The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Julia reddened, but said nothing.

  “You cannot have a child fathered by one of them.” Fannie looked at Alice. “Really, Julia. What were you thinking?” she asked.

  And maybe because Fannie was unable to keep the scolding schoolmistress out of her voice, maybe because Julia knew that if she was to weather the war, she must weather battles such as these one by one, over and over, she stood, gathered baby Alice to her chest like a shield, and told her cousin that she didn’t know what Fannie thought she knew, but she found this visit insulting and beneath them both. Fannie’s thoughts belonged to no one but herself, as did Julia’s, and to share them was perhaps unwise for both of them.

  The Widow Allen’s husband had run a livery service but had been neither a horseman nor a businessman and the company had been an outright failure. The carriage barn held the vestiges of his defeat. Dry and cracked collars, hames, and harnesses hung haphazard from the tongues and shaves of coaches and surreys all inappropriately extravagant for such a business in such a town. Mr. Allen had suffered from delusions of his own grandeur, and the purchases he had made to stock his company had reflected these fantasies. His large team had pulled a carriage he had ordered from England that was said to be modeled on the one in which the king himself rode. There it stood, large and oafish as a dull child kept back in school, against the carriage house’s far wall. Its paint was chipped; its leather thoroughbraces, trunk, and driver’s boot as cracked as a creek bed during a drought. The steel spreader bar was dull and rusty, and the hand-painted eagle on the door a ghost image.

  Charlie felt as if, within an already foreign world, he had turned a corner into something even more unknown. He wanted to run.

  He had arrived early, positioning himself in a back corner where, between the boards of two walls, he had clear view over several approaches to the barn.

  His ears pulsed with the strain of listening. Would he be able to tell Julia’s footfall from another’s? Just how much had she told this Lucy Robinson, and to whom else was she speaking? Because she had handed him nothing but silence in his further attempts to speak with her, it had not occurred to him that she might be sharing something different with others. He swallowed, coughed dryly, and swallowed again.

  One jacket pocket held the portrait he had never presented, the other held the small shoes. His slim fingers returned to his tie and collar like an insect feeling its way. What kind of image would he cast in her eyes? From their first embrace in late spring 1872 to her departure for Florida in January, he had been unable to imagine what she saw when he stood before her. Once, when he had been feeling particularly cared for, he had asked. It had been evening, an early November chill in the air. They were in the spot they liked best, in the shadow of Balance Rock, the large blanket she had brought with them tucked tightly under their chins. They were both growing cold, but neither of them wanted to move to get fully dressed.

  He tucked his nose beneath the blanket and inhaled.

  “What are you doing?” she said, smiling.

  “Smell you,” he said.

  She didn’t know if he meant that was what he was doing or what she should do. Both made her blush.

  He told her that when he saw her, he saw as well a memory that always gave him pleasure: his father swinging on the big gate to the far field at the end of another long workday. The sun had been low, his father’s exhaustion clear, but as the fence made its big arc, his father balanced on one foot on the lowest rung, Charlie had also seen the happy boy beneath the tired man.

  Her eyes had filled with tears of pleasure; she had placed a hand against his broad cheek, and he had felt enough out of harm’s way to ask, what about her? What did she see?

  She hesitated, and somewhere his heart told him to leave this particular line of inquiry where it was. He had spent his life in this country in continuous states of wariness about the answers to various forms of that question. And perhaps because of that, he continued to push at a place that if he had been honest, he knew would give way.

  He flipped the blanket away, revealing his naked chest to the air and to her. Her face filled with anxiety. He asked her again to tell him what she saw.

  She told him not to be silly and tried to cover him. Again, his heart gave him its warnings, and again he ignored it.

  “I need to know,” he said.

  He wanted to know what she saw of him so that he could know what she saw in him. And in her hesitancy he had his answer, but he had spent the ensuing months convincing himself that it was within his power to change it. What other option did he have? Could the ability to be a chameleon, a trait so strong in him, really be equally strong in her?

