The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Julia was not so lost in the new definitions of her world that she neglected to detect the awkwardness, and a flicker of disquiet about Charlie’s ability to be totally discreet passed through her, but her attentions were to her daughter as the needle of a compass to true north, so why should this not be the case for all others?

  This was perhaps explanation for why, as she stood there searching out her usual table and students, she took note of the room’s quiet but did not necessarily assign herself as its cause. The absence of the courtesies that usually greeted her arrival could be the unease of reunion, she told herself. She had, after all, been absent for several months. And men did tend to discover even more clumsy versions of themselves around babies.

  Sitting across the room, Fannie Burlingame, Julia’s cousin by marriage, fellow volunteer teacher, supporter of all things Chinese, took note of the room’s temperature. Given how much of a supporter she had been of this Chinese Experiment of Sampson’s, she would have shown her public endorsement for these boys no matter what her personal feelings about them, but she had been gladly surprised by the extent to which she had come to care about Lue Gim Gong. She had discovered in him a talent for horticulture and she and her orchards had been much pleased by his attentions. She felt about him the way an unmarried woman of a certain age feels about most younger men: a kind, vaguely maternal regard. Indeed, she would before long formally and officially adopt him, and in the end, bequeath to him an orange grove in Florida and a sizeable part of her formidable estate, treating him in death as she had in life: as the son she never had. So, of all people in the room, she understood how a white American woman, even a white American woman of a certain class, could come to find herself engaged and delighted with one of these Celestial visitors, but engaged and delighted was one thing, the picture of mother and babe across the room quite another. It was, she felt, an unhappymaking situation all around, and a further misfortune that she must call the woman in question cousin. Her face expressed such worry that one of her students fetched her some cold water and insisted she drink.

  It was young Lucy Robinson who stepped forward, breaking the stillness to stride across the room and bend at the waist to peer happily into the basket. The attack against her had been such an affront to the regulations of social interaction that she had found herself since that day able to cross those boundaries with more ease. It was as if having had the rim of a cup broken, she had discovered one could drink from it nonetheless. And an infant was an infant, and Lucy a nineteen-year-old lady. Her vision of the future was a warm, grassy meadow flocked with babies. It had always been thus. The attack had made these hopes more desperate, not less, and she tried to keep the sharpness of her need out of her speech as she relieved Mrs. Sampson of the basket, advising her to sit. She took the child expertly from its nest, cradling the tiny head against her shoulder, her body finding a rocking rhythm as easy and natural as the gait of a well-trained pony.

  “Oh, Mrs. Sampson,” she said, taking in the oaty smell of the child’s head, “she is a beauty.”

  “Yes,” Julia said, as if congratulating her on having noted something all others had missed. “She is extraordinary.”

  The straightforwardness with which Mrs. Sampson made this statement filled Lucy with envy and then shame. When would other people’s joys cease to inspire in her their opposite?

  Julia did not like to watch her child in someone else’s arms, but she understood this was the sort of maternal extremity to be avoided, and so she resisted the urge to return the child to her own embrace. Still, she stood there feeling as she imagined a schoolmistress must, having given a very young pupil something delicate and fragile to examine, hoping that care will take precedence and the experience will prove to be one of discovery rather than destruction.

  “Her eyes are quite exotic, aren’t they?” Lucy said.

  Julia could not ascertain the spirit of the remark. “I imagine God must’ve been in a good mood when He made them,” she said in what she hoped was a neutral tone. She liked this young lady. She liked that she had come across the room to them as if no other response made any sense at all. She did not want to stop liking her. Still, she succumbed to her urge and reached as mildly as she could for her child.

  “Oh,” Lucy said, her arms light and empty, anxious she had caused offense. “They’re wonderful,” she said. “So dark and alert, as if nothing can escape her.”

  Julia’s heart softened warily. She did not see one of the Chinamen rise and make his way toward her. She did, however, see Charlie appear quickly from the back room to intercept him with a gesture and several low words of Chinese. He did not look in her direction, and she was glad for the other boy’s distraction. She knew Charlie well enough to read his countenance as that of a parent whose suspicions concerning a child have been suddenly borne out.

  The boy’s visage was familiar and she searched her mind’s cupboards for his name. She could have searched for years, as this boy had been one of the group of workers most recently arrived in town, and she had not yet made his acquaintance. The familiarity she felt was due to the photos her husband had slid before her two nights prior. This boy’s face had been on the top of the pile Sampson had discarded as irrelevant to the task at hand.

  The boy said something to his foreman in return, and Julia had the distinct impression his comments concerned her, not because he glanced her way, but because of how assiduously he avoided doing so.

  Charlie did not answer the boy, who stood there smiling and then made his way out of the room and closed the bunk room door behind him.

