Fourth of July Eve, outside Macon, GA, 1966

        Marigold can’t sleep. Fireworks make her jittery like a hound. Backwoods folk pop bottle rockets constantly when they’re in season. She lies in bed shivering beside me, shaking my leg with her leg, twitching her toes, my toes—the left foot we share. Our foot. Tomorrow, the Fourth, is our busiest show at the Big Top, so I gulp a shot of some strong cough syrup, such dynamo stuff we use it on the big animals. I’ve heard the jocks and clowns sneak it to get stoned.

        Marigold won’t drink the cough syrup, only aspirin for her heart murmur—that’s what a doctor in New York once prescribed. She’s convinced the syrup will stop her heart. Like she won’t touch whiskey.
        “How come you let your sister drink,” folks will ask Marigold, “if you think it’s poison?” In their mind, we share more than some bones in our ankle and foot. But the doctor at the orphanage took X-rays. We’ve got our own systems. They look dumbstruck when we try to explain. Nobody at the Big Top made it to high school.

        The syrup works. An elephant of pleasure sits on my chest. I’m seeing the starlight out
our trailer window go wah wah wah—pulsating—when I drift off, despite Marigold’s startled
jerks dragging me across the mattress, kicking the sheet everywhere.

        I wake up to crickets and owls at some thick black hour. Marigold is pulling me off the
bed. She must have rolled onto the floor during a nightmare fit. I reach to jostle her awake,
saying, “Marigold, hey!” and feel her ice cold and stone stiff in the dark.​

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        Captain won’t pay for a doctor. He calls a vet to come check my rigid sister, insisting she’s not dead until scientifically declared so. This gnarled country horse surgeon pulls up in a Mercedes. He pokes and prods Marigold, disgusted—disgusted by me and her—and just says, “Dead. Goddamn.” He talks to me like a dog, scolding, tells me I’m lucky to be alive, then tells the Captain it’s a miracle, and leaves shuddering.
        Captain says he’ll deduct the forty-dollar vet visit from me and Marigold’s—now just my—pay.
        “Can we bury her?” I ask.
        “Now how in the hell could we, Iris?” Captain says. “Would we chop you apart?”
        “I don’t know, sir. Sorry,” I say to his back as he storms out.
        I’m numb. My sister.
        And we go on that night. Marigold painted up with foundation and blush, rigged to me
with strings so I can puppeteer her little dance steps while we sing “The Flower Duet.” Years
back, Captain bought a 45 of Lakmé at a record shop in Cleveland so we could cheat and lip sync
if need be since Marigold was always catching strep.
        Folks boo, throw coke bottles and crumpled popcorn papers like usual. Call us freaks.

 

July 6, Atlanta, GA, 1966

        Marigold we keep in a bathtub of ice but has already begun to give off a sweet, fruity smell. Her eyes are dried, shriveled; her breath’s no better for being dead. I feel hungover, sick. I read our Reader’s Digests from my chair, pausing at the places Marigold always laughed at my voices, until I grow faint and the words swim.
        I tell Captain she’s poisoning my blood.
        He says, “Well, Iris, what about your ‘different systems?’” and tells me that I’ve only caught a chill from the ice and need to wait for Memphis, where he knows a taxidermist, his cousin, who will saw Marigold and me apart for cheap.

 

July 12, Memphis, TN, 1966

        Michael Lee—better known as Ajax the Strongman—helps me cart Marigold around in a
wheelbarrow full of ice, me hopping dizzily alongside. They had a fling in Texas once, him and
Marigold. I mean they kissed. Aside from Captain when he hired us, there’s no man with any
interest in that. But I think maybe Michael Lee loved Marigold. For a couple of days in Texas,
anyway. Before the jocks and the clowns found out and teased.
        My breath is coming raspy, hard to sing my part of “The Flower Duet,” and the illusion’s
not as good without at least one of us singing.
        I can’t haul Marigold’s leg around to dance anymore. She’s grown heavier. I’m afraid to
drop her.
        The record skips, and I could swear I hear Marigold singing her part, shaky and far back
in her propped open mouth. Captain wedged corks between her molars. Sweat’s so thick on my
forehead my makeup runs. My vision stutters like the record. Michael Lee carries us off stage.

        Midnight, after the show, Captain’s taxidermist cousin drives up in a back-firing Ford
with a hole rusted through the hood. He’s sharp-faced and scraggly-bearded, like a fox or rodent.
He brings a kit of knives into the barn where me and Marigold are laid out on a mattress.

        Michael Lee said he’d hunt me some whiskey, promised to hold my hand, but when he
appears in the doorway to find the taxidermist holding first this knife, then that knife to the
lantern light, he says he can’t stand to see someone cut Marigold, disappears.
        As the ferret-faced taxidermist scurries over with his knife, fever-blindness greys everything to the smell of hay and cow piles. I feel his warm weight loom over us, moonshine fumes on his breath. Something rough yanks tight on my shin—a belt—and I remember Marigold grasping my hand at the dentist as girls, squeezing and asking me to sing, saying she was scared. We’d weave voices like fingers, through radio songs, like “Wildwood Flower.”

        Now I’m singing our Flower Duet so I can’t hear the cuts, shouting the words, drifting in and out, trying to keep the song going. I could swear that I hear her voice, Marigold’s, but I can’t tell if we’re still together, in harmony anymore.