  She approached the barn from the far field, picking her way with small steps through the tall grass. It was the gait that came over her when she was nervous. And she wore the expression he had seen whenever he had asked something new or unfamiliar of her. The time he had pushed her on the swing they had discovered in a clearing miles away from any houses, hanging from a branch of a sturdy chestnut. The time he had made her close her eyes and taste his brew of ginger and chrysanthemum. On such occasions, her face was adorned with a mix of caution and optimism and it had filled his heart to tipping.

  The baby swayed in its basket against her hip. When she neared the barn, she paused, rolled her shoulders back, and took on the look of a Temperance Society representative, and whatever hopes he had for this meeting jumped away like the grasshoppers escaping her footfall.

  Lucy and Ida were being impatient with each other, and Alfred regarded them from his chair by the window the way you might watch two dogs threatening to disagree.

  Even the few days Lucy had spent in the Sampsons’ Wilson House rooms had been enough to make the tenement apartment smaller and more inadequate. She couldn’t help but note the grime on the sills, the mold above the stove, the stains in the basin. The smell of vinegar did nothing to eliminate the lingering odors of the previous lives lived in these rooms.

  And this particular Friday, she had the added affront of Mrs. Sampson sallying forth to a secret adventure. No matter that Lucy’s role in arranging the adventure had brought her pleasure. Now all she saw was a life extraordinarily different from her own.

  She wanted to tip Alfred from that seat that he seemed never to vacate and dump the soup Ida was skimming all over her leather boots. The room revealed at least a dozen other things with which to find fault.

  Ida looked up and smiled. “You’re late,” she said.

  The girls’ intimacy made Alfred nervous, thankful as he was for it. Just yesterday, Daniel had asked, innocently enough, why neither Lucy nor Ida ever stepped out with any of the local boys. He added that some of the boys thought the girls might believe themselves to be better than regular folks. Alfred had used what he knew to be the tried-and-true technique of reminding others of the lingering effects of Lucy’s attack. Daniel had blanched and stumbled to say he hadn’t meant any offense.

  “Is the Widow Allen not serving supper tonight?” Lucy asked as though in collusion with her brother’s unspoken mind.

  Ida reddened and studied the soup with great interest. “You’re taking such care of that baby, I thought you might be able to use some help over here,” she said, regaining herself.

  Lucy straightened Alfred’s work boots, which lay at odds with each other by the door. She picked up Ida’s hat and gloves from the kitchen chair and laid them on the front table. “Thank you,” she said as though she meant just the opposite.

  Ida set the table with three bowls and poured three glasses of milk. “And how is that baby?”

  Lucy ignored her. Ida had made no secret of her objections to Lucy’s new position. She had argued that Lucy already had the solid and enjoyable work of dressmaking. She spoke of the flexibility of hours, the advantages of working for no one but oneself, but they both knew that what bothered her most was that the job took Lucy away from her. If Lucy no longer needed Ida’s care, Ida was no longer needed at all by anyone. I
n Ida’s mind, it was as if Lucy had dismissed her, and though Lucy would never admit it to herself, this had in actuality been part of the job’s appeal. If asked, she would’ve insisted that Ida’s new interests had caused her nothing but pain. She wouldn’t know how to say that she had, in some part, begun to feel herself a tiny, caged thing, and Ida both fellow animal and eternal custodian. Her asthma had worsened as if Ida’s hand were closing around her lungs. Sometimes when Ida was sitting especially near, Lucy could hear the small cracking sounds of delicate things breaking.

  From the beginning, she had felt that the baby needed to be held away from her dear friend. It saddened her, but it also made her reckless, though she couldn’t have explained how or why this was the case. And so she apologized to both her brother and her friend for her petulance, and included them warmly in her prayers preceding their meal, but they weren’t halfway to the meal’s end before she told them, relevant to nothing, that baby Alice was fine, currently, in fact, accompanying her mother on an errand of private purpose. She went on unbidden, laying bare the details as she knew them.

