“Better things to do with Grandfather, you mean.”
“Uh, yes.”
“I asked you once before and you never answered me. So, what do you talk about with him?”
“Golly, Harry, there’s everything to talk about. There’s bugs and snakes, cats and coyotes; there’s trees and butterflies and hummingbirds; there’s clouds and weather and wind; there’s bears and otters, although they’re getting harder to find around here. There’s whaling ships, there’s—”
“All right.”
“The South Seas and the Grand Canyon. The planets and the stars.”
“Okay, okay.”
“There’s the principles of distillation. You do know he’s trying to turn pecans into liquor, right? Although it’s not going so well, but don’t say I said so, okay?”
“Got it,” said Harry.
“There’s Newton’s laws, there’s prisms and microscopes, there’s—”
“Got it, I said.”
“Gravity, friction, lenses—”
“Enough already.”
“The food chain, the rain cycle, the natural order. Harry, where are you going? There’s tadpoles and toads, lizards and frogs. Don’t go away. There’s something called microbes, germs, you know. I’ve seen them through the microscope. There’s butterflies and caterpillars, which brings us to Petey; let’s not forget about him. Harry?”
I AWOKE in the morning to a tiny skritch-skratch sound like the noise a mouse makes in the wall, only it was coming from Petey’s jar. It was too dark to see, so I pulled back the curtain and set his jar in the windowsill. His cocoon pitched this way and that. As the room grew lighter, he thrashed and chewed away and either didn’t notice my face pressed up against his jar or didn’t care. Finally, he had a good-sized hole in one end of his cocoon, and what had once been Petey slowly strained its way out with a mighty effort.
And there, instead of the lovely bright creature I’d imagined, crouched an odd-looking thick-bodied butterfly with damp, tightly furled wings. It shook, struggling to uncrimp itself. I could see that it wasn’t my Petey anymore. I would have to find a new name for it. Something to reflect its long-awaited splendor. Something like . . . Fleur . . . since it lived on nectar, or maybe Sapphire, or maybe Ruby, depending on the final color of its wings. I left it to its work and went down to breakfast.
At the table I announced, “Petey hatched. He’s busy drying off his wings.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Mother. “What color is he?”
“I can’t tell yet, ma’am. He’s still puckered up. But he definitely needs a new name now that he’s not Petey the Caterpillar anymore.”
“Children?” said Mother, “do you have any suggestions?”
Sul Ross, the seven-year-old, proclaimed, “We should name him . . . we should name him . . . ,” he struggled, “. . . Butterfly.”
“That’s nice, dear,” said Mother.
“How about Belle,” said Harry, “for beauty.”
“That’s nice, Harry. Any other suggestions?”
Granddaddy said, “You might want to wait and see what it looks like first.”
I thought this an odd statement. But if anybody knew his butterflies, it was Granddaddy, so I figured he had some reason for making it.
“Yes,” I said, “let’s see what he looks like before we name him, although Belle is a good idea.” Sul Ross looked crestfallen, and I added, “And Butterfly is good, too, Sully. Maybe I’ll call him Belle the Butterfly.”
“Is it a him or a her, Callie?” said Travis.
“No idea,” I said, tucking into the flapjacks.
“Kindly don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Mother.
After breakfast I ran up to my room with the three younger boys on my heels debating what to christen our new charge. And there in all his glory was Petey, or Belle, stretched wide on his twig, enormous wings filling his jar. He was huge, he was pale, he was fuzzy all over. He was the world’s biggest moth.
“That sure is a funny-looking butterfly,” said Sul Ross. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s not a butterfly, Sully,” said Travis. “It’s a moth. Callie, did you know it was going to be a moth?”
“Um,” I said, taken aback by his size, “not really.”
“Gosh, I’ve never seen one that big,” said Travis.
“Me neither. He’s kind of creepy,” said Sul Ross, “don’t you think?”
