Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Still, he was sizable, when you thought of how he’d been up in her belly, inside her. It didn’t seem possible, did it? Crammed up inside her, poor Elsa, poor silly sad homely cow. Bearing down on him, bearing down, down, they had shouted for her to Push! push! and she’d all but given up, it was so hard, so pointless, when she saw that God would take him anyway: God would reach down and snatch him up and claim him for His own. Still she had pushed at whatever it was there between her thighs, stuck up inside her, hard and cruel as a rock, fighting her all the way, since it did not wish to be born. The face above her possessed a raw, immediate beauty. Its complexion was swarthy, its eyes shadowed, its forehead strong and bold. She screamed at it and would have scratched at it, but her own eyes rolled back in her head and were lost. No! she screamed. No, no. But who could listen in all that uproar? There was the stink of perspiration, and of bowels; the stink of blood. She half thought in her delirium that the pillow beneath her head, her best goose-feather pillow, was soaked with blood and would have to be burned.

  The face had not smiled. Its lips had parted in a recognition of her pain—her terror.

  “I don’t know you,” she screamed. “Go away: I don’t know you.”

  Such a long time in the womb, such a long time pushing his way out! You couldn’t help screaming at him, could you? Five or six or seven of them, the police were told. The sheriff first, and then the police. Listening. Embarrassed at Dr. Vickery’s grief. Apologetic, and eager to get away. (Elsa was to know that look of wanting-to-get-away very well as the months passed.) Seven men, or maybe eight? Who could tell? Her testimony was confused and contradictory. She could not remember. Then she remembered—remembered something. A face, a snatch of a name, a voice. Twelve days in the hospital, unconscious much of the time, running a fever. Doped-up. In that state she could remember something, but it was like a movie she’d seen and could not quite recall. Maybe it was best to pretend? to lie? She was so sleepy, her voice fairly drawled. Saliva ran down her chin. Such a baby! She started crying for no reason at all and couldn’t stop until someone gave her an injection, and even then she didn’t stop, just fell back into sleep into a raving dream where the tears continued worse than ever.

  She woke, she yawned, she staggered from bed. What day? What month?—The algebra book on her desk, face down, the spine broken. What day? Was Sarah Grace coming this afternoon? But she had made excuses two times in a row, busy with chorus rehearsals after school, or having to do an errand for her mother. And the last time she’d come to the Vickery house she had acted stiff and rather frightened, absolutely not looking Elsa directly in the eye. A nervous gangling giggling girl whom Elsa didn’t like anyway—had never liked. “All right, then, go home, go away, goddam you,” Elsa had whispered.

  That long, long winter. Waiting. Waiting for the heartbeat, for the first kick. Working lazily on a rag quilt, all sorts of crazy colors and stripes and flowered prints, her swollen fingers moving clumsily, something to do, something not to think about—was this scarlet-orange of an old silk dress the color his scarf had been, but naturally she couldn’t have seen?—since it was so dark? Jabbing herself with the needle more than once. Dropping the thimble so that it rolled beneath the bed and disturbed the vapory beginnings of dust balls. Oh Elsa, clumsy Elsa, what’s the use? Not one but several bassinets were offered. So she and Mrs. Vickery had their pick. Rather choosy with the baby clothes and blankets that were brought over by relatives, hand-me-downs still in good condition. Elsa and her mother listened politely as Dr. Vickery gave the names of various adoption agencies in other parts of the state—some church-affiliated, some not. There was a friend of Ashton whose sister who lived over in Shaheen was desperate for a baby, but she and her husband had no luck, no luck after eight years of marriage, and the adoption agencies were so slow, and maybe—maybe they could adopt Elsa’s baby? If it was a normal baby. If it was born without any trouble.

  “If that’s the Abbott boy’s sister,” Mrs. Vickery mumbled without bothering to look around, “I’m not so sure. I’d have to think about that.”

