The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate Read online

“I’m not saying you should aim for them, merely learn from them.”

  “Oh.”

  “Strive to make each subsequent failure a better one. And as for regrets…”

  “Yes?”

  “They are only useful as instructional tools. Once you have learned all you can from them, they are best discarded.”

  “I see. I think.”

  “Good. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate your taking notes while I check the last of these runs.”

  I plucked a pencil from the cracked shaving mug on the counter and sharpened it. If we were not exactly back in business as usual, we were at least heading in that direction.

  * * *

  ON WEDNESDAY, Father, Harry, and our hired man, Alberto, heaped the long-bed wagon with blankets and tools and barrels of food. Mother tearfully embraced Father, who whispered some private words of comfort to her. Then he shook Granddaddy’s hand and shook all our hands, and kissed each of us on the cheek.

  “Mind your mother, now,” he said, and if his gaze lingered on me a tad longer than the others, well, I deemed that unfair.

  Alberto shyly kissed his wife, SanJuanna, good-bye. Her lips moved in a silent prayer, and she made the sign of the cross.

  Father and Alberto climbed upon the wagon, Father taking the reins. Harry mounted King Arthur, one of our big workhorses. Not the most comfortable ride over the long distance, with his deep chest and broad back, but his massive power would be useful for clearing roads and hauling lumber. Their plan was to drive to Luling, where they would load the wagon on either a steamboat or a train for the coast, depending on the amount of relief traffic. Men and supplies were said to be racing to Galveston from all over the state, and my family was determined to do its part. And to find Uncle Gus and Aunt Sophronia and Cousin Aggie.

  Father clapped the reins and called, “Get up, now.” The horses dug in and strained against the harness. Slowly, slowly, the wagon creaked away. Travis held Ajax’s collar. The dog, unaccustomed to being separated from Father, squirmed and fought and barked. Mother turned and fled inside. My brothers and I accompanied the wagon to the end of the street, waving and calling our good-byes. A few minutes later, we watched it disappear around the bend in the road.

  We didn’t know that they’d be gone for over a month. Nor did we know how changed they’d be on their return.

  CHAPTER 7

  AMPHIBIA AND REPTILIA IN RESIDENCE

  The expression of this snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats.

  FATHER’S AND HARRY’S CHAIRS stood empty. The gap at the head of the table so depressed Mother that she asked Granddaddy to sit in Father’s place. He did so to oblige her but was not much of a mealtime conversationalist and spent most of his time staring into space. When addressed, he would blink and murmur, “Hmm? What was that?” The others probably thought him rude, possibly senile, but I knew that his placid exterior concealed a furiously active mind, contemplating what he called the Mysteries of the Universe. I loved him for it.

  Most days, Mother received a letter from Father. I noticed that she read certain parts to us over dinner while skipping over other sections. Then she’d smile bravely and say something like “your father holds us all in his thoughts” or “we must all do our part in this hour of need.”

  Then a telegram arrived, not from Father en route, but from Galveston itself.

  I happened to be upstairs reading The Jungle Book by Mr. Rudyard Kipling and was deeply immersed in the adventures of the “man-cub” Mowgli. (All right, technically it was Sam Houston’s book, and I’d “borrowed” it when he wasn’t looking, but he was no great appreciator of books, so why he got it for his birthday instead of me, I couldn’t fathom.)

  I heard crunching on the gravel drive and jumped up to see Mr. Fleming wobbling up on his bicycle. By the time he’d made it into the parlor, I’d gathered up as many of my brothers as I could find, and we stood waiting for him, along with Mother and Viola and SanJuanna. He bowed low and said, “Mrs. Tate. I got here a telegram from Galveston. I … I know you been waiting for this, so I brung it myself.”

  Mother tried to speak but could only nod her thanks. We held our collective breath as she opened the telegram with shaking hands. A moment later, she cried, “Thank God!” She burst into tears, and the paper fell from her hand. Viola helped her to her chair and fanned her with a piece of sheet music.

  I picked up the telegram, written in the telegrapher’s strange choppy diction.

  “Read it, Callie,” said Sul Ross.

  “It says, ‘Alive by God’s grace, stop. House gone, stop. Living in tent on beach, stop. Love Gus Sophronia Aggie Finch, stop.’”

  We stared at one another. Mother sobbed into her handkerchief, unable to speak. Viola fetched the bottle of tonic and a tablespoon, saying, “Miz Tate, you take this now. You had a shock to your system.”

  * * *

  EVEN AFTER THE GOOD NEWS, Mother continued somewhat pale and worried, waiting to hear from two of her childhood friends, but really, the rest of us were bearing up pretty well and going about the business of our daily routines.

