The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate Read online

  “They’ll have to go into the chicken pen,” I said. “It’s the only place they’ll be safe.” The chicken pen had a stout roof to discourage cats, coons, and hawks. We filled a wooden box with combings from Snow White, Mother’s favorite ewe, and put the birds in their new home. They aggressively demanded food without ceasing, being basically two oversized mouths attached to two undersized bodies. They stopped their terrible noise only long enough to choke down beakfuls of a soft mash of chicken feed, fluttering their wings in excitement.

  “Do you think we should give them water too?” asked Travis.

  “I reckon it can’t hurt.”

  Travis dipped his finger in the hen’s basin, and then, wiggling his wet finger, let fall a couple of drops of water into each beak. The birds liked it. As far as I could tell.

  The offended hens huddled on the far side of the enclosure and clucked in consternation. Finally, to shut the hatchlings up, Travis draped the bandanna over them and they fell quiet in the artificial dark.

  But calamity struck the next morning when we found Blue, the smaller of the birds, dead. Its sibling ignored the corpse and screamed at the top of its lungs for breakfast. From Travis’s reaction, you would have thought there was no greater tragedy in our family.

  “I killed him,” Travis said, fighting back tears. “I should have sat up with him. Poor old Blue. I failed him.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said in a vain attempt to console him. “It always goes that way with the runts. It can’t be helped; it’s the survival of the fittest. That’s the way Mother Nature works.”

  Well, there was nothing for it but we had to have a funeral, interring “poor old Blue” in the patch of land behind the smokehouse that Travis had staked out as a sad little cemetery over the years for his unsuccessful projects. (I myself would have left Blue to the ants and beetles to strip down to the bone so that I could have a nice clean skeleton to study, but Travis looked too distraught for me to suggest it.)

  We placed the carcass in a nest of shredded newspapers in one of my cigar boxes, a brightly colored one with a dancing lady in a red dress and mantilla. I almost apologized to Travis for not having something more somber, so contagious was his grief. He dug a hole and gently deposited the colorful casket in the dark soil.

  “Callie, would you like to say some words?”

  Startled, I said, “Uh, you go ahead. You knew him better than I did.”

  “Okay, then. Blue was a good bird,” said Travis, choking up a little. “He liked his mash. He did his best. And he never learned how to fly. We’ll miss you, Blue. Amen.”

  “Amen,” I said, for want of something to say, wondering if you were allowed to pray over a dead bird.

  He filled in the hole and tamped it down with the back of the shovel. Thinking we were done, I turned to go.

  He said, “Wait, we need some kind of marker.”

  We found a smooth river rock, and then he fretted over how to scratch the bird’s name on it. The bell rang for breakfast, and I said, “You’ll have to come back later.” I handed him my handkerchief and put my arm around him as we trudged back to the house.

  At the table Mother took one look at Travis’s swollen red eyes and said gently, “Darling? Is something the matter?”

  “One of my blue jays died in the night,” he mumbled, eyes downcast on his plate.

  “One of your what?” said Mother, cocking her head and fixing him with a bright beady gaze; she so resembled a bird that I almost giggled.

  “I found two baby jays. One of them died in the night.”

  “That,” said Mother, “is what I thought you said. But I can’t believe my ears. How many times have we talked about this?”

  “Ah,” said Granddaddy, choosing that moment to snap out of his usual mealtime musing. “The North American blue jay, Cyanocitta cristata, a member of the corvid family, which also includes crows and ravens, although the jay is strictly a New World bird. They are known to be intelligent and inquisitive and are excellent mimics who can often be taught to speak. Some experts consider them as intelligent as the parrot family. Many of the Indian clans view the jay as a trickster, mischievous and greedy but also clever and resourceful. You say you have one of these, my boy?”

  Encouraged, Travis said, “Yessir, although it’s just a baby.”

  “In that case, it will bond with you, so you’d best be prepared to support it through its adult life, which could easily last a decade or more. Yes, indeed, they are quite long-lived birds.” He resubmerged himself in his scrambled eggs and deep thoughts.

