Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “The Jews crucified Our Redeemer, didn’t they,” Mrs. Vickery said. Her voice had become slow, wondering, hoarse. Since Nathan’s “accident” the year before she had grown less certain of herself; she sometimes broke off her sentences without completing them. “There was that evil in the world from the start . . .”

  “Everyone shared in the crucifixion,” Nathan said. “The whole world was present.”

  “The Jews . . .”

  “The whole world,” Nathan said excitedly, “not just the Jews. But the world was Christ. It was His body.”

  Mrs. Vickery stared at him. She was now seventy-one, still big-bodied, heavy. The flesh had begun to hang from her in odd clumps at the tops of her arms and beneath her chin. She no longer had her hair set professionally, and so it had begun to turn yellowish, the color of faint tobacco stains. She was so close to her grandson that he rarely saw her; but there were times when she appeared to be anxiously scrutinizing him.

  “Yes,” she said, “but there were the Jews clamoring for His death, and the soldier who pierced His side . . .”

  “He willed it all! They were merely actors in His imagination!”

  Again she stared at him, frowning. Another consequence of Nathan’s accident was her intermittent deafness. Though she had been sitting as usual in a pew near the very front of the Bethany-Nazarene Church on that Good Friday, and though she had seen her grandson plainly enough, she had not heard most of his sermon, and she had heard none of his confession at the very end.

  “Christ was a form of God and He was never not-God and so He willed everything that happened to Him, just as we will everything that happens to us,” Nathan said hurriedly. “It would be blasphemous to think that Christ had not willed His own agony . . . or that we don’t will ours, regardless of what we think.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Vickery said, looking away from the young man’s pale, heated face.

  He continued speaking. The present-day era bewildered him, he said; he could not comprehend it. Christ was immediate, Christ was ever-present, yet people seemed totally unaware of Him. Everything seemed to be disintegrating: hundreds of thousands of people divorced every year; innumerable children abandoned or injured by their own parents; alcoholism and drug-taking and crimes and acts of violence; and a war on the far side of the earth that seemed to be sucking the nation’s vitality into it, like a whirlpool. What did it all mean? Why did it have this meaning? If God spoke through history, what was God’s message? Nathan felt that he must know . . .

  Mrs. Vickery only half-attended to her grandson’s words. The ring of his voice, the timbre of his voice . . . wasn’t it familiar to her . . . didn’t it inspire in her the sudden impulse to throw up her hands in mock despair . . . to contradict him bluntly and walk out of the room . . .

  Thaddeus?

  “I will have to go back again,” Nathan was saying, rubbing at his good eye. It was not possible to determine whether he spoke sadly, or proudly, or merely with resignation. “I can see that God is leading me somewhere. Has been leading me. Another six months or so . . . six months spent in preparation . . . And then I’ll return again to the world, and begin again as if I were no more than a child; as if I were newborn. You needn’t come with me if you’d rather not. The strain might be too great. I have no idea what God expects of me but it won’t be easy: it won’t be anywhere near as easy as before. This time I won’t have Marian Miles Beloff supporting me. I won’t have any staff, or any money . . . at least at first. So if you’d rather not come with me, I understand.”

  Mrs. Vickery cupped her hand to her ear, as if she hadn’t heard. She had been staring at his face intently. “Yes? What?”

  “I said you needn’t come with me if you don’t want to,” Nathan repeated. “You can stay here, or I could find a place in town . . . but I don’t know yet which town . . . I don’t know where God wants me to have my base. Maybe a large city . . . I must wait for God to speak.”

  “What?” said Mrs. Vickery, her hand still cupped to her ear. “Did you say . . . God . . . ?”

  IV

  The windowpanes crack alarmingly with the cold. It is still January. A January of the spirit. I huddle beneath the covers and see my breath in shy vaporous spurts. While Nathanael Vickery chose freely to fast and (despite the admonition of Christ) thereby asserted his infinite will over his finite appetites, I lie in my rumpled bed numb with hunger because it is simply too cold to get up.

  His fasting must have pleased God, in some ways. For God did reward him. In some ways.

  His fasting brought him God’s presence. Your presence.

  But are You not always present . . . ?

  In which case the fasting was superfluous. Is superfluous.

