Son of the Morning

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Ideally, Seekers’ homes were to be in rural areas, removed from the active, striving, commercial world. If death-clouds swept upon the earth (as it appeared they might, possibly as early as 1974), they would hover and condense over the large industrial cities, and their poison would be drained into those cities and the inhabitants destroyed. No Seeker feared death—for death did not exist, as Nathan Vickery taught—but it was necessary for as many Seekers as possible to survive, since unbelievers would be horrified by the catastrophe and would then hunger for salvation; and it was to be part of Your design that they turn at the very end of history to the church founded by Nathan Vickery. So the Seekers must guard themselves carefully, not out of vanity or selfishness or fear of death, but out of charity for the not-yet-baptized world.

  As early as 1967 the organization owned a fair amount of property: several farms, three or four houses in residential areas in small cities, fifty acres of undeveloped land in the Eden Valley. It was thought wisest and most pragmatic to maintain headquarters in the old Travis home in Windigo Falls because of the convenience of the location and the size of the house, despite the fact that Windigo Falls had grown to a population of over a hundred thousand and was a rather dirty, busy place—a pulp paper factory, a textile mill, and Greendale Chemacryl Plastics Inc. were all located on the river north of town. The house, however, was a windfall: a Greek Revival structure with four stately columns and a grandiose (though rotting) portico and an extraordinary number of high, narrow windows and many spacious rooms. The outside badly needed painting and repairs, the inside was rather shabby, but Seekers who had come to live in the house were eager to fix it up and, all in all, it was a considerable acquisition for the church—given to them outright by an enthusiastic convert in her late seventies who had inherited it, along with a great deal of money, upon the death of a senile woman named Alice Hull Travis, who had lived to be a hundred and three.

  Nathan made his home here except when he was on the road; as did most of the permanent members of his staff—Reverend Lund, the choir director, several volunteer secretaries, Japheth Sproul and the printer Donald Beck, and Nathan’s grandmother Mrs. Vickery, who had been given a suite of rooms on the second floor. What had been the living room was set up as a kind of chapel, with some fifty-odd folding chairs arranged in a semicircle, and a plain lectern at the front; other downstairs rooms were used for printing pamphlets and broadsides, and as mailing rooms. Reverend Lund had his own office and his own secretary (his wife, for a while; then his wife left the organization suddenly and went back to Mt. Shaheen, taking their son along; and so a volunteer worker took her place).

  “I don’t believe we’ll stay here more than another year or two,” Reverend Lund told Nathan. “Even if no one donates a larger, better place in a better location, we should be in a position to buy one, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Nathan said. “It’s possible.”

  “I’m thinking of Pittsburgh, maybe. A good central location, eh? Or maybe Cleveland. Or Chicago.”

  “Someday we’ll have homes in all those cities,” Nathan said.

  Reverend Lund stared at him, smiling. “Yes? Will we? I do believe you’re right,” he said.

  It was in the Travis house on a mild, ordinary morning in early autumn that You appeared to Nathan for the fifth time, without warning, sweeping down upon him as he was dressing to go out. He had no more than his usual hope, or apprehension, that You would declare Yourself to him; the evening before, he had participated in a quite successful (though tiring) service in a Disciples of God church a few miles away, and his mind had been dragged downward to some extent by a reluctant consideration of the number of Seekers who had joined in recent months, and the amount of money they had given thus far or pledged—details Reverend Lund never tired of talking about and bringing to the attention of others (for he believed passionately that the number of Seekers was very important: it was a witness to the world of the authenticity of God’s blessing). Nathan was not truly surprised by the growing success of his church, nor was he very much concerned with the various problems Reverend Lund continually brought up, which were mainly financial and clerical; and he was not troubled, as Reverend Lund and Japheth Sproul and others of his staff were, by the hostile nature of recent news articles—which he read carelessly, with as much indifference as he read articles of praise. He had felt purely himself on that morning: dressing quickly, without regard for what he wore, without much awareness of the fact that he possessed a physical appearance, a physical being others might observe.

  (“Let me take you shopping, let me buy you some decent clothes,” his friend Japheth begged. “You’re worse than I am—everything hangs on you, there’s no style or color—you look forgotten. The visual impression you make on an audience, Nathan, could be so much more powerful if you took my advice. Don’t you care? Aren’t you listening? Why?”)

