The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  There was a brief delay, as there seemed to be some discussion as to the order of the speakers.

  “You know,” Sampson said. “I built most of this church.” He gestured around them.

  Lucy followed the gesture. The building was, in fact, much like him: squat, of sturdy brick, filled with New England history and pride. It was nearly as wide as it was long and, without the spire added the previous year, would’ve appeared even less like a church and more like a factory. Indeed, she felt that the enthusiasm about the recent expansion, especially the construction of the spire, the tallest in town and the second-tallest in the state, as more than one congregant had mentioned to her, had most to do with attaching some lift of alleluia to an edifice that seemed much more comfortable squatting.

  “It is a lovely building,” she said.

  Sampson took perhaps more pride than he should have in the church, if not in the goings-on within its walls then at least in the walls themselves. He had certainly been instrumental in the fund-raising and construction, though perhaps his role had not been as crucial as he imagined. As his world in the factory grew more and more under siege, the importance of his church and his other civic contributions increased, and in this last week, he had found himself going out of his way to pass by these buildings as often as possible on his daily constitutionals.

  In two years’ time, Lucy, still in his employ, would hear of the fire in the church, and she would think of him, his disappointments and disasters held before her as suddenly and clearly as her own hand.

  “The spire is the second-tallest in the state,” he said.

  “I have heard that,” she said.

  At the podium, Reverend Anable seemed to be successfully mediating the disagreement between the two speakers. Lucy and Sampson sat and watched.

  “Would you like to sit with your wife and child?” she asked quietly, for reasons she didn’t fully understand.

  He looked again at the back of his wife’s head. “I think there is no room for me there,” he said, and the room quieted, as if in response to his observation, as Mr. Bartlett did, finally, commence to speak.

  Alfred had no hopes for the man’s preaching, except for its duration, as he looked forward to an hour or more in Ida’s company. He tried to ignore that she seemed to have forgotten he was there.

  Bartlett opened with the society motto and then asked the gathered group to recite the society pledge. He referred those on their inaugural visit to the pamphlets beneath the pews.

  The group stood. Ida spoke from memory. Alfred read along silently with the logic that not speaking the words aloud made his whole participation less hypocritical.

  They were told to sit.

  Mr. Bartlett went on to say that Old King Alcohol was the great enemy of the human race. Temperance was the only way to throw him from his throne. He didn’t have to remind this gathering that temperance was the moderate and proper use of things beneficial and the abstinence from things hurtful.

  “See?” Ida whispered.

  “What?” Alfred whispered back.

  The bearded man told them to quiet themselves.

  Alfred sat back, so perplexed by Ida’s comment that he missed much of what both speakers said. He was doomed, he thought, to be in the position of trying to make sense of Ida V. Wilburn.

  Professor Hitchcock drew the meeting to a close by reminding the group that temperance was not merely an issue of physical well-being but also one of morals and ethics. Theirs was the first society to do full justice to women, for example. As women had suffered more terribly than any other class from the evils of intemperance, it was felt that they should have a voice and a vote in all measures designed to overthrow this monster foe of the race. The wisdom of man and the love of woman should always be conjoined to accomplish the best results.

  Alfred wondered if this was what Ida had meant for him to take from this evening, another lesson in her long struggle to get him to admit that boys were, by and large, foolish and wild.

  “I’m no simpleton,” Alfred whispered.

  Ida regarded him. “Of course you’re not,” she said.

  He waited for something else, some qualifying comment, but it never came.

  Hitchcock went on, “Our Order knows no distinction on account of the color of a person’s skin any more than it does the color of his hair or eyes. I believe that here in North Adams, with your proud tradition of welcoming all races, you must know this more clearly than elsewhere.”

  It was as if he had reached down from the pulpit and pulled Julia and the baby up there with him. She felt the room’s attention on her bare neck like hands. She tucked Alice’s blanket more securely around her and reaffirmed her grip on the child.

  “Could he know about the child?” Alfred asked Ida.

  “That’s not the point,” Ida said.

  “It’s not?” he said, hoping she would explain.

  “Ssh,” she said, putting a hand on his knee. “Just listen.”

  But he could scarcely listen with his knee bearing the weight of her hand, and Hitchcock seemed at the end of his wisdoms, and after an explanation of membership, which apparently involved the signing of the pledge along with the payment of one dollar to be a year’s member, ten for a lifetime, and the singing of “The Teetotalers Are Coming” and “The Drunkard’s Dream,” the meeting was dissolved.

  Charlie did not know how to stop the train that seemed to be steaming its way toward his delicately constructed life, yet simultaneously he felt it impossible that the train was actually coming or could do any real damage. He understood these to be insights in conflict, but felt them equally nonetheless, the effect being a constant state of inner argument. He was, by the middle of August, pummeled and exhausted by himself.

  For all of Sampson’s reassuring talk to the newspapers, both he and Charlie knew that as strange in appearance as the strike was, it was still a strike, and as such was summons and provocation to both employer and his trusted man. Even the phlegmatic George Chase was ruffled, stopping in to his employer’s office twice as often as before to ask Sampson about his plan of response.

