Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Alone at night, unable to sleep, he padded about his study in his bedroom slippers, playing softly on the old ocarina (whose gentle, soft, hollow tones blended with the wind and seemed to lift him out of his isolation, throwing his loneliness out into the winter night where it had not the power to cripple him), pausing now and then to sip at a glass of bourbon. Afterward he turned on his reading lamp and sat hunched at his desk, studying the slim battered volume of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, turning page after page, absorbed, enraptured, exclaiming to himself: for he had never encountered any wisdom as profound and as reasonable as that of Marcus Aurelius, there was no other voice that cut so keenly into him, that awakened in him so passionate a certainty. From the very first, as a young man, he had always read the Meditations as the expression of a strong, self-determined, entirely enviable and even rather optimistic personality, not unlike himself.

  He wished he might haul Opal and the child in here, to instruct them. Reason and the art of reasoning: there is no higher law. All is but thinking so. One must be like a rock against which the waves of the sea break unceasingly, never surrendering to emotion—neither despair nor joy, terror or ecstasy. Superstition is abhorrent: the martyrdom of the Christians repulsive. One lives within one’s mind, one’s disciplined reason. Knowing that all things vanish swiftly, one accepts the universe as it is—a universe of change, flowing about us, flooding against us, bearing us away. Only the present moment is real. Time is but a point, reality a flux, perception indistinct, the composition of the body subject to easy corruption, the soul a spinning top, fortune hard to make out, fame confused. Physical things are but a flowing stream, things of the soul dreams and vanity; life is but a struggle and the visit to a strange land, posthumous fame but a forgetting . . .

  Night after night Thaddeus studied the Meditations, and leafed through medical journals and magazines, and fussed with his pipe, and drank too much, and wondered how long his wife and grandson could hold out against him. He tried to contemplate his own position in terms of Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom. You shame yourself, my soul . . . while you allow your happiness to depend upon the souls of others.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s so: that’s so.”

  It pleased him that the Emperor had been contemptuous of Christianity and that persecutions of Christians had taken place during his reign. Their ignorance, their superstition, their very passion would be distasteful to a man of reason, as it was distasteful to Thaddeus. More than that, it was despicable. Intolerable. A plunge into the abyss—a wallowing in the most brutish and unhuman of instincts. Repent, they commanded, repent or die . . .

  He marked his place in the Meditations with a scruffy blue-jay feather he used as a bookmark, and turned to the Bible.

  It was after midnight when he began reading, and he read throughout the night. Hunched over his desk, his head lowered, his eyes straining against the poor light, he read and could not believe what he was reading. It had been many, many years since he had even opened the Bible, and during church services he had been in the habit of luxuriously daydreaming, so he came to the Bible almost unprepared. It was as if he had never heard of the Gospels, and of Christ’s teachings; as if he were an alien confronted with a new language that he must understand or be destroyed.

  He began with St. Matthew. At the back of his mind were various Sunday-school tales, and the simple, rather touching hymns everyone loved to sing, and the image of the Child Jesus, meek and mild, answering hatred with love. But it was not so. The Gospel according to St. Matthew presented a self-righteous, intolerant, wildly egotistical, and even megalomaniacal personality—Jesus of Nazareth who confuses and bribes common people with miracles, who brags that He has not come to bring peace on earth but a sword, who threatens His enemies (those who merely choose not to believe in Him as the Son of God) with hellfire, a furnace where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth for all eternity. Why had Thaddeus believed that Jesus was fundamentally a loving person? It was not so; not so.

  “The man was psychopathic,” Thaddeus whispered.