  One moment he was in time, aware of the time: 7:45. The next moment time had stopped.

  You descended.

  A radiance swelling to such intensity that Nathan’s eyeball was seared: scalding wires seemed to run up his nostrils, into his brain. The radiance grew, pulsating, until it began to burn, the very air turned to flames, invisible and silent flames, blackening. He tried to move but could not. The light turned suddenly dark, as if it had been forced inside-out.

  “My Lord and my God . . .” he tried to whisper.

  As a child Nathan had loved the Sunday-school cards with their pictures of Biblical scenes in soft reds and blues and yellows and browns. And he had stared for long minutes at a time at the illustrations in his grandmother’s Bible, and afterward in the Bibles Reverend Sisley owned. The Adoration of the Shepherds . . . Abram’s Covenant with Lot . . . Joseph Meeting his Brethren . . . the Finding of Moses in the Bulrushes (one of the loveliest pictures of all, sky and water blended to a fine ethereal mist, and Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidens dusky-skinned and exotic and girlishly surprised) . . . Moses and the Burning Bush . . . the Tabernacle in the Wilderness . . . Elijah Calling Down Fire on Mt. Carmel . . . Daniel in the Lions’ Den . . . Jesus Healing the Leper . . . Jesus Healing Peter’s Wife’s Mother . . . Jesus and the Barren Fig Tree . . . Jesus Stilling the Storm . . . the Crucifixion . . . the Resurrection . . . the Ascension . . . He knew each of the pictures as intimately as if he had created it himself, out of his own awe, and even in recent years he found himself sometimes glancing at these or similar pictures, comforted by their simplicity, their air of placid finality: for even the Crucifixion, which should have been disturbing, was in fact pastoral as a watercolor.

  Now he saw the pictures though he was blind; they were being flicked toward him in the dark. From where did they come, to where did they go, where was he himself now standing . . . ? He had known in the first instant to surrender at once to Your power. He would never have resisted, despite his body’s panic; his soul had absolute dominion over his lower self and acted swiftly, without hesitation. My Lord and my God, his lips would have shaped, had it been possible . . . The pictures were being flicked toward him through the bright-dark air: Jesus’s soft blue robe, the bizarre but very pretty feather headdress worn by Pharaoh’s daughter, the yellow-orange flames of the burning bush. The darkness swelled and pulsated. Was it Your breath, Your very being, inside which he stood, immobile? A sea of glass and fire, fiery glass, throbbing and beating until it seemed his brain would be destroyed by the pressure: and then suddenly the pictures burst into flame and there came to his ears a terrific howl, soundless, sheer sensation that was the howl of the damned of hell he had heard many years ago and had never forgotten.

  About him pages of the Bible were blown, catching against his legs. The heat was nearly unbearable. The surface of the earth had cracked and blasts of fetid, fiery air came forth, catching up the pictures, the pages, and whirling them about. A ghost-image of his hand and arm materialized, instinctively reaching for one of the pages; but the fingers closed upon nothing, upon air, and were themselves
no more substantial than air. One by one the pages exploded into flame. There were hundreds of them, there were thousands: scattered across the earth’s surface, blown by demonic winds, fanned into flame. The howl of their destruction was terrible; Nathan felt it in his very soul; he would have joined the soundless, agonized weeping had he not been too frightened by Your wrath to turn aside from You for even a moment.

  The Bible: the thin, delicate pages: the childlike pictures: a chaos of flame.

  And You asserted Yourself then in Your infinite, writhing, coiling majesty, Your radiance once again so heightened that it turned pitch black, and the black then beat itself, frenzied, into light, and the light again black, by which Nathan came to know the power of Your breath, which is the breath of the living earth. Something brushed near against his face, like wings. Feathery-light, exquisite, faintly stinging . . . He was frightened. No, he was not frightened at all: there was no part of him not utterly absorbed in You, not utterly surrendered to You.

  My Lord and my . . .

  The enormity of You, a colossus! A vast membrane swelled to the breaking point with its own great breathing, its own wild life-heat. My Lord, Nathan wished to pray, while about him the flames leaped and the cries of the damned quivered in the darkly-bright air, communicated to him as vibrations are communicated through matter, language as sheer sensation. My Lord. My God. Have mercy. Underfoot were images of Moses, and Paul, and Mary with the Christ child in her arms; and Christ Himself, pale and gaunt on His cross; Christ Himself resplendent in His white robes, risen from the dead. The fiery-hot winds blew them about mercilessly, savagely, until they burst into flames and shriveled in a matter of seconds and were gone.

