“I’m sorry to say that these aren’t much good,” I said, showing my page to Granddaddy.
“As artwork goes, you are entirely correct in your appraisal. But the more important point is this: Are these representations true enough so that you can match them with the examples in the atlas once we get back to the library? If that is the case, then you have done an acceptable job.”
“I think I might be able to tell,” I said, “but I’m not sure I can ever swim in the river again.”
“All these creatures are completely harmless, Calpurnia, and they have enjoyed the river for many more eons than you. In addition, console yourself with the thought that you swim in the river proper, and these animals are not happy in flowing water.”
“All right,” I said. But still.
The bushes rustled, and Father’s dog Ajax trotted up, pleased with himself for having found us. He had no doubt been out courting Matilda, Mr. Gates’s bluetick hound, she of the unique yodeling cry that could be heard all over town. He greeted us in turn, nosing us for a pat, then splashed into the shallows and slurped at the brackish water. A fist-sized turtle plopped off a rotting log and Ajax charged clumsily after it. He enjoyed the game of chasing turtles and other small river creatures, but I’d never seen him actually catch anything aquatic. He was, more properly, a specialist in avian studies. But this time he surprised me by ducking his whole head underwater and coming up, startled, with an equally startled turtle in his mouth.
“Ajax,” I said, “what are you doing? Stop it. Put that back where it belongs.”
He pranced back to us, pleased with himself, and dutifully laid the turtle at our feet before shaking water all over us. He sat and looked up at me expectantly.
“He thinks he’s doing his job,” said Granddaddy. “You had better praise him or all your father’s training will be for nothing.”
“Oh, Ajax. Good boy, I guess.” I gave him a pat. “What are we going to do with your turtle? Travis already has one in his room, and I doubt that Mother will tolerate another. Perhaps you should hold his collar while I let this one go.”
“I’ll walk him up the bank,” said Granddaddy. “He shouldn’t see you letting it go, or he will come to question the purpose of his work and eventually grow disheartened.” He led Ajax away, and when they were both out of sight I inspected the turtle. Why had it allowed itself to be captured by such a large, dumb land creature? Was it old? Was it sick? There was nothing obviously wrong with it. It looked like every other turtle in the river. Maybe it was simply stupid. Maybe it was better that it died so that it wouldn’t produce more generations of stupid baby turtles. But too late, I had interfered and thus made myself responsible for its safety. Wondering if I was, in my own small way, promoting the survival of the unfittest, I pushed it into the water, where it disappeared in a wink.
“It’s all right,” I yelled over my shoulder. “You can let him go.”
I climbed up the bank after them, and Ajax met me at the top, sniffing at me for his turtle. “It’s gone,” I said, showing him my empty hands. “See?” I swear he understood me because his ears drooped and he turned away.
“It’s gone, Ajax, I’m sorry. Come here and be a good dog.” I ruffled his coat and thumped his sides the way he liked, even though I knew I would stink like a wet dog for the rest of the day. “There’s a good boy. You’re a good boy.” This cheered him up some, and he forgave me enough to walk with me while we caught up to Granddaddy.
Ajax found the biggest burrow I’d seen in a long while. It looked and smelled like a badger’s hole, and badgers were getting rare in our part of the world. He amused himself by sticking his muzzle deep inside and sniffing in excitement.
“What do you see there?” I called out to Granddaddy, who peered with interest at a small, uninteresting plant. “Come on, Ajax.” I hauled on his collar to keep him from losing the end of his nose to a swipe from the burrow’s notoriously irritable tenant.
“Vetch,” said Granddaddy. “It looks like hairy vetch, but it may be a mutant. Look, it’s got this odd dependent leaf at the bottom.” He pinched off a couple of inches of stalk and handed it to me. “Let’s save that one.”
A boring plant, but I put it in a jar and printed HAIRY VETCH (MOOTANT?) on the label.