“Uh. . . .” It’s true, he was kind of creepy, but I would never admit it. I had no idea moths could get to be that size. And this one was only a newborn.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Travis.
“I’m going to study it, of course,” I said, wondering what on earth I would do with this monster.
“Oh, okay. So what are you going to study?”
“Um, its . . . um, eating habits, that sort of thing. Its mating habits. Right. Yep, there’s territory, wingspan, things like that.”
“Are you going to have to touch it?” said Sul Ross. “I sure wouldn’t want to touch it.”
“Maybe not yet,” I said. “It’s barely born. It needs time to get used to things.”
“You better find a bigger jar fast, Callie. It’s going to bust out of that one.”
“I don’t think they come any bigger.”
“Maybe you could let him fly around your room,” said Travis.
Not likely.
“Eeeuuuw,” said Sul Ross, backing up. “I gotta go.”
“Me too,” said Travis. “Time for school.”
“Hey!” I called after them, “It’s all right, come back here. I’m not gonna let him out!”
Now what? Petey—or Belle, or whatever it was—fluttered in its jar. The sound was dry, ominous, morbid. I got ready for school, trying not to look at it, flinching every time it flapped. I’d have to let it out of that jar, I could see that, but I didn’t want to think about it. I spent most of the hours at school trying not to.
When I got home, I lingered downstairs and put in some extra piano practice, after which Mother ordered me upstairs to change my pinafore. I dragged myself up to my room and had a sudden spasm of anxiety as I put my hand on the doorknob: What if it had gotten out? Had I tightened the lid on the jar after opening it the last time? What if it was flying loose around the room? Then I caught myself. Calpurnia Virginia Tate. You’re being ridiculous. Are you a Scientist or aren’t you? Come on, now. It’s. Only. A. Moth.
All right. That did it. I peered around my door. There it hunkered in the jar, the same as I’d left it, too big to even turn around. It stirred, wings beating against the glass.
“Petey,” I said. “What am I going to do with you? I need to figure out what species you are. And I need to find you a bigger home.”
I pulled Granddaddy’s Taxonomy of the Insect World from my bookshelf and turned to the order Lepidoptera. Based on its color and ridiculous size, it had to be a Saturniidae of some kind. Differentiating between the most likely possibilities meant examining the specimen’s spread wings, but there wasn’t room enough in the jar. There was nothing for it, I’d either have to get it a bigger home or let it loose. I stared at it for a while. It wasn’t so bad looking once you got used to its freakish size. It did have cute feathery antennae. I had brought it this far. It was stuck in that jar because of me; I couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.
“All right, Petey, let’s go visit Granddaddy and see what he has to say.” I picked up the jar at arm’s length and carried it downstairs with him pulsating all the way.
I ran into Harry in the hall. He took one look at Petey and said, “Good heavens, is that your butterfly? It looks more like an albatross.”
“Ha,” I said, “ha.”
“Did you know it would turn into this?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” I said, breezily.
Harry eyed me and then said, “Let me look at him. He’s a prizewinner, isn’t he? If they had an entry for moths at the Fentress Fair, you’d take it, easy.�
�
An interesting thought. Along with the classes for hogs and cattle and home preserves, a category for moths. Which naturally led me to remember the pet division for children every year at the fair. Children showed up with their cats and dogs and parakeets, a bunch of boring, everyday pets. Why not something more interesting like, say, a giant moth?
“Say, Harry,” I said, “do you think I could enter Petey in the pet show?”
“He’s not much of a pet, Callie Vee,” he said, laughing.
“So what? Dovie Medlin showed up last year with her gold-fish, Bubbles, who wasn’t much of a pet, either. And it’s not as if they have to perform tricks or anything. All they have to do is sit there, and the judges come by and look at them. He’d get some extra points for being different, don’t you think?”
“That he would, but it’s months away,” he said. “How are you going to keep him alive? You can’t keep him in that jar.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out some housing for him. How long do moths live, anyway?”