  Whereupon Nathan Vickery learned that You will tolerate no other gods before you, no other forms of godliness.

  A sleeping giant, You were. And in Your sleep Nathan stumbled, utterly alone. One of his eyes had been sacrificed to You and the other was now blind, blinded by the terrible radiance of Your love. No other gods before you! No images of Your being! You are the Many-in-One, the One-in-One, the One. Nothing before or after. Nothing except the One. Your breathing caught him up and threw him about, heedless of his panic. He did not resist. He knew enough never to resist. Christ appeared some distance before him, whitely-flaming, and by his side was a ladder, and up and down this ladder enormous angels moved, their hair streaming fire, their eyes burning white with agony. In Christ’s face Nathan saw his own face: in those hotly-dark, moist eyes his own, what had once been his own, the face of his youth. And in an instant Christ and His attendant angels disappeared: were sucked into crevices in the very air. As Nathan stared, the crevices deepened, darkened, and then flared open again, and the figure of Christ reappeared, and His angels, as if they had not been sucked into oblivion; and in another instant they disappeared again, annihilated; and in yet another instant reappeared . . . And so it was given to Nathan to know that You give birth to Your creations and suck them back into Your oblivion as You wish, time and again, for all eternity. The creations are fluttering images, fiery light, godly enough, and even human, but they are visible only in Your regard, and should You choose to make them invisible they will disappear in an instant. When they reappear it is out of Your immense heartbeat, not out of their own will. Your breath! Your muscular protoplasmic breathing! In the distance Nathan saw individuals straying too close to Your pulsating radiance, and one by one they were drawn to it, pulled into it, and destroyed in a soundless explosion of fire. He must wave them back! Must warn them! The energy of their beings that they saw as their own was in fact Yours, and they had no awareness of You at all, wandering careless as children on an ice bank . . . Their heads were filled with babble, shrieks and cries and howls, their eyes were clouded with the thoughts of demons, evil spirits that had insinuated themselves into their souls and urged them recklessly onward to their destruction. Suddenly Nathan saw the faces of people he knew: the faces of many of the Seekers: Reverend Lund and Japheth among them. He must warn them, must wave them back. Must exorcise the evil spirits from their souls. He must run forward into that immense heartbeat secure in the knowledge that it would not destroy him so long as he subordinated himself to it with every particle of his being.

  VII

  After his recovery it happened gradually that the young man Japheth Sproul became his chief comfort.

  He no longer wished to upset Mrs. Vickery. She had been ailing for some time, and the mere suspicion that her grandson was not altogether well excited her dangerously. So Nathan and the others took care that she should know nothing alarming. How was Nathan today? In excellent health. How did last night’s service go? Excellently. Was anything wrong, was there any bad news? Never.

  He loved his grandmother and he loved his followers. But he could not talk to them, not even to Reverend Lund, who grew uneasy in his presence after more than a few minutes and drifted onto subjects that did not interest Nathan. It worried him that he should love these people so deeply, so purely, and yet have very little to say to them. Always, they looked to him for wisdom. They looked to him and fell silent themselves.

  But Japheth was rarely silent. He loved to talk, and talked very well, with a stammering, stumbling fluidity, a cheerfulness that enlivened his small, rather boyish face. He had come to the Seekers out of nowhere—descending with a number of other converts at a Sunday-evening service in Fort Gambrell some time ago. Nathan had sensed from the first that Japheth was different from the others; vastly different; he had been clumsy, and deeply embarrassed, his intelligent features shrunk with a kind of bemused chagrin.

  “But what did you think would happen?” Nathan had asked, astonished.

  “I thought—I had the idea—I was afraid that if you laid hands on me,” Japheth said, blushing, “I would fall over dead.”

