Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It came to pass that You endowed Nathan Vickery with the ability to alleviate suffering, and even to cure certain illnesses; though his powers of healing were not consistent, and though the boy himself nervously rejected all such claims, it was soon evident that at certain times and in certain circumstances the power that dwelt about his face and hands, pulsing and ebbing and leaping and darting, did have the effect of erasing pain as if it had never been. The first time he laid hands on a suffering person—a woman in her sixties, a farm wife from the hills of Shaheen who was said to have been in pain for many months, generalized throughout her body and undiagnosable, so the doctors claimed—it was remarked upon by all who witnessed the event that an almost flame-like light glowed about his hands, licking onto the woman’s bowed head, licking and streaming down her shoulders, and vanishing at once: in an instant, in a half-second. The entire congregation was rocked with amazement, and when the woman rose to her feet, baffled, blinking as if she had been asleep, and declared herself in a slow, dazed voice free of pain—of course there was uncontrollable excitement, and others came forward, some declaring themselves already cured of their afflictions before the boy could even touch them! Great thanks were offered unto God: there were hours of singing and chanting and clapping, punctuated by shouts of the faithful who spoke without knowing they spoke, as the Holy Spirit breathed His power into them. For it was as if the mere presence of the boy Nathan Vickery excited the awareness of God, and drew Him near. There were individuals whom such powers frightened, and these shied away from him, and even uttered doubts behind his and his grandmother’s backs: among them, unfortunately, was the wife of the elderly Reverend Sisley, now bedridden, querulous and spoiled. And there were others, as naturally there would be, and must; for is it not written that the world cannot hate the ordinary man, but must hate the extraordinary . . . ? Because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.

  So Your Son spake, and so it is.

  But the vast majority of those who heard Nathan Vickery, and who witnessed his powers, testified with great enthusiasm that he was indeed blessed by the Holy Spirit, and that he had gifts that went beyond those of the famous preachers of the day. (For it was an era of miraculous events, a time of signs and wonders: there were revival meetings and itinerant preachers and vast crowds that gathered in sports arenas, awaiting salvation; there were healing ministers like the Reverend Aaron Miles, and Sister Hannah Price, and Bill Branham, and Brother Joe Wallace, whose fame spread across the continent; and even locally there was the Reverend Marian Miles Beloff, whose special ministry celebrated the Power of Constant Baptism, and whose congregation numbered in the thousands.) While Nathan himself remained for the most part silent about his gift, those closest to him, his Grandmother Vickery most of all, began to proclaim that he would soon rise out of the obscurity of the Eden Valley and bear witness to all the world of the Gospels and of the fact that the world’s nations were entering into the era of Great Tribulation, and that the end was close at hand.

  “Seven years of war, of agony and madness,” Mrs. Vickery said, while her grandson sat nearby, stiff and uneasy, his face pinched after the ordeal of his preaching (for it was not uncommon in those days, before Nathan could deal with his exceptional gifts more wisely, that he might lose between five and seven pounds in a three-hours’ space of time; that his stomach and throat would close up and he might be unable to eat for a day or two afterward, and his grandmother would have to spoon-feed him warm milk and soup), “and then those who survive will be taken up by Christ Himself and His church, and Christ will reign for one thousand years . . . Nathan knows, don’t you, Nathan? It’s as he says. It’s all in the Bible. But you have to know how to read it, don’t you, Nathan?”

  And he would murmur an assent, his thin hands clasped, his gaze dark and brooding and abstracted.

  “Nathan is one of God’s chosen and he knows, he knows,” Mrs. Vickery said passionately. “And in time all the world will know.”

  He was a polite, dutiful grandson, courteous with all his elders, never minding that Reverend Sisley either nodded, smiling, without hearing what he said, or asked him to repeat himself again and again, chiding him for mumbling; never minding that Mrs. Sisley had him running up and down stairs on errands, or down the road to the store for supplies, as if he were a servant; patient with members of Reverend Sisley’s congregation who sought him out in secret, wishing to bare their souls to him, only to him, as if he had the power of forgiveness, as if he were Christ Himself. (They pleaded with him to cure their illnesses, to relieve their “heaviness of heart”; they begged him to lay his hands upon them though he insisted he had not the power of healing; a woman once journeyed to him from the Moran Creek area, bringing with her a deaf-mute child of nine who appeared to be retarded, or brain-damaged, and could he make the child well?—could he make the child normal?) Toward boys and girls his own age he was abstracted, remote, not shy as much as simply inattentive; unaware of them as young people like himself. Or perhaps he did not consider himself a young person, perhaps he did not consider himself human at all . . .

