Wariner, “The Sound of Gravel” (reviewed by Julie J. Nichols)

Review
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Title: The Sound of Gravel
Author: Ruth Wariner
Publisher: Flatiron Books (New York)
Genre: Memoir
Year of Publication: 2015
Number of Pages: 352
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN13: 978-1-250-07769-1
Price: $26.99

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters

On August 20, 1972, Joel Franklin LeBaron (b. 1923), the leader since 1955 of the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, was murdered in northern Mexico by a member or members of a rival church—the Church of the Lamb of God—headed by his brother Ervil LeBaron.

The brothers were two of thirteen children of Alma Dayer LeBaron, Sr. and Maude Lucinda McDonald, who moved to Colonia Juarez shortly after Joel was born. In 1944 the family was excommunicated from the mainstream LDS church for teaching and practicing plural marriage as part of the growing fundamentalist movement in Mexico. For the next eleven years, the family were members of Rulon C. Allred’s Apostolic United Brethren.

The Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times was founded in Salt Lake City by Joel, who became the president, and two of his brothers. They returned to Mexico, where their parents and most of the members of their family joined their new church. But in 1967, two years before Joel’s thirty-ninth child Ruth was born to his fifth wife Kathy, his brother Ervil began to preach that he—not Joel—should be the leader of the church. Ervil was removed from the leadership of the Church of the Firstborn and established his own church, whose members he taught that in accordance with the doctrine of blood atonement, Joel had to be executed for his sins. And so he was shot in the head in 1972, leaving Kathy with five small children in a condition of abject poverty.

*The Sound of Gravel* is well-titled. It’s pretty gritty. None of the information in the previous three paragraphs is to be found in Ruth LeBaron Wariner’s ultimately courageous memoir. No date at all is ever even mentioned until Chapter 15, when Ruth is in second grade and an attempt is made to assassinate President Reagan “in March 1981” (page 118), and once again a few years, a few pages, later.

We do know from the first page that Ruth is “[her] mother’s fourth child,” the granddaughter of Alma Dayer LeBaron, Sr., and a member of a family that “tried [their] best to be the happy, faithful people God had promised would come to populate the colony” of LeBaron. But the backstory is sparse. The larger context—of the fundamentalist sects, their position within (well, actually without) the mainstream church, and their relation to the rest of the country or the world goes unreported. I submit that the memoir would be even more powerful if these had been included. Dates and facts such as these orient the reader to the abominations—legal, temporal, and spiritual—to which the family was subjected as a result of the fanaticism of the breakoff churches’ leaders.

Perhaps it could be seen as a strength of Wariner’s memoir that her point of view is at first a child’s, accepting without the benefit of hindsight or adult wisdom the impoverishment and isolation of living in the colony. Slowly, gradually, she begins to recognize the family’s problems for what they are. We see the disabilities of several of her incestuously conceived siblings, the dismayed travail of her trapped and suppressed mother, the abuse of her stepfather (who had three other wives he couldn’t support any better than he supported Kathy) through Ruth’s awakening eyes. Details are plentiful, dialogue used well to paint the life they led. It’s not good. “Ruthie” begins to know this more and more surely, as they move from place to place, lying to conceal the nature of Kathy’s illegal marriage to Lane and struggling (an understatement) to keep their emotional and psychological heads above the floodwaters of shame, sickness, abuse, and poverty.

When two of Ruth’s stepsisters reveal that their stepfather has been abusing them too, Kathy dissolves in tears, but Ruth “didn’t think a single one of [those tears] was for me.” There’s little help for the child of a trapped, fanatic wife. Much of what Ruth comes to understand is a result of her fierce caring for her siblings. From the time she is forced to do it as a preteenager because no one else will, as her mother leaves the family alone to be with (and become pregnant by) the husband who abuses them, to the decades after her mother leaves them for good, Ruth is the carer. Soon Ruth admits:

“…my life would never be happy if all it amounted to was having several children by a shared husband. I couldn’t understand how love or adoration could be possible in that kind of arrangement, and I desperately wanted those things. But I also knew that it wasn’t enough to want them. You had to know how to get them.” (258)

She is breaking away in her heart and mind. But the break itself doesn’t come for several more years. When it does, the reader is as relieved—and as frightened and dismayed—as Ruthie has been for years.

The narrative arc of this memoir is a steep one. The years leading up to the final crisis are more and more cruel, Ruth’s ferocity and determination more and more necessary. The climax is terrible (I won’t give it away), her retributive action quick and final. The meaning of the entire book is encapsulated in the epilogue: “my siblings gave my life purpose, they were the bridge from pain to healing, from past to future. They are as much the authors of my survival as I am of theirs” (334). The reader nods: yes. That’s clear. And Ruth, the author of this memoir, is a super-survivor, a woman of strength and intelligence and grit. The reader can have nothing but admiration for her.

Still, the whole story begs for analysis. What’s behind the fanaticism of the fundamentalist leaders of churches that broke away from Joseph Smith in the first place? What motivates a woman like Kathy to continue in poverty and abuse? If the theme of *The Sound of Gravel* is that families can save each other on earth, can not only be “forever” in heaven, the other side of that theme is just as pointedly developed: families can also starve each other, hurt each other, kill each other. It’s a choice. Ruth’s choices are triumphant. That undeniable fact is the measure of this book.

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