  There were still workers doing their jobs so it was not that Charlie had such a difficult time keeping the boxes of product trundling out the back door. That was mostly a matter of gently pushing those workers who had remained at their machines to stay a little longer, work a little harder. But the beginning and end of each day, when Charlie had need to pass through the living quarters and encounter Ah Chung and his pack, were insult of the sort most difficult to stand. Each sight of them was humiliation and a blow to the reputation that he had spent so many years cultivating. He was gripped by the conviction that his damaged reputation was the sole obstacle to a life with Julia. How could she imagine a life with someone who could not even manage his own? He could take pride neither in the man he had been nor in the man he might be. He held Ah Chung centrally responsible.

  Yet his disbelief that any of this ruin could actually come to pass and his unshakeable conviction that he was capable of working his way out of the tightest grip allowed him to continue to countenance the reassurances he gave Sampson, about both the operation of the factory and the procurement of the identity of the child’s father, and to continue to act as though the workers’ respect and admiration was a given. He even treated Ah Chung’s dozen as though he was the best kind of father with mischief-making sons. He inquired after the eating habits of one and made a medicinal brew for another. If they smirked or exchanged looks with one another in response, he chose not to see. Some days he was more successful than others. Most of his nights were sleepless. His appetite was poor, his work habits careless, his mind filled with images of Julia and Alice: torment and consolation in equal parts.

  It was Sampson, finally, whose impatience overflowed. On a Tuesday evening in late August, he called Charlie to the Wilson House apartment and announced that he was sending for new Chinese from San Francisco. “The market is turned down, and still we are having trouble f
illing orders,” he said. “If these boys here will not fill their berths, I will fill them with others like them.”

  Charlie nodded, yet he knew with certainty that this violation of their contract would only further enrage Ah Chung and the rest, even the ones who had for the moment chosen not to strike. But his ears were attuned to the sounds of Julia and the baby coming from behind the thick oak door over Sampson’s shoulder. The sitting room was filled with evidence of the child and the care Julia was taking with her. Tiny towers of small clothes were in various states of construction on the sewing table. Baskets filled with the baby’s pleasures and necessities rested in handy places throughout the room. The air was suffused with the smell of talc and milk. There was no sign of the gifts he had offered.

  Behind the door, Julia was talking to the child as if to a grown woman. What if the door opened and he stood in her full view? What would she see? So, while nodding, he found himself challenging aloud his employer’s instructions. It was polite and circumspect, but challenge nonetheless. Did Mr. Sampson not think that perhaps just the threat of calling in new workers might be enough to persuade the strikers back to their tables? Since one of the strikers’ complaints was what they believed to be their oppression, might it not be better to make clear their options to them, but allow them the power of choice?

  Sampson furrowed his brow and waved a hand as if clearing the air of something unpleasant. “I am not engaged in courtship with them,” he said impatiently. “They are not objects of my affection. Tell them it is within my rights to replace them all, idle or not.”

  Charlie remained silent, yet Sampson looked up as if his foreman had said something reasonable and right. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, tell them all that I am ready to exercise that right.”

  Charlie’s neck tingled with minute warnings.

  “Don’t your people hold stock in group responsibility for the individual act and all that?”

  Charlie didn’t answer. It didn’t seem to matter.

  “If they do not offer up the father of the child for replacement,” Sampson said, lowering his voice, “I will replace them all.” He gestured toward the closed door behind him and his voice softened. “I cannot go on like this,” he said.

  Charlie said nothing.

  Sampson’s voice returned to its usual tenor. “So, there you are. The choice is theirs,” he said. “As you suggested.”

  Charlie stared with such blankness that Sampson asked if he had heard. Charlie bent his head in his usual bow. Had his eyes been open, he might have seen the catchall basket on the floor containing spare buttons, some old receipts, a small carved dragon, and a Chinese hairpin. But he didn’t, and in truth, the only questions he had were for himself. How had he ended up companion to Sampson on one side of a door with Julia and Alice on the other? Who must he hold responsible for that?

  “We boys are not as dim as you think,” Alfred said quietly to Ida on their way home.

  “Not all,” she said. “This is true.”

  It did not seem to him a comment necessary to address. His stride suffered and he appeared to gently lose his way for a moment.

  She righted him with a hand to his arm. “Was I too late bringing you to the meeting?” she teased. “Has the hard cider already found its way around you?”

  They had taken the long way home, Ida suggesting that they could do with as much of the breeze off the river as possible, and he was quiet and breathed through his mouth as they picked their way past the horse manure outside J. M. Avery’s livery stable at the river end of Summer Street. The horses stood in the shade, their impossibly large heads hanging in the late summer heat. Flies gathered in the corners of their heavily lidded eyes. They leaned into each other like tired lovers, one rear fetlock cocked to relieve themselves of some of their own formidable weight.

