Son of the Morning Read online

  “If we want to be perfect, Jesus told us what we must do,” the boy said more softly. “He never meant for people to have so much that they couldn’t even think what presents to give one another for His birthday—He never meant that at all. There’s nothing He said that—”

  “If we want to be perfect,” Thaddeus said. His voice was higher-pitched than he had wished. He did not want to hear himself mocking the boy, for it was so easy to mock him; yet he seemed to be mocking him nevertheless. “But why should we want to be perfect? You, me, anyone? Eh? Why perfect? Why perfect? The way we are’s good enough, isn’t it?”

  “—nothing He said has to do with such things,” Nathan went on calmly. “I asked Him about this house here, and all the things we own, and He said it was more than we needed: far more: and that it would be joyful for us to give away most of what we own, or all of it: that we couldn’t really understand Him until we were poor.”

  Thaddeus stared at the boy and could not believe what he heard.

  “What are you saying . . . ?”

  “Grandma said, when I asked her, that you had bought the house out of vanity. So that people would look up to you, and envy you. And because you wanted to fill the house with children. So the house is big, there are many rooms that aren’t used,” the boy said, his voice rising slightly again, almost melodic, frail and reedy and yet persistent, maddening. “There is too much in our lives. All these books—these magazines and newspapers—all these things to confuse us. There is too much, we should give most of it away, or all: and then we shall have treasure in heaven.”

  The child was utterly serious. Piteously serious.

  “Your grandmother has been telling you lies,” Thaddeus said angrily. “Her and that ignorant old Baptist preacher, that fool Sisley—putting this sick nonsense in your head! How dare they try to infect you—”

  “It’s Christ Who counsels me,” Nathan said.

  “Christ! Who is Christ!” Thaddeus cried.

  “He says you will never know Him, so long as you mock and ridicule. He says—”

  Thaddeus laughed loudly, waving the child away. No, it was impossible: it was really impossible. The child was insane. His only grandson was insane. Comely, almost beautiful, with those striking eyes and that sensitive face—so obviously an intelligent boy, spiritually akin to Thaddeus himself—and yet insane. There was no getting round it now. The old woman was insane and she had infected the child. He blamed her. Suddenly he detested her. And Reverend Sisley, and Mrs. Sisley, and the others—the others! They were all insane and he alone knew the truth.

  The child was leaning forward now, his thin shoulders raised as if in apprehension of Thaddeus. It was evident that he was greatly moved; Thaddeus had the idea that he was trembling inwardly. The madness of a child! The Christ-madness of a child! It was unthinkable, obscene. Had Thaddeus not been so dispirited, he would have tried to calm him, to change the subject, maybe to lead him out of the study and into another part of the house, or outdoors . . . But his expression remained harsh and rigid; his lips were fixed in a queer smile he could not alter.

  Nathan drew his shoulders up even higher. In a rather cold, reedy voice he said: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish . . . when his wrath is kindled but a little.”

  This was too much, this was intolerable: this Thaddeus truly could not bear.

  He began shouting. “What? What? Kiss the—what?” He threw his pipe down and got violently to his feet, knocking his chair backward against the wall. “Look, my boy: let Christ kiss my ass, do you hear? Kiss my ass! Christ and the Father and the Holy Ghost or whatever—let the bunch of them kiss my ass, do you hear? Eh?”

  Nathan blinked at him, uncomprehending.

  “I’ve had more than enough of this crap from you and your grandmother and everybody else,” Thaddeus said. Though he was angry, he fairly barked with laughter—his grandson’s shocked expression was hilarious. He imagined Opal and the Sisleys and most of the village of Marsena crouched outside the door, listening, astonished and frightened. Very well, then, let them listen! Let the world listen! “They can kiss my ass, you got that? The bunch of them! Your precious simpering Christ, and God the Father, and whatever the Holy Ghost is supposed to be. All I approve of is the Creation, do you hear? And even that wasn’t done right—even that was bungled. Only a drunk or a madman would have perpetrated such a—”

  It was then that Nathan, his face dead white, made a peculiar clicking sound in his throat and gasped for breath. His body shivered convulsively. His eyes seemed to go dead, to go opaque.

  “Nathan?” Thaddeus cried.

