The Celestials (28 page)

Sampson furrowed his brow and waved a hand as if clearing the air of something unpleasant. “I am not engaged in courtship with them,” he said impatiently. “They are not objects of my affection. Tell them it is within my rights to replace them all, idle or not.”

Charlie remained silent, yet Sampson looked up as if his foreman had said something reasonable and right. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, tell them all that I am ready to exercise that right.”

Charlie's neck tingled with minute warnings.

“Don't your people hold stock in group responsibility for the individual act and all that?”

Charlie didn't answer. It didn't seem to matter.

“If they do not offer up the father of the child for replacement,” Sampson said, lowering his voice, “I will replace them all.” He gestured toward the closed door behind him and his voice softened. “I cannot go on like this,” he said.

Charlie said nothing.

Sampson's voice returned to its usual tenor. “So, there you are. The choice is theirs,” he said. “As you suggested.”

Charlie stared with such blankness that Sampson asked if he had heard. Charlie bent his head in his usual bow. Had his eyes been open, he might have seen the catchall
basket on the floor containing spare buttons, some old receipts, a small carved dragon, and a Chinese hairpin. But he didn't, and in truth, the only questions he had were for himself. How had he ended up companion to Sampson on one side of a door with Julia and Alice on the other? Who must he hold responsible for that?

“We boys are not as dim as you think,” Alfred said quietly to Ida on their way home.

“Not all,” she said. “This is true.”

It did not seem to him a comment necessary to address. His stride suffered and he appeared to gently lose his way for a moment.

She righted him with a hand to his arm. “Was I too late bringing you to the meeting?” she teased. “Has the hard cider already found its way around you?”

They had taken the long way home, Ida suggesting that they could do with as much of the breeze off the river as possible, and he was quiet and breathed through his mouth as they picked their way past the horse manure outside J. M. Avery's livery stable at the river end of Summer Street. The horses stood in the shade, their impossibly large heads hanging in the late summer heat. Flies gathered in the corners of their heavily lidded eyes. They leaned into each other like tired lovers, one rear fetlock cocked to relieve themselves of some of their own formidable weight.

Ida had never been able to resist a horse, and she slowed, removing a glove to place her palm between forehead and muzzle at the face's broadest part, like an agent of God
distributing blessings. She paused at a well-formed chestnut larger even than the rest. “Hello, good pony,” she said.

Alfred did not take to horses, but the sight of her drawing pleasure from something that gave her so much of it brought back memories of their childhoods. Though they had not always had the other directly in sight, they had spent their childhoods side by side, running in the same pack of children, scolded by the same adults. She had once dared him to ride the Wilburn ponies in the Rappahannock River. He had not wanted to, but he had. The ponies were short, stocky Shetlands, and even ten-year-old Ida and Alfred could easily flatten their feet on the ground as they sat astride them. His pony was black, but beneath the Virginia sun he could see mottled rings of dark brown like a leopard's spots. Ida led the way down the short muddy embankment into the wide river, the horses wearing nothing but halter and lead rope, and he was not prepared for the feel of the small animal under him as it took flight within the water. It was as if the sturdy, warm animal on the dry ground had become a creature of the sea, slippery as a scaled thing. He had not been able to see a way to stay astride such a beast, and so he had not; each time he tried entering the river, he slipped quickly from the pony's back. And so he had settled, finally, for watching her. She had laughed with joy at the swimming pony and the clumsiness of her friend and the goodness of the life they found themselves living, and she had brought to mind the illustrations in his book of myths and legends of strange and marvelous sea women riding the backs of dolphins and whales.

Now, she regloved her hand and rubbed her nose against the chestnut's muzzle one last time.

“Why're you so rough with me?” Alfred asked.

She looked as if she wished she could tether herself to the line of horses.

“I don't mean to be,” she said, wiping her gloves on her skirts.

“But you are,” he said.

She joined him at the end of the street, dust clouding their boots, and took his arm to continue down to the river. “I know,” she said, and then fell silent.

Although above them were the rear lots of J. Boyles's newly built house and the Bloom hostel and R. Hartwick's livery, down in the hollow of the bank, picking their way across the shore's mix of sand and mud and river rocks, both of them felt as though the town and its inhabitants were many hills away.

He stopped at a small sandy outcropping shaded with birches and maples of the most unnatural bent. She walked on a few steps and then stopped to face him.

He said nothing, but she did not turn away. Small fish schooled together in the shallows. Somewhere, a bullfrog made his sounds.

“I like you,” Alfred said, thunder and lightning striking between his ears. “Why do you find me so lacking?”

She did not remove her eyes from him. Her heart was filled with concern at what it had required of him to say such a thing.

“Our lives've been rooted together from the start,” he said. “My mother always said that the best wife is also a best
friend.” He looked at the trees. Their shadows spotted his face. “Maybe we're not best friends, but I guess we might be.”

A cardinal pair swept past and landed on a thin huckleberry branch bent almost to the water. They regarded the humans and took off in different directions.

Ida knew everything he said to be true. She hadn't realized until that moment how much she had counted on him never saying any of this out loud. Because she knew that the obstacle to her love for Alfred was something he could do nothing about and something she could never share.

“Is it just that I am too familiar?” he ventured. His voice was now breaking and the small boy inside was terrible to see. She wished she could take him by the hands, the way his mother did when he was in the grips of his most boyish upset, put her face to his, and tell the truth. It was that he was not familiar enough. No matter what he did or said, he would never be the girl who bricked the path upon which she wished to travel. What exactly was the nature of her love for Lucy? She would've been unable to say. All she knew was that she was her best self in the company of Lucy Robinson.

