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Authors: V.J. Chambers

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BOOK: Out of Heaven's Grasp
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I grimaced. “I don’t think that matters either. I don’t like… having relations at all. I think it’s very… unclean and disgusting and… I don’t want to do it anymore, and I’m not going to. I won’t let you do it ever again.”

He got up off the bed and kissed me on the forehead. “All right, Abigail. We’ll take all of it more slowly, then.”

Wasn’t he listening? I said never. I
meant
never.

“I have something for you,” he said. “A present.”

A present?

“Come with me,” he said, taking me by the hand.

I recoiled from his touch.

He gripped my hand firmly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I let him lead me out of the house. There, in the driveway, was a jeep.

“This is for you,” he said. “You’re my wife now, and you’ll need your own transportation.”

My own car, huh? Well, that wasn’t a completely bad thing, I supposed.

“Do you like it?” he asked, smiling down at me.

I chewed on my lip. “Yes, thank you,” I said quietly.

He kissed me.

I shut my eyes and let him, but I didn’t respond to his urgent, sloppy tongue.

He pulled away, clearly annoyed. “This isn’t going to work if you won’t even try, Abigail.”

I didn’t say anything.

He trailed a hand over my back, and shivers went through my body. That was worse than anything. I didn’t want anything that this man did to me to feel… good.

I shoved him away, stumbling backwards. “Don’t touch me.”

“Abigail,” he whispered. “You’ve got the wrong idea about all of this. What happens between us is ordained by God, and it can be quite beautiful. I know that I was wrong before, but I’m trying to make it right.”

I shook my head furiously. “No, no, no.” I fled back into the house, threw myself into my bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

Bob knocked on the door. “Abigail, let me in.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Abigail, I am your husband, and you must let me into your room.”

I crumpled down to the floor, wrapping my arms around my knees.
Go away
, I begged silently.
Just go away.

He banged on the door again. “Open this door.”

I hugged my knees to my chest and started to rock.

He sighed heavily. “All right, all right. Perhaps I was still trying to go too fast. We’ll leave it for tonight, but next time, I will insist that you let me in, do you understand?”

No way. I’d told him never again, and I’d been serious. I would never have relations with that man. I’d fight as hard as I could.

* * *

Without musical instruments, the Sunday worship meeting was a ghost of its former self. Now, instead of an hour of unbridled praise and singing, all of the community taken away by the holy spirit, we sang four or five songs a cappella. The breaking of bread was still practiced, but I missed my place in the worship team, leading the congregation in the singing and worship. I missed playing my guitar for others. It had been one of the few things that truly brought me joy, and now it had been taken away from me. Truly, God must hate me, because he was making my life a living Hell.

To make up for the time that would have been used on worship, Gideon was now using the worship meeting as a chance for him to preach a sermon to the congregation.

That morning, he spoke of the burden that had been laid on his shoulders. “The Lord has been speaking directly to me,” he said. “And I am charged with giving his messages to his people. Some of the things he tells me pain me deeply, but I must do as I am told. If we do not submit to the will of God, then we are a sinful people.”

I could see that other people who’d been angry with Gideon’s taking away the instruments were quite moved by these pronouncements, but I wasn’t sure.

I was beginning to believe that we’d all had the complete wrong idea about God. We’d thought that he was a benevolent, loving deity, but in truth, he was harsh and cruel. He used us like playthings, forcing us to live painful, sad lives. It wasn’t a new thing for him. His treatment of his original chosen people, the Israelites, was just as hard and exacting.

God went through a lot of trouble to get them free of Egypt, sending all kinds of plagues and signs and wonders, even parting the Red Sea. But after they got out, God turned on them immediately. The minute they started complaining or expressing any kind of doubt, his anger began to simmer. And when they worshiped idols and turned against him, he washed his hands of them entirely. He forced them to wander in the wilderness for forty years, until every single member of that generation had died off. Only once they were all gone did he let the new generation go to the promised land.

God got pretty angry whenever people sinned, and he wasn’t really one to let it go.

Jesus was supposed to be better. He was supposed to have introduced a new law, and his death had washed away our sins. We were all supposed to be forgiven now.

But that didn’t mean our lives got easier.

Even the early Christians after Jesus got a pretty rough deal. The apostle Paul was imprisoned over and over again, before finally being beheaded. John the Baptist had his head cut off too, at the request of a dancing girl.

It really didn’t matter. God wanted us to suffer. And I was beginning to think that maybe he enjoyed it. Maybe he was sitting up in Heaven laughing at us, and busy creating even more humans to torment.

It was possible that he made up for all of it by allowing the faithful to go to paradise after we died.

But, for me, the promise of Heaven seemed very far away.

Gideon went on. “If there are those amongst you who are speaking out against the decrees of the Lord, know that they are not right with him. Know that those who do not experience perfect peace and acceptance of the Lord commands are actually under the thrall of demons. In fact, if you hear your neighbors, your children, your wives, or even your husband, complaining about the path that we in this community are on, then you must tell me of their transgression. It is important that we purify the people. Those who disagree must be rid of the demons that plague them.”

See? That was just like God, wasn’t it? He made it hard, and then he sicked demons on you if didn’t like it.

Maybe I was under the thrall of demons. Maybe I had been since the minute that Jesse walked into my life.

At this point, though, I wasn’t sure if the demons were actually worse than God. At least Satan let people have a little bit of fun. He let them eat meat and have electricity and go to restaurants. He let them dance and kiss and marry the people they loved.