  Now Charlie looked at her. His queue was gone, in its place a neat and Western cut. She remembered him telling her that without his queue, his homeland would no longer welcome him. The difference in his appearance was both drastic and not. How could she not have thought of him over the past days? Even when her husband’s interrogations had been at their most vigorous, she had thought of him, when she had thought of him at all, as something that might eventually cease to exist. But, of course, here he was, alive and in front of her, wanting, she now understood, something very different.

  The boy in the bunk room was Ah Chung Coon. He was a month shy of his twentieth birthday, fiercely dedicated to his mother, and embarrassed that he had so few memories of his father, who had died when Ah Chung was six. His eyes were wide-set, his ears large, his eyebrows oddly placed. His mouth held a natural downturn that made even his most passive expressions appear to be those of a judgmental elder. He was from a village less than half a day’s walk from the foreman’s, and upon his arrival the previous January, there had been talk between the two of them of the possibility that the branches of their family trees had crossed not too many generations ago. And they did indeed know people in common. The tailor in Charlie’s village had originally come from Ah Chung’s, and there were several women who had begun in one place only to marry into the other. Ah Chung had even sold cabbage at a stall next to Charlie’s father’s on more than one occasion, and he had attended one year of primary school with Second Brother. Then there was the fact that they shared one part of their birth names. But Ah Chung had been suspicious of assigning family status to anyone who would sacrifice his birth name for an English one.

  Charlie had long ago learned it was best to find associations and loyalties where one could. Even fabricated ones were preferable to none at all. They made his job easier. So he had insisted that he knew Ah Chung to be a cousin. Three generations back, on their fathers’ sides, he claimed, correctly guessing that the boy’s ignorance of and shame about his father would prevent any further argument.

  The boy had been in America only a fortnight before signing on with the Sampson Manufacturing Company. He had heard in San Francisco that the man was fair, the contract reliable, the living circumstances bearable. He spoke little English and had only a mild interest in learning more. A wife waited for him in his home village. She was not wealthy, but neither was she a step down for his family, and he felt his
time in America to be something he did for her and her family as well as for his. He imagined himself at the head of a large village parade, the rest of the villagers fanned out behind him. He had bragged, before his departure, of the houses he would build when he returned. And he bragged to his present coworkers of the gold he had already sent home.

  His coworkers were of split mind concerning him. The older men found him reckless and full of himself but not particularly worrisome. The younger agreed but treated him as a charismatic and demanding older brother, someone whose wishes you would not deny even if you found yourself capable of doing so.

  Nothing he had seen in this country had convinced him it had anything of substance to offer. Nothing made him more saddened than the sight of one of his countrymen sacrificing the Eastern ways for the Western. It was a sadness grounded in rage and righteousness, as if these were affronts against him and against all those countrymen walking proudly behind him at the head of his parade.

  And so the foreman caused him particular dismay. There was his name, and his conversion to the foreigners’ house of worship. There were the rumors of the recent contract negotiations and his underhanded dealing. Every aspect that allowed his white acquaintances to say of him, “He is more akin to us than not” was proof for Ah Chung of Charlie’s true inadequacies as a Chinaman. And if he was not a Chinaman, what kind of man could he be?

  There had been rumors in Ah Chung’s home village about the circumstances of Charlie’s brother’s death. Only rumors, but still. And now there was the matter of Chain Kow’s death and burial. The twenty-year-old had died less than a month after Ah Chung’s arrival, succumbing to pneumonia. The foreman had consulted with no one about the burial, which took place in the village cemetery and was presided over by Reverend T. A. Griffin of the Methodist church. A not insubstantial number of the Chinese had gathered to try and do what they could to see their friend into the world of the dead. Improper funeral arrangements could wreak all manner of ill fortune on the family of the deceased, and even the most recently arrived understood that for now, in this place, their fellow workers were family, and the factory home.

  They managed to remove all mirrors from their dormitory. They cleaned the corpse with a damp towel dusted with talcum powder and dressed him in a good silk tunic and pants embroidered with dragons.

  The traditional Chinese coffin, rectangular with three interior rises for neck, back, and legs, proved to be beyond the carpentry abilities of the coffin maker, who instead offered up a simple pine box with an expression that dissuaded the Chinese from asking for anything else or more.

  They broke the deceased’s comb in two, placed one part in the open coffin, and granted the other to his closest friend.

  They had hoped the coffin would not be carried directly to the funeral but placed on the side of the road outside the factory, where more prayers could be offered, more paper scattered. They had hoped that someone, perhaps the foreman, would have informed the deceased in the prescribed way that the funeral procession would have to cross a body of water, as an uninformed soul, it was said, would not be able to make such a crossing.

  The mix of unhappiness, fear, emasculation, and rage that they felt as one by one none of these hopes came to be realized was furthered upon their arrival at the cemetery. The plot their foreman had procured was not in the most preferable position, high on a hillside, but in a hollow at the base of one of the cemetery’s smallest rises. “He is burying us in a ditch,” Ah Chung whispered to the boy on his left. Beyond that, the foreman did not inform any of the whites that ritual demanded that when the coffin was taken down from the hearse and lowered into the ground, all present must turn away. So when that time came, some turned, others didn’t, and still others commenced to, then stopped, looking around like lost chickens.

