Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The skein of words connects me to You (or to the memory of You), and I myself am the word made flesh, stubbornly living though my reason for living has fled.

  The composition of this long, torturous prayer is exhausting, and yet I cannot give up. I want to know. Were You indeed present in the form of the Holy Spirit when Nathan performed his many cures?—his “miraculous” cures? Did You instruct him in everything? Was it Your power that healed his slashed hand, and allowed him to rise from a hospital bed (in the winter of 1969 he was badly ill with pleurisy) in order to continue his Crusade? Did You pulse and flow into him, and breathe with his eager lungs, and fill him like warm honey to his very fingertips? Was it Your passion that made his voice tremble, Your uncanny beauty that made so many of his followers fall in love with him . . . ? If so, You had no mercy: no pity.

  Japheth saw, Japheth was a witness.

  “GOD EXISTS,” JAPHETH went about muttering, in a state of almost continual excitement. “God exists. Exists.” He found it difficult to sit still long enough to eat; there was always something to do, a telephone call to make, mail orders to send out, a consultation with the printer or with one of the secretaries. Though his reaction immediately following one of Nathan’s services was never as extreme as that of Nathan himself—for it wasn’t uncommon that Nathan would lose seven or eight pounds in a few hours and collapse into a deep coma afterward and not wake for a full day—he was nevertheless profoundly affected: his skin broke out in angry red rashes, his bowels writhed, his teeth chattered with the exhilaration of plans for the next service.

  Now there were church groups and even secular organizations eager to bring Nathan Vickery to them, now there were fifteen and twenty-five and forty and seventy Seekers’ communities springing to life, some of them no more than a few friends who happened to have been converted together, some of them genuine communities with houses and land and dizzyingly ambitious plans. (Under Nathan Vickery’s general direction, and Reverend Lund’s meticulous guidance, the Seekers’ communities were established in order to provide a place of sanctuary for believers: no one could move into one of the houses without surrendering all the debris of his past life, including savings, property, personal attachments, habits involving sexual behavior, or alcohol, or drugs; and of course all emotional, assertive, non-Christian behavior had to be given up.) Now there were accountants and attorneys and tax specialists; and a staff hired to deal with the press and with public relations in general. (For a while Japheth headed this staff, and throughout his relationship with the Seekers he met regularly with press reporters and photographers, who seemed to appreciate his quick-witted eloquence and his disdain of solemnity, and were inclined to be merciful to him. With one part of his mind he despised publicity, but with another he appreciated the soundness of Reverend Lund’s strategy. “You can’t control the bastards by turning your back,” Lund said, “but you can halfway control them by meeting them face to face.” Japheth became professional enough to see the interviews as games from which he sometimes emerged victorious and sometimes emerged looking like a fool. And since Nathan never condescended to speak with interviewers or, as time went by, with people from the “outside” at all, it was necessary that someone intelligent take charge. Let not then your good be evil spoken of: thus did Japheth mutter at Nathan’s chaste back.)

  Now there were dismaying entanglements: a lawsuit initiated by the family of a cancer patient who allegedly broke off her cobalt treatments after having been “cured” by Nathan, and who subsequently died within a few months; and though it was protested that Nathan had not pronounced the woman cured, and that the Seekers hadn’t even a record of her conversion, the case went to court nonetheless. (I believe it is unsettled still, awaiting appeal on one level or another.) And astonishing windfalls: a tax-free inheritance of half a million dollars from the estate of an eccentric philanthropist who, as far as anyone knew, had never even heard Nathan preach . . . There were gifts of jewelry and insurance policies, houses, automobiles and trucks and vans, even offers of partnerships in businesses; and as always there were gifts of cash, made outright, without requests for receipts.

  FOR BY GRACE are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.

  So taught Japheth’s Master; and in the early seventies it seemed as if everyone was hungry for this teaching. Salvation had nothing to do with social responsibility or action of any kind; it had nothing to do with human relationships; the believer’s allegiance was to God, and God was all in all, absorbing everything into Him so that nothing remained.