Maybe it meant eternal torment, but at least their lives on earth weren’t absolute misery.

Then Gideon ended by announcing more joyous announcements. At least twenty more marriages were to take place. Other older men in the community were getting fourth wives, and some of the younger men were getting first wives. A few men were getting their long-awaited third wives.

But the girls he was assigning to these men weren’t old enough to get married.

It was generally accepted that no one was ready for marriage until he or she was “of age,” which we considered happening at eighteen.

The girls that Gideon was marrying off were younger. Most were sixteen, but one or two were as young as fifteen.

But I knew that no one would dare say anything. After all, expressing doubt about the Lord’s decree was a sure sign that you were in the thrall of demons.

And then I had an absolutely awful thought.

What if it wasn’t God deciding this at all? What if…

What if it was only Gideon? After all, Gideon had just given himself two more wives, one seventeen and one sixteen. I remembered what my mother had said when she’d found out that Bob was going to be marrying me.
It’s not God behind it. It’s Bob Carroll’s lusts.

I sucked in breath sharply, putting my fingers to my lips. I’d had lots of horrible thoughts recently, thoughts about how horrible and terrible God was. They were wrong, evil thoughts, but this one seemed worse somehow.

If this were true, if it was only Gideon, not God, then…

No. I couldn’t think it.

If I thought it, I had a sense that everything I’d ever believed would start crumbling, and that frightened me more than a thought of an angry, cruel God.
Much
more.

* * *

I realized that the jeep was the perfect gift, because it gave me my freedom. I could take off in the jeep if I wanted to escape. And when the next night that I was scheduled to be with Bob rolled around, that was all I wanted.

So, that evening, right after dinner, I ran out and got in my jeep. I drove off.

I was aimless, driving through the community for some time, no idea where I was going.

Then I realized that tonight was Thursday, and that was the night that all the men in the community went to prayer meeting. The women weren’t allowed in. It was going on right now, and it meant that Gideon wasn’t home.

I went to his house to find Susannah.

“Come for a drive with me,” I said. “I’ll have you back before the end of the prayer meeting. Gideon will never know.”

She was worried, and I could tell, but there was a gleam in her eye. She wanted to come. But she shook her head. “Not like this. If Martha sees, she’ll tell Gideon. He rewards the wives when we tattle on each other. Go down to the end of the drive and wait. I’ll pretend to go to bed, sneak out, and meet you.”

I did as she suggested, and within ten minutes, we were driving around in the jeep.

I drove away from the community and the community roads and took the jeep out into the desert, away from everyone. Once we were far enough away, I turned on the radio, and I tuned it to some station of worldly rock music.

Susannah giggled nervously. “What’s gotten into you, Abby?”

I gripped the steering wheel. “I don’t know, but I think I like it.”

She shook her head. “You’re going to get in so much trouble.”

“Oh, what could possibly be worse than the way things are now?” I said.

“Bob gave you a car,” she said. “That’s good, not bad. Gideon would never give me a car.”

“Bob only gave me a car to apologize for hitting me and forcing me to have relations with him while I was having a miscarriage.”

“You had a miscarriage?” Her voice was sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want his baby anyway.” It was strange that’s what she’d picked to be sympathetic about. Maybe getting hit and forced was normal for women in the community. I looked sidelong at Susannah. “Gideon doesn’t have any children at all, does he?”

She chewed on her lip. “I think there’s something wrong with him. But he’s convinced it’s Martha’s fault. But he’s mad, because I still haven’t gotten pregnant. He said that if he couldn’t have children, God would have told him.”

I snorted. “I’m not sure God really does talk to him.”

“Don’t say things like that, Abby.” There was fear in her voice.

“Seriously, Susannah. We’ve have musical instruments for years. We’ve never had more than three wives for years. And marrying girls under eighteen? It’s not as if these revelations are coming to all of the elders. They’re just coming to Gideon.”

“I’m worried about my sister,” said Susannah. “She’s been assigned to marry Nicholas Wallace.”

Jesse’s father. Everyone knew he hit his wives.

I reached over to grasp Susannah’s hand. “Oh, no. I guess I didn’t hear that in all the announcements on Sunday.”

“He didn’t announce it Sunday. He just got the revelation last night.”

I pulled the jeep to a stop but left the radio on. I turned to Susannah. “Your sister’s only fifteen.”

“I know.” Susannah looked like she might cry.

I had younger sisters too. Were they all going to be married off as well? I didn’t want that for them. They were too young for all of it. I was older, and it had all been too hard for me. I shook my head. “There’s got to be something we can do about this.”

“There isn’t,” she said. “If Gideon says something, it gets done. Abby, you don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s like.”

“What is he like?”

She twisted her hands together in her lap. “He makes you do things. You don’t want to do them, but he makes it so you can’t say no. He twists everything around and makes you feel like it’s your idea. He…”

“What does he make you do?”

She looked out of the window of the jeep. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does matter,” I said. “Bob was making me do things that I didn’t like. He made me…” I was going to tell Susannah about being forced to put Bob’s penis in my mouth, but now that I was getting ready to say it, I couldn’t seem to find the words.

“We don’t have to tell each other,” said Susannah. “We shouldn’t anyway. What’s between a husband and his wife is sacred. It’s between them and God.”

“But if Gideon is making you do things you don’t like, you can stand up to him,” I said. “I stood up to Bob, and it made me feel so much better.”

BOOK: Out of Heaven's Grasp
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