Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  At first, the only concerns were selfish ones: Chang and I had had a tour of Europe scheduled to take us to Amsterdam, but under the circumstances we had no way of embarking. That would be a huge financial strain (also, I had wanted to take myself away from the temptation of Adelaide for a time). Furthermore, we had traded in all of our dollars for Confederate money, which proved to be of less value as the years went on. That, however, was not the worst of it.

  Because Wilkes County was sheltered from the world at large by the Blue Ridge Mountains—and since our town saw no major battles—it was written that Wilkesboro remained untroubled by war. Like most details published in accounts of my life with Chang, what is on the page does not correspond with reality. Wilkesboro proved a perfect illustration of how the war transformed Southern society into anarchy.

  Though North Carolina was slow to secede, her sons were quick to decide not to fight against other Southerners, and so when war came, Wilkes County sent her boys to battle on the side of the Confederacy. The quickly formed Wilkes Valley Guards made camp on the hill above the old tanyard just outside Union Square (already rechristened “Westwood Park” once the word “Union” fell out of Southern favor) before marching out on the first of May 1861, numbering 200 volunteers strong.

  The fear in Adelaide, and it was a fear we all felt for our children and selves, lent my sister-in-law the fetching aspect of someone who has just been jolted awake from a long and stimulating dream. As for me, I was fifty, and I had grown to disdain the man age was making me. Bodily chores brought nervous depletion. Mornings, for example, shaving would tire me, because of the sight of our faces in the mirror, and getting dressed and undressed hit me in the same way at dawn and at bedtime. Our clothes and bedclothes had snared in their fibers the rankness of old men, and also stains of sweat. Moldiness rolled out from my own body, too, from my hollows and underbrush—and the sourness blew worse off of Chang. Unwelcome sniffs of myself and twin disheartened me a few times every day.

  Before long, Wilkes County gave 1,500 men to the fight, more than any other county in the state except for Mecklenburg. Only 250 would return alive, and not many of these survivors came home unharmed. Those who fought from Wilkes were rich and poor, slave owners and not, young and not-so-young, soldiering for tradition, and that they did so in such numbers left the town vulnerable.

  Union soldiers, escaping from Confederate prisons like the one in Salsbury, often wound up in Wilkesboro, and whichever runaway Yankees who did not skulk in the dark of the night toward the Federal lines in Tennessee lingered to loot our town. In this, the Union escapees were joined by Confederate deserters, who saw in our small mountain community a matchless safe haven. Before long, Wilkesboro. became a sanctuary for rogues both Union and Confederate, a tie between North and South.

  Meanwhile, I corresponded with the head of North Carolina Ladies for Temperance Society, Winston-Salem’s white-haired Mrs. Appleby. This woman, the widow of a well-to-do cobbler, told me my fame would shine a great light of attention on the cause. We wrote letters daily.

  I learned from this widow. Dyed in the wool of American life, alcohol is what had brought the nation to war, and led to the ruination of Wilkesboro. Would sober adults have trained their guns on their brothers? The principal cause of war, and also of cowardly desertion, was the self-inflicted state of stupefaction in which men lived. I lent my name to the Temperance Society’s literature.

  I was explaining all this to my twin and our wives on the morning of the day in 1864 when I was finally to meet Mrs. Appleby in person. Later that afternoon I was to address a gathering she had planned to boost membership in the society. After breakfast, Chang and I and our wives were in the living room facing each other on our two couches. Sarah had our little son William on her lap—he had been born in February 1861, so he must have been about three years old—and she was combing his hair. Since the war had come to Wilkesboro, our income had been infrequent and limited, and taxes were high. The town itself was depleted from the looting. Now even legitimate Confederate troops passing through the area took whatever they needed from the population. One scamp robbed Parson Hodge of his gold watch on his way home from church. Still, I felt good talking about the Ladies for Temperance Society now, better than I had felt about any conversation I had had with Sarah, Chang, or even Adelaide in quite some time.

  “It made so much sense, and so when Mrs. Appleby asked me to speak, I answered, ‘Yes, yes, anything I can do to help.’ Drinking is evil,” I said, “a sin, the devil’s eructation.”

