The Celestials (32 page)

Of course, the way she found out did not occur, and would not have occurred, to her husband. He had complete trust in Charlie Sing, more now than ever. It was the trust between man and dog or preacher and congregant. The lack of equality had been embraced by both parties so well and for so long that any resentment was not even a whisper from disharmony's corner.

Charlie did not tell her in order to betray Sampson, though he understood and regretted that particular consequence. He told her for the reason that he had done everything since her return. For her, for their child, for the possibility of family in this still strange world.

They had arranged, with the help of Lucy Robinson, who still had not arrived at an understanding as to why she continued to help two people whom she knew barely at all, to meet at Natural Bridge. There, beneath the giant boulder where he had just months before gone to read Julia's last letter from Michigan, she listened to what he had to say.

Blue jays argued in the shrubbery. The birches stood already bare, while, other than the hue of their leaves, the maples stood in mantles of full summer. Had either Charlie or Julia bent to lay a hand to the ground, they would have felt the oncoming winter seeping up through the earth like a snowfall in reverse.

“I expected as much,” she said. She looked at Charlie sadly. “How could I expect more from him than I offered myself?”

It was not the sadness in her eyes that laid fist to his stomach—it was the way her face, her body, everything about her was already steeled against it. This was not, he knew, an auspicious direction for the conversation to take.

“Low Yuen is very young,” he said.

Her face stilled and hardened further. “He will make do,” she said. “Why should he be any different from the rest of us?”

His concern for the boy was overshadowed by his concern for himself, and so despite her hardness of feeling and his own guilt, he asked, “Now what happens?”

Inside, his heart and mind made bargains with each other. If she looked at him, he had a chance. If she took his hand, even better. With nearly anything else, he should prepare for defeat.

She put a hand to the side of his head, covering his ear, part of a cheek. “How can we know?” she said. “None of us would have foreseen what has so far taken place.”

Her face was still determined, and whatever thrill his heart had enjoyed at her touch began to settle. She was touching him the way an aunt touches a nephew, wondering at the boy's growth while she hasn't been looking. It was the intimacy of strangers, and he felt as if his heart had been pushed into the dirt beneath them. At least it was her hands doing the burying. His rage at his own inadequacies tumbled through him, and to keep from slapping his
own face, he cupped her neck with both of his hands and suggested they quit this place. “It is a big country,” he said, as though an agent for transcontinental tours. “She is my child too,” he added.

“You and I will always know that,” Julia said, the sadness finally overtaking her face.

He understood this to be the beginning of a farewell, and he interrupted her, sure that if he stopped her speech he could stop the sentiment behind it and its consequences. “And Alice,” he added. “She will know who she came from, what she is.”

“She must be a Sampson,” Julia said.

He shook his head slightly. “We'll find somewhere where she can be ours.”

She took his hands and held them between them as if they were children at a dance. He stared at the white of her skin and the workings of her throat and thought he might be ill.

“There's no place like that,” she said, as if explaining to a child that sugared treats do not fall from the heavens.

“Why not?” he said. “Who says that?”

She secured the ties of her bonnet and smoothed the bodice of her dress. “I say,” she answered. She touched a finger to his lower lip and then she left. He watched her recede, her squared shoulders, her skirts washing evenly against her legs. Her resolve and fortitude were long delicate needles through his heart. She did not look back. Had she done so, he would have seen a face set and determined, agony pulsing beneath the skin.

*

Lucy Robinson would spend some part of the remainder of her long life turning over the decision she made that late October of 1873. The unrest at the factory among the Chinese had bothered her the first time around, and bothered her more when they struck for the second time. Perhaps this was because there was more open agitation, and despite drawing attention farther away from her own scandal, unrest was still unrest, and any turbulence that threw itself out into the world made it impossible for her to live under the pretense that her own attack was something of the past. Her anger with herself and her anxieties grew. Was she to be forever in that man's thrall? Even the Sampsons had learned without instruction how to move around her slowly, as if all behaviors need be performed with hands open and in full view.

It angered her that all these people felt the need to protect her. It angered her further, as the years passed, that their instincts were correct.

So for a while that October, she kept what she knew to herself. She and Ida witnessed the growing dissatisfaction among Ah Chung and his band at their Sunday school sessions. The strike this time around more closely resembled the agitation of the Crispins that the town well remembered. The thirty or forty Chinese supporting Ah Chung protested. They made signs. They worked to get others to join them. They presented a list of demands. Low Yuen must be reinstated. Charlie must be dismissed in his place, as it was Charlie who was to blame for the wrongs perpetrated
against them, Charlie who was working for some selfish design of his own. They must have higher pay, better job security, better living quarters. Why should they be paid less than the native workers? Which race was producing the better quality shoe in the shorter amount of time?

“Where was this spirit when the Crispins needed it?” Alfred grumped to Lucy and Ida one night. He had been unemployed for months.

Ida said, “As if you would do anything with a Chinaman, even stand on a picket line with him.”

Lucy said nothing, taking note that although the Robinsons were the closest thing to family Ida had in this small village, and they had not returned to Virginia partly out of loyalty to their strange community of three, she was, once again, siding against them.

At certain points in her life, Lucy would tell herself that she had been motivated by a sense of justice. She determined that she had felt the need for justice more acutely because it had eluded her own situation. And she did genuinely believe that setting things right in one arena might help relieve the burdens of the other. Though later, she would have the wisdom to admit that something less altruistic had been at work in her young heart.

