The Celestials

  Praise for The Celestials

  “What a riveting, wonderfully intelligent novel! Karen Shepard’s characters vibrate with desire and disappointment, so obdurately individual that a whole world springs to life around them and the past becomes completely present.”

  —ANDREA BARRETT, author of Ship Fever and The Air We Breathe

  “Karen Shepard has created a novel so much of its time and place, the 1870s, New England, and yet so utterly relevant to our complex century and the wider world. Her vivid characters share our longings and yet can act only within the framework of their mores and politics. Or can they? This eloquent and suspenseful narrative deepens our understanding of love, loyalty, and the possibilities of transformation. A mesmerizing novel.”

  —MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

  “Shepard mines history for its facts and textures, its speech patterns and states of mind, its simmering prejudices and life-altering transgressions, and finds all that transcends history to enter the heart and lodge there forever. The Celestials works with the same primal heat as The Scarlet Letter and the same sympathetic scope as The Poisonwood Bible, and enchants and edifies in equal measure.”

  —JOSHUA FERRIS, author of The Unnamed

  “A profound passion for a particular place at a particular time clearly inspired Karen Shepard’s gorgeously crafted novel The Celestials. I have not read anything quite like this book before, though the story it tells—of good yet fallible people caught in the unforgiving riptide of history—is one we need to be told again and again. I love the way Shepard tells it with a cool, deliciously cinematic eye . . . yet a warm and generous heart. Her characters will haunt me for some time to come.”

  —JULIA GLASS, author of Three Junes and The Widower’s Tale

  The

  Celestials

  The

  Celestials

  a novel by Karen Shepard

  Tin House Books

  Portland, Oregon & Brooklyn, New York

  Copyright © 2013 Karen Shepard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shepard, Karen.

  The Celestials : a novel / by Karen Shepard. — First U.S. edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-935639-56-5 (ebook)

  1. Labor unions—Massachusetts—Fiction. 2. Chinese—Massachusetts—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology—Fiction. 4. North Adams (Mass.)—Fiction. 5. Massachusetts—History—19th century—Fiction. 6. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.H39388C45 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2012050808

  First U.S. edition 2013

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  Interior photo credits: Anthony W. Lee and Private Collection

  www.tinhouse.com

  For my parents, Sidney Glazier and Tang Yungmei

  Contents

  1870

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  1873

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  27 September 1893

  Chapter Eighteen

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1870

  Chapter One

  In the blue of early morning, hours before the arrival of the Chinese boys, Julia Sampson felt her sleeping husband flush with heat and knew that he would stir. She left his body enough space and stroked his arm and chest. Sometimes this worked to cool him.

  His head rocked against his pillow and he reached to swipe at his brow.

  “Forgive me,” he said thickly, taking her hand and holding it against his chest.

  “For what?” she whispered, but he was still asleep.

  When he woke, she would ask what was wrong. And he would answer that he didn’t know.

  Outside their bedroom window, dawn was the mildest suggestion. She felt as she always did at that hour. Their world was a world of two; whatever comfort and aid were to be found were to be found in each other. She wished once again for children, and then she shook her head, tucking herself against her husband so that when he did wake, he would wake to her.

  Most of the Chinese strikebreakers had their foreheads pressed to the windows of the train’s immigrant cars, their thirteen-day journey nearing an end. The childlike anticipation with which they had set out had been replaced by an anxiety from which all of them suffered and worked to restrain.

  The roar of the fire-wheeled vehicle was relentless and deafening. The grit and grime were impossible to keep from their skin and clothes. The iron strips upon which the train shook and rattled, more than a few of them had agreed, looked like the character gong.

  Some studied their phrase books: He cheated me out of my wages. They were lying in ambush. He tried to kill me by assassination.

  Others tried again to develop a liking for coffee. The taste was like the odor of sheep. Several had refused the stew offered at the last station stop, their stomachs half starved from their continued fear of eating any of the provisions. How could they trust anything from the hands of these foreigners with the complexion of the shark’s belly, whose men and women sat across from each other, their shoes touching?

  One of them had seen a man pick up a thick book, brush it against his lips, and then hold it quietly in his lap.

  A woman at the first stop had touched her hand to her mouth by way of greeting another descending from the train.

  Most of them had been only days off the ship before signing on for this adventure to the east of this most unusual country. A mix of disoriented and weary, they were, however, grateful to have procured work so quickly. Those who had been in the country longer had spent their days well within the confines of San Francisco’s Chinatown, some of them never hearing any language but their own.

  Many of them believed that Americans walked in the formation of geese.

  This continent, they knew, was divided into two lands: the northern one in the shape of a flying fish, the southern like the thigh of a man wearing a billowing trouser.

  And now, headed all the way across this strange land, how would they fare? What would become of them?

  With the train’s deceleration, more of them crowded against the windows. What can you see?, they asked repeatedly, though no answers were offered. Their breath smoked the glass, and one of them reached up to wipe it clean with the wide sleeve of his blue tunic.

