Out of Heaven's Grasp (5 page)

“No, it doesn’t.” She glanced at me. “We’ll go home, and we’ll do what we’re told. And we’ll accept whatever they tell us. Because that’s the right thing to do. We have doubts, Jesse, but that’s all. It’s because we’re weak, and we’re being tested. We have to bury our doubts in the deepest ocean and move forward and do what God asks of us.”

After everything we’d said, it was strange to hear the community’s words coming out of her mouth.

She walked faster.

And I could have reached out and touched her then. I could have stopped her.

But I didn’t. Because she was right. We had doubts, and we were sinning. And it was wrong. The reason that it felt so good was that bad things always felt good.

The truth was that Abigail London was being used by the devil to try to make me stumble. I was a man, and it was my job to be an example. I was supposed to learn to lead women, to keep them from sinning. That was what spiritual heads did. Just because my father wasn’t particularly good at it didn’t mean that it wasn’t the way things worked.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She paused. She was a few feet ahead of me. She turned her head to look at me. “We should stay away from each other.”

“Yes,” I said. “We should.”

She turned away, and then she took off sprinting across the parking lot towards her family’s RV.

I watched her go, my stomach in knots.

When I crawled beneath the blankets in my truck that night, I should have prayed and begged God to take this temptation from me, so that I could grow into a righteous man worthy of his glory.

But I didn’t. This was a night of sin, after all, and after all the wrong things I’d done, I didn’t figure one more would hurt things too much.

So, I closed my eyes and thought about her long hair, about her bare neck and her flushed cheeks. I hadn’t touched her, so I touched myself.

CHAPTER THREE

Jesse

After I got home, I did my best to put Abby out of my head. We’d both decided that it would be better if we didn’t see each other, and I knew that was the right thing. I tried to concentrate entirely on my responsibilities. I threw myself into my work.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I tried to concentrate on watering the crops or on planting seeds, but the task became repetitive too quickly, and my mind was free. All I could think about was Abby’s smile, or the way she blushed. Now that I’d spent so much time with her, it was worse than it had ever been before. I had too much memory of her in my head. I could remember watching her close her eyes and chew the forbidden food in the restaurant, a look of sheer bliss on her face. I could remember the hint of wistful yearning in her voice when she talked about going on the road with her guitar.

And too much of the time, I thought of what she’d said.
We won’t get married at all, but we’ll stay in the same hotel rooms, and we’ll be amazingly wicked.
The idea of sharing a hotel room with Abby, well, that was a pretty distracting thought. No one had ever exactly explained to me what went on between men and women after they were married, but the younger guys in the community talked about it constantly in private, when we knew no one would hear us. Between all of us, I was fairly sure that we had the gist.

Most of the other guys my age were incredibly excited at the prospect of getting married, and sex was basically what was motivating them.

Until the meeting with Abby, I was exactly where they were.

But now… and it was a sort of weird thing to realize… but when I thought about having to marry someone besides Abby, about doing that with another woman, it seemed… like I’d be getting cheated in some way.

But I still tried to keep from thinking about her.

On Sunday, I watched her at the worship meeting, up in the front with the rest of the worship team, who played the music and led the gathering in singing. Our Sunday worship meetings consisted of an hour of singing and worship, sometimes more. The singing generally began with songs that everyone knew, sometimes some Keith Green or Randy Stonehill, songs that came from the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was where our beliefs had started. Our founder Robert Morris had been one of the Jesus People in California at that time. He’d moved us out here and established other communities throughout the U.S. when he had a revelation that California was going to fall off into the ocean.

The singing began in a somewhat orderly fashion, one song followed by another one. But as all of the congregation got more and more into the worship, some raising their hands in the air, everything became more loose. We considered this being filled by the spirit, who would inspire us to sing our own lyrics or even to sing in another language—speaking in tongues. Though it might seem as if this would become a jumbled mess rather quickly, the truth was that it was usually very beautiful and organic. When the spirit was among the people, they all sang together as if they were of one mind.

That Sunday, I tried to lose myself in the worship, but instead, I found myself watching Abby strum the guitar.

All I could think about was how beautiful she was.

I was still thinking about her when we got home for Sunday dinner. This was generally our biggest meal of the week, and my mothers and sisters worked hard preparing things the night before and early in the morning.

I went out on the back porch with my younger brothers and sisters, who were all running around and playing. For them, the meetings were a kind of prison sentence, where they were required to sit still and pay attention. They were allowed to participate in the singing, but they had to stay put, or it looked bad for the entire family.

From inside, in the kitchen, I heard my father’s raised voice. He sounded angry.

I turned back to the house, straining to hear.

“What were you doing while Leah was running around crazy like that?” he shouted. “Candace, you know it’s your responsibility to discipline those children.”

Great. This was the perfect way to begin Sunday dinner. I eased open the door and stepped back into the house.

My mother, Candace, was cringing away from my father by the sink. My father stood over her, his hands clenched in fists at his sides.

Mother Miriam stood off to one side, staring down at the floor. My other sisters also had their heads bowed.

I cleared my throat.

My father turned to look at me, drawing his eyebrows together. “What are you looking at?”

I folded my arms over my chest.

My father went back to my mother. “No daughter of mine is going to act like that in the meeting.”

