The Celestials Page 8

  The mild panic of which the women had taken note had to do with the fact of Charlie’s accident the previous day. Without debate was that Charlie’s right thumb had been crushed in the cam of a pegging machine. He was currently laid up in a hastily thrown-together sickroom off the kitchen. Beyond that, there was some disagreement. Either the thumb had been crushed by the sudden starting of power by a green hand whom Charlie was instructing or Charlie had undertaken to manage one of the pegging machines, the most difficult and terrible of all the apparatus used in shoemaking, before he was ready for such an enterprise. In both versions, his thumb had hung by just a few threads, and a surgeon had been called and an amputation performed. If lockjaw did not follow, he would be able to resume work in a matter of a few weeks.

  Ida had not realized at first that the man they spoke of was the same whose hand she had taken note of two Sundays before as he marched from train to factory. Once she did make this connection, she felt surprisingly sorrier about the situation, her sympathy compounded by her sense that it wasn’t only the victim who had lost something when that pleasing hand was maimed.

  The question for now was how to manage without their only interpreter. Perhaps they should desist for today and return when he was feeling more well?

  Lucy spoke before realizing she was going to do so. She said, “But surely those doing the good work of God have faced problems larger than this. Not only can we manage quite well, I think, but we are obliged to see that we do.”

  The teachers and clergy were quick to agree, and she marked the instance as the moment when she realized that her attack had left her with more authority than she’d ever previously enjoyed.

  She gathered a slate, a primer, and a Bible from the supplies laid out by the clergymen, and Sampson found himself impressed with her poise. He noted the unusual scarf worn high on her neck and tucked into her collar, and wondered at her name, which he wouldn’t learn until several years later when he would seek out her identity from George Chase, who would utter the name quietly, reminding his employer of the Pearl Street attack.

  Even on this first day, it didn’t take long for the teachers and students to contribute to the growing noise of the venture. One or two boys per teacher, the earnestness of the whole group amounting almost to enthusiasm. Even Julia, sharing a table with Thankful and two boys, both aged seventeen, both, astonishingly enough, named Ah Ley, found herself carried away with the task at hand. In this equation, she held all the abilities. Lack and need sat securely on their side of the table. She pointed vigorously at the dimly burning candle before them. “Candle,” she announced. “Candle.” She wrote it on the slate between them and tapped it with her finger. Then she held the candle up with enough enthusiasm to cause one of the boys to startle. “What is it?” she demanded.

  It took him a moment to comprehend. He would prove to be a trifle duller than Thankful’s boy. He sat gazing with bovine patience upon the object, but then he ventured his own rendition of the word. She had him write his version beneath hers on the slate. He was rewarded with her genuine and earnest praise, punctuated, to her surprise, by her placing a hand on his shoulder.

  Thankful raised her eyebrows at her sister-in-law, and Julia blushed, dropping her hand to her lap. The boy’s shoulder had been small and round, softer than she would’ve guessed, and an image of cupping her hand beneath an infant’s head came unhappily to her mind.

  “These Americans,” the boy would say to Charlie later that night, “they are always touching us.”

  “Try not to reveal your revulsion,” Charlie would advise.

  Ida and Lucy shared the table adjacent to the Sampson women and worked together to sketch and then recite the names of various simple objects.

  “Cat,” Lucy said, and Ida went to work at the tricky drawing of chalk on slate.

  Lucy peered at the finished product. “That is not a breed I know,” she said. “Is it missing a leg?”

  The girls commenced with a laughter that left their pupils smiling politely at these most incomprehensible of instructors. But as the months passed, the attachment between teacher and student would become noteworthy, and it wouldn’t be long before a Celestial would refuse to attend his lessons unless assured his teacher would be present.

  Even so, the town’s mildly patronizing stance toward this educational endeavor would keep anyone from even considering the charge struck between seventy-five young men of one race and fifty young women of another. For although the teachers were young and old, wealthy and not, the majority of the group were the young ladies of the village, or, as they would appear in the press, “the beautiful, refined, and intellectual” young ladies. The communal work of teaching and learning, the shared space it required, was unprecedented for both American ladies and Celestial boys, and the unprecedented is almost always the certain spark to larger flame.

  As if aware of this, during that first lesson, even under the influence of the morphine, Charlie fretted. From his sickroom, he strained to distinguish one line of conversation from another. He held his good hand to his head, the failings of his group lined like soldiers across the field of his mind. Quang Chung had an inability to keep quiet. Chim Kow had proven incapable of holding eye contact. Ley My had a habit of circling the outer edge of his lips with his tongue over and over, around and around.

  Charlie knew that as a rule the Americans whose eyes came into focus as they landed on you were the ones toward whom the most caution should be displayed. He had been filled with skepticism about Sampson. It had taken much persuading by the company’s other officers to convince him that the American was interested only in what he said he was interested in: fair work for fair pay. But Charlie found the man both appealing and mystifying in equal parts. How strange that the photo he had arranged of the Chinese on their arrival was displayed outside his office. How strange that he ended each day with an exchange with Charlie, inquiring after not the boys’ work, but their welfare. Yet Charlie liked the swing of the man’s gait as he patrolled the factory. He liked the midafternoon walk to the river that the man seemed to take every day. He liked that Sampson was a man in a three-piece suit throwing rocks like a boy.

