The Celestials (16 page)

By year's end, one half of the slate pencils used in the world would come from Vermont, and the same state would have a man with a beard seven feet long.

The new year of 1871 would arrive and would, for the most part, be greeted with a certain wary optimism. The citizens were, by and large, willing to grant the peaceful incorporation of Sampson's Celestials into the town's workings. Alfred felt his position with his brothers, if not to have improved, then certainly not to have worsened. Ida felt Lucy to be sturdier and more capable every day and her mind turned, with some trepidation, toward her own inevitable return to Virginia. Charlie felt confident that the boys were doing what they had been brought there to do. The boys themselves, even the most homesick of them, felt that with seven months of contract labor under their belts, they could manage two and a half years more without much damage. Soon enough they would be home, enjoying their families' congratulations and gratitude. Sampson felt he could now perhaps breathe easier, and could even afford generous thought to be sent the way of the cooperating Crispins. He said as much to Julia, who complimented him
on his Christian spirit and said, meaning it, that she was much pleased by his change of heart.

And in the following year, on a late winter day, Charlie would tell Julia about Third Brother. In return, Julia told Charlie that she had lost fourteen children, something she had confessed aloud to no one save Sampson.

He regarded her for so long and so well that she feared she had not made her meaning clear.
Poor, unhappy children
, he finally told her, his arms useless by his sides.

1873

Chapter Eight

The year was 1873. The final day of July. An oppressive ninety degrees in Sampson's office, even with both window and shade pulled against the sun. Sampson had to twice be reminded to lay his work aside and make ready to meet the 4:15 from Troy. Chase was gentle in his prompting, successful at keeping impatience from his voice, equally successful at instilling a sense of urgency. Mrs. Sampson had been at her sister's in Michigan for nearly six months, and before that with her husband vacationing in Florida for several weeks. She hadn't been in residence in North Adams since early January.

The town had thought it strange enough that the Sampsons had taken that unprecedented trip south; it was unlike him to leave the business in anyone's hands but his own, and unlike her to venture outside the village lines, let alone to the wild and unfamiliar Florida. The quiet speculating had
continued when, in February, husband had returned without wife. This had not, the Baptist sisters assured each other, been the original plan. They tried to imagine the Julia they knew traveling by herself the rest of the long way to Michigan and announced that they could do no such thing. The fact that they knew her not well at all did not enter their minds.

In the strong current of whispers such as these, Chase thought it neither appropriate nor kind for the woman to descend from the train only to find herself alone on the platform. He understood her to be one of the two most important women in Sampson's life. Miss Thankful Sampson had been the other, and Chase had spent much of the week previous imagining the shock that it must have been for Sampson to discover his sister's still body Monday morning last. It was his task, Chase had felt and would often feel, during the years of his employ to Sampson, to allow the man's best foot to come forward, to encourage somehow his employer's true heart and mind to reveal themselves in his behavior, and so now, for the second time in the hour, he bent at the waist and reminded Sampson that he would be wanting to meet Mrs. Sampson at the train.

Sampson looked up from the spread of papers on his desk, and Chase had the distinct sense that the man did not at first recognize to whom the face he encountered belonged.

Although there had been much to celebrate in the years since the Celestials' arrival, there had also been some difficulties and it was not yet clear which way the scales would tip. Gilbert and Sullivan had collaborated for the first time; the first typewriters had been mass produced; and in North
Adams, G. W. Nottingham had collected the births for 1872 and discovered some three hundred, bringing the local population to upward of fourteen thousand. The North Adams Gas Light Company was building another gasholder, with a capacity of thirty-three thousand cubic feet, and the strawberry festival at the Methodist church had netted thirty dollars. Sampson had added two more stories to his factory's rear and had refurbished his already handsome offices. He had contracted two additional groups of Chinese workers, the first of forty-eight and the second of twenty-two, and their assimilation was proceeding without unhappiness and with a yearly savings of forty thousand dollars. Some of them had taken Sampson's name. Copies of their portraits all went into a second handsome leather album with brass hinges that sat with the first on a shelf in Sampson's Wilson House study.

But in August of the previous year, one Celestial had died of consumption, and in February of the current one, another had succumbed to typhoid fever after two months of illness, and not all of the boys agreed with Charlie's decision to inter the latest unlucky soul in lot 507 of the Hillside Cemetery, which he had purchased upon his own decision at a cost of thirty dollars, and several of them had voiced their opinions forcefully. None of them had been much reassured or swayed by his explanation that it was best, when in America, to do as the Americans did. Surely, one of the cooks pointed out, the foreman had not forgotten that none of them were, in fact, American?

And although Grant's reelection had been handily won, the Republican Party had split, resulting in the defection
of many liberal Republicans to Grant's opponent,
New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley, who died before the electoral college could cast its votes. His party's platform opened with “First, we recognize the equality of all men.”

By 1872, the number of Crispin lodges had fallen to a mere fifty-two. And when the sixth Grand Lodge met in Philadelphia the following year, the few delegates who managed to be present attended, as Brother Frank Foster put it, “the funeral of the K.O.S.C.”

Jimmy O'Brien had just sold out the Tweed Ring in New York City. The Chicago fire had left ninety-eight thousand people homeless, two hundred fifty dead, and more than seventeen thousand buildings destroyed, and Catherine O'Leary would spend years trying to refute the rumor that it was her cow that kicked over the lantern that began the blaze. The Chinese joss house in Weaverville, California, that had brought young Charlie such comfort when he had been a resident in that forsaken place had burned down yet again, but this time there seemed no one interested enough to oversee its rebuilding, so it would remain a ruin for decades until the local historical society would raise the funds to resurrect it as a museum, of interest to only the most comprehensive of tourists.

