Hold Fast

T
he world
we live in has a lot of cold, dark, and frequently scary places, and you can’t turn on the evening news without encountering some fresh new hell of humankind’s brutality.

HOLD FAST
is a book firmly rooted in the real world. It is gritty, raw, and intense. We have not shied away from the bad or the evil. But while there are plenty of horrible things done by evil people, there are also Burke’s ‘good men’ who are not willing to let evil triumph; Orwell’s ‘rough men’ who ‘stand ready to do violence’ for us, and the night is always darkest just before the dawn of a bright new day.

We hope you enjoy our story.

D
aniel’s
gentle snoring wakes me early.

It’s still ten minutes before six according to the clock hanging on the rough plywood wall; five ‘til, according to the cheap digital watch that serves as our alarm clock.
Not that much lost sleep. The alarm was just about to go off anyway, but still. I could have had five more minutes.

Daniel grumbles when I nudge him. He’s cute when he does that, childlike. It makes me want to take him into my arms and cuddle him. Officially he’s my husband, but in reality? Daniel’s the only child I’ll ever likely have.

“Come on, sleepyhead,” I whisper, softly ruffling his hair until he’s awake. He opens his eyes and smiles at me. The physical resemblance to his half-brother never ceases to amaze me. Twins, if twins could be born so many decades apart, and to different mothers. How can two men look so much alike, yet be so utterly different?

Daniel is kind and sweet, finding joy everywhere in the world around him. He can even find beauty in this hovel we’ve shared for five years, with its splintery floors and yellowing plastic windows.

Perhaps it’s simply time? Perhaps it’s the responsibility? His brother Emmanuel is the anointed one, after all. The Lord’s chosen prophet.

My Daniel’s face is beginning to show wrinkles, but they’re from smiling; the light in his eyes is joy. Emmanuel’s creases were born from disapproving scowls, and his eyes burn with a terrifying zeal.

Mom, how could you have ever fallen in love with Emmanuel? And how could you bring me here, make me live like this? Can’t you see how sick this place is?

“What do you say we go back to sleep and pretend to be sick?” Daniel asks with a wink, sitting up with his back to the wall.

“I wish,” I sigh. Forget five minutes. I’d love another five hours. “But I can’t. You
know
I can’t. Today’s a market day and I have to get ready and load the truck and…” I trail off. There’s no point in finishing my sentence. Finish my sentence? My sentence is life plus eternity. It will never be finished.

Market days are hard, but they are also a blessing. They get me out of the compound. Every Saturday and Sunday from mid-spring until late autumn, we have a booth at the open-air farmer’s market in Greenville. It’s tiny and remote, almost the last outpost of civilization before reaching the deep forests of northern Maine, but I get to speak with people.

Normal
people who seem to be living
normal
lives.
Normal
people who don’t look up to a vicious, manipulative bastard who claims to have a New Revelation from The Lord.
Normal
people who have no need to look at the ground to avoid the wrath of a prophet and his two sons.

Normal
people.

Free
people.

Daniel claims that those people out there have no more freedom than we do, but I think he’s just trying to convince himself that what we have is for the best. But I know better. Daniel was born into this life. I wasn’t.

I remember life outside this compound. Life in a city, with houses and paved streets, not this cluster of drafty, converted garden sheds on a sprawling run-down farm deep in the forest. A life centered around friends and family, school and the mall. A life not built around a shabby chapel where an angry old man rants daily about the New Revelation given to him directly from The Lord’s lips.

A life where a man like Daniel could be free to openly express his love for Joshua. Where they could get married and live out the happily ever after from whatever fairy tale they build for themselves, if that’s what they wanted.

This is the only life he’s ever known, and I think he’s afraid to leave it, unsure he could survive in the unfamiliar. I can’t comprehend that fear of the outside, can’t understand why he wouldn’t want that life. I’d have run years ago if I were him. But then again, I’m happy that he didn’t. If Daniel hadn’t asked his older brother for me, God alone knows who Father Emmanuel would have married me off to.

I did run. Years ago, and more than once. But here I still am, so maybe he has a point.

Sitting up for the first time in the cool morning air is always painful, and the first few steps of each day are pure misery. Twenty-three years old, and I walk like I was sixty-three.

