The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  East of the packing room was the finishing room. To the other side of the factory’s entrance was the sole-leather room, furnished with all the machinery, tools, and facilities necessary for the expeditious and economical cutting of the soles. Twelve non-union men were employed there, and he searched unsuccessfully for any sign of whether relations with these men would be defined by harmony or discord.

  In the rear were engine and boiler rooms, coal house, and storerooms—all arranged and adapted for convenience, dispatch, and safety. An engine of twenty horsepower drove the machinery. The three stories were heated by steam, lighted by gas, and supplied with washrooms, cloakrooms, and advantages of every kind.

  He climbed the wide stairs to the third, and top, story, leaving the second floor and the bottoming room for last. This level was divided into two vast rooms, both abundantly windowed and ventilated, again with white hard-finished walls. One was the stitching room, home to tables that stretched 115 in front of twenty-three windows.

  The rear was the dominion of the sewing room foreman. East of this was the box room, where the boxes were made and stored.

  Earlier that spring, Sampson had tilled some two acres in connection with the building, laid out walks, grass plots, flower beds, and trees, and although Charlie was too cautious to remove himself from inside the factory walls that June night, he did enjoy the scent of growth and greenery that made its way through the building’s open upper windows.

  The bottomers’ room was on the second story, directly above the sole-leather room. Forty by eighty feet and eleven feet high. This was where the Celestials would work. Pushed against the walls, beneath and perpendicular to the windows, were a series of workbenches, destined within a matter of hours to be home to a team of three Chinamen per bench, one at the end and one on either side. Here, the teams would learn, through sign language and by example, how the parts of the shoes were to be put together. One foreman, an independent workman long in Sampson’s employ, would go about his work unmolested. As for the other, a Mr. Robbins of Springfield, within an hour of his arrival and visit to the factory, he would be accosted in the street by one Crispin after another with mysterious and awful hints. Mr. Robbins, an entire stranger to North Adams, but a typical New Englander with a good deal of strength of character and firmness of purpose, would later say to a reporter, “I heard all they had to say, and then I did not encourage them to say more.”

  For both foremen, Charlie would do the translating, and the boys’ wariness would grow. What could be said of someone who could stand, as Charlie could, with a foot in two lands, straddling the widest ocean of the world?

  In the workers, the visitors to the factory would find the long slit eyes from their earliest remembered geographies. They would be struck with the general impression of extreme delicacy and effeminacy. The workmen would not to the American eye seem to be men. The breadth of their face and the fullness of their nose suggested what the Americans could describe only as an inscrutable expression, and many of them would leave ready to ask of their companions: Is it the ignorance and prejudice of race or is it merely custom and familiarity which imparts such superior intelligence and sagacity to the American faces when compared to the foreign?

  That first night, Charlie read an inscription scrawled on the wall by the stairs: No scabs or rats admitted here. But there was good air for work, which Charlie was glad to note, as he knew that, before striking, the American workers had bottomed twelve hundred pairs of shoes a day, and he further understood that those numbers were not to be equaled but surpassed if this Chinese Experiment was to seem any kind of success.

  Adjoining the bottomers’ room to the south was a large room where the shoes were brought for inspection and temporary storage before going to the finishing room. Until the evening of June 13, the rooms east of and below this had been unoccupied, but now he made his way back to them, following the sounds of seventy-four men breathing and murmuring in their sleep, dreaming—happily, he hoped—in their native dialects.

  Lucy Robinson passed yet again a difficult night, and yet again Ida had been summoned in the middle of the darkest hours from the Widow Allen’s house to be her companion through it, Alfred awake and awkward on the other side of the thin curtain that separated the front half of the one room from the back.

  Lucy did not like to speak of the attack during the bright light of day, and Ida had come to cherish these nights for the intimacy they allowed. The widow found Ida’s tending to Miss Robinson both Christian and useful, as the Robinson girl’s attack was still the central topic among the sewing circle and Temperance Society ladies, and her proximity to the victim herself—only once removed, really—lent the widow the attention and interest she had long felt lacking.

  Ida had found the blankets in a twisted thicket at Lucy’s feet and had remade the bed around her friend as she had once seen a nurse do in a Richmond hospital during the war, and then she had changed Lucy’s damp nightdress, being respectful with eye and hand of the still-pink scars lacing her chest and side.

  The man had been a stranger. Lucy had not been able to describe his face, and what she had been able to describe—a clean and pressed gray shirtsleeve, slight veins beneath the smooth back of a hand, the smell of a soap heavily laden with perfumes—had not been enough for anyone else to put details to person.

