The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

by Jacqueline Kelly

  “Too bad, because it’s so much fun,” I said. No mere Becky Thatcher I, but crafty old Tom himself.

  A few minutes later, I ran across the meadow in the direction I had seen Granddaddy set off. “Wait, wait,” I cried. He was disappearing into the shady pecan bottom when I caught up with him.

  “I am delighted to have your company, but what are you doing here?” he said. “I thought you were pressed into work with the others and hired yourself out.”

  “I traded with Sul Ross,” I said.

  “What did you trade?”

  “Um, well, I didn’t exactly trade, sir. I hired him. I told him if he looked after the babies that I would give him two pennies. Plus, I told him he was allowed to throw rocks at the hens to keep them away.” I hastened to add, “But only small rocks—no bigger than my thumbnail, I made that very clear. He seemed pleased enough with the arrangement. This way, I make three cents. And I get to spend the day with you.”

  “Ah,” said Granddaddy. “You may turn out to be a real young woman of commerce.” And although he spoke genially enough, I sensed something—disappointment?—in his expression.

  “No,” I said after a moment’s thought, “I don’t think so.” I put my hand in his. “Do you think we’ll see something new today?” I said.

  His expression changed to one of gladness. “I am certain of it,” he said, and we set off for the riverbank.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE TELEPHONE COMES

  Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.

  CHANGE WAS COMING, both on the small stage of my life and the larger one of our town. The Bell Telephone Company had run a line all the way from Austin to the county seat in Lockhart, and one could now perform the astonishing feat of talking over a thin strand of wire to a man thirty miles away. (Or, to be precise, shouting at him. The interaction was reputed to be noisy.) Twenty years earlier, the journey to Austin had taken three days by wagon; ten years earlier it was half a day by train; now a message could be delivered in the time it took a man to draw breath.

  There was much debate about where the switching board and the Telephone (there was only one) should go. Some thought the gin since it was the center of commerce; others said the post office; but our mayor, Mr. Axelrod, ruled that it should go to the newspaper, the beating informational heart of our community. The newspaper office was right across the street from the gin, and so the apparatus could be used when needed to receive cotton orders and check market prices.

  Granddaddy grew excited about the ’phone and had an extra spring in his step when we went out collecting specimens.

  “By God,” he said, “progress is a wonderful thing. That boy Alex has done it, by God.”

  “Alex?” I said. “You mean Mr. Bell?”

  “I do mean him,” he said. “The very one.”

  “Um,” I said, “you know him?”

  “A good boy. Known him for years through the Geographic. I’m surprised I haven’t told you. I loaned him some money when he was starting out, and he gave me some stock in his company. Remind me to check the ticker next time I’m in Austin. Those shares might be worth something by now.” And then he said, “By God, I can telephone the Exchange and get the quotes. No need to go to Austin. Ha!”

  Our town talked of nothing else for a week. The Bell Company placed an advertisement in the Fentress Indicator announcing that it would hire a Telephone Operator and that this person had to be a dependable, sober, industrious young lady between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. Apparently the Company had had plenty of bad experiences with its earliest operators, who had all been recruited from the ranks of telegraph men (a rough lot and prone to drunkenness, rudeness, and disconnecting patrons). The advertisement also stipulated that the young lady had to be tall, setting off all kinds of speculation, both polite and otherwise. It also offered room and board and the stunning sum of ten dollars a week on top of this. For a girl. Not a wagoneer, not a blacksmith, but a girl. And indoor work at that. This was unheard of. The money, the prestige, the independence! I burned for the position.

  I asked my handiest brother, J.B., “Do you think I look seventeen?” He looked at me and spoke gravely through a thick mouthful of wet toffee, “You look real old, Callie.” This pleased me, but then he was only five years old so it wasn’t exactly reliable information. I went and found Harry in the barn, where he was mending a harness.

  “Harry,” I said, “do you think I could pass for seventeen?”

  “Have you lost your mind?” he said, without looking up.

  “No. Look, what if I do this?” I held my hair up in what I imagined were attractive bunches above my ears. “Don’t I look seventeen?”

  He glanced at me. “You look like a spaniel. The answer is no.” Then he stopped his mending and squinted at me. “Why? What are you up to?”

  “Oh, nothing. . . .” I had for a fleeting moment seen myself as Miss Tate, Girl Operator, dressed in a smart shirtwaist dress, perched on a rolling stool, connecting each call with great efficiency and presence of mind, and saying in a well-modulated voice, “Hello, Central. Number please. . . .”

  I was even willing to lie about my age and “borrow” a dress and hat from Mother’s dressing room in the face of such potential magnificence. I had it all worked out when suddenly the obvious flashed on me: Half the town knew me by name and the other half by sight. What kind of idiot was I? I thanked the Lord for showing me the stupidity of my ridiculous and dangerous proposition in time. But still . . .

