The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate Read online

  I said, “I think he needs a hole in the ground, a burrow to sleep in.”

  “We don’t have one.”

  “If you let him go,” I said hopefully, “he could make himself one.”

  “I can’t let him go. He’s my Armand. We just have to make one for him.”

  I sighed. We cast about for materials and found a pile of old newspapers and a scrap of blanket used to wipe down the horses after their day’s work. We put these items in the cage where Armand did his usual sniffing routine and then started industriously shredding the paper. He hauled it, along with his blanket, to the back corner of the hutch and, within minutes, had built himself a nest of sorts. He pulled the blanket over himself and thrashed this way and that. Then he grew still. Faint snores emanated from the mound.

  “There,” Travis whispered, “see how happy he is? You’re so smart, Callie Vee. You know everything.”

  Well, of course this puffed me up quite a bit. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all to keep Armand. (Or Dilly.)

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT we lined up to receive our weekly allowance from Father. We stood outside his door in order of age, and he called us in one at a time, doling out a dime apiece to the older boys; the younger boys and I each got a nickel. I understood the reasoning behind this—sort of—but looked forward to the day when I reached dime age. The small ceremony concluded with him admonishing us not to spend it all in one place, which most of us did right away at the Fentress General Store on jujubes, taffy, and chocolate. Father’s point was to teach us the value of saving money, but what we learned instead was how to calculate complex ratios of the maximum pleasure that could be extracted from each item for the longest time, as in, for example, the value of getting five cinnamon red hots for a penny versus three caramels for two pennies, and which brother would trade licorice for gumdrops, and at what exchange rate. Intricate calculations indeed.

  Despite this, I had managed to save the sum of twenty-two cents, which I kept in a cigar box under my bed. A mouse, apparently finding the box attractive, had nibbled on the corners. Time for a new box from Granddaddy. I knocked on the door of his library, and he called out, “Enter if you must.” I found him squinting at something through a magnifying glass, his long silver beard a pale lemon color in the faint wash of the lamplight.

  “Calpurnia, fetch another lamp, won’t you? This appears to be Erythrodiplax berenice, or the seaside dragonlet. It is the only true saltwater dragonfly we know of. But what is it doing here?”

  “I don’t know, Granddaddy.”

  “Ah, of course not. That is what we call a rhetorical question; no answer is actually expected.”

  I almost said, “Then why ask it?” But that would have been impertinent, and I would never be impertinent with my grandfather.

  “Strange,” he said. “You don’t normally see them this far from the salt marsh.”

  I brought him another lamp and leaned over his shoulder. I loved spending time with him in this room, piled high as it was with all sorts of intriguing things: the microscope and telescope, dried insects, bottled beasts, desiccated lizards, the old globe, an ostrich egg, a camel saddle the size of a hassock, a black bearskin rug with a gaping maw the perfect size for catching the foot of a visiting granddaughter. And let’s not forget the books, great stacks of them, dense scholarly texts bound in worn morocco with gilt lettering. And in pride of place on a special shelf, a thick jar containing the Sepia officinalis, a cuttlefish that had been sent to my grandfather years ago by the great man himself, Mr. Charles Darwin, whom Granddaddy revered. The ink on the cardboard tag was faded but still legible. My grandfather prized it above all things.

  He raised his head, sniffed the air, and said, “Why do you smell like an armadillo?”

  There was no putting anything past him, at least not anything having to do with Nature.

  “Uh,” I said, “it’s probably better that you don’t know.”

  This amused him. He said, “The name in Spanish means ‘little armored one.’ The early German settlers referred to it as the Panzerschwein, or ‘armored pig.’ The flesh is pale and resembles pork in taste and texture when properly prepared. My troops and I occasionally made a grateful meal of one when we could find it. During the War, they were not so common, having only recently migrated to our part of the world from South America. Darwin was quite taken with them and called them ‘nice little animals,’ but then he never tried to raise one. Although they rarely bite, they make terrible pets. They live alone as adults with no social tendencies, which might explain why they do not value human company in the slightest.”