As headstrong as she was, she could not bring herself to that level of honesty with him. And because her original intent had been to extract his promise to do no damage when it came to Charlie and Mrs. Sampson and that baby, she found herself doing much worse. She did take him by the hands, and she did put her face to his, in order to tell him that all he said was true, and although she did not love him now, she might yet learn to love him.

Although the relief on his face was not complete, when he gave her a brief, shy smile and said, “Well, then,” Ida knew herself to be a hateful person, something heartless clothed in human guise.

Ah Chung and the striking workers voted to return to their machines upon hearing Charlie's news that they were to be replaced. Although Ah Chung himself was for continued defiance, the others were made nervous by this news. They had signed contracts, after all. They had families who were counting on the regular arrival of their sons' earnings. They did not like to imagine their mothers bearing the burdens of village life, or believing their boys to be anything but good and upright sons. And Ah Chung, savvy enough to know when to push and when to align, concurred. He did, however, point out that it was Charlie who had delivered this message, and not just Sampson who benefited from their return to work.

Reading the boys' faces as they took their supper after their vote, Charlie knew that although Sampson had gotten what he desired, there was nothing to celebrate here. Even the cooks dished his food to him in silence.

Perhaps because of his shame, he could not bring himself to relate the second part of Sampson's message. How could he announce to this group that unless a father was named, all of them would be sent away?

In his bunk that night, unhappy boys all around him, sleep eluded him again, and he lay awake astonished at the position in which he found himself. How could he name
a father? How could he not? Was it not better to sacrifice one to save the rest?

He thought of Third Brother. Had it not been better for one of them, at least, to have made a successful arrival on Gold Mountain? What good would it have done to align himself with someone so clearly in the grip of death's long fingers?

From across the aisle Ah Chung's voice rose above the surrounding noises of sleep and dream. “Another sleepless night, Cousin?”

Charlie didn't answer, shame and rage at this young upstart mixing in his gut.

The boy above Ah Chung said, “Who are you talking to?”

“Mr. Foreman is troubled,” Ah Chung answered. “I have a family member in need.”

The boy snorted. “He is not your family.”

“But he says he is.” Ah Chung leaned out of his bunk toward Charlie's. “Cousin. He says you and I are not family. You must set him straight. You must make your authority clear.”

“He's asleep,” the boy said.

Ah Chung settled back down on his bunk. “He is not asleep,” he said.

Charlie could tell both of them were smiling. He remained silent. Had he been in their position, he would have felt the same way. And so, in two days' time, when even the nonstriking workers voted to remove him from control of their finances, he would know the futility of argument. He too would no longer have looked to him as
their best possible delegate, their one-man migrant association. So when they chose a new foreman, he would retreat sadly to his bunk in the middle of the day and say aloud to the empty room, “I have made a mess of things. I am sorry to have shamed us all.”

It would fail to occur to him that this was the position his brother had been in on that boat, and also one with which Julia was more than familiar, the position commonly occupied by most people in this world: voicing their sadnesses into empty rooms, the only consolation the echoes of their own articulations bouncing off the walls. It would fail to occur to him that even Ah Chung lay on this same pallet. So he would grasp no consolation in the apprehension that his misery was a shared one. It would seem to him on that hot August afternoon that he was a solitary man, lost between past and future. For the first time in days, he would sleep.

Chapter Sixteen

By mid-September 1873, the total United States debt was $2,270,000,000. What few green apples embellished the orchards of Hampshire and Franklin Counties had been generally preempted by the worms, and the apple harvest of that locality would prove almost a dead failure.

Boston newspapers reported that soup for the poor in their fair city cost $4,000 the previous year, while refreshments for the city government topped $41,000.

North Adams's water was almost entirely drawn from the Clarksburg Reservoir, and the levels in the north branch of the Hoosac were barely sufficient to drive the mills more than one day in the week at full head.

The
Transcript
of September 11, 1873, ran a front-page article titled “The Age of Suicide,” which claimed that “the habits of the period tend peculiarly to self destruction.” Further articles instructed the paper's readers on “How to be Rich” and the “Treatment of Old Horses.”

At seven in the evening on that night, a terrific explosion of nitroglycerin occurred near the central shaft of the Hoosac Tunnel, resulting in the death of David Bourdon, assistant blaster. The
Transcript
the following week reported that the explosion had been felt in Pittsfield. Bourdon's body was removed the day after death to Canada, his former home, where his family awaited it for proper burial.

And Ah Chung reminded his fellow workers that even the French Canadians took care of their own.

By September 18, they had been back to work for some weeks, though the mood within the bottoming room was as careful as if fox and house cat suddenly found themselves lapping from the same puddle.

Ah Chung was waiting for Charlie to offer some further example of misplaced loyalties and Charlie was determined not to offer anything at all. He turned more and more inward, his shoulders sloped with the effort.

Julia wanted a name. Sampson wanted a name. The Sunday school teachers, who knew practically nothing of the particulars of Charlie's position, seemed to stare at him with open pity. Merchants endeavored to give him his change without touching his hand. The minister at his Methodist church pulled him aside after services to say that he imagined the situation at the factory to be rough and wondered if Charlie would like to unburden himself. Dogs avoided him. He began to feel that if he could manage to allow day to run into day, he could, in the manner of a spirit returning to the Celestial world, disappear almost entirely.