The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  That night at a pub near Greenfield where Fisk put up for the night on his return to Boston, he would tell the story to the barkeep and remark that he didn’t really think Sampson intended to shoot him, but that he also thought the man so excited that he would not have known whether he had shot his weapon off or not.

  Julia, hearing the tale from Sampson that evening, would have agreed. “It pains me,” she said, watching her husband’s shoulders as he poked at the container of ice meant to cool their rooms. “It was not merely an inhumane act, but a senseless one. The harm that could come from having discharged a man who’d presented you with no affront seems clear enough. The good you were after seems—” She broke off, trying to still her heart. “Well,” she said finally. “The good seems not so clear.”

  Sampson hadn’t turned around, still bent over the ice.

  She went on. “I hear these stories one after another,” she said. “Does my pain mean so little to you?” For a moment the only sounds between them were the settlings of ice.

  When he finally did turn, his face was a child’s. “How can you ask me such a thing?” he said. “You hurt me. I am hurt.”

  She wanted to apologize, to take him in her arms, and to feel him take her in his, yet she could not quit feeling wronged, so all she said was, “Then I have company.” And they both stilled, neither able to comprehend her resolve.

  There were as many Congregationalists, Episcopalians, and Baptists as Methodists at the Sunday services following the Celestials’ arrival. The four churches stood a stone’s throw from each other on what was commonly referred to as Church Hill, the intersections of Church, Main, and Monument Square. Just a little farther afield were the three Roman Catholic churches, but their congregations didn’t have the history of mingling that the others did, preferring to keep to themselves.

  The more curious filled the Methodist church’s rough pews and stood three-deep in the back of the room, trying not to dirty their Sunday clothes against the walls.

  On that hot morning, as Charlie spoke of arriving in San Francisco as a newly orphaned boy of eleven and working as a miner and merchant before meeting “the esteemable Mr. Chase,” his audience had no way of knowing that sometimes he said he was thirteen when he arrived, that sometimes he was not a miner but a house servant, a storekeeper, or “a partner in one of the large merchant houses of San Francisco.” He did not mention the Chinese joss house that was nearly or successfully burned down four times in the years he lived in Weaverville, each time by a different group, all of whom shared the common desire of ridding the town of its infestation. He did not note that short of the mines, the only prospect for a boy was working odd jobs in the shops. Although he mentioned several of the hardships of crossing the Sierras to get to Virginia City, Nevada—eating bark, twigs, and boiled hide, encountering surprise snow too deep for horses and mules—he did not dwell on what he considered the unnecessary details of the slightly unsavory means a boy in his position had to use to make the crossing a successful one: the bribes paid, the discreet rumors spread, all the small ways he had put himself ahead of the group. Who could say where the line between admirable and selfish opportunism lay? This was America. To succeed here, he would need to act like an American.

  He also chose not to speak of the powerful miners’ union he had encountered in Nevada, because he had already discovered that it was never a good idea to complain to one group of whites about another. It was instead best to alter one’s story.

  On that June Sunday, he spoke slowly and clearly, and if his sentences were incorrectly constructed, they were delivered with a near-perfect understanding of his audience. He was humble without being obsequious, vulnerable without excessive need. The men in the room, including Sampson, who had arrived to the service late and left early, were impressed with the narrative’s adventure. The women with that as well as with the young man’s ability to maintain his dignity even while faced with life’s degradations. Most in the room would find it no hardship at all to agree with the correspondent from the Boston Daily Advertiser who would write of Charlie that he was as unassuming as the president.

  Looking back, Ida would recognize his speech as the moment when she began to understand what the advantages of his perceptive abilities might be, a quality made all the more appealing by the apparent popularity they enjoyed among the other women present. The murmurings of approval lapped through the room well before his speech was over. It wasn’t long after services were concluded that Ida and a small contingent of Baptist and Methodist women approached their respective reverends, suggesting in that way devout women have of making suggestions that it might be a good idea to instruct the new members of their community in the ways of a moral life. It seemed the Christian thing to do.

