The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Ida had been as dismissive as he’d ever seen her be with him. She couldn’t imagine what exactly he thought he knew, but there were any number of things beyond his conception that the foreman and Mrs. Sampson could be meeting about, and he had no idea where that baby had come from. As a matter of fact, it might not have been born from Mrs. Sampson at all; she might’ve gone away to purchase her very own Celestial child. As she spoke, she began to believe in the possibility of her own arguments. None of them had the faintest idea what lengths a woman of Mrs. Sampson’s means would go to to find herself a baby after all these years. No, she’d said before gathering her hat and gloves, she would not sit around listening to this drivel, and he would do best to refrain from speaking any more of it.

  Once Ida had left, his sister announced that she regretted ever sharing the tiniest crumb of the tiniest crumb with her thick and doltish brother and that she would certainly not do so again, and then she retired to her sleeping area, making more noise than necessary in her preparations for bed.

  He now had no idea what to think, though he felt what he almost always felt: resentful and hurt. He had not even wanted to risk heating his morning coffee, and so had taken a tin cupful of what was left in the pot with him. He drained that before he reached the corner of Pearl and Main, and tossed the cup into the shrubs behind the Murphy house.

  His only goal was to head toward the Sampson factory with no clear aim about what he would do upon arrival. He felt as he had as a boy when he’d secretly known Lucy to be lying to their parents. He hadn’t wanted to reveal her lie; he’d just wanted to watch her perform it. How or whether that situation bore on this one was not clear to him; one had merely conjured for him the other, and so when he saw Homer Handley heading to the factory, he fell into step alongside, asking cheerily what Homer knew on this fine morning.

  Homer was made wary by young Alfred, warier still by the last week’s whisperings. But even prior to that, Homer had found the boy shifty and too needy to fully trust. His looks were not reassuring. He had the face of a rich man demoted to a farmer’s life. And he was Southern. Homer’s ancestors were Massachusetts-born a hundred years back. He found himself bothered by the way the boy said, “Nice to see you,” instead of “Nice to meet you.” He didn’t like his accent. It made the boy sound ignorant. He knew that when he returned home that evening and related these sentiments to his wife, she would remind him that this past week had been hard on a lot of folks, and that surely the one solution here was more charity, not less.

  He imagined her fingers plucking burrs from his trouser leg and felt a calm settle over him. He could stand anything for a short time, and so he kept the judgment out of his voice and answered as his most convivial self, “Not much.” He could not think what else to add.

  Alfred had his hands in his pockets, shrugged his shoulders up to his ears, and then dropped them again.

  Homer comforted himself with the thought that in a few yards they would reach the gate of the factory, through which Homer had all rights to pass and Alfred none.

  “Sounds like things inside these walls have been up one hill and down another,” the boy said, indicating the factory.

  Homer’s gut hardened against the clumsy investigating. He wanted to cuff the boy lightly and remind him of all he didn’t know. “Shoes and boots,” he said. “Still and always, I imagine.”

  Alfred seemed especially pleased by this, as if he’d been administering a quiz and Homer had finally performed up to expectation. “Maybe not,” he said, drawing his hands from his pockets and circling them into an overhead stretch.

  Homer did not have a chance to ask what the boy thought he was talking about, though even without the commencement of the strike that interrupted them, Homer would not have put that question to him, not wanting to give the fool the satisfaction.

  The Sampsons would not learn about the strike until early evening, as they had been taken over the mountain by Mr. Gavitt with a six-in-hand to picnic at the cascade near the eastern portal of the tunnel. They had been invited by Dr. Anable and his brother, with their wives, of course. Also joining the party were George and Susanna Butler, Everett and Caroline Southwick, and Elias S. and Rose T. Wilkinson.

  Sampson had felt they should absent themselves from the plans. He had an assortment of reasons, all of which he felt too obvious to have to outline, although he did say he must conclude that the invitation had been extended out of something other than courtesy.

  Julia, who had been sleepless with nerves the previous night, her conversation with Charlie stampeding through her heart, busied herself with packing several baskets’ worth of infant needs and pretended not to have heard. Perhaps because of her meeting with Charlie, she felt even more acutely the need to make her public way in the world, Alice and her husband at her side. Whereas prior to the conversation she had felt herself to be forging ahead into a moonless night, she now felt she’d been handed a torch and a small, lucid map. She understood this to be a rational way to feel. When, after all, had Charlie refused her anything? Her mind held tight to this fact, letting loose its grip on the equal certainties that this was a request that pitted him against his own and one designed to help her secure a life from which he was to be excluded.

  Her husband stood in his usual office dress, unable to have discovered anything in his wardrobe appropriate to picnicking. She thought to say that if he was really to keep to his promise, he must become familiar with traveling as three. “I think,” she said, quietly, “that a lovely, unencumbered day at the cascade would be just the remedy for me.”

  His objections faded, as she knew they would. How had she managed to surround herself with two men wanting so badly to please her? How had she managed to be grateful enough for neither?

