Son of the Morning

  Now they were singing “Rock of Ages” and Leonie joined in, feeling elated, zestful, knowing that people near her would begin to hear her voice—she had been trained as a gospel singer from earliest girlhood: her voice was powerful and muscular and confident—and would be dying to turn around to see who that soprano was.

  Let the water and the blood,

  That from Thy wounded side did flow. . . .

  Leonie sang loudly and lustfully, her eyebrows arched high. She was sixteen years old, with a rich, olive, rather oily skin, and black hair that curled and frizzed out about her plump face. She had a woman’s body, mature and full, almost stout, with surprisingly thin ankles and small stubby-fingered hands and delicate wrists. Beneath her solid chin was the hint, the merest hint, of a second chin; hardly more than a crease of soft, rich-complexioned flesh. She had wide, full, lovely lips, and a rather snubbed nose, and pale green eyes that appeared to be slightly slanted in her face, like cats’ eyes—and catlike too was her sly, smirkish grin and the general sinuousness of her manner. She loved to use her voice, which was genuinely striking, and so she sang so forcefully that the young boy preacher could hear her—wasn’t he peering and squinting in her direction, a frail little boy in a suit too large for him, his damp hair plastered to his forehead as if he’d been laboring out in the sun? Let me hide myself in Thee: Leonie sang almost shrilly, sending the words over the heads of the men and women who stood before her. She knew all the words, knew them without understanding them, sang without faltering in a kind of hectic daze as her father and his assistants had taught her, and it seemed to her that the boy preacher did hear.

  Rock of Ages, cleft for me,

  Let me hide myself in Thee. . . .

  The service was coming to an end. She judged it to be moderately successful, for an ordinary weekend service: no laying-on of hands and casting out of devils and healing; only a few people speaking in tongues; only a few people rushing forward in hysterics to the altar rail to throw themselves at Christ’s feet. Let me hide myself in Thee . . . The boy preacher had handled the excitement very well: he hadn’t appeared to be alarmed by it, as far as Leonie could judge. (Maybe he was just too innocent yet and hadn’t had any real difficulties, any real hysterics thus far in his ministry—?) No doubt in Leonie’s mind that the boy was genuine, that he had the call. And he was such a sweetheart with his curly dark hair and his big eyes and his shimmering trembling melodic voice that rang out everywhere! She wouldn’t half mind taking him back to North Yewville with her as a surprise for her daddy and as a baby brother for herself. She wanted more family, she needed more family . . . a sister most of all, but a brother would have been fine: such a pity that her mother had died so young! The Vickery boy hadn’t any family either, except for his grandmother. (Was that big ruddy-faced woman in the front pew Mrs. Vickery?—tears streaming down her cheeks and shoulders heaving as she sang?) The rumor was that his mother had died at childbirth and she hadn’t been married and that God Himself had intervened to be the infant’s father: maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but just the thought of it made Leonie shiver.

  “He’s the one,” she thought. “What will be, will be.”