  He had been attending school only sporadically since the seventh grade, and at the age of fourteen he dropped out altogether. What was the purpose of such learning, why should Nathan Vickery, of all people, sit at a cramped desk and memorize historical dates and lists of presidents and kings and wars, and do ridiculous mathematical problems, and diagram sentences . . . ? All his teachers readily agreed he was a remarkable child: there was something uncannily wise about him, something aged and remorseless and unsettling. He had not much information (in history he always scrambled dates, literally transposing numbers as if such details not only did not matter but were altogether absurd; in mathematics his brain simply balked, and he could not see that a term known as an answer was related in any inevitable way to another term known as a problem), but he possessed an unmistakable knowledge, a knowingness that transcended mere facts. “He’s a genius,” one of his teachers said uneasily, wanting him gone from the class. “He doesn’t need anything we can offer him,” the principal of the school said, smiling, uneasy as well (for Mrs. Vickery’s manner had become more and more imperial as she aged, growing ever more stately and massive), wanting him gone from the school. “And the other students are so troublesome, it’s impossible to control them, what can any of us do? Your Nathan is obviously going to be a man of God; what can we offer him that he needs . . . ?”

  So he quit school, and it was a relief to him to be freed of the boxlike classrooms and his teachers’ expectations and the rough, noisy, unpredictable companionship of his classmates, whose hostility had upset him less than their awed interest. They did not puzzle him, for they were his brothers and sisters in Christ, and if they mocked him, well, it was familiar enough, for hadn’t Christ been mocked before him . . . ? Struck by a green pear or a rotten apple or a hunk of mud, brayed at by a six-foot farmer’s boy, Your mamma’s a whore, you ain’t got any daddy, funny-looking scrawny skinny Vickery, or approached by one of the more intelligent boys or girls in whom the agitated love of Christ was blossoming, Nathan felt equally clumsy, for the world of the schoolhouse and the schoolyard was not his world; not his domain. He was conscious of the authority of his teachers and did not want to interfere with it, did not wish to set his own authority in opposition to theirs, though he realized it was a higher authority and that his wisdom went far beyond theirs. His time would come, his kingdom would be revealed. He was not impatient.

  After leaving school, however, he made an effort to continue his education. Unlike certain men of God whom he had met, Nathan felt no pride in ignorance; and it was necessary that he know enough to combat Christ’s enemies when he encountered them. He believed the Devil tempted those who knew too little even as he tempted those who knew too much. A genuine call would eventually take him everywhere in the United States, across the continent, and to foreign lands . . . Must he know foreign languages? Must he be capable of speaking with foreigners in th
eir own languages? Or would God somehow aid him when the time came? He did not know. He worried that he must learn French, German, Russian . . . Chinese . . . Italian, Spanish . . . African dialects . . . Marsena had no library, and they rarely drove to Yewville; and the library there would not have been very helpful. Must he know the histories of these foreign lands? Must he know everything in order to teach the Gospel?

  It seemed unfair.

  Perhaps that was the wisdom of the truth that Few are chosen . . .

  It was a pity, then, that Dr. Vickery’s books were lost to him! Nathan could have wept to think of the riches of his grandfather’s bookshelves, now gone. The contents of a single shelf might have occupied him for many months. His grandfather had owned not only innumerable books of a scientific and medical nature, and an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for the year 1934, but odd, slim volumes of philosophy and verse, some of them in foreign languages. French, was it? Or Latin? Or German? If Dr. Vickery had lived, perhaps he would have been able to teach Nathan these languages . . . Perhaps they would have been able to converse.

  But he had not lived. And Nathan’s grandmother had gone about industriously throwing his things away: his few decent clothes to the Salvation Army in Yewville and the rest—the tattered sweaters, the baggy and stained trousers, the frayed shirts, a shapeless hat—to the refuse dump outside Marsena, along with other personal items and all his books and journals. A full afternoon’s labor it had been for Mrs. Vickery and Nathan, lighting with caution the gasoline-drenched things and raking them over and up to meet the air so they would burn thoroughly. Heavy hardback books, the old ocarina, a skull (whether human or plaster Mrs. Vickery did not care to determine) found at the bottom of a drawer, gloves with holes in the fingers, old bedroom slippers worn thin. “It’s better so,” Mrs. Vickery said, flushed with effort. “The clothes are no good to anyone and the other things are worthless, and the books—well, the books haven’t any place in Marsena. They’re what led him astray in the first place.”

  Nathan tried to protest, but both Reverend Sisley and his wife agreed that the books and journals should be destroyed. What were they but godless creations, the Devil’s work perhaps . . . ? Since there was never any mention of God in those books and journals it might be interpreted that the Devil had cleverly guided their authors, who were blind and deluded men like Dr. Vickery himself; atheists who pretended to knowledge they did not possess. In any case there was no one in Marsena who could read them, and it would have been a sin had they been allowed to fall into children’s hands.