  Nevertheless I too have visions fleeting beneath my eyelids. I too drift into sleep and am rewarded with astonishing, unspeakable sights. In fact, I have grown to fear sleep; at the very edge of sleep my entire body jerks, waking me. But the visions are not always nightmares. They can be sweet, soothing, hypnotic. I think they are the dreams of others, former occupants of this rented bed. Surely they are not my own.

  Query: If You are unknown, how do we know You are unknown? For You are always and forever invisible, lacking even the substance of the wind, or my steaming breath.

  Query: If You were with me once, before my plunge into matter and consciousness, isn’t it inevitable that You are with me now?

  Query: If You are with me now, why am I so utterly alone . . . ?

  IMAGINING NATHANAEL VICKERY is far more difficult a task than I had anticipated. Perhaps it is the cold: my fingers are numb most of the time, the nails a peculiar bluish-purple, until I warm them by closing them about a cup of hot coffee. But then they are warmed on the insides, the very tips of the fingers especially (where the flesh seems particularly sensitive), warmed and overwarmed, at times almost scalded.

  I sit huddled now in an overcoat, at a kitchen table with a chipped enamel top. The little red radio is within reach but I will not turn it on this morning: so much squawking cheerful vitality depresses me. If I had Nathan’s conviction that Your secret message was contained within that vitality—in its innumerable unfathomable aspects—I should turn it on, certainly. For the jigsaw puzzle pieces of Your voice would fly at me and I would be in awe of Your majesty once again. But unfortunately I don’t have that conviction.

  Imagining Nathanael Vickery . . .

  It is easier to imagine William Japheth Sproul III. Whom I rather like. But he does not enter Nathan’s orbit until 1965, and though he believed he was of crucial importance to Nathan’s career, I suspect in fact he was not. (Just as poor Leonie Dietz went about giving interviews in the late sixties, fantasizing herself as Nathan Vickery’s first and only love: blaming the failure of their love, in retrospect, on her father. But the hypothesis of a married Nathan Vickery, a married Saviour, was always ludicrous and no one took the woman seriously.)

  (It sounds as if I am angry with Leonie. But that can’t be—for why would I be angry with Leonie?)

  Imagining Nathanael Vickery: addressing curious, half-smiling strangers in Heywood Park in the nondescript city of Derby, population 80,000. At the very periphery of a county fair, on a makeshift platform, in the autumn of 1962. That winter, in a store-front church in Yewville, the Tabernacle of Zion, speaking earnestly and ecstatically to a congregation of twenty-five people, three of them stone deaf.

  Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb . . . ?

  He must have endured numerous hours of ordinary unecstatic life. He must have eaten, must have fed himself (or allowed himself to be fed: for he never lacked warm, concerned, maternal women who wished only to put some flesh on his bony frame, in the name of the Lord), must have showered or bathed occasionally (not often, I suspect), must have found accommodations for his many itinerant nights, must have slept, must have bought himself clothes when his old clothes wore out, must have gone to a barber to have his unruly hair trimmed . . . He must have done these things, I know. Yet I
can’t imagine them. I can’t remember them. Deeply absorbed in his experience of God he might come to, suddenly, and find himself in a warm, noisy diner, crowded in a booth with three or four well-wishers whom he had never set eyes on before (though in fact he was shrewd enough to always know that he knew whatever it was one might expect he should know), a fork halfway to his mouth. Left to itself, his body was hungry enough and his jaws gratefully devoured eggs and ham and hashed-brown potatoes and toast and even jelly, so there was no danger of his fading out of existence; but when he recovered consciousness he was often overwhelmed by the fact of other people, the reality of other people, living and breathing temples of the Holy Ghost, aspects of himself, brothers and sisters to him . . . and when he became aware of them in this way he quite naturally lost interest in eating, in his own bodily processes, and wished to address his fullest attention to them.

  He must have met opposition from the very first. There were drunks on park benches, hecklers who waved their fists and shouted with voices as strident as his own, there were amused policemen, and intolerant policemen, and in the town of Rockland (ironically, for it was in Rockland many years before that he had preached as a child, with gratifying success) an agitated state trooper forced him into a patrol car and drove him out to the highway, saying he had best hitch a ride to the next town, no one wanted any trouble in Rockland, no one wanted any religious advice. “We got more’n enough preachers of our own,” the man said in a not unfriendly voice. He must have been jeered at, interrupted, even threatened. He must have felt demoralized at times. But his later, rapid success seems to have obscured these early months and years, and in a way Nathan Vickery did not experience them, since by then You had allowed him to know that the trials of daily life were to be felt as history, as mere background to his ministry. For he never doubted his destiny. Not for an instant. He walked a high wire secure, and even at times rather brashly confident in the fact that You were the net beneath, and that should he fall—but he would not!—You would save him.

