The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  He thought of Third Brother. Had it not been better for one of them, at least, to have made a successful arrival on Gold Mountain? What good would it have done to align himself with someone so clearly in the grip of death’s long fingers?

  From across the aisle Ah Chung’s voice rose above the surrounding noises of sleep and dream. “Another sleepless night, Cousin?”

  Charlie didn’t answer, shame and rage at this young upstart mixing in his gut.

  The boy above Ah Chung said, “Who are you talking to?”

  “Mr. Foreman is troubled,” Ah Chung answered. “I have a family member in need.”

  The boy snorted. “He is not your family.”

  “But he says he is.” Ah Chung leaned out of his bunk toward Charlie’s. “Cousin. He says you and I are not family. You must set him straight. You must make your authority clear.”

  “He’s asleep,” the boy said.

  Ah Chung settled back down on his bunk. “He is not asleep,” he said.

  Charlie could tell both of them were smiling. He remained silent. Had he been in their position, he would have felt the same way. And so, in two days’ time, when even the nonstriking workers voted to remove him from control of their finances, he would know the futility of argument. He too would no longer have looked to him as their best possible delegate, their one-man migrant association. So when they chose a new foreman, he would retreat sadly to his bunk in the middle of the day and say aloud to the empty room, “I have made a mess of things. I am sorry to have shamed us all.”

  It would fail to occur to him that this was the position his brother had been in on that boat, and also one with which Julia was more than familiar, the position commonly occupied by most people in this world: voicing their sadnesses into empty rooms, the only consolation the echoes of their own articulations bouncing off the walls. It would fail to occur to him that even Ah Chung lay on this same pallet. So he would grasp no consolation in the apprehension that his misery was a shared one. It would seem to him on that hot August afternoon that he was a solitary man, lost between past and future. For the first time in days, he would sleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By mid-September 1873, the total United States debt was $2,270,000,000. What few green apples embellished the orchards of Hampshire and Franklin Counties had been generally preempted by the worms, and the apple harvest of that locality would prove almost a dead failure.

  Boston newspapers reported that soup for the poor in their fair city cost $4,000 the previous year, while refreshments for the city government topped $41,000.

  North Adams’s water was almost entirely drawn from the Clarksburg Reservoir, and the levels in the north branch of the Hoosac were barely sufficient to drive the mills more than one day in the week at full head.

  The Transcript of September 11, 1873, ran a front-page article titled “The Age of Suicide,” which claimed that “the habits of the period tend peculiarly to self destruction.” Further articles instructed the paper’s readers on “How to be Rich” and the “Treatment of Old Horses.”

  At seven in the evening on that night, a terrific explosion of nitroglycerin occurred near the central shaft of the Hoosac Tunnel, resulting in the death of David Bourdon, assistant blaster. The Transcript the following week reported that the explosion had been felt in Pittsfield. Bourdon’s body was removed the day after death to Canada, his former home, where his family awaited it for proper burial.

  And Ah Chung reminded his fellow workers that even the French Canadians took care of their own.

  By September 18, they had been back to work for some weeks, though the mood within the bottoming room was as careful as if fox and house cat suddenly found themselves lapping from the same puddle.

  Ah Chung was waiting for Charlie to offer some further example of misplaced loyalties and Charlie was determined not to offer anything at all. He turned more and more inward, his shoulders sloped with the effort.

  Julia wanted a name. Sampson wanted a name. The Sunday school teachers, who knew practically nothing of the particulars of Charlie’s position, seemed to stare at him with open pity. Merchants endeavored to give him his change without touching his hand. The minister at his Methodist church pulled him aside after services to say that he imagined the situation at the factory to be rough and wondered if Charlie would like to unburden himself. Dogs avoided him. He began to feel that if he could manage to allow day to run into day, he could, in the manner of a spirit returning to the Celestial world, disappear almost entirely.