She could have worked to settle the unrest without damage to Charlie. She could have tried to persuade Mr. Sampson that his usual gruffness and inflexibility might not best serve his interests when dealing with these particular Celestials in this particular case. She might have appealed to Mrs. Sampson's sense of justice and morality; she might have
asked her whether she could stand watching one boy field the consequences of another man's actions. She did none of those things, a fact that, in the years to come, would roost solidly in her mind.

On the twenty-fifth of October, an overcast and damp Saturday, Sampson dismissed Ah Chung and the ten other Chinese who had most annoyed him by their complaints. Their protestations, he said, were groundless and they had a seeming determination to do all in their power to prejudice their comrades against their employer and those other workers who saw fit to remain loyal to him.

On Saturday evening, upon returning to his apartment at the Wilson House, Sampson told Lucy and Julia that the dismissed men had accused Charlie Sing of causing their discharge. A bitter hatred of the good man had grown, Sampson told them. It would be two days before the dismissed workers could be put on a train. He worried for Sing's safety.

On Saturday night, Alfred out with Daniel, Lucy related the news to Ida over dinner. The apartment already held the chill of winter despite the closed windows, their seals lined with cotton scraps. Lucy warmed her hands around her stew bowl. “It is a terrible situation,” she said, genuinely troubled by the unhappiness that had rolled in like a mist. “Poor Low Yuen,” she said, thinking of the meetings she'd arranged between Mrs. Sampson and Charlie. It was not, she supposed, impossible that the boy was the father. Mr. Sing and Mrs. Sampson might not have been meeting about their own relationship after all. But this was not, she figured, the likeliest truth. The likeliest truth, she had come to believe, was usually
the one that stepped forward from the crowd, and when she thought of all she knew, there Charlie was, front and center.

She wondered what else he could've done. She wondered what she would've done in his position. She found it impossible to imagine herself standing in his shoes. She looked at Ida as if the solution might be found with her.

Ida sliced a carrot with the edge of her spoon and blew on it briskly. “Well, I have compassion for Low Yuen, to be sure, for all involved, really, but I care most about you.” She glanced at her friend over her raised spoon. “You seem unwell. I don't like others if they tax you.”

Perhaps because it seemed to Lucy that it had been so long since her friend's attentions had been turned on her so directly, and perhaps because she had spent her life in denial about the degree to which those attentions made the difference between a full or poor day for her, Lucy found herself telling Ida all that she knew. Maybe Ida could fix things. It was, after all, what Ida was best at. For a moment or two, Ida's face allowed her to question why she had ever kept a thing from her.

The boy was not the father. Charlie Sing was the father.

Ida made a sound of disbelief. Ida told her friend not to be ridiculous. She was acting like her brother. There was no way for anyone to know the truth of this situation. It was, from every angle, the most unlikely of situations. To try to grab and hold the truth here would be like trying to grasp an eel barehanded.

In all of Lucy's unhappy imaginings of what Ida might present her with, disbelief had made no appearance. Skepticism was the purview of the first officer to the scene of her
attack. But Lucy had always relied on the hard truth that she would speak and Ida would believe, and here Ida was, repudiating and rejecting. This perhaps accounted for the briskness with which she answered, “I know because I have seen and heard what I have seen and heard.”

“What have you seen and heard?” Ida asked.

Lucy set her spoon down and put her hands in her lap. “I think the details will cause you pain,” she said with a simple authority that achieved what she had hoped. Ida's spirit dropped like a kite on a windless day. She stared into her bowl as though something other than carrot and potato would be found within it.

“But surely,” she said, “they do not love each other.”

She did not attempt to temper the importance of the question for her, and Lucy understood that it wasn't that her friend didn't believe Lucy's explanation; it was that she had come to the same conclusions herself but was not willing to say them aloud. Lucy's certain knowledge of what and who mattered most to her oldest friend hit her like the concussive waves of a blast.

The unhappiness the knowledge incited sat across Lucy's chest. After a moment, she said, “Oh, but they do. I have seen evidence of the strongest feeling between them.”

Ida was stricken.

“It is most genuine,” Lucy added.

Later that night, Ida would request that she not speak of her ridiculous theories to anyone else. She would insist on Lucy's word on this matter, but for now, she sat at her place, speaking of other concerns.

Lucy kept her spoon in constant and easy motion, but in the years to come it would be this moment to which she returned. The simplicity of Ida's feelings for the Celestial and the way concern for him took priority over all else, even her own suffering. The surprise of the hurt this inflicted on Lucy. Ida had been the only one who after the attack had known how to care for the wounds and then the scars in such a way as to ease suffering rather than increase it. She had not, as others had, told Lucy that everything would be better; she had told her that some things would improve, and others she could stand. Lucy had loved her for that.

The next day at lessons, Lucy slipped a short, unsigned note into Ah Chung's primer making clear what Low Yuen was accused of and who had done the accusing. It would be of no solace that she had kept her promise to Ida and had kept her silence with all others, abstaining from mentioning Charlie's name even in her conversations with God.

On that Monday morning, Ah Chung threatened Charlie Sing with the ex-foreman's own gun. Sing would withdraw the accusations he'd made. A formal apology would be offered. He must quit the factory or be shot. Charlie's sadness was still so overwhelming that he watched the action as if from above, a monkey in a tall tree, briefly curious about the odd creatures below.

He was surprised at Ah Chung's antics. He understood the boy to be opportunistic but had the misguided sense that, as a result, he could rely on him for a certain degree of
pragmatism. He had perceived a calculated bluster and not the extremity he now witnessed.