“I’m sorry,” my mother whispered. “I must have been too caught up in the worship to notice.”

And I must have been too caught up in looking at Abby to notice. Usually, I tried to help my mother keep an eye on some of the younger children. It was hard for them to stay still for so long, but they looked up to me, and I could often get them in line with just a look or a gentle nudge.

“You show your truest worship by raising obedient children,” said my father. “How am I ever to get another wife if it looks as though I can’t control the ones I have?”

My mother chewed on her lip. “It won’t happen again, Nick, I prom—”

My father interrupted her with a loud slap across her face.

I was across the kitchen in two seconds, standing right next to my mother. I glared at my father.

He looked me over.

I didn’t say anything. I only stared him down. He knew better than this. Though it was permissible for men to discipline their wives, it was always to be done in private, never in front of other wives and children, and it was never permitted for men to hit their wives in the face.

All corporal correction of both wives and children was to be done with a hand only—never an implement like a belt or a paddle—and to be administered through clothes to the buttocks. Those were the rules.

My father didn’t follow them, however. This wasn’t the first time he’d beaten my mother or my brothers or my sisters. Or me, for that matter.

But lately, I’d gotten too big for him to try much with me, and he’d laid off. Ever since the first time I’d seen a hint of fear cross his features when I stood up to him, I’d been using my presence to stop him from doing it anymore.

My father clenched and unclenched his fists, looking from me to my mother. Then he sneered. “Well, see that it doesn’t happen again, Candace.” And then he swept out of the kitchen.

My mother bit down hard on her lip. She was shaking, and a tear slid down her cheek. It was red from the slap.

I touched her shoulder. “Mother—”

She shoved me off. “It’s none of your concern, Jesse. He is
my
husband, and he is
your
father. He’s the head of this family, and you shouldn’t disrespect him like that.”

“No,” I said. “He shouldn’t do things like that to you. He knows that—”

“You need to respect him. He is the head of the family.” Her voice shook. “Now, get out of here and let us cook.”

* * *

I saw Abby at the gospel meeting that night. On Sunday evenings, the elders took turns giving sermons to the congregation. That night, Jeremiah Allen was droning on about the blood of the lamb or something. He’d found every verse in the bible that mention the blood of the lamb, and he was talking about why it was so important that there be blood and why it was so important that it come from a lamb. He said that the blood made the point that our sins were serious. They led to death. And that only something as innocent as a lamb could wash these sins away. And, of course, all of this just pointed to Jesus, who was the most innocent being ever, who had to die to forgive our sins.

None of what he was saying was new to me, so I mostly tuned him out and stared at the back of Abby’s head. She had her hair in two French braid pigtails and I stared at how perfect the braids were. Each piece of hair was the same thickness and the others. It was like a work of art, her hair. It was so glossy and pretty and perfect.

To be on the safe side, I’d forced my little sister Leah to sit with me that night. After dinner, I managed to get out of her what she’d done during morning meeting. Apparently, she’d been so inspired by the music that she’d wanted to spin around. When she did that, her little dress had flared up, and my father thought that was immodest. Not to mention the fact that she shouldn’t be moving at all.

I was annoyed by his anger. Leah was four years old. It was hardly the time to be worrying about her modesty. She was a little girl. Anyway, she sat next to me the whole gospel meeting. I gave her a piece of paper and a pencil, and she drew pictures all over the paper for the entire sermon.

I didn’t think she was paying attention to me at all.

But after the meeting was over, when we were all getting up to leave, she tugged on my clothes. “Hey, Jesse?”

“What?” I said.

“How come you keep staring at Abigail London?”

Man. If Leah had noticed, did that mean everyone had?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said and nudged her to start heading for the door.

I’d brought my truck to the meeting hall, and I usually gave some of my brothers and sisters a ride back home afterward. But this time, I stayed back and didn’t offer to shuttle anyone. Both my mother and Mother Miriam had driven vehicles, so there was enough room for everybody without me.

Abby was in the parking area with her friend Susannah Davis. I wanted to wait for her to be alone, but I didn’t know if she would be.

I knew that we’d decided to stay away from each other, but I’d been thinking about her every second of every day for too long.

So, after my family pulled out of the parking lot, I wandered over to the two of them.

When Abby saw me, she went pale.

Susannah only smiled. “Jesse Wallace. Hi there.”

“Hi,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. “It was a stirring sermon tonight, wasn’t it?”

Susannah smirked. “Since when do you even pay attention the sermons?”

“I pay attention,” I said.

Abby wouldn’t look at me.

I plowed on. I was standing next to her, wasn’t I? She could hear me. That was all I needed. “Yeah, after a sermon like that, sometimes I like to take a long walk, just to think it over. Just me out under the stars. Might do that tonight, in fact. Might be out walking in the fields, maybe even behind the London farm, around ten o’clock.”

Abby raised her gaze sharply. She realized what I was doing. I was inviting her to meet me—alone—behind her house tonight.

It was a dangerous play. But I had to try. I had to see her.

“Well, if you were out there, and my father saw you, he probably wouldn’t be happy,” said Abby.

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “Don’t you like taking walks, Abby?”

She swallowed. “I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Well,” I said. “I’ll be there whether you like walking or not.” I looked into her eyes, hoping for some kind of confirmation that she’d meet me.

She only looked away.

* * *