The Celestials

by Karen Shepard

  Perhaps its most impressive feature, besides its $85,000 cost to subscribers, was its massiveness. It boasted not one but two towers, both of which competed in size with the main part of the edifice, which seemed to loom over the street like a house cat over a fishbowl. The workmen were absent on Sundays, and the signs on all three entrances read: NO ONE MUST ENTER, so Charlie found himself alone.

  He sat gingerly on one of the new seats of the horseshoe gallery at the western end and knew immediately that whatever peace he had hoped to claim would not be found in this place. The seats were chestnut trimmed with black walnut, much more elaborate than the oak benches in the old church.

  He found the interior plan more than vaguely discomforting, rooms branching off halls in ways that were impossible to track. Studies and libraries tucked under double stairways. Pocket doors disappearing into walls. The whole thing struck him as more animal’s den than sacred space. So why had he sought solace here?

  “There you are, my Celestial,” a voice from behind him said.

  His heart lurched at Julia’s pet phrase.

  It was Sampson. “I hope you don’t mind my having hunted you down,” he said, and Charlie understood that his employer’s attentions were returned to him. He gestured to the pew, and Sampson removed his hat to sit.

  They regarded the choir gallery.

  “Did you know the organ is to be at a cost of $4,500?” Sampson asked.

  Charlie shook his head and told Sampson that he was not consulted on the church’s daily operations.

  “Well, perhaps you should be. This preacher of yours is a very loose accountant and has proven to have very imperfect talents for the disbursement of money.” He glanced at Charlie. “Your boys’ decision about removing you from the care of their finances aside, I find you most expert in this arena.” He seemed to be trying to ascertain if any offense had been taken.

  Charlie remained silent. His employer’s kindness incited shame.

  “Methodists,” Sampson added.

  Charlie knew about the Sampsons’ conversion. He had often bothered himself imagining the occasion of their dual baptism, building on the few facts Julia had given him. It had been a Sunday afternoon in late March, the river water still frigid with winter melt. He imagined singing and prayerful shouting. He imagined they had held hands, Sampson’s assertiveness giving strength to the normally reserved Julia. He imagined the minister pulling them forward and back beneath the service of the water.

  Both men were silent. The late afternoon light fell through the open windows on the west side, and dust motes floated like snow in its beams. For several moments, Charlie felt it to be a pleasant site to pass the afternoon and pleasant company with whom to pass it.

  “One branch of Julia’s family was Methodist,” Sampson said. “Joseph Hayden, machinist for Giles Tinker. Helped form that small class in the Notch.”

  “I think sometimes to convert to Baptist,” Charlie said, picking quietly at the pew’s trim with his thumbnail.

  “Well, you’d be better off than you are here,” Sampson said. “Eighty-five thousand dollars for a place to pray,” he added, shaking his head.

  Julia had never been able to make the differences between his Methodists and her Baptists plain to Charlie, and he had asserted that it seemed to him that all Western churches turned their congregants’ faces to an interior circle, whereas Eastern worship lifted faces up and back to the shared space of history and memory. He had tried to explain the experiences of kneeling to the family altar, or sweeping the ancestors’ graves. But the inadequacies of his English frustrated him and he worried that he was making no part of what he wanted her to know visible. For this reason, he had once found himself presenting his thoughts on the matter to her in Chinese. When she had not seemed disconcerted, he had gone on. He explained that when he prayed in the Chinese way, he saw all who had preceded his own family and he understood upon whose backs he now knelt. And he saw all future generations, on whom Charlie could rely to honor him. Thus a man’s life became both more important and less. The line could not be formed without the one man, but the one man was powerless without the strength of the others before and behind him.

  Julia had loved the fluid cadences of the Chinese and had repeated some of her most favorite sounds. But despite the pleasure her pleasure brought him, he knew that he had been unable to make himself clear, and that this might always be the way between them.

  Now, as he sat next to her husband, his thoughts sailed from Baptist conversion to pursuit of yet another livelihood, from applying for citizenship to quick accumulation of large sums of money, each a potential way to persuade her that he was the kind of man any woman should want to make father to her child and husband to her self.

  “We were married in the Union Church in Stamford, Vermont, you know,” Sampson said.

  Charlie wanted both to run from the building and to listen more attentively. “I did not,” he said carefully, as though each word were a glass in a tall tower of glasses.

  “It was the only church in Stamford for years. You weren’t going to get more than one from a group of settlers who had left Massachusetts to escape long sermons.” He gestured around them. “You could have fit three of that church in this one,” he said.

  Charlie gave him a small smile.

  “In the summer months, by the time we villagers made the walk to it, our stockings were covered in dust. In winter we kept warm by filling our foot warmers with coals donated from the fireplaces of the Wilmarth House. It was my job to fetch the coals from the inn and distribute the warmers through the pews. My first sight of Julia was from the ankles down.”

  Charlie had peeled stockings from those same ankles. She had told him she had always found her feet to embarrass her more than any other aspect of her body and so he had lavished particular attentions upon them.