  He had been given a deadline of September 22 by his employer. “The father’s name, or I hand them all tickets back to San Francisco,” Sampson had said.

  Shortly after that, Julia had managed to get a note to him through Lucy Robinson. Are you really, after all, not going to help me?

  And so when the town awoke on Friday, September 19, to the news of the failure of the great banking house of Jay Cooke and Company, Charlie may have been the only person to welcome the information. He would be further pleased to learn that several other businesses would follow in its footsteps, making the nineteenth of September forever known as Black Friday, the beginning of a financial panic that would last for sixty-five months, the longest nationwide depression the country would see for decades to come. Charlie thought not about hungry children or despondent or ruined families. He thought instead that this news might be distracting, and he was glad.

  And for one or two days, he was correct. Sampson tracked the news from New York with the relief that a subject other than baby and wife, strikers and paternity could provide. What a respite to be able to stay Julia or George Chase, both no doubt bringing further anxiety to his doorstep, with a raised hand and say, “Apologies all around, but I must attend to this.”

  During Friday and Saturday, he had much to track, as Wall Street was in the wildest excitement of terror. Jay Cooke was a firm of continental relations and immense business, and its fall carried with it some of the strongest banking firms of the city. Failure after failure was announced until it seemed as if the whole street would go under. By Saturday night, some forty-one leading houses had failed in New York alone, and railroad values had fallen six percent, other stocks as much as ten. Wall Street was filled with crowds of men mad with alarm and despair. Suicides were expected, and by Sunday, expectations had been met.

  And so Charlie’s Monday deadline passed unnoticed by his employer. In fact, Charlie saw nothing of Sampson for several days, and he began to hope for further grim news from New York as a blanket over the fire of his own local troubles.

  But by Thursday, Sampson’s thoughts had begun to hold both the faraway and the local in the same frame, mostly because of a remark of his wife’s.

  “It seems to me,” he said loudly enough for her to hear him from the nursery, where she had been busying herself in ways he found inexplicable for a time he found impossibly long, “that the depreciated paper currency is at the bottom of this all.”

  She said nothing. Rattling sounds commenced and then ceased.

  “And the cause of that is the prolonged financial debauch we have indulged in. We have been living wrong, and now comes the punishment and retribution,” he went on.

  Her voice when it finally did make its way out the nursery door was filled with impatience. She said, “ ‘Accumulation and speculation are the team to which business should yoke itself.’ Isn’t that what you used to say?”

  He wondered whether the time would ever come when he would find the precision of his wife’s memory blessing rather than burden. “Speculation, yes,” he said, “but wise speculation. Not this willy-nilly kind of exploration that entails the abandonment of all that we know to be sound practice.”

  Julia stood at the door with Alice in her arms, and once again he had the impression of being ganged up on.

  “So no experimenting,” she said. “No unprecedented acts of business the consequences of which would not be clear until delivered upon us?”

  He frowned at her,
stood, and then sat again, taking enormous interest in the arms of his chair. “All right, all right,” he said. “I am not an idiot.”

  “I did not say that you were,” she said, swaying lightly from one widely planted foot to the other. She had taken to performing this action whether or not she held Alice in her arms, and he found it disquieting, as if some spirit had taken up residence in her body and was busy exploring her inner rooms.

  “All I am saying is that it seems you may have started speaking on one subject and found yourself on another,” she said, the impatience drained from her tone.

  He picked at the brocade of the chair.

  “Stop that,” she said gently.

  “No matter,” he said, standing again. “Perhaps we all have gone too far astray. Perhaps the answer on Wall Street and here is the same: a return to prudence and honesty.”

  It was the closest he’d come to admitting to her what an extreme betrayal he felt her behavior to be. Until now, they had spoken of their problem almost only as if it were made exclusively of the baby and the paternity, and not also of her trampling on their vows, their love, their twenty-four years of life together. It was as if they’d chosen to stand on and discuss the tip of an iceberg, ignoring the underwater mass beneath them.

