The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Her husband would want an explanation. Charlie would want an explanation. By now, she was sure, word was moving through town like river water. The whole town would want an explanation. She felt as if any story she offered could not be the entire tale. Who knew how this baby had found her? Who knew why she had kept the infant to herself for so long? Who knew what fear kept one from doing? Who knew why this time her hope had been addressed?

  It had been a Sunday in October, their first time lying together, and it strangely pleased her to think of God on His day of rest having seen them hiking up to Balance Rock, and heard their quiet voices, breathless with their exertion. When they arrived at the top, Charlie took Julia’s hand, and they stood there in fear and astonishment, wondering how it could be that their hearts reached after this particular other. They prayed for guidance. Julia thought, I shall be better for knowing him. Charlie saw an image of the two of them reading side by side in a room, one of her hands on his, the other turning the pages of history. They were still touching.

  “Do people come this way?” he asked quietly.

  “Often,” she said, and he dropped her hand to reach for her face. She did the same. Their noses, when they finally kissed, nestled above each other’s upper lip. They inhaled.

  From that day forward, seeing Charlie in her mind’s eye meant seeing them both from above, as if watching a couple of whom she had no understanding or knowledge. And that day in late October 1872 when she had found her tired self in the embrace of that kind, careful Celestial, both of them bathed in the shadow of the impossibly balanced stone, and his body found its way inside hers, she was undone. Because no matter the regard in which she knew her husband held her, in his eyes were sadness and disappointment. Though he sought to convince her that the desire for children was more strongly held by her than by him, what was a farmer or businessman without an heir? In her Celestial’s eyes there was nothing but astonished pleasure. “Let’s keep our eyes open,” she said, shocking herself, and they did. Her eyes watered with the strain of it. It felt to her as if God had reached down, taken her between finger and thumb, and placed her on top of that precarious rock, where He set her to spinning with a gentle push.

  He kept their mouths close and spoke, his lips moving against hers like the sign language of tiny animals. “You are the most mysterious thing,” he said, and she thought he was right. They were mysteries to themselves.

  She had lost so many babies that the moment this girl arrived Julia had been steeled for her departure. She had read too much of the consolation literature surrounding grief and the mourning of the death of children. She was tired of its emphasis on the joyous afterlife. Although she would always be a believer, and never felt calmer than in the face of something she recognized as God’s grace, those lost babies had caused her to believe that a woman’s highest duty was in fact to suffer and be still. She had learned in her bones the useful lesson of doing without.

  It had seemed to her that Life had stood before her telling her that she must learn to like him in the form in which she found him before he could offer himself to her in any other aspect. And then had come Charlie and it was as if he had taken her by the chin and tilted her head up and then down, allowing her to view the world above and below her own small one. And if life with Charlie had been the teetering, the arrival of her baby girl had been the push over the edge. But after falling, she had bobbed softly back up, as if floating on deeply salted water. Life was neither what it had been nor what she had thought it could be. There was no way of knowing what would happen next. What she would tell Sampson when she joined him in the other room was what she felt: that it was quite something to have won the privilege of going on.

  Long after the Sampsons quit the depot, Ida stood watching Charlie on his hillside perch. She had planned to follow him, to discuss the extraordinary sight they had both seen, but the longer he stood there, the more his body, leaning against the slightest of maples, told her that the sight of Julia with babe in arms had in some way undone him. Her feelings for him were so well intentioned that she began to believe it did him an injustice to watch him unseen in this way, and so she sent him good wishes in her mind and turned quickly to go the long way round to Lucy and Alfred’s, where she was expected for supper and where she would not reveal what she had witnessed.

  *

  In 1881, no fewer than eleven bills would be submitted calling for Chinese exclusion. Senator John Miller would exhort Washington to “secure the American Anglo Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration.”

  This would be about the sanctity of the American home, about protecting it from a race that cared nothing for marriage or family. George Frisbie Hoar, the senator from Massachusetts, would lead the argument in defense of the Chinese. He would be considered by his opponents a doddering fool, mocked for not facing up to the realities of the present and the dangers of introducing the alien to the pure.

  But on this moonless July night in 1873, Charlie remained as Ida had seen him through the fall of darkness. He stood as one of the trees around him, his movements like theirs, minor and cadenced, the play of a natural kind of rhythm.

  He knew the baby was his, and it was as if the sight of Julia with their own small child had drained his body of all its agitation, replacing it with a serenity he was not sure he had ever felt. He was a basin drained of dirty water. He was a breeze-filled room. He was a father caught up short by the sight of his first child. Through his mind, a phrase ran round and round: We made this thing.

  His mind filled with an exhibition of memories, and for hours he did what was for him the unusual: allowed it to go where it would. A millet pillow that his mother had made with four characters embroidered on it: May Everything Go Well. The tiny pigtails, firecracker queues, one behind each ear, that young boys wore before their hair grew long enough for one big plait. His mother grinding rice into flour. One of his brothers in a child’s bamboo chair made level with stones.

