The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  It tickled Sampson that a meeting such as this had proceeded beneath the dimwitted noses of those Crispins without their catching even a whiff of the goings-on. He was, of course, wrong about that, being guilty once again of underestimating those people whom it convenienced him to underestimate. For these reasons, he would have been unhappy, even angered, to learn that not only had the manufacturers’ plans been laid on the table at the Crispins’ afternoon session but also that the claim had been made by more than one brother that Sampson himself had been seen masquerading around town that very day, trying to know the content of this worthy gathering.

  He would have been most bothered by the claim of “masquerading,” with its overtones of the sneak and the coward. If he had desired to attend the meeting, attend the meeting he would have, unhatted. And had he been there, he would not have been angered to hear how often his name crossed the lips of the Crispin crowd. Mr. Sampson was to the working men what Judas was to Christianity, what Jeff Davis was to the freedom of slaves. His object was to change the whole civilization of Massachusetts into an Asiatic civilization, and since the blow of Mr. Sampson had been given with deadly intent, a blow of equal deadliness must be given in defense.

  Sampson would have agreed with Alfred that these moments were practically the only moments of color in the entire afternoon’s session. Alfred had grown tired of the motions and countermotions, the committees formed and the votes counted. Daniel had been right. You could not out of one side of your mouth decry apathy while out of the other deny the taking of violent action. By the time, late in the afternoon, when Mrs. Warner requested that a committee be appointed to request the gentleman in the corner who was talking to leave the hall, Alfred was ready to lay fists to his fellow brothers.

  So distracted was he by his anger and frustration that he noticed not at all that he had eaten the apple complete, seeds and stem. His mother had always been able to calm these moods—his “states,” she had called them—by forcing him down onto her lap, wrapping her arms around him, and holding him with a strength just short of discomfort. She had continued with this remedy long past the time when his body fit in her lap, and since her death he missed it so often that he sometimes wrapped himself in his own arms, which always left him with less comfort rather than more.

  Given his state, it wasn’t surprising that it was Sampson who noted the boy and not the reverse. He took the boy in. His hair was the color of straw and as unruly as a street child’s. His brow sloped up and away from eyes the color of brackish water. Sampson felt he had known crowds of such boys growing up in Vermont, boys who had handled their from-dawn-to-dark farm chores with ease, whose definition of “future” had never ventured beyond the next meal, who were coddled by sister and mother, treated briskly by father. Boys whom Sampson’s own father had on more than one occasion wished his youngest son more closely resembled. Sampson himself had wished the same even more vigorously, while protecting himself from the sting of their disregard by convincing himself that they were not a group to which a boy should want to belong. He had sworn to Julia shortly after they married that he would not make the mistakes with his son that his father had made with him. She had said that his father must have done something very right, and that all of their children would be lucky to have Sampson as a father. Any recollection of this exchange caused Sampson pain, and as the years passed, and being a father seemed less and less likely, he would have had to admit that all those boys, even the Crispin boys, shared more with him than not.

  By Sampson’s eye, Alfred was in his early twenties. His shoes were simple brogans, over five years old, it seemed to the shoemaker, but the leather was good and he guessed that Alfred’s closet didn’t hold footwear of any other kind. The boy appeared agitated, spitting onto the grass between his planted feet, ignorant of the sidelong looks of passing ladies. Partly due to his general good mood, but mostly because of his loneliness, Sampson approached the boy, laying a hand on his shoulder.

  Alfred startled, knocking the hand away with a quick swing of his forearm.

  Sampson laughed and put his hand back heavily, the way one does on the neck of a skittish horse. When Alfred recognized to whom the hand belonged, he ducked his shoulder away, standing to face him. It surprised Sampson, and he swallowed once again the bitter taste of exclusion by reminding himself that he held all the cards in this game. “A break between rabble-rousing sessions?” he asked.

