The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Julia suffered a cut at the back of her neck, just above the collar, and Nancy Harding, the girl she had tried to shield, had to pick the dirt and chips of stone from the heels of her hands with a sewing needle, she had fallen so hard against the road, but other than that, the women were unharmed, though Julia was still so flushed, her eyes so bright, upon her return to the Wilson House that Sampson would not be convinced by her assurances until she allowed the doctor to be summoned and he pronounced her level of agitation to be completely normal given the circumstances.

  Tom McLaughlin and Charlie Upham were dispatched to the county jail, paid their fine, and within a month had found their separate ways out of town for good. Still, there was no doubt now amid the town that the problem had not disappeared. For the most pessimistic it was a sign that the early success of Sampson’s Experiment was over. In the days following the episode, Julia found she could set her heart to similar racing with ease. And as those effects of the attack receded, she felt a vague sadness and impatience with all that was settled and sure.

  Having heard about the incident, and the injury inflicted upon his employer’s wife, Charlie made his way to the Wilson House, explaining to Sampson when he opened the apartment door that he was there to pay his respects and offer a gift of good health.

  Sampson, surprised but not unpleasantly so, widened the door and stepped back, beckoning his foreman to enter.

  Julia was seated on a chair by the window, a blanket covering her lap. Their eyes met, hers alive with tiny movements of alarm. Charlie bowed, lowering his gaze, his face still and blank.

  He offered his hope that her health would be improved as quickly as possible. He placed a small carving of a dragon on the table before her, apologizing for its hasty and rough construction. He explained that the dragon was a symbol of blessing and fortune, as it was the only animal to unite heaven and earth. He politely refused Sampson’s offers of food and drink and made his exit, wondering all the way back to the factory at the behavior of this strange American lady.

  Had Alfred known that the photos of the Celestials had been Julia’s idea, it is hard to know whether he would have felt better or worse about the attack against her. She had argued to her husband that they would remind the town that these boys were here, genuine people with genuine needs and responsibilities, and remind the Celestials of the same things. Both walk down the street, both eat and drink, both are made of flesh and blood in the image of God.

  Even as she was making these claims, she knew she did not really believe them. Each Sunday, she could not have felt herself to be more different from the pupils across from her. That feeling, since it both shamed and excited her, was why she was so insistent on the execution of her idea. It was as if she were seeking to pin those boys to paper herself.

  Julia had never wanted her own portrait taken, though Sampson had suggested it on more than one signal occasion. It had been too nervous-making, the idea of a likeness of herself set onto card stock, held in a frame, slid into an album. What if she could not control her expressions? What if her portrait revealed something about herself she wished not to see? But while making her arguments to her husband, she found herself imagining a portrait with, to her surprise, Charlie Sing.

  After his visit to the Wilson House, she had begun reading to him from time to time at the end of lessons. It was a way, she had told him, to improve his already strong command of the language. Sometimes he read to her, but not for long, instead passing the open book back to her, his finger marking the spot where she should take over. She never objected, partially because she enjoyed reading aloud and did not find opportunity to do so very often, and partially, though she would not know to articulate it this way, because there was something about his quiet and calm to which she was drawn. They never spoke of the fact that she had not identified herself as his employer’s wife.

  She had not thought she put him before any other Celestial in her mind, yet there they were in her imagination, the two of them framed in card stock. The unbidden nature of the image made her feel as she used to when Sampson would catch her unawares, placing a hand above her hip bone, sending small charges through her as if he were flint, she the tinder. The opposite of quiet and calm. She knew not to make these thoughts part of her arguments.

  “Would it make you happy?” he asked.

  She was so surprised at this question that she asked, “Would what make me happy?”

  “Exactly,” he said, perplexing her even further.

  She warmed beneath his gaze. Attention had always had this effect, as if a lighthouse beacon had suddenly fixed on her, picking her out from a shoreline of gray rocks.