  But what could he expect from these Americans? And what did he want from them: to be one of them or to be taken care of by them?

  His injured hand was propped atop an excess of pillows, as per the surgeon’s instructions. The doctor had been blunt about the necessity of the amputation. Charlie was lucky, he had said. It was only a thumb. The tunnel workers were losing much more than that.

  Charlie did not in general engage in fantasy, but lying there listening to the swell and break of the hubbub in the other room, he believed that if he were to unwrap those bandages, he would reveal his thumb, whole and intact.

  The second week of Sunday school, Sampson asked Julia to check on his foreman during lessons. She protested that she was not a doctor, had no experience in the loss of limbs, had not even met the foreman, but Sampson ushered her out the apartment door telling her to stop being so silly. Introduce herself. Inquire as to the man’s health. If he could not trust her opinion, whose could he trust?

  Julia ventured into the sickroom during a break in the lessons. “Hello,” she said. Charlie looked like a man who had spent the last week bedridden. Rumpled and limp as well-used sheets. She recognized the state all too easily. His mouth, she knew, would be sour and dry, his bones filled with ache. Yet his face was calm and smooth, his good hand quiet against the sheets. “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked.

  Charlie was sitting up with his back against the wall, his feet crossed at the ankles. His bandaged hand was resting on a pillow in an eternal salutation. He regarded her. “Who are you?” he asked.

  I am Mrs. Sampson, she thought, but did not say. Perhaps because she felt her life to be one of placation and compromise and perhaps because she wished, just for once, to get away with something brisk and startling if only to herself, she held out her hand and said, “I am Julia.” A
nd so, a secret, at least for the moment.

  His eyes went from her hand to his own bandaged one and back again. He settled for a bow of his head. She reached over and took his left, healthy hand into a brief, firm shake, though because she’d taken him by surprise, and because his hand was at an awkward angle, the gesture was one of girlfriends rather than first-time acquaintances. He reacted the way he always reacted to surprise—as if inside his body the tide was on its way out.

  “Oh,” she said, taking note of how his face had gone still and away from her. “Apologies.”

  He barely knew this woman and she was already apologizing. Strange Americans with their strange ways.

  It was his strangeness that would always allow the most uncharacteristic of behaviors from her. The sense she had that he wasn’t quite of this world allowed her interactions with him to be unfettered by this world’s rules. How else to account for her brazenness even on this, their first meeting?

  Charlie closed his eyes. Perhaps when he opened them, she would be gone.

  “Are you worn out?” she asked. “Being bedridden is harder work than it appears.”

  Perhaps it was his strangeness that also guaranteed her lifelong misreadings. She was not a stupid woman. If anything, she enjoyed healthier observational powers than most. About him she noted no less than usual, perhaps even more, but his foreignness meant that what she made of those observations was almost always determined by her own feelings and, therefore, almost always faulty in some crucial way.

  “No,” he said, opening his eyes.

  She stood there.

  “You want to read, then read,” he said, without rudeness.

  “Do you want me to?” she asked.

  “I want nothing from you,” he said. He had heard Sampson use that phrase the previous week when firing a white man and had filed it away. He depended, in terms of his use of the English language, on imitation. It made the imitated feel flattered and as though interacting with one of his own. Charlie would have been most proud to know that there would come a point in his life when his command of the language would no longer prompt surprise.

  “Then I won’t read,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, enjoying the roll of American slang in his Middle Kingdom mouth.

  She held his eyes with her own. Later, they would tease each other about which of them had looked away first.

  That second Sunday school session ended with what would become a tradition: the exchange of song.

  Julia and Ida, Baptist church acquaintances, led the instructors in “There Is a Happy Land,” “God Bless Our Native Land,” and a few other simple songs of that sort and of equal relevance. Sampson, having arrived in time for the end of lessons, beamed from the room’s back corner: once again, something he had put his hand to had come to immediate success. He joined the singers with his own rich baritone, happy to share his good mood.

  Ida had taken Lucy by the hand to join the instructors at the room’s front, but Lucy had not been able to bring herself to sing, and even being up there beneath the gaze of so many had caused her stomach to seize, and she was obliged to drop Ida’s hand and make her way to a side table, where she sank thankfully to the worn wooden bench.

  Ida tried not to see her friend’s retreat as cowardice. She had found herself wrestling with an impatience over Lucy’s timidity. She wanted her old Lucy back, the girlfriend of creek swims in their petticoats and horseback rides on green-broke geldings their fathers had forbidden, skirts torn on wire fences, and books and slates buried in secret caves or forgotten in the long grass of the Robinsons’ backyard. Happy as she was to have those late-night conversations lying beside each other in Lucy’s narrow bed, she wanted their old conversations once again, the future plans of silly girls, all of them involving never being separated, not by death or husband.

