The Celestials Page 17

  In addition, there was the distraction of several tragic accidents on a single day. Donald McKay had been struck by the engine of the early evening train. He died in his son’s house as the clock struck nine.

  While bathing in the Hoosac River, A. M. Parsons dove violently against a rock and received injuries that bettered the best efforts of both local physicians.

  Thomas Kearns in trying to lace a broken belt at the Glen Mill had the belt catch in his clothing and his arm was torn completely from his body leaving, witnesses said, the joint bare. He left a widow and six small children, and became the third death of the eleventh day of August 1873.

  For many of the townspeople, Julia and Sampson and several of the Chinese workers included, this particular accident returned from memory the one involving poor Miss Houle in the sewing room of Sampson’s own factory less than two years prior. While cleaning her machine, the lovely Miss Houle had her flowing hair caught by a shaft. In a moment it had been wound up and torn from her head together with a portion of her scalp, making a frightening and terribly painful wound. If not for the remarkable presence of mind of Charlie Sing, who had instantly caught and dragged her from the machine, she would undoubtedly have died. It was this that had kept the town’s minds away from the one question that eventually, once it was clear the poor girl would make an almost full recovery, pushed its way to the surface, bursting through like a grateful swimmer: What was the foreman doing on the women’s floor at all? What possible task could the Celestial, so early in his own education in shoe manufactury, have been pursuing in the stitching room?

  The direction of this cart had been furthered down its rattling path by sixteen-year-old Yu Lee, who claimed shortly after the accident that his foreman was courting the lovely Miss Houle. Perhaps because he was, in fact, enjoying a nascent flirtation with the young lady, Charlie made a vehement and self-righteous request for the immediate dismissal of the talkative worker. The young lady’s father, also a Sampson employee, made the same request. Their sense of justice mattered more to Sampson than the opinions of a boy whose name continued, throughout the dispute, to elude him, and so he had granted the request.

  It had been silly, the boys told one another after Yu Lee’s dismissal, to think that Gold Mountain would be different in all ways. The shores of both places were, after all, lapped by the same ocean. The circle in which they were told to stand was much the same, no matter how different the dirt into which it was drawn.

  And so it was no surprise when, two years later, in mid-June, Charlie and Sampson attempted to make short work of Yu Lee’s return to town to share glowing accounts of his success in a Springfield needle factory. Some said that Sampson, perhaps at his foreman’s request, had had the man driven from town. When the newspaper ran a small article about the return, Sampson gave the editor an unprompted interview in which he avoided all mention of the former employee but was quoted as saying, “The three years for which the workers engaged has just expired and with a very few exceptions they are reengaged, and we have yet to hear of any threatened strike among them, or of any desire on their part to leave their new home.”

  James T. Robinson, the Transcript’s editor, inquired of his son and partner as they fed the letterpress whether he had heard any speculation of a Celestial strike. Arthur Robinson assured his father that he had not, and the elder Mr. Robinson said that it was curious that Mr. Sampson felt it necessary to squelch hearsay that didn’t seem to exist.

  And when Arthur Robinson set the type concerning the three deaths in a single day, nearly two months after Sampson’s comment, which Arthur had so easily dismissed, he found himself surprised at his certainty that the accidents would prove to be harbingers of further unhappiness. This was not his usual line of thought. Even his father scoffed at him, though he would eventually regard him with newfound respect and wariness when, by week’s end, the Chinese would strike.

  Sampson’s determination arrived partnered with increased impatience. Never a forbearing man, he now seemed to be striding across previously unexplored expanses of restiveness. His request of his foreman had been humiliating enough. To have to now wait for something productive to come from that conversation seemed too much to be asked of any man.

  It seemed to Charlie that his employer stuck his head into the bottoming room once an hour just to catch Charlie’s eye and then raise his eyebrows in inquiry. To all of these intrusions, Charlie would respond with a slight shake of his head, his eyes closed to the other workers, who, he was sure, were taking note of these exchanges.

  If he wasn’t climbing the stairs to the bottoming room, Sampson was summoning Charlie to his office. Had nothing come of his inquiries of Mrs. Sampson? Whom had he interviewed thus far? What were his own hunches? A man’s gut, Sampson told him, was often the best barometer in such a situation.

  Charlie told him that his gut was undisturbed, and he’d never before been in such a situation. He must ask patience. He understood the difficulty of the circumstances. He understood Sampson’s unrest. He would, as he had promised, do what was in his power to see a resolution come to fruition. Surely Mr. Sampson understood the delicacy of the inquiries he had to make. The turning over of the soil had begun. Sampson must give him time for further unearthing. Sampson had his employee’s pledge that eventually, soon, he would discover all that Sampson wanted to know.

  Charlie’s gut had in fact been nothing but disturbed since he’d seen Julia. He had been unable to keep down even the mildest broth. Headaches accompanied those of the stomach. Even the dimmest of the boys had noted Charlie’s excessive licorice consumption. Some of the boys trusted him. Many did not. The increased contact with Sampson was not a help in this regard.