  He granted permission for her plan. Out of love, Thankful would tell her later, and she knew her sister-in-law to be speaking the truth, and over the following months and years this would be one of the many things for which she felt shame.

  When Alfred found himself one Saturday evening sitting next to Ida and Lucy on a green picnic blanket, cutting thick slices of Lucy’s homemade bread, all he knew was that he was sitting close enough to Ida to feel her warmth and smell the odor of camphor peculiar to her skin. When had she come to mean what it was clear to him she now meant? He knew not. What he did know was that she had rolled her dress sleeves to her elbows, and her forearms, bare in the sun, rendered him without words.

  She had plenty of words. He’d done nothing but bow his head under the hailstorm of her speech for the last two days. She sat cross-legged on the blanket and pelted him with questions. Had he really had no inkling of the mischief of those fool brothers of his? Either he’d been part of their idiocy—and didn’t he like to claim proudly that the brothers always acted as one?—and should be more ashamed of himself than usual, or he hadn’t, and the loyalty of his tribe wasn’t what he’d thought it to be. The impulse to add that if that were the case, then he’d lost another family rose in her throat and she was so taken aback at the cruel journeying of her own mind that she took an abrupt and oversized bite of bread to keep herself from speaking any further.

  But it was too late; Lucy, who had been sitting at the blanket’s far corner silently eating grape after grape, was weeping. They drew around her, though as he was asking his younger sister what was wrong he was also aware that the length of his kneeling thigh was pressed against the length of Ida’s own. If not for the cloth of his pants and her skirts, he thought. And then he thought he should at least try and behave as a better person would and moved away to draw Lucy into his embrace.

  “You are too hard on each other,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. Speaking her mind seemed to make her crying more vigorous.

  Alfred had one arm around her; Ida another.

  “We have only each other,” she said. She was willing to receive their embraces, but she kept her own hands to herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Alfred said. What he meant was he would cease from making the Celestial boys his targets and would encourage others to do the same. He would turn his attention to his sister and he would keep it there. It was the thing his family and their friends had expected him to be unable to maintain—close and careful watch over his sister. Kneeling there uncomfortably, he swore to himself that this time he would not live up to their diminished expectations. Yet even as he took his oath, he knew that he took it for Ida.

  As for Ida, she said nothing, only thought that what her friend had said wasn’t true, at least not for her. Lucy and Alfred had each other. What Ida had was a picnic blanket that might as well have been an ocean, Ida on one far shore, Lucy on another.

  Chapter Seven

  By the eighteenth of August 1870, the thermometer in North Adams had been averaging for the prior four weeks upward of eighty degrees. The cooperative shoe company had orders for over three hundred cases ahead, and over one hundred seventy hands more than had worked at Sampson’s were now employed at the Crispins’ venture. That morning’s Transcript published the text of the contract between Sampson and the Ch
inamen in full, and in the same issue, Julia read of the suicide of a Mr. Adolphus Wells, a man of intelligence and industry, exemplary in all his life. A carpenter of superlative workmanship, he had been in poor health for several years, and after losing a job the previous spring, he feared that he should never work again. His domestic relations had been happy, and to all appearance, his life had seemed more free from trouble than the lives of others. How dreadful were appearances, thought Julia. How little we know of the hidden lives of those about us. She winced at the public display of a situation so private.

  The prior Sunday, a meteor had passed over the village. It had been nearly midnight and she had been awake and at the bedroom window. The meteor was sufficiently brilliant to light up the landscape despite the moon being at its height. She had wanted to wake Sampson, but not turn from the window. She had thought of calling out, but had not wanted to disturb the night, and so she let him sleep on, pretending in the morning that she, too, had missed the thing entire. But now, the image of Mr. Wells facedown in river water shared her mind’s space with the meteor’s flash, skyrocket without the noise.