  Chang snorted. Sarah balanced our boy ungracefully on her lap and fussed with his hair; her own was a gray-blond tangle. At Sarah’s side, Adelaide brought a finger to her mouth and began to chew on its cuticle. With the added bulk of her body, the clean, soft rolls of skin brimming sweetly over the top of her dress were like clouds disappearing into the horizon.

  “Sit still now, Will,” said Sarah, dragging a comb through our boy’s wet black ruff—she was dressing him up to attend his father’s speech at the Temperance Society. My son was round, his features still indistinct. “Smile, William,” I said, and showed him what I thought a good smile should look like. He continued to squirm on his mother’s lap.

  “Stop it, Will,” said Sarah. “You know Mommy’s stomach can’t take any rudeness, now.”

  Adelaide stared at her sister struggling to groom the boy, and I guessed what my brother’s wife must have been thinking: Someone as awkward as Sarah has no chance of making her son look refined.

  “Will!” Sarah said, pointing in my direction. “Do you want your father to make you stop?” The boy stole a glance at me before looking timidly at the floor. The role of a father is not only to provide, I thought, but to play the frightening villain.

  I smiled at William, and tried without success to catch his eye. I admit that I loved my children unequally. Each successive one dimmed the glow of fatherhood a little. Not that every child at birth was anything less than the root of my attention. I did feel a warmth with each nativity, but as my children grew, their attitude toward me would shade over, their loving faces would take on a disturbed look when they began to realize the sort of father and uncle they had. This change happened every time, to each child. Except Katherine.

  “Don’t be scared, now, Will,” said Adelaide in a soothing voice, taking an interest in her sister’s child. “You don’t want to make Aunt ‘Laide grab you and start tickling.” At this, the boy smiled widely. It was one of the few times I understood one of my children fully.

  Adelaide, laughing along with William, seemed so perfect for my touch. Do not think of her, I thought. Instead focus on the evils of drink. “Would you like to come to my speech?” I asked.

  Chang said, “Oh, I will come.” He was trying to be funny. His shoes tapped mine, whether deliberately or not, I could not say.

  “Thank you, Chang, very much,” I said. “But I was asking your wife.” I noticed Sarah had suddenly stopped brushing our son’s hair to look up at me.

  “Even with little William attending,” I said to Adelaide, “the post chaise has room for you.” I tried to speak naturally, to everyone in the room. “I’d like as large an audience as possible.”

  Addie looked for a time out the window at the blue boneset flowers growing beyond our porch. “I suppose I could go with you’all,” Adelaide said, with all the warmth of a frosty Northern creek.

  Lately, so that we could keep to the safety of our home, we had begun to eat a lot of corn and hogs from our own farm, but recently our Governor Vance had gotten Robert E. Lee to send Brigadier General Hoke’s two regiments and one cavalry squadron into the western mountain counties to deal with the deserters and escapees and make the town safer. With the news that a Captain McMillan’s cavalry had turned Wilkesboro into an armed camp, Sarah, Adelaide, little William, Chang, and I ventured out into town and on toward Winston-Salem and Mrs. Appleby’s Temperance Society. It would take us half the day to get there. Adelaide sat on the far side of me in
the post chaise.

  We had to ford shallow Cub Creek because the little footbridge had been barricaded by Confederate soldiers. This slowed us a bit, and once we got across Oakwoods Road and onto Main Street we saw servicemen heaping their armaments in the courthouse yard; just beyond that, the whitewashed old jail saw a line of soldiers in front of its thick black iron door, and from its windows jutted the outstretched arms of too many new inmates crowded inside. The army had taken the town back from the looters, but the street was as empty of townsfolk as it had been before the soldiers’ arrival.

  I barely recognized Wilkesboro. As food and other supplies had grown scant, and the conscription act had taken those few able men younger than thirty-five who had not already joined the fight, crops had gone untended, anarchy had sprouted, and Unionist feeling had begun to emerge in Wilkesboro’s dark corners.