“It’s bad this morning, isn’t it?” my husband asks. We may not be intimate in the way of husbands and wives, but we do care very much for each other. Daniel’s eyes lose some of his joy as he takes in my limp, but he can’t see the grinding in my hip with every movement, or feel the throbbing ache.

“It could be worse,” I tell him with a game smile. “At least I can tell it’s not going to rain today.” I stare out the scratched and yellowed window at the dawn and yawn.

“You’re thinking about it again,” he says. “About running.”

“Thinking? Yes. Dreaming, even.” I sigh. “Always.”

“Courtney, you know it can’t happen,” Daniel says, taking my hands in his. “Next time? The lesson won’t be so easy.”

“Oh, I know it can’t happen. I can’t run, Daniel, because I can’t
run
. They taught me that lesson so very, very well. Really
drove
it home, you might say.” I smile bitterly, and my husband winces and looks away. Yes. Lessons. Friendly little learning aids to help even the slowest student understand things. Like why she shouldn’t run.

Yes. Oh, very much yes. I’m still thinking about running. When it comes to learning how to give up, I’m a damned slow learner.

Perhaps the lesson wasn’t meant only for me, or even mostly for me. Maybe it was meant for everyone else. And maybe Daniel’s not afraid that he can’t survive
in
freedom. It might be survival just to reach freedom that he thinks is impossible.

Daniel turns his back to me and we both hurry to remove the long flannel nightshirts necessary even in summer with such flimsy shelter. My husband helps with the buttons on the back of my market day dress. It’s the least faded and patched thing in my limited wardrobe, but it’s still probably at least as old as I am, and I adjust a bleached-white apron to cover some still-unpatched holes in the front of the skirt.

It’s our standard morning routine. We wake up, we dress. We go to prayer holding hands, we eat our meals together. In public, we officially despair every month when we don’t have happy news to share with the community of a new blessing visited upon us.

Right, because unless the archangel Gabriel comes down in person for a late-night visit, that is just not going to happen. And even if it did, how could I bring any new life into this place? What kind of person would do that to a child?

It’s not the life I dreamed about, but then… does anyone ever get their perfect dream life?

With breakfast and prayers finished, it’s time to be about the business of the day. My husband sends me on my way with a kiss on the cheek, and I head for the barn. My mother greets me with a baleful glare—she’s already brought the truck around, and I’m late. She and Nathan have been waiting for me.

Loading the truck is backbreaking work for two women and a boy, but we manage. Bushel baskets and wooden crates loaded with fresh fruits and vegetables fill the stake-bed truck almost to overflowing. The bench seat of the truck is nearly as crowded with my mother and Nathan.

“Be careful, Courtney!” My mother gets skittish every single time we drive over the narrow wooden bridge.

“Mom!” I growl back. “I’ve managed to drive over that stupid bridge ten thousand times already without killing us. Could you please let it go?” I’ll pay for that later, I know, but she’s not going to risk slapping me while we’re driving.

“Actually, it’s not even two thousand,” she says, rolling her eyes at me. Or perhaps not. Is this going to be one of her good days?

“How did you come up with this number,” Nathan asks and I can’t help but smile at his genuine curiosity.

“Well, Courtney’s twenty-three now, and she got her permit on her fifteenth birthday. She’s been taking me to the market twice a week so…” My mother pauses on purpose to give Nathan a chance to do the math.

Wedged in the front seat of the minivan between us, he frowns and solves the problem out loud. “Twenty-three minus fifteen, that’s eight. And then there are fifty-two weeks a year. So that would be four times across the bridge a week by eight years times fifty-two weeks.” The boy frowns, going back over his work in his head while ticking results off on his fingers. “But no, that’s not right either, Sister Heather. You and Sister Courtney hadn’t come to The Lord yet when she was fifteen. She was… I don’t know how old she was.”

“You’re right, Brother Nathan! That’s so clever of you to remember that. She was sixteen. So go ahead and figure it out now.”

My mother nods and winks at me. For all her faults, I have to hand it to her, she’s a fabulous teacher. She’s just tricked the kid into doing what he claims to hate. I keep my eyes on the road ahead while Nathan counts on his fingers, wondering if she’ll eventually remind him that we don’t drive to the market during the winter months.