  He had come up behind her on Pearl Street, an area of town overrun, as the local paper put it, “with hooligans and thugs not, it seems almost unnecessary to say, from local parts.” He had guided her with such quiet insistence to the small space between the two O’Connell shops that several moments had passed before the idea of struggle had occurred to her. Once she had begun to twist away, he had produced the knife, and once she had understood the pain to be her own, she had abandoned her struggles. She did not speak of what happened after that, not even with Ida under cover of darkness. It shamed her more than she sometimes thought she could stand that the doctor knew as much as she herself did of the damages done to her person, inside and out. That unhappy mix of the private and the strange was one of the hardest burdens to bear. The doctor, the sheriff, the attacker himself, all of them unknown to her and her to them, until the wary bonding of violence. With her brother, of course, the opposite had occurred: the sister he had felt he’d known was in the stroke of a few minutes made forever strange. And now, months after the incident, she kept as still as possible, sometimes any movement at all causing the otherworldly pain to move through her with an extremity that sent the air out of her as if she were a bellows. It was one of the reasons she secretly hoped the man would not be found. If she could barely stand upright among friends, how could she possibly do so in the face of a stranger who had taken such liberties with her?

  Ida resettled her on the fresh pillow, lay beside her on the narrow bed, placing a hand lightly on her friend’s forehead, and it was unclear to which girl the gesture brought the most comfort.

  “Oh, Ida,” Lucy said, her eyes closed and dry. “There’s no one going to want me.”

  Ida cradled her friend’s hand in her own. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, as she always said to this, the inevitable worry. “They will be up and down the stairs for you,” she said. “It will be like Penelope and her suitors. They will be eating your food, drinking your drink. Foolish men making fools of themselves, and though you could have your pick, you’ll know your one love is out there, making his way to you.”

  Lucy smiled a little. “You’re full of nonsense,” she said. “Who knows where my one true love is.”

  Ida blushed. What she was feeling but wouldn’t know how to say was, “I know.”

  What she said instead was: “Your Odysseus is coming even as we speak. I’ve always been better at books than you.” It was a clumsy and inaccurate claim that she would continue to make about herself in relation to most people.

  Outside, the stars were still visible as ghostly shadows. The earliest of morning birds sounded in the willows along the river, and the tenement began
to come alive with the creaks and thumps of workers getting ready for another day. Upstairs, John Hardy stretched and pressed his thumbs into his eternally sore lower back. The Morgans’ terrier barked at Joe St. Pierre in the hall, and Miss Carrie Gardner from downstairs let her latest beau out, her laughter an ungainly trespasser on the stairs. Throughout the town, the Celestials had invaded the sleep and minds of the natives. J. H. Adams, furniture dealer, reached for his wife across their youngest daughter, who was once again sharing their bed, and thought of the plaits of black hair swinging against the delicate backs of the newcomers like bellpulls in drawing rooms, the luxury of summoning help with a mere tug. Mrs. Tucker, milliner, washed her face at a porcelain basin decorated with the images of plump Chinese babies playing with lions and balls and felt, for the first time in the five years of owning the thing, an inexplicable embarrassment. J. W. Spear, recent widower and dry-goods merchant, used the precious minutes before the waking of his four children to sit in his nightclothes at his dear wife’s writing table and pen the first draft of an advertisement he would run in next week’s paper, entitled “The Chinese Have Come.”

  Some worried or ranted. Others argued with themselves or with spouses, boarders, or housemaids. Boys wondered what kind of mischief the Celestials could be made to get up to. Girls recalled the texture and shade of their skin.

  Mothers reminded themselves to preach tolerance and kindness to their children at the breakfast table. Merchants hoped for a spirit of materialistic accumulation of all things American. Ministers prayed. The striking shoe workers slept in, their wives moving noisily around them, each gesture designed to say, Bills, bills, bills.

  And the town entire marveled at the twists and turns in the roads God had laid for them. It was as if into the hands of seventy-five boys God had placed small mirrors, and as the Celestials walked the streets of North Adams, those mirrors captured the faces of the townspeople, suddenly new and unrecognizable. As the town slowly woke, the question filling minds was not only What do we make of them? but also What do we make of ourselves? The one question that crossed no one’s mind was What do they make of us?

  Alfred was awake, though not readying himself for work. He was not thinking much about the strike, his Crispin brothers, or the Order’s plans to discuss what to do about these strikebreakers dropped from the heavens. Nights like these, with his sister and her friend behind that curtain, he did not sleep. He listened instead for the sounds of Lucy settling into Ida’s care.

  He had not given Ida Wilburn much thought in Virginia. She’d been merely his younger sister’s friend, someone he often included in his play, but someone in and out of their home so often that he stopped hearing the sound of the back door when it was she tugging at its handle. But here everything, including Ida, was different. Here her face held in it his mother and father, boyhood friends and favorite dogs. And, maybe most importantly, his sister before the attack. So here, as far from his hometown as he’d ever imagined he’d be, her brisk countenance stopped him short every time and he felt as if he were riding a horse who had refused a fence. Each time, he had to find something to do with his hands, give himself enough time to gather the reins, circle his mount, and approach the fence anew.

  The pain of the dead child dividing itself from Julia’s body lasted through the night. With each cramp, she imagined herself not as a safe harbor, but as terrain that offered a child nothing of life and everything worth fleeing. She had felt this way so often that it had for some time been the way she felt about herself without child.

