Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  He stepped quickly across the open porch and began talking to my brother and me. “You ain’t from up North, are you?” His voice was high-pitched with excitement. “Name’s Jeff Roda.”

  “No,” we said.

  “You sure are a sight.” His chin to his breastbone, he gazed at us with a bewildered grimace. “You ain’t Northerners, now?”

  “No. We is Chang,” my brother said. “And Eng,” I said. “Of Wilkesboro.”

  “This is my first trip to a city suchlike Wilkesboro,” he said. “I heard about you big-town folk. You’all grow them weird in Wilkesboro, I always knowed it.” He had the faint light in his eye of suspicions confirmed. “I can only imagine how they grows them up North.”

  The way this young man plucked at his red hair made me think of the littlest of children. “I like you fellers from the start,” he said. “You want to come to Kansas?” He must have seen our apprehension, because quickly he continued: “We’re going to Lawrence to set things right in that ... hotbed of abolitionism.” The way he said the word “hotbed” made it obvious the phrase was not his; moreover, his dirty face and his manner indicated that he was too poor to have any slaves of his own. But his emotion stirred me. It is not often you know simply by seeing a stranger’s face that he would kill or die for a cause or a comrade. And I believe that is how he saw me, and how he saw my brother: As two possible comrades. No one up North had ever shown such feelings of fraternity, or trusted us so quickly. “Could be a time,” he said, and I had the irrational hope that he was as immediately fond of me as I was of him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Roda,” I said, “for your kind consideration.” And he smiled as wide as only men unfamiliar with the hardness of the world can.

  Chang and I, of course, did not go to fight abolitionists in Bleeding Kansas, but this man Jeff Roda has stuck in my memory, though I never saw him again, because in meeting him I knew both that the South would secede and that I would support it. The hateful so-called Know-Nothings, organized against immigrants, had emerged as a powerful party in the North. The Northern motto—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable—sounded false and hollow.

  A few weeks after meeting that young border ruffian, Chang and I and our wives had our father-in-law over for dinner. A year earlier, the girls’ mother had died, and their brother Jefferson, too, from a head injury that came when the boy was clowning and slipped off a fast-moving carriage. Mr. Yates had been visiting quite a bit since then, but rarely for dinner. He’d diminished a bit with the years; his body was smaller now, and stooped, and his voice, too, was smaller.

  We all sat around the long dining table. Chang’s son Christopher was there, too—already weighing nearly fifty pounds. The other children—Katherine and Julia and Chang’s Josephine—were upstairs with Thom, whose main job now was to take care of the children.

  The topic of dinner conversation was John Brown, a free-state partisan who had led a small party two days before in a bloody raid upon some Southern, settlers, murdering five men and displaying their slashed bodies as a warning to slaveholders. Yates was telling Chang and me that Brown should be killed and strung up in public.

  “I think I’d like to witness such a thing,” said Adelaide, who sat with her son in her lap. I hadn’t had the opportunity to hold Addie’s hand in months that seemed like forever. “Such a man needs be made example of.”

  “Not me, you’all,” said Sarah, still not grown too old to make her baby faces. “With my poor stomach, I never would have been able to watch it.” She was at this time pregnant with our son Stephen, and her belly was starting to balloon.

  Frowning to herself, my wife sat there insecure and less than flourishing. Earlier in the day, Chang and I had come across a frail kitten under a log, its forelegs split and eyes oozing rheum, the little creature mewling in such a pitiable condition that Chang and I asked Thom to put it out of its misery with a merciful blow of a rock to its head. Now as I looked at Sarah, rubbing her belly and plainly agitated, the thought crossed my mind that my wife did not have the stomach for life.

  “Are you talking about that caitiff’s execution, or his caitiff deeds?” Mr. Yates shook his head, pursing his small mouth. He wanted to pontificate and not be interrupted, least of all by a woman. It had been nearly fifteen years since we had met him; he’d developed a palsy in his left eye.

  “I understand what Pa is saying,” said Adelaide, a wisp of smugness in her tone. “That old Osawatomie Brown deserves no fate separate than hanging.”

