A quick note for those of you are also subscribed to my Acknowledge Substack—I’m publishing two different versions of this essay. The version you’ll find here employs more creative conventions than the other, conventions which are a bit unusual given the subject matter. I felt that this version was better suited to Selkie and the Ruby. Hope you enjoy!
We’re sitting by a river at dusk, fishing. His wide brimmed hat is atop my head, where he playfully plunked it earlier. “I’m no poet,” Nels insists. “But you wrote love poems, didn’t you?” I counter. Cowboy modesty fills the corners of his mouth as they curve upwards. He smiles wistfully. “Callin’ me a poet puts the real thing to shame, don’t you think?”
This man is a romantic, I know it. I wonder what he makes of the stars and the planets that are twinkling behind the clouds now. “If I believe in any kinda fate it’s that me and Lavina were meant to be,” he says. “I’d stake my life on it.”
“I guess you did in a way.”
“If I could take that back, I would.” His gaze drifts towards the water. Nels smears a tear off of his face with the back of his hand. “What’s the Bible say? Love is stronger than death? Somethin’ like that.”
He’s inadvertently proving my point now quoting the Song of Songs, I think. This is some strong romanticism right here. “But if you mean astrology?” He says. “Well, I don’t know about all that.”
The first time I heard about Grandpa Nels his life was presented to me as a moral lesson. My mother characterized him as an addict—alcohol and gambling. She stressed how badly he had hurt his wife and his children. She had lost her father when she was a little girl. Her stuck childhood grief sat like a timpani drum at the back of an orchestra, holding together the rhythm of the story whenever it sounded.
When my mother’s father died in a plane crash, there was no one to blame—engine failure. But when Grandpa Nels died there was. He had killed himself. My mother whispered this tragic edict to me. Four generations worth of shame hung on the air as she spoke. This shame was learned, taught by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1893, George Q. Cannon, an early apostle in that Church, had this to say about suicide:
“It is a dreadful sin to take one’s own life. It is self-murder, and therefore, anyone committing this crime should not expect a public and honorable funeral.”1
Fourteen years later, Joseph F. Smith (another early Mormon leader) elaborated on this concept when he declared that people who commit suicide will be excluded from heaven.2 These teachings perpetuated for almost a century before they fizzled out. I recall hearing suicide described as self-murder in the nineties as though it were canonical. Thankfully, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken a more merciful stance on suicide in recent years. When Nels died in 1903, however, the stigma was at its zenith.
By happenstance, this turn-of-the-century denunciation of suicide got memorialized at the Heber cemetery. Joseph Stacey Murdock’s (JSM) grave is marked with a sizable monolith installed near several towering fir trees. Three of his five wives, and many of his children, are buried beside him. His son Nels, however, can’t be found amongst his Murdock kin. That’s because he was interred on the opposite side of the cemetery.
What might be my favorite family story is embedded in the space between these two memorials. JSM’s monolith is a large slate gray pillar with four sides. One of the faces was reserved for Lizzie, the wife who outlived all the others, but Lizzie rebelled. She did not want to be buried beside her husband.
Evidently, her final wishes were conveyed with such authority that they were respected even after she died. The fourth face of JSM’s monument was never carved, and Lizzie was laid to rest beside her outcast son. The father may have rejected his boy, but his mother never did, not even in death.
I’ve been teaching myself astrology to keep up with my friend, Saoirse. I don’t think Gary Chapman would revise The Five Love Languages to include speaking astrology in his well-known list, but that was originally why I became interested in the subject. It is far more complex than physical touch or acts of service. Maybe it would count as quality time?
It’s an entire symbolic lexicon, and there is math involved too! Instead of successfully tracking the rotations of various planets through the sky its usually my head that is spinning. If it weren’t for my childhood long obsession with all things Greek and Roman myth I wouldn’t have a prayer of keeping up with Saoirse. Although, honestly, Google helps.
When you are looking up someone’s natal chart, Saoirse taught me, you can get a lot of information if you have a birthdate and a place of birth. With just these two pieces of information we know that the planet Venus was in the sign of Leo the night Nels was born, for example. But certain information is dependent on the time of birth. In Nels’ case we can estimate a time of birth using the following little family story.
On October 1st, 1868, Lizzy was left home alone in a pioneer shanty on the barren Moapa Valley in Nevada. The settlers called the place the Muddy. Lizzie’s teenage sons had been out trying to till the arid land, but when their plows finally broke against the unyielding earth they quit for the day.