  Alfred looked around as if this might be some kind of test. He imagined what his father would have done in such a situation, and then he offered his hand and waited for the manufacturer to take it. It had been claimed that afternoon that the Chinamen would not make good shoemakers, nor would they make good mechanics in any industry. The machinery bothered them wonderfully, it was argued, and they never would encompass it entirely. Charlie Sing had had his thumb taken off, and several more thumbs would follow. If these claims were true, then the time when Crispins and Sampson would once again need to figure out how to negotiate with each other was not far off.

  They shook hands slightly too firmly for slightly too long. Alfred said, “A break in capital’s plotting to make life even harder for the workingman?”

  Sampson laughed again and tried to remember if he knew the boy’s name. “I know your face,” he said, “but forgive me if I’m meant to know your name and have forgotten.”

  “Alfred Robinson. We met not long ago in your office.”

  Sampson remembered but to the boy presented a face full only of confusion. “I’m sorry.” He shrugged.

  Alfred shrugged back. And they stood there.

  “Are you kin to Lucy Robinson?” he asked, surprising Alfred and himself.

  “I am. Her brother.” Since the attack, Alfred was used to people whom he didn’t know knowing them.

  Sampson said he’d never met her, but he seemed genuinely concerned about her well-being. But Alfred did not want to like him, even if he imagined having to work for him again, and he began a litany in his mind of the examples of the man’s arrogance and posturing and unfair ways with the men Alfred called brothers. “She’s doing much better, thank you,” he said in a voice that he hoped communicated that any further travel down that road would result only in Sampson’s having to return from whence he’d come.

  “Well,” Sampson said, seeming to have run out of things to say.

  “Well,” Alfred agreed.

  And it didn’t matter that they were about to part or that Alfred would not offer his hand again upon doing so. For all that Daniel Luther saw when he topped the rise of the park’s far path was Alfred Robinson, newcomer to shoemaking, the North, and the Crispins, standing in the embrace of Calvin T. Sampson, the man who stood for everything Daniel and the other brothers stood against. Granted, Alfred was not returning the embrace and seemed, even to the sometimes dull-minded Daniel, excessively ill at ease, but it was surely an embrace, and although Alfred was uncomfortable he was also neither stepping away nor registering protest. So though Daniel’s father would have said nothing good ever came of conclusions drawn from witnessing only parts of the whole story, Daniel had come to believe the opposite of his father’s philosophy. People like him never got the whole story. His life depended always on being able to judge the depths of the hole from the fence post that stood in it. And he knew, standing there watching, that yes, Alfred was uneasy, but more than that looked grateful. His shoulders were curved into the embrace. His expression was almost sad. Had Daniel been in Alfred’s shoes, he would have felt the same. They were, after all, practically boys, both of them still missing the tender regard of their mothers, not having found something similar anywhere else. So it wasn’t the betrayal of the Order that saddened him most. He had for quite some time now counted Alfred as a friend, perhaps his closest, and had, until this moment, thought Alfred had done the same. So he pledged to keep quiet about what he’d seen, because when he had imagined them gathering comfort, he had always imagined it would be from each other.

  If Id
a had paid any attention to Alfred’s comings and goings in the following weeks, she might have noted the coincidence of his absences with the growing number of incidents perpetuated against the Chinese. As it was, she and the rest of the town took note of the increased harassment but, because everyone believed the identities of the responsible parties to be clear in a general way, didn’t feel the need to investigate the particulars. Each incident became, then, fresh evidence of the ignorance and troublemaking of the Order rather than the particular resentments and growing anger of certain members of that Order.