  “Would you want to see it with your own eyes?” Sarah cringed at the thought.

  “I don’t directly want to up and go see it myself,” Adelaide said airily. “But we should maybe all of us see it—this man who sash-i-ates all over wilderness, killing folks—all of us in North Carolina, to remember the facts of our situation.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Sarah said. “Just not me.”

  Adelaide smiled slightly, and she pinched the cheeks of fleshy little Christopher, who sat on her lap. “Listen to your aunt, now,” she said. The boy nodded seriously, then closed his eyes and burrowed his black-haired head into his mother’s stomach. Adelaide wore a strange ruffled yellow house gown she had devised for herself. Above the frilly neckline, her chest was more visible than usual, and though the tightness of her skin was not what it had been in her youth, like a young girl she still had a childish little plot of freckles scattered across her collarbone. Her hair was gray, a droplet of perspiration meandered the arch of her neck.

  My nephew must have felt the stare I gave his mother, because soon he opened his eyes and made a quizzical face at me. I had been casting the same hopeful glance for years. I did not look away now.

  “My point exactly, Adelaide,” Yates was saying. “Will Pundyk’s cousin was down there in the Bleeding. Poor wretch got chased down to the river and shot like a dog.”

  “Father,” said Adelaide, “the boy’s ears may be a little young for this talk.”

  “And when he tried to stand up above the water”—Yates’s eyes were flashing—"someone struck him dead with a club.” My father-in-law tried to catch my eye, or Chang’s.

  “Horrible, indeed,” I said. “In fact—”

  “Please go on, Father,” Sarah said. She was never outwardly critical of me, as I was never to her.

  “I even heard that Negroes hold rifles out there.” I had rarely heard my father-in-law’s voice sound so solemn.

  Adelaide brought her hands over her face, then moved them slowly down her neck, the better to deal with the gravity of that statement. Those hands. She shifted the load of Christopher from one leg to the other. “Go upstairs now, son,” she said, and the boy went scampering from the room.

  “Well,” Chang said finally, looking for any path into the conversation, “at least it over.”

  “Over?” Yates turned scarlet and showed the range of his poor man’s teeth. “Over?” His eye trembled.

  At this point Soren, one of our slaves, came in from the swinging side door that led to the kitchen, and he began to pour everyone Coffee. No one spoke as the Negro walked from person to person holding his white china coffeepot. When he’d finished, all eyes followed the slave as he left the room.

  Adelaide said to Chang, “I don’t know, maybe my husband’s from China so you don’t know anything about anything.” She shook her head. “But around here, that chickenhearted raid is obviously one of the most evil-qualitied things that ever happened.” She was growing more agitated as she spoke. “These squirrelly old blackguards think that what they done, they done as a service to God! And you’all call that over?”

  Chang opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He tried again to respond, but lost the nerve. Instead he took a quiet sip from his coffee cup, the steam from which dampened my cheek.

  Then Mr. Yates said, “Parson Hodge was saying in his sermon that that’s just the way they are, those Yankees. ‘What else,’ the Parson says, ‘could be expected from someone from the ot
her world, who is colored with ”Freeloveism, Socialism, Spiritualism,” and all the other isms that were ever devised by man or devil?’ ”

  Adelaide continued to glare at her husband. “Over, Chang says.”

  At this point I think my wife noticed I was looking at Adelaide, because Sarah began to glare at me with a queer cast to her colorless face. There was no way she could have suspected my feelings, of course. But her eyes did make me less than comfortable. As the arc of our decreasing intimacy crossed the arc of my rising passion for her sister, my wife’s silence had become more profound, tiresome, almost cunning even. Maybe that is why I was always surprised at how talkative she became when her father would stop by.

  After dinner, Mr. Yates left. Our wives went up to sleep, and Chang and I stood on the porch of our home and took in the spectacle of the starry Southern sky. The anticipation of the coming sleeptime with Addie—it was her turn with us that night—gave rise to butterflies in my stomach, but the annoyance I felt toward my brother simply for existing beside me—and toward my wife upstairs, because she existed, too—alleviated almost all my guilt.