  It astonished Japheth that more and more young people of the middle class were attending Seekers’ meetings, even when they were held in churches and auditoriums and sports arenas many miles from suburban communities or university campuses. Haggard smiling boys with their hair tied back in pony tails, girls with their long straight hair falling to their waists, in scruffy khaki windbreakers or ankle-length capes or handwoven Indian shirts, wearing sandals or costly leather boots: Japheth picked them out at once, the very first night they appeared, their eyes already glassy with a certain hard, willful desire before they even heard Nathan Vickery speak. Japheth was somewhat disturbed. He could not really comprehend what it might mean. These were his people, in a sense; younger than he, but sharing certain economic and social and political concerns; and of course they were well-educated. At least they had been educated at considerable expense.

  “Do you realize who these people are?” Japheth asked his associates. “These young people? That group that came in the van all the way from New York City?”

  Of Nathan Vickery’s closest associates, only the printer Donald Beck, who had attended college for two years, had a background comparable to Japheth’s. His father was said to be an executive with an insurance company in Indiana, and Japheth gathered that Donald had attended an Eastern preparatory school. But when, in the presence of Reverend Lund, or another staff member, Japheth allowed himself to make certain clever remarks (for he was sometimes maddeningly frustrated by the obtuseness of his associates), Donald merely smiled and blinked at him, seemingly without comprehension. He was a strong-bodied, shy man in his late thirties, who wore his thinning blond hair combed back away from his forehead so that the strong ascetic bones of his head were prominent. He spoke infrequently, and always in a subdued voice. Japheth had had little success in becoming acquainted with him, for Donald evaded his questions, and it wasn’t possible to know whether Donald had been married or not—it wasn’t possible to know, even, whether he might still be married. He was very religious: when he wasn’t working he stayed apart from the others, reading the Bible and praying; it was said that he kept the same general hours Nathan Vickery did, and tried to fast as he did, though extreme bouts of fasting were more or less forbidden in the Seekers’ communities. (After a great deal of worry and discussion they had had to adopt this “law”—a nineteen-year-old girl had collapsed from malnutrition a year before, and there were bizarre episodes of hallucinations and paranoid terror in a number of the homes.) Donald Beck, like many of the other church members, had appeared one day out of nowhere, eager to hand over to the Seekers all his money and material goods and to volunteer his skills in exchange for the privilege of living in the community. He had been drawn to the Seekers in a fairly typical way—struck by a poster announcing Nathan Vickery’s imminent Crusade for Souls (in the small city of Dunes, near Port Oriskany), fascinated by the sharp bony planes of Nathan’s face, his stern half-smile, the frosty certainty of his eyes; and troubled as well by the small headlines beneath the photograph, What Does It Truly Mean To Be Washed In The Blood Of The Lamb? and Are You A Seeker For Christ Without Knowing It? It had never occurred to him that there might be a truth about himself that had not been revealed to him; he had always found it difficult to believe that the world’s—and his family’s—assessment of him was just. And so he had gone to Nathan’s service, and within half an hour something extraordinary had taken place in his soul
, and he found himself weeping as though his heart were broken, on his knees, his head bowed before Nathan Vickery’s warm, low, richly vibrant voice. When Nathan touched him, pressing down firmly on both his shoulders, he experienced a violent, almost convulsive shock: he nearly lost consciousness: and afterward he realized that at Nathan’s touch something had rushed out of him, a queer substanceless yet writhing, stinging thing, in shape rather like an eel; he had known, even before one of the Seekers explained, that the thing had been a demon.

  The torment of his former life, the relative aimlessness and insecurity, the frequent half-wishes for death, had been caused all along by this poisonous spirit, which he had sheltered without knowing it; which, perhaps, he had even defended in his stubborn pride in his own self-reliance. Now all that was changed. All that was past. He lived no longer in and for himself, but only for Christ, and for Nathan Vickery, and for his fellow Seekers. (He even wore, tight about his left arm a few inches above the wrist, a braid of dark hair, which was usually kept hidden by his sleeve: which Japheth assumed to his dismay to be Nathan Vickery’s hair. But how the man had obtained it without Nathan’s knowledge he could not imagine . . . For Nathan would certainly forbid such behavior if he knew.)