  Ida would have been further surprised to know that it was behavior of her own that had contributed to that anger and resentment. On the Monday after Alfred’s return from Boston, a small group of the Celestials had been taken to the Freeman printworks for a visit and a tour. This had been Ida’s notion, backed up by the good women of the Baptist church. Alfred had listened, on Monday night, to her enthusiastic description of the Celestials’ level of interest in anything toward which she directed their gaze. If she showed them a sign, they tried to read it; if she pointed out a flower, they bent to smell it. She wouldn’t be surprised if after their one afternoon’s visit to the printworks, they could be placed in charge of those machines. He remembered how much she’d teased him about the trouble he’d had mastering the pegging machine. He never had gotten the hang of the thing; his foreman had put him into the boxing room to see what damage he could do with hammer and nail.

  Her opinion mattered to him even more than he had understood. He was coming to know this the way one comes to know by putting a hand to dry grass that the spring ground beneath is still wet. And so, on Tuesday, as the second group of interested Celestials made its way to Freeman’s, bucketloads of water poured down on them from above accompanied by the stifled laughter of the factory girls wielding the buckets.

  Town opinion was divided as to how seriously to take this incident. The Chinese had taken to drinking their after-dinner tea in the courtyard outside the entrance to their rooms, and that Tuesday evening the men spoke of little else from their haphazard circle of low stools. Several of the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds argued that this had been an example of the brazenness of American women, a brazenness that secretly thrilled them, though they tried to keep the titillation out of their voices. They would’ve been chagrined to know that their attempts were unsuccessful.

  The men weighed the implications of the water incident. All of them were old enough to know that one discovered more by silence than by speech, and silence had the suggestion of wisdom. Once they did let their opinions be known, the younger boys would be more likely swayed by them and less likely to dwell on the fact that there was but a few years’ difference in age.

  If indeed the women had been engaging in some kind of childish play, was that something to be celebrated or not? How astonishing, after all, that the eyes of the village girls had turned in their direction at all. A good sign, no doubt. Yet surely this news could be met with nothing but more resentment from the village boys and fear from the village elders? But some of the boys insisted that the girls had merely been vehicles for a man who had been seen in the shadows. Charlie hoped this to be the truth. It was dismaying, but expected and familiar, both of which were preferable to the opposite.

  One of the cooks claimed that the children of such women would be redheaded devils whose knees didn’t bend.

  The other claimed they didn’t bear children; they stole them. “There’s nowhere to put your little thing,” he pointed out.

  Charlie colored. The cooks were the only two of the seventy-four whom he hadn’t personally interviewed. He added their names to his growing list of reasons to do things oneself.

  By the end of that week, the last of the Chinese were trained and hard at work in the bottoming room, and the town assumed that the further disgruntled and deflated Crispins were responsible for the delivery to the Celestials’ entrance of two milk crates of dead rats that Saturday afternoon.

  Charlie carried them himself to Sampson’s office, bowed slightly, and said, “We have no use for these.”

  Sampson assured him that he also wanted nothing to do with the dirty things and suggested that he get one of the Celestials to dispose of them.

  Charlie felt put off by this. Ignorant Americans seemed to be more Sampson’s responsibility than his own. On his way back to the Celestial quarters, Charlie called over a newly hired office boy, not more than ten, loaded the two crates in the boy’s thin arms, and said that Mr. Sampson had ordered the boy to discard them. “Work fast,” he added conspiratorially. “Today, his mood is not so good.”

  It had taken Alfred hours to gather enough dead rats to fill even half of the first crate, but when his energy flagged, he had merely to conjure the image that had prompted him in the first place: Ida and one of her Celestial boys walking up the hill behind the factory carrying a kite of foreign design. He had heard that students and their teachers had begun these little outings, but he had not expected to see Ida partaking in them. Why he had not, he didn’t know. The town was, for the most part, in favor of these jaunts, seen as they were to be the harmless, happy games of children. And indeed, Alfred was witness merely to a man and a woman walking up a hill. Perhaps it had been the banality of the image that had so bothered him. But it had bothered him so severely that he had stood there and stood there across the street, his eyes never leaving the top of the rise over which they’d disappeared. And there he was when they returned, an hour later, now more animated, though not, he had to admit, more intimate, and the moment they crested the hill, making their careful way down again, he winced as if it were his knees bearing the weight of their downhill strides, and he stood there feeling as if he were an idiot or a dog, something other than himself.

