When he was very small his grandmother hugged him and rocked him to sleep in her strong arms. Again and again. “Don’t cry, don’t fret, sweet one, sweet little mouse, my dear one . . . Why should you cry? She can’t hurt you.”
She swayed, holding him tight against her; her eyes glittered strangely with tears; she smelled of soap and milk and bread dough. How he loved her! His tiny fingers plucked at her mouth, her ears, her hair. She sang: “Bye, baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting,” and he drifted off to sleep.
He wept and kicked frantically. She was gone.
And then she appeared—stooped over the bed to pick him up, grunting.
“What a fuss! Oh Lord what a noise!” she laughed.
She carried him about with her, grateful for his warm, compact weight. He was hers, was he not? Hers. Her first-born, Ashton, had come too soon in her life—she’d been hardly more than a girl herself when he was born, and she hadn’t been ready for motherhood. She had not understood it. Her marriage, her emotional and sexual love for her husband, had distracted her from the baby; he had not quite existed for her. She had loved him, of course. But he had come too soon in her life.
Now her marriage was in the background. Her love for Thaddeus had become a companionable love. She honored him and respected him and believed she could not live without him—would not care to live without him. He was her husband, after all, and they were one flesh, one spirit. They had grown together, in a sense, and could not truly see each other as separate individuals; so it was not possible for her to feel a womanly desire for him. Not any longer. Her desire was no longer of the flesh, it was of the spirit—a tremendous hunger of the spirit that only the child Nathanael could satisfy.
She fed him, spoonful by spoonful. Her face grew ruddy again with happiness. In a throaty, husky, delighted voice she sang:
O Galilee, sweet Galilee
Where Jesus loved so much to be
O Galilee, sweet Galilee
Come sing thy songs again to me!
The child’s face held such love for her, how could she bear to gaze upon it? His eyes! His small, sweet, perfect lips! She felt, in a way, that she was not worthy of his adoration. After all—she was not his mother. And he would know it, even if he didn’t know it yet.
“Your mother does love you, Nathan,” she said. “Except she isn’t well. She’ll be well soon and then . . . and then she’ll come back to you, wait and see. Do you understand? No? Yes? What a lovely big smile!”
When she crooned a lullaby or one of the simple gospel tunes, the infant stared at her with an almost quivering intensity, an almost painful absorption, as if he were drawing the words from her: he, and not she herself. The way he stared—! It frightened her, almost, that he should be so different from other children.
“He knows,” she told Thaddeus one night when they stood by his bed, watching him as he slept.
“Knows—? Knows what?” Thaddeus asked.
“Everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything. He knows everything,” Opal said in a soft, trembling voice.
“About Elsa, you mean?”
“Elsa, yes,” Opal said impatiently. “And everything else.”
Her husband stared at her, frowning. At such times he said little, as if sensing how she was set in opposition to him, how stubbornly she would oppose him if he provoked her.
“He isn’t like other children,” she insisted. “He’s deeper—far deeper than Ashton or Elsa was. You don’t remember them, but I do! This child is much older than they were at his age.”
“Older? In what sense?”
“In his soul.”
“Ah yes: his soul,” Thaddeus said uncertainly.
“He knows.”
She waited for him to contradict her, but he did not; he was turned slightly away from her, staring at the sleeping child.
“He knows all there is to know,” she whispered fiercely.
Her husband did not understand and she despaired of making him understand. He was too much taken up in worldly activities; his soul was broken into fragments, claimed by a hundred people, and more; there was no certainty in him. Lying awake beside him as he slept his exhausted, uneasy sleep, Opal prayed for him, moving her lips silently. She had not prayed for many years; she had joined the congregation at services in those routine, familiar prayers, and often she had sung along with the others, hymns in praise of God and of the Son of God, but she had not truly prayed for many years—her soul had not been moved. Since the birth of her grandson, however, she had begun praying once more and there were days when a kind of constant prayer coursed through her, O God help, O God please, O God have mercy: from dawn to midnight the words pulsed in her with a fervor she could not recognize as having come from herself.
Because the child had come into the world so accursed, so loathed, she knew she would love it more than she loved her own children. Perhaps, in a way, it was hers—her own William, miraculously reborn.