  The group that poured out of the factory was a most unusual sight. Led by Ah Chung, some carrying their peg rasps, their shirtsleeves rolled above the elbows, the dozen or so men strode quickly into the factory’s side yard as if they had suddenly remembered something of dire import awaiting their attention. They constituted barely one-sixteenth of the total number in Sampson’s employ, yet they walked as though a mob of two hundred. In the early morning August sun, it was as if a group of sleepwalking children came to from a dream, disoriented and uncertain.

  They flocked near the back stoop and watched Ah Chung pace across the yard.

  And while the white workers and the remaining Chinese hovered in the doorway, watching the peculiarities of the day unfold the way one sibling keeps his eye peeled to the punishment of another, Charlie made his way into the group and stopped. “Where are you going?” he called to Ah Chung in Chinese, trying to fill his voice with offhanded curiosity.

  The group turned toward Ah Chung and Charlie knew that when the boy looked around, he would see a dozen men aligned with Charlie at their center.

  Continuing to overestimate his own power would be one of his mistakes in the months and years to come. He should not have, just an hour ago in the dining quarters, brought up the subject of the baby. He should not have pursued his questioning about paternity. He should not have offered bonus pay for relevant information. He should certainly, at any rate, have noted the changing atmosphere of the room. He should have taken more complete note of Ah Chung’s countenance, and he should have done the same now as the boy turned to regard his foreman.

  Ah Chung smiled. “Hello, Cousin,” he said, and then asked if Charlie wanted to ask more questions.

  Charlie asked again where the boy thought he was going. The others in the group watched as if they, too, were curious.

  Ah Chung said he was going to talk to Sampson. He said maybe Charlie should ask himself some questions.

  Charlie told him to behave.

  “Behave?” the boy said. He addressed the group. He was not the one, he said, who had pledged his loyalty to a white man. He was not the one whose bundle of gold coins at the end of every week was so much weightier than the rest. He was not the one making funeral arrangements and e
mployment decisions. He was not the one dining in white homes, buying the white man’s turkeys for the white man’s holidays.

  He gestured for the group to join him on the grass. He waited for the boys to settle around him and then suggested that perhaps Charlie had left more than his brother on that boat. He put voice to what they all felt: the only brothers they had in this strange country were each other. Would the foreman treat them the way he had treated his own relations?

  Ah Chung turned to Charlie. “I hear from my village that your mother still grieves the loss of her youngest son.”

  Charlie said nothing, though he knew it was a damaging silence to hold.

  By this point, even the girls in the sewing room were sitting on sills, trying to ascertain meaning from their aerial views. Some of the white men asked the Chinese boys near them to translate. All they could manage with their limited English was to shake their heads and offer, “Very bad.”

  “I’ve never gone to meet Mrs. Sampson in her house,” Ah Chung said, scanning the group. “You?” he asked the youngest boy.

  Charlie knew what was required of him if he wanted to regain any of the ground slipping away. He must speak of the mixing of the races the way these peasant boys thought of it. He must speak of the baby as the perversion they thought her to be. He must infer about Julia the same thing. And this was where his mind shut down. Though he had spent the night wounded and sick with sadness, even rage, at her, he could not share that with these boys. So he continued to say nothing, and Ah Chung took his hesitancy and held it up to them as more evidence of the foreman’s misplaced loyalties. Charlie understood that he might be right. The vessel Charlie had been sailing since his arrival in this country, to carry him to a safe place, began to rock beneath him. Those with him began to leap away, taking their chances in the surrounding waters. He wanted nothing more than to join them. Instead, he turned and made his way through the crowd at the door back into the building.

  It was Homer Handley who convinced Ah Chung to return the boys to the factory. Who knew when Sampson would agree to meet with them, if at all? What aim would it accomplish for the group to sit out in the unforgiving sun?

  “We not work,” Ah Chung said to him.

  Homer shrugged. “Do what you want,” he said. “Just seems wiser to do it inside.”

  And so, even with Alfred Robinson’s eyewitness account, it was a difficult strike for the Transcript editors to describe in the following Thursday’s paper. It resembled not at all the strikes they were familiar with reporting. There was no threatening of the sort the newspapermen were accustomed to. What seemed to be occupying most of the Celestials’ time was a kind of well-mannered refusal. They refused to leave their quarters. They refused to ascend to the bottoming room, where the number of tables at work was reduced by only four. When the time came, they ate and drank and laughed with those who chose to continue working. Sampson had supplied them with room and board and they did not see reason to deny themselves what they had been contractually promised. They made no speeches. What discussion there was took place in small circles of wooden stools pulled close enough to speak with no question of being heard.

  Flummoxed, father and son Robinson resorted to a six-line story on page three of a four-page newspaper.

  Mr. Sampson’s Chinese Workmen

  As false and exagerated stories are afloat concerning a temporary trouble in Mr. Sampson’s establishment, we are prompted to state the facts. A portion of the old workmen had a dispute amongst themselves, not with Mr. Sampson. This trouble lasted for a day or so, but was settled, and on Tuesday they all went to work and everything is proceeding as before. This is all there was of the “strike.”