  And so on this day, the Southern soldiers patrolled the streets of Wilkesboro in their gray uniforms, looking at us with queer expressions on their faces as our post chaise rolled slowly by. The soldiers, known as “butternuts,” could not hide their worry behind the long beards they all seemed to have, no matter what age they were—and they were men of all ages. A few of these servicemen carried off goods that were obviously not rightfully theirs. One young Confederate infantryman was lugging a plush red chair along the dusty road, and another, wearing for some reason a Union soldier’s little blue cap, was appreciating some poor woman’s necklace against the gray sky.

  At Westwood Park, in the shade of the Tory tree—an oak so named because loyalists were hanged there in the Revolutionary War almost one hundred years earlier—several dusky woolen blankets lay covering dead bodies. As we made our deliberate way out of town and toward Cairo, the even smaller community on the outskirts of Wilkesboro, I saw a wounded young man in Union dress bleeding from the head and lying on one of those dusky blankets. He was holding onto the ankles of one of his blond Confederate captors, pulling at the Rebel’s pant leg, and I thought of the reports of wounded soldiers lingering on the battlefield for up to five days before being moved to a hospital.

  I often had a nightmare about the war. I dreamt of a line of our advancing soldiers twisting away from a storm of gunfire even as they ran toward it, attempting to shield off death with their forearms. In my dream the wounded Confederates did not drop; in the haze of gunsmoke they came asunder: each of the killed stood cleaved down the middle. And those cut apart made their wayward rounds, a gang of halves in a tipsy dance.

  At about six in the evening we arrived at the Temperance Society meeting center (also Mrs. Appleby’s home) in Winston-Salem, a large brick house approached between a corridor of tall-stalked maples. A wall ran the length of her green property.

  Mrs. Appleby opened the door and smiled a curious familiar smile. She had the posture of a sickle, and she searched my eyes for something. She leaned toward me, putting a hand over one side of her face, as if that would shield her near-whisper from my brother’s ear: “Mr. Eng, I am pleased you could make it, very pleased.” Sarah and Adelaide fidgeted behind Chang and me—my wife carried my sleeping son over her shoulder—and I performed the introductions. Mrs. Appleby looked nervously at Chang.

  The living room was spacious and quite dark with the shades drawn. All the furniture had been cleared away. Several rows of lecture chairs looked toward a podium by the fireplace.

  The North Carolina Ladies Union for Temperance was ten old women strong: Bible readers and needlepointers, tidy Southern widows without vice, these ladies tapped their laps gently with their pink fans. They wore no jewelry whatsoever, but that may have been due to the war.

  “Ladies, this is Eng.” Mrs. Appleby spoke with the slow gravity of someone trying to impart some message without spelling it out. She looked like she’d been born sometime before Thomas Jefferson took office.

  We arrived as the ladies were enjoying their opium tea, which they drank from the Temperance Union’s large yellow teacups. One old woman who looked like Mrs. Appleby—small and nervous, bent over—drifted over to us with a tray of teacups. Chang refused. I accepted, as did our wives. After we took her tea, the woman retreated backward, smiling and nodding her head, without looking at us directly.

  “I am here to affirm the flagitiousness of alcohol,” I said from the podium when it was my turn to speak. To be addressing a crowd, and not because of the accident of my double-birth, was a pleasure. “It does not matter how many livers one has—it is hurtful to drink!” I stroked the back of my brother’s head gently, and it gave him a start. He gazed at me under a furrowed brow. I may have bubbled with glee involuntarily.

  As I laid out my errorless case against drink, my brother shifted closer to me, to take his arm off my shoulder and play with a strand of loose thread on his coat sleeve. We were nearly facing each other now.

  As the lovely tea’s relaxant energies took effect, I decided not to mention the new scientific documentation about the influence of ethanol on the brain stem—the black bubble effect. I began instead to recite. A few words by Frances Anne Kemble were among my favorite in the language, and I may have swelled my chest with pride as I declared: “A sacred burden is this life ye bear/Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly/Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly/ Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin”—here I intoned deeply for emphasis—“but onward, upward, till the goal ye win!”