  Mother, clearly wishing to shoot daggers at Granddaddy, instead turned them on Travis.

  “We agreed there would be no more wild animals, did we not?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And?”

  “And … uh.”

  I interjected on his behalf: “They’re only babies, Mother. They both would have died if he hadn’t picked them up. At least he saved one of them.”

  “Calpurnia, keep out of this,” she said. “Travis can speak for himself.”

  “Yeah, Calpurnia”—Lamar snickered under his breath—“let the little birdbrain speak for himself. That’s if he doesn’t start bawling.”

  “And you.” She wheeled on Lamar. “Do you have something useful to add to this conversation? No? I didn’t think so.”

  Oh, Lamar, how had you become such a pill? And why? And more important, could anything be done about it?

  Travis rallied his arguments. “I’ve got him in the chicken pen, Mama. He won’t be any trouble in there, I promise.”

  Did anyone else besides me notice the change in his form of address? He hadn’t called her Mama since his eighth birthday. She visibly softened and said, “But, darling, they’re always trouble.”

  “Not this time, I promise.”

  “You always promise.” Mother massaged her temples, and I could read in that gesture that Travis, the beamish boy, had won again.

  Sure enough, Jay quickly grew attached to his master. He became more attractive as his feathers filled in and turned bluer, but his gimpy right wing was a problem. Every time Travis and I tried to splint it, Jay turned into an exploding ball of blue feathers in our hands, furious, flapping like mad, and screaming blue murder (ha!). It turned out that all the flapping we provoked was probably the best thing for the wing, and it slowly grew stronger. Even so, when he was finally ready to fly, I noticed that he always flew in a circle, the stronger left wing propelling him clockwise.

  Jay lived mostly in the pen, but sometimes Travis would take him for a “walk,” and Jay would either ride on his shoulder or flap from tree to tree alongside. Jay became a good mimic. He learned to cackle like the hens and crow like our rooster, General Lee, driving the normally prideful bird to distraction so that he fretfully paced the yard, seeking his invisible rival in vain.

  Jay’s plumage grew beautiful; his voice did not. When he was separated from his boy-god, he screamed down the heavens in rage; sometimes we could even hear his strident calls as we sat at the dining table, a good fifty yards or so from the pen. We all pretended not to notice.

  Travis started giving Jay a weekly bath in a shallow pan of warm water, and the bird thrashed about in great delight. They spent more and more time together out of the pen. We grew used to seeing Travis with streaks of white on his shoulders, to our maid SanJuanna’s vexation. He even took Jay to show-and-tell at school, where he proved to be a big hit, although Miss Harbottle flinched every time he screamed or flapped, fearing for her black dress and lofty coiffure, with good reason.

  Jay took special delight in taunting the cats, but for some reason, he particularly singled out Idabelle, swooping down and screeching at her whenever she went outside to take some sun. Viola told Travis more than once, “You keep that devil bird away from my cat.”

  Then, of course, the calamitous, the gruesome—and the entirely predictable—happened. Idabelle ran through the back door bearing a limp bundle of blue feathers in her
mouth.

  Now, you can’t exactly fault a cat for eating a bird, can you? That doesn’t seem fair; it’s just the way Nature goes. There wasn’t much to bury, only a wing and a handful of tail feathers.

  I’d never attended an actual funeral (and by that I mean for a real person) and had always wanted to see one, but after our ceremony for Jay, I changed my mind. Travis’s grief was terrible to behold. And although I felt disloyal for thinking so and would never have said it aloud, I suspect that all the rest of us were relieved to see the end of Jay.

  CHAPTER 5

  RARA AVIS

  The jaguar is a noisy animal, roaring much by night, and especially before bad weather.

  I WOKE UP with a small thrill of anticipation coursing through my veins. It took me a moment to remember why, but then it came to me: I was due to crack open a new Scientific Notebook. I’d jammed my first one chock-full of many Questions, a few Answers, and various observations and sketches. It had been my faithful companion for the past year, and it included my notes about the brand-new species of hairy vetch that Granddaddy and I had discovered, the Vicia tateii. Maybe one day the book would be an object of scientific and historic interest. Who could say?

