Out of Heaven's Grasp (24 page)

“That won’t be necessary,” said Bob, through gritted teeth.

“I would hope not,” said Gideon.

* * *

Bob was furious on the drive home, too furious to speak. I sat next to him with my hands folded in my lap. With every moment that Bob didn’t speak, I began to grow more and more apprehensive. I’d never seen Bob this angry before. Even the time that he’d spanked me, he hadn’t been quite this worked up.

When we got back to the house, Bob dragged me back to my bedroom and threw me into the wall.

It hurt, and I was still suffering from the end of the miscarriage, which meant that I was still bleeding. The cramps were only about as bad as regular period cramps now, but I was still in bad shape.

He advanced on me. “You will obey me, Abigail.”

I cringed. “Bob, I do obey you.”

He slapped my cheek.

It stung, and I put my hand to my skin in shock.

“You will obey me in everything,” he said. “And you will do it with a willing heart. I won’t let a little bitch like you ruin my entire life.”

I cowered against the wall.

Bob took me by the shoulders. He shook me—hard. My teeth slammed painfully into each other. He slammed me back into the wall.

I winced.

“You will submit to me.”

“I do submit,” I said. I was starting to cry again.

“Then you’ll give yourself to me right now,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant.

“Take off your dress.”

“Bob,” I said. “I’m having a miscarriage. I’m bleeding. I—”

“Take off your dress,” he snarled.

When I didn’t, he yanked me away from the wall and pushed me face down into the bed. He pulled my dress up to my waist, baring my legs.

“Don’t,” I said. “Please, don’t. Not right now.”

“You see?” he said. “You’re not submitting.”

I was sobbing. I felt so humiliated. “Please.”

He ripped my underwear off and forced my legs apart.

And something hard and angry went through me. My tears dried up, and suddenly, I didn’t much care about being submissive or obedient or getting right with God. God had forsaken me, near as I could tell. If this was the life he wanted for me, there wasn’t much I could do about it, but I was through trying to like it or submit to it. I clenched my jaw. “Don’t,” I said again, only this time, I was angry.

I could hear him unzipping his pants.

“Bob, if you do this now, I will never let you do this to me ever again,” I snapped.

He only laughed. “You’ll do what I want you to do.”

And he was inside me.

It hurt. Everything in that part of my body was tender and swollen.

He wasn’t gentle. He was slamming in and out of me, and he didn’t seem to care that I was bleeding.

I cried out in pain.

He cracked me on the back of the head. “Shut up.”

I grabbed handfuls of the quilt on the bed and squeezed. I screamed silently into the covers.

Never again
, I promised myself.
Never again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Abby

Fern had kept me off the schedule for two weeks, true to her word, so I had time to figure out what I was going to do. I was serious when I said that I wasn’t going to let Bob ever have relations with me again. Maybe it meant that I was going to Hell, but I didn’t think Hell could be much worse than letting Bob do that to me every fourth night for the rest of my life.

I didn’t come up with a lot of usable ideas. Bob was stronger than me, and I wasn’t sure if I could fight him off if it came to a physical fight. But I hadn’t really attempted to struggle, not before. All of the other times, I really had submitted to him.

I resolved that I’d show him what it was really like to have a wife that was disobedient.

The thought gave me a grim satisfaction that couldn’t have been godly, but I didn’t care. God didn’t love me. He’d proven it over and over again. I was on my own, and this was one thing that I could do for myself.

However, my relationships with the other wives in the house actually started to improve. Sally stopped being so horrible to me. She was very helpful as I recovered from my miscarriage, offering to take over chores for me so that I could rest. I was grateful to her, and her children started to warm up to me as well.

Fern and May were sympathetic and sweet.

I didn’t think it would last long, of course. Once I started actively resisting Bob, I knew that they’d all decide I was sinful and unworthy. But for the weeks I had, I cherished the fact that I actually felt accepted in the family.

One afternoon, Sally and I were working on making bread together.

We were actually giggling, talking about the way that Bob didn’t like crusts on his sandwiches, as if he were still a little boy or something.

And then someone knocked on the door.

“Holly,” called Sally. “Can you answer that, please?”

Now that all the children were home from school, they were all there all the time. I’d tried to spend some time with them, helping them with studies, but it was chaotic and difficult to get them to pay attention in a different environment than school. Furthermore, the older children said that they didn’t need me to teach them anything. They were convinced that, since I’d taught the smaller children, I was only qualified to teach little ones.

The wives and I hadn’t discussed Gideon’s decision, though I could see that they weren’t particularly pleased with it. I knew that the few hours that the children were away was a time when they could focus on other work instead of caring for the children. Having them home simply made their lives harder.

Now, Holly led a group of teenage boys into the kitchen where Sally and I were.

Sally and I were both covered in flour. We looked at them expectantly.

“Gideon’s sent us to gather up all the musical instruments,” said one of the boys. “You need to bring us any guitars or flutes you have. If you have a piano, we’ll move that too.”

I wiped my hands on my apron. “What does Gideon want with the musical instruments?”

“He had a revelation from God saying that musical instruments are inciting the people to sin. He says that we should be worshiping in solemnity.”