  Ida had never been able to resist a horse, and she slowed, removing a glove to place her palm between forehead and muzzle at the face’s broadest part, like an agent of God distributing blessings. She paused at a well-formed chestnut larger even than the rest. “Hello, good pony,” she said.

  Alfred did not take to horses, but the sight of her drawing pleasure from something that gave her so much of it brought back memories of their childhoods. Though they had not always had the other directly in sight, they had spent their childhoods side by side, running in the same pack of children, scolded by the same adults. She had once dared him to ride the Wilburn ponies in the Rappahannock River. He had not wanted to, but he had. The ponies were short, stocky Shetlands, and even ten-year-old Ida and Alfred could easily flatten their feet on the ground as they sat astride them. His pony was black, but beneath the Virginia sun he could see mottled rings of dark brown like a leopard’s spots. Ida led the way down the short muddy embankment into the wide river, the horses wearing nothing but halter and lead rope, and he was not prepared for the feel of the small animal under him as it took flight within the water. It was as if the sturdy, warm animal on the dry ground had become a creature of the sea, slippery as a scaled thing. He had not been able to see a way to stay astride such a beast, and so he had not; each time he tried entering the river, he slipped quickly from the pony’s back. And so he had settled, finally, for watching her. She had laughed with joy at the swimming pony and the clumsiness of her friend and the goodness of the life they found themselves living, and she had brought to mind the illustrations in his book of myths and legends of strange and marvelous sea women riding the backs of dolphins and whales.

  Now, she regloved her hand and rubbed her nose against the chestnut’s muzzle one last time.

  “Why’re you so rough with me?” Alfred asked.

  She looked as if she wished she could tether herself to the line of horses.

  “I don’t mean to be,” she said, wiping her gloves on her skirts.

  “But you are,” he said.

  She joined him at the end of the street, dust clouding their boots, and took his arm to continue down to the river. “I know,” she said, and then fell silent.

  Although above them were the rear lots of J. Boyles’s newly built house and the Bloom hostel and R. Hartwick’s livery, down in the hollow of the bank, picking their way across the shore’s mix of sand and mud and river rocks, both of them felt as though the town and its inhabitants were many hills away.

  He stopped at a small sandy outcropping shaded with birches and maples of the most unnatural bent. She walked on a few steps and then stopped to face him.

  He said nothing, but she did not turn away. Small fish schooled together in the shallows. Somewhere, a bullfrog made his sounds.

  “I like you,” Alfred said, thunder and lightning striking between his ears. “Why do you find me so lacking?”

  She did not remove her eyes from him. Her heart was filled with concern at what it had required of him to say such a thing.

  “Our lives’ve been rooted together from the start,” he said. “My mother always said that the best wife is also a best friend.” He looked at the trees. Their shadows spotted his face. “Maybe we’re not best friends, but I guess we might be.”

  A cardinal pair swept past and landed on a thin huckleberry branch bent almost to the water. They regarded the humans and took off in different directions.

  Ida knew everything he said to be true. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she had counted on him never saying any of this out loud. Because she knew that the obstacle to her love for Alfred was something he could do nothing about and something she could never share.

  “Is it just that I am too familiar?” he ventured. His voice was now breaking and the small boy inside was terrible to see. She wished she could take him by the hands, the way his mother did when he was in the grips of his most boyish upset, put her face to his, and tell the truth. It was that he was not familiar enough. No matter what he did or said, he would never be the girl who bricked the path upon which she wished to travel. What exactly was the nature of her love for Lucy? She would’ve been una
ble to say. All she knew was that she was her best self in the company of Lucy Robinson.

  As headstrong as she was, she could not bring herself to that level of honesty with him. And because her original intent had been to extract his promise to do no damage when it came to Charlie and Mrs. Sampson and that baby, she found herself doing much worse. She did take him by the hands, and she did put her face to his, in order to tell him that all he said was true, and although she did not love him now, she might yet learn to love him.

  Although the relief on his face was not complete, when he gave her a brief, shy smile and said, “Well, then,” Ida knew herself to be a hateful person, something heartless clothed in human guise.

  Ah Chung and the striking workers voted to return to their machines upon hearing Charlie’s news that they were to be replaced. Although Ah Chung himself was for continued defiance, the others were made nervous by this news. They had signed contracts, after all. They had families who were counting on the regular arrival of their sons’ earnings. They did not like to imagine their mothers bearing the burdens of village life, or believing their boys to be anything but good and upright sons. And Ah Chung, savvy enough to know when to push and when to align, concurred. He did, however, point out that it was Charlie who had delivered this message, and not just Sampson who benefited from their return to work.

  Reading the boys’ faces as they took their supper after their vote, Charlie knew that although Sampson had gotten what he desired, there was nothing to celebrate here. Even the cooks dished his food to him in silence.

  Perhaps because of his shame, he could not bring himself to relate the second part of Sampson’s message. How could he announce to this group that unless a father was named, all of them would be sent away?

  In his bunk that night, unhappy boys all around him, sleep eluded him again, and he lay awake astonished at the position in which he found himself. How could he name a father? How could he not? Was it not better to sacrifice one to save the rest?