  The thought of the small of her back guided through a doorway by another’s hand, her mouth coaxed into laughter by way of another’s words, brought pressure to his eyes and bile to his throat. He could not allow his imagination to go farther. She was still rocking Alice.

  The sight of someone he loved holding someone he didn’t was strange and unpleasant.

  Another man had known her. This was something he would have to live with. His deadly and impossible task. “Oh, Julia. The oldest of them is close to half your age.”

  Her eyes flashed with surprise and alarm and, he hoped, shame.

  “I know,” she said plainly.

  He was crying, and he screwed his eyes shut to put a stop to it.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  He did.

  “I did not intend to hurt you,” she said.

  He regarded her. How could someone he had presumed to know so well have surprised him so fully? He had taken such pleasure in his familiarity with her ways. It was a pleasure that even in retrospect he could no longer enjoy.

  She was still rocking. “Stop that,” he said, giving his face one final determined swipe. And she did, and Lucy Robinson, listening from the apartment’s kitchen, heard the floorboards cease their creaking, and inside, all was still.

  *

  Other than what she’d told Ida and Alfred about the meeting between Mrs. Sampson and the foreman, Lucy had kept what information she knew buttoned safe to her chest, and she wished she had not shared what she had. That incaution had caused her much shame. She prided herself on her discretion, on her ability to be the quietest voice in a room. As a child, she had been the one who had consistently been brought into adult confidence. Her mother especially had found that the sharing of secrets with her offered a particular kind of consolation, and although she often felt guilty about using her child for selfish purposes, the relief it allowed her was too large to resist. For Lucy, the effect had been to make her feel even less of a child. Until she grew to be friends with Ida, she had not been a girl to like the rough-and-tumble play of youngsters on a farm. She did not like tromping down creeks or slipping into rivers; the odor of barns and the animals within them made her feel as if many hands were being held firmly over her mouth and nose. But neither was she a bookworm, a good girl who excelled at chores and who would never consider letting her bonnet go untied. She was not a child as her family or friends understood a child to be. And so she had found herself thinking, Why not embrace the adult world? Perhaps there would be more for her there. She had therefore become the model of maturity and poise, an adult who operated with the caution of someone in a foreign land.

  The only place she had not felt herself to be an interloper was in the presence of Ida. They’d been a country of two. “Thank goodness you have found someone to be your natural self with,” her mother used to say. “Your particulars seem to suit each other.” Their brothers teased them about it, and other acquaintances steered clear.

  And so her reaction to Ida’s behavior on the following Sunday came as a surprise. They were spending the week’s end as planned, at the opening day of the Cattle Show and Fair of the Hoosac Valley Agricultural Society at the North Adams Fairgrounds just outside the town proper.

  After several days of perfect weather, the clouds had begun to gather, and Sunday had opened with a drizzling rain. The livestock were beginning to make an appearance; the Exhibition Hall was filling with tables and booths. The roundabout was on hand but not yet up. By early afternoon, when they found themselves investigating the fair’s main thoroughfare, some half-dozen booths were ready and anxious. Lucy suggested the Grand Arena for the matched carriage horses, always her own favorite. Free-ranging animals made her nervous; those under yoke or harness seemed to her dignified and secure.

  Ida wrinkled her nose. “No,” she said. “Let’s not.” She looked around as if searching for, but not expecting to find, an alternative.

  Lucy registered surprise and a little hurt at the speed with which her friend had disregarded what she knew to be Lucy’s preference.

  “The weather is miserable,” Ida said and then fell silent, as if this were Lucy’s fault.

  From the pens came the sounds of cattle and poultry, sheep and swine. Lucy imagined jaws sliding over hay, dirty tails taking desultory swipes at insects. In the rain, the smell was sure to be overwhelming. “Do you want to see the animals?” she offered.

  “You don’t like animals,” Ida said.

  “But you do,” Lucy persisted.

  “Don’t do anything just for me,” Ida said, her voice smoked with sarcasm.

