Then—as Leigh told it—the New Nazarenes all fell into a hush. A few of the women dropped to their knees in postures of prayer. At first, Paul just stood there, his face buried in the soft fabric of the man’s shirt. He tried to pull away, but the man held him steady and whispered something in his ear. Paul started to struggle, but he couldn’t break free of the man’s grasp. His arms and knees went limp; he started to collapse, but the man held him up. Paul’s shoulders started to shake. He cried out in wild, animal sounds. Still holding him, the man sank to the ground and held Paul there as he wept. He whispered something else to him, and within seconds, they were both laughing. Moments later, the whole crowd was weeping and laughing along with them.
This, Leigh said, was Stephen Prophet.
“Later, I asked Paul what Stephen had said to him,” Leigh said. “It was a passage of scripture, from Psalm 55: ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and the storm.’ Stephen told him, ‘Your mother has found peace and rest. This is your place of shelter. Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you.’ That was all it took. Paul was a disciple after then.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“It seemed like a miracle at the time,” Leigh said. “For years, I’ve been asking myself how Stephen could have known those things.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” I said. “Maybe you’re misremembering.”
She reached for her purse. I thought she might take another pill from the bottle I assumed contained some sort of antianxiety medication for frail little southern girls, to help them survive the ordeal of getting married. Instead she removed a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
“I thought you quit smoking,” I said.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Not at all,” I said. In some peculiar way, seeing her smoke again made her more recognizable to me.
She lit up and cracked the window.
“So,” Leigh said, “we became Jesus freaks.”
I couldn’t quite fathom Paul according to the image Leigh described. Without reservation, he threw himself into life at New Nazareth, joining in on building projects and farm work and singing with the house band, which would perform Christianized country rock at evening services in the meeting hall. Leigh joined in with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, taking a place among the women, who cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children.
“I didn’t know what to think about it all,” Leigh said. “At first I was just happy to see Paul so committed to something. Everyone was so nice to us. I’d never been around people like that before. They were all so . . . joyful. So different from anything I’d ever experienced before. All my friends at home and at school were so cynical about everything. And my father—well, you know my father.”
I nodded.
“It seemed like a lovely little utopia,” Leigh said.
Along with the meeting hall, there were bunkhouses and a handful of adobes already built for family homes, with others in the works. A mile or so up into the hills, a natural spring fed a blue alpine lake. The New Nazarenes had built an aqueduct from the spring, so there was fresh water for bathing and cleaning, along with a well pump drawn from an underground river.
In New Nazareth, there were just enough rules to make the place feel like a legitimate church community, and just enough freedom to keep everyone happy and confident that they were part of something more beautiful and redeeming than the corrupted world of their parents. Aside from communion wine, booze was frowned on, but pot and psychedelics were, according to Stephen, “A-OK with JC.” Free love was practiced, well, freely. It was like a summer camp with drugs and coed bunks.
All the anger and bitterness went out of Paul. He was unburdened, ecstatic with the rapture of redemption. Before long, Paul was leading prayers and giving testimonials at evening worship.
Gradually, Leigh felt her initial happiness for Paul being overtaken by quiet resentment. Back home in Spencerville, she was the exceptional one with all the talent and expectations. Paul was the slacker who wasn’t supposed to be good enough for her. In New Nazareth, she was just Paul’s girlfriend.
Furthermore, while Leigh had yet to join in on the whole “free love” thing, Paul had become—in Leigh’s words—“pretty popular” with the girls.
“Were you OK with that?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she said. “But who was I to stop him? For everyone else, that part of life was as normal as evening worship. There was no guilt about it, and no sneaking around. I didn’t want to be a square.”
One night after worship, Stephen Prophet took Leigh for a long walk in the orchard. Desperate as she was to be special, she gushed to him about all the traumas of her own life: her mother’s ordeal with cancer, her father’s relentless pressures, the guilt she felt about running away and leaving him alone. When she was finished, Stephen smiled and asked her if she wanted to be baptized. She said yes. After he held her hands and prayed, he laid her down in the grass and took off her clothes.
“I cried the whole time,” Leigh said.
“Because of Paul?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “But I was mostly crying because I wanted my own conversion experience. I had no idea then what that was supposed to feel like. I just knew I wasn’t having one.”
The next day, Stephen baptized Paul and Leigh together in the spring in the hills above the compound. A few days later—a week, maybe—with Stephen officiating, they were married.
I was dumbstruck.
“You and Paul got married?” I said.
“Not really. I mean, yes and no,” Leigh said. She sighed. “It wasn’t legal, you know? We didn’t have a license. But yeah, I mean, yeah, we were married.”
I was speechless. Leigh drove on, sucking long drags from her cigarette, exhaling in thick plumes that seemed to hang in the air before being swept out of the crack in the driver’s side window.