“You seem to know me, don’t you?” she asked him. “There’s something so wise about you, so precocious! You know all of us, don’t you? Eh?”
Opal stared and stared at him. It was impossible for her to get enough of him. Such a quiet, intense baby—blinking at times as if astonished. His tiny forehead furrowed with a sort of intelligent bewilderment, his eyes narrowed, his hands flew like trapped birds. The several words he possessed appeared to possess him: “This,” he would say, stammering, shaking his head, trying to point with both hands, “This. This this this.” And again: “Yes. Yes. Yes.” If he tried to nod, the nodding got out of control; his poor little head bobbed and baby spit dribbled down his chin. Each acquisition of a new word—no, granma, baby, hot, cold, here, good, bad, cat, granpa, rain, sun, night, hungry—involved frantic effort, squirming and coughing and sputtering. It was exhausting for Opal merely to watch—if only she could help him! His eyes were large and dark, all iris at such times. It was as if he were giving birth to himself, frantic, unable to stop. “Yes? What is it? What are you trying to say?” she asked in a keen, piercing voice. “Poor dear baby, poor sweet mouse . . . You know what you want to say, don’t you? Eh? But where are the words, where are the words!”
Sometimes when she stared at him she slipped into a warm, consoling trance.
Did not the baby Nathanael assure her by his presence, his mere existence, that all was well?—that all would come about according to Your design, and was therefore not to be dreaded? The birth of Ashton, her own son, had delighted her but had not, for some reason, amazed her; perhaps she had been too young to grasp the wonder of the birth of a child. And Elsa, poor Elsa, had been born after William’s death, and after a miscarriage and years of futile effort . . . so that Opal had come to consider herself a luckless woman, probably sterile. But Nathanael was altogether different. He blossomed day by day as she watched, he was not her child in the flesh but hers nevertheless, hers, a miracle of beauty and vitality that spoke to her of something beyond herself that she could not have defined. If she tried to explain her certainty to Thaddeus, she faltered and stammered and was conscious of his judging her—the man was always judging everyone! But the infant did not judge, though he possessed great knowledge, an inexplicable wisdom. All that had happened was meant to happen, from the beginning of time. She should not fear: should never fear. How could she, Opal Vickery, set herself against God’s infinite wisdom?—wasn’t that a sin? It came to her as she gazed upon the baby Nathanael that a single moment’s doubt, the mere flicker of an eyelash, was a terrible affront against the Lord and might very well cast the sinner into hell forever.
Reverend Sisley had said from the pulpit that the world was plunged into an era of great turmoil and that many, many must die. It was God’s will. Had not God promised that Satan would be loosed from his prison and all the nations of the world drawn into battle—? A sinful mankind must expect punishment both in this life and in the next.
And yet all would be well. One must hav
e faith.
She must have faith.
The baby Nathanael allowed her to know such things, though she could not have explained how. She hugged him against her breasts, weeping. Her joy was so intense she could hardly bear it. “Oh my dear one, my precious one! How close you came not to have been born! And now the very world is transformed by you—Nothing is the same—”
His small compact weight felt right to her. Her body seemed to remember it from a distant past. He belonged nowhere but in her arms, here, at this very moment: for this too was eternity.
Between her and the baby there coursed a sense of recognition, a hot, heady connection of love. His eyes appeared to change hue, like precious stones, deeper, darker, depthless, mesmerizing. He tried to talk, babbling and chattering happily. A fatherless and motherless child: hers: God’s. What miracle of Biblical times could compare with this? What work of God’s was greater?
“Listen to you! Just listen! You’ve got so much to tell us, don’t you?” she cried.
She carried him outside and held him up, fairly shivering with emotion. The love he stirred in her was enormous—almost frightening—a rich, raw, throbbing hunger like nothing she had ever felt before. Sexual hunger had radiated from her loins and had transformed her in the past; but this sensation radiated from her heart and her lungs and her throat, and seemed to make its way through her entire body, wishing to flow into the outside world, wishing to love all of God’s creation. She swayed as if in a strong wind, holding the baby aloft.
It was a clear, weatherless morning. There were strands of cloud, the soft querying sounds of mourning doves, an odor of damp from the earth. The baby kicked and struggled and tried to speak, but the sounds he made were indecipherable.
“. . . so much to tell us, eh? Don’t you? Nathanael William Vickery!”
