in anything except horse trailers. You can ride a horse a decent distance if you need to get it from one place to the other. If you need to transport one a truly long distance, a horse trailer is large, safe, and not too high off the ground. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone might try to move a horse in the back of a full-size pickup truck if there were no other options for a long-distance transport and if the pickup had a high cattle rack surrounding the truck bed to ensure that the horse couldn't fall out. Horses are smarter than cattle, so how you'd convince the horse to walk up into the bed of the truck is an interesting riddle to solve, but, assuming you could, the scenario is conceivable. Even then, horses are larger than cattle (bulls aside), so it would be cramped for the horse. But Mr. P regularly hauled a horse in the back of his truck, and what made it especially memorable for everyone, but for children most of all, was that his truck was a tiny, beat-up Japanese 2x4 that couldn't offer the protection of a cattle rack for the horse because the bed was far too small to fit a cattle rack. The only benefit for the horse to this crazy set-up was that 2x4s were, as a rule, lower to the ground, so the poor horse didn't have far to step up when Mr. P prodded it to get in. You might think that this would also mean the horse wouldn't have as far to fall when Mr. P took a sharp turn or hit the brakes. But I can honestly say we never heard of a horse falling out of the back of his truck. We also never heard a good reason for why he hauled a horse around in the first place.

At some point when I was a boy, my father was assigned to be the "home teacher" of Mr. and Mrs. P, who now lived alone. "Home teaching" is a church-sponsored program whereby priesthood holders (that is, active members of the male sex over age 12) are paired up and assigned a few families to visit once a month. During their visits to their families, home teachers are supposed to give mini lessons about Mormon values and beliefs (there is even a yearly manual, with lessons outlined for the home teachers). Home teachers are also encouraged to get to know their families and to help them with whatever the families might need. The program ensures that Mormons stay connected, and that less active members (or at least those less active members who will receive home teachers) are visited and encouraged to reconnect with the church. In our rural setting, there weren't too many inactive members, but somehow or another my father was always assigned to them. This was probably because he managed to get inactive members to allow him to visit. His visits tended to be light on the lesson and heavy on the help, which probably explained his success. But he did always manage to work in a little talk about church.

Long before I was twelve I was my father's de facto home teaching companion. I'm not sure whether this was because the boys or men he was paired with were not reliable or because it seemed less odd to the inactive families he visited if he just brought his own young son. Whatever the reason, as a young boy of seven or eight I suddenly had up-close contact with the strange Mr. and Mrs. P. My father was assigned to the P's for over a year. We visited every month. At the end of each month, my father would have to give an accounting of his home teaching visits to the priesthood leader over his quorum (quorums are priesthood groups separated by rank, which largely corresponds to age). My father never missed a month or a family. So, once a month for over a year I got to visit that strange and infamous couple.

Their tiny house was perched on the side of a hill that was covered with sage brush. There were no trees planted near the house, as was usually done, although down on the flat to the side of the hill there were some old cottonwoods and pines. The house was far too small for twenty children, but that was because it had been built when at least half of the children had moved on. Still, you had to wonder where the other half had slept - and on what, as the place was sparsely and poorly furnished. Mr. and Mrs. P both smoked a lot, and so the house and its inhabitants reeked of cigarettes. That alone would have made them the wickedest people I'd met up to that point in my life (Mormonism forbids tobacco). But even more damning was the one thing that hung on their whitewashed walls: a certificate of divorce, which they had framed. I asked about it during one of our visits, and Mrs. P proudly explained what it was. I don't think my father realized before my asking about their single piece of art that the P's were divorced, and it must have made him wonder whether it was o.k. that they were living together if they weren't in fact still married. When I asked why they still lived together if they were divorced, my father apologized, but he didn't say that an answer was none of our business. Anyway, we didn't get much of one. Mr. P smiled but said nothing. Mrs. P just laughed loudly and said they got along better that way. I remember that she threw back her head when she laughed, and her long, grey, coarse hair shook like a horse's tail twitching to keep flies away. And I also remember that I could see that her teeth were brown when she laughed, and that she was missing a few.

My father spent a lot more time talking with them about hay crops and lambing and the weather than he did talking about Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon. The P's didn't ever seem to need temporal help (spiritual help was another matter, but they weren't asking), so my father often brought them vegetables from his garden or eggs or milk. They genuinely seemed to like our visits, which were probably the only social calls they had outside their vast and sometimes violent family. Up close, I discovered that the old couple were even more eccentric than any of us had imagined, but that they were also hardworking and generous with what they had (my sisters and I got to raise bum lambs, courtesy of this family).

My father's and my home teaching assignment to the P's ended because the old couple split up. She moved in with a son near their old homestead, while he moved up somewhere north of town (where he lived exactly was unclear, although it may have been in a sheep herder trailer on another tract of land he owned). People sometimes spotted her walking on the side of the highway, and the rumors in town were that she'd gotten seriously involved with drugs of one kind or another. We'd see him driving around town from time to time, occasionally with an uncomfortable-looking horse in the back of his tiny pickup. Their house sat vacant for a few years, until one of their younger, calmer sons moved in. He wasn't as wicked - or as interesting - as his parents. He even became somewhat active at church. And my father wasn't assigned to be his home teacher.