  When Japheth brought up the subject of the young people, Donald Beck was strangely offended. He stared at his hands, he began to crack his knuckles unconsciously, he would not meet Japheth’s eye. “There’s something in the air, something new and not yet formed,” Japheth said eagerly, “a kind of miracle . . . An entirely new type of Christian.”

  Donald merely made a guttural sound, vaguely affirmative. But he continued to frown and would not look up.

  “When Reverend Lund gets back from Cleveland we must talk to him. We must make him understand how important this is. Instead of booking Nathan in the small towns and the usual places, he should be arranging for him to visit cities, particularly cities with universities. A new plan of attack is called for, don’t you think?” Japheth asked. His anxiety about even the simplest conversations had become rather amusing: he could see how absurd it was for him to be trembling and perspiring, as if he were imploring Nathan Vickery himself to take him seriously, and not merely Donald Beck. But tremble he did, and it took an effort for him to keep his teeth from chattering. “It’s so important that Reverend Lund understand. He’s an excellent businessman, I acknowledge that, but he’s narrow-minded, and obtuse, and he has never seemed to trust me—not even to accept me. Brothers in Christ, we are! Brothers! But he pretends to ignore my suggestions, and then a few weeks later he implements them without giving me credit, and Nathan would naturally think that he—Reverend Lund—thought them up. And I hardly want to degrade myself by telling Nathan what the situation really is . . . What do you think, Donald?”

  After a pause the older man glanced uneasily at Japheth and said, so softly that Japheth could hardly hear, something about the commandment of Our Lord: That ye love one another.

  “What? Oh yes. Yes,” Japheth said. “But at the same time—I think it’s sometimes necessary to—You see, Donald, we may be on the brink of a new era. Not just the Seekers: but the nation itself. The young people who were at the service last night—I was talking to them for quite a while afterward—they’re profoundly disillusioned with the secular life, not just with their parents—they rejected them years ago—but with the secular world altogether, with politics and social action and getting things done. One of them was a law student at Columbia, and he told me he’d been on the edge for months, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, or worse, and he’d heard of the Seekers from someone else and thought we might possibly be the answer. He dropped out of law school and is living on a farm in upstate New York and—Well, I don’t want to get carried away,” Japheth said, laughing, troubled by Donald Beck’s impassive face, “I just want to explain—You see, these are wonderful young people, intelligent and well-educated and sensitive—they’ve had all they ever required in terms of material possessions, and their parents have loved them—for the most part, I mean—they’ve done everything for them, anyway. And so—And so it would be a marvelous thing if we brought the faith to them, if we made a real effort to win their souls—Don’t you think?”

  “I think,” Donald said slowly, gripping his hands together tightly, and managing a timid glance at Japheth’s face, “that it doesn’t matter to Christ or to Our Lord or to Nathan who people are. There is neither rich nor poor, nor . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Japheth said, hardly listening in his excitement. “But for the first time Nathan seems to be drawing people from the middle class, the educated class—For the first time since I’ve been working with him there seems to be the possibility of—of something wonderful, something marvelous—a revolution of consciousness! And we might be—Nathan might be—at the very center of it: don’t you understand how urgent it is?”

  Donald shook his head, frowning. “All things unfold as they must,” he said.

  “But at last he seems to be reaching out to the kind of people who scorned him in the past.”

  “He,” Donald whispered. “Who do you mean by he? You shouldn’t talk about Nathan Vickery like that: not he.”

  Japheth stared at him. Donald was deeply tanned from working in the sun, and the whites of his eyes appeared to be unusually white. Where Japheth was quivering with passion, Donald was rigid, as if he did not dare allow himself to move; even his restless hands were stilled.