“WHAT IS THAT you have, Nathan?”
The child held it out to Thaddeus—a feather of some kind, about four inches long.
“Ah, isn’t that beautiful!” Thaddeus said. He squinted through his bifocals, drawing the feather across his palm. It was beautiful: a jay’s feather, blue with black stripes, a white tip, a grayish-white quill. “It isn’t for me, is it? Is it for me?”
“Yes,” the child said, nodding solemnly.
“That’s very kind of you,” Thaddeus said, smiling. He wished he could make his grandson smile in return; the child stared at him with his large, troubled eyes as if they had never seen each other before. “A gift, is it? Well—I can use it for a bookmark. It will make a very practical bookmark, won’t it?”
The child nodded.
“Where did you find it?—out in the yard?”
The child said something in his soft, quick voice that Thaddeus could not quite understand.
“Speak up, boy. I don’t think I’m hard of hearing yet. You found it—?”
“Jesus,” said the child shyly. “. . . Jesus gave it to me.”
Thaddeus stared at him, still smiling. A joke? A game? “Jesus gave it to you? This feather . . . ? What do you mean by that?”
The child’s eyes were dark, flecked with hazel and green. There was something prematurely grave about his face—as if the skin were stretched too tight across the slender bones. He was three years old now and had been talking for almost two years, always in the same light, rapid, breathless way, rarely smiling in Thaddeus’s presence though he seemed comfortable enough with Opal. Now his lips moved again but his words were nearly inaudible. Thaddeus had to fight the impulse to grab him and give him a good shake. A feather! Jesus! Jesus! Was that what his grandmother was filling his head with these days?
“Jesus gave you this feather, did He? Handed it to you?”
The child began to nod, then hesitated. His lips twitched. He was about to smile, perhaps; or cry; he sometimes smiled when Thaddeus scolded him gently, and sometimes cried.
“Out in the back yard, I suppose?” Thaddeus said lightly.
The child nodded. A smile evanescent as a firefly played about his lips. His complexion was smooth and waxy and mauve-pale, his manner cautious and restrained. Thin-armed, thin-legged, with dark curls and large, intense eyes, he was so absorbed in the conversation that his entire body appeared to be trembling. Thaddeus could almost feel the tension in the child’s slender body. He loved him, and pitied him. And felt a pang of exasperation. “Well then,” he said, sighing, “why don’t you show it to your Grandma. She’ll appreciate it.”
But Nathanael would not take the feather back. “No,” he said, frowning. “It was for you.”
“For me? Really?”
“Yes. He meant it for you.”
Thaddeus stared at the feather uneasily. What was the point of this, what was the child’s meaning? For there must be meaning to the exchange. It was a game of some kind, a bit of harmless trickery. Perhaps Opal had something to do with it; she often read stories to the boy, many of them adaptations of Biblical tales, and she took him to Sunday school, and then to regular Sunday services. Now that Ashton was gone, and Elsa . . . Now that her own children were gone Opal had turned all her attention to Nathanael.
Thaddeus turned the feather slowly between his fingers, studying it. The astonishing precision of it: of the meanest, most ordinary feather: was this what his grandson saw, was this the reason he believed Christ had given him the feather? Strange. Unnerving. Thaddeus felt acutely uncomfortable in the child’s presence. He loved the boy, yes, certainly he loved him, and yet . . . and yet he was always rather relieved when Nathanael ran off to be with his grandmother.
To Opal he said that night: “Do you think you should encourage him? With this Christ business?”
Opal was turned partly from him, brushing her short, frizzy hair.
“I mean—his fantasies about Jesus, his stories,” Thaddeus said. It surprised him that his manner was jocular, almost jeering. He would have liked to speak to his wife seriously, yet his voice kept rising almost to a shout; and he saw that his hands were trembling. “After all, Opal! Jesus this, Jesus that! I mean—Really—You don’t want the child to grow up with a—an imperfect grasp of—Are you listening, Opal?”
She faced him, her gaze dragging after. Cowlike, placid and stubborn, she stood in her flannel nightgown with her arms at her sides. Her jaw had thickened; her color was ruddy. She has secrets, Thaddeus thought involuntarily.
