The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir

“The rest of us followed silently, watching and listening as Mom took a wide step over the highway shoulder and onto the dirt road, the gravel crunching beneath her footsteps, the sound of home.”

Sound is an important motif in Ruth’s memoir, and the sound of gravel represents where she was raised. Hearing this sound meant that she was back in LeBaron, back to an unpredictable life that demanded strength, underscoring the theme of Courage and Resilience in the Face of Adversity.

“It represented a core belief of theirs: we should be grateful for every little thing God had given us.”

Kathy and Lane often preached their belief in gratitude no matter what circumstances a person was living in. This provided their excuse and their shield from the guilt that would otherwise have overwhelmed them had they truly considered the situation in which they were raising children. The Consequences of Childhood Neglect is thematically evident in how it took years for Ruth to realize that her living situation was not normal or right.

“The words were tinged with a definite sweetness, but also something else, and whatever that something was, it kept me frozen in place from fear or unfamiliarity, my hands clasped behind my back.”

When Lane began preying on Ruth, she sensed that something was wrong before he had even acted, based entirely on his tone of voice. Even at age six, Ruth understood the difference between good intentions and ill intentions, and she recalls this moment as the beginning of years of abuse.

“Going to school meant walking past round-piped chimneys that billowed out smoke like giant steel cigarettes, and air that had grown thick with the scent of burning wood.”

Ruth uses simile to provide rich imagery for the scene that surrounded her daily walks to school in LeBaron. The comparison of the chimneys to cigarettes implies a slow death or toxicity in the colony, and the thick air was a consequence of the desert heat and lack of 21st-century technology.

“A rainbow rose from a mesquite field in the distance and split the gray clouds in the sky. I imagine it had been there all morning but I’d been too sad to notice it. Seeing it now, I took it as a sign from God, a sign that everything was going to be okay.”

Ruth acknowledges that some of her memories of the past are skewed by the human tendency to notice only what one wants to notice. Her description of the rainbow as a sign that things would be alright conveys an undertone of irony, as though she realized with certainty that this was a passing moment of optimism which would soon give way to a much longer period of trials.

“Hearing all this, I couldn’t help but feel sad. Sure our lives in LeBaron had been hard—our house was cold and small and nothing in it ever worked—but we were living for God’s purpose. I didn’t like that my grandparents didn’t believe what my mom did. What if when they died, they didn’t get to go to heaven?”

Ruth’s life as a child was shaped by familial love, which develops The Joys, Pains, and Sacrifices of Familial Love as a theme in her memoir, and she was always taught and shown that sacrificing oneself was the highest way to serve God. However, she began to experience cognitive dissonance regarding what she had always been taught when she spoke to her grandma. Ruth’s grandma was never afraid to be honest and express her disdain for the polygamous life.

“Mom never spoke to us of what happened at the hospital, of how it felt to be a mother who couldn’t give her child what she needed, who felt forced to entrust her daughter to the care of strangers.”

Throughout her challenging life, Kathy experienced severe hardships and was often entrenched in a feeling of powerlessness toward her life, her surroundings, and her children. When Audrey’s mental health began to severely decline, putting the family’s safety at risk, Kathy had no choice but to permanently admit her to a hospital. Ruth’s empathy for her mother is constantly evident in her memoir, as Kathy was the primary focus of Ruth’s life as a child.

“The yellow moon that night cast a dim light over the sandy, cactus-covered landscapes. Here and there, mesquite trees and tumbleweeds appeared on the sides of the road and then disappeared. Like the valley of LeBaron, it was a place of desolation but also of beauty.”

Ruth often includes detailed imagery of the desert landscape of her childhood. Driving to Arizona, she notices that the landscape is much like her home in LeBaron. Ruth’s family frequently traveled between the US and Mexico, so the entire landscape felt like one large, connected place. The harsh, unforgiving environment reflected the conditions in which she lived. Survival required one to be as resilient as a desert plant.

“That single-wide was one of the nicest places we ever lived. Lane’s generosity was real, although not any more real than the nightmares he would later visit on me.”

Ruth muses on the dualistic nature of human beings and how Lane was capable of good but also of terrible evil. Like many people in positions of power, Lane seemed to relish feeling needed and did as much as was required to maintain power and respect in his four families, while acting against their well-being at the same time.

“Mom’s skepticism threw me off balance and I began to question myself all over again.”

When Ruth talked to her mother about Lane’s abuse, Kathy reacted with doubt, wondering if Ruth either imagined it or exaggerated it. Clearly, Kathy could not handle anything that challenged her worldview or what she considered a holy purpose. In doubting her daughter, Kathy was unintentionally gaslighting Ruth, leading her to doubt herself.

“Still, he hadn’t said he did anything wrong. Was I making a big deal out of nothing? I wondered.”

Like Kathy, Lane possessed skills in deception and manipulating people to his will. These traits are likely what led him to become a polygamist husband in the first place, and they are also the reason he later took advantage of Ruth and several other children. Ruth spent years hating herself and wondering what she did wrong—or even whether she should be upset at all.

“Afterward it would seem to me that I crossed some sort of threshold that day, that I’d been merely a sister in the morning, but by afternoon I was something else altogether.”