  “The Lord guides us in all things,” he taught everyone who would listen.

  It was true that certain individuals invariably turned away from him, irritated or insulted or frankly discomforted (“Has Jesus come into your heart? Why do you keep Him waiting? How long are you going to keep Him waiting?”), and certain individuals responded with shouts and catcalls and even childish violence (throwing horse chestnuts at him in a downtown park one autumn, and once, when a local church had generously donated the use of its small building for the evening, silly young men rode motorbikes through the door and up the aisle); but no one was really indifferent, and always, always there were those who were profoundly moved. Of twenty-five people he was sure to capture four or five. Or more. It was as if he tossed something out to them, something invisible, that nevertheless caught in their unprotected flesh, in their very souls. And he knew, he sensed, that he had them. He was never wrong in estimating how many he had, for between these individuals and himself there was an immediate rapport, a kind of startled, frightened love that neither they nor he could deny.

  Churchless and itinerant, without the support of local ministers, without the visible support of any believers or family, Nathan Vickery nevertheless made his way forward according to Your design. He accumulated believers; he took their money gratefully, shyly, but without false reluctance; if anyone guessed his identity he did not hesitate to acknowledge that he was the young preacher who had mutilated himself up in Port Oriskany a few years before, but he asked that this identity be kept secret because it was his belief that the Lord did not wish him to profit from that hurt . . . at least at this time. His natural modesty pleased everyone he encountered. He spoke of himself frankly as a seeker—a Seeker for Christ—and he wished only to bring others along with him on his quest. In the Mt. Shaheen Baptist Church one evening in 1963 he preached a sermon so effective that all but a half-dozen of the fifty people present came forward when he called for fellow seekers, including the pastor’s son; and later that evening the pastor himself, Marcus Lund, made the extraordinary decision to become a Seeker and for the rest of his life to help Nathanael Vickery with his campaign for souls.

  Reverend Lund was a stocky, stern man of middle age, with faint, fair wisps of hair combed damp across his head, and a rather thick, strong neck and a curious round face, like a child’s, and again like a monkey’s, appealing in its own way. It was said of him that he was tyrannical—he ordered his wife and his son and his associates around as he pleased, and he had once criticized his organist during church services, in front of the entire congregation. His son Mark was seventeen years old and extremely shy, with a slight stammer; his wife was a plain, sweet-faced woman in her early fifties, given to nervous smiling. Reverend Lund spoke in a high, rapid, inflectionless voice, as if it wearied him, this constant ordering of people about, yet what choice had he . . . ? When he met Nathanael Vickery he began to speak to him in this manner, asking him curtly just what he wanted, what he hoped to achieve in Mt. Shaheen, with whom had he worked in the past, why he hadn’t a degree from a Bible college; then in mid-sentence he paused, and his shrewd, cold, monkeyish face seemed to freeze; and he could not remember what he was saying; and a kind of power seemed to pass over from Nathan to him, with his full assent.

  (Later he whispered to Nathan when no one else was about, his cheeks reddened, his eyes gleaming with a childlike daring, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose . . .” Nathan, hearing this, turned upon the man a sharp, critical stare, and did not reply, did not even smile. For such words seemed to him blasphemous.)