  So when, trudging through the muck of the riverbed or slipping on the stacked wood in his neighbors’ woodsheds, a burlap bag tied around his waist with baling twine, he thought he might just give it up, all he had to do was remind himself of the way she’d made him feel, ambling slowly up the hill with her Celestial, noting Alfred not at all.

  What did he guess they’d been up to, he’d demanded of Daniel.

  “Flying a kite?” Daniel had suggested.

  So he was left with his imagination, and it was then that his rancor and rage began to rise in his throat like floodwater. And it was then that he got the idea of borrowing Henry Bolt’s terrier, which he set loose in the feed rooms of a handful of barns while he stood against the closed door to watch. The dog climbed walls, even made it partway across ceilings, grabbing the fleeing rats and dispatching them, his eyes already scanning for the next gray blur. Alfred was left more satisfied than he’d been in weeks. He asked Henry Bolt to set a price for the animal, but Henry called the creature to his side and said he wasn’t for sale. And just like that, the warmth of satisfaction was gone from Alfred’s chest, replaced by something he didn’t know to call loneliness.

  As the summer proceeded, more of the Chinese spent their free time out and about. They frequented the local stores, went to church and public lectures, marveled at traveling amusements. They flew more kites. They sat in the park, their faces to the sun.

  Sunday school sessions became less formal and pinched. Laughter was more common than not. The exchange of gifts between teachers and students increased. Shoes of perfectly reasonable quality rolled out of Sampson’s factory at two dollars a case less than they used to. The Crispins continued to hold their mass meetings, but by the second one at Tremont Temple, of the two hundred workingmen who convened the meeting, only fifty remained at the adjournment. Their half-hearted attempts to convince the Chinese to join their band of brothers had been unsuccessful, and by the end of July, all danger from them seemed, most of the town agreed, to be over. For a while, there were no new incidents.

  And then Ah Ang Fook was accosted at the corner of Eagle and Main on his return to the factory. Small rocks hailed down on him from the rooftop of the Ballou Block. Several hit their ma
rk and the following morning he dressed to conceal the bruises. The police were called to the scene, but by the time they had identified the roof and climbed the staircase, the perpetrators were long gone. Sampson denounced the act and out of his own pocket reimbursed Ang Fook for his purchase from the drugstore of the two bottles of Renne’s Magic Oil that had been broken.

  The week after that, Sunday school was extended to Wednesday evenings, and the women who had volunteered for extra duty turned in various directions outside the factory fence, calling their good-byes to each other in the cool summer twilight. Of course, Alfred had not intended for Mrs. Sampson herself to be any kind of a target, and Ida even less, but sometimes when one begins a boulder rolling down a hill it is impossible not only to stop it but also to keep it from gathering speed. He should have known there would have been other brothers equally unsatisfied with the Order’s apathy in the face of the Celestial invasion, others secretly thrilling at each new revenge, but the thought had not entered his mind, largely because the Order’s apathy was not central to his rage. The other brothers knew only that those coolie boys were partaking of a meal that belonged on a Crispin’s table. Crispin hands had been tied by capital and the Order’s own leadership, and they lashed out at those within reach.

  They set upon the women from behind with volleys of stones and handfuls of gravel and saw only Mrs. Sampson’s back as she fell to the ground, covering her companion as best she could. Ida did not fall. She held her primer as a shield before her face and began walking toward them. “Tom McLaughlin and Charlie Upham,” she called. “What kind of cowards do you take us for?” she asked loudly enough that several neighbors reported hearing her clear as a bell.

  The boys dropped their stones and gravel, backing up as they did so, and as she kept coming, their nerve, which had been spontaneous and rash to begin with, fizzled entirely and they fled, cutting across Freeman’s lot until sure she hadn’t pursued them.