Chapter One
When First We Met
Monday, December 10, 1842
North Carolina
Chang-Eng," the children chanted. "Mutant, mutant."
Now and then the little innocents sprang from the dust
cloud chasing our carriage to cry my name and Chang's. The path
we traveled cut through a droughty careworn field, and to either
side of us a fast-passing scene of blond grass and dead milkweed
thirsted under the burnt sky of sunset. My ear tingled with the
nearness of my brother, who picked lint off of my shoulder and
knew not to bump my head as he did so. His dark eyes showed little
reflections of me. I was thirty-one. My life was about to begin:
I was entering North Carolina.
My brother and I did not know that love was soon to deliver
us. But twenty-one children and three decades later, how obvious
it seems that everything to follow was a consequence of that evening.
When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from
your bedside like embers off a bonfire. Alone in the dark with a
final chance to bind together circumstances that have made you a
peasant who sells duck eggs on the Mekong one day and the
South's most famous temperance advocate the next, you see a curtain
open onto the landmark moments of your past.
When Chang and I arrived in North Carolina, we were coming
to the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that the
public could not see without assuming we two were so very different
from everybody else.
The halfwit we'd hired drove at a quick pace. And now,
jounced inside a rickety carriage that had the legend THE SIAMESE
TWIN in chipping yellow paint on its doors, I was trying to nap
beside Chang.
My eyes were not closed for long. My brother tapped my
shoulder. "Eng?"
I knew better than to ask him to quiet when he was in one of
his talkative moods.
"Maybe," Chang said, "you read out loud?" He spoke in a soft
voice whenever asking me for something.
"Now?" I made a show of closing my eyes more tightly. "I'd
prefer not."
"A Shakespeare speech from your book, make the trip go
faster?" There was a shiver in his words from the bustle of our
ride. I felt his half of our stomach spasm.
"Let me please catch a little rest," I said, opening an eye. "Why
don't you read it yourself?"
"Me? You joking." The listlessness in Chang's smile suggested
what it is to spend three decades within five to seven inches of
one another. "Eng?"
Reporters love to mention that I am the "less dominating
member of the pair." A man may be quiet, does that mean he is
not assertive?
"Eng?" That we hadn't eaten in hours spoiled his breath.
I shut my eyes tight again. Nailing down a personality is about
as easy as pinning marmalade to a wall. I faked a snore.
"Eng!" he said, patience being a luxury allowed those who
have more obliging brothers. "I know you not asleep."
The dust of riding whisked us into Wilkesboro, the last stop on
this junket of somersaults and smiles that had spanned the eastern
seaboard. I could not have imagined that in Wilkesboro we would
meet the women who wouldfor all the kings I'd met and the
nations I'd beenmake up the kingdom in which I'd walk.
Chang had the driver bridle our two horses to a stop in a grassy
square near the center of town: a little commons that had not
yet changed its name from "Union Square" to "Westwood Park."
This open space was blotchy with killed grass, its unused flagpole
stood without purpose in the wind. A line of four threadbare trees
gesticulated like marionettes behind the flagstaff.
Townspeople rushed at us from every direction. Dozens of unkempt
children and their unkempt parents gathered round our
carriage, pointing fingers. The rest of the population climbed on
roofs for a better view. My brother grinned at them all. He delivered
his patented wave, like a little boy proving with a casual flick
that his hand is clean on both sidesthe motion Queen Victoria
used to greet her masses.
"Come down, carriage man," my brother called out to our
driver, wetting my face with spittle. "Will you please open door?"
The driver muttered at us from his buckboard. I asked this
idiot, "Did you say something?"
He let us out, his well-shaved cheeks pink as Mekong tuna
meat. He said, "Nothing, sirs."
"You are addressing Eng alone." I accepted the man's hand,
stepping from the carriage with my brother close on my left. "Do
you hear my twin talking? You must say, `Nothing,
sir.'" I was
tired and irritable. "When you speak to Eng, you speak to one
`
sir,' not two."
Far away, between the rough corners of Wilkesboro's buildings
(small white Presbyterian church with no steeple, narrow white
beer parlor, small white general store displaying all its stock in its
window), rows of sleeping blue mountains hid in shadow, each
more blurred than the last. And the full moon had begun its crawl
across the sky.
Everything about this environment seemed animated by our
arrival: the crowd gathering on all sides of us; the bandy-legged
old man in a white suit who limped across Union Square with a
yellow rose in his lapel, and the pair of young girls who ran over
and walked him arm in arm toward our carriage; the slaves across
the courtyard pitching straw and pretending not to look; the dirty
little white hands poking our ligament as we stepped from the carriage.
Several reached for my face.
"Chang-Eng!" Even the dirtiest of children radiant like they'd
just been given candy. "Mutant, mutant!"
"Thank you," Chang and I said as the dust gathered on our
identical black suitstight and crisply English in cut, the very
ones Barnum had bought for us. Strolling through the crowd, my
brother and I were two complete bodies affixed at the chest by a
fleshy, bendable, seven-inch-long ligament resembling a forearm.
"Chang-Eng acknowledging you, good people" Chang said.
We crossed Main Street side by side, in the calibrated rhythm of
our united movement, arms sweaty over each other's shoulders.
Like Chang, I wore my hair in a black braid long enough to curl
around my head. I tied it in a blue silk tassel that fell over my
brother's shoulder, as his fell over mine.