  The boy appeared to be getting to his feet, lunging forward. But he had no strength; his legs buckled. He fell heavily onto the floor, the side of his head grazing one of the legs of Thaddeus’s desk.

  And in that manner You manifested Your displeasure to him: in that manner You poured Your spirit into his meager flesh.

  IX

  Heaven and earth were joined together in a massive embrace, their parts coiled together, convoluted. It was a darkness many times the dark of an ordinary night. Yet Nathan could see: he could not have prevented himself from seeing.

  Heaven and earth in an embrace of many arms and legs . . . roots and giant tendrils and enormous vines and the branches of trees and of rivers, boulders like human muscle, rock and salt and ice and precious stones. Immense walls of granite. A terrible cold. On the far side of the walls a movement, a tear in the night’s substance—and the Lamb of God appeared, climbing out of the darkness, out of the cavern that tunneled so deeply into the earth, blazing and triumphant. In His company were a host of angels, resplendent in light, quick-darting as birds. As the darkness at Christ’s feet increased, becoming a sort of element like water, and then like dirt or mud, the light about His radiant face grew more powerful, so that Nathan could hardly bear to look. Thou Jesus, son of David! Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world! But this was not the gentle Christ Who had appeared at Nathan’s bedside years ago; this was a Christ blazing with light, holding a sword aloft, His hair and beard darkly gleaming, His eyes glaring. As He rose from the darkness—which sucked noisily at his feet—He drew with him a multitude of souls, the souls of the blessed who would enter heaven with Him on that day. Thousands upon thousands of the saved, rising from the cavern as the old earth passed away—and they too blazed with light, their faces radiant, suffused with joy.

  Bodiless, no more than a painfully quivering pair of eyes, a fissure in the darkness, Nathan Vickery stared at Christ and Christ acknowledged him from His pinnacle in the heavens: lowered His immense sword so that, for an instant, its tip was pointed toward him. I am a child of the wrathful God, Christ cried in a terrible voice. I am not to be mocked.

  And so Nathan cried out for forgiveness for his grandfather; and his cries rose to the outermost reaches of heaven and penetrated into the very depths of the earth, where light had become thickened into rock; but Christ did not reply. Aloft, ringed with flame, His face gigantic now as if pulsing with anger, He merely gazed down upon the child Nathan with a stern, contemptuous, jeering look. Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy, Nathan prayed.

  Have mercy.

  AFTER NATHAN RECOVERED from his vision he attempted to tell his grandfather of the danger to his life, but the old man would not listen: would not tolerate the child’s warning voice. “If you repent,” Nathan said, panting, “if you beg His forgiveness—” But the old man refused to listen. He stormed out of the room, he slammed doors, he hid from the Word of God, and thereby brought about his doom.

  “He will die if he doesn’t repent,” Nathan told his grandmother, who swallowed as he told her of his vision—of Christ and the angels and the blazing, dazzling flames—Christ and His terrible sword—Christ and the multitude of the saved, who were being lifted out of the darkness and borne aloft into the Kingdom of God. She swallowed, and blinked, and hugged him against her, but said nothing. Christ and His sword and His angels and His save
d, Christ and His terrible words of warning directed toward Nathan—and the tip of the sword pointed earthward, toward him, as if he were the focal point, the axis. As if all that must be fulfilled would be fulfilled through him, and none other.

  “He will die if he doesn’t repent, if he doesn’t beg God to forgive him,” Nathan sobbed, burying himself in his grandmother’s embrace.

  They prayed for Thaddeus Vickery, that his heart would be softened and his willfulness melted away; and his soul exposed to Christ at last; and his doom averted. They prayed that You, in Your infinite love, would touch him—would raise him to You, unrepentant though he was. As the days and nights passed they prayed fervently, hidden away from him. He understood what they were doing—correctly interpreting his wife’s strained, anxious look and his grandson’s pale, wasted little face—and this infuriated him all the more, for he was a man of intense feeling, quick-tempered and stubborn and fatally proud.

  “You’re mad,” he said to them. “You’re sick. Get out of my sight!”