  But most importantly, he did not want what Sampson wanted. What Charlie wanted was to alter Sampson’s attitude toward the information he could already produce. This he could not see how to manage.

  As Sampson grew more restive, Julia found herself to be more and more an evergreen of extraordinary height and strength, with solid roots spreading in directions she had never imagined. The undeniable need of women to have child after child began to make a different kind of sense to her.

  She was not insensitive to the stares and whispers, and she was, of course, exhausted and worn by her husband’s daily pronouncements, but she felt all of it to be the insignificant circus acts of performers far below her. She and Alice stood amid the clouds, swaying in the breeze.

  So on Wednesday, when her husband returned home announcing he had made a decision, she steeled herself to argue against it. She needed help with the child, he said. He had found someone to give it.

  “Alice and I need nothing and no one save each other,” she replied. She believed what she said so completely that she missed the hurt and sadness that her comment had conjured across her husband’s face.

  He stuck his hands in his back pockets and set his weight onto his heels. “You must let me give you this,” he said quietly. “You have removed yourself from our life,” he said. “I am trying to find my way back to you.”

  He could not look at her while he spoke. He had been inexplicably pleased to discover the girl he had noted during that first Sunday school lesson was the same Lucy Robinson who had suffered the infamous attack. He had been even more pleased when she had agreed to be taken on as a housegirl. Lucy’s attack had cemented her in his mind as someone in need, so a request made of her did not further the humiliations he was suffering from all corners. When he had quoted the salary to her, her eyes had filled with surprised gratitude, and he was reminded in one stroke of how much he had been missing from his wife these past weeks. He was sure he could somehow explain this to Julia.

  He stood there looking at his wife’s large feet in her well-made boots, his sadness an iron band around his chest. When had they become a husband and wife who needed the explanations of polite strangers?

  She regarded him. What it cost him to speak to her this way did not escape her. She swallowed what she had been saying
to him in one way or another since her return, though she wanted nothing more than to tell him again that the one thing he could do for her was to welcome this baby as his own.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “It is someone you like,” he said. “Young Lucy Robinson.”

  She felt like a cornered cat. She did like Lucy Robinson. She had told her husband so upon her return from last Sunday’s Celestial class. “You are using my own feelings against me,” she said.

  He looked genuinely pained. He pulled his hands from his pockets and tugged at his hair as if to create more discomfort for himself. “I am never against you,” he said. “I am always and already with you in body and spirit.”

  She looked unconvinced. Given the nature of their arguments since her return, she knew just what a divide existed between their particular desires. When had this happened? Was the responsibility for it hers alone? Not so long ago, she would have said there was no couple more in harmony. Almost every one of their days had ended with the two of them in their bed, their bodies fitting to each other like good silver in its velvet-lined case. It had been the source of her pity for the situations of other women.

  Alice cried out from her bassinet at Julia’s feet, and Julia bent to retrieve her. “What do you imagine she will do for us?” she asked.

  Over the past days, Sampson had been struck each time by the way the baby in her arms turned the familiar shape of his wife into a foreign country, the contours of her borders faintly threatening. The resolve he had carried upon entering the room was slipping from his fingers like silt. “Whatever you require,” he said vaguely.

  Alice’s scent filled Julia’s nose and mouth. She could taste her at the back of her throat. “You know what I need,” she said.

  His eyes returned to the carpet she had felt an extravagance but he had purchased anyway. In one way or another, she had spent the time since her return asking him to turn his back on what the whole town knew, to carry on down this road on which she had embarked with not a word from her, his supposed partner on all roads. Walk with me, she was asking, as father of this child. And he had asked her in one way or another to request anything else of him, anything at all. “I cannot give you that,” he said now.

  Alice squirmed in Julia’s arms, demanding attention. Julia gave her a finger to grip. “Are you absolutely sure?” she asked, looking at her child’s round, healthy face. She was such an old mother. How would she give this child everything she needed? She felt suddenly depleted, a wool blanket wet and wrung out. All she wanted was for him to take her by the corners, shake her loose and spread her in the sun.

  “I have spent my whole adult life loving you,” she said.

  Not all of it, he thought. “And I you,” he said, still unable to meet her eyes.

  “I know what I am asking,” she said. “I know what an enormous and exceptional thing it is.” She took a step toward him and then stopped, worried that if they came within too close a proximity of each other, she would lose her commitment. “But I am not asking it of you alone. I am asking it of us. Together.”

  Her heart was a gyroscope of determination and fear. She warned him to take his time before responding, to understand what it would mean for him to refuse them this. “Do you really want to stand before your wife of twenty-four years and tell her that despite all the obvious difficulties there is something inside of you that cannot allow the two of us to have and enjoy the one thing that has been missing from our otherwise healthy and blessed life?”

  Sampson swayed on his stiff legs as if she had knocked him from side to side. She had conceived this child with another man. A Chinaman. He looked up quickly, regaining some of his familiar fortitude, and said, “Obvious difficulties? You are being either disingenuous or ignorant or both.”

  She went on as though he had said nothing. “I have always understood you to have sympathized with my grief and to have shared it as if it were your own. Was I so mistaken in my understandings?”

