Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Concentrate on the work at hand, I thought. And not Adelaide’s hand.

  One young slave boy sweated along with his elders. Piles of grass and rocks grew higher and higher to the left of our tillage as we and the slaves made progress in the harrowing of this dark brown soil. Thom leaned on his cane as he walked up and down the row of Negroes and bade them to work harder. Even as they toiled, my slaves were watching Chang and me in wonder. I pitied them for the hopelessness of their position. And fleetingly I thought that the most awful thing about slavery was this: Servitude was brought upon them only because they were different, as my brother and I were. They were different, though of course also dangerous. That was the point of the whole situation, I remembered. From the bloody insurrections at Santo Domingo, to the short-lived rebellion led by the Negro Gabriel in Virginia in 1800, to the conspiracy of slaves in Charleston in 1822, and especially to the bloody and stubborn Virginia insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831, I was not unaware of the historical evidence. Slaves had to be kept under control. Plus, abolition was a Northern movement, and I had no love of the North, especially after it had given birth to the political party of antiforeign bigots called the Know-Nothings.

  Chang and I worked days on end, morning and afternoon with no rest, and then one Wednesday Chang and I allowed ourselves a late start because our wives’ cousin Emily had come to visit. When we came downstairs that morning, Sarah and Adelaide were already having breakfast with our guest, whom we had never met.

  “Oh, hello, boys,” said Emily. “We were just discussing what a lovely home you’all have, lovely if I may say so.” She was a very wrinkled woman, but you could see the elements of Adelaide’s looks in Emily’s long jawline, thin blond hair, and in the light of her eye. “Won’t you sit with us?” She took a gulp of her tea. “Oh, listen to me, telling you what to do in your own home.”

  Chang and I eased into our chair at the head of the table. Emily sat to the right of us, our wives to the left. Chang reached for Adelaide’s hand, but she did not allow him to take it. “Did you wash yourself before you came down, Chang?” she said. “You smell as healthy as the barnyard.” Then she turned to Cousin Emily. “My sister obviously got the cleaner of the two.”

  “I never knew Wilkes County could be so lovely,” Emily said. “In my day we never had such lovely tea. Mind if I ask where you get this lovely tea?”

  I was the only one who noticed the look in Chang’s eye. It reminded me of the squirm of a fish after it’s hooked and hauled into the morning.

  “We buy our tea in town,” said Sarah. “Just like everybody else.”

  “Really, it’s lovely,” said Emily. “Last time I came to see you‘all in old Wilkes—it’s better than an old mansion here, your lovely home. You’all know I’m simple folk, we have a small . . . I’ve heard so much about you two boys—oh, goodness, I’ve finished all my tea, do you mind, Addie, if I have a sip of yourn? Anyhow, I’ve heard so much about you boys. Never thought any Yates would have such a lovely home—”

  “Feel free to stay as long as you want, Emily,” I said. “After a carriage scare like yours, you must like to relax a bit.”

  She was finishing Adelaide’s tea. “That’s very kind of you, Eng. You’re Eng, correct? I thought so. And you’re Chang then? Oh, as plain as day, you are. What a silly question, if you’re Eng, then you’re—”

  “You’all want to know how you tell them apart?” Adelaide said. “One makes you angry when he talks, the other’s a little better on the nerves, but he tosses around so much Shakespeare it can put you to sleep. If you’re angry and asleep, it’s a sure bet they’re probably both talking.”

  Had circumstances thrown Adelaide into a different life, into the drawing rooms of London, say—and lent her a bit of a refashioning—perhaps her natural wit would have garnered her some admiration, and maybe her long face—had she been given the benefit of doubt accorded heiresses—would have been considered a fetching irregularity. And now she traced her collarbone with the tip of her finger.

  Sarah was grimacing. “I think you may have got it wrong, Adelaide, I think you may have got it the wrong way round about these husbands.”

  Emily waved her hands in the air, trying to wipe away any disparaging words about Chang and me. “Well, either twin, thank you for your—I appreciate your lovely hospitality—don’t you want your tea, Sarah?”