  There were long periods of time when mother and daughter worked side by side in the kitchen, making noodle dough, rolling pie crust, preparing an ordinary evening’s dinner, and no thought of it intruded; not at all. The radio played country music beamed out from Port Oriskany and the snow blew stinging against the windows and the oven heated the room and there was no need, even, to complain about Sarah Grace or the other girls, or someone-or-other who had said something-or-other that had found its way to Mrs. Vickery’s ear. True enough, Elsa was slower than ever before, and sometimes left things half finished (once left the dust mop lying in the foyer right in front of Dr. Vickery’s door, so that he nearly stumbled over it), and Mrs. Vickery did have a sharp tongue; but they got along as well as ever. It was important to keep busy. Only when the day came to an end, and Dr. Vickery and Ashton were expected in, did the mood change and Elsa want to run upstairs and hide beneath her bedclothes and cry and cry like a baby. For, if Dr. Vickery had been out on house calls or at the hospital and they heard his car in the driveway, they glanced at each other guiltily and Elsa saw that her mother remembered—remembered everything. And betrayed her in an instant.

  Then the baby managed to get himself born, and gained weight as the weeks passed, and sometimes it was difficult for Elsa to remember whose he was and what he meant. Even what his name was (which he seemed to know—the Nathan part of it, at least). Mrs. Vickery and Aunt Hannah and Samantha Hurley, Elsa’s cousin, and Mrs. Stickney from down the road fussed and chirped over the baby, and sat in the parlor drinking tea and eating fruitcake, chattering while Elsa sat in silence staring at the scuffed toe of her shoe, and about her head flew all sorts of news—the older Preston girl was as good as engaged to Duane McCord, who was now making a great deal of money at one of the steel mills in Port Oriskany; someone’s cousin had run away to Canada to join the Air Force and was now training in England; there was to be a stepping-up of the draft before spring; one of the Ackerson boys had turned sixteen and quit school like all his brothers. Elsa blinked, and saw the sweater falling onto her; the cuff nearly poked her in the eye. Had he said anything as he tossed it onto her? Or had he said all he’d wished to say? Strange if they met someday. At a volunteer firemen’s picnic, maybe. At Wolf’s Head Lake some summer. “Why are you looking at me? I don’t know you,” Elsa mouthed. She would be carrying the baby in her arms. Curly-haired, it would be; cute as a button; dressed in blue. “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” she whispered. His eyes pleading, his mouth downturned. But no: no.

  Then again, they might have met somewhere else. Years ago. She might have been with other people; with Dr. Vickery, for instance. Remember when he’d been called out to one of the big valley farms, where a young German field hand had been hurt, and Elsa had accompanied him, and Dr. Vickery had set the poor man’s broken leg—? Sunburned, with streaked blond hair, speaking only a few coarse words of English, trying not to cry: a quite handsome young man in his late twenties. He might have been so injured, his face stretched in agony, and Elsa and her father might have met him in the rich golden sunshine of harvest. And then—

  Was Nathan a good baby, was he sweet as he seemed?—so the ladies asked. And Mrs. Vickery said he was indeed. Hardly any trouble at all. So different from her son Ashton at that age. A perfect baby, really, and so quick to catch on, you could almost see him thinking—you could almost make out his anxious garbled words. The ladies talked about other babies, all of them trouble in some way—colicky, diarrheic, “rambunctious.” Boy babies were the worst, they all agreed. Elsa and Mrs. Vickery were so fortunate. Mrs. Stickney spoke vehemently, describing in detail the uproar caused by her son during the first year of his life, and told Elsa she was very, very lucky little Nathan wasn’t like that. “Oh well,” Elsa said, pulling her thoughts together. “Well . . . if he was that bad, you know, why probably we’d give him away to someone-or-other. What do you call it? Adoption, adop
tion something. Oh yes: agency. I mean,” she said, faltering as the women stared, “I mean if he was that bad, that terrible bad, and nobody could get a night’s sleep.”