  The sudden knowledge sickened him and he felt, for an instant, weak with fear. Yet he read on. St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John revealed the same person: Jesus of Nazareth who was vindictive, crafty, sly, opportunistic, and hypocritical. But, most of all, bullying. Cruel and sadistic and bullying. Hateful. The words of undeniable wisdom—that mankind should be loving and forgiving and considerate of one another—were not original with this man, but commonplaces; possibly Hellenic, possibly Oriental? What was original in Jesus was His insistence upon His own divinity: Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way. And again: He that is not with me is against me. Terrifying the multitudes with His threats of hellfire and endless agony, preaching an idiotic, blatantly untrue dogma that intention and act are equal, and involve equal responsibility, Jesus of Nazareth taught that one should forgive one’s enemies while fully intending not to forgive His: for His enemies were to suffer horribly. Childish and unjust, whimsical, rather savage; a truly impulsive personality that did not hesitate to curse a fig tree because it had no fruit for Him when He happened to be hungry, thereby causing the fig tree to wither and His disciples to marvel at His powers; the petty hero of a host of absurd miracle tales that make the point (the intention of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John notwithstanding) that only an exhibitionist can compel the “love” of the masses. Thaddeus read and reread certain passages, hardly able to comprehend the nature of what was being revealed to him. Like most atheists, he had assumed, patronizingly, that the Christians who surrounded him on all sides were goodhearted, idealistic, deluded people who tried gamely to live up to the high moral principles of Jesus Christ, their Saviour, but naturally failed since they were not perfect. No doubt Dr. Vickery himself had said upon occasion, with the weary irony of centuries, that the churches had “perverted” Christ’s teachings, and that—most embarrassing cliché of all—if Jesus were to reappear on earth again, He would once again be crucified. Now, rereading the passages that dealt with the crucifixion, Thaddeus’s sympathies were entirely with Pilate, who struck him as the only reasonable man in the narrative. Jesus had clearly wished to be crucified, He had forced others to participate in his martyrdom; like a spiteful, selfish child He had to have His way—for only His way had any value. “A maniac,” Thaddeus said softly. “A criminal. A simple-minded zealot who certainly intended to purge Israel if He had had enough power . . . Is this the man everyone adores, is this the man who has shaped the Western world?” One must love Him—or suffer in hell. There was no other way. God could not be reached save through this self-proclaimed Messiah, who harbored within Himself a chilling contempt for humanity; who so despised life that He railed against it, slandering the flesh and all natural desires, urging His followers to martyrdom. It was repulsive. It was fascinating. That Thaddeus Vickery at the age of fifty-six should at last see . . . should at last penetrate the mystery of the loving Saviour. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

  “Murderer,” Thaddeus said.

  IT WAS NOT long afterward that Thaddeus Vickery, entering the kitchen of his house by way of the back door, stomping snow off his boots, saw his wife and grandson at the big wooden table working together—rolling and cutting dough for noodles, it seemed. The room shimmered with heat and the odors of food. So fragrant, so dense! Dr. Vickery had been out most of the day and was unusually tired, and when he stepped into the warm kitchen it was as though he were stepping into an element thicker than air, somehow clotted, viscous. He found it difficult to breathe. The very flesh of his face, his jowls and cheeks, sagged heavily; when he uttered a greeting his words came out muffled and inarticulate. Such fatigue! He had not felt so tired in recent memory. And his left foot was all pins and needles from the cold.

  Opal turned to him, her broad face flushed, the crease between her eyebrows deeper
than he recalled. An old woman, he thought sadly. Nathan, bent over the table, slicing with painstaking care the rubbery, flour-sprinkled dough, looked up at his grandfather with a quizzical, searching gaze, his expression startled. Was he about to smile? To call out a greeting? A warning? The long curved bread knife in his hands caught the glare from an overhead light, through the smudges of flour and dough, and a wire of some sort—it must have been a near-invisible, scalding-hot wire—darted from the tip of that knife to Thaddeus’s left eyeball. It was a wire: Thaddeus screamed as he felt it pierce his eyeball.

  In an instant it ran back to his brain, plunging everything into darkness. The entire left side of his body caved in. He heard the start of the scream, not its finish; he felt only the caving-in, the collapse, the violent falling-away of his body and not the impact of the floor itself. And he saw nothing. After the wire pierced his eye he saw nothing—not the child’s face, not the child’s look of terror, of guilt: nothing.

