Page 116 of The Confidant
He nodded. “I wanted things to be different for you, Scarlett.”
“What are you talking about?” What did he want to be different?
But instead of answering my question, he just looked at the painting of Jehovah on his wall—the one with Jehovah sitting on a hill surrounded by the children he was teaching.
“What is this revelation that you were supposed to tell me about?” I asked.Just tell me because you’re really scaring me right now.
“I’ve been pleading with the Lord for it not to be you.” He turned back to me, his eyes haunted in a way. “You’re still so young.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, anxiety suddenly pulsing through my veins at the way he said that.
“You know how I’ve been trying to set you up with Xander since last fall?”
“Yes…”
“I’m sure you probably found it out of character for me, since I’ve never been too keen on you seriously dating anyone in high school. You’re still my baby girl, and I remember what it’s like to be a teenage boy.” He ran a hand through his graying hair. “But this past fall, I had an interesting experience with the High Priest where he told me about a practice that I hadn’t heard of before in all of my studying of the scriptures.”
No…I frowned as a sense of dread washed over me.
“It’s the practice that Samuel Williams was commanded to begin back in the days of the early church…” He looked at me carefully. “The one you said you recently learned about.”
Dad swallowed nervously as he opened his desk drawer, revealing two faded journals inside—one of which looked almost identical to the journal Xander had shown me in his dorm. For a second, my dad hesitated to pick up the journals, as if he didn’t really want to touch them. But after glancing at me once more, he lifted them in his hands and set them down on his desk.
He cleared his throat. “I think you’ve seen at least one of these journals before.”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard as I nodded. “The maroon one looks like the journal Xander tried to show me.”
“So as I said, the High Priest spoke to me about this revelation several months ago, telling me some things I’d never heard of before…” He stopped, as if to rethink the direction he was going. Then he gave his head a slight shake and said, “What the High Priest told me is that shortly after the church was founded, Samuel Williams was commanded to take on spiritual partners to help build the Kingdom of God on Earth. And well…” He swallowed like he didn’t want to actually continue.
Which made sense, since talking about our beloved High Priest having intimate relationships with multiple women was an uncomfortable subject—especially for a man like my father who had never discussed anything to do with the birds and bees with me outside of asking whether I kept my oath of chastity during my biannual worthiness interviews.
So to make things less awkward, I hurried to say, “I read enough to know that he had children with many of the women.”
“You did?” He pulled his head back and frowned.
“Yes.” Before he could think I had moved my research to unapproved sources, I added, “An essay on the church’s website talked about it.”
“Oh.” His shoulders relaxed.
“Did you read the essay about it, too?” I asked, curious since Hunter had mentioned that when he’d brought up some of the issues he had with the church to my dad, it hadn’t seemed like he’d known much about them.
“I haven’t really looked very far into those.” My dad glanced down at the journals. “You know me. I hate reading on a screen and much prefer learning from books that I can hold in my hands.”
“That makes sense.”
My dad had never really caught on to technology. He’d been older when I was born. Got his news from the newspaper. All his other reading was from Visitations with Jehovah, The Bible, or the church magazines and books.
He probably didn’t really know what social media was. He didn’t watch any of the popular TV shows or movies.
He was basically living in a time warp. The few times my stepmom was able to convince him to watch something with her, it was always the tried-and-true Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals from the 1950’s and 1960’s since the shows of these days were too worldly and inappropriate, according to him.
Yes…I’d be in big trouble if he found out I had been watching PG-13 movies with my friends since sophomore year.
“Anyway,” Dad said, “the spiritual practice was used to ensure that the bloodline of our beloved High Priest could grow. Much of it was done in secret as you probably read, since it wasn’t accepted by the government back then. There were many children born to his spiritual partners during that time. And when the practice had sufficiently served its purpose, it was eventually stopped.” He paused and looked like he was preparing himself to say something that might be even more shocking than what we’d already discussed. With a bewildered look in his eyes, he sighed and said, “But it turns out, the practice didn’t completely die.”
“What?” I gasped, not sure I’d heard him right. “The spiritual partnerships didn’t stop?”
He nodded. “The High Priest told me in our initial meeting that the practice was actually continued by one of Samuel’s family lines and is still in practice today.”