  Lucy was baffled. Her mind sorted through possible offenses she might have inflicted and landed on the even less pleasant possibility that Ida’s recent sour moods had nothing to do with Lucy.

  Ida looked around as if waiting for someone she was sure would never arrive. “Everyone likes autumn,” she said. She scanned the hillsides. “Just something that comes after summer and before winter, if you ask me.”

  “What’s gotten under your bonnet?” Lucy asked.

  Ida regarded her. “Nothing,” she finally said. “Just wore out.”

  “You should rest,” Lucy said.

  Her friend snorted and suggested they get out of the weather in the Exhibition Hall.

  In years past, they had tended to avoid the hall. Filled with its garden vegetables and floral arrangements, its works aspiring to art and its infinitude of cushions, scarves, and tidies, it was the one place certain to make both girls feel most foreign. But they made their way through the humid, crowded tent. They stopped to handle Mrs. Lamphier’s Peerless potatoes, weighing a pound each. Ida held up a basket bouquet of star of scarlet geraniums on a ground of purple ageratum, turning it this way and that. “It’s pretty,” she said.

  Lucy raised her eyebrows. Last year they would’ve rolled their eyes together at such a thing.

  Ida proceeded to the wax anchor, cross, and crown by Mrs. J. J. Pratt of Williamstown, and several pictures in worsted by Mrs. O. D. Titus. Lucy followed, lost in her own thoughts about Ida’s current mood and what Lucy might have done to put her there.

  Charlie’s portrait was almost hidden among the other photographs and paintings of Lucius Hurd. Hurd had arranged it between a view of the Taj Mahal and another of the pyramids of Egypt. Ida plucked it from the row, resettling it with the other portraits. “Embarrassing,” she said. “As if he’s some sort of exotic landscape.” She searched the vicinity of the table, and Lucy feared she was looking for Hurd himself to give him a thick slice of her mind.

  Lucy took her by the arm, hoping to prompt her into proceeding away, but Ida seemed not to feel her hand. “I would buy this if I could,” she said.

 
“What for?” Lucy asked with a little too much surprise. They had both received cartes de visite from the Chinese workers, but that novelty had passed. Lucy wasn’t even sure where her copies were anymore.

  “Not everything has a practical use,” Ida said. “I’d buy it because I like it. I like him.”

  This last comment, and the way Ida said it, as though trying unsuccessfully to toss it off, sent a tremor through the small of Lucy’s back. Since she was not predisposed to engage in such an understanding, she did not identify it as jealousy. She did not admit that Ida’s comment upset what she had come to rely on as the natural order of their relationship. Even if she felt caged and trapped by Ida’s attentions, she had come to rely on their presence. And both women remained so locked against themselves and the world around them that they missed word of the excitement transpiring at the Grand Arena, where the team of William S. Blackinton, a pair of remarkable large and handsome horses, became frightened by striking their feet against the whippletrees and started on a run, their driver powerless to hold them.

  The track was occupied by matched horses on exhibition and by many other conveyances and the dangers of a disastrous collision were imminent, but the horses turned from the track and started across the uneven field. They passed in front of the judges’ stand and finally regained the track and only after two further circuits did they, panting and white with foam, slow to a walk and allow themselves to be driven home without injury.

  Upon their return to the Robinson apartment, the girls were told about the episode by Alfred, who at first expressed worry as to their well-being and then shock. “How could you have missed such a thing?” he asked. “Are you deaf, blind, and dumb?”

  Ida assured him that they were not, and Lucy said that they had been otherwise occupied, and both stood there nursing their mutual sense that the other was most to blame for the miseries of the day.

  *

  Charlie spent the afternoon within the scaffolded Methodist church. The old building had been removed in April 1872 to make way for the new, which was meant to be ready for occupancy by the middle of the upcoming November, and which from certain angles, interior and exterior, could be imagined as already fully completed and constructed.