He said, “I’ve also got a woolly caterpillar over here. Have you ever raised one of these?” He held up a twig on which squirmed the biggest, fuzziest caterpillar I’d ever seen, a good two inches long. (Or, more properly, five centimeters. Granddaddy had told me that true scientists used the Continental system, which would soon come into widespread use in America.) The caterpillar was covered in dense fur that looked as plush and inviting as a cat’s pelt, but I knew better than to stroke it. I’d been told my whole life that woolly caterpillars would sting you badly. I just didn’t know if it was a little badly or a whole lot badly.
“What kind is he?” I asked.
“I’m uncertain about the species,” he said. “There are several that look alike to the naked eye, and you can’t know what you’ve got until it emerges as the winged imago.”
“So how bad is their sting?”
He said, “I suppose you could touch him and find out. Which raises an interesting point: How far are you willing to go in the name of science? This is something for you to ponder.”
Well, maybe. Or maybe I could give one of the younger boys a penny to touch it for me. But then I considered the price I’d have to pay later with Mother. Definitely not worth it.
“Let’s take him home, and I’ll raise him,” I said. “I think I’ll call him Petey.”
“Calpurnia, you will find it a bad idea to give names to your experimental subjects.”
“Why?” I said, dropping Petey and his twig into the biggest Mason jar we had, quart-size, with holes punched in the lid.
“It tends to spoil the truly objective observation.”
“I’m not sure what that means, Granddaddy.”
But he was lost in thought over some animal tracks. “Fox, I think,” he murmured. “With a couple of kits, by the look of it. That’s encouraging. I thought the coyotes had got them all.”
By the time we got back to the house, we found that Sam Houston and Lamar had brought home a startling catfish that weighed forty-five pounds on the gin scale. Its huge, frowning mouth was framed with lashing barbels as thick around as pencils. It was a fright to look upon. The biggest of these fish didn’t fight the hook much, so my brothers did not count them good sport. The main challenge was hauling them out of the river and lugging them home without touching the poisonous spines on their fins.
That night we had big chunks of it for dinner, rolled in cornmeal and deep-fried, its white flesh still tanged with the undertaste of mud that didn’t seem to bother anybody else. I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t even want to see it. It was as big as J.B. I mean, the size of that thing. It was big enough to take my whole leg in its mouth, and me swimming in the river every day. I pictured it grabbing me and dragging me down to the bottom, holding me there too long, or maybe long enough, depending on whether you looked at it from my perspective or the fish’s. My family would find me later, my hair swirling about like tragic Ophelia’s. Or maybe they wouldn’t find enough good-sized pieces to justify the cost of a funeral; maybe they would only find my chemise. Would you have a casket and a ceremony for just a chemise? Probably not. But how about a limb? Hadn’t General Jackson’s arm been given a full funeral ceremony? Or how about a head? I guessed a head would do it.
With that, I decided that I had analyzed the matter enough and did my best to think no more about it. Still, for months after that, when I stepped into the river, I thought of that Leviathan at one end of the scale waiting to mutilate me and the swarming microscopic creatures at the other end waiting to insinuate themselves. It was too bad, but sometimes a little knowledge could ruin your whole day, or at least take off some of the shine.
CHAPTER 9
PETEY
Peculiaritie
s in the silkworm are known to appear at the corresponding caterpillar or cocoon stage.
AS THE SUMMER WORE ON, I spent more and more time studying Science and less and less time practicing the piano. This turned out to be unwise in the long run, since each time I missed practice I had to make up the time and pay for it with an extra half hour. On Saturday, after playing for a whole two hours (!), I made my escape with my Notebook and tapped on the library door.
“Enter if you must,” Granddaddy called out. He was examining some plates in The Atlas of Microscopic Pond Life.
“So you have finished with your cultural obligations for the day?” he said, without looking up, and I realized that with the transoms open he could, of course, hear me thumping away in the parlor across the hall. “I do like the ‘Water Music,’” he said, “and I hope you won’t grow so tired of learning it that you put it aside for the rest of your life. That’s the great danger of too much piano practice. I hope Margaret understands that.”