“He seems to believe that Christ is always around him,” Thaddeus said, trying to keep his tone light. “No doubt they encourage that kind of thing at Sunday school—? I know what Reverend Sisley is like. I don’t object to it, Opal, in adults, but in children who can’t differentiate between the world of fantasy and the world of reality, don’t you think it’s—well, dangerous? Don’t you think so, Opal?” he said, almost pleading.
“I know you don’t believe,” Opal said quietly. She hesitated, cleared her throat, began again: a harsh, ugly blush spread across her throat and her right cheek. “I know it’s hard for you to believe. But Christ is with us. He is, Thaddeus. Whether you acknowledge Him or not—whether you see Him or not. He’s with us. I know.—It makes you angry to hear me say such things, but I must say them. I—”
“Opal, please—”
She shook her head wordlessly.
They had had similar exchanges in the past. Since Ashton had enlisted in the Army, since Elsa had gone to board with a cousin of Opal’s who lived in Derby, the issue of Opal’s religious beliefs—her religiosity, as Thaddeus called it—had arisen from time to time, always at weak, awkward moments like this. Thaddeus’s instinct was to turn from her brusquely and crawl into bed and, in a few minutes, feign sleep. It was not simply that the Christ business annoyed him; it alarmed him as well. He was not at his strongest, having been active since six-thirty that morning: rounds at the hospital in Yewville, a visit to a dying woman, office hours here at the house. And part of the evening spent trying to fix the sump pump in the cellar . . . But he forced a smile, a sympathetic smile, and took his wife gently by the shoulders, and pressed his l
ips against her warm forehead. What to say? Oh my God, he thought wildly, what to say?—after thirty years of marriage, to realize you don’t know whom you’ve married—
“We’re both tired, aren’t we,” he whispered.
“Yes,” Opal said.
“So we won’t quarrel. Not tonight.”
“Not tonight.”
In bed, in the dark, he couldn’t resist: “Except he’s only a child, Opal. Entrusted to us.”
She said nothing. She was certainly not asleep, however.
“He has no one but us,” Thaddeus said.
The bed quivered with her massive, exasperated sigh.
“No one but us,” Thaddeus said angrily.
SHE DID NOT contradict him. She would allow him these petty, inconsequential victories.
She knew what she knew: Christ is with us whether you acknowledge Him or not. So she allowed her husband to say what he would say and to turn from her and sleep his restless sleep. In the very next room the child Nathanael slept in a bed that had once belonged to Elsa—with railings and a decal of a lamb on the headboard—and she knew he was with God even as he slept a child’s deep, intense, dreamless sleep, and that nothing his grandfather said or did could interfere.
Elsa came back to visit once or twice a month, riding with one of the McCords who lived in Derby; she and Mrs. Vickery were rather uncomfortable with each other. “Well, you haven’t said a word about my hair,” Elsa cried nervously, fluffing her springy artificial-looking waves, and Mrs. Vickery tried to smile, saying, “You always did look sweet: you know that,” and then they fell silent. They were grateful for the boy’s presence, or for Dr. Vickery (who would take the afternoon off, if no patients were scheduled), or even for Mrs. Stickney or the Sisleys or old Mrs. Arkin, who sometimes dropped by when Elsa was back for the weekend. Not that they knew her, or would have recognized her—she was twenty pounds lighter at least—far too skinny, in Mrs. Vickery’s opinion—and the lipstick and makeup and high heels and bouncy hair and self-conscious, nervous giggling were a shame; but try to tell a young girl anything, try to make her listen for five minutes instead of rattling on about her job (she was clerking at Woolworth’s and was next in line for a waitressing job at a bar and grill, where, she said, she’d make almost twice as much as she was making now) and how she had fixed her room up (“Why don’t you and Pa come to visit, just once?” she begged, squeezing her hands together between her bare knees in a way she must have learned from another girl, or from a Hollywood movie) and how she had so many wonderful friends there in the city, Holly McCord who was going with a sailor, someone else who was engaged to a boy who worked in Port Oriskany during the week at the big steel mill, and someone else—a cousin of someone’s—Mrs. Vickery remembered, maybe, that girl who’d spent the summer with Rosemary Preston a few years ago—? Well, her. And she was married, and her husband was in Belgium around where Ashton was supposed to be; wasn’t that a coincidence? And—
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