  The child Nathan was all nerves now: weasel-like, jumpy, furtive, not very attractive. His face was pinched, yet curiously illuminated; his eyes were bloodshot still (since his convulsive fit and the hour-long coma that followed, the whites of his eyes were threaded with blood), and yet intense, almost glaring. Thaddeus had seen such children up in the hills, in the mountain settlements: undernourished, feral, often stunted, often brain-damaged. Not very attractive. In fact quite ugly. Repulsive. Wiry and quick as animals, with the sly, frightful grace of animals. Yet cruel: cruel as demons. “I pity you,” Thaddeus shouted. “Get out of my sight!”

  He had brought the child back from the dead. In a state of terror he had felt for the heartbeat, but there was none—he had felt for a pulse in the wrist, in the neck, but there was none. The boy had stopped breathing, his eyes were unfocused, a terrible clammy coldness seemed to rise from him, a coldness of death. One moment he had been normal enough, or nearly; he had been upset by Thaddeus’s remarks, and a little pale, but not distraught; the next moment he was having a fit of some kind, choking and gasping for air, and he had pitched forward onto the floor, writhing, helpless. His heartbeat? Was there no heartbeat? No breath? His lips had gone bluish-white. His body gave off a close, rank, panicked odor.

  “Nathan, Nathan . . . !” Thaddeus cried.

  But he had brought the child back from the dead. Crouched over him, awkward and grunting, a droplet of perspiration falling from his own face onto Nathan’s like a solitary tear, he had forced the child’s breathing into motion again: had forced a ragged, rattling breath into the boy’s lungs again: and so the child lived. Thaddeus had the ability to labor over his patients’ bodies with a gentle, rather blind, methodical thoroughness that was not affected by his personal nature, not even by his grief or alarm. He was “gifted” as a doctor, so it was said; but he dismissed the very idea as absurd. At crucial times his hands acted of their own accord, springing into life with a quick, sure alacrity, and he had a certain talent for diagnosing—but he would not have wanted to claim such abilities as his own. It was enough for him that a patient survived, that his body rose again to health; gratitude made him uneasy.

  And so, too, with his grandson, he had the idea that his hands, his instinctive, unhesitating mechanical movements, were responsible for bringing the lungs back to life. Of course the child had not been dead—his breathing had stopped and his heartbeat had stopped, or at least gave the appearance of having done so, but he hadn’t really been dead: he had simply drifted off a little from the shore of life, of living, and Dr. Vickery with his deft practiced hands had reached out to grab him and haul him back to land. That was all.

  Nathan had awakened, babbling incoherently, and then sank back into a kind of stupor, semiconscious, delirious. But alive, alive. Thaddeus carried him to the horsehair sofa and covered him with a blanket. Was it a form of epilepsy? Might it even be asthma? Or what had once been called hysterics? He would make an appointment to take the child to a clinic in Port Oriskany for a complete series of tests. He knew (though not well) the staff neurologist; he would telephone the man first thing in the morning and describe in detail his grandson’s symptoms and . . .

  “We’ll make you well and this terrible thing won’t happen to you again,” he said, stooping to kiss Nathan’s cold forehead. “Poor child. Poor baby. Poor love . . .”

  YET IT HAPPENED, despite the efforts of Nathan and Mrs. Vickery to arouse Dr. Vickery’s awareness and love of You, that a tragic estrangement took place in the household, and as the days passed, darkening always earlier as the winter solstice approached, Thaddeus turned more and more from them, a querulous bitter stubborn man. He was not old—he was by no means old—yet he fell into the habit of muttering to himself, continuing arguments with his wife when he was hidden away from her, late at night, in his study or prowling about the darkened downstairs of the house.

  “Repent! Repent!” he whispered, clapping the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “Repent: so the Devil whispers.”

  He hid from his wife and his grandson in his work. He had never worked harder. A ten-hour day was not unusual with him but now he kept office hours well past dusk, and rose early to make house calls, and stopped by the home of a new, young doctor who had recently begun a practice on the Yewville Road and who was said—so the gossip went, cruelly and characteristically—to be bitterly jealous of Dr. Vickery, who had every patient in the area in his pocket: and the meeting with the doctor went very well indeed, and Thaddeus was satisfied that they parted friends. (He intended to refer certain of his patients to the younger doctor; not generosity but simple pragmatic wisdom—he had far too many patients already.)

