The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Read online

  As a last resort, I rounded up my courage and went out to my grandfather’s laboratory. I pushed back the burlap flap that served as a door and stood quaking on the threshold. He looked up in surprise from the counter where he was pouring a foul-looking brown liquid into various beakers and retorts. He didn’t invite me in. I stumbled through my grasshopper conundrum while he stared at me as if he was having trouble placing me.

  “Oh,” he said mildly, “I suspect that a smart young whip like you can figure it out. Come back and tell me when you have.” He turned away from me and began to write in his ledger.

  So, that was that. My audience with the dragon. I counted it a wash. On the one hand, he hadn’t breathed fire at me, but on the other, he’d been no help at all. Perhaps if I’d made Harry go with me, Grandfather would have accorded me more attention. Maybe he was peeved that I’d interrupted his work, although he had spoken to me in polite tones. I knew what he was working on. For some reason, he had gotten it in his head to figure out a way to distill pecans into whiskey. He apparently reasoned that if you could make fine spirits from common corn and the lowly potato, why not the princely pecan? And, Lord knows, we were drowning in pecans—sixty acres of them.

  I went back to my room and contemplated the grasshopper puzzle. I had one of the small green grasshoppers in a jar on my vanity, and I stared at it for inspiration. I had been unable to catch one of the big yellow ones, even though they were much slower.

  “Why are you different?” I asked, but it refused to answer.

  The next morning, I awoke as usual to a scuffling in the wall next to my bed. It was a possum, returning to his lair at his normal time. Shortly after this, I heard the slap and slam of sash weights as SanJuanna threw open the parlor windows beneath my room. I sat up in my high brass bed, and suddenly it came to me that the fat yellow grasshoppers had to be an entirely new species, separate and apart from the green ones, and that I—Calpurnia Virginia Tate—had discovered them. And didn’t the discoverer of a brand-new species get to put her name on it? I was going to be famous! My name would be heralded far and wide; the governor would shake my hand; the university would award me a diploma.

  But what did I do now? How did I stake my claim on the natural world? I had a vague idea that I had to write to someone to register my find, some official in Washington.

  I had heard debates at the dinner table between my grandfather and our minister, Mr. Barker, concerning Mr. Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species and the dinosaurs they were unearthing in Colorado and what this meant to the Book of Genesis. They talked about how Nature weeded out the weak and left the hardy to carry on. Our schoolteacher, Miss Harbottle, had glossed over Mr. Darwin, looking discomfited as she did so. Surely such a book addressing the origin of species would tell me what to do. But how on earth could I get my hands on it when controversy still raged about such matters in our corner of the world? There was even an active chapter of the Flat Earth Society in San Antonio.

  Then I remembered that Harry was due to take the longbed wagon into Lockhart for supplies. Lockhart was the seat of Caldwell County. The county library was there. Books were there. All I had to do was beg a ride from Harry, the one brother who could deny me nothing.

  IN LOCKHART, after conducting our business, Harry loitered on the corner so he could admire the figures of the ladies strolling by, exhibiting the latest finery from the local milliner. I mumbled excuses and slipped across the courthouse square. The library was cool and dark. I walked up to the counter where the elderly lady librarian was handing some books to a fat man in a white linen suit. Then it was my turn. Just at that moment, a woman with a little boy came up. It was Mrs. Ogletree and her six-year-old, Georgie. Georgie and I shared the same piano teacher, and his mother knew my mother.

  Oh, no. The last thing I wanted was a witness.

  “Good afternoon, Callie,” she said. “Is your mother here today?”

  “She’s at home, Mrs. Ogletree. Hello, Georgie.”

  “Hi, Callie,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Um . . . just looking at books. Here, you’ve got yours, you go ahead of me. Please.”

  I stepped back and grandly waved them forward.

  “Why, thank you, Callie,” she said. “Such lovely manners. I shall have to mention it to your mother next time I see her.”

  After an eternity, they left. I kept glancing around to see if anyone else was about to come up. The librarian frowned at me. I stepped up to the counter and whispered, “Please, ma’am, do you have a copy of Mr. Darwin’s book?”

  She leaned over the counter and said, “What was that?”

  “Mr. Darwin’s book. You know, The Origin of Species.”

  She frowned and cupped a hand behind her ear. “You have to speak up.”

  I spoke up in a shaking voice. “Mr. Darwin’s book. That one. Please.”

  She pinioned me with a sour look and said, “I most certainly do not. I wouldn’t keep such a thing in my library. They keep a copy at the Austin library, but I would have to order it by post. That’s fifty cents. Do you have fifty cents?”

  “No, ma’am.” I could feel myself turning pink. I’d never had fifty cents in my life.

  “And,” she added, “I would need a letter from your mother permitting you to read that particular book. Do you have such a letter?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, mortified. My neck was starting to itch, the telltale precursor to an outbreak of hives.

  She sniffed. “I thought not. Now, I have books to be shelved. You must excuse me.”

  I wanted to weep with rage and humiliation, but I refused to cry in front of the old bat. I left the library in a purple froth and found Harry lounging in front of the general store. He looked at me with concern.