“It was all just play, Rocky,” she said. “Like third graders staging a pretend wedding on the playground at recess. Everything about New Nazareth seemed like a whole bunch of kids caught up in a big game. The whole time, I felt like sooner or later someone was going to blow a whistle and we’d all go back to our real lives. Do you know what I mean?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
All I could think of was Leigh and Paul placing cheap silver rings on each other’s fingers and saying “I do” in front of the same leering hippie who, a few days before, had been off in the woods thrusting between Leigh’s thighs.
“The married couples seemed a little more exclusive,” she said, “so I thought maybe the wedding would bring Paul back to me a little. But it didn’t.”
That part I understood.
“Did Paul know about Stephen?” I asked.
“I don’t see how he couldn’t have known. I mostly did it to make him jealous,” she said. “Can you believe how stupid I was?”
She looked at me with wide, pleading eyes. Her pupils were the size of pinpricks. She didn’t seem to be looking at the road. Nevertheless, we kept moving at a brisk, even pace up along the shadowy, sidewinding asphalt path of the parkway.
The gaps of light crept through the trees as the forest thinned and the bright blue field of the sky pierced the canopy of yellow and orange leaves. Remembering Leigh as she was back then, my stomach churned with hatred for this blue-eyed hippie charlatan.
The car rounded a wide bend that led up to an overlook. Leigh pulled in and parked in front of a low stone wall facing the broad valley and the distant, narrow line of the James glittering at the edge of the horizon.
“What made you leave?” I asked. “Why did you decide to come back home?”
She cut the engine and lit another cigarette, taking a sharp drag and exhaling out the open window.
“My heart’s beating so fast,” she said. “I can hardly feel my hands.”
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Do
you need me to drive you home?”
“Just give me a minute,” she said.
She climbed out of the car and walked toward the overlook, pacing back and forth along the sidewalk. I followed her, hovering nearby, close enough to catch her if she fell.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I’ve been through this before.”
As the sun began to drop behind Otter Peak, the air turned chilly. Leigh hugged herself, picking nervously with her fingernails at the fabric of her sweater.
“Maybe you should sit down,” I said.
“All right,” she said.
I grasped her shoulders to help her sit down on the curb. I could feel that she was shivering; I sat down next to her and wrapped my arm around her back.
“Maybe I’ll feel better once I just get it out,” she said.
“Let’s try that,” I said as gently as I could. “What happened, Leigh?”
“Oh, Rocky,” she said. “You’re still so innocent, aren’t you?”
I couldn’t believe how clueless I had been. But I was just nine when they ran away. I still thought of that whole part of our lives the way I had when I was in the fourth grade. Back then, I thought that babies came out of a woman’s belly button and that getting pregnant was as simple and governable as ordering the Sea-Monkeys from the ads in the back of my Spider-Man comics.
“When I was finally able to admit to myself what was happening,” she said, “I stayed up at night wondering how long it would be before I could tell whether or not it was Paul’s.”
Once she knew she was pregnant, Leigh stopped smoking or taking anything. Like most people who abruptly sober up after a long period of foggy indulgence, she started noticing things that would have seemed obvious if not for the reefer haze. For instance, the fact that almost all the married women had at least one child with those dark, kinky curls and disarmingly pale blue eyes—all little Stephens.
“One day, I was with the women in the kitchen. I was chopping cilantro—I remember that very well because I always hated cilantro. When you’re pregnant, everything smells so much stronger,” she said. “I ran out of the kitchen and into the woods to throw up. I just started crying and couldn’t stop. I told myself it was just hormones and decided a walk in the woods would help me calm down.
“I’d been walking for a while before I saw them,” she said. “It was Stephen and one of the children with the curly black hair and the pale blue eyes. They were both naked. The boy was on his knees in front of Stephen. I think he must have been nine, maybe ten years old.”
Neither the boy nor the prophet noticed her. She just stood there flabbergasted, searching vainly for an explanation that didn’t add up to something too profane and horrible even to be imagined. She slowly crept back until she was sure they wouldn’t see or hear her. When she felt she was out of their range of vision, she ran back to the compound, hysterical.
It took me a while to process this information. I was old enough to know such things happened, but to hear it described so matter-of-factly, particularly amid everything else I was hearing—I was nearly numb with shock.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. Tears streamed from her eyes. “I suppose I was just too stunned to react. But that’s not good enough, is it?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
When Leigh told Paul what she had seen, they had a long, angry fight. Stephen’s a fraud and a pervert, she said. A pedophile. Incest and pedophilia—not even a bunch of stoned hippies could pretend that was “A-OK with JC.” Paul said that she must have made a mistake, that she must not have seen what she thought she saw. They were probably just praying, he said.
“But I knew what I had seen,” Leigh said, “and it was no mistake.”
That night, Leigh lay awake in bed, wondering whether the baby growing inside her would be another little boy with dark, curly hair and pale blue eyes. She wondered how long it would be before Stephen took her own little boy off into the woods to pray.