On their way home, they passed one of Lizzy’s friends, and they persuaded her to travel with them the rest of the way home. This was one of a few miracles that Lizzy recounted later in her life.3 Through whatever small but generous means afforded her, she had support the night she gave birth to her fifth son, Nelson William Murdock.
Not long after he was born, Nels’ father, mother, and still growing polygamous clan left the Muddy behind and returned to Heber, Utah, where Nels grew up. Nels had 22 brothers. He had a penchant for mischief, and he was good with livestock. He charmed friends and relatives with his guitar, but he was also a hard worker. His father was awarded the mail contract in Wasatch County, and so Nels and several of his brothers were kept busy running letters across the valley on horseback.
Brigham Young assigned his lackies, men like JSM, responsibility over the mail because Brigham monitored letters that traveled in and out of Utah territory. Correspondence that was deemed potentially seditious was opened without the sender’s consent and previewed. In at least one instance, the case of Jesse Hartley, this led to an assassination ordered by Brigham Young.4 Presumably, this surveillance program carried on for some time after Brigham’s death in 1877.
Among the Murdock boys, pony express espionage took on a more benign form. Nels got caught in a love triangle. Lavina Averett, a clerk at the Heber Mercantile, had two beaus, Nels and a miner. When the competition moved to Park City for work, besotted Nels intercepted the love letters the miner sent to Lavina. So, Nels was free to woo Lavina, the woman who would become his bride.
Like his father, Nels could be passionate, temperamental, and selfish. But he also differed from his father in many ways. Nels was artistic, and he could be deeply sensitive. Nels fell in love with Lavina—real genuine love, which was something JSM never experienced.
Nels was smitten. He promised Lavina that she was the only woman for him, and he meant that. He wrote her poems. He serenaded her. Big romantic gestures—that was Nels’ signature. It’s curious how he became so ardent, surrounded as he was by cold, unloving patriarchs who decreed that their inherent righteousness entitled them to as many wives as they could cajole, persuade, traffic, threaten, or otherwise manipulate into marrying them.
Something about the differences between Nels and his father made him the target for abuse. Like Supickett, Nels was fashioned into a family scape goat, a kind of whipping boy for his father and his many brothers. Nels would often go fishing with Supickett to escape the men in his family. The abuse started early.
Nels’ son, my great-grandfather, Blaine, told stories about how one summer, in preparation for a big family meal, JSM sent his sons out to fish. When he wasn’t looking, Nels’ older brothers cut his fishing lines, and dumped out the fish that he had already caught. When they got back home, Nels sheepishly presented the smallest catch to his father. To teach him a lesson for his laziness, JSM gave Nelson a violent beating. Afterwards, the brothers admitted to Nels what they had done. They thought it was funny.
These dynamics continued to play out as the boys grew older. When Nels fell in love his brothers mocked him. Nelson and Lavina, the love birds. His father called him a sissy, soft. He resented that he had not arranged the match, and that Nels had chosen for himself.
But Nels had chosen well. His new bride was clear headed, and she did not suffer bullies. Lavina went to bat for her husband. She hated the way JSM treated his son. She would defend Nels against his father’s mistreatment, and JSM would retaliate. Our family still remembers how they “fought like cats and dogs.”
The young lovers were up against the world, in many ways. JSM was the top religious leader in the pioneer town they lived in, which was populated with many relatives who bought into his narcissism. Nelson had many enemies amongst his relations—in particular brothers who had entered an abuse cycle long ago, and were, in adulthood jealous of the love Nels shared with his partner. Sadly, they never stopped making their little brother responsible for the shadows they lacked the courage to lay claim to in themselves.
Despite all of this, Nels and Lavina carved out a happy life together. There was plenty of struggle. But they had his mother’s support, and they had their beautiful babies. They lived in Lehi for a time. Five years into their marriage, in 1899, JSM died. Things were looking up. Eventually, the Church gave Nelson a large sum of money to use to buy a herd of cattle. Nels’ jealous brothers caught wind of this and laid a trap for their younger sibling.
Nelson often traversed through depression, and he had a penchant for self-sabotage. These states of being were learned in childhood, internal patterns that reflected the cycles of abuse he had no escape from as a little boy. For Nels, these self-sabotaging behaviors manifested as a weakness for alcohol and gambling. Although their father had been the big shot in town (the bishop, the stake president, and the mayor at various points) his sons weren’t exactly what you’d call righteous.