  *

  The baby regarded Charlie as he soldiered on, reaching into his satchel for the gifts he had been saving. He tucked the coins on their red string and the tiny peachwood arrow by her blanketed feet, and tried to place the rice-filled pillow beneath her head, but settled for next to her ear. He was saving the shoes and the portrait for last.

  He explained each item’s purpose while skepticism painted itself faintly across Julia’s face. When he told her the arrow was for protection against demons who looked to steal children for the purpose of reinforcing the foundations of bridges, her skepticism blossomed into scorn.

  “The foundations of bridges?” she repeated, and swept all three items expertly out of the basket and into her bag.

  “The pillow is made from a scarf of my mother’s,” he said.

  She buttoned the bag shut deftly with one hand and set it back on her arm. The basket hung from her other arm. She seemed unwilling to relieve herself of anything. Her hat remained on her head. Her hands remained gloved.

  “I made those things,” he said.

  “They’re lovely,” she said. “We thank you.”

  It was the voice he’d heard her use with store clerks. His insides were expanses of ice forming across dark water. He touched a finger to the baby’s forehead. Her eyes tried to follow it in that haphazard infant manner. She looked to him like a lunatic grandmother, and he wondered whether people were right about the consequences of mixing the races, but then the baby’s eyes settled and he saw himself, his brothers, and grandparents. He leaned in to look closer, as if he might be able to see a miniature rendering of his entire village.

  Julia pulled the basket and the baby slightly out of reach. “I know you are disappointed,” she said in the manner of someone who has grown impatient with formalities. “I think I have some idea of what your hopes may have been, and I am sorry that they cannot be realized.” She was speaking as though if she did not make haste, she might forget where she was going, and her voice had the determined fragility of a young girl arguing with her mother. “But I am counting on your good sense to help me do what is best for all involved.” She readjusted the basket. “I am sure you will agree that Alice’s well-being must be put above all else.” And now the fragility won out, her voice breaking like dry kindling.

  He cupped her neck with both his hands, and she stopped speaking.

  “Why do you use this voice with me?” he said, putting his head close to hers.

  She closed her eyes as if her head ached. The basket was wedged between their legs. Alice regarded the shadows that had fallen across her.

  “This is me,” he said. “I know you,” he said.

  She was crying. She put her bag and the basket down on the dirt floor uneven with the hardened ruts of old wheel tracks. Outside, the sun had fallen, but the cool wave of evening had yet to break over them. A disoriented bat swept above them in the rafters. In the house across the field, the Widow Allen began her lonely preparations for a supper for one. She kept her head bent to her kitchen tasks, her eyes away from the windows with a view of the hill. Even the thought of the barn filled her with a sense of all she had lost. She did not see Ida making her way up the road, which was just as well, as Ida was not heading for the house but for the shed at the crest of the hill, where she planned to wait and see what she would see. The sight of yet another receding back would have been too much for the widow to bear, and she would have skipped yet another meal.

  Julia wiped her tears with Charlie’s hand. “It is all too hard,” she said. “I see only one way through.” And then she explained what her husband had promised her. If she would just give him the name of the father, he would do nothing with it but tuck it away in a locked drawer. If she would just give him that, he would uphold the roof under which Alice could flourish.

  Charlie’s core thawed and rushed with the warmth of fear. His lungs filled with spring melt. He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

  She said, “I cannot see how any other options are actual possibilities.” She hooded her eyes with his hand and looked at his feet. “What can I do?” she asked, her voice stronger.

  Her need for him made him feel as though he’d woken from the best kind of sleep, but he saw the two of them as if on a stage, an orderly and judgmental audience all around them.

  Her eyes were filled with animal sentiment. “I cannot have this child taken from me,” she said. “I would not survive it.”