  After the passage of seven days, Ah Chung took it upon himself to make a red plaque and place it outside the dormitory door to ensure that Chain Kow’s returning soul would not get lost.

  Returning to the bunk room after his exchange with his foreman, Ah Chung discovered that plaque laid haphazard on his bunk. He glanced at the only other occupant of the room, a boy laid low with fever. The sick boy returned his regard.

  When Ah Chung demanded to know who had treated the plaque with such indifference, the boy answered simply, “Charlie Sing.” And when Ah Chung asked whether he did not find this the behavior of a foreigner’s dog, the worker said nothing at first, and then, turning his slow, feverish eyes upon his fellow Chinaman, said, “Cousins, wasn’t it?”

  Ah Chung reddened and retreated to his bunk, turning his back to this world and its occupants who once again proved to be the sources of nothing but disappointment and dismay.

  In the classroom, Julia was at a table, trying to instruct a new boy while simultaneously navigating the complexities of Charlie’s questioning and keeping an eye on a squirming and decidedly awake little girl.

  Charlie spoke to her in English, confident that the boy could not follow the conversation’s thread. Such was Charlie’s state that he failed to realize that they might be overheard by the nearby instructors, and he further failed to note Ida’s intense study from her table across the room.

  He said he was dismayed not to have learned of the child from Julia herself at perhaps an earlier date than the rest of the town.

  She looked at him, her face unguarded. She seemed confused about why he should have expected such a thing.

  He allowed her silence, continuing to stare at the tiny being between them.

  “They say it is a Celestial child,” he finally said, sadly regarding the basket.

  “They will say what they will,” she said, pointing at the new boy’s slate and her rough drawing of a snowman. “Snow-man,” she said to him with exaggerated emphasis.

  “Snow-man,” he repeated dutifully.

  Charlie could not summon the voice to ask further questions. Perhaps it was not his child, though the idea that she had known another Celestial seemed beyond belief. So perhaps the knowledge that it was his child was merely a room Julia did not want him to enter. The sadness that possibility provoked filled his lungs like water.

  “We must find a way to speak about this,” he said. Her attention, he understood, was everywhere but on him, and this understanding filled him with a desolation that he thought he could not stand. He wanted to pull her hair from its combs until she yelped.

  She tapped the slate and showed the boy, by placing her hand over his, that she meant for him to copy her letters. He set to the task.

  She rested a hand on the baby’s belly. Beneath it, the girl wriggled and turned.

  “I don’t see why we must do that,” Julia said softly, looking at him fully for the first time all afternoon.

  He thought his horizon of misery could not be pushed any farther. His mind was a marsh of despair. So when Ida made her way across the room—much later, she would tell him that she had not been able to stand seeing him in such a state any longer—he barely heard her inquire the child’s name.

  “Alice,” Julia said. “Alice May Sampson.”

  And just like that, he watched his horizon recede even farther, beyond his most pessimistic imaginings. His heart was in the grip of a giant’s fist, and he could not see how to unlock its grasp.

  Years later, Julia would marvel at how little concern he had been to her. Before being with child, she would not have guessed it would have been so. Why had she not thought of the small circle as a circle of three? Why had this man whom she would’ve said she loved not entered her mind? Thinking of this disregard would never fail to make her neck color. She was not the person she had thought herself to be. But was it only curse to discover this about oneself? Might it not also be opportunity?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The town spent the opening weeks of August turning in on itself like a nest of hatchling snakes, and all relevant parties—Sampson, Julia, Charlie, Ah Chung, even Ida, Lucy, and Alfred—should have understood that their own pertina
city was going to serve as the source of further turmoil rather than less. It was as if they’d become boys with sticks, poking and prodding, their good sense overpowered by the spirit of inquiry.

  Even if made aware of this understanding, such was their single-mindedness that it was likely their course would have been unswerving. After all, they might have declared, would anything in their short lives have been achieved without a staunchness of purpose, a blinkered tenacity? Each was sure of the virtue of his or her own aims.

  Ah Chung and Alfred would have been especially dismayed to learn that their resolve was a shared resolve, as Alfred set his stock in these ideals as American born and bred, something passed from native father to native son like brown eyes, wavy hair, a good hand with animals. Ah Chung would have found these opinions mildly comical. Heaven and Earth had begun in China. In the beginning had been a black egg inside of which a man larger than any other slept. In his hands he held hammer and chisel, and after eighteen thousand years of sleep, he awoke, splitting the egg in two. The top part, illuminated and unclouded, became Heaven, and the bottom, thick and dark, Earth.

  To Ah Chung’s Chinese eye, this country was but a fledgling place. Americans had perhaps adapted aspects of Heaven and Earth, but as far as he was concerned they were the tiny creatures on the bodies of tiny creatures, of consequence in only the most minuscule way.