  “You have no right,” Donald whispered, “to speak of Nathan Vickery like that. To degrade him like that. As if he wasn’t here with us, as if his spirit wasn’t here.” He glanced about the room, as if to seek out Nathan. “You have no right to make plans for the future in his name. Not even to think of them. For all things are done in Nathan’s name in their own time, as we’ve been told. And the Kingdom of God is close at hand: you know that. The church can take only so many souls with it to heaven, there isn’t room for everyone, the Chosen of the Lord number no more than a hundred and forty-four thousand, you know that . . .”

  Japheth swallowed uneasily.

  “. . . and the adulation of the world is vanity,” Donald continued in his slow, groping voice. “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”

  After a long moment Japheth began again, though without as much confidence, to explain that the United States might be on the brink of an entirely new consciousness: a revolution in Christ’s name. And after the United States . . . ? Possibly the entire world.

  Donald Beck stared, as if not recognizing him.

  “It’s my personal theory that—that the younger generation is turning aside from material things,” Japheth said, “and—and from certain of the old cultural ideals—they were originally Greek ideals, I believe—the desirability of combat, of strife and competition and endless contests—the worship of masculine virtue—virility—I think we’ve come to the point in the evolution of our species where we’re ready to—to make a leap to another—The cruelty of the Hellenistic ideal has had its day, after so many centuries: at last we can be brothers and sisters in Christ! At last—”

  Without speaking, Donald Beck rose and left the room. And Japheth remained where he was, staring after him.

  SOME DAYS LATER Beck took him aside and informed him that he, Donald, had been praying for him almost constantly, that his troubled soul be at peace. “There is something poisonous in you,” the man said frankly, “something restless and grasping and evil. You don’t realize it because it’s so close to you. You’ve lived with it all your life. But even after Nathan Vickery has accepted you and taken you in, you’re not whole, you’re not one of the Chosen . . . So I’ve prayed for you. And I’ve asked others to pray for you too.”

  Japheth managed to stammer something. “What? Why . . . ?” But the man did not hear, or did not choose to hear; he simply walked away.

  “You bastard,” Japheth muttered.

  And his bowels ached with hatred, and his ey
es filled quickly with tears.

  X

  If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple . . . !

  So he cried out to the multitude, his arms held wide. White-gowned, impatient, he called to them in a half-wailing, seductive voice, his hair swinging savagely about his face. If any man come to me, and hate not . . . he cannot be my disciple. All were silent, listening. The electric organ was stilled, the choir was stilled, as if in terror of his passion; everyone sat hushed before him, each alone with him and his voice. Was he angry, his eyes flashing, his hands closed into fists? Or did he tremble with desire for them, in a strange half-fainting trance?

  Come forward, he pleaded. Come forward.

  The white robe was dazzling. The voice lifted higher and higher, and dropped suddenly, richly commanding. Come forward, come forward and make your commitment to Jesus.

  As he spoke they began to stir, and then to rise, some of them doubtfully, fearfully, making their way to the aisles. Staring at him, mesmerized by his face and his ceaselessly moving arms, there were those who stumbled on the stadium steps, and had to catch themselves by taking hold of the railing. Awake. Now. Come forward. Tonight. Now. Jesus is waiting. I am waiting. Now.

  A lone airplane flew overhead, quite high. Nathan’s voice pierced its familiar companionable drone, amplified many times. The sick-at-heart. The weary. The lonely. You who hear my voice and would resist, groveling in your skin. You too must awake: must come forward. Jesus is waiting. Jesus is impatient. He has been waiting so many, many centuries, waiting for you to cast off the bonds of sin, to step forward into his embrace . . . ! Those who have suffered for the sake of righteousness, and those who have suffered for the sake of sin: awake now and come forward before the Lord God turns His wrath upon you. Do you hear? Do you understand? I am the Lord God beseeching you through the person of Nathanael Vickery . . . I am the Lord God crying out to you to come home, to come home.