James S. Murdock owned the Wasatch Saloon.5 Another brother, Royal Murdock, owned the Gem Saloon.6 In July of 1903, Nels’ brothers invited him to one of these establishments for drinks. They rigged a game, and persuaded Nels to bet the large sum of money the Church had given him at the table that night. Sadly, Nels fell for the ruse. When the brothers won the money, they refused to give it back.
Nels plunged rapidly. This was not the first time he had left the saloon with his pockets empty. When he told Lavina what had happened, she snapped. She couldn’t take him betting their money away anymore, she said. She intended to divorce him. Impulsive and evidently already peering over an edge, Nels told Lavina that there wouldn’t be room enough in the world for the two of them if they were to split up. He grabbed a nearby can of carbolic acid, a cleaning agent used on chicken coops, and guzzled it in front of her.
I still haven’t caught a single fish. “It’ll come,” says Nels. “Don’t you worry.” I’m frustrated. “You’ve only got to catch one, kid.”
“I’m 34 now, Nels. Same age you were when you… died. You had five children by now. What am I doing wrong? I never get any bites.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “M’fraid maybe you’ve been carryin’ some of this.” I cry. “You’re like my wife. Lavina speaks her mind too. She doesn’t take kindly to louts and bullies. Most men don’t like that.”
I don’t know what to say in the face of that kindness, so I change the subject. “Did you know that Pluto was in Gemini when you died?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Well Pluto was the Roman god of death,” I explain.
“Roman?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what Lavina means, did ya know?” Nels says. “Lady of Rome. It’s an old-fashioned name.” Any chance to talk about Lavina, and he takes it, this man. “Even more old fashioned where I come from,” I reply.
“I’ll bet. So, Gemini?” he asks.
“Sign of the twin—duplicity. And for you it’s in your third house, which is the house of siblings and communication.”
Nels’ eyebrows raise in surprise. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
What made him do it? What made him kill himself? It’s hard to say, but I can imagine that before his brothers cheated him at the poker table Nelson may have hoped that once his father died, he would finally be free. Alas, after he died, JSM’s eldest sons took over the family estate.
The Murdock men could be just as cruel as their patriarch. They ruled the roost in Heber, and they had decided long ago that Nels, his kindness, his sensitivity, and his desire to lead from his heart disqualified him from belonging in their ranks.
The pain became too much for Nels, so he ended it. He died an agonizing, slow death. He left behind four sons and one daughter who circulated the story for years that Nels had shot himself in a cornfield, because presumably, that was more bearable than the truth.
Sadly, the Murdocks took no accountability for their cruelty. They blamed Lavina instead. Had she been a better wife, they said, this never would have happened. They took it upon themselves to enforce the condemnation that had been meted out by the Church. Given all of the stigmas associated with suicide, Nels was lucky he got a plot in the family cemetery at all. Because suicide made Nels a murderer according to the doctrine of the time, the Murdocks placed him far, far away from their esteemed father’s grave. Never mind the indigenous lives their father had taken.
Some family stories, although fragmented, paint an excessively disheartening picture. One story suggests that Lavina and her family were alienated at Nelson’s funeral, that someone prevented community members from sitting beside the grieving family. Another suggests that JSM’s eldest sons blocked Grandma Lizzie from sending a basket of food to Lavina and her children after her son’s death.
Interestingly enough, while serving as Heber’s constable several years later, JSM’s eldest son, John Heber Murdock, successfully campaigned to have all the saloons in Heber shut down. According to a life sketch written by John’s daughter, Amelia Brittingham Witt, this happened before prohibition reached Utah in 1917.7 She went on to say that several of John’s younger brothers, who were in the saloon industry, were unhappy with John for shutting down their revenue streams.
Perhaps John’s self-appointed mission to close down the saloons was in some way motivated by the death of his younger brother, Nels. Among those 22 brothers there must have been many different kinds of personalities and characters. For better or for worse, we don’t know any longer which of the brothers laid that trap for Nelson in July of 1903. We don’t exactly know what motivated them either, outside of a long-standing cycle of victimization. It’s clear it wasn’t love.
Here is what we can know. In a family line that has been revering JSM for nearly 200 years, we have forgotten the boy seated beneath his father in the family tree. Nels was the black sheep who was outcast for trying to live according to the values of his heart, instead of the values espoused by his vengeful, controlling father and the domineering culture they both belonged to.
