“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.
Ephraim nodded. “Yeah. He was raised in a religious home, but he ran away when he was sixteen. He started selling this sugar water door to door, which he claimed
was some kind of health cure-all or something, and people believed him because he was charismatic. He was doing all kinds of crazy shit, like writing bad checks and stealing credit card numbers. Anyway, all that was on the east coast, so he went out west. And he hooked up with the hippies on Haight-Ashbury and the Jesus People, and he started mixing together all the stuff he’d learned growing up with the stuff the hippies were saying, and suddenly he had a bunch of people following him around. There was no revelation from God. He was a con artist.”
I slugged down the rest of my beer, feeling off balance. What was Ephraim saying?
“You want another beer?” said Anthony.
“Uh, sure.”
Ephraim raised his eyebrows. “You don’t believe me.”
“Well, how do you know? You weren’t there.”
“It’s all on the Internet, man,” he said. “I can show you if you want. There’s a guy who got out of the community in Wyoming who has a big website. He went around and interviewed people who knew Robert Morris back in the sixties. Most of what they tell us is just lies.”
Anthony put another beer in my hand.
I took a big drink of the cold fizzy liquid. “But why would he do that? Why would he pretend to get revelations from God? Why would the elders do that?”
Ephraim laughed. “For power, man.” He shrugged. “For sex. What other religion tells you that God wants you to fuck three chicks as often as possible so they can have lots of babies?”
I grimaced. When he put it like that, it sounded sordid. And we’d always been taught that what we were doing was holy.
“You know,” said Ephraim. “He only made it so that everyone could have more wives because he got caught cheating.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“Robert Morris. He got that revelation conveniently after Becky walked in on him. And she was so pissed at him for turning it into a doctrine sent down from Heaven that she shot him.”
Well, we all knew that story. How Robert Morris had been killed by his wife, Becky. But we’d always been told that Becky did it because she was under the thrall of a demon. I guessed jealousy as a motive made better sense. After all, there was a lot of jealousy amongst wives in the community, and everyone knew it. It was considered a test sent from God for the faithful.
Ephraim leaned forward. “Look, I know it’s a lot to take in. When you find out your whole foundation of beliefs is based on nothing, it’s pretty hard to deal.”
“I don’t know.” I toyed with the tab on my beer can. “If they’re really all making it up, then…” I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it, because it destroyed everything. It meant that the community was corrupt and evil, and that there was nothing righteous about any of it.
“What you’ve got to guard against is starting to feel like nothing means anything,” said Ephraim. “You have to find a structure of beliefs to replace the ones you lost. Because without some kind of structure, you just fall apart.”
Anthony groaned. “Oh, man, not this again.”
“What?” I said.
“Ephraim goes to a church now,” said Anthony.
We never called the Life a church. It was a lifestyle, not a building, and churches belonged to the world. We were in the world, but not of it.
Anthony rolled his eyes. “He’s always pushing it on us.”
“I’m not pushing,” said Ephraim. “I would never push. After coming out of the Life, I can understand why you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with another religion. But I do want everyone to know that it’s there, and that you’re all welcome to come with me anytime you want. It’s not like going to meeting back home. You don’t have to get dressed up. There’s not all these people standing around judging you. It’s a good place, with good people, and they accept everyone. They act more like Jesus said to act than the people in the Life do. All the people in the Life do is condemn you. They only love you if you follow the rules. But that’s not what Jesus is about, you know?”
I took a slow drink of beer, trying to collect my thoughts. Was Ephraim right? Was Robert Morris nothing more than a horny, power-hungry man who’d manipulated people into living a strict lifestyle? We practically worshiped Robert Morris, and I could see how it might be appealing to be worshiped. I could see how someone could make up a whole system of beliefs if it meant that he got treated like the mouthpiece of God.
“You doing okay?” said Ephraim.
I raised my gaze to his. “If Robert Morris was just a man who manipulated people into treating him like God, how do you know Jesus wasn’t the same thing?”
Ephraim drew back. “You don’t mean that, do you?”
I set down my beer can. My heart was thudding inside my chest at the hugeness of what I was thinking. Everything that I’d ever believed was crumbling around me, and—the strange thing was—I was almost enjoying watching the walls fall. “It just doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason to believe any of it, really. If some of it’s wrong, maybe it’s all wrong.”
“Dude,” said Ephraim. “Jesus is God. Lots of people think that. Not just the Life, but millions of people all over the earth in different denominations of Christianity. It’s not the same thing at all.”
I picked my beer back up. “Yeah, well, maybe all those people are wrong.” I took another drink.
“You can’t live without something to believe in,” said Ephraim.
“Why not?” I said.
* * *
Abby
I got home from teaching to discover that all the other wives were going to some kind of women’s prayer meeting, and that they expected me to stay home, watch all of the children, and make them dinner.
I let the small children go out in the back yard to play, and asked the older girls—Holly, Marissa, and Cora, who ranged in age from ten to twelve—to help me in the kitchen. They weren’t happy about it.
“We never all help cook together,” Cora informed me. “Marissa helps her mom, and Holly and I help our mom, but we don’t do it at the same time.”
“Yeah,” said Holly. “Besides, there’s nobody watching the little kids. Don’t you think I should be out there?”
“Jasper’s with the children,” I said. Jasper was May’s son. He was thirteen, and the oldest of the children that still lived at home. “Look, I know this is a big transition for you guys, but it’s a big one for me too—”
“My mother says you shouldn’t be here,” said Cora. “She says that Father wasn’t supposed to have another wife. She was supposed to be the last one.”
“Yeah,” said Holly.
“Yeah,” said Marissa, folding her arms over her chest.
I sighed. “Well, there’s nothing any of us can do about it now, is there? This is what God wants, and we have to do what God wants.”
They all glared at me.
I rubbed my forehead. “Can you girls chop vegetables?”
They didn’t say anything.
Fine. I’d try a different tack. “Whether you like it or not, I am one of your mothers now. So, you’ll have to obey me, just as I have to obey your father, and he has to obey God. That’s the way things work. Acceptance is transcendence. Now wash your hands because you’re going to chop vegetables.”
There was a lot of eye-rolling and loud sighing, but the girls did what I said after that. They weren’t much help otherwise, however. I was trying to prepare a stir fry, which I figured would be easy enough. Of course, I didn’t know where anything was in the kitchen. I tried to ask the girls where the pots and pans were stored, or where the rice was kept, or where the utensils were for stirring. But they wouldn’t tell me. They simply smirked at me, keeping quiet.
When I began searching the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers in desperation, the little brats laughed at me.
I wanted to strangle all three of them. They were making everything so much harder.
Finally, however, I managed to find things that worked. I got some rice boiling, and I got the vegetab
les into a skillet.
Then there was a wailing noise, and the door to the outside banged open.
Little Finn, five years old, was being led inside by Rose, seven. He was sobbing.
I kept stirring the vegetables. The thing about stir fry is that if it isn’t stirred, it burns. But I looked over my shoulder. “What’s going on, guys?”
“Jasper hit Finn,” said Rose.
What? I sent Jasper out there to watch the children, not hurt them.
Jasper slunk into the kitchen with the other kids trailing after him. “When’s dinner going to be done?”
“Jasper,” I said. “Did you hit your brother?”
“No,” said Jasper. “Leon did it.”
“Why did you let him? You were supposed to be watching them.”
“Watching little kids is a girl’s job,” said Jasper.
Finn was screaming. “It hurts. It hurts.”
“You better do something,” said Holly, making a nasty face.
“Yeah, do something,” said Cora. “You’re the mother, aren’t you?”
I really wanted to slap those girls silly. I took a deep breath. “All right, Holly, if I’m going to take care of this, I need you to keep stirring these vegetables.” I held out the wooden spoon to her.
She rolled her eyes, but came over and snatched it from me.
I knelt down next to Finn, who was still crying.
“Hey,” I said in my softest, calmest voice, which was quite a feat at that point, because I was pretty frustrated. I felt like I was being pulled in a thousand directions at once, and I couldn’t focus on any of them. “Where does it hurt?”
“All over,” he sniffed.
“Where did you get hit?”
He shrugged.
I sighed. “Finn, what happened? Who hurt you?”
“It was Leon,” he said. “Leon did it.”
“It was not,” said Rose. “It was Jasper.” She glared down at Finn. “You’re supposed to say Jasper.”
Oh, for Heaven’s sake. There was no telling what was going on here. I rounded on Leon. “Okay, Leon, that’s it. You have to go in a time out.”
“What?” Leon folded his arms over his chest. “That’s not fair. I didn’t do anything.”
“It was Jasper,” said Rose.
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