  Granddaddy would occasionally mention the War Between the States, but not often. Probably best, as several Confederate veterans lived on in our town, and the War—or at least its outcome—still rankled with many of them. I also thought it best not to mention to Travis that his own grandfather had dined on Armand’s ancestors and found them good eating.

  “Granddaddy,” I said, “I would like a new cigar box, please, if you can spare one, and I need to borrow a book. So I can read about the armadillo we don’t have.”

  He smiled and produced a box for me, and then pointed to Godwin’s Guide to Texas Mammals. He said, “There are certain animals that apparently cannot be domesticated, for reasons that are not well understood. It isn’t only the armadillo. Consider the beaver, the zebra, and the hippopotamus, to name a few others. Many people have tried to domesticate them and all have failed miserably, often in a spectacular and sometimes deadly fashion.”

  I could just imagine Mother’s reaction to Travis coming home with a baby hippopotamus on the end of a string, and I thanked my lucky stars we lived in a hippo-free county. I opened my reference text, and Granddaddy and I worked together in contented silence.

  Right before bed, Travis and I checked on Armand. (We had agreed to call him Armand, even though we still couldn’t rule out Dilly.) He rooted and scrabbled and ignored us, so we left him to it.

  The next morning, Travis gave him another boiled egg. He ate it, ignored us, and retired to his burrow.

  Travis said, “I wish he’d be my friend. I bet if I keep feeding him, he’ll be my friend.”

  “That’s only ‘larder love.’ Do you really want a pet that’s only glad to see you because you bring it food?”

  I told him what I’d learned about the species from Granddaddy, but he shrugged it off. I figured he’d have to find out for himself. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE ARMADILLO CRISIS

  In the Pampæan deposit at the Bajada I found the osseous armour of a gigantic armadillo-like animal, the inside of which, when the earth was removed, was like a great cauldron.

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, Travis appeared at breakfast with dark circles ringing his eyes. And he smelled something fierce.

  Mother, alarmed, said, “Do you feel all right? What’s that terrible odor?”

  “I’m all right,” he mumbled. “It’s the rabbits. I fed them early.”

  “Hmm,” said Mother. “Perhaps you need a teaspoon of cod-liv—”

  “No, I’m fine!” he shouted. “Time for school!” And he bolted from the room.

  He’d come perilously close to being dosed with the dreaded cod-liver oil, Mother’s all-purpose remedy for whatever ailed you, and the foulest substance known to man. If you weren’t sick before taking a dose, you certainly were afterward; the mere threat of one small spoonful was enough to cause the sickest child to levitate from his deathbed and gallop off to school or church or whatever onerous chore awaited him in a state of glossy good health.

  On our way to school, I asked Travis what was wrong.

  He said, “I brought Armand in last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He slept in my bedroom.”

  I stared at him. “You’re kidding me. You brought his cage inside?”

  “No, just him.”

  I stared at him some more. “Yo
u mean … he was loose in your room?”

  “Yes, and you should have heard the noise he made.”

  The mind reeled. He went on, “He wouldn’t go to sleep, so I sneaked down to the pantry and got him an egg, but he still wouldn’t settle down. He kept digging in the corners and rubbing his armor against the legs of my bed. A horrible scraping noise, all night long.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “What about the others?” Travis shared a room with the little boys, Sul Ross and Jim Bowie.

  “They both slept right through it,” he said bitterly. “They didn’t even notice.”

  “You know keeping Armand isn’t a good idea,” I said, and was about to deliver a sisterly lecture on the many reasons why not, when we were joined by my friend and classmate Lula Gates, who sometimes walked to school with us. A whole bunch of my brothers—including Travis—were sweet on her. Lula wore a new ribbon in her long silvery-blond hair that made her eyes look especially green. Mermaid eyes, Travis called them. When he saw her, all his fatigue dropped away. (I should mention here that Travis had a special gift for happiness. He was one of those rare individuals whose face lit up like the sun when he smiled, his entire being suffused with contagious happiness. The world could not help but smile back.)