It was funny hearing the word solemnity come out of a teenager’s mouth. The boy was obviously just parroting what Gideon had said. And I didn’t like it. How could Gideon do this? Musical instruments were an integral part of the community. We always used them in our Sunday worship meetings, and they were a source of entertainment for families on some evenings. When the community had occasional bonfires, we all played and sang around the fire. Without the instruments…

“Gideon says that any women who have a problem need to talk to their husbands,” said one of the boys.

“And any of the husbands need to go to him,” said another.

Sally looked utterly shocked. “You boys are playing a joke, aren’t you? Well, it’s not funny. I know all of your mothers, and when I tell them—”

“It’s not a joke,” said one of the other boys, and he sneered at Sally.

“We’re supposed to take them by force if necessary,” said another boy.

Sally didn’t take well to being talked down to. “Well, you wait right here and don’t do a thing. I’m going out to talk to my husband.”

I shook my head at her. “If Gideon’s behind this, Bob won’t be able to do anything.”

“But he’s an elder,” she exclaimed.

“If you don’t tell us where they are, we’re going to start searching the house,” said one of the boys.

She gasped. “I cannot believe you are being so disrespectful, young man. Is this how you talk to the wives of an elder?”

“Gideon says we can talk to wives however we want,” said the boy who’d sneered. He turned to the others. “Come on guys, let’s go find the instruments.”

Sally was incensed. She washed her hands and went out into the fields to find Bob.

While she was gone, the boys went through all the rooms of our house, yanking out any musical instruments they could find. They took my guitar, and it nearly broke my heart, but I didn’t try to stop them. I had figured out that it wasn’t a good idea to stand up to Gideon.

When Sally came back with Bob, they were yelling at each other. He was telling her that if Gideon had ordered it, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Sally wasn’t used to being yelled at by Bob, and she said that she couldn’t see how this could be the work of God.

“Don’t you question it, Sally,” Bob told her. “Acceptance is transcendence.”

By this time, the other wives had heard the commotion. We all gathered together in the kitchen.

Fern looked very concerned. “Bob,” she said. “Robert Morris himself played the guitar.” She and Bob were both old enough to remember him.

“God must be giving us a new set of more stringent rules,” said Bob. “We must have proven ourselves holy enough to handle the task.”

Fern nodded slowly.

But I could see that everyone was worried.

Things were changing in the community. Gideon had a lot of power. And it didn’t seem as if anyone could stop him.

* * *

The first night that Bob was supposed to come back to spend the night with me, I locked the door to my room.

He got angry and banged on the door, telling me that I had to let him in.

I talked to him through the door and said, “I told you that if you did what you did to me, I would never let you do it again.”

That really pissed him off.

He picked the lock and got inside, but I locked myself in the bathroom.

He picked that lock too, but when he came for me, I started clawing at his face and kicking him.

Bob was in good shape for his age, but he wasn’t as young as I was, he got pretty tired of chasing me around. Furthermore, I scratched him up pretty bad.

He was livid, but he decided to leave the room and not bother with me that night.

In punishment, he barricaded the door to my bedroom and refused to let me out to eat for two days.

On the third day, Fern came in with a plate.

“Don’t you ever tell Bob that I brought you something to eat,” she said to me, handing me the food. “But I need to know from you what happened.”

“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about what happened in the bedroom with our husbands with other wives,” I said, accepting the plate. I was starving, and I began to dig in right away. “Thank you for the food, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Considering Bob and I don’t really engage in relations anymore these days, I don’t suppose it matters too much. Besides, I can tell he’s not telling me the whole story.”

I was embarrassed, but I told her anyway. Maybe my hunger made it easier. But I explained that Bob had hit me and hurt me and then forced himself on me on the day after my miscarriage.

While I spoke, all the blood drained from her face.

When I was done explaining, she got up from the bed and began to pace, her hands clenched in fists. “I’m going to have a very long talk with Bob,” she said, seething.

Later that evening, Bob came to my room and took away the barricade.

He hung his head and asked if he could sit down and talk to me.

“We can talk,” I said. “But nothing more.”

He nodded. He sat down on the bed and patted the place next to him.

I shook my head.

“Okay, you can stand,” he said. He sighed. “Listen, Abigail, I need to apologize. I haven’t been the best husband to you that I could have been.”

I folded my arms across my chest.

“The truth is,” he said, “I suppose I haven’t spent much time thinking about how you were feeling. I had a long talk with Fern, and she reminded me that girls your age are very innocent, and that you know very little about what it’s expected of you in marriage. She feels this entire experience has probably been overwhelming for you, and I realized that I should have been more… patient with you in the beginning. Perhaps I rushed things between us.”

Did he think saying these things was going to change something?

He reached for me. “I want us to start over, Abigail.”

I backed away from him. “I don’t think it matters, Bob. I don’t love you.” It was such a relief to say it out loud.

“Well, maybe I’ve made it a little hard for you to feel…” He sighed again. “Look, Abigail, I realize that you are very young, and that I am not. I know that you were involved with that Wallace boy, and that I’ll never compare to him in your mind.”

He’d brought up Jesse? But we were supposed to pretend Jesse had never been born. I bit my lip. “It doesn’t have anything to do with that.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps not. I suppose that I’ve made the mistake of forgetting that your youth does not make you impervious to feelings. I’ve tried to make you bear more than I should have.” His voice lowered. “I can be gentler and more careful with you. I can promise not to push you so much when we are having relations.”