Out of Heaven's Grasp (39 page)

It took a bit of time with the two of us out there, both working, before I started to loosen up.

Jesse and I got in the worst arguments about money.

He would tell me that it really wasn’t doing anyone any good to have all my money piled up in a bank somewhere. “Money’s not worth anything until you spend it, Abby.”

But I wanted to hoard it and keep it safe. I was terrified of losing it all.

Sometimes, when Jesse and I would argue, he’d get really red in the face, and he’d clench his fists.

When he got like that, he’d usually run out in the middle of the argument and go for a drive.

It was maddening, because I never felt like I got out half the things I wanted to say. But I knew that he didn’t trust himself when he was that angry, and that cooling off was the best thing for him. He’d confided in me that his deepest fear was turning into his father, and he said he’d rather die than hurt me.

I knew that Jesse could be scary when he was angry. I’d never forgotten the way he’d beaten Bob to a bloody pulp. Bob had deserved it, of course. He’d beaten me that way, and I didn’t feel sorry for him. But it did mean that I took Jesse seriously when he said he needed a break.

Honestly, it helped me too. By the time Jesse got back from his drive, I never felt quite as angry as I had before. Time helped to evaporate the force of the feelings.

And time stretched on, passing and moving us further and further from our lives in the community. I still thought of my family and my friends from time to time. Jesse would find me sobbing over the thought of my sisters married off to men like Bob.

I wrote letters to my mother, to Susannah, to my brother Thomas, to all of them.

No one ever answered them.

I don’t even know if anyone ever read them. But I hoped they did. I hoped they knew that I loved them, and that if they ever needed help and wanted to leave the community, that I would be there to help.

I spent a lot of time learning new songs on my guitar. The music in the outside world was so varied and bright and amazing. There was more of it than I ever could have imagined, and I wanted to absorb it all. I spent hours listening to songs, and then teaching myself to play them on the guitar, allowing my fingers to find the notes.

I’d always been able to do that. Once I heard something, it was just a matter of playing around a little bit, moving my fingers over the fret board until I could make the guitar mimic the sounds in my head.

But soon, I wasn’t just playing other people’s songs, I was allowing my fingers to crawl over the frets and skim over the strings to make my own songs. I wrote them with lyrics about the way I felt, giving all my emotion over to the lyrics and the music.

Jesse would sit across the room with his eyes closed. He loved the way I sang.

One night, he said he had a surprise for me, and he took me out to a bar in town. Though I was okay with drinking a little bit of alcohol, I still wasn’t crazy about bars, and I didn’t see how this was a surprise for me.

But there was a sign outside on a sandwich board.
Open Mic Tonight!

I didn’t know what that meant, but I soon learned that anyone was allowed to play music for the entire bar. All I had to do was sign up. And Jesse had brought my guitar.

I was nervous as all hell, but I was also full of this giddy feeling. I knew I had to do it. I knew I had to sing in front of people. I’d always wanted to try.

When I started, my fingers shook and my voice wavered, and I was afraid that everyone would think I was terrible. But as I began to play, the music relaxed me, and I fell into the sounds, almost forgetting that anyone was watching.

Until I was done, and the entire bar erupted into applause.

I raised my head, looking around at all the people clapping. Clapping for me.

It was better than I thought it would be.

I was addicted. I barely missed an open mic night after that.

We celebrated a few holidays throughout the year. It was great fun to get dressed up at Halloween, which we never celebrated in the community.

Thanksgiving was bittersweet, as it was one of the holidays the community observed. I missed the crush of so many family members all gathered around the table to eat.

But it was interesting to eat the traditional turkey instead of the wheat gluten roast my mothers always made.

And then it was Christmas. In the community, we never celebrated Christmas, although we all knew about it, because it was preached that it was the height of sinfulness. To the elders, Christmas was a pagan holiday appropriated for Christian use. Jesus wasn’t even born at that time of year. And they thought things like Santa Claus and Christmas trees were akin to worshiping idols. Of course, there was no gift giving.

So for Jesse’s and my first Christmas, it was a very, very big deal.

We went and got a live Christmas tree and all the ornaments for it, and made a whole day out of decorating it. I was convinced that our tree was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and I was moved to tears several times a day when I’d walk past it.

The tree was a symbol to me of all the things that we’d left behind and of how far we’d come. We’d taken control of our life, and we’d decided what we would believe and what we wouldn’t.

Having a Christmas tree… it was something that I’d secretly dreamed of as a little girl, even though I knew it was wrong to want such worldly, sinful things. Now I had it, and it filled me up with joy somewhere deep inside.

On Christmas morning, Jesse and I both woke up as early as any starry-eyed little kid. It was still dark outside as we crept into our living room and gave each other the gifts we’d gotten for each other.

Jesse gave me a tiny box, wrapped in silver paper, and when I opened it, there was a diamond ring inside.

My breath caught in my throat. “Is this…?” In the Life, there were no such things as engagement rings, because they were signs of vanity.

He gave me a half-smile. “Thing is, Abby, I just don’t think I could make it without you. I don’t know if I care about what anyone else thinks about us. I know that we’re forever, even without doing some ceremony. But I guess I just thought that it might be nice to make it official, anyway?”

I ran a careful finger over the gleaming band.

“So what do you think?” he said. “You want to get married?”

I threw my arms around him. “Yes, you idiot, yes.”

He slid the ring onto my finger, and we both looked at it. I gazed up into his eyes, the same eyes that had tempted me to break the rules in the community. It had been a tough road, but I wouldn’t change it. I was free now, and it was worth more to me than I could explain.