“Mother says I can go back to a half hour tomorrow. Oh,” I said, looking at the plates over his shoulder, “that’s what I drew, isn’t it?” I opened my Notebook to the illustrations I’d made of the microscopic river creatures. My ancient mace looked like the one in the text. “Volvox,” I read, “it’s Volvox. Is that how you say it?”
“That’s correct. Such a satisfying form. I admit I have a special weakness for it amongst all the Chlorophyta.”
“Look,” I said, “here’s another one.” My drawings were up to snuff. I was very pleased with myself.
“Go ahead and label each of them in your book,” Granddaddy said, “and note the page in the atlas so you can find them again.”
I decided to use ink instead of pencil, which made the whole process nerve-racking, but I ended up with only one tiny blot.
Then I said, “Granddaddy, what should I feed Petey?”
“Who?” he said.
“Petey. The caterpillar.”
“Calpurnia, must I give you the answer in a spoon like a baby? Surely you can figure it out on your own. Think about the problem. Do you remember where you found him? What sort of tree was he living on?”
“Ah,” I said, and went out to find leaves of the same kind we’d abducted Petey from. That made sense. A caterpillar’s job was to eat, so naturally he wouldn’t be found wasting his time lounging about on something he didn’t like. Petey curled into a fuzzy comma when I put the leaves in his jar. I replaced his narrow twig with a larger-branched one for exercise and diversion, should he feel the need. I set his jar on my dresser between the hummingbird’s nest and a bowl of tadpoles I was studying. My dresser was getting crowded. A half hour later, when I looked again, Petey was munching on his foliage and seemed happy enough, but with a caterpillar how can you tell for sure?
I checked on him again before bedtime, and he was motionless, stretched full-length along his twig. He appeared to be asleep. At least, I hoped he was only asleep. I looked to see if he had eyes, and if they were closed. Both of his ends looked the same, but when I inspected him with a magnifying glass, I found two shiny black dots buried deep in the fur at one end. Those had to be his eyes, didn’t they? He didn’t appear to have eyelids.
Question for the Notebook: Why don’t caterpillars have eyelids? You would think they would need them, spending their days in the sun as they do.
Travis inspected him the following morning and raised a good point I hadn’t considered when he said, “Why did you call him Petey? How do you know he’s a boy?”
“I guess I don’t,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find out when he hatches. I don’t know what kind of butterfly he’s going to be, either.”
More Questions for the Notebook: Do caterpillars come as male and female? Or do they turn into male or female while they’re asleep in their cocoons? Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren’t given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.
MOTHER DISLIKED Petey’s presence but tolerated him because he would eventually turn into something beautiful. Mother yearned for Beauty in her life. She supported the Lockhart Chamber Orchestra and took us once a year to the ballet in Austin. It took us half a day to get there on the train, and we would spend the night at the Driskill Hotel; there we would have ice cream floats at the fountain and afternoon tea in the Crystal Room.
Every month she pored over her magazines that came in the mail—The Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s. From these she made patterns, cutting and sewing silk flowers that she arranged in the parlor. Although we had fields full of wildflowers blooming in the spring, she never arranged those. Sometimes I would pick a handful of them and put them in a pitcher by my bed. They looked nice but they were good for only a day or two. Then they didn’t so much wilt as disappear. You were left with a vase full of smelly water.
Petey disregarded the world around him; in fact, he disregarded everything except the bundles of leaves I brought him daily. He ate and slept and ate and slept, and in between bouts of eating and sleeping, he ejected many tiny, compacted green bales from his hind end. This meant I had to spend part of each day cleaning up his quarters. I hadn’t signed up for this, and I soon grew tired of it, but I kept telling myself it would all be worth it when he turned into a magnificent butterfly. He grew unbelievably fat, as thick as a sausage. One day I brought him the wrong kind of greenery, and he sulked and wouldn’t eat it. I was ready to jettison him outside for all the trouble he put me to. Plus, he didn’t make a very entertaining pet.