Ruth always took care of her siblings and helped her mother, but now that her mother was gone and Matt was clearly panicking, Ruth started to feel more like a parent than a sister. This was a period of massive transformation and upheaval in her life, and it led to her decision to leave LeBaron to protect her siblings and herself.

“His skin was so thin it was almost see-through, but it glowed, as if he were lit from within, the blue button eyes providing the only contrast.”

Ruth offers a rich description of each new child born into the family, providing a vivid picture, humanizing the new addition, and communicating Ruth’s immediate love for every new sibling. Her depiction of Micah’s innocent, almost angelic appearance is particularly poignant because it adds an extra element of tragedy to his death years later.

“As the years passed, it began to seem as if Luke’s mind had been frozen in time.”

Ruth uses a common cliché in a new way to describe her brother’s psychological development in adolescence and the way it seemed to halt after a certain point. Although her brother’s disability saddened her, she appreciated the consistency it offered, the knowledge that she could rely on him to always be the same Luke. However, when he later revealed that Lane abused him despite his disability, Ruth was incensed and knew it was time to leave.

“I had loved my sister, I told myself. Even though I had resented the heavy burden of taking care of her, I’d loved her.”

Ruth often struggled internally between her feelings of obligation and servitude for her family and her need to be her own person. When Meri died, Ruth experienced a period of guilt but reminded herself that her feelings of frustration toward having to care for Meri were not really about Meri but about her own feelings of loss over never having a real childhood.

“Whenever Lane touched me, I felt he left fingerprints that stained my skin.”

The abuse that Lane perpetrated against Ruth scarred her emotionally and, in this metaphorical description, left physical marks as well. She grew to hate her body and therefore often avoided looking at herself in the mirror. Ruth’s experiences of abuse took her years to untangle and heal from, and they were a burden she carried in silence during her youth because her mother refused to help her.

“Mom turned and faced me with the look of a determined bull staring at a matador’s red flag. The force of it had made me step back through the threshold and into the living room. But I couldn’t stop that part of me that was crying out, that part of me that no one listened to.”

Ruth metaphorically compares her mother to an angry bull, emphasizing Kathy’s intense emotional state and the feeling of panic that Ruth experienced in that moment. For years, Ruth felt unheard, neglected, and fooled into believing that she was the problem. At this point, Ruth was older and had the courage to finally speak up for herself.

“As I pulled the covers up and let Micah settle in next to me, I heard Mom’s voice in my ears: Children need to get used to being in the dark. She’d repeated that countless times throughout my childhood.

No, I thought, they don’t.”

Ruth resolves to be a different sort of mother than her own, and rather than teach her siblings that they must suffer alone and learn to accept a hard life, Ruth decided to comfort and support them. This moment metaphorically conveys the type of person Ruth aspired to become—someone who was not like her mother.

“Didn’t she see what that life had done to her? I felt devastated for her. She was as trapped by her beliefs as I had been by Lane.”

After years of watching her mother endure poverty, abuse, loneliness, and stress, Ruth finally began release her anger and pity her mother instead. She realized that Kathy was too entrenched in her beliefs to ever escape them, and empathized with the experience of feeling powerless to change her situation.

“‘Ruthie, you just have to have faith.’

No, you don’t, I thought. You also need money and a husband who’s not a deadbeat.”

In this glib observation, Ruth considers her mother’s flawed thought process and her reliance on something as vague and undefinable as faith. Ruth started to see that practicality was missing in her life, and her mother lacked the self-worth to leave Lane or find a man who would treat her with respect. Instead, she relied on God to keep her safe.

“It was as if all the big and small stupidities she’d put up with over the years in the name of my father’s religion, all the injustices that she’d seen perpetrated against innocent children, all the starvation and suffering and now death—all of it was boiling over in her head. But she held her tongue.”

Ruth observes in her grandma a wisdom and a stubbornness that she wishes she had in herself. She notes her grandma’s total objection to polygamy, and this plants the seed of questioning in Ruth’s mind. One of the biggest problems with fundamentalism is its tendency to lead to childhood neglect, and Ruth’s grandma seemed the only one willing to say it out loud.

“When it came to my own abuse, I had always felt dejected, powerless, and completely bottled up. But the moment I realized that my gentle, defenseless, disabled brother had suffered the same fate, an unfamiliar impulse came over me, a passion so primitive I couldn’t make it go away. I had to act. I had to act now.”

Ruth describes how she experienced her anagnorisis in a moment of epiphany when she learned that Lane was abusing Luke. After a decade of abuse and living in poverty, Ruth snapped when she found out that Lane was taking advantage of her brother. Because she grew up taking care of siblings who had disabilities, Ruth is strongly devoted to the rights of vulnerable people.

“I realized that all those words, words that had held such power throughout my childhood, words that had characterized our way of life, words that had defined me, my siblings, our mom—they meant nothing to me. All the preaching, all the hours in church memorizing scriptures, how could that mean anything when the community supporting it wouldn’t defend the innocence and safety of a child? With a certainty that took my breath away, I decided I had to get away from LeBaron, and I had to bring my siblings with me.”

The repetition here emphasizes the impact that the words of the church’s teachings permeated Ruth’s life and influenced much of what happened to her. Because of religious fundamentalism, Kathy was forever trapped in a belief system that prevented her from being the mother she should have been to her children, and they all paid the price for it. The flaws in the religion’s teachings became all too obvious for young Ruth to ignore.