  “Hey, Lula,” he said, “guess what I’ve got? A pet armadillo!”

  “Really?”

  “You should come and see him. He’ll eat right out of your hand. I’ll let you feed him if you like. Would you like to?”

  “Gosh, you always have the most interesting pets. I’d love to see it.”

  And that’s how—probably for the first time in history—the nine-banded armadillo became a tool of courtship and an implement of wooing.

  Lula came the next day, to Travis’s delight. I could tell he was pulling ahead of my other brothers in the Lula stakes. He took Armand from his cage and fed him an egg, which Armand tore into with his usual relish. Lula watched in fascination but, being a bit of a delicate flower, declined to hold the beast when offered the chance. (Although we could not have known it at the time, this turned out to be a fortunate choice on her part.)

  On the weekend, Travis spent hours in the barn with Armand, fruitlessly trying to turn him into a pet. He cuddled him and fed him by hand and buffed his armor with a soft cloth, but Armand simply did not care.

  One night at dinner, Travis surprised me by speaking directly to Granddaddy, something he seldom, if ever, did. He started out with, “Sir?”

  No response.

  “Sir? Grandfather?”

  Granddaddy snapped out of his reverie and looked around the table, trying to locate the speaker. His gaze finally settled on Travis.

  “Yes, uh … young man?”

  Travis quailed under the direct and curious gaze. He stammered, “I-I was wondering, sir. Do you know how long armadillos live? Sir?”

  Granddaddy stroked his beard and said, “Generally, in the wild, I would say about five years. However, in captivity, they have been known to survive as long as fifteen.”

  Travis and I glanced at each other in dismay. Granddaddy noticed this and looked amused but said nothing more.

  * * *

  WE FED ARMAND twice daily, and he put on weight nicely, no doubt due to the fact that he no longer had to wander afield for his dinner. He tolerated Travis briefly cradling him but that was all. He never seemed to welcome us, despite the fact that we brought him his daily hard-boiled eggs. He never stopped digging at the corner of his cage, to the point that we had to reinforce it with bits of scrap lumber. But Travis, inexplicably, loved Armand as he loved all animals and would not give him up.

  One morning I visited the pantry and found no hard-boiled eggs. Viola sat at the kitchen table peeling a giant mound of potatoes. My brothers, growing boys all, managed to plow their way through a hillock of spuds every day. I said, “Why don’t we have any eggs?”

  “So it’s you,” she said. “I wondered how those eggs was walking off. What are you doing with ’em?”

  “Nothing,” I said stoutly.

  “You eating them all yourself?”

  “Yup.”

  “I doubt that, missy. You feeding some hobo at the river? Your momma ain’t gonna like that.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t tell her,” I said, a shade more pertly than I’d intended.

  “Don’t take that tone with me, little miss.”

  “Sorry.” I sat down and peeled with her, marveling at the speed at which her nimble fingers worked, finishing two clean spuds to my single eye-pocked one. We worked together in silence for a while and then I said, “It isn’t a hobo; it’s something else. I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone.”

  “Anyone” meaning, of course, Mother.

  “Don’t be doing that to me. You know better.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “You certainly are.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny. If you must know, it’s for a sort of experiment.”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “It seems like people often say that to me.”

  “Huh.”

  I noticed that Idabelle the Inside Cat was not in her basket by the stove. No doubt this was part of Viola’s tetchy mood. She tended to fret when her constant feline companion and helper was off patrolling for mice or lolling in a patch of sunlight upstairs. Idabelle’s job was to keep the vermin down in the pantry, and she did a fine job of it. In winter, she made an excellent bed warmer. We also had the Outside Cats that looked after the back porch and the outbuildings. They occasionally wandered into the barn to stare at Armand who, naturally enough, ignored them.