Harry said, “I don’t know. You’re the naturalist. I’m guessing a few weeks.”
Mother walked out of the kitchen and came to a sudden halt, staring at Petey’s jar in disbelief.
“What is that thing you’ve got in there, Calpurnia?” she said, her voice rising.
I sighed. “This is Petey, Mother. Or,” I added with false cheer, “you can call him Belle, if you like.” As if a beautiful name could somehow cloak this grotesquerie. Petey rippled drily, and my mother took a step back. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“What happened to your . . . to your beautiful butterfly?” she said.
“He turned out to be not so much a butterfly as a moth, you see,” I said, holding the jar out to show her. She took another step back.
“I want you to get it out of here. That’s a moth, for pity’s sake. Imagine what something that size would do to the woollens!” I had forgotten that she and SanJuanna fought a perennial pitched battle with hordes of small brown moths for possession of our blankets and winter clothes, their trifling weapons of cedar shavings and lavender oil no match for the ongoing push of Nature.
“It doesn’t eat wool, ma’am,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it does. It may only eat nectar, or it may eat nothing at all, depending on its species. Some of them don’t feed at all in the adult stage. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
Mother raised her hands. “Do not, under any circumstances, let that thing loose in here. I want it out of the house. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pressed a hand to her temple and turned and went upstairs.
Harry said, “Too bad. I’d have liked to see him in the pet show. Step right up, folks, come and see Calpurnia Virginia Tate and her giant pet moth!”
“Very funny. All right, I have to let him go, but I have to show him to Granddaddy first.” I went looking for Granddaddy in the library, but he wasn’t there. I could go out the front door and around the long way to the laboratory in back, or cut through the kitchen and face more revulsion and more explanations on the way. I tucked the jar under my arm and went through the kitchen. Viola took one look at me and said, “What you got there?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said and kept moving out the back door. Petey stirred in his jar. I wished he would keep still. I had grown used to his appearance, but that noise. There was something foreboding and primeval about it; it made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
Granddaddy was stooped over his ledger book when I found him.
“Hello, Granddaddy, look what I have,” I said, holding out the jar to him.
“My, my, that is certainly a hefty specimen you have there. I’ve never seen one so sizeable. Have you identified the family it belongs to?”
“I think he must be Saturniidae, or maybe Sphingidae,” I said, proud of my pronunciation.
“What do you plan to do with him?”
“I was going to enter him in the pet show at the Fair, but Harry thinks he won’t live that long, and you keep telling me he’s not a pet. And Mother wants him out of the house. So that means I can kill him and keep him for my collection. Or I can let him go.”
Granddaddy looked at me. We both looked at Petey, squashed in his jar. “He’s a handsome specimen,” Granddaddy said. “You may never see another like him.”
“I know.” I frowned. “You did warn me not to name him. But I’ve raised him this far. I don’t think I can kill him.”
AT DUSK, when we gathered on the lawn to await the first firefly, my brothers stood on the porch while I set Petey’s jar in the grass. Granddaddy watched from a rocker and sipped store-bought bourbon. I took the lid off the jar and stood back.
For a minute Petey huddled there without moving. Then he crawled over the lip of the jar and emerged from his glass cocoon. As he wobbled his way onto the grass, Ajax came trotting around the corner of the house. Petey stretched his quivering wings wide. Too late, from the corner of my eye I saw the dog charge, his ears flapping, thrilled with the prospect of a new game of fetch. Petey pulsed feebly into the air and came to rest a couple of feet away, with Ajax closing fast. He was going to swallow my best specimen, my science project, my Petey. Fury boiled within me. Stupid dog! I ran at him and screamed Ajax!—so loud that I startled myself. Who knew I had that much wind in me? The birds in the trees took flight, and Ajax hesitated. I lunged at his collar. But he leaped sideways, thinking that it was all a fine new entertainment. He pounced again and Petey rose again, chest-high this time, flapping like an awkward pullet testing its wings.
