Out of Heaven's Grasp (13 page)

I nodded. I felt very uncomfortable. Things were very rigid, weren’t they? What if I screwed it up?

* * *

Jesse

Ephraim Long had been exiled from the community over five years ago. I had a vague memory of him from when I was a kid. Now, he was big and hulking, wearing a tank top that showed off his tattooed arms. He smoked a cigarette in the kitchen of the crash pad house and leaned on the kitchen island. I’d never been inside a worldly house before, and—though it was somewhat similar to a house back home—the smooth, white walls and sleek electric appliances were definitely strange to me.

I was on the other side of the island, standing with Anthony, who’d brought me here.

“The lease is in my name,” said Ephraim. “So, if anything goes wrong here, it’s on me.” He pointed at himself. “As you can imagine, I want to make sure everything stays cool.”

I nodded.

“When I got cast out,” he continued, “it was damned hard. There was no one else out here to offer me a helping hand, and I had to work it out on my own. Which I did. And I don’t want any of you guys to have to go through that. Which is why it’s cool if you crash here. But there are rules.”

Anthony rolled his eyes. “Stop pretending to be a hardass, Ephraim.”

“I’m not being a hardass.” Ephraim flicked his cigarette. “I’m just telling him how it is.”

“When I first got here, he scared the shit out of me,” said Anthony. “But he’s actually really chill.”

“First up, you gotta get a job,” said Ephraim. “It’s no big deal if you want to use this address for that. I don’t mind. But everyone here works. No slackers. I know a couple places that you can check out, if you’re hunting. Lotta places don’t want to hire us because they don’t think we’re responsible, and the problem is that’s true more often than not. We all grew up in a very restrictive environment, and it’s real easy to cut loose and go crazy out here. But you have to remember that you have responsibilities here, same as there. Every single one of us worked hard in the community. You gotta work your ass off out here too. And you gotta know when you can play, and how not to play too hard. Got that?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded anyway. I really didn’t want to spend another night in my truck.

“Good,” said Ephraim. “Second thing is that we all kick in for rent and groceries. You put something in this refrigerator, it’s fair game, okay? So don’t get all bent out of shape if someone drinks your soda or something. You want to keep something private? Buy your own mini-fridge and keep it in your room with a lock on it.”

I was even more confused. I’d never really spend much time thinking about food. The women in the community prepared it, and I ate it. I was beginning to realize how much different everything was going to be.

Ephraim kept going. “Third thing. No drugs. And I’m serious about this shit. No drugs of any kind, okay? It’s one thing to have a few beers and cut loose a little bit, but drugs are going to eat you alive. People who do drugs spend all their money on drugs, and they drag everyone around them down. If I catch you high, if I catch you with drugs, or if I catch you doing drugs, you are
out
of this house. That clear?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Cool,” he said. He surveyed me for a minute and then his face broke out into a huge grin. “Well, then welcome home. You want a beer?”

Anthony snickered. “See, I told you, he’s cool as shit.”

Ephraim stubbed out his cigarette in an ash tray and opened up the refrigerator. He pulled out a can and offered it to me.

I looked back and forth between Ephraim and Anthony. In the Life, the only time we ever drank alcohol was during the breaking of bread, in which we had a drink of wine and a bite of bread in remembrance of the Lord, as he’d commanded at the last supper. And when I said “we,” I really meant “they,” because only married people were considered strong enough in Christ to participate. The rest of the time, alcohol was strictly forbidden. I knew that some of the more rebellious guys sometimes scored some and drank outside the community in the desert, but I’d never been one of those guys.

I’d never had a beer before.

But… why not? I was going to Hell anyway, right?

I grinned back. “Yeah, okay, sure.”

* * *

Abby

“Math is stupid,” said little Jenny Long. She wrinkled up her nose at the subtraction problems she was trying to work on.

I knelt down next to her. “It might seem like it now, but it’s actually really important. When you grow up big, do you want to be able to make food for your family?”

She shrugged. “That doesn’t have anything to do with math.”

“Actually, you’ll need to know lots of math if you want to double a recipe or if you want to plan out complicated meals for guests. You’d be surprised how much you use it every day.”

She glowered at me.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

I’d noticed this about children. They had a very hard time articulating what they didn’t understand, and they used their lack of understanding as an excuse to not even try. Sometimes it was maddening, but today, I actually found that I was glad to have something to do that didn’t feel foreign and strange, the way everything did at Bob’s house.

“Why don’t you read me the problem?” I said.

“I can’t read it, it’s numbers.”

“What are the numbers?”

“It’s fifty-six takeaway eighteen.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, do you remember the first thing you do with a problem like that?”

She peered at it. “You try to takeaway this number from this number. But it doesn’t work, because six is smaller than eight.”

Ah. So that was the issue. “You don’t remember what we do when the number is bigger?”

She shrugged again.

“You don’t remember borrowing?”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh yeah!”

I nodded. “You do remember.”

“Yeah, I take numbers from this side.” She gripped her pencil tighter and began to scribble on her paper.

I stood up, smiling. Kids liked to feel that they’d gotten the answer on their own. The trick was always to know how to guide them there. Simply spouting the directions at them again made them feel like
you
were doing the work, not them.

Our school here wasn’t an officially recognized public school. We got around the government rules by calling it a homeschool collective. All of the children under fourteen went to our little school, but I only worked with the little ones—five to ten. The older children were in another room.