  Though Leonie had been in Rockland only a day or two, she had been hearing about the Vickery boy all that time, from one person or another, mainly women friends of her mother’s cousin, or neighbors who were always dropping by. (On account of her presence, she judged: after all, she was the Reverend Marian Miles Beloff’s only daughter.) It was said of the Vickery boy that he fasted for days at a time in order to purify his body, and that he had queer eating habits, more complicated than those of Catholics or Jews. (“Or Moslems?” Leonie had said brightly, as if she knew all about the eating habits of Moslems.) He was so close to God, it was said, that if someone spoke to him too abruptly, unannounced, he didn’t hear at all; he was with God and deaf to man at such times, and it took him a while to “come back.” He could remain for hours on his knees, praying. (“But he sounds like a monk or something!” Leonie squealed, thinking of her father who rarely, these days, got onto his knees: and if he did, someone had to stand close by to haul him up again.) He knew most of the Bible by heart, of course. He could play the organ just wonderfully—and it used to be a sight to see him, so small, sitting on the very edge of the bench so he could reach the pedals; he’d begun playing when he was very, very young. (“My daddy started playing the accordion and mouth organ when he was six,” Leonie said. “Is he maybe like that? The music just comes out of nowhere, out of the air?—that’s what my daddy used to say.”) There were times when he kept to himself, in a darkened room, fasting and praying and begging God for a sign, and when he emerged from his isolation there would be something strange and altered about him—his eyes frosted-looking, or his teeth edged with blood, or bruises on his arms and legs and neck, or the indentations of nails on his palms. Much of the time he was a quiet, dutiful, sweet-faced boy whom Reverend Sisley could trust with anything, but there had been two or three occasions when he had given such impassioned sermons and led his people in such impassioned prayers that there had been spontaneous healings—written up in the newspaper, they were, and witnessed by dozens of people who swore to the truth of what they saw: an elderly woman cured of a blockage in her throat that had prevented her breathing right for twenty years; a twelve-year-old girl cured of “nerves”; the brother of one of the church’s deacons cured—for seventy-eight hours—of some terrible pathetic trembling that had come over him a few years before, causing his arms and legs to quiver, and even his eyelids. And there were other cures, other occasions; other rumors. (“But the boy doesn’t have a healing ministry, does he? I never heard that,” Leonie cried. Her own father hadn’t been called by God to a healing ministry—a healing ministry being, as he said repeatedly, a very serious thing.) People disagreed about him, because there were those—men, especially—who just didn’t take to the spectacle of a boy preacher, and who probably would have scorned Christ Himself when He first began speaking to the multitudes. But everyone who heard the Vickery boy preach did agree he was no ordinary boy—not by a long shot. “You drop by the church and peek in and see what you think,” Leonie was told, and though she held off assenting, she did fully intend to go. (“But I hope he isn’t deformed somehow,” she said. “The last child preacher I heard, at the ’Vangelical Conference a few years ago, was a little girl with a block shoe or something—built up so her one leg was even with the other, you know? And she was a wizened little ugly thing just loud-mouthed, coached by her mommy and daddy, that was all, and not speaking for the Lord at all: not a bit! They put her up there for the collection, thinking they would rake the money in, but they failed utterly as my daddy and the other men said—failed utterly. But I expect this Nathan Vickery isn’t on the order of that.”)

  So it turned out he wasn’t, he wasn’t a fraud or a fake or demented or silly; Leonie judged his presence as good as that of just about any preacher she’d heard, except for the big-name ones like her own father, or the Reverend Bill Branham, who was even more famous, or Sister Hannah Price out of Dallas, Texas, who had preached an unforgettable sermon in Cleveland about eighteen months ago—the sick and the lame and the blind and the deaf had truly been aided that night, as Leonie Beloff could testify, having seen with her own eyes the miracles that transpired, and having been so excited by Sister Hannah that she came near to fainting a half-dozen times and did faint on the way home, despite the fact that her father tried to joke her out of it. The Vickery boy wasn’t quite on that level, because he was, well, too commonsensical and even-speaking, and Leonie had the idea that he was rather intelligent for a child his age, or for a person of any age; and being intelligent just didn’t set right up on a stage or at a podium. But he was genuine. Christ dwelled within him and there was no mistaking that.

  “Yes. Him,” Leonie thought.

  The hymn ended with a long-drawn-out Thee.