  “It doesn’t agree with my stomach, in fact I think I may go up and—”

  “In that case, can I have just a sip of yourn?” Emily looked at Chang and me mischievously as she drank from my wife’s teacup. Then she said, “I don’t mind telling you, I for one don’t think anything of it that they married you twins. If you can make my cousins happy, I always say. And that’s all we talked about this morning before you came down, Addie especially. ‘Well, Eng says this, Eng says that’—I thought you were her husband, and not you, Chang.”

  Adelaide couldn’t help wearing a mischievous half smile that seemed to say I’d be able to crack my desire for her. I had to check my breathing.

  Later that afternoon, Chang barely helped at all when we bent in unison to pick up stones, letting me carry the bulk of their cragged weight. Thom came over to us and said, “Well, this will all be cleared soon, masters.” He used a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. “We’ve got almost half the land cleared since breakfast.” Even amid the sunshine and sweet-scented grass, he smelled of the very old, and of labor. “Why don’t you rest, masters?” He was the only slave whose pants fit well enough to cover his ankles.

  “The whole point, Thom,” I huffed as my brother and I struggled with some underbrush, “is to work quickly and not to stop. That is what you should tell the others.” Chang and I kept pulling at the underbrush, the soil scattering darkly against our boots. I had done most of the hard jerking. I looked at my twin askance, thinking, It is no wonder Adelaide is always snapping at him.

  Just then the young Negro boy walked to one of the piles of rock holding a few pebbles.

  “All right now, son!” Thom called to the child.

  “Who is that?” I asked Thom.

  “My sister’s boy.” The old slave let out a chuckle.

  Chang and I stopped working for a moment, to catch our breath. “I did not know you had a nephew,” I said.

  “Well, Master Eng, I do,” he said, and walked up among the other slaves.

  Thom may have whispered something in passing to one of the Negroes working a few yards ahead of us—a vigorous adolescent slave who flung rocks to his side with ease—because the young man laughed aloud after Thom walked by. I had the irrational thought that maybe all the slaves, with their voodoo, somehow knew of my feelings for my brother’s wife, of my stupid hope that the smile she had given me before had a sign in it, that the strokes of her hand on the Ivory Eagle and afterward had been intentional. I shook those thoughts from my head and continued to work, but I had trouble looking at Chang as I did so, and I suppose that was due to a kind of guilt.

  Later, when the sun was soon to set, my brother and I went to work on building the fence for this new parcel of land. We chopped wood, something we were renowned for doing well. We had invented the “double-chop” method of woodcutting—a technique that is used today across North Carolina whenever two men want to fell a tree. I’d strike with my ax angled in one direction, and Chang would strike the other side of the trunk by slanting his at the opposite angle. This practice allowed us to cut straight through the tree, neither brother needing to change the angle of his ax. When cutting, I would imagine chopping through our band every time.

  On this evening, our method was not effective as usual because my brother was hitting the tree halfheartedly. My work had created a wedge that was twice as wide as the one made by my brother.

  After Chang gave a particularly weak chop, I looked at him. “What is it?”

  “Before, she touch my hand,” he said, as if we had been in the middle of a conversation. He took a perfunctory hew at the trunk.r />
  “What?” I asked, swinging heartily.

  “Before she touch my hand, at dinner, in mornings, wherever, she holding my hand like a wife.” His face looked devoid of emotion. “Adelaide.” He laughed, almost. “Now she pulling it away,” he said, and took his biggest cut of the evening.

  This absurd thought shot through my brain: How dare he think of her.

  “Maybe she have eye on somebody else. On American man!” he cried. My heart skipped a beat even at the mention of this. I imagined her nuzzling some tall redheaded American beau with thick sideburns.

  “No!” I said. “No, no, that is not possible.” We quit our chopping.