He mumbles to himself, “Four times fifty-two is two hundred and eight… times eight, makes 1,664, but minus... it’s 1,456, and it’s a round trip so- 2,912!” Eyes narrowed, Nathan bares his teeth at me in a predatory grin. “Courtney,” he hisses. “You
lied.
”

I bite my tongue and keep my eyes on the potholed logging road. It’s a waste of time trying to explain concepts like exaggeration and nuance to Nathan. All nine-year-olds, even ones raised in a
normal
life, have a tendency to see the world in black and white.
This
one, though? Father Emmanuel’s youngest son was brought up to watch everything, to sniff out the slightest, smallest sin in our closed community. In a life where the wages of sin literally are death, that makes him a very dangerous child.

As always, I’m torn between sadness for the little boy and fear of him. What would he have been like if he’d been raised outside of the world according to Father Emmanuel? His quick intelligence, the clever and inquisitive nature, could have taken him anywhere, let him be anything he wanted.

The world according to Father Emmanuel is my private hell, a tiny box with no exit and only a pinprick window where I can see the world on market day, and Nathan is his father’s spy.

I can’t hate him for it, though. Nathan’s just as trapped as I am, and he doesn’t even know it.

I can’t forget it, though.

Even if Nathan didn’t work out the math for the winter months, the fact remains: I drove past the graves of my stillborn sisters this morning for at least the thousandth time. Deep in almost virgin forest, the graves lie unmarked and unremembered but for the small white chunk of granite and perennial wildflowers that a younger, envious version of myself placed there. Every time I drive past the path leading to that small clearing, I want to scream to the world that this man is
Satan
, not the holy man he pretends to be.

But there is no one to scream to.

The Church of the New Revelation, everyone on the compound would swear that Father Emmanuel is nothing less than The Lord’s gift to our fallen and sinful world, a witness and a prophet, with a mission to bring America and the world back to righteousness. My mother? Forget walking on water,
she
probably thinks he could breakdance on it if he wanted. The few people in the outside world whose path I cross, they think we’re just a quaint relic, a leftover from an earlier time. Like the Amish or the Mennonites, perhaps, but with a little more hellfire and brimstone. They have no idea, and they never will. They won’t
see
, because they won’t
look
.
I’ve tried to tell them, but they won’t listen.
And anyway,
they always say,
it’s nowt t’do wi’ me and mine.

That’s what they said the first time I ran, when they brought me right back to my mother and her vile holy man.

“Whoever spares the rod hates the child, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them,” Father Emmanuel explained. “As it says in The Lord’s Word, ‘train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not depart from it.’”

He pretended that it tore him apart to punish me, but there was a sick glee in his eyes as Brother Lucas beat me bloody and bruised with a length of broom handle. For my own good, of course. To train me up in the way I should go. So I would not depart from the way.

I was sixteen then, so much younger and more innocent, but he was right. By the time it was over, I knew I would never forget the lesson. I’d learned that I couldn’t count on anyone but myself.

And then the second time I ran… The truck’s jostling over deep ruts and brutal potholes covers my involuntary shudder at the memory.

And where would I run to, anyway? My father’s dead. The very night he died, my mother drove home from the hospital to get me and brought us here. She wouldn’t even wait for the funeral. We had to leave his sins behind, and like Lot’s wife, no looking back could be permitted.

Dad was an only child, and my grandparents were gone long before he died. And Sean. I’d run to you, if I knew where you were. The only two men I’ve ever loved, the only two men I could run to… and they’re both beyond my reach.

The deep logging trails give way to graveled dirt roads barely wide enough for the heavy logging trucks to take their loads of tree trunks to the paper mills, and finally to smooth paved roads.

“So you
admit
you’re a liar,” Nathan taunts. The logging roads are too rough for conversation - too rough for anything but holding on for dear life to anything solid – and I’d hoped that the boy would have forgotten this in the jostling.

Nathan was picked to escort my mother and me to the market because he’s strong enough to help us put up the booth, but also because he’s smart enough to watch everything we do, and dedicated enough to report even the slightest hint of sin. Even worse, he knows it. His father’s flattery and brainwashing have turned an intelligent and curious young boy into a vicious miniature of his father, zealous in sniffing out wrongdoing in others, and he would love nothing more than to demonstrate he’s earned his master’s trust by having something juicy to report.