  Later that day, Alfred was of a different mind, laying his knife and fork alongside the cold meat and cornmeal Lucy had plated for Sunday dinner. The ladies of the town were still offering food and services as if she were a charity case, permanently disabled. The three of them were eating better than they had in years, though the situation entire made Alfred somewhat ashamed, as he knew his striking Crispin brothers were having their suppers from the Order’s treasury.

  “Ida,” he began, his head reeling at the prospect of disagreeing with her, “you know both me and Lucy appreciate all you’ve done for us, and I’m not in the habit of meddling in your business, but I can’t ride this particular wagon with you.”

  Ida snorted. “What difference is it to me where you ride?”

  Lucy placed her hands palm up in her lap and regarded them sadly.

  Alfred said, “They’ve got different habits, different religion. Education, ideas of government. All different. They’ve got no patriotic love of this land.”

  Ida smiled. “Whose words are those, then?”

  Alfred blushed. He did keep a notebook. It was easy to get mixed up at the meetings, and as a Southerner among Yankees, he felt it was important to keep things straight. Even the newspapers were filled with more speculation than resolve. The headlines swung from “The Asiatic Sons of Wax” to “The Crispins: Their Death Blow Predicted.” But no matter the headlines, they were all printing a version of the question the New York Tribune posed: What shall we do with John C. Chinaman?

  Why me? Alfred thought, not for the first time since his parents had died. And if he were to be more truthful than he was at this point in his life capable of being, he would have to confess that it was a sentiment he’d been nursing for as long as he could remember. In his childhood, it had taken nothing more than his mother asking him to fetch water or his father asking him to light the candles to set his jaw in petulance and persuade him that no one had known suffering equal to his own. Realizing the childishness of the sentiment did not drain it of its power.

  “You can’t civilize them,” he said now. “They’ve got no sentiments akin to ours. They’re ready to work for nothing and accustomed to living on less.”

  Lucy started to speak and then fell silent again. In the tenement, children were being excused from dinner tables and given leave to do what they would for the rest of the daylight hours. Boots and shoes scraped on stairs. Shouts and hollers sounded beyond their door, everyone aware that Monday morning would be there before they knew it.

  “Alfred Pell Robinson,” Ida said, “that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say, and you’ve said a few. It wasn’t so long ago that words like those were being spoken of those French Canadians you call brothers. ‘The Chinese of the Eastern States,’ wasn’t it?”

  He said nothing and just wondered grimly how it was that Ida knew what she knew.

  “Of all people,” she said, “the three of us need to do the right thing here. These Yankees are watching us. Use your head, Alfred. For once in your life.”

  He picked at a thumbnail. How was it that this short sixteen-year-old could take him like a surprise storm? How was it that her opinion had come to matter so much to him?

  “There’s nothing w
rong with my head,” he said. “Let ’em come single-handed is all I’m saying, like other emigrants. Let ’em come and take their chance. But they come banded together. That isn’t right.”

  Ida was laughing. “This is the argument of a Crispin brother?” she said.

  He tried to look unfazed, but she had already turned to Lucy as if he had vacated the room.

  “Next Sunday,” Ida said to her friend, “the church is giving out slates and primers. We’ll sing hymns. We’ll teach them letters and numbers from the Good Book. You’ve been sitting around this apartment long enough.”

  Alfred shook his head. “Aw, Ida, I don’t know about Lucy. The doctor said—”

  Neither of the girls looked at him. Lucy had discovered that if she stared long enough at her hands it was possible to feel as if they weren’t hers. She flipped them back and forth against the cotton of her skirt.

  “No one knows her better than I do,” Ida said, reaching out to tent her own hands over Lucy’s. Her best friend’s hands continued to flip beneath hers like moths. “Even you know that,” she said to Alfred, finally glancing his way.