  The veins in his neck showing now, he said, “What else explain it, brother? I know she will never love me again. Before we laugh together; now—” He took another cut at the tree. Wood chips jumped through the air. This was the anger and heartache that would before long lead him to the bottle.

  “But you have—relations at night,” I said. I truly was trying to be a good brother.

  “She want children,” he spat. “It mean nothing.”

  My mood brightened. “You do not think that she will ever love you?”

  “No,” he said. “You see the way things is, why you have to ask me?”

  “And so—you really think she would love another?”

  “Yes! What I saying to you all this time?”

  My great joy, like an ax at chop, cut through all my thoughts. She would never love him; even he admitted it. I made him repeat his fears several times. I thought of nothing but Addie for the rest of the evening.

  That night, when I was alone with Sarah and Chang, I could not stop talking about Adelaide, though I knew I shouldn’t be doing so. I looked for any excuse to mention her—(“Do you remember,” I found myself saying to my wife and brother, apropos of nothing, “what Adelaide said today about circuses, about how the real oddities are the people who pay to see other people?”)

  Though I lived so close to my brother, and secretly wanted his wife, Chang and I saw the world completely differently. It was obvious that my twin, for his part, had visions of regaining the Adelaide who had existed at the time of their wedding, the Adelaide who had yet to cool toward him; meanwhile, I had been pining for an Adelaide who after years still did not exist—the Adelaide who would one day love me. And the result of all this? Chang’s vision suffered from seeing too much of Adelaide as she really was, and mine from seeing not enough.

  The next evening, at slumbertime, Adelaide, Chang, and I were in bed in our main room, and much as they had been fighting earlier, my brother and his wife were having relations, proving nothing more—I was consoling myself—than her desperate want of children. Again, candlelight flashed on their bodies.

  I deliberately placed my forearm close to the thick, fleshy part of Adelaide’s leg, but her hand did not brush mine. My band flexed and stretched as far as it would go, my face near enough to my brother’s closed eyes that I could feel his breath hot in my ear, I left my hand close to Addie for some time, in the perfect spot for her to touch it if she’d wanted. But my hand remained untouched—nothing against my discouraged knuckles but cool naked air.

  I decided to bring that hand to graze hers, which was now flat on the mattress and propping her up. I did so, and she moved away from me as quickly as she could without alerting my shut-eyed brother. Adelaide did not even look at me.

  So I had been wrong; it had never been more than a mistake!

  She’d never intended to touch me, and I’d misread her smile. I, positioned under the window, tried now to concentrate on the song of the wind as I was rocked back and forth. I did not want to watch. My heart had grown a canker.

  I brushed my hand against hers again. She did not move it as quickly as she had the first time; I was unsatisfied with this Pyrrhic victory. All the pleasure I had earlier gleaned from such accidental caresses was gone.

  Chang moaned, red blotches on his cheek and neck.

  I had to take hold of her hand, actually squeeze her flesh. It would have to be executed in the same way as a military operation.

  —But what if she pulled away? To grasp her hand, to squeeze it—this would not be a brushing of skin, it would be an undeniably intentional act. If she rebuffed it, if she screamed, all would be lost. I began literally to shake with fear. As well as a wretched person, I was a coward. I couldn’t do it.

  At the count of ten, I’ll place my hand atop hers, I told myself. And squeeze it when Chang isn’t looking.

  If you do not, I swore to myself, I will kill myself in the morning.

  Ten blinks of an eye rushed by and vanished. I was in agony.

  After a minute and twenty-two seconds, each counted to the rhythm of a pounding heart, and while my brother contorted his face in oblivious bliss, I resigned myself to the fact that there was no way I could reach out and take Adelaide’s hand.

  But reach and take it is just what I did.

  She made a shocked little noise, and pulled it from mine, almost losing her balance in the process. Chang did not notice, his mouth still open. Adelaide returned her hand to its position on the mattress.

  She would not look at me; she was gritting her teeth.