  On August 18, she accompanied the initial group of Celestials to the first of their photographic sittings. Standing there in William P. Hurd’s studio, the August air as thick outside as in, Charlie hushed and herded the first group of five boys. It had not been difficult to persuade them, though he had been able to offer no clear explanation of their employer’s motivations. No one could say why husband and wife Sampson wanted all seventy-five of them to sit for individual cartes de visite. It was impossible to imagine to whom they could conceivably offer such cards. But once they’d been assured that the almost two-dollar sitting fee—more than twice their daily earnings—would be paid by the Sampsons, they had agreed that it seemed prudent to give the man upon whom their livelihoods depended what he seemed to want.

  There was no distinguishing between Sampson’s desires and those of his wife. Mrs. Sampson had been in the last week more and more of a presence, insisting that Charlie impress upon the boys that they were to dress in their favorite clothes and bring with them an assortment of their possessions. Perhaps a favorite book or keepsake. She had seemed to have not the slightest idea what those things might be. Charlie concluded that although it had been Mrs. Sampson who had come to the factory to make the request, she was acting as an emissary for her husband, who perhaps hadn’t had the time to do so himself. The notion that the photographs were an idea hatched from her own mind was an even more baffling one and Charlie naturally turned away from the complicated, choosing, if he could, the path of least confusion, although he found himself unable to ignore all consideration of her. She was, he was coming to feel, a bewildering figure. Why had she appeared in his sickroom to read to him? Why had she continued to do so? Why had she not introduced herself as Mrs. Sampson? And why, perhaps most confusing to him, did these uncertainties not make him retreat to a self-protective distance?

  But in Mr. Hurd’s studio, he noted that Sampson in no way seemed to be part of the endeavor. Mrs. Sampson expressed an enthusiasm for the objects the Chinese had brought that he found startling. She picked up Ah Har’s rice paper letter and asked Charlie if it was a letter from the boy’s family. She wanted to know if Chung Him Teak had carried the scarf with him on this whole long journey from home. If Sam Toy had carved the dragon himself. If many of them were talented in this way.

  Charlie shrugged politely. Usually, this kind of hysteria made him shut down, close as many of his watertight doors as possible, but in Mrs. Sampson, he realized with some mystification, it made him want to coo at her until she stilled and calmed.

  She teased him gently about falling short of his responsibilities. “Do you know them not at all, Mr. Foreman?” she asked, turning back to the treasures before her.

  He had grasped enough of overheard conversations at church and Sunday school and the factory to know that the town’s opinion was that Mrs. Sampson was delicate and shy, so he remained without speech, set off-balance by her apparent self-confidence. He would never know anyone to go from anxiety to sureness as quickly and as often as he would come to learn that she did.

  Even then, he was beginning to understand that she was, as he was, willing to offer others what they most wanted to see. He would never fully grasp that this was not something held in common only between them, but a trait shared the world over.

  She was right, he thought on that August afternoon. He knew none of the boys’ stories. He was not even confident of all their names. He could not have listed their home villages. Was this something he should be working to remedy? It had never occurred to him. Because, of course, Charlie shared the guilt of everyone who had ever referred to the boys as Sampson’s workers, the Boys, the Chinese, the Celestials. How wrongheaded to think that seventy-five individuals could be defined by one or two words. And how much of that wrongheadedness had been encouraged by that first stereograph Sampson had commissioned. Every visitor to the factory who passed by the outer wall to Sampson’s office also passed by that stereograph: a mass of dark-haired boys dressed in dark clothing and topped by dark hats. Perhaps Charlie was thinking of that image and feeling the wince of self-recrimination as he recalled his role in arranging the boys into their lines and in reassuring them that nothing of note would come from this. For whatever reason, as Hurd welcomed him into the portrait chair and gave him simple instructions, Charlie glanced up at Julia standing with the five boys behind the camera, not smiling, simply watching, and as he met her eyes with his own, he had the terrifying impulse to tell her about himself. Not the version he had given to the Methodist congregation, or to Mr. Chase, or to the immigration officer years and years prior, but everything he knew about himself and his life thus far, everything he understood, as plainly and clearly as he knew how to tell it.