  In that instant, he understood what her arrival meant in terms of what her family and the rest of his hometown thought of him. And he remembered a time, years ago on the Wilburns’ front porch, when Ida, three years his junior, had quizzed him on his multiplication facts, correcting his every wrong answer in her crisp, flat voice. She hadn’t laughed or teased him. She had just laid out their differences in plain view. Okay then, she seemed to be saying. Let’s get on from here. He had to admit that praise from her might have always carried more weight for him than kind words from other corners. It was always more powerful to be admired by critic than by friend.

  Charlie lingered in the last pew, alone finally save the reverend’s boy sweeping the center aisle. Sometimes, beneath a tree or in an open meadow, in the face of some extraordinary beauty, or sometimes in church, he could entice a stillness to enter his body, as if the divide between it and the world had been bridged. In church, the feeling was better. He considered the altar, the cross fashioned from what looked like the roof beams of a barn. The air was thick with a woolen heat. Outside, a small pool of boys waited. The reverend’s boy raised his broom in their direction, glanced at Charlie, and left to join them. Silence returned.

  The collar of his dress shirt was wilted. He could smell the damp worsted of his suit. Without moving his head, he took in the carved pulpit and the worn steps down to the wooden pews. He counted back to the row he himself occupied and, without turning, took in the open door, the sharp yellow sunlight beyond it. In a moment, he would stir himself to life, head back to the factory for the midday meal and a bowl of tea. There was laundry to do, and preparation for tomorrow’s training. One of the boys was turning fifteen, and Charlie had suggested to the cooks that it not go unnoticed. Many things to think about, many responsibilities to others, when he himself had only the most tenuous purchase on this strange new place.

  But, for now, he sat and looked without looking and waited. Sometimes, in church, the same bridge between earthly and heavenly could be forged, if he was patient enough. Here was terrestrial; here was celestial. And across that bridge always walked Third Brother, miracle and torment. Bringing water from the well, his bamboo pole bouncing like rubber as he walked. Spying on his older brother as Charlie unwound the red string holding the evenly braided hair of the neighbor girl. On the ship to Gold Mountain, sick with something Charlie didn’t know how to fix. His eyes wide, as Charlie readied his own bundle for the descent down the gangplank. “Isn’t he kin?” one of the seamen had inquired, indicating the barely breathing figure on the pallet.

  Charlie had shaken his head and repeated what he had been told to recite by those from his village who had already been to Gold Mountain and returned successful and safe: “I not know anything. I not have anything.”

  The sympathy strikes at the other shoe factories in town were all but over. The owners had offered a return to work at a ten percent reduction, and having been refused, had said they would employ new help. With five days’ successful work already under the Celestials’ belts, there was no need for the owners to say more, and so their terms were accepted. By the Thursday following Charlie’s speech, the only Crispins out of work were Sampson’s Crispins.

  Proprietor A. B. Wilson of the Wilson House had been told to expect perhaps two hundred workingmen at Thursday night’s meeting. He had doubled his waitstaff, though he had forbidden the sale of spirits, as he believed this particular group of men never to have been improved by drink. Even small beer was off the menu. He tried not to dwell on the loss of revenue his decision entailed.

  Despite having invented the Wheeler and Wilson Sewing Machine in 1849, despite having owned patents for the rotary hook shuttle and the four-motion feed, both devices used in modern machines, despite having built the imposing Wilson House in 1865 at the cost of $140,000, Mr. Wilson would die a poor man. In the words of one cousin speaking in confidence to another a week after the funeral: “Mr. Wilson was given great mechanical genius, but no more financiering genius than a child.” But he was in 1870 the owner of the most elaborate building in Berkshire County, perhaps even in Western Massachusetts. As Washington Gladden, leading American Congregational pastor, would write: “Eight large stores, a fine Public Hall, a Masonic Hall, a Manufacturers’ Club Room, and a Billiard Room are included within its walls; and besides its spacious offices, its ample dining-rooms, its large and well appointed kitchens, pantries, store-rooms, its excellent baths and its elegant parlors, it offers to guests a hundred airy and well-furnished chambers.” Modern conveniences appeared on every floor, including gas, steam heat, and the best sanitary arrangements, and a first-class livery was close at hand. It was without a rival.

