Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The old Vickery house had fallen into the hands of a family with many children and was no longer the house he remembered. And the village itself seemed sadly impoverished. As he walked away, a skinny mongrel trotted along behind him, sniffing at his heels. Another dog joined it, a mongrel as well but larger, with curly black hair and long floppy ears. One of the dogs growled deep in his throat. William Vickery looked around at them nervously, but saw they were keeping their distance. The skinny dog was obviously quite old and appeared to be blind in one eye; at any rate the eye had turned a queer milky white.

  Next to the old Vickery place was a farm he half-remembered. It had belonged to a family named Bell. It seemed in better condition than the Vickery house but he had no interest in examining it closer. William, he was. William Vickery. A stranger. The Vickerys were gone, the Bells were probably gone. No one knew him. No one observed. Something had happened to him one summer day behind the Bells’ house, back by the outbuildings. He had crawled through a barbed-wire fence to get to it. Pride, someone had whispered. You are guilty of pride. But he could not remember. You must be defiled, someone had said.

  The mongrel with the black fur was barking at him now, its ears laid back. But it kept a certain distance and was obviously afraid of him.

  “Go away,” he whispered, gesturing vaguely. The dogs were not very real to him, nor was the old Bell place. The barn, the chicken coop, the white and red chickens that picked in the dirt even now, after so many years: none of these things was very real to him, or very significant. He awaited Your instructions but You were silent. What should he feel, what was the proper human response, what, precisely, should he remember? Shreds of himself were everywhere in this village, in this landscape, but he could not assemble them, could not bring them together. Was it possible he had been born in that falling-down house a hundred yards away? And his mother had nursed him there for a while, and then had turned from him, had wept and run from him, and had never come back. Her brother Ashton Vickery too had been driven from home. He had fled, had returned briefly and disappeared again, lost, a wreck of a man, smelling of cheap whiskey; it was not possible to believe he had once been young. They weren’t really my children, Mrs. Vickery had said. Only you. God sent me only you.

  In that ruined house Mrs. Vickery had loved him. And his grandfather too had loved him. And had died. You dwelt with them for a while and then passed on and now You were nowhere near. What did it mean? What should he feel? He remembered how You had filled him at all times, how You had whispered in secret to him, telling him things no one else could know. One summer day You brought him to a small barn behind this house, You forced him to crawl beneath a barbed-wire fence, You were pitiless, terrible in Your wisdom, and something had happened, something had transpired, he had been broken in utter humility and degradation and You had claimed him then as Your own: but he could not remember clearly and had no real conviction that it had happened to him.

  My child, You had whispered, gloating.

  But perhaps that had not been William Vickery, who stood now in this place. And perhaps it had not really been You.

  III

  The pavement, the cobblestones, are splattered with sudden angry pellets of rain. An impatient look to the river: white-tipped tongues rising and heaving and slapping. My shoes are wet. My cheeks are streaming. I am not angry, that is the river’s mood; I stand here broken and acquiescent and waiting.

  As I have been waiting for years.

  Nathanael that was, and is no more: William that was not, and is; has one given birth to the other, or are we brothers . . . ? The birth cord that linked us was stretched thin, thinner and thinner until, like a thread, it snapped, and now there is oblivion on both sides, as if You in Your invisibility, in Your secret wisdom, closed above our heads Your great darkling wings and all was erased. Or nearly so.

  It has been many years.

  If necessary I lie to them about You. And Nathanael. I tell them in their own neutral tones that You were a delusion and Nathanael mad: and, disappointed, halfway suspicious, they are forced to accept my judgment . . . But tell us, others say, slyly, greedily; tell us about God. About Jesus, the Son of God. And the person you were: you were, weren’t you, one of the Chosen . . . ? A delusion, a dream, I tell them gently, with the tractable smile that performs such feats, such small tidy wonders, here in the world.

  Time, that was to be no more, endures. Continues. Nor am I out of it.