  Now Leonie bethought herself that she should skip aroun
d the crowd somehow and introduce herself to tonight’s visiting preacher, and to his grandmother (that horse-faced woman must be his grandmother, though they didn’t look anywhere near alike: the way she was up there hugging him, as if he was a baby!), and to the Disciples of God regular minister himself, but the evening was awfully warm, and her mind was drifting off onto . . . drifting off onto those boys she had been ignoring by the pharmacist’s that afternoon, those loud-mouthed smart-alecks who had been teasing her on account of her wild frizzy hair and asking her who she was, was she maybe a new girl in town?—and would she like a Coke or a soda?—or a ride out along the river?—and frankly she had had enough of piety for one evening. (“I’m just not that serious-solemn boohooing making-a-big-fuss-over-Christ kind of Christian: not me,” Reverend Marian Miles Beloff said repeatedly, and Leonie was exactly the same.) And there were so many other people milling around, wanting to shake the boy’s hand, and the regular minister—white-haired, with glasses and a squint and a funny little rosebud mouth—looked so dull, and the place was awfully warm . . .

  So Leonie ducked out of the church without introducing herself to anyone at all and by the time she saw her father again, Tuesday of the following week, she had half-forgotten about Nathanael Vickery, and anyway they had more important things to talk about: such as the fact that Reverend Beloff was going to be financed for a gospel program on a radio station in Port Oriskany, and that meant they would have to move (again: they had moved some five or six times in Leonie’s memory), and there was the possibility too of a revival circuit later that summer, or anyway part of a circuit, if a certain deal pending with the famous Bill Branham didn’t fall through. (It seemed that Reverend Branham gave so much of himself, he was often incapacitated; and there was need for competent backup preachers, provided they weren’t too competent.)

  “Oh, I heard the most darling little-boy preacher out in Rockland, at a Disciples of God,” Leonie thought to say finally, but Reverend Beloff only grunted a reply, possibly he hadn’t even heard, and Leonie—who had caused something of a minor scandal in the neighborhood, having been seen talking and laughing with utter strangers on Main Street and having been glimpsed, on Sunday evening, riding in someone’s jalopy out on the highway—thought it best to steer their conversation away from the subject of Rockland in general. Which was fine with Reverend Beloff, who, as he expressed it, always lived with one foot in the future.

  So Leonie did not meet Nathanael Vickery at that time, nor did Reverend Beloff take the slightest interest in him. But when he came into their lives several years later Leonie was to remember him at once, with a hot, quick flash of certainty, a sense of intimacy, as if they had known each other very well, like sister and brother; as if they had always known each other. So that is the form His being takes, Leonie was to think. That.

  II

  Dr. Vickery’s sudden death had so upset his wife, and the memory of him—his face beet-red and contorted and one eye practically popping out of its socket, and those terrible convulsions!—stayed with her for so long, night and day, that it was several months before she could deal with the estate: all the legal problems, the taxes for the district and for the county and for the state and for the federal government; and curious inexplicable claims made against her by people in the area who said Thaddeus owed them money for repairs or services—not exactly barefaced lies, but cruel exaggerations or distortions of the truth. (The Derby mechanic who checked over Thaddeus’s car and made routine adjustments tried to claim that Thaddeus owed him three hundred dollars—and Opal might have paid if her grandson hadn’t suggested she go through the papers in Dr. Vickery’s drawers once again, hunting for canceled checks.) It was a bitter, bitter thing, this death: and in a way Opal would never forgive her husband for it.

  “His last look was one of anger,” she said often. “Fury. His face was so wrinkled and red, he was glaring at the boy and me . . . !”

  A massive stroke: coming from nowhere, totally unexpected (though Dr. Vickery did have high blood pressure), and lethal. He was never to regain consciousness but died within a few hours; and at the very end, thank God, his face acquired a look of genuine peace.

  She did not know if she had loved him; how could she have loved so stubborn a man, who had set himself in such blind, ignorant opposition to the Lord? She went for days without weeping, troubled by the fuss relatives and neighbors insisted upon making; and what a nuisance, the man’s small army of patients!—all of them brokenhearted, a few quite terrified at the thought of losing him, as if he were the sole physician in all of the Valley. “You’ll get along without him,” Opal said sternly, displeased with so much noisy sorrow. “He was only a man, after all—only mortal.”

