Son of the Morning by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

VII

How long will You keep Yourself apart from me, O Lord? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?

The loneliness.

Empty of mind, empty of heart.

Now it is December and very cold indeed and there is nothing to say about my craving for You that I have not already said a hundred times. Early in the morning, before dawn, I walk outside in the snow in my bare feet, hoping to feel pain; hoping to feel something. Overhead the stars are fading. The sky is coarse and curdled. Sparrows awake in a tumult, in the straggly hedge outside my window, and their frantic chirping mocks the despair of my soul.

I am no longer ill, it is said. But neither am I well.

Why do You continue to forsake me, seeing that I am broken in body and mind and spirit these many long months! The cruelty of Your disregard, the remorselessness; the indifference. For out of the south comes the whirlwind, and cold out of the north, and by Your breath is frost given to the earth.

And that is all.

LONG AGO THERE was Nathanael Vickery and he dwelled with You in the blissfulness of utter peace. On the surface of his being there was agitation, as the surface of a body of water is pricked and disturbed and appears to shudder and to disintegrate, yet is constant and whole. Long ago he dwelled with You while he established himself firmly in the world of man, achieving a success in that world that ordinary men might bitterly covet, and he had no care for money, no care for fame, or the high regard of men and women; for it was given unto him to see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, and though his body exerted itself in this world his spirit triumphed elsewhere, being of the same substance as Your nature. Why should he have taken thought for his life, for what he might eat or drink?—for the comforts of his body? He inhabited a body but was not of it. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. So it is written, and so Nathan believed.

“YOU AND I could marry,” Leonie said lightly. “You’re how old?—eighteen?—why, eighteen’s old enough for anything! First time I saw you, you were only a boy, skinnier than you are now and edgy as a weasel and your voice the strangest, hauntingest sound I ever heard—it just went through me, went through me in waves, and the thought came to me that I already knew you: that we’d met before and would certainly be meeting again.”

“Then you played that trick on me,” Nathan said slowly.

“Oh no, honey! You were just a boy that first time, no more than twelve or thirteen. It was a few years before Kincardine, I forget where—Rockland, maybe, or the outskirts of Yewville.

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