  Their designated foreman remained in his seat, dating a new page in his journal: 6th month, 13th day. He wrote in his labored English, Bright and sunny; no cloud or rain.

  Had the train’s route enabled a more elevated view of the town, the Celestials would have seen that North Adams had a peculiarly happy and peaceful look, as if a tea set were balanced in the hollow of God’s large hand. Factories, hotels, and homes shared the roads and riverbanks with trees and hills, wildlife and rock. Great pines grew heavenw
ard, the lowest branches as high as a high building. Even the long arms of a pair of the largest of men could not have met around the broad trunks. In spite of stubborn soil and the meddlesome disposition of the Hoosac River, East Hoosuck, later to be North Adams, had been laid out seven miles long from north to south and five miles broad from east to west. It was in shape a parallelogram, the only township in the county of regular geometric form.

  To the north stood the Green Mountains of Vermont. To the east rose the Hoosac Range; to the west, the Taconic Range. Early settlers claimed it impossible to see the entire town from any one point of observation.

  The southern and northern branches of the Hoosac River converged in the center of town; clear, rapid springs descending apace into deep, shady pools with gravelly beds. The trout populated them as plentifully as the workers occupied the tenement housing behind the mills. The first farmers, at laying eyes on this land, had said that the glorious beauty of a Berkshire summer and autumn would fill neither the granary nor the purse. But by 1870, farms cleared of trees and rocks and located near one of the many living streams shared borders with the thick and formidable forests, shelter to skunk, bear, and bobcat; moose, deer, and turkey; Canadian lynx, porcupine, and fox; loon, heron, black duck, and even, on occasion, the unduly adventurous seagull.

  Mosquitoes and flies wandered in and out of M. S. Southwick’s high-class millinery goods on the corner of Main and Ashland. Deerflies pestered the horses under the care of E. Vadnais, blacksmith at 66 Center Street. Bulb mites molested the gardens of Miss Fannie Burlingame on the corner of Summer and the high end of Church. Carpenter ants and wood-boring bees wreaked their havoc on porches of pine, alder, and ash. On the front pages of the newspaper, items concerning the best fertilizer for corn shared space with announcements of a village of vigor and enterprise where capital was not suffered to lie idle in the vaults of banks but was constantly in motion.

  The hills were covered with greenwood of yellow birch, maple, and hemlock and crisscrossed with old roads and Indian paths and well watered with mountain brooks often breaking into waterfalls of unexpected charm. Rocks dripped with maidenhair and moss. There were orchids in the swamps. Limestone cobbles grew gardens of walking fern and purple cliff brake.

  The town tended to vote Republican in both state and national elections, and was devoted in equal parts to the temperance movement and the nostalgia of a simpler past. The temperature had been known to change forty-four degrees in twenty-four hours. There was no month of the year that was not sometimes very pleasant and sometimes its disagreeable opposite. Floods and fires, illness and death were accepted as pages in God’s large book, but so were the clouds settling on the summits and ridges of Mount Greylock, the tallest in the state, and the sharp yellow-greens of the trees’ spring leaves, and the ash-purple blanket laid over the hills at twilight. On this thirteenth day of June, God’s creative hand was renewing His original efforts to adorn the world with richness and splendor; the pastures were clothed with flocks, the valleys covered with fledgling corn, and the worms tunneled into the soft earth of early summer. All was wilderness and its contrary mate, and in the distance, the first whistle of the 4:15 from Troy vibrated rapidly against the thousands of eardrums attending to it.

  There were an equal number of citizens not attending to the train’s arrival, including Mr. Calvin T. Sampson’s wife.

  Julia watched her husband that morning as he readied to quit their well-appointed rooms on the highest floor of the eastern tower of the Wilson House.

  He had mentioned history, as in history being made. She had not asked for clarification, as she knew he would offer it bidden or not, and he had been making this same point in one way or another for the last several weeks since his plan had commenced. He was in the prime of his life, the pioneer shoe manufacturer in North Adams. She handed him his hat and waited.

  “Practically to a one, our nation’s newspapers have sent representation to witness this event,” he said. “These Celestials will transform American manufacture as we know it, and in their hearts those union hooligans know they are finished.” He twisted the brim of his hat and she relieved his hands of it, placing it upon his head. “I did that,” he said simply.

  “So you did,” she said with some careful pride.

  He opened the apartment’s door and turned again to face her. “You might reconsider your decision not to come,” he said quietly.

  She smiled and told him that perhaps she would, though she knew she would not. That he would now be even further disappointed when she did not make an appearance was a price she was willing to pay.

  By June of that year, Julia Hayden Sampson was forty-three years old and had lost thirteen pregnancies. She did not think of herself as having experienced a common suffering. Each loss had been hers alone. She did not want to belong to that particular and unhappy community of women, and so she imagined herself an unpopulated island to which there was no bridge. A month prior, her woman’s time had not arrived, and she had passed the weeks since occupying that terrible space constructed of the intricate mix of hope and dread.