North Carolina was a welcome change from Boston, Washington,
Philadelphia, New York, that series of East Coast cities that
even before the War of Yankee Aggression had become as vulgar
as a row of women of easy virtue on a street corner. Some believe
the war divided America's history in one stroke, all at once advancing
Northern manufacturing and the forward parade of Yankee
progress. But by December 1842 the North had swelled so
hastily it simmered with industry and crime and most of all too
many people, while Southern towns like this remained in rural
condition, natural as ever. Wilkesboro was among those bygone
cheerful hamlets that were so numerous across the map of North
Carolina they seemed like stars in the nighttime sky, before Reconstruction
hobbled the South.
My brother kept his smile and hadn't quit waving to the townsfolk.
Few returned his greeting. A yellow-skinned man and his
conjoined twin may be admitted into a village in North Carolina,
but will never be adopted by it fully.
Main Street was rounded, with a humped center and sloping
sides, and it led us across town. Chang and I were silent as we
walked; I rarely spoke to him. At all times, a wordless debate concerning
the fundaments of movement traveled across our bond
like a message across telegraph wire, and that was conversation
enough. I called this the Silence, and I was comforted by it.
The people of Wilkesboro had begun to follow us at a distance:
here two blond schoolgirls crouched behind a craggy black
oak tree to stare; there, in the Law Office Building, under the
pressed-metal facade, a few cheerful boys shouted taunts. One
brave Negro walked near us before scampering off to giggle behind
some wagons tethered to the Court House gallery; across the
street near a livery stable a woman froze in her tracks to gape at
the Twins, her face turning pale as death. A few townsfolk, however,
did smile openly at us as we passed, and let fly a friendly giggle
whenever Chang waved.
"Eng," Chang said, crimping his eyes as he often did when he
found his happy place in the world. "It is exciting, yes?" With his
free hand he smoothed the lapels of his jacket.
"Brother, I don't know what you mean."
Chang was taken off guard; he always managed to discount that
we were miles apart in temperament.
"Well," he said, searching my face, "this, I mean!" Crooking
our ligament, he drew himself in front of and even closer to me,
and he looked over my shoulder at the now large crowd following
at our heels. Chang and I continued to walk in this mannernearly
face-to-face, with my brother striding backwardas he
flung his hand in the air and waved at the people. Everyone
clapped. Chang swung around to face forward again.
It was this sort of pandering showmanship that I hated, and
strove to avoid for most of my career. (Like most everybody, I am
proud of certain accomplishments: that we never participated in,
nor were in any way associated with, an American circus; my
predilection for reading, which saved me from the manner of immigrant
speech that Chang never lost.)
Main Street came to an end at the Yates Inn. A Southern community
such as Wilkesboro, in its distant relation not only to the
central government, but also to neighboring villages, believes itself
an individual, free from all others. And yet, little inns just like
this one were features of nearly all minor Southern towns, and by
now Chang and I felt at home loitering by innyards, waiting to be
admitted.
Wilkesboro's version of the Southern hostel was a two-story
unpainted log house, its modest front yard overgrown with
chokecherry. A giant woman sat on the inn's drooping front
porch, fanning herself in the skeletal shade of leafless oaks. She
was some five hundred pounds, if not more, this innkeeper. Moist
patches of her scalp were visible under her thin gray hair, like peat
bog spied through the reeds of a marsh, and her hairline gave way
to a glistening forehead just as a marsh would open onto a river.
My brother and I came to stand before her, resting our two free
hands on the porch railing. The lady innkeeper scrutinized Chang
and me in our unforgiving black. "A charming creature"her
bassy voice wiggled the flesh hanging below her chin"just
about as strange as they say." I could not tell whether the woman's
face was friendly or taunting. She wore a homemade dress of gray
cloth-stuff made with no thought to style. Her skin refused contour.
Birds shrieked in the trees.
I imagined this woman a courtier in His Majesty King Rama's
palace, bejeweled, dressed in silk while four or five husbands
danced around her, runty men with short life spans.
To her left stood a frowning boy in a straw hat with a crooked
rim. To her right, a pair of blond womenher daughters, I guessed,
though they were not so younglong-faced, flat-chested, and each
with lip rouge on her front teeth. The taller one's eyes flickered impatiently,
like the wings of little birds. The way she did not turn
away in horror gave me the urge to saw through my ligament. It was
the light at that hour, or my fatigue pressing in, but I believed she
was smiling at me.
My brother's skin was mucky as the Mekong itself, his breathing
a gasp.
The declining sun acted on the girl's fine hair, cutting it into
elements of gold and pink gold and shadow. She blushed and
bowed her head, but she continued to peek at me from under her
brows with eyes the color of blueberries. She bit her lip. A young
lady was looking at me, of all things, and smiling. I could not
fathom itlooking into
my eyes! I returned her stare, I don't
know where I discovered the courage.
Only a few seconds passed, evidently, though I was sure the
moment slipped from the calendar. For the seeming eternity I
stood there, my heart pounded only once, a single thunderclap,
echoing. This strange girl's clear eyes looked like safe worlds in
which to escape the circumstance of what I was.
Chang's heart, too, began to go frantic for this tall blond
innkeeper's daughterI felt it. Was it me the girl was fixing her
gaze on, or the twin close at my side?
The whole time, the girl's sister stood in shadow and chewed at
her nails. But before long this one was looking up into my face,
too, without smiling or frowning. The entire town had gathered
behind us, watching everything. And the sisters' large mother
leaned forward in her groaning seat and straightened her dress,
patted her hair.
"Jefferson," the large woman said to her boy. "Go get your father."
Daintily, she removed a little gnat that had flown into her
mouth. "Tell him I found a pair of husbands for your sisters."
I swear the townsfolk cheered.
Copyright © 2000 Darin Strauss.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-525-94512-1