  Now gradually there was financial support. There were people who volunteered to share their homes, to lend automobiles and pickup trucks, to feed Nathan and the several members of his “staff” when they traveled about. In Indian Springs he was welcome to stay for as long as he wished with the sister of a woman who had found Jesus through him at a revival meeting in Hazelton, and in Yewville he and the Lunds and two other Seekers were given the use of an entire house for a week, through the beneficence of the publisher of the Yewville Journal, who had heard of Nathan’s itinerant ministry and was very much interested in it. (Word had come to him by way of a relative in Kincardine, who claimed to have been cured spontaneously of sinus headaches during one of Nathan’s meetings.) The campaign in Yewville was so successful that it had to be extended to five days, since on the third and presumably final day so many people had turned up at the rented hall—a Legionnaires’ Hall that could accommodate only about two hundred people—that many were standing in the aisle and at the rear, and still others had to be turned away. The Yewville Journal covered the campaign in surprising detail: there were photographs of Nathanael Vickery with his arms outspread, welcoming converts; there were photographs of the newly saved, tears streaming down their faces—women, men, even children; and front-page interviews with people who claimed to have found Jesus through Nathan’s intervention and whose lives were now completely changed, and with a half-dozen people who claimed they had been cured of ailments simply because Nathan Vickery had touched them in passing. (“I kept it a secret from everybody about these terrible pains I was having in my chest, and when he called for us to come forward for Jesus I could hardly stand, I didn’t see how I could make my way through the people in the aisle to where he was, but I did, I did, and when I got there I was bawling like a baby because it was like a veil or a grimy windowpane had been taken away and I could see, I could see it wasn’t just a man standing there but Christ Himself smiling at me and welcoming me, forgiving me for everything, and he came to touch me, just laid his hands on my head, a touch light as a bird’s wing brushing against you . . . And the pains lifted at once: just went away: and it’s the Holy Spirit in my heart now instead of what was there before. And I know I have life everlasting, and that there is no need for fear, because God is with me alw
ays, and Nathan Vickery is with me always in his prayers . . .”)

  In Woodside they rented the Air Force club all for three days, and had a full crowd every evening; in St. Joachim they rented an enormous tent (used during the summer for bingo, at church picnics) and filled it every night; in Chautauqua Falls they were given the use of the Eden Pentecostal Church for several days, and were willing (though Reverend Lund had to bargain a bit) to share the collection with the pastor in an arrangement equitable to both. In the mill town of Aynsley, on the Alder River, they were warmly welcomed by the pastor of the Mount Zion Tabernacle of God in Christ, who was convinced that Nathanael Vickery was the challenge from their part of the world to all the rest of the world: that he would meet and overcome the fraudulent ministries of such hypocrites as Billy Graham and Oral Roberts and Farley Meikar, who were traitors to the Pentecostals, and who were always aspiring upward in society, greedily seeking converts among the well-to-do and the famous. Even Baptists and Methodists were too free-thinking and hypocritical, pretending to be superior to the Pentecostals, when anyone who knew his Bible could point to those passages in Mark that upheld the Pentecostal truth in defiance of all challengers . . . And it was in Aynsley that Nathan experienced his most prodigious success so far: some twenty-five or thirty members of the Mount Zion Tabernacle of God in Christ, and a half-dozen people from outside, claimed to be cured or healed of afflictions either because Nathan laid hands on them, or prayed for them, or merely looked at them. (“Nervous headaches,” painful boils, toothache, earache, rheumatic pain, cloudy vision, “lumps beneath the arm,” dizziness, a sense in the head of things pressing tight, a sense of unreality that had been plaguing the sufferer for weeks: Nathan cured them all.) The Yewville Journal covered the Aynsley campaign in almost as much detail as it had covered the Yewville campaign the year before, and other newspapers in the state reprinted portions of the story, including photographs of converts to the Seekers for Christ who claimed to have been miraculously cured. The Sunday feature of the Port Oriskany Gazette did a story on the Seekers that ran for four pages, and though Reverend Lund had been quite certain he had handled the reporter shrewdly and had been absolutely obliging in every way, the story that appeared was not altogether satisfactory: there were testimonials by the cured and the converted, and two very favorable comments on Nathan’s ministry by local pastors, but the article ended with three paragraphs of harsh and even contemptuous “assessment” by the pastor of the Paulin Memorial Presbyterian Church, whose credentials were impressive indeed—he had a number of degrees after his name and was the author of several privately printed books on religious matters and was, evidently, an expert in the spiritual life. He rejected the entire notion of “faith healing” and dismissed the Seekers as yet another splinter group among the Pentecostals, fighting for their life in 1965, anachronistic, reactionary, possibly even fraudulent. (Reverend Lund was furious, and telephoned the man without consulting Nathan, and called him a liar and a hypocrite—for he hadn’t attended a single evening of Nathan’s campaign, and had never heard the man preach!—and possibly even an agent of the Devil’s. “We want a retraction!” Lund shouted. “We want a front-page apology and a retraction or we’ll take you to court for libel!” But the Presbyterian minister merely hung up, and though Lund did consult an attorney, there was no lawsuit.)