  Sampson also did not sleep well, and she listened each time he woke, turning to her in midsentence as if their conversations carried on regardless of consciousness. The first time, he spoke of the tidy bundles of belongings the boys had carried, how they had reminded him of his own brown leather valise from nearly twenty years ago, when he was first starting out, carrying his goods from house to house. Did she remember how he had sold out his stock in less than ten days? How the gentlemen of Boston’s Atherton, Stetson & Co. had been surprised to see him back so soon for another invoice of shoes?

  That valise was still on the floor of her wardrobe, brushed daily by the low sweep of her dresses and petticoats. In it, she kept mementos of their early life together. Their baptismal letters from the church. The handkerchief she had held while speaking her vows. The first present he had made to her: a flat gray rock banded naturally by one white line, small enough to fit easily in her palm.

  And, indeed, she did remember that twenty-fourth of April 1851, when he had left her for Boston. She remembered that her panic at being left was offset only by the joy of their reunion. She remembered the amount of credit: $117 for three months, and the condition that if it was paid in thirty days, he should be allowed a discount of three percent. He had paid it off, though not within ten days, not even within thirty, and they had had to appeal to his cousin George Millard for a small loan, which so bothered Sampson that as soon as it was paid back he promptly erased from his mind that it had ever existed.

  She had learned long ago not to correct him on these adjustments to his life’s stories, and did not do so this night, nor would she have even if not under great physical stress.

  The second time he woke, he raised himself on his elbows and said only, “They don’t drink coffee.” And the third, he looked at her for several seconds, but said nothing.

  His sleep was so fitful that when he finally did turn on his side and commence the breaths and thrums of real sleep, she worried that her own discomfort would wake him, so she repaired to her sister-in-law’s room and bed, waking her to say, “I am losing another,” and Thankful made space for her beneath her white sheets, helping her through the worst of it, changing the muslins between her legs, persuading her to sip from the multitude of medicines, tonics, and remedies she spent much time collecting and comparing, easing her, finally, into something like sleep. And although Julia had forbidden it, Thankful roused her brother, letting him know why it was necessary that now, in the early hours of the morning, he join his sad and sleeping wife. And he did, and Julia was glad, for she woke to her husband settling around her as a shoe with its mate in a box, placing his hand, dry and warm, on her head.

  “Thankful never could hold her tongue,” Julia said, already crying.

  “Bless her for it,” Sampson answered, wiping his wife’s face with the heel of his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said.

  “For what?” he asked.

  She closed her eyes and held his hand over them with her own. “For everything,” she said.

  He made to move, and she knew what was coming: his request for her to open her eyes and believe him when he told her that he had nothing for which to forgive her. That she was, as she had been on the day they met, on the day they married, the one person in the world for him. That she was always and forever enough. Her moments of greatest loss would be in her mind always paired with the greatest evidence of her husband’s love. It had the consequence of making the losses feel more enormous.

  She pressed his hand harder to her face, curled her body more tightly against his. “Stay,” she said. And he did.

  Chapter Four

  Wednesday the fifteenth of June saw the successful penetration of the factory by a Crispin spy, a Mr. George Fisk, from Boston. Sampson had vowed to close the factory against visitors and had begun a policy of keeping all entrances locked or guarded, but during a momentary absence on Wednesday of manufacturer, bookkeeper, and boy, one door had been left carelessly unfastened (the boy had already been relieved of his duties), and Mr. Fisk walked quietly in and found his way upstairs and into the bottomers’ room. Each person who saw him supposed he had been introduced and vouched for by someone else, and so he spent an hour in clandestine inspection.

  Despite his vow, Sampson had not been able to resist showing off his experiment to some privileged few, and already a manufacturer of shirts from New Jersey and several other shoe factory owners from around the state had been
to look on at the enterprise. On Wednesday, the latest batch included two reverends and the owner of a textile mill from Pittsfield. The talk was of educating the Celestials. They watched the boys maneuver the pegging machine in its devious way around the shoes. Sampson passed around a shoe turned out and ready for market. It was as good as any you could pick out of a hundred cases downstairs that the Crispins had made, he said affectionately.

  It was not the harm of Fisk’s presence that upset Sampson, but the impudence in it. He perhaps would have let it pass—he had promised Julia he would try to behave against his instincts in matters involving confrontation—but Fisk returned later the same day, called for Sampson’s presence, and informed one of the non-union cutters, before Sampson’s face, that there was a better position waiting for him, and that he could make money by leaving the factory. Sampson felt himself entirely in the right when he pulled a gun on the spy and said, “If a man steps on my toes, I will have revenge on him, if it is not for years after.”

  Fisk responded, “I have not trodden on your toes.”

  Years later, when Charlie would introduce Sampson to the Chinese notion of losing face, Sampson would recall his exchange with Fisk, but at the time, he merely said, “Then I cannot say what is causing them to feel such an ache,” and he informed the cutter that he best hope Fisk was true to his promise of employment, as that cutter would not find his livelihood there any longer.