  But now it was time to bid adieu to the old one and start the cheerful new red one Granddaddy had given me. I opened it and inhaled the smell of fresh leather and paper. Could anything top the promise and potential of a blank page? What could be more satisfying? Never mind that it would soon be crammed with awkward penmanship, that my handwriting inevitably sloped downhill to the right-hand corner, that I blotted my ink, that my drawings never came out the way I saw them in my head. Never mind all that. What counted was possibility. You could live on possibility, at least for a while.

  I crept downstairs, avoiding the treacherous spot in the middle of tread number seven that cracked like a pistol shot. The house was just beginning to stir. If I hurried, I could have some time alone to myself. I eased the front door open and stepped outside into the freshness of the morning to make my notes.

  And there, to my surprise, stood a strange gray-and-white bird on the front lawn. It was about the size of a chicken but of an entirely different shape. The plumage was sleek; its beak was curved and wicked and reddish in color; its legs were yellow and ended in, of all things, webbed feet. So it was a bird that could swim as well as fly. And that beak, it didn’t look as if it was meant for picking fruit or catching bugs, but rather for tearing flesh. So, a carnivorous bird? A flesh-eating duck? I sat down on the porch, moving slowly and quietly so as not to alarm it. I opened my new book and wrote, Saturday, September 8, 1900. Vy cloudy, SW winds. Strange bird on lawn, looks like this:

  I worked hurriedly to finish my sketch before my subject flew away. I was shading in the finishing touches when the front door opened and Harry came out. “Pet,” he called, “it’s breakfast.”

  The startled bird took off and flew toward the live oaks bordering our lawn, where it landed on the ground. This surprised me. Then I thought about it. Of course, it wouldn’t be a passerine, or perching bird, not with webbed feet like that.

  “Harry, did you see that? What is it, do you think?”

  But Harry had gone inside.

  I made a quick check of my barometer before following him and noted that the pressure was down significantly. Was there something wrong with it? I flicked it with my fingernail but it held steady. Huh. Maybe you had to change the balloon from time to time to keep it fresh.

  I went inside, and right at that moment, the wind picked up and slammed the door behind me with a loud crash. It meant nothing to me at the time.

  Since it was a Saturday, I got my obligatory half hour of piano practice over with right after breakfast and then tracked down Granddaddy in the library. I tapped on the door, and he called out, “Enter if you must.” He sat at his desk reading Thallophyta of North America. I confess, fungi were not exactly my favorite subject, but as he always reminded me, all of life was intertwined and we could neglect no aspect of it. To do so indicated shallowness of intellect and shabby scholarship.

  “Granddaddy,” I said, “can I use the bird atlas?”

  “I believe the question is ‘may I use the bird atlas?’ And the answer is, of course, you may. My books are your books.”

  I left him to his work and pulled the weighty Thompson’s Field Guide to the Birds from the shelf. I thumbed through it, briefly diverted by the stunning display of the peacock and the awkward form of the flamingo before coming to a section I’d never browsed before: Sea Birds of the Gulf of Mexico. For a girl who had never been to the seashore, this was interesting stuff.

  “Gosh,” I said, poring over the pages.

  “Calpurnia, I know you are capable of expressing yourself without resorting to popular exclamations. The use of slang betrays a weak imagination and a lazy mind.”

  “Yessir,” I murmured. But my mind was not attending to him. I stared at an illustration of the bird I’d seen on the lawn. “Golly.”

  “Calpurnia.”

  “Hmm? Oh, sorry. Granddaddy, look at this bird. I saw one just like it this morning.”

  He got up and looked over my shoulder. “Are you sure?” He frowned.

  I opened my Notebook and showed him my sketch, saying, “It’s the same one, isn’t it?”

  He compared the two drawings, his gnarled forefinger moving back and forth between them. He muttered, “The silhouette is correct, as is the gorget, and the primary and secondaries. And you’re sure about this dark area here? Between the upper wing and the distal wingtip?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And there was no white window here on the wing?”