  Sometimes Reverend Sisley and his wife came to visit, and she had to be very careful what she said. It was better to say nothing. So she said nothing. Afterward Mrs. Vickery might scold (“How can you just sit there mute?—have you gone simple?”), but it was better to say nothing, or as little as possible, so she wouldn’t make a mistake. Reverend Sisley led them in prayer, read from his Bible, blessed them and accepted their blessing, and smiled at Elsa through his glasses. Sometimes his eyes were damp with tears. Elsa was, he believed, bearing up remarkably well under her burden, she was meeting her challenge head-on; Jesus must be very pleased with her. It was possible, Reverend Sisley said, that Elsa was closer to Jesus than any of them, closer even than he himself, because of her suffering and her courage and the cross she had to bear. Mrs. Vickery and Mrs. Sisley sometimes wiped at their eyes, but Elsa never did. What was the use . . . ? The first time she had met with Reverend Sisley, not long after the rape, he had acted strange with her, he’d fumbled through his Bible and avoided her eye and read passages to her she couldn’t follow, or didn’t care to follow, something about Eve and the First Sin and woman’s suffering and the serpent in the Garden and the apple and angels with swords and God’s righteousness, and she had stopped listening, and found it hard to make herself listen ever again . . . I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Yes: she found it hard to make herself listen.

  “Stop thrashing about. What’s your hurry? You’ve got all morning,” Elsa said. All morning. There’s not a single blessed thing to do but eat, is there?”

  But he was crying. He was certainly making a fuss.

  “You’ve got to wait for this to cool,” Elsa said. (She had allowed the baby food to overheat; it had been boiling furiously when she snatched the pan off the stove.) “Do you want to burn your silly little mouth?”

  On a pile of newspapers beside the stove the cat lay half asleep, looking up drowsily at the baby’s noise. It was an old tom, battered and lazy, gray-striped, with a face like an owl’s, an expression that seemed at times almost intelligent, almost critical. Sometimes Elsa dreamed about the cat instead of the baby, the old gray tom instead of Nathanael William. Did it matter? One or the other? You had to feed them both. Except the cat was cleaner, washed his own coat and took care of his own messes outside, and didn’t raise a squawk. If worse came to worst, Elsa thought, blowing on the spoonful of mashed vegetable, the cat could run off and become a hunter and eat birds and mice and rats and even squirrels, and get by, but Nathanael William would just starve to death on his own; he was so puny and helpless. Such a fretful squirming stubborn little thing! What if he crawled away somewhere, what if it was summer and Elsa took him into the woods and he got lost, or she locked him, in play, in the old smokehouse on the Arkin farm where no one went any longer, and came back home and her parents said, “Where’s Nathan?” and she looked around, surprised, and said, “Why, I don’t know: don’t you have him?” and it wouldn’t be her fault if he sickened and died if she mislaid him and couldn’t remember where . . .

  She tasted the baby food and it seemed to be cool enough now, and Nathan was fussing so, and fretting, she’d better start to feed him: so she did; but it must have been too hot because he set up a terrible yammering noise. And this was the good baby those bitches all congratulated her on, this! “Oh hush,” she said, bouncing him a little on her knee, “just hush. Why are you so noisy? What do you want? What’s the point of all your carrying-on?” Gradually he calmed down. His fat fingers plucked at the air, his tiny lips worked. Was he trying to talk to her? Trying to accuse her? She didn’t know if he was ugly or beautiful or just like everybody else’s baby. She didn’t know why he had been born—why so much commotion had been raised. She held the spoon a few inches from his wet, anxious mouth and it crossed her mind that his face had no shape at all but was just a kind of squashed-together mass of skin with the beady little eyes poked into it, and the little nose, and the mouth: it was terrifying, that face. It had put itself together out of parts of her, her blood and flesh and even her bones, and still it wanted more of her, always more. “Just what is your problem?” she asked. He fretted and blinked and squinted and struggled in her lap, making clumsy swipes at the spoon that came nowhere near the spoon but annoyed her all the same. “What do you want? Why are you so greedy? What’s the hurry? Where are you going?” She brought the spoon to his mouth and nudged his mouth open, and he managed to take part of the food, sputtering slightly. His arms flailed. He was quite strong. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Nowhere. Isn’t it nowhere? Eh?” She brought the spoon toward his mouth again, but this time, at the very last moment, pressed it against his little pug nose so the mushy food stuck to it; which made him fret all the more. He looked so silly! The next time, she brought the spoon up against his forehead and smeared a bit of the disgusting stuff on him there, and couldn’t help but giggle, he was so flush-faced and sputtering like an old man, and kicking so hard. A hot wave of sheer sensation coursed through her. Her voice rose shrilly and began to quaver. “So you’re hungry again? Always hungry! Greedy! Where do you think you’re going, kicking those legs a mile a minute like that?—You’re going nowhere, little noise-box.” Trembling, she held the tiny spoon an inch or so from his face, near his eye. He wailed, he threw himself about with an amazing spirit. If he jerked forward in his greed, he might jab himself in the eye—and whose fault would that be? Tossing himself around like that! Such a silly arrogant little noise-box, such a maddening little pig! A voice had rung out not long ago, filling the church with its certainty, its chanting truncheon-hard certainty, and Elsa had half-listened, and half-comprehended, and now the words ran through her in a furious jumble and she wanted to laugh at their craziness: And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell . . . Words, words! Such a jumble! They meant nothing, or everything; she had no time to listen; the baby was squalling louder than ever in his hunger and baffled humiliation, and she made a tiny lunge at him with the spoon, and—