  I scratched the welts that had popped up on my neck and yelled, “What is the point of a library if they won’t give you a book?”

  Harry glanced around. “What are you talking about?”

  “Some people aren’t fit to be librarians,” I said. “I want to go home now.”

  On the long, hot, silent trip back in the wagon piled high with goods, Harry looked over at me. “What’s the matter, my own pet?”

  “Nothing,” I snapped. Oh, absolutely nothing, except that I was strangling on bitterness and gall and was in no mood to talk about it. For once I was glad of the privacy of the deep sunbonnet that Mother made me wear to prevent freckling.

  “Do you know what’s in that crate?” Harry said. “The one right behind you?” I didn’t bother to reply. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I hated the world.

  “It’s a wind machine,” he said, “for Mother.”

  If it had been any of my other brothers, I would have snarled at him, Don’t be ridiculous—there’s no such thing.

  “Really, it is,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  When we got home, I couldn’t stand the noisy excitement at the unloading of the wagon. I bolted for the river. I ripped off my bonnet and pinafore and dress and threw myself into the water, casting terror into the hearts of the local tadpoles and turtles. Good. That lady librarian had ruined my day, and I was determined to ruin someone—or something—else’s day. I ducked my head underwater and let out a long, loud scream, the sound burbling in my ears. I came up for air and did it again. And one more time, just to be thorough. The cooling water gradually soothed me. After all, what was one book to me? Really, it didn’t matter. One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white chargers and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home.

  I lay on my back and watched a pair of swallows racing up and down the river, tumbling like acrobats in pursuit of invisible bugs. Despite my hours of freedom, the summer was not proceeding as I’d envisaged. Nobody was interested in the Questions that I wrote in my
Notebook. Nobody was interested in helping me figure out the Answers. The heat sapped the life out of everybody and everything.

  I thought of our beloved, big old house and how sad it looked in the middle of the yellow dried-out lawn. Usually the grass was soft and cool and green, inviting you to take off your boots and run across it barefoot and play Statues, but now it was a scorched bright gold and as menacing to the feet as straw stubble. The yellow grass made it hard to see my brand-new species of big yellow grasshopper. You couldn’t find them until you practically stepped on them. Then they would zing upward and fly ponderously on clacking wings for a few feet and disappear in the grass again. Catching them was difficult, despite their being fat and slow. Funny how the smaller and quicker emerald ones were such a snap to catch. They were just too easy to spot. The birds spent their days gobbling them up while the yellow ones hid nearby and taunted their less-fortunate brothers.

  And then I understood. There was no new species. They were all one kind of grasshopper. The ones that were born a bit yellower to begin with lived to an old age in the drought; the birds couldn’t see them in the parched grass. The greener ones, the ones the birds picked off, didn’t last long enough to grow big. Only the yellower ones survived because they were more fit to survive the torrid weather. Mr. Charles Darwin was right. The proof lay in my own front yard.

  I lay in shock in the water thinking about this, staring at the sky, looking for some flaw in my reasoning, some crack in my conclusion. I could find none. Then I splashed my way to the bank. I hauled myself out by some handy elephant ears, dried off with my pinafore, dressed as fast as I could, and ran home.

  When I got back to the house, I found the whole family clustered around a busted-open crate in the hallway. In the middle of the excelsior nest sat a squat, black metal machine with four blades on the front and a glass reservoir on the back into which my father poured kerosene. In the middle of the blades, a round brass boss proclaimed in curly script, Chicago’s Finest Wind Machine.

  Father said, “Stand back.” He struck a match and set the thing alight. It filled the room with a mineral stink and a great whoosh of air. My brothers all cheered. I cheered too but for a different reason.

  Life in our house got somewhat easier after that. Mother retired at midday with her wind machine, and all our lives got better, especially Father’s, whom she sometimes invited to retire with her.

  It took me a week to get up the nerve to visit Grandfather again. He was sitting in his laboratory on a dilapidated armchair, the oozing stuffing mined by mice.

  I said, “I know why the big grasshoppers are yellow and why the little ones are green.” I told him my discovery and how I’d figured it out. I shifted from foot to foot as he looked at me and listened in silence. After a while he said, “Did you come up with this on your own? With no help?”

  “Yes,” I said, then told him about my humiliating trip to the Lockhart library. He stared at me for a moment with an odd expression on his face—perhaps surprise, perhaps consternation—as if I were a species he’d never seen before. He said, “Come with me.”

  He didn’t speak a word as we walked to the house. Oh, dear. I had done the unthinkable, not once, but twice, by interrupting him at his work. Was he going to turn me over to Mother for yet another lecture on good manners? He led me into the library, where we children were not supposed to go. So he was going to deliver the lecture himself. Perhaps he would berate me for my clumsy theory. Or perhaps he would switch me across the hands. My dread grew. Who was I—Callie Vee Tate of Fentress, Texas—to think I could even contemplate such matters? A nobody from nowhere.