“Ever since I had sobered up, I’d been reconsidering every decision I’d made from the moment you and Paul surprised me in the amphitheater. How long were we going to stay in that place? What was the rest of my life going to be like? Were we going to live like this forever? What would become of the baby inside me? After what I had seen in the woods, I couldn’t imagine staying at New Nazareth another day. But where would I go, and if I left, would Paul come with me?”
The next morning, when she woke, Paul was gone. Left alone with her terrible secret, Leigh began to feel afraid. Had Paul gone to report what she had said to Stephen and the others? How would they react? The New Nazarenes worshipped Stephen like, well, like a prophet—like the prophet. Leigh knew what people had been willing to do for, say, Charles Manson or Jim Jones.
She put on her shoes and stuffed a few things in a shoulder bag and went outside and started walking off through the hills until she reached a road. She wasn’t thinking about anything—she wasn’t thinking at all. She just wanted to go home.
“You didn’t even say good-bye?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Everything,” she said.
Before long, an old rancher in a pickup truck pulled up beside her. He could see that she was crying. He knew where she had come from. He drove Leigh to the Greyhound station in Santa Fe, took her out to breakfast, and bought her a bus ticket back to Virginia. It must have made the old man’s year to save some stranger’s long-lost daughter from the clutches of the longhairs. Two days later she was standing in front of her father.
As she told me all of this, I imagined Leigh in the back of some forlorn bus, frightened and filthy from her trek through the woods. I thought of a clean-shaven old man in a Western shirt and a crisp straw cowboy hat, waving her off as the bus pulled away to take her back home to her father. I wondered whether the old rancher would have felt so proud of himself if he knew the kind of man he was sending that poor girl home to.
Leigh shook her hands as if she were trying to dry them. Behind us, a car cruised past on the parkway. After it passed, the air fell into a still silence.
“Will you get me a cigarette, Rocky?” she said.
I retrieved her lighter and cigarettes from the console. Her hands were still shaking, so I removed a cigarette from the pack and held it to her lips. She managed to keep the tip steady while I lit it for her.
“What happened to your baby, Leigh?” I asked.
She took a long drag and pushed the smoke out into the air above her.
“I’ve really got to stop these,” she said. “I must be turning green.”
Her hands still trembled, but she seemed somehow sanguine—as if the act of confession was its own sort of penance, and she was nearing atonement.
“Well, Daddy was happy to have me home,” she said. “But he wasn’t happy about what I’d brought back with me.”
The Honorable Prentiss Bowman III couldn’t bear the idea that people might soon learn how his daughter, once the top student in her class and a nationally ranked athlete in two sports, had been knocked up with Paul Askew’s bastard.
Even after Roe v. Wade, you couldn’t just walk down the street in Spencerville and schedule an abortion like you were ordering up a milk shake at Pearsall’s. But there have always been places where things like that could be taken care of. One such place was the Monacan Mountain Rehabilitation Center, which had once been called the Middle Virginia Hospital for the Epileptic and Feebleminded. For many years, the so-called ‘rehabilitation center’ was also the place for Virginians of means to discreetly take care of a little “family problem.” All that was required was someone to declare the poor patient mentally unfit. Leigh was neither the first nor the last daughter of privilege who had secretly been temporarily declared mad under the same circumstances.
“Have you ever heard of a saline abortion?”
she asked. “It’s actually a method for inducing labor. Wonderfully humane, if you want to know the truth.”
They laid her out on a table, pumped her uterus full of saltwater, and told her to wait for the dam to break, so to speak. She stayed like that for three days, surrounded by raving lunatics strapped to their beds while that tiny cherub floated in the ocean inside her.
On the third day, Leigh felt a tremor in her loins and a sharp pain in her abdomen. She cried out for help. The orderlies came and held her arms while she crouched at the edge of the table and screamed in desperate agony as her little ocean spilled out of her onto the floor.
When she was well enough to travel, Bowman came for her. They never spoke a word about any of it, as if they were honoring some implicit contract to behave as if nothing from the moment Leigh had fallen for Paul Askew to the present had ever happened.
“Daddy had an old friend from prep school who worked in the embassy in Paris,” she said. “He helped me get into a study-abroad program there, and later into university. I would have stayed after I graduated, but Daddy insisted that I come home.”
Her eyes drifted away from me, off to the horizon and the blue valley below it.
“I like to think that if I’d known for sure it was Paul’s, I would have fought to keep it, or at least to carry it to term and give it up for adoption,” she said. “But my father never asked me what I wanted, and I never argued with him. It was easier to let him decide. That way, I thought, I wasn’t responsible. How’s that for cold reasoning?”
“You were young,” I said.
She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. I reached down to collect the butt and tucked it into my pocket.
“A few years ago,” she said, “while I was waiting in a salon for a hair appointment, I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone. Inside was an article called ‘Prophet: Rise and Fall of a Hippie Preacher.’ ”
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 11