  The image of Frances Kemble herself floated now before my eyes—I pictured her in a flowery bonnet—and I pointed to the cups about the room as I soliloquized: “Here’s that which is too weak to be a sinner—honest water, which ne’er left man in the mire!” I placed my thumbs under the lapels of my jacket, a Siamese version of Lincoln at Gettysburg. I tucked my chin into my chest, I raised a fist and shook it. “And nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy!” I said as Chang extracted from his coat pocket his little silver-plated flask. He was unscrewing the top.

  “Maidens of Temperance,” I cried, augmenting my words with sweeping arm gestures. “What we needs do—”

  Mrs. Appleby, sitting directly in front of the lectern, hissed at me, “Sir, your brother.”

  I did not look at Chang. Neither did I look at the faces of this modest audience. What I did was close my eyes, and the dark I found on the inward side of my eyelids was encouraging.

  “O, that men should put an enemy in their mouths,” I was yelling now, “to steal away from their brains!”

  The sound of my brother’s eager swallowing did agitate me, I confess. As did the frail feminine protesting of the gathered members of the Temperance Society. And also the awareness of the cool metal flask an inch from my cheek I found bothersome. Do not get angry, I told myself. He was exactly the kind of man I was trying to save, my poor brother lost to alcohol. To distract myself from the whispers, and to numb my anxiety, I screamed: “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink!” My eyes squeezed shut, I was now simply gushing lines, not connecting them, nor worrying about the logic of segue. “He bids the ruddy cup go round/Till sense and sorrow both are drowned!”

  At this point a dull knocking sound got my attention. I opened my eyes. An ancient woman of some breeding, her enormous bosom splayed at her midsection, was assaulting Chang with the curved end of her cane. The sun had set on my speaking engagement.

  The woman said “Stop” as she swung at Chang, and he was laughing “Stop” as he checked her blows with his forearm. With his other hand, my brother kept the flask to his lips.

  Mrs. Appleby and a number of her fellow activists pulled this old woman off Chang and sat her down. Mrs. Appleby waved her fan toward the woman’s reddened face, for she looked faint.

  My brother was grinning around his flask, but his eyes were black and sad as those of a gelding, and a shudder passed through him and into me.

  “Why are you doing this?” I whispered bitterly.

  “I am thirsty.”

  In the audience Adelaide sat laughing—at Chang or me I did not know
. But it was apparent that she did not feel enough of an affinity for either of us even to experience shame at our shame. The women of the Temperance Society ran about fretting and muttering, Sarah was blushing scarlet as she hid my son’s eyes from the spectacle, and Adelaide was laughing.

  I thought that was the low point of my life in North Carolina. I was wrong.

  No matter how often the new government sent forces to extract all the outlaws from Wilkesboro, Northern and Southern renegades would converge again on Wilkesboro as soon as the soldiers would leave, and once more looters would come. We had nowhere to sell our crops.

  It was impossible for us to travel away from the Confederacy for any amount of time, and few people in the South were interested in seeing Siamese twins, attached at the chest; the populace had more important concerns. We managed to tour only once in the last three years of the war, and that tour was not lucrative enough to justify its expense.

  Nothing that was made outside of the South could be obtained easily, thanks to the suffocating blockade. And Lincoln had declared all slaves in the rebellious states free. In practical terms, this proclamation had no direct impact. Lincoln was sly enough to free slaves only in the Confederate states. Still, we now knew that if the Union won, the abolition of slavery would follow. And after the Battle of Antietam, it looked more and more like the Union would win eventually.

  This meant we were certain to lose our slaves, either by governmental decree or simply because we would not be able to afford them for long. And to add insult, the final Emancipation Proclamation sanctioned the recruitment of blacks into the Union army’s United States Colored Troops, which gave the uncomfortable impression of slaves fighting their masters. Thom, who tended to our children, never mentioned the proclamation, and neither did any of our other slaves. But everyone knew both slavery and the rebellion were doomed.

  By now Adelaide had taken to calling our home “Lonely Trap,” instead of Trap Hill. I knew the war would come to affect us personally before long. I wondered if I would ever be brave enough to reengage Adelaide in any way. I realized I had something in my heart like the corked vigor of an unopened bottle of champagne. I did not know if I could keep it down forever.