  Despite my fear, I took a good look around the room, since I knew I’d never have the chance again. The library was dim, even with the heavy bottle-green velvet drapes drawn back from the tall double window. Right by the window sat a huge leather armchair and a spool table holding a lamp for reading. There were books on the floor by the chair and more books stacked in tall wooden shelves made from our failed pecan trees (you couldn’t escape the enduring fact of pecans in our lives). There was a large oak desk covered in intriguing oddities: a blown ostrich egg on a carved wooden stand, a microscope nesting in a shagreen leather case, a carved whale’s tooth etched with a bosomy lady not exactly contained by her corset. The family Bible and a huge dictionary with its own magnifying glass lay side by side next to a red plush album full of cramped formal portraits of my ancestors. So. Would I be getting the Bible lecture or the Letting-Down-My-Ancestors lecture? I waited while he made up his mind. I glanced around the walls, which were covered with shallow boxes displaying alarming stick insects and bright multicolored butterflies. Below each gay scrap of color was a scientific name in my grandfather’s careful copperplate script. I forgot myself and went over to peer at them.

  “Bear,” said Grandfather.

  Huh? I thought.

  “Watch the bear,” he said, just as I tripped on the open sneering mouth of a black bearskin rug, its fangs a trap in the gloom for the unwary.

  “Right. Bear. Sir.”

  Grandfather unthreaded his watch chain to remove a tiny key. He unlocked a tall glass cabinet crammed with more books, preserved birds, bottled beasts, and other curios. I sidled over to get a better look at this irresistible display. A misshapen armadillo caught my eye, warped and buckled and lumpy, obviously stuffed by the most inept amateur. Why did he have that? I could have done better. Next to it was a five-gallon specimen bottle of thick glass containing the strangest beast I had ever seen. A thick, blobby form, multiple arms, two big glaring eyes distorted by the glass into huge saucer orbs, the stuff of nightmares. What on earth was it? I drew closer.

  Grandfather reached into the stack of books. I saw Dantes Inferno next to The Science of Hot Air Ballooning. There was A Study of Mammalian Reproduction and A Treatise on Drawing the Female Nude. He extracted a book covered in rich green morocco leather handsomely tipped with gold. He polished it with his sleeve, although I could see no dust on it. Ceremoniously, he bowed and offered it to me. I looked at it. The Origin of Species. Here, in my own house. I received it in both my hands. He smiled.

  Thus began my relationship with Granddaddy

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MEASURE OF

  THE MORNING

  The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why . . . the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather. . . .

  THREE DAYS LATER, I crept downstairs and went out onto the front porch very early before the daily avalanche of my brothers could crack open the peace of the morning. I scattered a handful of sunflower seeds thirty paces down the drive to draw the birds and then I sat down on the steps on a ratty old cushion I’d scavenged from the trunk room. I made a list in my red leather Notebook of everything that moved. Isn’t that what naturalists do?

  One of the sunflower seeds hopped across the slate tiles of the front walk. Odd, that. On inspection it turned out to be a tiny toad, a quarter of an inch long, hopping mightily after an escaping millipede, itself no bigger than a thread, both going for all they were worth until they disappeared in the grass. Then a wolf spider, startling in size and hairiness, streaked over the gravel, either chasing something smaller or being chased by something bigger, I couldn’t tell which. I reckoned there must be a million minor dramas playing out around the place without ceasing. Oh, but they were hardly minor to the chaser and the chasee who were dealing in the coin of life and death. I was a mere bystander, an idler. They were playing for keeps.

  Then a hummingbird careened around the corner of the house and plunged into the trumpet of the nearest lily drooping in the heat. Not finding it to his liking, he abruptly backed out and explored the next one. I sat a few feet away, entranced, close enough to hear the angry low-pitched buzzing of his wings, so at odds with his jewel-like appearance and jaunty attitude. The bird paused at the lip of a flower and then turned and caught sight of me. He hovered in midair for a second and then rushed at me. I froze. The bird s
topped four inches shy of my face and hung there, I swear. I felt the tiny rush of wind from his wings against my forehead and, reflexively, my eyes squeezed shut of their own accord. How I wish I’d been able to keep them open, but it was a natural reaction and I couldn’t stop myself. The second I opened them, the bird flew off. He was the size of a winged pecan. Fueled by rage or curiosity—who could tell—he cared not at all that I could have crushed him with the lightest swat.

  I had once seen Ajax, Father’s best dog, get into a fight with a hummingbird and lose. The hummingbird had dived at him and spooked him until he’d trotted back to the front porch, looking very embarrassed. (It is possible for a dog to look embarrassed, you know. He’d whipped around and started licking his nether parts, a sure sign a dog is trying to hide his true feelings.)

  The front door opened, and Granddaddy came out onto the porch, an ancient leather satchel strapped over his shoulder, a butterfly net in one hand, and a malacca walking stick in the other.

  “Good morning, Calpurnia,” he said. So he knew my name after all.

  “Good morning, Granddaddy.”

  “What have you got there, if I may ask?”

  I jumped to my feet. “It’s my Scientific Notebook,” I said grandly. “Harry gave it to me. I write down everything I observe in it. Look, here’s my list for this morning.”

  Observe was not a word I normally used in conversation, but I wanted to prove my seriousness to him. He put down his satchel, and it made interesting clinking noises. He took out his spectacles and looked at my list. It read: