The Celestials (10 page)

That summer, when the doors to the co-op opened, the newly purchased and piled hides sending their animal odors through the building, the kits lined up against the walls like girls at a church dance, the first thing the cooperating cordwainers did was stand for a photograph. They did not stand against the wall of their own building. They walked, spilling into the dirt street, the women—many of them in their Sunday best for the occasion—stepping carefully between the ruts of wagon wheels, down Brooklyn Street, across River Street to the north wall of Sampson's factory. Word was that Sampson himself was in Boston and the only guard was posted to the office entrance on the south wall. A sewing girl, sister to one of the Crispin cooperators, leaned out the window, waving at her brother to indicate that she would be down in a minute to unbolt the gate.

One by one, men helping the women, the group of seventy made it through the fence and grouped themselves in front of Sampson's north wall, most of the original Crispins at the back entrance, the sewing girl hastily passing them
a few wooden stools upon which to stand so their heads would be raised above the rest in the final image.

It was evening, the sun beginning to lower itself behind the hills with the grace of an elegant guest lowering herself into a front parlor's best chair. As Alfred was the only one among them who had witnessed the Chinese posing for their photograph, the workers arranged themselves according to his direction, which he offered in a manner he hoped would be understood as not filled with too much pride. It was he who insisted that the sewing girl who had signaled the all clear sit in the second-story window and that she secure a friend to join her. It had been that way, he remembered, in Sampson's photograph. In every way, the photograph mirrored Sampson's of the Celestials, the only difference being that the Chinese had been posed at the south wall and the cooperative at the north, as if one group had arrived only to push the other out the back. The photographer was William P. Hurd, using the same equipment he had used to document the arrival of the Celestials, all pulled in the same wagon by the same aged mare, who would manage to walk this earth for three more summers before folding her awkward legs and settling down for the last time in the far corner of her favorite pasture.

Chapter Five

Had Julia been at the Methodist church a week previous when Charlie had addressed the congregation, instead of still afraid to show her face, her failures painted there for all to see, she would have felt a kind of grace listening to his imperfect words, and she wouldn't have known whether to attribute it to his speech or to the man himself. Either way, despite being a devoted churchgoer, she would not have been part of the small posse of women suggesting further contact and interaction with these Chinese boys. For although she welcomed grace in all its forms, beneath the calm it brought was something fluttering and alive, something that would have made it difficult for her to rise to her feet. Had she been there, the line of churchgoers in her pew would've grown impatient waiting for the woman at the end of the row to open her eyes and make her way out.

So it was only at Sampson's insistence that Julia volunteered for the Celestial Sunday school. His consultation
with the pastors of the village had resulted in the call for volunteer teachers.

It did not escape Julia that even before Sampson had laid eyes on them, the Chinese had seemed to transform her husband from the supremely pragmatic to the utterly paternal. He had never, as his peers had, offered his French Canadian employees schooling or stores, churches or homes. What he had wanted from them was hard work. What he gave in return was adequate pay. He had not felt they should expect his concern for their welfare to extend beyond that.

The contract with the Celestials, on the other hand, stipulated “house, wood, and water.”
Free
house, wood, and water, Julia recalled, walking alongside her husband the day before Sunday school was to commence. He had asked her to accompany him on a stroll up the hill that George Chase and his wife had recently purchased. They were planning on making a home there, and Sampson hoped Julia might see the idea of home ownership as less frightening and more appealing. As lovely as the Wilson House was, Sampson had enough of the farmer left in him to value nothing more than land with a solid house upon it. He had always imagined himself on the wide porch of a sturdy structure, the land as far as his eye could see his own. Chase would end up building several structures, modest and grand, and the property, much to Sampson's annoyance, would quickly and forever-more become known as Chase Hill.

Sampson had already paid the Chinese workers' railroad passage there, and if they fulfilled their contracts he would provide passage back. If his business experienced a
downturn, he was obligated to continue to supply full pay. The big wooden storage bins that had once been used to sort the spools of thread for sole stitching and the wooden molds for uppers now contained laundry. It was easy to feel these boys were in some way his own. Seventy-five, where before there had been none.