  Watching the books burn, squinting against the sullen ponderous smoke that rose from them, Nathan wanted to protest again: Couldn’t he have just one of the books? Just one? But Mrs. Vickery was rather agitated and he knew what she would say; it was pointless, it would have upset her, it would have been cruel. And after all, Christ had said clearly enough that man cannot, by taking thought, add a single cubit to his stature.

  Mrs. Vickery and the Sisleys agreed that Nathan might acquire a globe or a book of maps, however, since it was possible that someday in the near future he would travel great distances in the service of the Lord. “I can’t see anything harmful in that,” Reverend Sisley said with a smile. So Nathan borrowed a world atlas from one of his former teachers and spent many hours studying it. The world . . . the earth. He grew unaccountably excited when he scrutinized the maps, nearly as excited as when he read Scripture aloud to himself; his fingers stroked the smooth pages as if he were blind and compelled to seek a secret wisdom. How strange the book seemed to him, how puzzling, how exquisitely mysterious . . . He exhausted himself in his effort to grasp the concept of the earth as a mental construct, partitioned into sections, contained within a book. At times his head ached with the strain of trying to comprehend. For it was a paradox, wasn’t it?—that there was a geographer’s idea of the earth set out clearly and neatly in the pages of a book, and a real earth, an irrefutably real earth, that carried the geographer and all the rest of humanity with it, hurtling through space? He tried, he tried very hard for weeks, to “see” the larger earth in terms of its representations in the atlas: nations, continents, hemispheres. And most crucial of all he tried to “see” the earth as God’s earth, His original creation, still living, still in the process of being created. The effort made Nathan feel faint and slightly ill. Never did the Bible puzzle him, since he read it, in a sense, from the inside—as if God-in-Nathan were writing the Bible even as he read it; but the world atlas puzzled him. Ah, how was it possible that men matched neat little diagrams in their heads with the vastness of God’s creation! How was it possible they could delude themselves into doing so, century after century? He walked alone in the fields, along the river, along the highway. He studied the hilly, jagged terrain that should have been familiar to him, and the look of the sun in the sky, and the precise look of the clouds in their ever-changing design. And it seemed to him vanity that men should attempt to cram the wide earth into their books, as if by doing so they might conquer it.

  It was given to him to know that, when the time came, the Lord would provide sufficient knowledge for him—sufficient for him to conquer the earth in his own way. When the time came.

  Since that evening in June, just before his twelfth birthday, when Christ in His infinite mercy had helped him to defeat the sin of pride in himself, Nathan had acquiesced in his fate. He realized that his destiny had been set for him from the start of the world, from the very beginning of time. It was not simply that he refused to question his destiny, but that there was nothing in him that might question it. Who was he to set himself apart from his fate—?

  It was clear that he dwelt in a body, that he animated a machine-like body that was somehow his, his responsibility; it was clear that this body, especially the face, was known to the exterior world as Nathan Vickery. Inhabiting this machine, this fleshly shell, he existed only for the glory of God, and when he was not actively preaching the Gospel or studying the Bible or speaking with God or Christ, he did not really exist at all.

  “Exist . . . ?” Nathan thought. “Do I exist . . . ? But in what way, and why? And how? . . . It seems so unimportant.”

  He dwelt high in a tower, behind the eyes, the living eyes, of a creature known to the world as Nathan. But he was not Nathan: and surely Nathan was not himself. For this creature, this fleshly thing, had come into the world at a certain moment in time, on a certain date—June 30, 1940, his birth certificate declared—while he himself had lived from all time, before time; in eternity. There were fellow Christians who wept that they had drifted from God, or that God ceased to hear them, but Nathan found it difficult to comprehend that any human being at any time was capable of imagining himself not with God. “But how is God apart from you?” he would ask these suffering people, these sinners, in his gentle childlike wondering voice. “Don’t you feel Him with us now? At this very moment? Here? Now?” He was bewildered, he half-thought such people were misrepresenting themselves to him for some unfathomable reason. Reverend Sisley himself came to him in secret and asked him questions about the Bible, problems that had been bothering him for many years. The Creation: the Incarnation: the Resurrection: the Tribulation to come, and the Rapture, and the Last Judgment: the old man believed all these things, and accepted them, but what did they mean?

  “What do they mean?” Nathan asked, astonished.

  “I know they are true, I know the Bible sets the truth before us,” the old man said slowly, almost drawling, “but . . . but . . . But what does it all mean, Nathan?”

  Nathan stared at Reverend Sisley, his eyes filling with tears of pity. For it was evident that the old man had come to the very end of his ability to comprehend Your existence: he stood like a man before a darkened glass, rubbing desperately at it to clear away a space for his vision, not knowing that what he does is futile. Nathan answered him gently enough, saying, “There is no meaning. There is only God.”