  Sampson said, “Now there are two churches up there. Hard-shelled Baptists and shouting Methodists.”

  He glanced at Charlie, who nodded and said, “I see.”

  “She wore shell combs in her hair. Her nose was dusted with rice powder.” He smiled sadly. “Did you know we have been husband and wife for over twenty-four years?”

  “It is a long time,” Charlie said with equal sadness.

  “Thank you for saying so,” Sampson said, though Charlie did not know what he had said that merited gratitude.

  Sampson leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. “I have told her that if I know the man’s name, I will not harm his person or livelihood.” He straightened his shoes against the seams of the carpet. “I have promised her that with the name lodged in my mind, I can go forward. I have promised her my role in the life she desires.”

  He turned his head without raising it and regarded Charlie. “Could you do such a thing, Mr. Foreman?”

  Charlie could feel the dampness between his shoulder blades. He had spent the last three years determining his own course by using this man as sextant. One night shortly after Julia and Sampson had departed for Florida, he had haunted Sampson’s office. He had opened and closed the man’s books. He had straightened the rug. He had even slipped into the extra pair of boots always kept by the door. It had been silly, yet thrilling.

  And now this man sat before him at a loss. Charlie sympathized with the disorientation, and answered with honesty. “I don’t know,” he said. And then he apologized, aloud for his ignorance, and in his mind for his betrayals.

  Ida passed her Sunday evening as she usually did, at the Celestial Sunday school, but since the strike, there had been more agitation and less focused study. Boys now clumped around Ah Chung and his clan more than they looked to their teachers. The small gifts for teachers had not been presented in several weeks, private lessons had taken a downturn, dinner invitations from the volunteers had been politely refused.

  All this made it hard for the teachers to keep their own focus, and Ida found herself deaf to her two students as she strained to make sense
of the gathering around Ah Chung’s table. Finally, able to stand it no longer, she arranged to trade tables with their elderly volunteer teacher. The poor Mrs. Slattery was only too happy to remove herself from this inattentive and unsettled group.

  Ida sat beside Ah Chung. “Speak English,” she commanded.

  He smiled at her. This boy had always struck her as unpleasant. Too sure of himself from the moment he had stepped off the train. Whereas the other new arrivals spent their energies on steadying the boat, his attitude had from the outset been more like that of a dog bored with play. It had taken longer for her to understand whether he took this stance in order to improve the situation for his fellow workers or merely for himself. Even after the strike, her mind was not made on this issue, and her uncertainty resulted in further impatience.

  “You and yours seem to be complaining,” she said.

  “You want us complain in English, Miss Wilburn?” he asked, still smiling.

  She wished to slap him as she used to slap her brothers. She took a breath and attempted her best Sunday school voice. “I am your teacher. I am interested in your complaints. I am interested in you,” she said.

  “You not my teacher,” he said. He pointed across the room at Mrs. Slattery. “She my teacher.”

  She chose to ignore him. “If you have a problem, perhaps I can help.”

  He said something in Chinese to the group. They laughed, some of them glancing at her awkwardly.

  “English,” she said again.

  “My English bad,” he said, a low whine invading his voice. “I guess my teacher not so good.”

  More laughter, though Low Yuen, one of the youngest, looked stricken.

  Ah Chung was now addressing the group more than her. “Maybe that our big problem,” he said. “Okay, Miss Wilburn. That our complaining. We need better teacher.”

  Against her judgment, she said, “So first you replace your foreman, and now your teachers? Perhaps you would like to do the teaching? Perhaps you could handle the finances and the education of these boys.” She gestured at the group, most of whom had lost comprehension of her, or had never had it in the first place. They looked at one another, wondering what was required of them.

  He spoke to the boys around him. They stood, their benches scraping, gathered their hats from the wall pegs, and with bows in her general direction, took their leave. The young one, Low Yuen, turned back and moved as if to speak, but then chose to walk on without doing so.

  After the last had removed himself to their living quarters, Ah Chung stood, settling his own hat on his head. “I not speak English. You not speak Chinese,” he said, as if explaining not only how they had arrived at this place but also where and how they should move forward from it. Ida flushed. He shrugged at her, turned, and took his leave.

  She remained on the bench. And she was still there when Charlie returned from the church to find her the sole occupant of the dark and otherwise empty schoolroom. Her confrontation had made her feel as she had during a childhood encounter with a black bear in the woods. Make yourself big, her father had always told her. Make yourself a bigger animal than he. And so she had, her arms aloft, her feet wide in the spring growth. She had yelled; she had waved her hands and arms as if ridding herself of insects, and the bear had been dissuaded, dropping to all fours and retreating into the deeper woods, twigs and branches snapping under his lumbering weight.

  And so when Charlie approached her table and inquired as to her well-being, she decided on honesty and said, “You have your hands full with that Ah Chung and his boys.”

  Charlie lightly tapped the table’s edge. He turned his hands palm up as if he might find those boys nestled there like baby squirrels.

  She smiled. She had always liked his hands. “What I meant was that they are a troublesome group, are they not?”