  He had noticed Japheth for a while, and forgot him for a while, since he had been traveling a great deal at that time and new members were joining the church every day; and many of them, like Japheth, were eager to give all their money and their material possessions to the organization in return for the privilege of living close to Nathan, and of sharing in his work. Reverend Lund had been suspicious of Japheth during the first weeks: he had believed the young man to be a spy of some sort, possibly a newspaper reporter, possibly an associate of a rival church. And then Japheth had worked so frantically on one of the campaigns—canvassing half a city on foot, patiently ringing doorbells in the cold, distributing handbills, helping to set up Nathan’s platform and address system, and even volunteering to help clean the hall when it appeared that the owners had not fulfilled part of their agreement—that even Reverend Lund had been impressed. Tireless, of a sunny temperament, in the habit of making small and sometimes not quite intelligible jokes, Japheth Sproul was generally well-liked and it was not surprising that Nathan himself began to spend more and more time with him.

  After he staggered from his room that morning, and woke sometime later in Japheth’s presence, it seemed to Nathan that he might be able to explain what had happened to him to Japheth, and that he might speak as frankly and as freely as he wished, not taking care to measure his words and the effect of his words, as he did in public. That he had been frightened and for a while even repelled by God, that, as far as he could judge, God did not value any of His manifestations over any others—Christ being revealed as no more significant, apparently, than Nathan himself: if only he could share this extraordinary revelation with Japheth, what a relief it would be! To say finally that You are indeed a God of wrath, and the vials of Your wrath will be poured out upon the earth as it was foretold; to say finally that the race of men and the race of devils were intermingled, and must be forced apart, in order that Your kingdom be restored on earth . . . But the vision had so exhausted him that for hours he had been unable to speak coherently, and for the rest of that day, and part of the next, he had had to sit in his room with the blinds pulled, alone, only his lips moving in a constant, near-silent prayer of supplication, waitin
g for the new, fragmented, confusing bits of wisdom to coalesce. He knew himself—Nathanael Vickery—to be a frail vessel composed of particles of light, atoms of energy, that could at any moment be sucked into utter oblivion, except that You had chosen him for Your specific purposes as You had once chosen Jesus of Nazareth. As Christ Himself had been an idea of Yours, given flesh and blood and a fate He must have felt to be unique, so Nathan realized that he too had been given life in order to fulfill Your wishes: but what might those wishes be—! He would have liked to confess to someone, to anyone—anyone who might take pity on his bewilderment and not mistake it for humility—that he had witnessed the extinction of Christ, His form blasted into its elements and then reassembled, sucked in and out of existence, and his kinship with Christ was therefore a terrible one: they were linked not in their power but in their powerlessness.

  Someone knocked softly at his door but he did not answer.

  And again someone knocked, later. Nathan heard his raw, surprised voice lifted in irritation: “Go away! Leave me alone! Why are you tormenting me!”

  It had been Japheth, he guessed afterward. But the incident was never mentioned between them.

  Once he began to recover from the shock of the vision, however, he allowed Japheth to visit him whenever he wished. Instead of having his meals alone, as he commonly did, Nathan asked Japheth to join him, and afterward they walked out along the river bank; or worked together on the land that was to be used to grow vegetables—for it was Nathan’s ambition that each of the Seeker homes would someday be self-sufficient: each “family” would grow its own vegetables, bake its own bread, raise its own cows and chickens. At such times Japheth did most of the talking. He seemed eager to speak, of even the most private things, and while Nathan was sometimes surprised at the personal, and therefore inconsequential, nature of his remarks, he found himself strangely intrigued. Japheth spoke of his childhood in Boston, which he characterized as lonely; he spoke of his father and his father’s scholarly work, which sounded to Nathan like sheer vanity: a life’s work poking and prying at the edges of God’s Word; he spoke of his tormented adolescence, which he hoped he had finally outgrown; he spoke of the guilt he felt over the breakup of his engagement to a young woman whom he had loved, or believed he had loved, very much; he spoke of his queer, inchoate, and to Nathan’s mind rather mild, religious experiences, which seemed to have died out before his sixteenth year. “For a long time I waited for them—for it—to return, and then I gave up. And then I met you,” he said breathlessly. All this was offered to Nathan in a quick, light, undramatic voice, as if Japheth Sproul wanted him to understand he did not take himself altogether seriously. Frequently he concluded his remarks by gesturing wryly and saying, “Well—that’s how it is.” At other times he shrugged his shoulders, murmuring almost inaudibly, “But why should you care about all this . . .”