Our lips met softly and slowly.

In front of us, our beautiful Christmas tree glittered and glowed.

My happiness felt like it was bubbling up inside me, like it was going to spill out.

I was re
m
inded of a bible verse.
My cup runneth over.

And, right then, it really did.

AFTERWORD

Though I probably know enough about the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints that I could have set this book in that system of beliefs, I chose not to do so for various reasons. One reason is that while I know a lot about the cult’s beliefs and about the beliefs of Mormons, I’ve never lived as either, and I knew that I wouldn’t be giving a completely accurate representation.

Another reason is that I wanted to write a story that was a bit more universal. I didn’t want to attack the FLDS and claim that they were evil or that the polygamous lifestyle was evil. Instead, what I wanted to focus on was fanatical religious beliefs. Fanaticism is nearly always dangerous, even if it never becomes violent or physically abusive. The psychological damage it causes is enough for me to condemn it completely.

So, to that end, I set out to create a sort of piecemeal American cult, using aspects from several different sources. I created a cult leader named Robert Morris. He shares some attributes in common with Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. He’s a conman, he has a predilection for sleeping with women that aren’t his wife, and he is killed before he can
really
go nuts to the tune of Jim Jones. This halts the religion that he founded at a certain stage and ensures its ability to endure. Most cults eventually burn out when their leaders go off the deep end, but if a cult leader gets martyred, it improves their chances for eventually morphing into a normal religion.

Of course, Robert Morris is living way too late to be Joseph Smith. He lives in the 1960s and 1970s and is involved in the Jesus Movement. I modeled this on David Berg, founder of the Children of God or the Family International. Berg even left California specifically because he thought California was going to fall off into the ocean. I thought that was too good not to use. Unfortunately, David Berg was not martyred, which meant that he got to introduce the doctrine of Flirty Fishing (prostitutes who witness about Jesus and also make cash!) and then eventually went completely crazy by institutionalizing sexual abuse towards children. It’s really too bad no one killed that guy before he got going.

A few other things came from other sources. I made the Life vegan because I wanted to be all-access here. It’s not just religious people who become fanatical. There’s definitely the same dangers with any kind of radical belief, and I’ve known some really out-there vegans. (Full disclosure: I’m a vegan.) I cut the Life off from electricity to make them more like the Amish and also appropriated the Amish community in Sarasota for my purposes.

Also, I think the story of the FLDS is intriguing because it was caused by two different cult leaders. One being Joseph Smith, but the other is, of course, Warren Jeffs. Gideon Walker is my Warren Jeffs. A lot of the things that Gideon does are taken directly from things that Jeffs did. Jeffs is the one who really started going crazy with the child bride thing, and he purportedly would ask creepily detailed questions of anyone who had been caught in some kind of sexual misconduct.

The final pieces of the Life’s beliefs, however, come from my own personal experiences. Robert Morris grew up in a religious environment much like mine, and he incorporated his past into the beliefs of the cult he was creating. Calling services “meeting,” calling the building a “meeting hall,” having the congregation “break bread” instead of have communion— all of those things come from the sect that I was raised in until I was about thirteen.

I grew up in a branch of the Plymouth Brethren. (If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the Exclusive Brethren of the UK and Australia are another branch.) Wikipedia calls us the “Open Brethren,” but admits that they created the appellation. We never called ourselves anything but Christians, and we worshiped in a Gospel Hall.

Though there was
nothing
polygamous about the Gospel Hall, I always felt a strange sort of kinship when I would see pictures of those women on polygamous compounds in their prairie dresses with their hair up on top of their heads because…

We looked just like them.

Women in the Gospel Hall were not permitted to wear pants, and we weren’t allowed to cut our hair. When we went to meeting, we were required to cover our heads. So I remember being part of a sea of women with hats and long, long skirts. I remember my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother all wearing their hair piled up in buns and my older cousins with their hair in beautifully sleek French braids which they somehow
did themselves
(something I still can’t do).

Every time I would look at the polygamous women, it would remind me of my childhood.

I suppose that’s why I began devouring the memoirs written by women who had escaped the FLDS. There was much that they endured that I never had to worry about. There was no physical abuse in the Gospel Hall, no forced marriages, no child brides, and no plural marriage. But there were still things that I deeply identified with. Every time the woman in the memoir would go out and put on regular, secular clothes for the first time or cut her hair, I would cry, because I remembered the first time I cut my hair. Every time she would realize that all the people in the outside world were not all inherently evil, I would cry, because I remembered when I believed that the only good people on earth were inside the Gospel Hall.

I can’t fully understand the horrors that real people escaping from abusive cults must deal with. Luckily, I’ve never been raped or hit or hurt. But these abuses come from deep within the psychology of any set of fanatical beliefs, and I understand that psychology. There are two pieces of it. One—boundless entitlement. Two—abject insecurity.

You’re taught that you are better than everyone else in the world, and, for some people, this is an excuse to commit horrible acts and to justify them.

But you’re also taught that you’re only better than everyone else if you follow a set of stringent and strange practices. Trying to live up to this kind of perfection is impossible. So that means life within a fanatical system is wrought with constant failure. You berate yourself. Others berate you. You try and try and try, and you are never good enough.

Anyway, this book is for anyone out there who has ever managed to get away from any kind of fanatical belief system. There is some part of us deep down, always an high alert, trying to push us to be perfect, even if we know that the beliefs that warped us were all lies.