Talk like A Mormon: Moving through the Ranks - Young Men

12 is an important age for Mormon boys. It is the age at which a male may be ordained to the first office in the lower or preparatory priesthood, called the Aaronic Priesthood (after Moses's brother Aaron, who, according to the Bible, was the first man ordained by God to be a priest in the temple). Mormon boys from the ages of 12 through 17 are said to be part of "Young Men's," short for "The Young Men's Organization." They are generally referred to this way only in the collective sense ("the young men" or "Young Men's"); an individual boy is not referred to as a "young man" when talking about his rank. (Mormons do use the term "young man" in the same sense that the term is used generally by the English-speaking world). Instead, an individual from "Young Men's" would be identified by the rank he holds within the Aaronic Priesthood, and ranks correspond to age groups. The ranks are:

1. Deacon: 12- and 13-year-old young men are deacons, and they belong to the "Deacons' Quorum." Deacons have primary responsibility for passing the sacrament (the bread and water) during Sacrament Meeting on Sundays (think of Sacrament Meeting as Mormons' version of Mass). One deacon is selected by the men who work with the quorum to be the quorum president, and he in turn gets to select two counselors from among his peers. The presidency gets to design the pattern for the passing of the sacrament and to decide which deacon takes which part of the pattern (think of the the pattern as the equivalent of a play in a ball game: each boy passes the bread and then the water to a section of the chapel based on the number he is assigned). Mormons love efficiency, so there can be constant redesign and improvement of the pattern. Deacons also collect fast offerings. On the first Sunday of every month, called "Fast Sunday," Mormons are expected to go without food and water until the Sunday block of meetings has ended. As part of the fast, they are asked to give as "fast offerings" whatever money they would have spent on the meals (generally breakfast and lunch) they have skipped. They can do this at church (there are little envelopes by the bishop's office precisely for this purpose), but deacons are also sent door to door on that Sunday to collect the offerings. When I was a deacon, we were told not to look to see how much people gave, but it was easy to do since the envelopes were closed with a string fastener much like an interdepartmental office envelope. Needless to say, I peeked from time to time. I often noted how some inactive Mormons who never came to church and likely never skipped a meal would still let us come to gather fast offerings and would give a generous amount, whereas some holier-than-thou regulars at church would give a pittance, but would present it to us as if it was a great offering.
2. Teacher: 14- and 15-year-old young men are teachers, and they belong to the "Teachers' Quorum." There are also a couple of men assigned to work with the teachers, and one of the teachers is chosen as the president, who in turn gets to select counselors. Teachers have two primary responsibilities, both relating to the sacrament. First, they take care of the preparation and clean-up of the sacrament. This means that they bring the Wonder bread to church and place it in the trays for the group of young men just older than them to break, bless, and give to the deacons during the sacrament portion of Sacrament Meeting. They also place the tiny cups (made from paper when I was young, but mostly from plastic these days) in the trays with the tiny cup holders, and then fill them with water. They place both the bread and the water trays on the sacrament table and cover it with a white cloth. Then, after Sacrament Meeting, they clean the trays and store them. As a side note, Mormons don't guard or babysit the leftover sacrament (as do Catholics their Holy Eucharist). Teachers just pour out the leftover water and dump the leftover bread. Except on Fast Sundays, when some of them (or at least some of my fellow teachers and I, when I was that age) would eat the leftover bread because we were SO HUNGRY! Second, teachers close the doors to the chapel when the sacrament is prayed over and passed during Sacrament Meeting. This is to discourage entrances to and exits from the chapel during this most sacred part of the meeting. Just the same, if someone has to go to the bathroom or has a crying baby, teachers let them by.
3. Priest: 16- and 17-year-old young men are priests, and they belong to the "Priests' Quorum." As is the case with deacons and teachers, a couple of men work with the priests. What is unique about priests, however, is that one of the men who works with them within the quorum is the bishop of the ward, and it is the bishop who is the president of the quorum. The bishop will select two priests to serve as his assistants (first and second). Priests' primary responsibility is to break the sacrament bread and to say the set prayers that are delivered over the sacrament before it is passed by the deacons. Ordinarily Mormons do not use set prayers, but these particular prayers were revealed to Joseph Smith as special sacrament prayers, and they are recorded in a collection of his revelations called Doctrine and Covenants, which Mormons consider to be scripture. The prayers have to be delivered exactly as the prophet received them, except that the original prayer for the second portion of the sacrament says "wine" instead of "water" (early Mormons used wine for the sacrament until Joseph Smith received a revelation about food and drink called the Word of Wisdom, which forbade wine). I have to admit that I wondered a time or two when I was a priest about why God didn't realize that he was going to forbid wine when he gave Joseph the prayer that had to be recited exactly as written. It was almost as if God wanted to confuse us, or to see whether we were smart enough to substitute "water" for "wine" if we were reading the prayer from Doctrine and Covenants. Luckily, by the time I was a priest, printing and laminating were common with church members, so we could always use a printed and laminated copy of the prayer that only said "water." I figured God gave us printing and laminating in order to fix the confusion (or help the less smart priests). As Mormons like to say, God will never test us beyond what we can handle!