  X

  Thaddeus Aaron Vickery, born 1891 in the village of Marsena, died on the evening of December 21, 1947, at 10:15 P.M., in that same village. He died of a massive stroke that fell upon him without warning; and in Your mercy You saw fit to allow him death without the intervention of consciousness. He was mourned by all who knew him—by hundreds of people who attended his wake and his funeral, and who appeared to be, in some cases, quite stricken with grief at the loss of Dr. Vickery, as if they had imagined that he was exempt from the laws of Nature and of God, and might have lived forever. He was especially mourned by those closest to him, his wife Opal Sayer Vickery and his grandson Nathanael William Vickery.

  As it is said in the Book of Isaiah: All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it! surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

  Book Two

  The Witness

  I

  Before Your creation was, You are.

  And we who are Your children wait patiently for You to return—to breathe life into us, to save us from the terrible waters that threaten to overcome our souls. Save us, O Lord, is our prayer in these dark times. Save us! We sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: we are come into deep waters, where the floods overflow us.

  Save me, O Lord, for am I not obedient unto You? Am I not patient? Am I not one of Your children?

  It did me no good to be impatient.

  There is no loneliness, O Lord, like that of a man whom You have once loved—and then abandoned. But this You know full well: for it is not possible that You do not know. For You come before all Your creation and in it we are swallowed whole: in You we are swallowed whole.

  You are the Alpha and the Omega. You are the soul, and at once the whisperer unto the soul: I am thy salvation. You are He who writes these words and He who reads them, You are both myself and my terrible longing for You, spread out now throughout my body, packed tight against the envelope of my skin.

  Like the wretched desire of Nathanael for the young woman Leonie: filled to bursting.

  A nightmare! A raging pain behind the eye! A loathsome thing even to contemplate so many years later! . . . Yet he triumphed over it and was one with You and was beloved of You, a blessing denied most of Your children, however obedient and loving they are.

  Do You hear? Do You listen?

  It was Your promise that there shall be time no longer and I attend still upon that promise. We are in the last days, perhaps in the last hours. For it is said All the wicked ones You will annihilate. And again it is said by Jesus, regarding the last days, that this generation that is now will not pass away until all these things occur—until the world order is overthrown and the Kingdom of God is made manifest. Yet I remain deep in time, O Lord, sunk deep in its mire so that my very breathing is threatened. I dare not sleep except in a sitting position, for fear of the terrible nightmares that overflow me when I lie down naked and defenseless. There is such torture in the hours, O Lord, in the minutes that pass unheeding since that day nearly four years ago when You saw fit, in Your infinite wisdom and justice, to abandon me. Yet I am not impatient. I have not the energy for impatience any longer, nor would I tempt my Lord and my God a second time with my childish cry that He show His face at last . . .

  Several months ago I began this prayer, composing it as a petition to You, a ceaseless plea. And it is evident that You approve of my labor, for though there are difficult, painful hours there are, from time to time, unpredictably, moments of grace: of sheer grace: when I write quickly and fearlessly and know myself closest to You. I hope, O God, that You will judge me by Thine own strength and not by my weakness.

  My prayer is not one of anger or impatience, nor is it one of lawless curiosity and speculation. I am forever obedient to You: forever meek and humble in Your sight. My prayer is an utterance of faith, of infinite faith. I would not have begun it except my longing for You struck so mercilessly deep one night, I could not see how it might be possible for me to endure that night, or the next, and the next: for the nights are long, O Lord, in Your fallen world. (I do not mean that I found it difficult to sleep; restful sleep has eluded me now for years. I mean that I found it difficult to endure the night, and even to conceive of the possibility of enduring it.)

  Consider the silence of the night sky: the clouds of night that break the sky into rudderless clumps, moon-glaring, frantic with wind. What solace? What comfort? It is only October, yet the air is stark and cheerless, as if we were plunged already into winter. The breath of the night is the breath of Your absence, O Lord. And the leaves in the poplars outside my window—! A frenzied whispering, a ceaseless plea. Why do You forsake me?