  The lustrous brown cow with short black horns and a woman’s lashes who shared his grandfather’s room. The sounds of the ocean from the bottom of the ship. The first signs of Third Brother’s fever. His face as Charlie descended the gangplank.

  He had lied about it to his parents, but word about what had passed on that ship had, in its winding way, gotten back to his village. His mother and father had written to him that he had not followed his duties. He had not cared for his brother well enough. He had sacrificed his brother for himself. He had shamed them. Peace and prosperity would not follow. But Charlie knew that the Chinese way was to find truth in several religions, and to the teachings of Confucius he had also been instructed to add Buddhism and Taoism, and once in America, he had further learned, or decided to believe, that Jesus was also a great sage. The best way, Charlie had long ago decided, was to take truth where you could find it. In this manner, families, even those scattered across oceans, stayed together, worked in harmony. American families, he had felt for some time, were like horses on a carousel: always in motion but never coming together.

  The Chinese Imperial Government would forever define him as a self-exile, a felon. An individual has a supreme duty to the collective. But which collective? Could there be a collective of two? He wanted to puzzle out the answer with Julia, the two of them on a blanket beneath Balance Rock, in full light, the smell of cut hay, fledgling corn, and her damp skin all around them. He tried to imagine her answer, and he could see her beautiful mouth forming words slowly, as she knew he had made a habit of watching mouths closely in order to be sure of comprehending. He felt the weight of her leg across his, the callus on the tip of her sewing finger as she traced the curve of his ear.

  He had heard much about the foreigners before he had confronted them himself. They had suns that made darkness like day, their noses were shaped like sharp beaks, they lifted their feet like prancing Manchu ponies, their men and women were shameless enough to walk down the street arm in arm.

  Julia, too, had sought to know som
ething of his country through their conversations, and then through books, and then through their conversations about those books. Much of what she gathered made little sense to her but found lodging in her mind nonetheless. She failed to grasp almost all of a mention she had come across of a thirteenth-century mathematician’s methods for explaining how to fashion equations involving a triangle and a circle, but the equations involved something called the celestial unknown, a phrase she liked and remembered.

  She had not, out of kindness, shared all that she had read, although she had, out of a lifelong respect for authority, believed some part of it. The Chinese were from one of the primitive cradles of human culture—credited with the invention of gunpowder, compass, inoculation—yet for ages they had made no advancement. Pride, fear, and cunning were the chief elements of their character. Their men were a little larger than the average American woman. Their feet were small. They did not reason; they had no original ideas; they did a thing because they saw it modeled by someone smarter than they. Their religious ceremonies appeared to be an effort to guess the future by the tossing or burning of little sticks. The Chinaman was always on time, was not thievish, and did not clamor for privileges. The Irishman hit at random and wasted his strength; the Chinaman did not.

  Upon unplaiting his queue for the first time and combing her fingers through the thick black hair, Julia had told him that she had read that their queues were greatly prized. She asked him if it were true that the loss of the plait was a loss of such magnitude that many men killed themselves if it was cut.

  Sometimes, Charlie had managed to murmur, her hands in his hair. His hair spread across her lap like a second skirt.

  He had not told her what he thought now: that without his queue, returning home would be an impossibility.

  He closed his eyes and asked for wisdom. He saw only Julia and the child. Might it have been better to have stayed where one began, gone nowhere new, encountered nothing unfamiliar? Who knew how or why one docked at certain ports? Who knew where one was traveling, or how one would get there? He knew only that to question good fortune was to watch it slip away. Which was why he drew from his pocket the small knife his father had made for him, and in a few awkward strokes cut his thick braid as close to his skull as he could manage. It fell to the ground and he gathered it up and secreted it in his tunic pocket, already making plans for where and when he would present it to Julia, making clear to her his desires and the lengths to which he was willing to go to achieve them.

  Sampson considered himself a patient man, though most who knew him did not. His characteristic patience, he felt, had been on display for the larger part of the last several hours. He had not raised his voice; he had not risen from his chair in the front room, taken when Julia had come, finally, from the bedroom, the infant child apparently secure enough in her sleep. Subterfuge and betrayal are, of course, most easily perpetrated by the innocent. It was one of the many ironies with which he and Julia would soon be acquainted. He had fallen in love with what he saw as her innocence and fragility. He had for some time resisted sharing the multitude of questions and hurt feelings tumbling through his body like thrown dice. Yet now, the clock on the verge of striking midnight, the gas lights flickering bravely in their glass globes, he was no closer to understanding the extraordinary sight of his wife debarking the train carrying an infant girl.

  “It is our own sweet child,” she insisted. It was what she had been saying in one form or another for hours, and although he understood the words, there must have been something in his reaction that suggested to her the necessity of repetition. And she herself had only the dimmest sense of how she was going to explain. She had had months and months to do nothing but contemplate the growing life within her and its implications. But the more she had tried to attend to the explanation for the thing she found happening to her, the more she had thought only of the thing itself.