  He found his voice, ready to offer what he was sure she was seeking. “We can be family,” he said. He made a circle with their two hands, the nub where his thumb should’ve been against her palm, and reached into his pocket with his free hand for the shoes.

  He felt the muscles tighten in her arm before he saw the cast of her face, but both told him that he had been mistaken. She was a performer; he was the audience of one who had been too rapt by the drama to see its inevitable conclusion. He could imagine her asking what exactly he expected could become of the two of them together. She would be right. So clear was his sudden understanding that he knew what she would say before she spoke. He was not even shocked at its magnitude.

  She needed a name. “Please,” she said, still holding his hand. Her eyes were full of fear and love, but not for him. He withdrew his hand from his pocket. His heart was a massive animal brought to its knees.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ida did not wait at the shed as she had planned to. The sun had dropped completely behind the hills, the sky had dimmed and blued, and something about the leftover light and the busy work of the doves in the cornfield made her feel small and shamed. She imagined her father observing her and asking, his voice filled with disappointment and love, whether this was really the path she wanted to take. Knowing one thing about a person did not mean you needed to find out another. People deserved to live the delights and burdens of their lives in private.

  She had until now found this attitude an excuse for his lack of curiosity. He could pass hours in his workshop figuring out the mechanism of a spring, the weights and pulleys of a clock, but ask one question of him about the whys and wherefores of a sister or a teacher, a friend or a cousin, and he would pinch the top of his nose with his slater’s hands and shake his head as if a dog he had always thought well of had misbehaved. But now she saw his inclination as kind and generous, something simple but of certain value.

  So she returned to her room in the widow’s home, but sitting there in her small attic chamber, the heat like wool against her skin, she found herself thinking of the mix of sadness and rage in her brothers, the solitude of her father, the excessive busyness of her mother. Each thing she embraced here was like brick after brick in the wall she was building between them and her. Her father was a kind, good man, but there were things about herself she would never be able to share with him.

  She understood her interest in Charlie to be the latest of these bricks. His eyes w
ere level and slow and she’d never seen him in anything but a reasonable state of calm. He was more like a woman than any man she’d known and it was hard, therefore, not to think more highly of him than perhaps he deserved.

  In her attic room, her mind went this way and that along these routes, and got so lost that she dozed fully clothed, one foot off her single bed. When she woke, an owl called from a distant tree and received no response. The boards creaked as the Widow Allen made her way downstairs, enduring another sleepless night.

  Ida made no attempts to disrobe or even remove her boots. She examined the six squares of night sky mottled by her window glass and found herself wishing she knew more than she did about the constellations. She turned the night’s dinner conversation over and imagined the information Lucy had offered and what Ida herself already suspected as stars in that black sky, the heavenly body they made fractured and unclear.

  Appearances aside, who could know the completeness of what had passed between Mrs. Sampson and the foreman? And what right did any of them have to prod in a pond whose only obvious qualities were its depth and murk? Lucy and Alfred had decided to stay in town for the foreseeable future. She knew what mischief someone like Alfred could get up to. She would not do damage here. In the morning she must convince Alfred of the same. Her father would be pleased by her decision and the reasons for it.

  But the full truth was at that point in her life beyond her understanding. Her mind, in its wandering that night, kept returning to speculation of what might have passed between the Celestial and the white woman. And to a fascination of such pull that she could no more turn away from it and its implications than a child could from an open door through which she was not meant to be looking.

  Given how the rest of their evening had gone, Alfred thought it best to vacate the apartment well before his sister rose the next morning.

  He had quizzed her as much as she would stand for the rest of the night. Her loss of patience had been to his mind so mean-spirited that he had felt forced to point out that if she had not wanted to reveal any more, she should have revealed nothing at all. And anyway, he had added, he didn’t need her information. Had she forgotten that he’d been at the depot the day of Mrs. Sampson’s return? He’d seen that rat eater concealing himself like a thief. She hadn’t seen the expression on his face.