The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Chapter Seventeen

  On Thursday, October 2, 1873, a four-pound toadstool was discovered in Lee. Peter Galligan paid the police court $250 and was sentenced to six months in the house of correction for liquor selling, while on the charge of keeping a nuisance he was fined $20 and received three months’ imprisonment. The Transcript, speaking on the country’s financial crisis, opined that if the businessmen of North Adams stood by the local banks, deposited as usual, and drew only for the regular purposes of trade, then the fury of the storm in New York would not have serious effect in local terms.

  The day was crisp and bright and all God’s objects appeared as if spit-polished by earnest young boys in uniforms of well-pressed cloth.

  It was hard for those who had been, in one way or another, waiting for the identity of the father for so long not to think that today would bring some relief. Even those townsfolk who did not know the particulars of the Sampsons’ unresolved situation had felt the anxieties of the past months. And certainly the recent lives of the Chinese workers had been filled with unrest. It might even be argued that the town entire, alien and native, wealthy and wanting, had been living as a herd of horses, noses to the air of an oncoming disturbance of weather. It would be solace to be able to relax their attentive ears and drop their heads to the grass.

  But the realization of desire is often dissimilar to the fantasy, and almost as soon as Sampson had handed the young Low Yuen his ticket, his final pay, and his measured thanks, those divergences commenced to roll through the town like thunder.

  First off, the boy’s reaction offered Sampson no satisfaction. Whereas Sampson had secretly hoped for a moment of unspoken yet complete understanding between the two of them, the boy’s eyes were filled with nothing but confusion. He was enough of a boy and enough aware of his position in this world to keep his questions to himself, but they started to make their way into the world soon after he left the office.

  The news of his dismissal traveled through the factory at a rapid pace. His fellow workers had watched him being summoned from the bottoming floor, and when he didn’t return, they began one by one to quit their tables and make their way down to their living quarters, and Homer Handley and the other white workers took note from their own stations that here was yet another day of compromised work and diminished product.

  Despite what Julia had believed, Charlie was not surprised to hear of Low Yuen’s dismissal. She had, he thought, been naïve, and Sampson, he knew, understood himself to be a right and moral person, inclined, even obligated, to bring what he understood as injustice to public light. Charlie had known, as he had offered Low Yuen’s name, what would come of his action. What he chose to believe was that Julia knew as well, and that what she was asking was not just for Charlie to build her a door out of the trap in which she found herself, but for him to pass through that door with her. So great was his need for this truth that he did not examine its illogic.

  He remained at his pegging machine until he realized it would be the wiser move to follow his brethren downstairs. He reminded himself that he should be as curious as they; their reactions should be his reactions, and it struck him that he had become someone who had to play the role of a Celestial rather than be one. He was saddened.

  The Chinese were gathered in the bunk room, as if even their own dining quarters were too public for such a day. There were too many of them for the available open space, and he was reminded of the journey that had brought them all to this country. Perhaps their lot in life was to go from one cramped room to another.

  At the center was Low Yuen, who had rarely been the center of anything. He still clutched his train ticket. He asked one of his coworkers if he would mind reaching his bag from beneath his bunk. Ah Chung stilled the coworker with a gesture. “He’s not going anywhere,” he said, pulling a stool over with his foot and indicating that Low Yuen should take a seat, which the boy did.

  Ah Chung asked him to recount the scene in the office. “Leave nothing out,” he said. But before the boy could speak, could explain that, no, Mr. Sampson had offered no explanation for the dismissal, before the boy could be made to feel the small sting of shame at not having asked for one, Ah Chung glanced Charlie’s way and said the houseboys of foreign devils were not welcome there.

  Charlie removed himself without argument, as he believed that this too would go the way he expected. Ah Chung would use the dismissal to reincite his band of supporters. Whether or not a reason for the dismissal was discovered, he himself would be blamed for it. This would not be a miscarriage of justice. He would be further isolated from the group, further pushed beyond the outer walls of their small imitation of home. As he passed through the dining quarters and let himself quietly out of the factory’s side door, pausing on the bottom step to look first left and then right, he reminded himself with the stubbornness of a child that this was what he had wanted.

  Although not making use of the train ticket had been Ah Chung’s idea, Low Yuen himself had been at a loss to imagine crossing the country on his own, returning to San Francisco alone and unemployed. It was a city he found filled with nothing but chaos, inciting in his body nothing but fear. He could not return home until he had stored away enough money to pay his debts and the cost of the trip, and even if he found his finances in such a state, he could not imagine returning to his village, to his overworked mother and stern father, as essentially the same boy he had been when he left.

  So instead, he returned to his work station. He kept his head bent to the task of attaching one part of a shoe to another. Who knew why Americans did the things they did? It was best not to question their behavior, but to stay out of its way.

  Because Sampson chose to avoid the bottoming room in the days after the dismissal, and because the room’s white foreman had more trouble than he liked to admit telling one Celestial from another, it was several days before Low Yuen’s continued presence moved into the frame of Sampson’s vision. And even when it did, his mind was slow to wrap itself around the implications, occupied as he was, and had been, by Julia and his fear that she would, through some channel he had not gated or dammed, discover that he had not kept his word to her.