  When she had understood that this baby had taken solid hold, she had encouraged Sampson to take an unprecedented vacation. They stayed in Florida for several weeks, and it had been, to her surprise, a lovely time, the consequences and difficulties ahead still deep within her belly. Husband and wife relaxed for the first time in a long while, and shedding outer layers of clothes, walking the beach, and reading in sea-worn wooden chairs beneath the rocking shade of tall palms had been like breaking the surface after a long time underwater. She could imagine that her husband next to her was first and foremost her friend, as he had been when they fell in love, and as such would greet her news with joy.

  Why not just tell him there on the beach? She knew her time of remaining silent was slipping away, but it was in many ways a lovely silence, and betrayal and secrets lead to more of the same, and she hadn’t been able to tell him anything, and it wasn’t long before she found herself suggesting that instead of returning with him to North Adams as planned, she might travel to Cassopolis, Michigan, and enjoy a visit with her sister. It had been so long since they had seen each other.

  Her sister, of course, had assumed the baby’s paternity was not an issue, and had been all too happy to marvel with her at the daily changes in her body and mind. They had opened their blue eyes wide at the growing size of her belly, had expressed similar disgust at the ugly way pregnancy had with one’s navel. They had giggled at her growing bosom, had wrapped her breasts with strips of linen to keep the tenderness at bay. So it had been easy for her to imagine that her sister’s response would be the world’s. In the meantime, she enjoyed the tiny silver stretch marks across the underside of her belly and the tops of her thighs that made her feel shiny and scaled. The spread of her feet. The ache behind her knees. The pleasurable waves between pubis, womb, and breast. The way she could conjure the baby’s movements inside her. When she closed down thought, she was rewarded by that quiver that seems like the first touch of a stranger who has singled you out in the crowd.

  Of course, once the girl had made her way without fuss into the world, Julia’s sister had taken note of what the rest would also observe. But a semblance of cozy calm can be maintained by an unspoken agreement to deny the facts. Her sister did not ask her to explain, and Julia did not offer. And now, with her husband in the formerly childless quarters they had shared for years, she hoped for the same thing. She had not asked for much in their twenty-four years of marriage. She had managed with what he saw fit to offer. They were two people who had lived through those years of turmoil before and during the Civil War, a time when, as his sister used to say, people ate it up, wore it out, or made it do. And so, she told her husband that she hoped he would forgive her for wanting to be sure this child would arrive in the world safe and whole before announcing its presence to him. It was her fervent wish that he share her wonder at being granted this blessing. All children were strange things, weren’t they? Otherworldly. As if closer to God than the rest of us. Who knew, she said, why the Lord had seen fit to provide them with so much hardship on the way to this child. It was not their job to question the road they had traveled to get there. It was their duty to accept whatever they should find in the Lord’s provisions with such grace as they could.

  Because she believed that despite the many differences between herself and her husband they were, at bottom, bred of the same stock, she believed that her entreaties would hit their mark. She believed that he would enter into that agreement with her, would agree to forget and then forget he had forgotten. He would keep no lists.

  But he crossed the room and took her slim shoulders in his wide hands. He did not shake her. His grip was not uncomfortably firm. It was tender, but clear. He called her his darling. He told her he loved her more than he thought it possible to love someone. But this child was not his child.

  Chapter Ten

  Ida’s growing interest in the Celestial foreman had not gone unnoticed by Lucy, yet she reminded herself that she enjoyed no exclusive right to Ida’s attentions and so kept her silence, maintaining an outward placidity that pretended to have noticed nothing at a
ll. Her interior, however, was a creek swollen with spring melt and each time Ida quit the apartment to instruct him in yet more English, or to host him for another meal at the Widow Allen’s table, it was all Lucy could do to keep herself from expelling a brief cry. Ida had spent over three years tending to her in large and small ways, and didn’t that imply something about what Lucy could expect from her best friend?

  Although she had in many respects overcome the horrors of the attack, and had been for some time making her own modest living in the world by sewing ladies’ underclothes of the type sold in the best shops of New York and Boston, she felt most of the time, and knew that Ida understood this, that her life was a waiting life, lived in the antechamber to life’s vast central hall.

  Her assailant was, the sheriff had assured her with impatience, likely to be long gone and never to return. The sheriff wasn’t an unkind man. He had done his best, but his best had proved to be not good enough, and his impatience was born of shame at his failure. Lucy blamed him not at all, partly because it was not her nature to assign blame, and partly because she had always thought of the unknown man as her assailant, something in her possession. The smell of his laundered clothes and strong soap lined her nostrils still. My assailant, she might whisper to herself when no one was around, the way children in their beds at night holding a precious object aloft might whisper, My toy. She thought that somewhere, wherever he had put in, he thought of her in this same manner. The intimacy, although terrible, was awesome, and who wouldn’t want in some way to return to it? So she found herself playacting her own life until his inevitable return, when her life, one way or the other, could begin again. It was as if that day in the alley he had set her at the head of a wide, lonely path, and without him, she could never advance any farther down it.