  “No, sir, not that I could see.”

  “Then it is a laughing gull, or Leucophaeus atricilla. Strange. A gull with a typical inland range of twenty-five miles, and yet here it is, two hundred miles from the coast.” He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and frowned at the ceiling, lost in thought. There was silence, except for the ticking of the mantel clock. I dared not interrupt his pondering. After a few minutes, he got up and peered at his own barometer on the wall. His expression was remote, and grave.

  I said, “Is there something wrong with your barometer? There’s something wrong with mine too.”

  “No. There’s nothing wrong with the barometers. But we must warn them. I hope it’s not too late.”

  A thrill of fear shot through me. “Warn who? Too late for what?”

  He was deep in thought and did not answer. He put on his coat and hat, grabbed his walking stick, and headed for the door. What was going on? I trailed behind him, sick with anxiety. He walked briskly, casting uneasy glances at the sky and murmuring, “Don’t let us be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “A terrible storm might be coming,” he said. “I fear the worst. We must warn them on the coast. Your mother has family in Galveston, does she not?”

  “There’s Uncle Gus and Aunt Sophronia and their daughter, Aggie. That makes her my cousin, but I’ve never met her.”

  “Your mother should telephone them right away.”

  “Telephone? Galveston?” I marveled at the idea. We’d never done such a preposterous thing; the expense and inconvenience were unimaginable. I examined the plump cumulus clouds on the horizon, and although there were a lot of them, I saw no portent of doom. They looked like ordinary clouds to me.

  We passed the cotton gin once owned by Granddaddy and now by Father. A row of old Confederate soldiers and Indian fighters rocked back and forth out front, arguing over past glories and defeats, pausing from time to time on the forward swing to spit tobacco. The ground around them was dotted with foul, shiny gobs that looked like dead brown slugs. Willy Medlin had the sharpest aim, despite being the oldest and most decrepit, maybe because he’d practiced the longest. He could hit a cockroach, Periplaneta americana, dead-on from ten feet, an accomplishment much admired by my brothers. The old coots hailed Granddaddy, who had fought by their side during
the War, but if he heard them, he gave no sign.

  We hurried to the Western Union office housed next to the newspaper and the telephone switchboard. The bell over the door signaled our arrival, and the telegrapher, Mr. Fleming, came out to greet us.

  On spying Granddaddy, he drew himself to attention and saluted smartly, saying, “Cap’n Tate.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Fleming. No need to salute. We are both old men. The War is long over.”

  Mr. Fleming stood at ease and said, “The War of Northern Aggression will never be over, Captain. The Cause is not lost! The South shall rise again!”

  “Mr. Fleming, let us not live mired in the past. Let us be forward-thinking men.”

  I had heard similar exchanges before. Mr. Fleming was easily riled up and could spew pure vitriol on the subject of Yankees. Under normal circumstances, it could be quite entertaining, but today was not a normal day.

  Granddaddy continued, “We must hurry. I need to send three telegrams immediately.”

  “Certainly, sir. If you’ll pencil your message in this blank here, I’ll get them out as soon as I can. Who are they going to?”

  “The mayors of Galveston, Houston, and Corpus Christi. But I’m afraid I don’t know their names.”

  “That’s not a problem. We’ll address them to His Honor the Mayor, and that should do it. I know all the head telegraphers. We’ll make sure they get delivered.”

  Granddaddy wrote his message and handed it to Mr. Fleming, who peered at it through his half-moon spectacles and read aloud: “‘Seagull sighted two hundred miles from coast, stop. Evidence of major storm coming, stop. Evacuation may be necessary, stop.’” He lifted his glasses to his forehead and frowned. “That it, Cap’n?”

  “That’s correct, thank you. Galveston Island lacks a seawall and is the most vulnerable, so please send that one first.”

  “This is mighty serious business. You really think they should get out because of a bird?”

  “Mr. Fleming, have you ever seen a laughing gull in Caldwell County?”

  “Well, no, I guess not. But it still strikes me as a pretty drastic measure. I’ll bet they’re used to big winds down there.”