  On Thursday morning, her coffee cold and her daughter growing impatient, Julia read the article and was bothered by it in ways she couldn’t fully fathom. Her mind faltered at the word settled and again at the phrase proceeding as before. Somehow, she felt the editors had missed the point. She believed, without knowing why, that the events of the last few days suggested that these boys were not going to be held within rooms of her husband’s making anymore. Perhaps even Charlie would not have the sway over them that he had enjoyed. And she discovered that these apprehensions on her part prompted concern not for her husband, or for Charlie, or even for the boys themselves. Her own situation, after all, allowed for a certain sympathy with their desire to break free of the fences behind which they had been instructed to live. She wanted only to know what the heavens had in store for herself and her child and who could help her avoid it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sunday the seventeenth of August was filled with thunderstorms, the skies a slate gray, the leaves under assault by wind and water. Alfred’s boots were wet through, his skin white and puckered within his wool stockings. If it had not been Ida doing the asking, he would not have found himself in the street’s muddy ruts on an evening such as this heading toward church, for him the most unlikely of destinations.

  The Reverend Mr. Bartlett of Lowell and a Professor Hitchcock of Amherst, both agents of the Massachusetts Total Abstinence Society, were to address the public. When Ida had arrived at the apartment after supper, Alfred tried to raise the topic of the strike and what it might mean in terms of his suspicions about Charlie, but Ida had cut him off with news of the Society’s meeting. All were welcome, Ida had assured him. It would please her if he would come along. When she saw his face, she asked whether he really so much preferred his beer to her, and he flushed and reached for his hat.

  The Baptist church was filled, the inside air close and humid. They were able to secure two seats halfway down the aisle, but the pews were overcrowded and Alfred found himself pressed damply between Ida and a large bearded man who seemed unwashed by anything save the rain. Alfred moved closer to Ida, and though she did not object, neither did she yield any more space to him, so he sat, miserable, and tried to make his frame narrower than God had seen fit for it to be.

  Julia was in the front row, the baby sleeping against her shoulder. Even those standing restlessly behind the church’s last pews could see the child’s spray of black hair against her white bonnet. Mrs. Vera Pendleton suggested to her husband that it was as if Mrs. Sampson had chosen the bonnet for the express purpose of making a show of the hair’s color, and her husband, who did not like to agree with his wife unless offered no other path, had to concur that it did indeed seem that she was bent on flaunting the child in ways that did not strike him as completely necessary.

  Lucy and Sampson, who had arrived late, sat a row behind the Pendletons, and Lucy held out hope that either her employer had not been attuned to their talk or that he had not been dealt too hard a blow by it. In her few weeks of work for the man, she had found herself with more and more goodwill toward him. Some of this had to do with the fact that he was under strain both at home and at work, and she discovered easy sympathy for the public nature of his troubles. Some of her compassion had its source in a kind of selfishness: it was a relief to have the town’s tongues wagging about scandals other than her own. Ida had told her years ago that the time would come when people would return to thinking of her simply as Lucy Robinson, rather than placing that ubiquitous poor in front of her name. They would find other troubles to toss around. There were always more balls in trouble’s basket. But Lucy had not been able to imagine such things coming to pass, and still felt as a person laid low with illness feels about those moving about her in health. How did they manage it?

  So since these weeks with the Sampsons, she was enjoying the vigor of comparative good health. She found him gruff and clumsy and full of nerves about appearance and reputation, but rather than wincing at his displays, she discovered herself to be smiling at them and occasionally succumbing to the urge to pat him on his thick, sloped shoulder or even once to tug painlessly at his graying beard, astonished at her forwardness and the pleasure it brought her.

  In those moments, he had stiffened and allowed the girl’s exuberance to pass without comment,
as he did not know what words to put to use in such a situation. He would, however, have been able to say that her presence in their rooms brought to mind cups filled to the rim. He felt every day upon his return to the apartment that he was encountering a large table, well set for ten happy guests.

  He had, of course, heard the Pendletons as well as she had, but had not been particularly struck by their comments, since they articulated his own sentiments. Regarding the tilt of his wife’s head, the particular line of her neck, he could tell that she would soon be suffering from one of her headaches. He knew, too, that she would not, in public, minister to herself. The brown bottle of Dodd’s Nervine would remain in her bag until her return home. In such cases, he knew, it offered her some small solace to have him within reach.

  He glanced at Lucy and was struck by the thought that she had once been a child no larger than the one in Julia’s arms. Winging its way behind that as if in migratory formation was the notion that baby Alice would one day take the form of a young woman. These were ordinary thoughts, comprehensible by the dullest of half-wits, yet they filled his mind with astonishment.

  “What is it?” Lucy asked. “Are you overheated?”

  “Do you realize that you were once a tiny infant?” he asked.

  She regarded him as if for signs of heatstroke or brain fever. “I do,” she said.

  He sat back in the pew and placed his hands on his thighs as if having just completed school exams. “That’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it?” he said.

  She sat back as well and watched the Reverend Mr. Bartlett take the pulpit. “It is,” she said.