  Charlie did not like to speak ill of his own with the Americans; no good could come of it, but Ida Wilburn had always struck him as a straightforward young woman, upright and sure. He knew others thought her too brittle, too strong, a little mirthless. Once he had heard another Sunday school teacher refer to her as a battle-axe. He had grasped the sentiment if not the meaning of the term. But he was tired of constant watchfulness. It had been a decade of relentless attention to the shifting weather of the Americans around him. He was tired of it. She had filled the months of Julia’s absence with distraction and attentiveness. She seemed to find him appealing because of his differences rather than despite them. She was kind.

  And so he answered her directness with more of his own. “I think on them too often,” he said. As he spoke, he was astonished at the extent of his exhaustion. He sank to the bench opposite her, too tired to keep his back straight.

  Her eyes were filled with benevolence. It made him want to put his head on the table.

  They sat for a moment, the night sounds coming in through the windows closed against the fall chill. She asked if he was familiar with the story of Antaeus, and when he responded that he was not, she told him it was a story he must know, an ancient story with relevance, she was sure, to their own situation here in this modern village.

  It occurred to him that even before Julia’s departure from town, indeed since his arrival in town, Ida had treated him with a respect and admiration that he had appreciated, even given his own inattention to anyone other than a certain few.

  She explained that whenever Antaeus, the earth-born, was thrown to the earth, he received new strength and was in consequence able to overcome all his antagonists, until Hercules one day held him aloft in his arms and strangled him in the air.

  It was not clear to Charlie what to make of this tale. He could see no relevance to his own life. But he nodded and told her that it was a most interesting story.

  She nodded in return, pleased, and said that although she was a Baptist, it seemed to her that Christian strength was not the only path to spiritual strength. The spirit of God moved her when she least expected it, in the most unlikely of places. Spiritual strength accrued when one rested one’s strength on the immediate fact of things.

  She stared at him, and he worried that once again, in his failure to comprehend, he was disappointing her.

  She leaned forward and did the most astonishing thing of covering one of his hands with hers. Her hands were rougher than Julia’s, but not unpleasantly so. Her fingers were the same width at their tips as they were at their base. She brought back for him a memory of his mother’s way of holding his hand when they took wagon rides with his father to sell their rice and vegetables. They would lie in the back of the wagon on quilts spread over sacks of rice and baskets of cabbage. They would stare up at the sky and she would braid one of his fingers over another, add a third, undo them, and start over. In this way, they would pass the whole ride.

  And so he relaxed his hand beneath hers and pretended that to be sitting thus was an ordinary part of an ordinary day.

  She told him that she had been sure that as a Celestial, he would find the tale interesting and perhaps even helpful to understanding the current situation among the other boys.

  He turned the story over in his mind. What possible course of action could she be suggesting, if any at all?

  She patted his hand and withdrew hers, standing and readying herself for departure. “Whatever help I can offer you may have,” she said.

  He was mystified, but already missed the weight of another’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “Very much.”

  Later, he would ask her what she had meant by telling him that story, and she would not recall having done so. He would try to set the scene for her, the hour, the disagreeable conversation she had had with Ah Chung, her hand on his.

  “I don’t remember,” she would say in such a way to convince him that further interrogation would turn up nothing. And then she would say with simple plainness, “I remember your hand.”

  On Wednesday the first of October, Sampson, miserable, informed his wife that a name had been procured. He wished for the s
ource to have been his wife, but one could not always achieve one’s wishes. Instead, he had been forced to rely on Mr. Sing, a man whom he now had one more reason to admire and trust.

  Julia nodded, turning around the fact that Charlie had given Sampson, rather than her, the name like a jeweler searching for flaws. Had he thought the discomfort of her husband announcing the news to her would be less than that of her announcing the same to him? Was he in some way announcing a loyalty to her husband rather than her? Or merely doing his best to achieve what she most desired?

  She wondered what name and had to rein herself back from inquiry.

  They were in the bedroom, where she was resting, a sleeping Alice in the bassinet beside her.

  Sampson sat ineptly on the edge of the high bed. He found her quilts too stuffed, her bed pillows too numerous. “It is a horror to know,” he said, avoiding her eyes.

  It pained her to know how much he was suffering and how little she could ease it. “I’m sorry,” she said. But she could not keep from adding, “You will keep your promise to me, will you not?”

  As she spoke, she understood that from now on, not only would she be unable to ease his suffering, she would continue to add to it. She understood as well that the pain this would cause her was tolerable.

  He scanned the room like a beast ranging his cage with his eyes and took her hands in his and bent his forehead to hers. “How can I do this?” he pleaded. He rolled his brow back and forth against hers. “How can you ask it of me?”

  She was crying, but she gestured toward Alice. “This is how,” she said through her tears. “Please,” she added.

  He lay down beside her and she wrapped herself around him. He knew that in the morning, he would hand the boy a week’s pay and a ticket on the afternoon train. Both were already in the drawer of his desk. But for now, he tucked his wife’s hand beneath his resting face and hoped that the baby would never wake.