  Chang held a drink; he was beginning to develop “the taste.” At first he had started imbibing small amounts that were not sufficient to intoxicate me, but enough to loosen his tongue to plead with Adelaide when she was cold with him. And so, Chang was now tending a glass of scotch. Ice jiggled in the glass, the only sound save a cricket or two.

  Apropos of nothing, Chang said, “I know now my Adelaide will love me again,” smiling, his moonshiny breath in my nose.

  “How do you know that?” I asked. Was this his desperation speaking?

  “I thinking now about me and Adelaide before Christopher born.” His smile was that of a happy man taking stock. “And everything was good.”

  “Was everything”—I tried to steady my voice—“ ‘good’ then, Chang?”

  “We will get back to like that, me with Adelaide.” He was sharing what he thought was the irrefutable truth now, and it kept him grinning. “I just be extra nice to her. She love me again soon.” He took another sip. (From the Temperance Handbook: “The tainted nectar compels people to chuckle through hardship, permeates their mind with bogus, liquid happiness. It denies the learning that usually chaperones sorrow.”)

  My brother delighted in another swig of alcohol, and he coughed. I did not like myself for what I thought next.

  It is my hand Adelaide holds in the dark, I reminded myself. At least she does every year or so.

  You do not want to lose her hand, I told myself. Nor the joy of keeping the very secret itself for all this time. Not to this grinning baboon.

  “Eng, I love her still.” Chang smiled like Father would when he’d pet Mother’s delicate head. “Do you understand?”

  The word “infidelity” crept into my mind, debasing the feelings Addie’s touch had excited in me—and had kept alive with so little to sustain them. I had a pregnant wife. And children of my own. This had never been my intention, this clandestine and utterly infrequent hand-holding with Addie, his wife.

  I looked now at Chang. I could easily picture him at twenty, fourteen, ten: grinning with his whole face.

  “I not believe our good luck still, sometimes.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as if he was trying to inhale what fortune he had in this world.

  I loved my brother; I hated my brother. My act of infidelity had been nothing other than the innocent clasp of a hand—that was not so corrupt, after all, was it? I now believed myself a terrible person. But is there anyone alive in whom a devil does not sometimes dwell?

  “Yes,” I said. “Our luck.”

  I even hated Adelaide at that moment, with her long face and wide hips and sharp tongue. She would never have dared to scold her husband as she did if he had been an American man. And holding her husband’s brother’s hand—how dare she do that to him? All was self-hatred and despair.

  I turned to look up at the window of the room where I knew my wife was sleeping. The candle was out, the window dark. I imagined her pregnant stomach rising and falling gently with each breath. Another clink of the ice in Chang’s scotch glass, and I wanted to grab my twin and run us to wake Sarah, whereupon I’d tell them both everything—if not divulge exactly the extent of my feelings, then I would say I was afraid that I might be in danger of falling in love with my sister-in-law. That would give me a chance at least to talk about Addie. Did she care for me at all?

  “What is it, brother?” Chang asked, his face gentle with concern. He was the man she had once loved; I doubted whether her feelings were ever that serious for me. Maybe Chang was the true love of her life, and if that were so, she would surely come round to remembering it.

  “Are you?” I whispered in my irrationality.

  He squinted at me, patted my clammy hair. “Let’s go to sleep now, what?”

  “I’m sorry, Bean Sprout, you are correct. Precisely.”

  Of course, my brother was wrong. Adelaide and I continued to hold hands every year or so and she continued to treat him terribly. And Chang began to drink more heavily. Before too much time had passed it had become reckless. Especially when we were touring.

  I did not like his burgeoning habit, but at first I did not fight it. Naturally, this was before I knew of the secret evils of alcohol, that it is a baneful unguent, blackening the crevices of your mind; this was before I knew the scientific evidence. But I felt the devil when he drank—that, I knew.

  One night, at the Calvary Pine Bluff Church on the mudflats of the Arkansas River, we had reached the portion of our show when spectators ask questions (a new and short-lived addition to our act), when Chang, after only a single audience question, said, “One more asking, then we are finish.”