  As Hurd finished his instructions, and the small sounds of the Celestial boys around her ceased, their attentions turned to their foreman in these peculiar circumstances, Julia felt an unfamiliar anticipation. It suddenly seemed to her the most intimate of situations, to be here on one side of the camera viewing someone on the other. She felt as if she and Charlie were sitting for some larger portrait, as if they occupied an upstairs room of an intricate dollhouse and an unseen camera peered at them through the tiniest of windows. A small tremor passed beneath her skin.

  Hurd told Charlie to hold still and assume a pleasant expression. Julia noted his attempts to follow these instructions, and for the six seconds that Hurd removed the cap from the lens, she and Charlie held each other’s gaze, neither of them feeling as if they should look away.

  As it turned out, that first excursion to Hurd’s studio would prove to be the lip of the gorge over which Charlie and Julia would allow themselves to fall. In the following weeks, as the rest of the boys were photographed, Julia and the foreman became more and more at ease with each other, and although it was she who made it her duty to educate him, it was he who made it his duty to receive those lessons. It was she who first led him to the Natural Bridge, reading Hawthorne’s description of the place as they strolled, and it was she who demonstrated how one was meant to walk backward up Bethel Street to avoid infection of the lungs, or so said the town’s widows, with no argument from its physicians or pharmacists.

  Extended Sunday school hours meant that many teachers and students were spending Sunday and Wednesday evenings after lessons engaged in informal activities, and on several occasions, Charlie and Julia’s excursions were joined by other Celestials and their teachers, Fannie Burlingame and her by-then-favorite student, Lue Gim Gong, among them. Charlie served as translator, though Fannie had learned a few Chinese words. “Tell them,” Julia would instruct, “that here is where the settlers held their own against the Indians.” “Tell them that this is a parsnip; this a beet.” And if he had had any hopes as to the focus of her attentions being particular in any way, they were stilled. Fannie often teased Julia, telling her that if her lessons were to be this dull, she wo
uld drive these boys back across the ocean. She should, Fannie advised, let the boys do some of the talking. They had remarkable talents and stories to share, she assured her cousin. All one needed to do was ask and listen. And Charlie began lining up possible talents and stories in his mind so as not to be caught unawares if Julia’s inquiries commenced.

  Four months after his arrival, on a mild fall day, they were a group of a half dozen when they sojourned to the Mohawk Trail, winding its way over Hoosac Mountain, and Charlie had a most difficult time with the signs at the foot and summit. WALK UP, IF YOU PLEASE, read the first. RIDE DOWN, IF YOU DARE, the second. Julia laughed like a girl at his stuttering attempts at translation and explanation, and when she quieted he noted with some surprise that he wished for her laughter to return. And the next time he saw her, when they had finished their reading, he pulled from the pocket of his smock his mother’s hairpin. She felt it too large a gift. He insisted, and told her that if she liked, he could demonstrate how one was to maneuver the pin so that it would not fall out. She held it in her lap and looked down at it, assuring him that if she could not manage it herself, she would be sure to avail herself of his offer. She told him it was a most beautiful object. He said that it was the woman who gave the object its beauty. She stood and tilted her head slightly as if to get a better view of him. She told him that his mother must, then, be a beautiful woman, and then she took her leave.

  But by the following spring, despite the time spent in each other’s company and their enjoyment taken with that company, they would share equal surprise when, on an excursion to the Notch Brook and the Cascade, the brook’s marvelous descent to the river, she took his hand to aid his crossing of water infamous for its peculiar coldness, and found herself reluctant to release it. As they stood on the brook’s banks, shadowed by baby Christmas trees, a blanket of the tiniest of wildflowers soft and crushed beneath their wet and chilled feet, they both felt as though they had made the difficult ascent only to pour over the precipice like the water itself, descending a thousand feet in one liquid rush.