He was kind enough not to make this latter observation to his wife, though as they stopped at the crest of the hill to look back over the town and his factory, smoke pouring out of its central stack, he did suggest she might help them. A third of the Celestials had already completed their training and were at work. The cooperative, also visible from their vantage point, would be running in a matter of days. He must embark to Boston in the middle of the next week to meet with other manufacturers to discuss what course they would take to put an end to that Crispin enterprise. He held her elbow as they stood there. It seemed important that she feel about these boys as he did. Perhaps God intended for them to create what they could in this unusual way. “They are like children,” he said, brushing at her eyebrow with the side of his thumb. “You can help them.” And so she did.

Lucy and Ida arrived at the Chinese quarters early, having left a pouting Alfred behind in the apartment. He didn't see why they had to volunteer when from schoolchild to widow everyone else already had. “Be a Christian,” Lucy had said, kissing him on the top of the head as their mother used to when he was a child.

The afternoon was clear, and the landscaping that Sampson had had laid in was in full health, and a few days later, when news of the previous day's earthquake in New York City finally reached North Adams, the two girls would comment how strange it was to look back on that Sunday weather and think that mere miles away a whole city was recovering from such a phenomenon. “Did you know,” Lucy would ask, looking up from the newspaper, “that nausea is always experienced in earthquakes?” During the course of her recovery, she would develop a lifelong interest in natural disaster and extraordinary displays of wreckage. Ida would think it unhealthy, the focus on ruin rather than repair, but Lucy achieved solace from such stories, as if her own assault had been disaster to be sure, but natural nonetheless.

They made their way down the graveled walk to the building's rear, their conversation hushing as they entered the Chinese quarters, both of them aware this was not the sort of experience they would be having under any other circumstances. Ida thought of announcing to her mother that she was about to sit across from a foreigner who spoke not a word of God's English and found her neck warming as she crossed the threshold.

The Reverends Griffin, Sanford, Gladden, and Jennings were present. As was William Ingraham, Baptist Sunday school instructor of twenty years plus and Sampson's sewing room foreman, and, of course, Sampson himself. There was an air of mild panic among the men, and Ida found herself guiding Lucy by the elbow to the other side of the
room. Men in a state of unrest were in Ida's opinion to be avoided. She had once, as a child, toured a gunpowder factory with her father. All the visitors had been obliged to slip off their shoes and don paper slippers, the powder dust on the floor too dangerous to come into contact with the hard soles of street shoes. At the end of the tour, they had disposed of their slippers in a wooden crate just inside the factory's doors. She had yet to meet a man, other than her father, whom she didn't believe to be the equivalent of flint and shavings, liable at the slightest provocation to ignite.

It was to her surprise then that the large group of almond-eyed creatures gathered at the wooden tables lined up on each side of the room did not incite in her the usual response. They were smaller of stature and slighter than they had appeared at the station, most of them clearly possessing no more than her own sixteen years. None were very hardy-looking, and she could not imagine them doing the heavy work of farming and slating. Perhaps shoemaking, something she had always thought not particularly manly, would suit them.

Their trousers looked excessively comfortable. As did their black cloth shoes. Their hats, common felt ones of black, hung above them on pegs situated in rows around the room.

“Their heads are quite alarming,” Lucy said.

Their pigtails were coiled around their crowns, putting to mind a fancy lady's chignon. Ida found the whole thing charming. Their faces were plump and round and as smooth and destitute of beard as a woman's.

Actually, Lucy found their shaved heads more than alarming. They were so smooth, so clean-shaven that she couldn't stop imagining what it would be like to touch one of them, slippery and viscous beneath her fingertips.

One looked at her and with a pleasant smile that narrowed his already oblique eyes said, “How do?”

Her attacker had bid her good afternoon as he had wrapped his arm around her from behind. The back of his hand had been hairless. She shook her head rapidly like a hound shaking a toy and the Chinese boy who had addressed her thought perhaps she suffered from the shaking disease he had seen in his grandmother. If so, she was harmless, he knew, and his heart warmed in her direction.

But Lucy refused to think her repulsion at the sight of the bevy of smooth scalps had only to do with her assault. Was she to be as simple as that for the rest of her life? And so she swallowed to ease her stomach and inclined her head toward the boy. “I'm well, thank you. And you?” she asked, expecting and receiving no response.

She would for the remainder of her life find her first and strongest reaction to the sight of human skin, especially male human skin, the same mix of unease and nausea that she experienced that first day of Celestial Sunday school. It would prove to be only one of the many ways that man had left his mark.

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.