  Though in Your time not a day—not a moment!—has passed. (For I vividly remember that birth, the flashes of light assaulting my teary eyes, the salt taste of blood, the water that, lapping wildly against the white porcelain of the basin, took on the hue, subtly, delicately, of a somewhat turgid blue sky that was—or am I mistaken?—glimpsed in a mirror, obliquely through a mirror; I remember the birth as if it were only this morning. Such is Your gift, which I retain still though You have departed.)

  Man’s hunger for God, I might tell them, the curious greedy disbelieving ones, cannot be satisfied by earthly food. Don’t speak to me of “human” love. Don’t speak to me of “making a place for oneself” here. It is quite pointless. It is not even cruel: only pointless.

  I would ask them only—Am I a brother to anyone in this agony? In this terrible loneliness? For it is a question I cannot ask You. It is a question You—even if You would speak—cannot answer. Behold me O Lord, I mouth to the petulant waves, for I am one of those who has been cast down; who has been broken and obliterated. And in whose obliteration even You have been extinguished.

  So I stand here at the railing. Waiting. My lips moving with an old prayer. There is a low dull droning from the edge of the earth, where many winds converge. I am shameless. Look at my cheeks streaming tears. I am in exile, I am proud and broken and absurd, and so shabby it is quite natural that people stare and children jeer—whom else can they mock, if not me? They know that my task is to become one of them, and that I have failed—more, I have failed even to mourn my loss. It is only You I mourn. It is only You I know. They do not exist, any more than Nathanael Vickery exists.

  So I wait. I am quite patient. The river’s violence is not my own. I expect nothing. I hope for nothing. I will stir no one to expectation or hope, still less to hysteria; my voice is still hoarse, the back of my mouth scrapes raw if I lift my voice above a whisper. So it is, and evidently must be. In Your justice. In your infinite mercy.

  And Your playfulness—

  For I came upon, just last week, a tabloid newspaper of the kind that is sold in drugstores and grocery stores, and often left on park benches or, partly crumpled, in trash baskets, and my attention was drawn to a three-inch headline UNDERGROUND RELIGION FLOURISHES and a somewhat blurred photograph of a man in an ankle-length gown standing on a platform with his arms raised and his head thrown back, his expression rapturous. For a terrible moment I thought the man was myself. Then I saw that it must be another preacher, a much younger man with wild shoulder-length hair, who stood with his legs parted and his knees slightly bent and his long, thin fingers stretched wide, so wide that one would think he must be experiencing great pain. A spotlight behind the preacher created an aureole about his head—a fortuitous effect!—that gave him an uncanny look while it blurred and softened his features. I held the newspaper close to my face. It trembled slightly; I held it firmer. And after a long moment I saw that the preacher was myself. Or Brother Nathan.

  Yet we looked in no way alike. It was not even possible that we were brothers. Yet there was, there is, no we: there is only an I. My vision cannot be double, I have not the anodyne of madness . . . The young man in the gown, Brother Nathan who is no more. Yet evidently exists: in fact, flourishes. I skimmed the smudgy dancing print to learn that the Church of the Seekers for Christ is rumored to be active on the West Coast, despite official pronouncements that it had been disbanded and its property and assets seized after innumerable legal entanglements and a declaration of bankruptcy by its board of directors some years ago. (There h
ad been, according to the disjointed article, a number of embezzlement charges brought against high-ranking Seekers, and more than a hundred lawsuits, most of which were settled out of court.)

  But the most extraordinary news was the fact that Nathan Vickery still heads his church.