  The instructors held the last note and there was silence as the bemused Celestials regarded them. From his sickbed, Charlie called out in Chinese, and the boys immediately commenced a round of hearty applause and then gathered to give a song of their own.

  Back in their houses for Sunday dinner, the American instructors would tell their loved ones that the Asian air had been simple, monosyllables of all kinds mixed together in what was, they might venture to say, a rather lugubrious rhythm. The words, of course, made no sense at all, but neither, they would hasten to add, did much of the popular singing of their own language. To a household, all would conclude that the Celestials’ song had indeed been peculiar, though not unpleasing.

  Lucy, meanwhile, felt as if she might faint or throw up. She stared at the line where wall met floor the way one struck by seasickness stares at the smallest scrap of distant land. She could feel Ida’s impatience like heat from a stove and it saddened her. One of her pupils, whose name she was ashamed to realize she could not recall, quit his singing and slid next to her on the bench and took her hand. She flinched, but he held it in a way that seemed drained of intimacy. He pointed to her head and stomach and then applied firm pressure to a spot on the inside of her wrist.

  Her dizzy head righted itself; her stomach ceased its wavering. When she removed her eyes from the floor’s seam, testing her newfound health, they fell on Ida’s face, which wore an expression Lucy recognized easily from their childhood. It said: You are making me sad, but Lucy was so astonished to have the touch of a male bring solace rather than suffering that she could not rouse herself to remove her hand from the boy’s, whose name she still could not remember, but against whose thumb her pulse beat like a small machine.

  Chapter Six

  The newspapers of Wednesday, June 29, reported that California produced three million pounds of quicksilver annually; St. Louis was to have a theological seminary for the colored; an old lady in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, had seventy pet cats; American girls were flirting too much in Paris; Thomas Keating, on a charge of second drunk, was fined seven dollars and costs; a lad named James W. Gray was arrested for being a stubborn and disobedient child; and a Crispin rally was held in Tremont Temple in Boston. That same day, several of the state’s manufacturers also convened in that City of Notions.

  By chance, Sampson took an early supper a mere two park benches away from Alfred, both of them having chosen the opportunity to get some air and time to themselves. They found the company of large groups unmanageable after extended periods. The feeling was exaggerated by the excesses of that particular city, which seemed somehow less American than others and left both men feeling anxious and grim, though in different ways and for different reasons.

  Sampson had been to New York on but a few occasions and had found that city suggestive of everything to do with the future. He would have expected to feel a philosophical kinship with a city such as that, but had not. He had felt instead as if elbowed aside by some high-ranking officer of civilization, as if being reminded that in this march to further conquests he was merely a foot soldier.

  In Boston, on the other hand, he felt not only the possibility of commerce but also the importance of his particular place in that endeavor. After all, his ancestor Myles Standish had been the first white man to land on the shore of what would be Boston Harbor. Or, at least, that was what was said. It was also said of Standish that he was broad in the shoulders, deep chested, with muscles and sinews of iron and had landed upon the peninsula partly to see the country, partly to make peace with the Indians, and partly to procure their truck. Apparently, his party had returned home with a good report of the place and a considerable quantity of beaver.

  How could someone such as Sampson not like a city that would triple its physical size through land reclamation by filling in marshes, mudflats, and gaps between wharves along the waterfront? The city’s irregular outline evoking its status as the foster child of rivers, creeks, bays, and inlets, its well-paved and long streets of handsome shops and fine blocks of commercial offices, all conspired to make him feel his rightful place was there, under the State House’s high gilded dome, eating his dinne
r on a bench in the Common.

  It was only the two hundred and fifty thousand citizens who disturbed these otherwise happy thoughts. Though the populace thronging the streets was well dressed, there were still far too many of them. Though the public vehicles were well appointed, they seemed to Sampson, and to Alfred, far inferior to a well-made carriage pulled by a single good horse. The men had, after all, both been farmers in what seemed to them now a long-ago and different life. For Alfred, though, Boston inspired what New York inspired in Sampson: a sense that the city and its populace entire were regarding him the way one might a stray cat that you fed on the front porch and that now stands at your door, crying for ingress. This was, of course, a familiar way for Alfred to feel. Fifteen years later, on his only trip to New York City, he would prefer the invisibility in which that city cloaked him, and would take Ida’s hand, confident that no one they passed would take note or frown at the sight of one man cradling the hand of another’s wife. And when she removed it, kindness flooding her eyes, he would remain equally confident that none passing them by had taken note of his humiliation.

  Alfred turned his face to the early evening sun and chewed his apple and cheese with his eyes closed. Sampson sliced a wedge from the smoked sausage he’d brought from home with the buck knife he’d carried in his front pocket since he was a boy. Why pay city prices for country food? Two small pickles rested on the bench next to him, their juices seeping quietly through his cotton handkerchief.

  He was not proud of the day’s work, but pleased at its result. The leather dealers and boot and shoe jobbers had combined in the manufacturers’ movement, and the arrangement had been made that the leather dealers would sell to the cooperative manufacturers only for cash down, and the jobbers and wholesale dealers would unite in refusing to buy their goods when made.