  Yes, there was oblivion of a kind in his work, in the exhaustion it brought. What did it matter that his wife and his grandson were mad, and mad with spite against him, what did it matter that they cut themselves off from him and no longer loved him, but only stared at him with their insufferable pitying concerned eyes—? He had always forgotten his personal problems when he was in the presence of people who needed him; there were times, scattered throughout his decades of work, when he had even forgotten, or put aside, rather severe pain and discomfort (the start of an attack of appendicitis at the age of twenty-nine, the agony of an impacted wisdom tooth in his mid-thirties) simply because he was too busy with his patients. And so, now, during those terrible December days that followed the second of Your revelations to Nathan Vickery, Thaddeus obliterated himself in his work, in the symptoms and illnesses and misfortunes and fantasies and despairs of other people.

  I’m afraid, they wept, that I have cancer. A lump, a pimple-sized bit of flesh, stubborn and gristle-like, might it be cancer, might it be my death? Plantar’s warts—what pain! And no dignity to it. I’m afraid, they cried, that my heart is going bad: I can’t seem to catch my breath in this cold weather. The youngest of the McCord girls came in, accompanied by her blowsy hardfaced sarcastic mother (whom Thaddeus remembered as one of the young wives he had almost adored, many years ago) who acted as a kind of nurse, brusque and methodical and merciless, as Dr. Vickery did a vaginal examination of the daughter: fifteen years old, sullen and terrified and quick to scream before the instrument was even well in, a wan, pretty, doomed child, at least three months pregnant by Dr. Vickery’s estimation, and infected with gonorrhea. (“Did she think it would just go away?” Dr. Vickery asked Mrs. McCord, and Mrs. McCord said, “She didn’t think about it at all.”) A twelve-year-old boy brought in with a cracked rib: pain, but an easy break: easily tended. Dr. Vickery, they said, my blood pressure—is it my blood pressure?—my skin feels tight to bursting and there’s a ringing in my ears sometimes and my eyesight goes dark. I’m afraid: can you help me? Sore throat; deafness; lingering colds; flu; lice; fever; difficulty with breathing; arthritis; bleeding from the rectum; a terrible itch in both eyes; backache; stiff joints; insomnia. But I don’t want to go to a hospital, they said, their faces stiffening; my mother never went in
to a hospital, never once, had nine children at home and lived to be ninety-four and died at home, never once went into any hospital. Dr. Vickery, they said, it’s nothing much, is it? How soon can I get back to work? Erratic heartbeat; rickets; faintness and dizziness; a problematic pregnancy; a one-year-old who threw up most of his food; Mrs. Stickney with her bladder problem; Carlson Bell with his roundabout way of pleading with Thaddeus to lie to him.

  At times he was not only exhausted but depressed, when it seemed to him, despite his natural optimism, that health and well-being were a narrow lane winding through a jungle of enormous, lustful, crazy vegetation . . . that one could toil to the end of his strength and his spirit’s endurance and keep the pathway cleared for only a brief spell, a few days at the most: for no human effort could halt the avalanche of sheer rapacious nature. And he would recall the situation in his own household, and his very being seemed to shrink, to cringe, for where was his solace now, if no one loved him?—if no one cared for him? His daughter Elsa lived three hundred miles away with a man he had never met, and his son, a war veteran, a grown man now of thirty-two, had become even more of a stranger to him; Ashton had left this part of the country entirely and had sent home no address. And Opal and Nathan had turned against him. Where was his solace, his strength? He needed a sort of blind, naïve courage in order to keep the pathway cleared, an almost arrogant optimism: otherwise he would weaken and fail . . .

  He took his meals alone in his study and slept on the old horsehair sofa, not wanting to be with his wife; dreading her look of supplication and disapproval. And her pity. Sometimes he heard her talking to the child in another part of the house and he wondered if they were talking about him. He kept to himself, proudly, with a kind of rancorous satisfaction. If he ate only haphazardly, stuffing himself with cold cuts and pieces of bread and cheese, refusing Opal’s hot dinners, if he sometimes went without breakfast, taking only black coffee, smoking a few cigarettes, what did it matter?—what did it matter to his family? One morning he had an attack of dizziness and a prickling sensation passed over him, a feeling of pins and needles in his left arm, but he simply waited for it to fade; he wasn’t going to waste his energies in self-pity.