  There is no loneliness so bitter as that of a man whom God has once loved fiercely and has then abandoned. No human love can satisfy him, nor can any human pleasures drug his senses. In the immensity of God’s disregard he languishes like a child who cannot eat, slowly and piteously starving to death.

  What torments me even further is the fact that the composition of this prayer is such a painful, such a relentless undertaking, for I who compose it must also live by means of it, sucking and gasping for breath. Could anyone witness my struggle, he would be moved with pity for me, and perhaps with revulsion as well: for in our world those who suffer are not long tolerated, and spiritual suffering is not honored at all. And could anyone glance through the effort that has already occupied me for months, wrung from me drop by drop by drop, he would be astonished to find it so brief. A lifetime, and so brief! So quickly read! The labor of these sleepless nights could be scanned in a few hours, and dismissed as merely unsightly, as unpretty, and thrown aside—for such is the nature of the fallen world, and pity is rarely offered those who suffer each alone.

  Why do You forsake me?—a question no one wishes to hear.

  HOW STRANGE A form his being took, the girl thought. He was so sweet-voiced when he wished to be, and then again so strident, so powerful—his voice ringing clear and bell-like as her own father’s voice when he was preaching at his very best. It did not seem necessary for him to read from the Gospels; evidently he knew great blocks of passages by heart; and he did not shout them out mindlessly, as other preachers sometimes did, and as the one or two child preachers she had heard had done (like queer wind-up toys, those strange children, no feeling to them, no subtlety), but he spoke the words as if they were his own, as if the Holy Spirit did indeed speak through him, consoling rather than frightening, brightly and hypnotically conversational rather than ranting . . . How strange that that eleven-year-old boy was given out to be Nathanael Vickery, Reverend Sisley’s boy from Marsena: for it was clear to her that she knew him and had heard him preach many times before, that he had been this way before, and that her father could not fail to recognize him as well.

  “Is that the Vickery boy, the one they talk about?” Leonie asked.

  She s
tood at the rear of the church, her arms folded tight beneath her breasts. It was a warm June evening, a Friday, and every pew in the church was filled. It was not her church; she had only stopped by on a whim, having nothing to do since her father was out of town for the rest of the week—preaching a revival out in White Springs for the Evangelical Christian Missionaries’ Alliance. She was Esther Leonie Beloff, the daughter of the Reverend Marian Miles Beloff, renowned in this part of the world; and his fame made her self-conscious, and rather pleased, for it seemed to her obvious that she and her father were set apart from other people, from her father’s congregation and his many admirers, for instance—that God had chosen a special destiny for them both.

  “For him too,” she said, staring at the Vickery boy. He was now leading the congregation in prayer: not droning as most preachers did, but speaking, almost singing. His voice was melodic, yet strong enough to carry to the very rear of the room: to her. Was he a freak, Leonie wondered, was he truly marked by God as her own father had been marked (for Marian Miles Beloff had begun his preaching ministry at the age of thirteen), were the things people said about him true . . . ? “Yes, just listen to him!” she said, stifling her laughter. “Eighty-five pounds and his little-boy face gleaming with sweat and his voice like it just pierced through a cloud—oh dear heart, isn’t he something! I’ll take him back home with me.”

  A Disciples of God church on the outskirts of Rockland: asbestos siding, interior smelling of newness, cheap varnish and cheap paint and something earnest, eager. Disciples of God wasn’t her church, wasn’t her father’s. His church was fairly new too but it was made of brick, set atop a hill in North Yewville, the lawn unevenly green but a lawn nevertheless: whereas the earth outside this little crackerbox was all barren and lumpy. She wasn’t from Rockland, was only visiting a cousin of her mother’s while her father was away; she didn’t know the regular minister and didn’t care to know him; it was only Nathanael Vickery who interested her. Such a frail child, small for his age, and big-eyed—she could see that even at this distance. And it was true about him being so gifted. She would have to tell her father it was true: that boy preacher everyone was talking up, from Marsena, was the real thing. Once you heard him, there was no mistaking what he was.