Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  So it was chatter, chatter. Her hands flying about, her fingernails painted bright red.

  In Nathanael’s presence she was more fluttery than ever, though she rarely addressed the child himself. (Mrs. Vickery noted how the boy stared at his mother, his small lips pursed together: judging her, was he? Wanting no part of her.) She inquired after Marsena people, and certain patients of Dr. Vickery’s (“Oh, is poor Mr. Donner still alive?” she once asked, wide-eyed), and Vickerys and Sayers generally, and of course Ashton (who so rarely wrote, and when he did, had nothing to say: complaints about the food, mainly, and his wet feet, and an ingrown toenail, and of Negro soldiers he’d encountered in England whose behavior was such, he said, that it had to be seen to be believed—wait till those niggers got shipped back home!), and how the house was holding up, and the outbuildings, and Dr. Vickery’s old Ford, and not until she’d run through a list of silly items did she think to inquire about her own son: who was not her son any longer.

  “Well—isn’t he looking fine!” she would exclaim.

  “He should,” Mrs. Vickery said. “He eats everything set before him, and doesn’t fuss, and is his grandma’s good, good boy. Aren’t you?”

  The child nodded shyly.

  “He’s my good boy,” Mrs. Vickery said.

  But Elsa was not her good girl, not any longer; no daughter of hers, really; it was a relief when she left on Sunday evening and the house was quiet again. Hairpins in the bathroom, a smell of cosmetics and cheap cologne, Nathanael somewhat edgier and jumpier than usual—that was all. “She isn’t Elsa any longer,” Mrs. Vickery told Thaddeus rather bitterly. “I don’t even know her.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Thaddeus said.

  But she knew what she knew. Though she didn’t say anything to the boy, didn’t bring up the subject of his mother at all. Why, when it wasn’t necessary? When the boy rarely brought up the subject himself?

  Rarely asked about Elsa, and never—wasn’t it odd, wasn’t it a relief—never about his father.

  “That’s a blessing at least,” everyone told Mrs. Vickery.

  VI

  Of the many signs and wonders attending Nathanael Vickery’s life, there were seven revelations of extraordinary magnitude: seven times when God seized him in the flesh: seven small crucifixions, from which he recovered with increasing difficulty. The last and most terrifying was made to him at the age of thirty-four, when he addressed a multitude of over one hundred thousand people in the fairgrounds at Patagonia Springs; the first, and gentlest, was made to him at the age of five.

  AT THAT TIME there lived in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains, some eighteen miles north of Marsena, a young Pentecostal preacher named Micah—Brother Micah Tannebaum. He had married at the age of seventeen, and his wife, who was a year younger than he, died giving birth to a stillborn infant; not long afterward Micah was called to God and commanded to spread the Gospel according to God’s instructions. Which he did, declaring himself self-ordained: Brother Micah Tannebaum of the Mt. Lambeth Tabernacle of Jesus Christ Risen.

  Working alone one summer he refashioned an old one-room schoolhouse, converting it into a church with a pine pulpit and rows of chairs in place of pews. He painted most of the outside of the wood-frame building, and fixed the crumbling chimney, and mowed the overgrown weeds; he even laid linoleum tile on three-quarters of the floor. A tall, broad-shouldered, slow-speaking young man whom everyone pitied at first, and then came to admire, he drove tirelessly about the countryside, even up into the mountains, recruiting Christians for the Mt. Lambeth Tabernacle. He never argued, never raised his voice. It was simply that the Holy Spirit had descended upon him one midday and bade him repent of his personal sins and accept Jesus Christ as his Saviour and then to spread the Gospel to all quarters of the earth—to those who would listen, and to those who would not. His manner was simple and direct. In front of a group he often became rather emotional—“breathed upon” by the Holy Spirit, he called it—but in ordinary discourse he was unemphatic, good-humored, rather charming. He rejected absolutely the fire-and-brimstone preachers who tried to terrify good honest Christians, just as he rejected the “big city” preachers who had drifted too far from the Bible and pulled things out of newspapers and the radio to talk about—even Methodists and Baptists, some of them, who were becoming corrupted by the times. Christ’s teachings, he said, were clear enough. God’s will was clear enough. For the most part men were confused and ignorant rather than evil—the men he’d encountered in his lifetime, anyway; they only needed awakening and instruction, and their salvation would be guaranteed. If the Devil was loosed from the bowels of the earth, going about his destructive work, causing crop failures, armies of cornborers, ice storms in early September, tornadoes, deformed births, the war in Europe and in the Pacific, all this rationing and scarcity and inflated prices—if the Devil was moving freely among mankind, why, the thing to do was meet him head-on: acknowledge his presence but show no fear. Resist temptation, but more than that—actively confront the Devil and drive him away.

  Within a few years Brother Micah’s congregation consisted of between fifty and sixty full-time members. And of course there were often visitors at his church, since it was known that he performed miracles.