And despite acceptance of the Celestials by most of the villagers, including their attendance of a grand and festive celebration of the Chinese New Year for two consecutive years, there had also been some scattered violence, mostly in response to Sampson's April 1871 decision to replace his white overseer in the bottoming room with Charlie Sing.
Sampson had refused to acknowledge the violence, insisting that Mr. Sing was the better man for the job and that anyone who said otherwise could not call himself a Christian, but Charlie had made certain to include some of the more outspoken objectors on his Thanksgiving turkey list both that year and the following one, and had suggested to Sampson that he abstain from his desire to begin hiring white men to mix in with the Chinese workers on the bottoming floor. Sampson had held off, but only until midsummer of the present year, when, he said, he could resist no longer. The expected grumblings about his decision came not from the white laborers but from the Chinese themselves. They already had so little, they protested to Charlie. He was their foreman. It was their interests for which he was meant to care. Did he think it fair that the already small place they could call their own was to be invaded even further?

By March of 1873, the cooperative shoe factory was advertised for rent and would never again appear in the city directory, and Charlie steeled himself for the display of further resentments against his kind.

And so, by the day Mrs. Sampson was to return from her long stay away, the mood in the town and factory was not a stable one. Things were going to happen, though nobody could guess what. Even Lucy Robinson, in the scar tissue of her healed wounds, could feel a change in weather coming.

Eleven days previous, Ida had delivered the mail to the Chinese boys at the start of their lesson. She handed Charlie the letter postmarked from Michigan and said too
evenly, “More news from the Midwest,” then watched his reaction with care.

She had told no one that the foreman had received three letters from Michigan in Julia Sampson's absence, but letters passed through many hands and by that point, only a year into the postman's tenure, everyone knew that this postman's indiscretion would keep him from rising any higher than the position he currently held.

Charlie avoided her eyes with a small bow and slid the letter into his work tunic's inner pocket, where it kept company with Julia's previous missives, the corners of all four envelopes poking occasionally at his chest. It did not escape Ida's notice that he was already moving toward the door before the final hymn had been sung, and when Alfred met her at the factory's gate to walk her home, she made small fun of him, her voice filled with mockery and impatience and nothing like good nature.

Ida had, over the last three years, taken much note of Charlie and his ways with his charges and the townsfolk. He had proved to be all that she had thought he might and more. He was calm and deliberate, a careful worker and a thoughtful speaker. He reminded her of her father, though she would not share that with him for years.

Charlie walked, as he did almost every evening now, to Natural Bridge, the latest letter humming against his chest. He had not argued with Julia when she had told him in late December that the trip was a necessity and that it would be, of course, unwise for him to contact her while she was away, but his center had felt as it had when he was a boy making
his careful way across the bridge that spanned his hometown river. The woven rope bridge had given and swayed beneath his cupped feet, sending his heart into the air and down again. When her first letter had ended with the news that she would be extending her trip indefinitely by going to Michigan, he had sunk to the snow-covered ground, not rising until his pants were soaked through.

None of her letters had offered anything resembling full explanations for her behavior, and he had found it difficult not to think of her trip as flight. He had tried as their intimacy had developed to keep his dignity and reserve, but sometimes during their moments together he had not been able to keep the force from his embrace, and he had felt her brace herself as if against a strong wind.

Her letters were long, and he read them so often that he had committed them to memory. If, as a child, she had complained of cold, her mother would say, “But it doesn't make you any warmer to complain of it.” She had loved for her father to carry her “pickaback.” Charlie had not an inkling of the word's meaning, but loved it nevertheless. Raisins and peppermints had been her favorites, though she was happy to settle for sticks of striped barley candy or something called the “Salem Gibraltar,” which she would have to explain more fully when she saw him next. Her family's farm had been in a valley where, in winter, the sun set at four and the snow sometimes drifted so that they could not see their nearest neighbor for weeks, but she and her sisters had had an unused shed as their castle, music had been made by rain on the roof, and abandoned
plows had been transformed into litters carried by servants dressed in satin. Her favorite tales had included
Jack the Giant Killer
,
Aladdin
, and
Red Riding Hood
. Her sister had several of them still, and one of the many pleasures of her stay had been the surprise of rediscovery.

By the time Charlie reached the mouth of the path to the small gorge, it was growing dark. His impatience prevented him from climbing the full way to the bridge, and he settled behind the large boulders. It was unlikely anyone would be coming this way at this hour, but in that event, he wanted to be out of sight.

The letter was disappointingly thin, but the sight of her small, tidy penmanship thrilled him and the slow speed at which he had to read bothered him not at all.

My Celestial,

The weather here is too unbearable for me to write much—the letter paper dampens almost immediately, the pen nib works not a whit—so just an inadequate note to assure you that I am thinking of you and I trust you are thinking of me. Although I miss so much of our village, there has been something quiet and lovely about my stay here. I never cared much for machinery, and so much of North Adams seems like one giant, buzzing factory. (Remember the view we had of all those smokestacks from the north hill?) I did, of course, out of necessity accustom myself to the noise so that it became like a silence to me, but now that I am here, where the factories have been replaced with the sounds of hog farms
and chicken coops, it is hard not to feel that all that machinery is like some overgrown, spoilt child. I am sure I am not making myself clear. No matter. Suffice it to say that I would rather sit under the trees and hear the birds sing than have a whole handful of gold or silver. I have read in a fairy-tale book of people who could understand what the birds were saying. Wouldn't that be wonderful?