  On the big day, a dozen of our tall and not-so-tall young ladies presented themselves in their soberest hats, clutching letters of reference in their cleanest white gloves. They lined up along the raised wooden boardwalk in front of the newspaper office and stood for hours, some of them straining on tiptoe. When they went inside, they were made to stand with their backs to the wall and have the distance between their fingertips measured. It turned out that they needed someone with long arms who could plug in connections the length of the switching board. At the end of the day, they announced that Miss Honoria Goates from Staples would be our new Telephone Operator. There was considerable grumbling about this. She was tall, yes, and maybe she had long arms, but there were plenty of fine young ladies in Fentress, were there not? It was the Fentress Telephone Company, was it not? Why hire a foreigner from Staples, four miles away? Would she take the room and board or drive herself daily, and if so, how would she manage in bad weather? And on and on.

  Honoria Goates and her tin trunk arrived two days later and were placed in a tiny room the size of a closet containing the switching board and a cot so that she could answer the phone at any hour of the day and night. Her meals were to be brought to her from Elsie Bell’s Rooming House down the street. Such extravagance was unprecedented.

  In any event, it turned out not to matter that Honoria was from Staples or that she had long arms. What the Company didn’t know about her (but the rest of us did) was that her uncle, Homer Ray Goates, had been struck by lightning while plowing and had been found in the field, charred and smoking lightly, by Honoria herself. Mr. Goates lived, but lost most of his hearing and had to tote a huge ear trumpet about with him from then on. He also became prone to sudden fits of hilarious laughter over nothing, which, while disconcerting, nevertheless made him entertaining company.

  Poor Honoria had lived in mortal fear of electricity ever since. And who in her shoes would not? So, when faced with having to plug her first line into the board, with the supervisor at her shoulder to teach her, she shrieked and fled the building, no doubt expecting to be fried like her uncle by some satanic spark leaping through the wires. She stumbled across the bridge, not even stopping for her things, and ran all the way home to Staples in teary disgrace. Her father sent for her trunk the following day.

  Maggie Medlin, Backy Medlin’s great-niece, was hired to take her place. Maggie was shorter than Honoria but sturdier of
disposition. Her abhorrent younger sister, Dovie, basked in Maggie’s reflected glory and took to beginning every sentence with, “Well, my-sister-the-Operator says. . . .”

  We all hated her for it.

  Finally, the Bell Company men made it out to Fentress, and the great day came for the opening of the telephone line. The company’s representative arrived on the train from Austin. There wasn’t room to hold the ceremony inside the newspaper office itself, so we gathered on the street outside. The Odd Fellows’ Brass Band played a short selection, the Moose Band played at length, and the International Woodmen of the World, the band with the fewest members, went on forever. The mayor and the Company man made long, boring speeches about this great day. Mayor Axelrod cut a wide red ribbon with fake oversized cardboard scissors to officially open the Telephone Company in Fentress. Cheers went up, hands were shaken, and free lemonade and lager were passed around. Sam Houston tried to cadge a beer and was properly rebuffed.

  And then, at noon on the dot, it happened. A shrill jangling noise rang out in the breathless expectant air. The crowd gasped and ooohed. On the line was our state senator in Austin calling to congratulate our town as we hurtled toward the twentieth century. Maggie Medlin connected the line, and our mayor stepped into the closet and yelled at our senator, who yelled back at him from forty-five miles away, giving him that morning’s price for cotton on the Austin Exchange.

  Granddaddy murmured to me, “Do you realize what this means, Calpurnia? The days of whale oil and coal dust are over. The old century is dying, even as we watch. Remember this day.”

  Mr. Hofacket of Hofacket’s Portrait Parlor (“Fine Photographs for Fine Occasions”) was there with his big bellows camera to memorialize the day. He wanted to talk to Granddaddy about the Plant and was disappointed that we still hadn’t heard back. He’d have gabbed about it all day except that Mayor Axelrod pulled him back to his duties as official photographer. We crowded around, spilling off the boardwalk and into the street. Mr. Hofacket set up his camera. Granddaddy gripped my hand. Then Mr. Hofacket ducked under his black veil and held up his magnesium flash powder.

  “Don’t move!” cried Mr. Hofacket. We all froze. Mr. Hofacket’s powder lit us up like summer lightning and caught us for that one second in time. When we later saw a copy of the photograph, most of the faces were solemn and severe. I looked pensive. The only smiling face was that of Granddaddy, grinning away like the Cheshire Cat.

  CHAPTER 17

  HOME ECONOMIES

  As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.

  AGAINST MY WILL, I had arrived at that age when a young girl began to acquire those skills she would need to manage her own household after marriage. And of course, all the girls I knew expected to get married. Everybody did, unless you were so rich that you didn’t have to, or so hard on the eyes that no man would have you. A few girls went off to be teachers or nurses for a while before they got married, and I considered them lucky. And now we had the example of Maggie Medlin, Telephone Operator, an independent woman with her own money who answered to no man other than Mr. Bell. Since there was still only the one telephone in town, her duties were not onerous. She sat before her board, receiver around her neck, eating apples and reading the newspaper until the board buzzed with a call to be relayed. She then plugged in a cord and said in the same crisp voice every time, “Hello, Central, what number please?” She had to say this, despite the fact that there was only the one number. All the girls in school admired her. We played Operator with a scrap of cardboard and a length of twine for a switching station. This looked like the good life to me. But the telephone proved to be so popular that soon everyone had to have one. Maggie was not allowed to leave her station and became a veritable Company slave.