  ONE FRIDAY EVENING in midsummer, not many days after the fifth birthday of her grandson, Opal Vickery took the boy with her to a prayer meeting at Mt. Lambeth. She bathed the child and dressed him with care in the navy blue suit she had made for him, a replica of his grandfather’s only decent suit, though without the vest; she bathed herself and powdered her large, clumsy, vulnerable body and put on several dresses before she decided upon the right one—a flowered cotton print, predominately white, with long sleeves and a full, swirling skirt. Despite the heat she pulled on cotton stockings, tugging and stretching until the seams were straight. Her skin grew ruddier, her breath scant.

  “If you come across any of those three-inch screws,” Dr. Vickery said as they were leaving, “you remember to get me some, will you? Because I—”

  “Yes, of course. Yes,” Opal said, fairly dragging Nathanael out the door. The Bells’ car was parked in their driveway; they must hurry; it was already past six o’clock. And she did not want the child to blurt out innocently that they wouldn’t be going shopping in town at all—they were going to a prayer meeting up in the hills. (Dr. Vickery must not know: he would have been scornful, and possibly rather angry. He had been disapproving of the Baptists for some years now, having stopped attending church entirely; but his attitude toward the Pentecostals was brutally comtemptuous. Nor did Opal want people in Marsena to know where the Bells were taking her, for what if word got back to Reverend Sisley?)

  So it was with a sense of daring, of illicit adventure, that she settled into the back seat of the Bell’s car, trembling with her own boldness.

  The dense layered sky above the mountains cracked and appeared to shift with sudden flashes of heat lightning: soundless and lovely.

  “Look!” the child whispered, pointing.

  “That’s summer lightning,” Opal said. “That’s no danger.”

  “Is that where we’re going? Up there?” he asked.

  She peered at him with a mother’s keen, critical eye, and saw that he wasn’t afraid; not at all. His skin glowed and his fine dark eyes were brighter than usual, as if he felt, as she did, the excitement, the daring, the possible recklessness . . . And Mrs. Bell, half-turned to them, was recounting in her flat, nasal, bland voice certain events that had occurred in Brother Micah’s ministry thus far that she did not necessarily believe, nor did she disbelieve. Her husband Carlson, behind the wheel, kept nodding emphatically. He interrupted her at one point to say: “It’s in the Book. Ain’t it? For anybody to read that’s got a brain. Our Lord Jesus Christ appears to His disciples, after His death, and He says . . . He promises . . . Something about devils, casting out, and laying hands on the sick . . . laying hands on the sick: healing: ain’t that so? I don’t have the
words set down but they go like that. Ain’t it so?”

  “Nathanael knows the passage, don’t you?” Opal said.

  The child, who had memorized many verses of the Gospels, lowered his gaze and did not reply. Opal touched his stiff little shoulder. She saw that his hands were clenched together—was he shy of the Bells?—most likely, though they were next-door neighbors—but why must he be shy? It was within the boy’s power, Opal believed, to conquer his own childish fears. She loved his gentleness, his gracefulness, his sweet, preoccupied moods—so wonderfully different from the little hellion her own son had been, and from the rowdy unthinking ordinary children of her neighbors and relatives; at the same time she was passionately proud of him when he managed to recite, as he did upon occasion, passages from the Bible. (He had memorized Chapters 1, 6, 8, 12, most of 14, and most of 18 and 19, of the Gospel of St. John, and had brought pride to the Marsena Baptists by winning for their Sunday school first place in a county-wide competition only a few weeks earlier; and he knew many other passages besides, particularly those that had struck Opal as the most moving and the most significant.)

  “Don’t you know it, honey?” she whispered.

  Carlson Bell was driving along the narrow, unpaved road with a caution Opal thought exaggerated. She was impatient to get to Mt. Lambeth, a small settlement on the north fork of the Eden River that she hadn’t seen more than a half-dozen times in the past thirty years, since it was out of the way and there was no reason, ordinarily, for her to go there. Dr. Vickery journeyed up there occasionally, on medical business—routine physical examinations and ear-nose-throat and dental check-ups at the single public school—and nearly all he ever had to say about that part of the country was that the war had hit it even harder than Marsena: a pitiful number of young men killed or wounded or lost, and a considerable number moved away, probably permanently, to work at those high-paying jobs in the defense plants in Port Oriskany and other cities on the lake. “The countryside is emptying out,” he grieved often, blaming the Government that was shifting everything about from under their feet and had no heart for the poor farmers who could barely make a living unless they owned enormous farms and could afford to install fancy machinery; blaming the federal and state and local politicians; blaming history itself. Opal only half attended to her husband’s gloomy prophecies now, having lost interest—or was it faith—in his reading of the universe; how had she ever, as a young girl, believed in him so uncritically, so proudly? (And during the long war years she had refused to talk with him about the “progress” of the war, had refused to listen to the radio broadcasts he was so addicted to, and had turned her gaze aside from the newspapers and magazines that dwelled so gluttonously upon destruction, as if God had not provided for His own children all along: as if these half-dozen years of evil were very important in the light of eternity. She cared for her son Ashton, of course. She prayed for him daily, sometimes hourly. And yet even he came to seem curiously unreal . . . It was as though by running off and enlisting before the Government called him, without a word to his parents and certainly without a care for their feelings, he had somehow abdicated his blood connection with them.)

  Yes, they were a disappointment—her husband, her son, and her daughter.

  But as Mr. Bell drove slowly along a road that was hardly more than a bumpy cow lane, raising enormous clouds of dust behind them, she heard herself echoing Thaddeus: “This part of the country is emptying out, isn’t it? Such a pity . . .”

  Rocky hills, small scrappy farms, houses little more than shanties with tar-paper roofs and bales of hay dragged up against their foundations for warmth; barbed-wire fences badly in need of repair, scrawny gray sheep, the texture of poverty, of futility; a pity. Strange, that it should be surrounded by such physical beauty—such blatant, indifferent physical beauty. Most of the Chautauqua Mountains were pine-covered, but the two highest peaks, Mt. Ayr and Mt. Lambeth, rose delicately snow-capped, distant and glorious in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun. “Praise God for that,” Opal thought.

  Mrs. Bell was speaking of a rumored case of healing Brother Micah had evidently performed. He had laid his hands on someone’s head—and terrible migraine pains had disappeared.

  “And a ringing in the ears as well,” Carlson Bell said.

  “Well,” Opal said slowly.

  “And more than that, Opal. Much more,” Mrs. Bell said fervently.

  Opal stared at her neighbor’s creased, smiling face, and at Carlson Bell’s thin profile. She knew Carlson had not been well this past year. He had aged, hadn’t he?—looked eighty years old, though he couldn’t be much more than sixty-five—tried to keep up his robust, slightly cranky manner, but there was no disguising the sallowness of his skin and the fact that he had lost a considerable amount of weight. Leah Ackerson said she’d heard it was a tumor under his arm, draining away all his strength, but Violet Preston said it was “blood trouble,” and naturally Opal could not question Amanda Bell about it; though the women had lived next door to each other for decades, there were certain matters they never discussed. (Anything to do with money, or trouble with family members or relatives: anything that was a blow to pride.) Nor could Opal question her own husband about Carlson because he never spoke of his patients’ troubles. He never violated their privacy, as he chose to put it. It was like pulling teeth to get out of him the mere fact that someone-or-other had come by the office, though Opal could see the car plainly enough in the driveway . . .

  “More than that?” she said faintly.

  They were almost at Mt. Lambeth now. Carlson slowed to five miles an hour, driving over a one-lane bridge with a rattling wooden floor and no railings. Below was the narrow, lazily meandering north fork of the river, rather shallow at this point and, in the near distance, glittering like a snake’s scales.

  Beside Opal the boy squirmed and she realized she had been squeezing his tiny moist hand unconsciously. They glanced at each other—Nathan timorous, Opal apologetic—but the boy must have misinterpreted her look because he said in a guilty undertone that he remembered the verses now—he did remember them.

  “Jesus rose on the first day of the week,” he said softly, eagerly, “and after that he appeared in another form, and . . . and Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover . . .”

  Mr. Bell said, “Amen!” to this, at the very moment that Mrs. Bell, expelling her breath as if something had both frightened her and caused her to laugh aloud incredulously, said, “Serpents—!”

  “HOW OLD IS the little one?” an elderly woman asked Opal, peering at Nathan. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, her eyes were like tiny bits of glass, most of her teeth were missing, yet she was smiling happily. Pulled down tight over her forehead was an olive-green knitted cap; she wore men’s shoes with the toes cut out.

  “He’s five. Just five the other day.”

  “Five!”

  The woman gaped at Nathan, smiling even more widely.

  Other women drew close, frankly studying Opal’s dress and her shoes and the black patent handbag she was carrying.

  “This is your first visit with us, isn’t it? Oh, you’ll learn from Brother Micah! You’ll learn!”

  Evidently Brother Micah had not yet arrived. The congregation was waiting for him outside, talking boisterously, shaking hands with one another and even embracing—Opal had never seen people so openly demonstrative, and even men—men embracing one another: what a sight! Cars and pickup trucks were p
arked in the cinder driveway and along the road, practically in the ditch. There must have been forty or fifty people, all of them cheerful, rather overloud, as if they’d been drinking—but they had not been drinking, since drinking was forbidden. It was odd that all the men should be gathered in one group and the women and children in another. Carlson Bell had gone at once to join the men, without a word of explanation, and Amanda had led Opal and Nathan unhesitatingly to the women. Opal noticed there were a number of very young children, even toddlers, even infants in their mother’s arms.

  So much smiling! So much good-natured chatter! All these people knew one another well. And seemed extraordinarily fond of one another. It was possible, Opal thought, that they were all related—these were mountain people, after all, and who had they to marry except one another? For some reason their exuberance made her uneasy. She held Nathan’s hand tight, hoping he wasn’t frightened; hoping she had not made a mistake, bringing him here. These were such impoverished, gaunt-faced, drab people . . . Their accents all but hurt her ears, and the clothes they wore . . . ! A pity. A shame. But the boy wouldn’t know, wouldn’t judge. Nor would he tell his grandfather. Opal hadn’t even the need, she knew, to caution the child against telling Thaddeus; he sensed what she wished him to do or say, and what not to do or say; there was never any disharmony between them.