  According to a Seeker identified only as Brother Donald, Vickery maintains absolute authority over the Seekers and, though necessarily in exile, conducts services regularly for a “small, select group of disciples who have proven themselves worthy.” These services are clandestine, of course, kept secret from all nonbelievers, since the Church of the Seekers for Christ has many enemies who wish to destroy it. “Our Master is in exile, not in hiding,” Brother Donald said, “because of the many vicious threats against his life. But he has not turned away from us. He is still our Master here on earth, and our pathway to the Lord.” But where is the commune, reporters inquired, is it somewhere in California—? But Brother Donald declined to answer. He was described as a tall, exuberant, friendly man with a firm, powerful handshake, eager to talk—to talk for hours, it seems—about Brother Nathan and the Church of the Seekers for Christ, though without revealing any secrets. He is himself head of a small Seekers’ house in Los Angeles, an “independent” community formed after the breakup of the original organization some years ago. Is there any possibility, reporters asked, that Brother Nathan would come out of exile? And speak once again to the entire nation? “We have only a few more years,” Brother Donald said, “before the end. It’s coming: it’s on the way. And about six or eight months before that time the Master plans to reappear and lead his people out of bondage. I mean bondage to illusion, to the material world, to sin. If he appears that close to Armageddon the police state will not have time enough to apprehend him. And if they try to arrest him, and persecute him, as they did last time, we have more sophisticated means now of dealing with them. I bring not peace but a sword, Christ told us. The police state has been in the hands of the Devil for the past seventy-five or eighty years . . . All this will come to pass around 1982, or 1985. Only the Master knows for certain.”

  The vision in my eye faltered as I read. On an inside page I discovered still another photograph of myself, on another raised platform, and as the photograph was taken I had evidently whirled about violently so that droplets of perspiration flew off me and were caught strangely in the glare of the spotlight. The caption beneath this photograph claimed it had been taken only a few days before by a photographer who had infiltrated one of the clandestine Seekers’ ceremonies, despite rumors that nonbelievers were dealt with harshly.

  The man in the photograph was Brother Nathan. But the photograph must have been taken years ago . . .

  In the end I stuffed the newspaper back into the trash basket and walked away. And tried to put Your playfulness out of my mind.

  STILL, I AM faithful. I am Yours.

  Will You not whisper unto my soul, as You once did, I am thy salvation . . . ? For Your cruelty has not broken me, nor has your inscrutable mercy; and even Your irony—which I could not have anticipated, in that place long ago where light did not hurt and the taste of blood did not sting—has not discouraged me. Death has no appeal; nor has suicide; for if I be washed in the Blood of the Lamb but it is my own blood, it will not be cleansing, it will not be according to Your design.

  So I wait for You, and will wait the rest of my life.

  About the Author

  JOYCE CAROL OATES has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestsellers The Accursed and The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  With Shuddering Fall (1964)

  A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)

  Expensive People (1968)

  them (1969)

  Wonderland (1971)

  Do with Me What You Will (1973)

  The Assassins (1975)

  Childwold (1976)

  Son of the Morning (1978)

  Unholy Loves (1979)

  Bellefleur (1980)

  Angel of Light (1981)

  A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

  Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

  Solstice (1985)

  Marya: A Life (1986)

  You Must Remember This (1987)

  American Appetites (1989)

  Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)

  Black Water (1992)

  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)

  What I Lived For (1994)

  Zombie (1995)

  We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)

  Man Crazy (1997)

  My Heart Laid Bare (1998)

  Broke Heart Blues (1999)

  Blonde (2000)

  Middle Age: A Romance (2001)

  I’ll Take You There (2002)

  The Tattooed Girl (2003)

  The Falls (2004)

  Missing Mom (2005)

  Black Girl / White Girl (2006)

  The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)

  My Sister, My Love (2008)

  Little Bird of Heaven (2009)

  Mudwoman (2012)

  The Accursed (2013)

  Carthage (2014)

  The Sacrifice (2015)

  A Book of American Martyrs (2017)

  Copyright

  SON OF THE MORNING. Copyright © 1978 by Joyce Carol Oates. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Steve Attardo

  Cover artwork © Pierre Mornet

  Digital Edition JULY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279572-4

  Version 05252018

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279570-0

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