  Scarcely in control of my actions, in a new-sprung surge of courage I took her hand again. I noticed it was trembling, and I squeezed it over and over, like a man in an epileptic fit. Adelaide made a feeble, halfhearted attempt to wrest it from my grasp, but finally she did not struggle. She looked me squarely in the eye like a statue, her mouth open slightly, the candlelight dancing on her face. She squeezed my hand in her own.

  I was in a state of ecstasy. I listened blissfully to the wind, trying to separate its music from that of her breath. I held her hand.

  After a few short seconds, Chang was about to open his eyes. Adelaide sensed this, I think, because she began to pull away. I gave her hand a last, lingering clasp. She wrenched it from my grip.

  The happiness that had flooded my heart now drained away. What I had gained tonight may be lost forever. I had been lucky to summon up the audacity this time, but would I again, and when would I next get the chance? I feared the ground I had just gained was forfeited.

  Poor Chang opened his eyes and petted his wife’s head.

  Adelaide held her fingers far from mine, and, the candle put out, she rolled over to sleep beside her husband, who now was positioned between us and facing me. In the cool blue dark, Adelaide and I eyed each other over the rising and falling side of my brother’s body. She drew her lips into her mouth. She blinked a few times as she stared at me, and then she looked up at the ceiling, gathering a bit of blanket in her hands in an absentminded way. She would not look at me any longer.

  For some time after, I did not get much sleep. Often, after either Sarah or Adelaide had blown out the candle, depending on with whom we lay, which itself was determined by the days of the week, I would watch the snuffed candlewick until it had quit smoldering, and listen to the seething wax even after it ended its tinny plopping on the tray. I would look at the bodies in bed with me. When I did dream, it was of remorse and guilt and hankering for another touch. Days were no easier.

  I knew two Adelaides: my brother’s bride whom I saw in the sunlight every morning, a woman I stole a conscience-smitten glance at whenever I found myself in a position to address her in a tone neither friendly nor unfriendly; and the other Adelaide, Addie, whose hand I would on very rare occasions have the luck to hold at night, under covers, when I was ashamed even to be looking at all.

  Ours was a silent compact, to clasp hands infrequently and nothing more, least of all to acknowledge it. And then, the next morning, we’d sit at table for breakfast. Chang would say, “Everybody sleep?” and I’d feel like the villain I was.

  Adelaide made a point of smiling and keeping her eyes on Chang. “Yes,” she’d answer. “You ask about sleep so much, you’d think you was Rip Van Winkle.” And I might catch Adelaide stealing a momentary glance at me and my heart wo
uld turn over in regret and bliss.

  If I was never able to know her physically, then I would catalogue all that I could come to know about her: that she was headstrong. Passionate. Cutting. Elegantly long-chinned. That she had been a precocious child given to spontaneous handstands, and that every little boy in Wilkesboro had taken a shine to her in the years before she had grown to her full height. That she enjoyed turkey more than chicken, that her laughter was always loudest on its third trill (“ha, ha, ha”). As for the unknowable turns of her peculiar mind, at least I could come to fathom those attributes that the rest of the world had somehow missed—or, if they had caught them, sneered at—and I could treasure them. Yes, she was coarse sometimes, but, though I wanted to help her lose that coarseness, I became attached even to that quality in her. I was able to have an affectionate silent laugh about it, just as I was able to do with my own foibles. That is what I learned about devotion: The bonds of love are best when you embrace the same outlook in judging your lover’s flaws as you do your own. That is the key to forming the sort of attachment through which one chooses to unite oneself to another human being.

  And that is how my love created an additional person, different from the woman people in Wilkesboro knew as “Adelaide.” I suppose I knew it foolish to spend my life pining for my “Addie,” whom I had invented, made up using as many parts of my personality as her own. Still, I could not help expanding her feverishly to proportions that would seem ridiculous to those who knew the Adelaide familiar to the outside world.

  As for Sarah, I thought I could still be true to my wedding vow if I tried to treat her as a friend, a platonic associate. I was a hypocrite.

  Soon this would all become complicated. I was about to become a father.