  Sampson held on to the back of the nearest chair. Whatever familiar strength he had mustered was gone. How had his life come to this point? For what was he being punished?

  “I want to do this for you,” he said, his voice like nothing either of them had previously heard. “But I cannot see how.” Despite everything, he wished to cross the room and take her hand in his, but if she were to refuse him, as he feared she would, he knew he could not stand it. Instead, he sank to the floor, his back against the chair leg, his knees pulled up.

  She had not seen him like this since he was a young man. Her heart was a bird searching for a way out of a windowless room. She set Alice back into the bassinet and made her way to him. She knelt, her skirt covering his feet, and took his hands in hers. He had been betrayed, yet her touch made him dizzy with gratitude.

  “If you knew,” she whispered slowly, “would that be enough? Could you then go on?”

  His head was a small spinning part, unclear of the larger machine’s functions.

  “If you had the knowledge, could you then deny it and continue with this life we thought we would not have the chance to inhabit?”

  She wondered if he could do this, but she felt herself to be in a deep pit, and this the rope lowered to her from above. And so she placed her hands on his chest and leaned in to him. “Could you do that for me?” she asked, laying an emphasis on her final two words.

  In the days since Charlie’s encounter with Julia at Sunday lessons, he had spent what little spare time he had making his daughter a pair of shoes. Traditional stitch-soled, black cloth shoes. For the necessary materials, he deconstructed a pair of his own cloth shoes, the ones his mother had made for him, that he had worn on the ship to California, that he still wore at his workbench in the factory. He worked at night, by lamp, in a narrow field up the hill from the factory. He carried the required tools in a shoulder sack, a glass jar filled with tea, and a low stool upon which to sit. To his curious fellow Celestials, he explained that he was going to find a place of more quiet and calm to study his Bible. It was not an explanation that did anything to endear him to his charges, but it was an explanation that they regarded as true.

  He used the palm of his hand to measure the white cotton soles. Between the soles and the black cotton uppers, he stitched a small ribbon of bright blue taken from the hem of one of his tunics. The sewing took longer than he expected, his missing thumb making him awkward with needle and thread, but he was happy to be working on a project such as this and felt no impatience with the time it was taking.

  When he was done, he placed one of the shoes on his open palm and looked at it this way and that. He turned it over and saw his own patterns of wear on its sole. He slipped three fingers into the shoe and felt the depressions and dips of his own stride. Yes, he thought in his small circle of light, his daughter would walk in these shoes.

  One of Lucy Robinson’s first tasks was to arrange a meeting between Charlie Sing and Mrs. Sampson. This was on a Friday in the middle of a workday.

  Lucy’s hands, busy folding Alice’s tiny necessities, stilled at her employer’s request, but her expression remained unreadable. After a moment, she said, “The best time might be after the factory is down for the evening.”

  Later, Julia would chastise herself for making this request of Lucy so quickly. She would determine that if she had really cared for the girl, she would not have given her access to a matter so private. But at the time, Julia had very few wagons coursing about her mind except those containing her own needs, and so she experienced only thankfulness at having two heads rather than one to apply to the task at hand.

  And Lucy’s was a particularly efficient head. It was as if she had been asked to orchestrate the discreet and delicate every day of her young life. The Widow Allen’s carriage barn, she informed Julia, had not been used in years and lay at the outermost edge of the widow’s vast property in the dip of a high hill. One could approach it from field rather than road. She had somehow managed to get word to Charlie while c
alling just the right attention to herself by stopping in to Sampson’s office to say that she was there to deliver a primer to the foreman for one of the new boys and she had thought Mr. Sampson might like to hear that his wife and child were passing a lovely, undisturbed morning.

  Sampson had not asked for such reports, but was pleased enough at both the message and the messenger that he made no further inquiries.

  She did indeed pass a primer to Charlie, in such a way that he was sure to see the small corner of Julia’s stationery revealing itself from the leaves of the book. She attempted to quiet his alarm with a kind smile.

  It seemed to her, as she returned to the Wilson House, that she was not of this world but gliding through it, touching its living inhabitants here and there, leaving warmth in her wake. It was a pleasure to think about herself in this unfamiliar way for a while, and it was the first time she had felt her alien nature as blessing rather than burden, and she resolved to speak to Alfred about staying in North Adams, at least for the time being.

  Fannie Burlingame waited for a time when she knew there was no danger of finding Sampson at home to call on Julia. It was an awkward conversation for both women, but Fannie soldiered on, sure in her belief that often the most virtuous ends require the most difficult means.

  Politely perched in two stiff chairs in the front room, the women faced each other, Alice in her basket on the floor between them making her infant sounds.

  “I am not,” Fannie reassured for the second time, “suggesting that any relationship at all is something of which to disapprove.”

  Julia nodded, refraining from saying that she wouldn’t think that’s what her dear cousin would be suggesting, given her own relationship with her own Celestial.

  Fannie stood, suddenly impatient. “Please, Julia,” she said. “You are married. To my cousin.” She broke off as if dismayed at having to make things even this overt. “You cannot have relations with one of these boys.”