When I mentioned this to Granddaddy, he chastised me by saying, “Remember, Calpurnia, Petey is not your pet. He is a creature in the natural order of things. While it is easy to be more interested in the higher-order animals, and I must confess I myself am guilty of this weakness, it doesn’t mean we can neglect our study of the lower orders. To do so indicates a lack of purpose and a shallowness of scholarship.”
So, all for Science, I cleaned up caterpillar poop. Then Petey went off his feed again for no good reason. I checked his forage, and it was the right kind, but he wasn’t interested. I thought, You spoiled, sulky caterpillar, I should throw you out on the lawn. You can take your chances with the birds and see how you like that, mister.
To my surprise, when I woke up the next morning, I found that he had his cocoon well under way. So he hadn’t been pouting after all; he’d been resting up and planning for his labors. I had come close to throwing out a blameless caterpillar.
All day long, he squirted a fine gray thread from his front end (I think), and busily tangled it this way and that, fashioning a messy cocoon with odd bits of thread sticking out here and there. It looked like slapdash work. His knitting was no better than mine, which made me feel some sympathy for him. He slowly sealed himself up in his capsule like an Edgar Allan Poe caterpillar.
“Good night, Petey. Sleep well,” I bid him. Petey stirred and then settled one last time in his self-made prison. The cocoon didn’t move for two whole weeks while Petey went about the slow, magical business of rearranging his parts in his sleep. There was something gorgeous and mysterious about it, but it was also somewhat revolting if you thought about it too closely. It made me think of Life. And Death.
I had never seen a real live dead person. The closest I had come was a daguerreotype of my uncle Crawford Steele, dead at age three of diphtheria, wrapped in swathes of white lace. You could see some of the whites of his sunken eyes, so you knew that he wasn’t asleep, that things were not all right. I went to Harry and asked, “Harry, have you ever seen a dead person?”
He said, “Uh, no. Why are you asking?”
“No particular reason.”
“Where do you come up with these things? You scare me sometimes.”
“Me? Scare you?” The thought of me scaring my biggest, strongest brother was laughable.
“I was thinking about Petey moving his parts around, and that made me think of living things, which made me think of dead things. So the next time there’s a funeral in town, will you take me?”
“Callie Vee. ”
“There’s nothing creepy about it. It’s scientific interest. Backy Medlin looks kind of decrepit to me. How old is he, do you reckon?”
“Why don’t you go down the street and inspect his teeth?”
“That’s a good one, Harry, but I doubt he has any left. He’11 go soon, don’t you think?”
I passed Backy Medlin every day on my way to and from school. He sat with the other codgers on the gallery of the gin, rocking and spitting and interrupting each other’s stories of the War and griping at each other that, no, it hadn’t happened that way, it had happened this way. And so on. (Backy’s name came from his prodigious use of chewing tobacco and his poor aim at the spittoon. He spat frequently, randomly, mightily. A constant foul brown rain pattered down on the dust around him, and you had to keep a sharp lookout.) No one paid the men the slightest attention anymore. Sometimes even they got sick of yakking and turned to dominoes, playing with an old carved set with dots so stained from a million games that they were nearly indecipherable. The tiles clacked pleasingly, and every now and then one of the old men would exclaim “Ha!” and you knew he had thrown down a particularly good one.
“So will you take me to Backy’s funeral?” I said.
Harry said, “Really, Callie, this isn’t very nice talk.”
“I’m not wishing him to die. I’m just curious. Granddaddy says that a curious mind is a pree . . . is a perk—”
“Prerequisite?”
“Yes—that—to a scientific understanding of the world.”
“Fine. But have you done your piano practice yet? Miss Brown comes tomorrow.”
“You sound like Mother. No, I haven’t done it yet, and yes, I’ll do it. Harry, how many years will we have to take lessons? I’m getting tired of it, aren’t you? Why don’t some of the others take piano for a while? I have better things to do.”
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Page 9