  THE PLANT THRIVED. We heard no word from Washington. Granddaddy toiled on with me at his elbow whenever I could escape to the laboratory with him.

  One Saturday morning, Mother looked up from her sewing as I was running out the front door, one of Granddaddy’s butterfly nets and his old fishing creel slung over my shoulder. “Stop a minute,” she said as my hand turned the doorknob. I didn’t like the way she looked me over. “Where are you off to?” she said.

  “Down to the river, ma’am, to collect specimens,” I said, edging crabwise out the door.

  “Come back here. Specimens are all very well,” said Mother, “but I’m worried that you are lagging behind. When I was your age, I could smock and darn and had the essentials of good plain cookery.”

  “I know how to cook,” I said stoutly.

  “What can you cook?” she said.

  “I can make a cheese sandwich. I can make a soft-boiled egg.” I thought about it some more, and then said triumphantly, “I can make a hard-boiled egg.”

  My mother said, “Lord above, it’s worse than I thought.”

  “What is?” I said.

  “Your ignorance of cookery.”

  “But why do I have to cook? Viola cooks for us,” I said.

  “Yes, but what about later? When you grow up and have a family of your own? How will you feed them?”

  Viola had been with us always, since before I was born, since before even Harry was born. It had never occurred to me that she wouldn’t always be there. My world wobbled on its axis. “Viola can cook for my family,” I said.

  There was silence. Then Mother said, “All right, you can go. But we will talk about this again soon.”

  I ran out of there and did my best to forget the conversation, but it nagged at me all the way to the river like a tooth beginning to go bad. All joy had fled the morning. Mother was awakening to the sorry facts: My biscuits were like stones, my samplers askew, my seams like rickrack. I considered my mother’s life: the mending basket that never emptied, the sheets and collars and cuffs to be turned, the twenty loaves of bread to be punched down each and every week. It’s true that she didn’t have to do all the heavy cleaning herself—she had SanJuanna for that. And a washerwoman came on Monday and spent the whole day boiling the clothes in the dripping laundry shed out back. Viola killed and plucked and cooked the chickens. Alberto dispatched and butchered the hogs. But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.

  The day didn’t begin to look up until I caught a spotted fritillary butterfly. They were swift and elusive and difficult to net. I knew Granddaddy would be well pleased, plus it helped keep my mind off cooking and mending. When I got home, it took me a whole hour just to set the delicate body in preparation for mounting, and by then I had forgotten what an ignorant girl I was. Just as well, as the campaign to bring me up to domestic scratch was, without my knowledge or cooperation, ginning up in earnest.

  The campaign gained momentum when Miss Harbottle decided that all the girls in my class would enter their handiwork in the Fentress Fair. This was distressing news. I found sewing a waste of time, and I had been easing along doing the minimum. My work could charitably be described as sloppy, like Petey’s cocoon. Stitches dropped themselves and later reappeared at random so that the long striped scarf I was knitting bulged in the middle like a python after dining on a rabbit. I fancied that a malevolent Rumpelstiltskin crept into my room at night and undid my best work, turning the gold of my efforts into pathetic dross on a wheel perversely spinning backward.

  Although she’d been watching my knitting to some degree, it had been a while since Mother had inspected my fine sewing. One day she asked to check my work. I reluctantly took her my sewing bag, and she poked through it for a minute. “You did this?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Are you proud of it?”

  Was I proud of it? I pondered this. Was it a trick question or not? I coul
dn’t tell; I didn’t know which way to flop. “Uh . . .”

  “I’m asking you, Calpurnia.”

  “No, ma’am, I guess I’m not too proud of it.”

  “Then why don’t you do work you can be proud of?”

  I thought again. I had no snappy answer, so I had to fall back on honesty. “Because it’s boring, ma’am?” A truthful answer, but one I knew to be foolish, even as it exited my mouth.

  “Ah,” said Mother. “Boring.”

  A bad sign when she repeated your own words back to you like a parrot. Now, parrots. Those were some interesting birds, living to such a great age that they were passed down in the family will. Why, Granddaddy had told me about a parrot who had lived past his century and learned over four hundred conversational phrases, as acute a mimic as any human being . . .

  “Calpurnia, I don’t believe you’re . . .”

  Although I doubted I’d be allowed a parrot (Granddaddy had also told me they were very expensive), this didn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of something smaller, a cockatiel, say, or maybe a budgie. . . . Mother’s lips were moving. . . . Something about practicing?

  “Have to do better . . .”

  A budgie would do as the bird of last resort. They could be taught to speak, couldn’t they?

  “When I was your age . . .”

  And if I had a budgie, would I be allowed to let it fly loose in the house? Probably not. It would drop white dollops like antimacassars on the good furniture, and that would be the end of that. And you couldn’t forget Idabelle the Inside Cat in her basket by the stove. Maybe I could let it fly in my bedroom. It could perch on my headboard and chirrup in my ear, a pleasant sound—

  “Calpurnia!”

  I jumped. “Yes, Mother?”

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  I stared at her. How could she tell?