  In the days after the dismissal, as Ah Chung and his group quietly investigated the reasons for it, Sampson felt the torment of anticipation for the thing he least wanted to come to pass. It was of no consequence that Julia was happier than she’d been since her return, or that she seemed to have taken and let go a certain clutch on life. It was as if she had stood for a long while at the shore of a lake and had now decided that despite the temperature of the water, she would, after all, venture forward.

  His belief that his betrayal had been sired by hers did not bring him any solace. Everywhere he turned, he anticipated and imagined her wide face filled with sadness and hurt and, worst of all, a lack of surprise.

  Of course, the way she found out did not occur, and would not have occurred, to her husband. He had complete trust in Charlie Sing, more now than ever. It was the trust between man and dog or preacher and congregant. The lack of equality had been embraced by both parties so well and for so long that any resentment was not even a whisper from disharmony’s corner.

  Charlie did not tell her in order to betray Sampson, though he understood and regretted that particular consequence. He told her for the reason that he had done everything since her return. For her, for their child, for the possibility of family in this still strange world.

  They had arranged, with the help of Lucy Robinson, who still had not arrived at an understanding as to why she continued to help two people whom she knew barely at all, to meet at Natural Bridge. There, beneath the giant boulder where he had just months before gone to read Julia’s last letter from Michigan, she listened to what he had to say.

  Blue jays argued in the shrubbery. The birches stood already bare, while, other than the hue of their leaves, the maples stood in mantles of full summer. Had either Charlie or Julia bent to lay a hand to the ground, they woul
d have felt the oncoming winter seeping up through the earth like a snowfall in reverse.

  “I expected as much,” she said. She looked at Charlie sadly. “How could I expect more from him than I offered myself?”

  It was not the sadness in her eyes that laid fist to his stomach—it was the way her face, her body, everything about her was already steeled against it. This was not, he knew, an auspicious direction for the conversation to take.

  “Low Yuen is very young,” he said.

  Her face stilled and hardened further. “He will make do,” she said. “Why should he be any different from the rest of us?”

  His concern for the boy was overshadowed by his concern for himself, and so despite her hardness of feeling and his own guilt, he asked, “Now what happens?”

  Inside, his heart and mind made bargains with each other. If she looked at him, he had a chance. If she took his hand, even better. With nearly anything else, he should prepare for defeat.

  She put a hand to the side of his head, covering his ear, part of a cheek. “How can we know?” she said. “None of us would have foreseen what has so far taken place.”

  Her face was still determined, and whatever thrill his heart had enjoyed at her touch began to settle. She was touching him the way an aunt touches a nephew, wondering at the boy’s growth while she hasn’t been looking. It was the intimacy of strangers, and he felt as if his heart had been pushed into the dirt beneath them. At least it was her hands doing the burying. His rage at his own inadequacies tumbled through him, and to keep from slapping his own face, he cupped her neck with both of his hands and suggested they quit this place. “It is a big country,” he said, as though an agent for transcontinental tours. “She is my child too,” he added.

  “You and I will always know that,” Julia said, the sadness finally overtaking her face.

  He understood this to be the beginning of a farewell, and he interrupted her, sure that if he stopped her speech he could stop the sentiment behind it and its consequences. “And Alice,” he added. “She will know who she came from, what she is.”

  “She must be a Sampson,” Julia said.

  He shook his head slightly. “We’ll find somewhere where she can be ours.”

  She took his hands and held them between them as if they were children at a dance. He stared at the white of her skin and the workings of her throat and thought he might be ill.

  “There’s no place like that,” she said, as if explaining to a child that sugared treats do not fall from the heavens.

  “Why not?” he said. “Who says that?”

  She secured the ties of her bonnet and smoothed the bodice of her dress. “I say,” she answered. She touched a finger to his lower lip and then she left. He watched her recede, her squared shoulders, her skirts washing evenly against her legs. Her resolve and fortitude were long delicate needles through his heart. She did not look back. Had she done so, he would have seen a face set and determined, agony pulsing beneath the skin.

  *

  Lucy Robinson would spend some part of the remainder of her long life turning over the decision she made that late October of 1873. The unrest at the factory among the Chinese had bothered her the first time around, and bothered her more when they struck for the second time. Perhaps this was because there was more open agitation, and despite drawing attention farther away from her own scandal, unrest was still unrest, and any turbulence that threw itself out into the world made it impossible for her to live under the pretense that her own attack was something of the past. Her anger with herself and her anxieties grew. Was she to be forever in that man’s thrall? Even the Sampsons had learned without instruction how to move around her slowly, as if all behaviors need be performed with hands open and in full view.

  It angered her that all these people felt the need to protect her. It angered her further, as the years passed, that their instincts were correct.