  We finished the spuds. As I went out, I kissed Viola’s cheek, and she swatted me away.

  At dusk, Granddaddy called me into the library and gestured for me to sit down in my usual place on the camel’s saddle. Holding up a magazine, he said, “Calpurnia, I have here the latest edition of The Journal of Southwestern Biology. It contains a report of a naturalist in Louisiana who appears to have contracted Hansen’s disease from handling an armadillo that served as a vector.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Therefore, I suggest that if you by any chance have an armadillo in your possession—and I’m not saying you do, mind—that you release it into the wild as soon as practicable.”

  “Uh … all right. What’s Hansen’s disease?”

  “A strange and terrible malady for which there is no cure. It is commonly known as leprosy.”

  I rocketed from my chair like a pheasant flushed from the scrub. I bolted from the room, my mind racing, my heart pounding—no, no, not Travis! Not the hideous fleshy tumors that deformed the face and hands, leaving the victims shunned and helpless, living out their lives quarantined in leper colonies behind barbed wire. It was unthinkable that softhearted Travis would be banished to the land of the damned!

  I careened into the barn, causing the stabled horses to shy and the Outside Cats to streak away in alarm.

  There stood Travis, cradling Armand. I charged, screaming, “Put it down! Put it down!”

  Travis flinched and looked stunned. “What?”

  “Put it down—it’s dangerous!”

  Travis stared at me stupidly.

  I reached for the armadillo and then pulled back, unable to bring myself to touch it.

  “Put it down,” I panted. “They can spread diseases, Granddaddy said so.” I took the skirt of my pinafore and, using it as a protective wrapping, grabbed the creature and dumped it to the ground.

  “Hey,” Travis protested. “You’ll hurt him. What diseases, anyway? Look at him, Callie. He’s perfectly healthy.”

  He stooped to pick Armand up.

  “Leprosy,” I gasped.

  He froze. “What?”

  “Granddaddy says they can spread leprosy. If you catch it, you have to live in a leper colony and never see your family again.”

  He blanched and stepped back.

  Armand snif
fed casually at a loose wisp of hay while we stared at him as if he were an unexploded bomb. I caught my breath and patted Travis on the arm. “It’s probably okay,” I said. “He’s probably one of the healthy ones.”

  Travis shivered. Armand snuffled and wandered around the barn for a minute.

  “Maybe you should go and wash your hands.”

  Saucer-eyed, he stared at me and croaked, “Will that help?”

  I had absolutely no idea but lied through my teeth: “Of course it will.”

  We hightailed it to the horse trough, where I worked the pump handle for all I was worth, while Travis frantically scrubbed his hands, teeth chattering.

  We turned in time to see Armand mosey toward the scrub at the edge of the property. I wondered how a creature so seemingly oblivious of everything around it could possibly survive in the wild. I compared Armand with Ajax, Father’s prize bird dog, driven by curiosity, constantly policing his territory, alert to every small change, aware of every subtle scent. His intense vigilance served as a highly tuned survival mechanism. That was apparently missing from Armand.

  Question for the Notebook: Is it Armand’s protective armor that fosters his nonchalant attitude? Maybe if you toted a shell around on your back and could curl into it at a moment’s notice, you didn’t have to pay much attention to your environment. Was that why he appeared deaf and dumb to his surroundings? Or was he in fact acutely attuned to his world, but we, as humans, simply played no part in it?

  We watched him scrabble away in the gathering darkness.

  Travis waved sadly. “Bye, Armand. Or Dilly. You were my favorite armadillo. I hope you don’t get sick.”

  Armand or Dilly stayed true to form and ignored him.

  Travis spent the next week scrubbing his hands raw. Mother noticed this and complimented him on his hygiene, saying, “I am glad to see that at least one of my boys finally understands the importance of clean hands. What brought this on?”