“No!” I screamed, and this time Ajax heard a word he recognized. Puzzled, he looked at me with Petey between his front paws. This was all fine sport, wasn’t it? His job was to retrieve flying things, wasn’t it? I rushed at the dog again, when Petey, with a mighty effort, launched himself into the air and in that split second was transformed from an ungainly land-bound dweller into something else, a creature of the wind, a citizen of the air.
I watched in amazement. Petey looked like he’d been flying forever. Ajax huffed and pulled at his collar, and I let him go. There was no catching that moth now.
“Wow!” exclaimed my brothers. “You did well, Callie.” “I thought that moth was a goner, for sure.”
Granddaddy raised his glass in salute as Petey disappeared into the scrub.
Later that night, I sat on the front porch by myself as it grew dark, delaying bedtime as long as I could, until all I could see was the last of the white lilies along the front walk. They glowed in the dark like pale miniature stars fallen to earth. Then something whizzed past me through the air, making straight for them, where it set up a commotion, thrashing around inside one flower after another. It sounded like a hummingbird, but I couldn’t see it. Did hummingbirds fly at night? I didn’t think so. Could it be a nectar-eating bat? I didn’t know, and even though I couldn’t see for sure, I decided that it had to be Petey. At least, I told myself so.
I preferred a happy ending.
CHAPTER 10
LULA STIRS UP TROUBLE
(BUT DOESN’T MEAN TO)
The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of Paradise, and some others, congregate; and successive males display their gorgeous plumage and perform strange antics before the females, which standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner.
IT TOOK MY FRIEND Lula Gates a long time to live down the ignominy of getting sick in public at the piano recital. For weeks she talked of nothing else. I grew tired of it and told her it could have been worse, that Maestro Frédéric Chopin had once done the same thing at a command performance for the king and queen of Prussia.
“Really?” said Lula, brightening at once.
No. I made that up. But it did make her feel better, and as a consequence she shut up about it.
I guess Lula was beautiful, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time. She had a long blond braid of honey and silver threaded together that hung al
l the way down her back and swayed with a life of its own when she played a vigorous piece on the piano. Her eyes were an odd, pale color somewhere between blue and green, their hue depending on the color of her hair ribbon. There was one strange thing about her that I found fascinating: She always had a delicate mist of perspiration across the bridge of her nose, winter or summer. It was barely enough to moisten a fingertip, but when you wiped it away, it immediately reappeared. This sounds unattractive, but it was entertaining rather than off-putting. As a small child, I would stand there and dab it away and watch it return for as long as she would let me. There seemed to be no explanation for it.
You would think that having Lula as a friend would be a great relief to me after all my brothers, and generally this was so, but sometimes she could be a bit sappy. She wouldn’t collect specimens with me at the dam (snakes). She wouldn’t walk with me to the old Confederate Training Ground (blisters and snakes). She wouldn’t go swimming in the river (undressing and snakes). But we shared a desk at school, and we always had. This is how our friendship had started and why in part, I guess, it persevered. Plus, I believe that her mother might have promoted the friendship. She might have thought it a social plum for Lula to have a friend in the Tate family. And did her mother also harbor hopes that Lula might one day snag one of the Tate boys as a husband? It’s possible. I’m guessing we had more money than other families in the county. Lula’s own family seemed comfortable enough. Her father owned the stables, and they could afford piano lessons, and they had a maid but no cook. She had only the one brother, feeble-minded Toddy. Toddy didn’t go to school but instead spent his days in a corner of his room, clutching the ragged remnant of an old quilt and rocking himself without ceasing. He was peaceful unless you took his scrap of quilt away, and then he became distressed and produced horrible, loud mooing noises until he got it back. His family found it more trouble than it was worth to take it away from him for washing, so as a consequence it smelled disgusting. Apart from this, the Gateses’ house seemed quiet compared with mine.
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Page 10