  So for a while that October, she kept what she knew to herself. She and Ida witnessed the growing dissatisfaction among Ah Chung and his band at their Sunday school sessions. The strike this time around more closely resembled the agitation of the Crispins that the town well remembered. The thirty or forty Chinese supporting Ah Chung protested. They made signs. They worked to get others to join them. They presented a list of demands. Low Yuen must be reinstated. Charlie must be dismissed in his place, as it was Charlie who was to blame for the wrongs perpetrated against them, Charlie who was working for some selfish design of his own. They must have higher pay, better job security, better living quarters. Why should they be paid less than the native workers? Which race was producing the better quality shoe in the shorter amount of time?

  “Where was this spirit when the Crispins needed it?” Alfred grumped to Lucy and Ida one night. He had been unemployed for months.

  Ida said, “As if you would do anything with a Chinaman, even stand on a picket line with him.”

  Lucy said nothing, taking note that although the Robinsons were the closest thing to family Ida had in this small village, and they had not returned to Virginia partly out of loyalty to their strange community of three, she was, once again, siding against them.

  At certain points in her life, Lucy would tell herself that she had been motivated by a sense of justice. She determined that she had felt the need for justice more acutely because it had eluded her own situation. And she did genuinely believe that setting things right in one arena might help relieve the burdens of the other. Though later, she would have the wisdom to admit that something less altruistic had been at work in her young heart.

  She could have worked to settle the unrest without damage to Charlie. She could have tried to persuade Mr. Sampson that his usual gruffness and inflexibility might not best serve his interests when dealing with these particular Celestials in this particular case. She might have appealed to Mrs. Sampson’s sense of justice and morality; she might have asked her whether she could stand watching one boy field the consequences of another man’s actions. She did none of those things, a fact that, in the years to come, would roost solidly in her mind.

  On the twenty-fifth of October, an overcast and damp Saturday, Sampson dismissed Ah Chung and the ten other Chinese who had most annoyed him by their complaints. Their protestations, he said, were groundless and they had a seeming determination to do all in their power to prejudice their comrades against their employer and those other workers who saw fit to remain loyal to him.

  On Saturday evening, upon returning to his apartment at the Wilson House, Sampson told Lucy and Julia that the dismissed men had accused Charlie Sing of causing their discharge. A bitter hatred of the good man had grown, Sampson told them. It would be two days before the dismissed workers could be put on a train. He worried for Sing’s safety.

  On Saturday night, Alfred out with Daniel, Lucy related the news to Ida over dinner. The apartment already held the chill of winter despite the closed windows, their seals lined with cotton scraps. Lucy warmed her hands around her stew bowl. “It is a terrible situation,” she said, genuinely troubled by the unhappiness that had rolled in like a mist. “Poor Low Yuen,” she said, thinking of the meetings she’d arranged between Mrs. Sampson and Charlie. It was not, she supposed, impossible that the boy was the father. Mr. Sing and Mrs. Sampson might not have been meeting about their own relationship after all. But this was not, she figured, the likeliest truth. The likeliest truth, she had come to believe, was usually the one that stepped forward from the crowd, and when she thought of all she knew, there Charlie was, front and center.

  She wondered what else he could’ve done. She wondered what she would’ve done in his position. She found it impossible to imagine herself standing in his shoes. She looked at Ida as if the solution might be found with her.

  Ida sliced a carrot with the edge of her spoon and blew on it briskly. “Well, I have compassion for Low Yuen, to be sure, for all involved, really, but I care most about you.” She glanced at her friend over her raised spoon. “You seem unwell. I
don’t like others if they tax you.”

  Perhaps because it seemed to Lucy that it had been so long since her friend’s attentions had been turned on her so directly, and perhaps because she had spent her life in denial about the degree to which those attentions made the difference between a full or poor day for her, Lucy found herself telling Ida all that she knew. Maybe Ida could fix things. It was, after all, what Ida was best at. For a moment or two, Ida’s face allowed her to question why she had ever kept a thing from her.

  The boy was not the father. Charlie Sing was the father.

  Ida made a sound of disbelief. Ida told her friend not to be ridiculous. She was acting like her brother. There was no way for anyone to know the truth of this situation. It was, from every angle, the most unlikely of situations. To try to grab and hold the truth here would be like trying to grasp an eel barehanded.

  In all of Lucy’s unhappy imaginings of what Ida might present her with, disbelief had made no appearance. Skepticism was the purview of the first officer to the scene of her attack. But Lucy had always relied on the hard truth that she would speak and Ida would believe, and here Ida was, repudiating and rejecting. This perhaps accounted for the briskness with which she answered, “I know because I have seen and heard what I have seen and heard.”

  “What have you seen and heard?” Ida asked.

  Lucy set her spoon down and put her hands in her lap. “I think the details will cause you pain,” she said with a simple authority that achieved what she had hoped. Ida’s spirit dropped like a kite on a windless day. She stared into her bowl as though something other than carrot and potato would be found within it.

  “But surely,” she said, “they do not love each other.”

  She did not attempt to temper the importance of the question for her, and Lucy understood that it wasn’t that her friend didn’t believe Lucy’s explanation; it was that she had come to the same conclusions herself but was not willing to say them aloud. Lucy’s certain knowledge of what and who mattered most to her oldest friend hit her like the concussive waves of a blast.