  It did not occur to her that in such a case even those she held dearest could not discover her. She did know that her husband was not a man to fail: since his boyhood, he had accomplished whatever he undertook, showing a power to execute as well as a mind to plan, together with much tenacity of purpose. The Asiatic boys heading their way were fresh proof of that. So the responsibility of the dark cloud over this life he’d built for the two of them was hers and hers alone. And for that reason, she had shared nothing of her latest anguish, planning to surprise him with good news, and dreading having to confess yet again to her utter failures as a woman and a wife. She would not be going to the factory today. Who knew what damage the atmosphere of a place like that could do? If this was history her husband was making, it was history that was at that moment of no concern to her.

  Instead, she spent the next several hours before her dressing glass stripped to her skin, interrogating her body. Even when goose bumps raised themselves across her form, she did not stop. Surely, she thought, God would not do this to her again.

  In 1870, the population in these United States was well over thirty-eight million. Ulysses S. Grant was president. The Civil War had been over since a bright Sunday afternoon five Aprils prior. The previous spring, Chinese and Irish crews had laid the last two rails joined with a tie of polished California laurel, and the final stake had been driven in the Transcontinental Railroad. Of 63,291 women in San Francisco, 1,452 were Chinese prostitutes. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on the first Thursday of February. New York was the largest city in the country, and North Adams the largest manufacturing center in the Berkshires, boasting thirty-eight factories and two hundred cotton mills. Or, in the words of a local historian, North Adams was the smartest village in the smartest nation in all creation: the concentrated essential oil of Yankeedom. Yet one-third of the town’s inhabitants were foreigners—largely Irish, French Canadian, and Welsh—at work in the textile mills and tanneries, the paper factories, and on the formidable Hoosac Tunnel, which had been commenced in 1851 and which wouldn’t host regular service until 1876, at a total cost of $20,241,842.31 and 195 lives.

  Five languages were preached from the town’s pulpits. And now another headed toward town: Cantonese, the language of the seventy-five Chinese male workers, most of whom had barely attained their majority, on the late train from Troy, and Omaha before that, and all the way back to their start, thirteen days prior, in Oakland, California.

  The Celestials were coming. Denizens of a country so foreign that in America it was known as the Celestial Empire, inhabited by the alien and strange. The Celestials were coming. Two thousand citizens of North Adams awaited their arrival as they would the quiet but firm interruption of an opinionated dinner guest.

  It was an unusually mild afternoon, a breeze from the north swaying the elms on the hill as nineteen-year-old Alfred Robinson worried the rock he had slippe
d into his pocket.

  His fellow Crispins were three hundred strong on the south end of the passenger platform. They had been waiting for hours. The Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was a force to be reckoned with, the largest union in the country, forty thousand members in Massachusetts alone. And on this day they were joined by their brothers from five other local shoe factories, all staging sympathy strikes, refusing, among other things, to consent to a reduction from ten dollars a case to nine during the dull season. If Mr. Sampson had refused to recognize their strength so far, he wouldn’t be able to ignore it for long.

  On that thirteenth of June, Calvin T. Sampson was forty-three years old, married for just over twenty-one years to Julia Hayden Sampson, whom in her childlessness he conceived of as fragile, and his factory was one of the largest in Massachusetts. He liked to say that from his establishment, or through his encouragement, every shoe factory operating in town had its origin. One of the leading citizens in enterprise and public spirit, he had plenty of money and knew how to make more and, as one New York paper put it, “in the democratic acceptation of the term, was a true and practical Christian, and a genuine, untarnished brick.”

  From the station at Troy, Sampson’s superintendent, George W. Chase, who had arranged the Celestials’ contract and traveled with them from California, wired his employer: Just through Troy.

  Sampson stuffed six pistols into the pockets of his suit trousers and greatcoat, checked on the small army of constables he’d hired to meet the train, and took a carriage to Eagle Bridge, where he would climb aboard and ride with his new workers into North Adams.

  He had blue eyes that Julia favored, a beard and a moustache already tinged with gray about which she was ambivalent, and stood five feet eight inches in his bare feet. He was the youngest son of Calvin Sampson and Polly Millard Sampson (dead at that point for twenty-four and sixteen years, respectively) and, with his eldest sister, Thankful, and nearest brother, Chester, was one of the three surviving children of the six his mother had been able to bring to term. For the last several years, Thankful had resided with Julia and Sampson, and she and Sampson had often spoken of how, while their mother remained alive, they had felt as if their job was to distract her from the three small ghosts always graying the room. Sampson had told his wife more than once that this experience gave him some understanding of her own losses. Her expression had disabused him of his certainty. And truth be told, he understood that the sadness that dogged her after each and every loss was a long, dark hallway to which he had no access. After the last pregnancy, he had reassured her that though he could not enter this corridor of her grief, he would be at its end awaiting her return. Her sobs had resumed and he had felt, as he often did when speaking of such things, that he had been asked to bottom a shoe with a hammer made of paper. He did not know what to do with his own sadness, and the one person he might’ve asked for aid in this regard was not available to him, and so he had determined simply to banish his distress and turn his attentions to hers.