  It was his philosophy to allow all members of the community to use the Wilson House’s public spaces, which is how on Tuesday last, the Crispins had held their secret meeting in one room while Sampson and the other manufacturers had held theirs shortly afterward in another. The evening had passed without incident, as he had arranged for the Crispins to use the rear entrance. No one had been the wiser, and Mr. Wilson had found himself enjoying the sight of one class of man streaming out of one door and another passing through the other.

  But now he was nervous, and he rarely grew nervous. It was only half past, the hall was already filled beyond capacity, and a glance out to the street indicated the arrival of even more. Chairs had been removed a quarter hour previous and still men were shoulder to shoulder.

  He found Samuel P. Cummings on the hotel’s front porch, greeting new arrivals. Cummings was of Danvers, Massachusetts, and not a French Canadian but of Irish/English descent. A shoemaker of twenty years’ standing and one of the executive committee of the National Labor Union, by the following year he would be appointed grand scribe of the Order’s International Grand Lodge, a position he would manage to hold on to for only a year.

  It was Cummings, along with Alexander Troup of Troy, a national labor advocate, and Emma Lane of Boston, the mistress of Massachusetts labor women, who had been advertised to address the multitude, and Mr. Wilson knew, as all good proprietors did, that the way to bring problems to their quickest and quietest resolution was to place them at the feet of the most influential person in the room.

  And so Wilson suggested to Cummings that the meeting be taken to open air, and the near four thousand workingmen from the county entire and as far afield as Troy didn’t disperse from the head of Main Street until after ten that night, listening first to Cummings and then to Troup (Miss Lane failed to appear) brood over the coolie question from a rustic stand hastily improvised by Mr. Wilson. Alfred, having arrived only five minutes early, could barely turn the corner of Pearl onto Main and wondered why he had bothered to come at all.

  Upstairs in their apartment at the Wilson House, Julia, Calvin, and Thankful faced each other warily around one of their favorite board games. A warning from the manufactur
er pointed out the dangers of introducing dice into the family home, so the three used a totem instead. Thankful was ahead, having landed on both “The Assiduous Youth” and “Benevolent Man.” Sampson had landed on “Dramatist,” and was forced to begin the game again. The playing board, all three agreed, was beautiful, each of the eighty-four squares arranged in a spiral traveling from “Infancy” to “Dotage,” and illustrated with images of vice or virtue. The rules were printed in an easily legible hand around the spiral. Julia, however, found herself oddly irked by the directions: “Whoever possesses Piety, Honesty, Temperance, Gratitude, Prudence, Truth, Chastity, Sincerity is entitled to Advance six numbers toward the Mansion of Happiness. Whoever gets into a Passion must be taken to the water and have a ducking to cool him. Whoever possesses Audacity, Cruelty, Immodesty, or Ingratitude must return to his former situation till his turn comes to spin again.”

  Following their remarks about the game, the conversation was halting, Julia and Calvin still smarting from Wednesday night’s disagreement, Thankful eyeing the both of them and thinking how difficult it was to have one’s life tethered in full to another couple. How much easier, she thought, if she were moving to the ebb and sway of just a husband, rather than a husband and wife. How much easier, yet at her age, she thought sadly, how unlikely.

  None of the three suggested ceasing, working as they were to keep the sounds of the meeting up the street at bay. The town’s Crispins and their sympathizers gave vent to their feelings as their side of the question was advocated, and through the open windows came loud and frequent cheers, the periodic stamping of feet, and the clapping of four thousand pairs of hands. It was the laughter that seemed to disturb Calvin most, and his fingers thrummed the felt of the game table, their game pieces jittering. His agitation was so apparent that Julia took pity on him and placed her hand over his, settling his fingers and the game.