  A gangly man stepped forward from the crowd. “You’re married—”

  “Needing a drink for answering this one.” Chang took his flask from his pocket: Wilkesboro moonshine, its smell prickly like a bee sting to the nose.

  “I’ll answer the question,” I said, giving my brother the eye. “Go ahead, sir.”

  The man fidgeted and looked apprehensive, but he said, “I was wondering if your marriage—”

  “No wondering about our marriage,” Chang said. I hated the thick way he’d begun to sweat when he drank. “No more talk.” He took another swig, and another. It did not escape the notice of the reporters on hand.

  This was when I began receiving posts from the North Carolina Ladies for Temperance Society, which at the time was a society of one—a white-haired lady in Winston-Salem named Mrs. Appleby. She wanted to make me an honorary member of her sorority. I ignored her letters—if my brother wanted to sin with drink, it was not my business.

  My magnanimity toward my brother’s problem came to an end, however, on a fall day in 1857, when we took my daughter Katherine, now not so tiny after all, for a ride in our horse-driven post chaise around the perimeter of our property. She had had a condition marked by inflammation of her liver, and as a result had lain in bed since the end of the previous spring, vomiting and fainting. But by the fall she had gotten stronger, and when she felt well enough I’d wanted to take her out for a ride.

  It was warm and bright, and though she was not smiling, and was pale—how odd to me still, a pale-skinned daughter of mine!—she seemed to be enjoying herself. She sometimes would wrap her arms around my chest, jump up and grab me by the collar, and then kiss me precisely on the chin. I never knew how to handle affection shown in that way. (I was not blind to certain facts about my condition and fatherhood. But I wanted to be loved by my daughter.)

  The post chaise seated Chang and me comfortably, side by side, while my daughter sat on my lap. Her bony rump on my knee, she was as light as a kitten. “Gid’yap!” I yelled, and Katherine would laugh every time. Our horse was a fat brown gelding we’d named In whose winter coat was about to come in, and it rode us about our land, up a hill overlooking a pasture thick with foliage, and down toward the paddock where we raised our ho
gs. The landscape was serene; my brother was drinking bourbon from his flask. Addie had avoided talking to him at all at lunch, though he had asked her numerous questions. “Addie,” he’d said, “come with us for horse ride?” She’d merely continued to eat her snuff.

  Now I tapped Katherine on the shoulder with the hand not bridling the horses and pointed to the paddock. “Do you see the hogs?” I asked, the bounce jolting my speech a bit. “Do you see the shoats?”

  “Yes.” She had a voice I’d imagine a fly would have, minuscule and sorry even when nothing’s wrong.

  “Do you know the noise the hogs make, Katherine?” I asked.

  “No.” She puckered her face.

  Meanwhile, our horse was trotting at quite a hop.

  “It’s a squeal,” I said. “You know it; try and make the noise of the pig,” I said. Chang’s slurping was disturbing me.

  “Please, Father,” Katherine shook her head side to side. “I don’t want to.”

  I looked at Chang, then at my daughter, hoping that he would understand I did not like him drinking so much in front of her. Of course, he reeked; his breath and skin emitted a more hateful odor after drinking bourbon than after wine.

  “Make the sound of the hog, Katherine,” I said. “You are able to, I know it.” Chang’s alcohol was beginning to bubble in my encephalon now, and the little globules organized themselves around my brain stem like infinitesimal ball bearings. I hated the feeling, like slipping on ice, that marks the first steps in the march to drunkenness. The reins felt heavy in my hand. The horse In sped up, and I jerked him.

  “Chang, I wish you would stop dancing with that Lady Libation,” I said, trying to speak in a code Katherine would not understand. The world was starting to skate by.

  “This horse bounce too much,” Chang sneered, as if the jolting had been a personal insult. He took another swig.

  In was riding at an expansive clip now, and I reined him back. The green of the trees and the approaching hogpen were now exceedingly well defined—as if I’d formerly been seeing the world through a milky film without knowing it. Meanwhile, my daughter’s bony frame jiggled on my lap.