  She heard her mother’s heavy, fast footsteps but it was too late. Mrs. Vickery was already in the kitchen, only a few yards away, and had already seen—had already begun shouting at her.

  V

  O Lord, You alone are the pulse beat, the arterial blood that flows in secrecy in the darkest, bluest recesses of the soul. How shall I praise You? Even as You have turned aside from me in loathing, how shall I praise You? You knew all my longings from the first; the very light that shone in my eyes was mine no longer. For it is said that as the newborn child is contained in the soul of the world, so is the world itself contained in the soul of the newborn. There is not one without the other. There is not one without the necessity of the other.

  My vision, O Lord, is greatly reduced, but I am far from blind, and there are days—mornings, especially—when my right eye is fairly strong, and I experience a painful sense of hope. It does not last, it does not last for more than a few minutes, but I am grateful for all such gifts and pray only that You will see fit to return to me.

  What was once measured in hours, and then in days—so very bitterly!—is now measured in years: Your absence. Why did you forsake me, O Lord? At the very height of my power?—the living demonstration of my love for You? And why do You continue to keep Yourself from me, despite my ceaseless prayer? Is Your loathing for me a measurement of my sin? But how specifically did I sin? And do I sin now? Is this very prayer of mine an affront to You, which I make in utter ignorance? How can I know? Who will tell me? Who is a witness? Who can comprehend?

  Who is listening?

  I endure the world, as You endured it; I dwell in the world but am
not of it. So the seasons pass. So the moon and sun spin about my head. I am aging, I am very mortal. The breath of Your love in me has become grievously faint. But I do not despair. I will never despair.

  I tremble with the desire to be a witness to Your truth, as I was once; to plunge into the corrupt and ignorant world bearing Your message. Lord, there is none like You! None! Let all the nations hear, let all of mankind praise! But they do not listen—no more now than in the time of David. They have never listened. They have most gleefully exchanged the glory of the imperishable God for representations of perishable man, of bird and beast and reptile; they willingly exchange Your truth for lies, worshiping the creature in preference to the Creator. I would raise my voice against them now, as I did in the years that have passed, but I am too weak—I am much changed, as You well know. Why do You keep Yourself from me? Is it my fate to be at home neither in the world of man nor in the realm of God?

  THE CHILD NATHANAEL dwelled with God, and there was no time when he was not with God. So it was: before his birth and afterward. He knew not the terrible loneliness that I and many others, fallen from Your regard, have known.

  The child Nathanael knew the blissful light of Your presence both before his tumultuous birth, and afterward. For many years afterward. He was Your child and in his soul there was contained the very soul of Your creation—past and future. He had no direct knowledge of You, nor did he have a word for You. His grandmother soon began to speak to him of God, and of the Son of God, and when they were alone together she would read to him from the Bible, and he listened as if enchanted, for though he had no word for You he sensed that these words were Your words and this history Your history—but he had no direct knowledge, he could not know. He knew only what remained with him of Your Kingdom of Light, of utter ecstasy preceding the bitter turmoil of birth.