Nels lived a simple, small life, but he knew something about the human heart. The path that had been laid down for him, the easier path to follow, chased power. He chose to shoot his shot for love instead.
“What else do you know about the stars?” Nels asks.
“I took an astronomy class in high school. Galaxies, the speed of light, the big bang, the composition of meteors. Really interesting stuff.” I grin and look at Nels sideways. He purses his lips together. “So, you do want to talk about astrology, then?”
Nels throws up his hands in surrender. “You got me.”
“Well, my Venus is conjunct some of your planets. You know Venus?” With a twinkle in his eye Nels responds, “What man doesn’t know about the goddess of love?”
I giggle. “My Venus, the planet that symbolizes love, is in the constellation Aries. It conjuncts your Jupiter, good fortune; Neptune, spirituality; and Moon, emotions.”
“So, we’re helpin’ each other out. I like that. Where’s my Venus?” Nels asks.
“Your Venus is in the constellation Leo. It’s a fire sign, like Aries.”
“Ah, so you’re a passionate lover, like me, then.”
I blush so deeply my toes turn red. He continues. “It’s good to be passionate about what you love, kid. It’s real good.” Nels pulls in his fishing line. He dusts off his knees. I’m not ready for him to go. I stammer out—
“There’s something kind of special about your Venus placement, Nels. The day you died it was in exactly the same place it was the day you were born. Down to the degree.”
“Wow. Really?” he says. “What do you make of that?”
“I’m not sure. I thought I’d ask the poet.”
A woman’s voice echoes across the grass behind us. “Love springs eternal in the heart of a fool? How’s that one?” Nels springs to his feet. “I don’t think that’s how it goes,” he says. He pulls the woman in for a long hug. “It’s how it should go,” she insists.
Nels smooches the woman on her face. “Catch anything, darlin’?” she asks. He gestures at me. “Just this one tonight.” Lavina looks at me, equal measures of maternal warmth and inquisitiveness in her eyes. “We don’t often get visitors from where you’re from. You gonna stay for dinner, little one?”
“I don’t think I can stay much longer. I have to be getting back.” Tears well up in my eyes. I stammer again. “Before I go, I just wanted to say, I’m proud to be your granddaughter, Nels. I really am. I’m so sorry it took me so long to see past everything. To really see you. I wish I’d seen you sooner.”
My ancestors grab me by the hands. Nelson says. “Everybody needs a home, especially black sheep like us. We can be your home, if you’d like us to be.” I quiver and freeze.
“Let it go, baby,” Lavina clucks her tongue and pulls me in closer. “It’s in the past. It’s history. It’s done. We’re okay now. We found our way back to each other, see?”
Lavina puts her hands on my shoulders and guides me out of the embrace. The lovers stand in front of their cabin by the river for a beat, as if they are posing for a portrait. They are happy together. I can feel it.
I notice the full moon rising in the sky above the cabin. That’s probably important. If Saoirse were here she could tell me why, no doubt. Nels saunters over to where I’m standing and he peers into the sky. “What you lookin’ at honey, the moon? Come inside. You can tell us all about it.” I smile, take his hand, and we go in.
Cannon, George Q. The Juvenile Instructor. Vol. 28, page 352. 1893. https://archive.org/details/juvenileinstructor1993/page/352/mode/2up?view=theater&q=juvenile+instructor. Accessed online 14 January 2025.
Smith, Joseph F. “Opening Address.” Seventy-Eighth Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. October 1907. https://archive.org/details/conferencereport1907sa. Accessed online 14 January 2025.
“Elizabeth Hunter Murdock Story.” Page 4. https://www.familysearch.org/memories/memory/12865544?cid=mem_copy. Accessed online 14 January 2025.
Marquardt, H. Michael. “The Coming Storm: The Murder of Jesse Thompson Hartley.” Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West. The Arthur H. Clark Company. Norman, Oklahoma, 2011. https://user.xmission.com/~research/mormonpdf/storm.pdf . Accessed online 14 January 2025.
Wasatch Wave. 1890-09-30. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6kp9g37/22014416 Accessed online 14 January 2025.
Wasatch Wave. 1906-12-07. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6kw6w34/22055833. Accessed online 14 January 2025.
Witt, Amelia Brittingham. “John Heber Murdock: Autobiography Continued.” https://www.familysearch.org/memories/memory/66616266?cid=mem_copy. Accessed online 14 January 2025.