We mostly taught the kids math and reading. The older ones got some history—bible based, of course—and some basic training on running a household or running a farm.

I’d volunteered to teach mostly to get out of the house. As an eighteen-year-old, I’d felt far too old and far too in the way at home with my mothers and sisters. Now, however, I was glad that I had, because the escape from Bob’s house was a nice change.

After school let out that afternoon, Susannah and I walked back from the school together. Her house and Bob’s house were on the same side of the community, and it wasn’t too far to walk.

“Do you feel different?” said Susannah, looking sidelong at me.

“Different about what?”

“Well, you’re married now,” she said.

I thought about what Bob had done to me on my wedding night. I was still a little sore. Whenever I thought about it, I got a little bit shaky and afraid. But I’d managed to eat somewhat better since then. I didn’t want to talk to Susannah about it. I was too ashamed of it. It was embarrassing and filthy, and it wasn’t appropriate anyway. So I shrugged. “Not really.”

“Are you, um, doing okay? You know since…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jesse.”

I stopped walking, my body going stiff.

She stopped too. “Abby?”

I lifted my chin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on, it’s me,” she said. “You don’t have to follow those silly rules. We can talk about him. No one can hear.”

“God can hear.” I started walking again.

She hurried to catch up with me. “You
are
different,” she mumbled.

I wanted to break down in tears and bury my face on her shoulder and tell her how horrible it was. But I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain all of it. If I didn’t say anything out loud, maybe it would all be less real.

“Abby,” her voice was still a whisper. “What about… you know,
relations
. Did you do that?”

My stomach seized up, and I felt like I might vomit.

“What was it like?”

I shook my head.

She raised her eyebrows.

I fought with my stomach, trying to keep myself from throwing up. “I can’t,” I muttered. “I can’t talk about it.” I picked up my heels and started to run, even though it was far too warm outside for running. I ran and ran, and left Susannah behind.

She didn’t understand, and I didn’t want her to. I wished I could go back to the time before I knew.

* * *

Jesse

“What did they cast you out for?” Ephraim sprawled on a couch in the living room, a can of beer in one hand.

I sat in an easy chair next to him. I was drinking my third beer? Maybe my fourth. I wasn’t sure. I knew that at first, I’d simply thought that beer tasted bad, but I hadn’t wanted to let it show in front of the other guys, who weren’t reacting to the taste at all. I’d drunk it as fast as I could, just to have it over with. But then they’d given me another one, and somewhere in the middle of that, I’d started to feel a little bit… loose and happy. It was nice. I liked it. “There was a girl,” I told him.

“I knew it,” said Anthony from the other side of the couch. “That’s their thing, man. See, we’re competition.” He gestured at the three of us. “They want the young girls to themselves, so they cast out all younger guys.”

I surveyed the beer can. “Sure seems like that. Seems like God’s handing out some awfully convenient revelations these days.”

“So, who was it?” said Anthony.

“Abigail London.”

“Oh,” Anthony chuckled. “Nice.”

Ephraim laughed. “I keep forgetting how young you guys are. Last time I saw Abigail London, she was in pigtails.”

“Oh, she grew up,” said Anthony, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

“Don’t talk like that about her.” I glared at him.

“Right,” said Anthony. “You’re still in the phase where you’re kind of half in love with her. Trust me, man, forget about her. She’s in there, you’re out here. It’s over.”

He was right. I sighed.

“I don’t know,” said Ephraim. “They’ve really started upping their game with that stuff lately. When I got kicked out, it was because of drinking. But every guy I’ve seen for the past year or so, it’s been like Anthony said. They’re trying to keep all the young girls to themselves. Did they marry her off to somebody old?”

“Bob Carroll.”

They both furrowed their brows.

“He’s already got three wives,” said Anthony.

“And yet,” I said.

“Man, that place is just getting worse and worse,” said Anthony.

“It’s got something to do with Gideon Walker,” I said. “He got himself elected the leader of the elders.”

“Leader of the elders?” said Ephraim. “There’s no leader of the elders. That’s completely against everything that the Life believes. After the death of Robert Morris, the doctrine clearly states that there should never be one leader, because that leader is subject to retaliation. The whole idea of the elders is to spread out the leadership. That’s weird.” He gazed into his beer thoughtfully.

“I thought the existence of the elders was just ordained by God,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ephraim smirked. “That’s what they say about everything, right? Like it was God’s will that you be cast out?”

I nodded. He was right. “So, what are you saying? You don’t think it’s God’s will?”

“Do you?”

I hesitated. “If… if it isn’t, then they’re just making it up.”

“Yeah,” said Ephraim. “They are. The elders have a lot of power in the community. And so they make things up that help them stay in power.”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. I didn’t like the thought of that. I’d been raised to believe that these men were spoken to directly by God. They were holy and pure. If they weren’t… if they were lying to everyone…

“You know anything about Robert Morris?” said Ephraim.

“Well, obviously I do,” I said. “He founded the Life.”

“I mean, beyond what they tell you,” said Ephraim. “Because most of it’s bullshit. For instance, did you know that the only reason that Robert Morris was in California in the first place was because he was on the run from fraud charges.”

“What?” I said. We were taught that Robert Morris was the most godly man on earth next to Jesus Christ. He’d been given direct revelations from Heaven and told to gather together God’s new chosen people.