The Celestials (31 page)

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 source 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.

Chapter Seventeen

On Thursday, October 2, 1873, a four-pound toadstool was discovered in Lee. Peter Galligan paid the police court $250 and was sentenced to six months in the house of correction for liquor selling, while on the charge of keeping a nuisance he was fined $20 and received three months' imprisonment. The
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, speaking on the country's financial crisis, opined that if the businessmen of North Adams stood by the local banks, deposited as usual, and drew only for the regular purposes of trade, then the fury of the storm in New York would not have serious effect in local terms.

The day was crisp and bright and all God's objects appeared as if spit-polished by earnest young boys in uniforms of well-pressed cloth.

It was hard for those who had been, in one way or another, waiting for the identity of the father for so long not
to think that today would bring some relief. Even those townsfolk who did not know the particulars of the Sampsons' unresolved situation had felt the anxieties of the past months. And certainly the recent lives of the Chinese workers had been filled with unrest. It might even be argued that the town entire, alien and native, wealthy and wanting, had been living as a herd of horses, noses to the air of an oncoming disturbance of weather. It would be solace to be able to relax their attentive ears and drop their heads to the grass.

But the realization of desire is often dissimilar to the fantasy, and almost as soon as Sampson had handed the young Low Yuen his ticket, his final pay, and his measured thanks, those divergences commenced to roll through the town like thunder.

First off, the boy's reaction offered Sampson no satisfaction. Whereas Sampson had secretly hoped for a moment of unspoken yet complete understanding between the two of them, the boy's eyes were filled with nothing but confusion. He was enough of a boy and enough aware of his position in this world to keep his questions to himself, but they started to make their way into the world soon after he left the office.

The news of his dismissal traveled through the factory at a rapid pace. His fellow workers had watched him being summoned from the bottoming floor, and when he didn't return, they began one by one to quit their tables and make their way down to their living quarters, and Homer Handley and the other white workers took note from their own stations that here was yet another day of compromised work and diminished product.

Despite what Julia had believed, Charlie was not surprised to hear of Low Yuen's dismissal. She had, he thought, been naïve, and Sampson, he knew, understood himself to be a right and moral person, inclined, even obligated, to bring what he understood as injustice to public light. Charlie had known, as he had offered Low Yuen's name, what would come of his action. What he chose to believe was that Julia knew as well, and that what she was asking was not just for Charlie to build her a door out of the trap in which she found herself, but for him to pass through that door with her. So great was his need for this truth that he did not examine its illogic.

He remained at his pegging machine until he realized it would be the wiser move to follow his brethren downstairs. He reminded himself that he should be as curious as they; their reactions should be his reactions, and it struck him that he had become someone who had to play the role of a Celestial rather than be one. He was saddened.

The Chinese were gathered in the bunk room, as if even their own dining quarters were too public for such a day. There were too many of them for the available open space, and he was reminded of the journey that had brought them all to this country. Perhaps their lot in life was to go from one cramped room to another.

At the center was Low Yuen, who had rarely been the center of anything. He still clutched his train ticket. He asked one of his coworkers if he would mind reaching his
bag from beneath his bunk. Ah Chung stilled the coworker with a gesture. “He's not going anywhere,” he said, pulling a stool over with his foot and indicating that Low Yuen should take a seat, which the boy did.

Ah Chung asked him to recount the scene in the office. “Leave nothing out,” he said. But before the boy could speak, could explain that, no, Mr. Sampson had offered no explanation for the dismissal, before the boy could be made to feel the small sting of shame at not having asked for one, Ah Chung glanced Charlie's way and said the houseboys of foreign devils were not welcome there.

Charlie removed himself without argument, as he believed that this too would go the way he expected. Ah Chung would use the dismissal to reincite his band of supporters. Whether or not a reason for the dismissal was discovered, he himself would be blamed for it. This would not be a miscarriage of justice. He would be further isolated from the group, further pushed beyond the outer walls of their small imitation of home. As he passed through the dining quarters and let himself quietly out of the factory's side door, pausing on the bottom step to look first left and then right, he reminded himself with the stubbornness of a child that this was what he had wanted.

Although not making use of the train ticket had been Ah Chung's idea, Low Yuen himself had been at a loss to imagine crossing the country on his own, returning to San Francisco alone and unemployed. It was a city he found filled with nothing but chaos, inciting in his body nothing but fear.
He could not return home until he had stored away enough money to pay his debts and the cost of the trip, and even if he found his finances in such a state, he could not imagine returning to his village, to his overworked mother and stern father, as essentially the same boy he had been when he left.

So instead, he returned to his work station. He kept his head bent to the task of attaching one part of a shoe to another. Who knew why Americans did the things they did? It was best not to question their behavior, but to stay out of its way.

Because Sampson chose to avoid the bottoming room in the days after the dismissal, and because the room's white foreman had more trouble than he liked to admit telling one Celestial from another, it was several days before Low Yuen's continued presence moved into the frame of Sampson's vision. And even when it did, his mind was slow to wrap itself around the implications, occupied as he was, and had been, by Julia and his fear that she would, through some channel he had not gated or dammed, discover that he had not kept his word to her.

In the days after the dismissal, as Ah Chung and his group quietly investigated the reasons for it, Sampson felt the torment of anticipation for the thing he least wanted to come to pass. It was of no consequence that Julia was happier than she'd been since her return, or that she seemed to have taken and let go a certain clutch on life. It was as if she had stood for a long while at the shore of a lake and had now decided that despite the temperature of the water, she would, after all, venture forward.

His belief that his betrayal had been sired by hers did not bring him any solace. Everywhere he turned, he anticipated and imagined her wide face filled with sadness and hurt and, worst of all, a lack of surprise.