  In secret, of course, she and Nathan prayed for his soul. Nathan led the prayer, his small pale face practically hidden by his hands, and the two of them remained on their knees for long dreamlike delirious minutes on the bare floorboards of the attic. The prayers went on and on and Nathan’s voice rose and sank and rose again, choked with tears, and Opal could only murmur assent, beginning to sob, racked with the pain of her loss, and the pain of that last ugly sight of Thaddeus—falling to the kitchen floor in his old worn-out overcoat, his once-handsome face like a gargoyle’s, hideous with death. Or was it God, was it the revelation God made to this unbelieving, scornful servant Thaddeus?—not death at all that had astounded and angered Thaddeus, but God?—God?

  “Why did he die like that?” Opal asked, angry herself. She was not quite coherent; she was rather exasperated with her husband. “Like that?—so fast, and without any preparation?”

  “All things must be fulfilled,” Nathan said slowly.

  She inclined her head toward him. She did not fully understand, but she assented.

  “All things must . . . Yes,” she said.

  And so Opal Vickery managed to deal with the legal and financial problems her husband left her (for he died intestate, like many another physician), and some eight months after his funeral she was in a position to sell most of the property: a great deal of the money went for taxes, but a fair amount was given to the Marsena Baptist Church and to the Evangelical Missionaries’ Alliance. A year after his death she signed over the house to a homeless family the Sisleys had heard of, an arthritic cabinetmaker and his wife and seven children who had been living on welfare up in Yewville, crammed into a bungalow; most of the furniture went with the house—the sofas and tables and chairs and Thaddeus’s old desk and even his old useless hourglass—since Mrs. Vickery wanted nothing to do with it. She was talked into taking along some of the finer antique pieces, and several ceramic doorknobs, when she and Nathan moved into the Sisleys’ house—which was a fairly large house right in town, a stone’s throw from the church. The Sisleys had often complained of loneliness there, since they had no children. It had occurred to them from time to time that the Lord meant for them to share their home, but the opportunity had never so obviously arisen in the past.

  “Now we’re all together,” Reverend Sisley said, deeply moved. “And it feels right, doesn’t it?—that’s how you can tell the Lord is smiling upon us. It feels right. A new family is born out of the sorrow of loss, a new union is made in the eyes of the Lord, and all is well. It just feels right, doesn’t it?”

  He gave Nathan lessons, and spoke of sending him to Bible School in a few years (the minimum age was supposed to be sixteen but perhaps an exception could be made in Nathan’s case: Nathan was so obviously an exception) if there was enough money; he gave over the Sunday-school classes to the boy, since Mrs. Haas, who had been in charge of them for years, was so badly ailing; and allowed him to lead prayers and read the Gospel and take over entire services now and then, since the boy’s presence in front of the congregation was so mature and so assured—and wasn’t it a surprise, when the boy often seemed so shy, so tongue-tied in person? almost, in a way, backward? But he surely came to life when he was preaching the Lord’s wisdom and there was no doubt that Reverend Sisley’s cong
regation approved, for not only did more people show up for services when it was known Nathan Vickery would be presiding, but the collection was always more generous—always. “It’s partly because he’s a child,” Reverend Sisley told his wife, careful to let her know his feelings were not hurt, his dignity not bruised, “but mainly, I think, because the Lord is behind him and supporting him all the way. The Lord is really enthusiastic about Nathan.”

  The Reverend Thomas Sisley was in his mid-sixties at this time, slow of speech, partly deaf, an amiable smiling man who nodded a great deal, perhaps because he couldn’t always be certain of what people were saying. His best days were behind him, he readily admitted; he had been a passionate witness of the Gospel at one time, back in the early years of the century and well up into the twenties. He had moved many hundreds—or was it thousands—of people to come forward for Christ; and the Lord had been generally well-pleased with him. So he believed, so he was given to believe.

  “Now it’s only fitting that a new generation springs to life,” he said. And to the boy himself he said: “All you have to do, Nathan, is trust in the Lord. Nothing more. The Lord asks you only to do what you can—and He’s with you all the way.”