  There were nature walks and field trips with Granddaddy. There were vetch seeds to germinate. There was Sir Isaac Newton, a black-spotted newt I’d found in a drainage ditch, who now lived on my dresser in a shallow glass baking dish with a mesh-wire lid. (My dresser was getting crowded, what with my precious hummingbird’s nest in a glass box and assorted feathers and fossils and small bones.) I had to keep an eye on Sir Isaac, since he frequently tried to escape despite the fat flies I supplied him with. One morning I found him in the far corner under my bed, so covered in dust that I had to take him downstairs and wash him off at the kitchen pump.

  Viola took one look and shrieked, “What in Jesus’s name is that?”

  “There’s no need to pitch a fit. It’s a black-spotted newt, also known as Diemyctylus meridionalis. Don’t worry, he’s completely harmless. This species is actually beneficial to man in that it eats flies and other pests, so—”

  “I don’t care what it is, you get it out of my sink!”

  “I just need to—”

  “Your momma see that thing in here, she’ll have my job.”

  “What? Don’t be silly.” The thought of Mother firing Viola was beyond comprehension. She had been with us forever, since before I’d been born, since before even Harry had been born. The entire household would collapse without her.

  “Nothing silly about it. Out of my kitchen. Now!”

  Miffed, I took Sir Isaac out to the horse trough, where he splashed about happily enough.

  And there was my budding friendship with Polly the Parrot, cemented for good the day I presented him with a whole peach of his very own. He practically purred with pleasure. He even liked the stone and kept it to sharpen his beak on.

  I wondered if he would like a lady parrot to keep him company, and if so, how would we ever find one? Granddaddy had told me Polly could live to be a hundred. The thought of him doing so without one of his own kind made me sad, even though Mr. O’Flanagan took good care of him. He often carried him outside in warm weather and sprayed him with a hose; Polly spread his wings under the fountain and gyrated in ecstasy. Then Mr. O’Flanagan set him on his perch in the sun next to the old codgers in front of the gin who were still reliving the War on a daily basis. They would stop their ruminating long enough to engage in conversation with Polly, trying to teach him to say “The South will rise again!” But Polly would have none of it; he loved only Mr. O’Flanagan and would have no other master. I noticed that the bird now spoke with an Irish accent. When he dropped one of his foot-long crimson feathers, Mr. O’Flanagan saved it for me. What a treasure! I’d bet no other girl in Texas had one on her dresser.

  One night after dessert, Mo
ther pulled a letter from her bodice, saying, “Father and Harry have finally arrived at the coast. Tomorrow they board the steamship Queen of Brazoria to take them to Galveston. I know that all our thoughts and prayers are with them.”

  A solemn hush fell over the table except for J.B., the baby, who piped up with, “Dada’s going on a boat? Can I go too?”

  Mother smiled faintly and said, “No, little man. Not this time.”

  “But I want to, Mama, I want to.”

  Lamar muttered, “Oh boy, here we go again.”

  I shot him a dirty look and scooped J.B. from his seat as he was winding up for a full-scale conniption fit. I carried him out, saying, “Come on, J.B., I’ll tell you a story. Won’t that be nice?”

  He checked his blubbering. “Will there be boats in it?” he hiccuped.

  “If you like.”

  “I like boats, Callie,” he said, smiling like an angel through his tears and snot.

  As far as I knew, he’d never seen a boat, but I said, “I know you do, baby. Let’s get you cleaned up, and then we’ll have a story with lots and lots of boats. As many as you like.” Then I said, “Who’s your favorite sister?”

  He giggled and said, “You are, Callie.” It was our own little joke, and it never failed to tickle him.

  That night while brushing my teeth, I tried to imagine the beach where the Finches now camped. I’d never laid eyes on the ocean, and it struck me as a baffling, mystical place from everything I’d read. What did it sound like? What did it smell like?

  I was familiar with my own dear river, of course, but the thought of tides and waves, the thought of this massive, constantly changing body of water, befuddled and excited me. I’d put viewing the ocean on the list of New Year’s wishes I’d made when the calendar rolled over from 1899 to 1900. (The same list that had included seeing snow.) I’d never traveled farther than Austin, only forty-five miles away. Even though my outer life was depressingly landlocked, my inner life was full of imaginary travel to exotic lands fueled by books, the atlas, and the globe. Most days it was enough. Some days it was not.

  * * *

  I HAULED MYSELF out of bed. It was a good half hour before sunrise but I was anxious to record my daily observations before my brothers could shatter the fragile peace of the morning. I opened the bottom drawer of my chest and reached in, but instead of a neatly folded chemise, there was a strange, coiled shape in the shadows. Where there should be no strange shapes, especially not coiled ones. My brain shrieked, “Snake!” and I flinched. The snake flinched too and opened its mouth, showing me an array of tiny teeth and a pale palate. It wasn’t a very big snake as snakes go, but then, size doesn’t really matter when you’re dealing with a venomous animal. It was banded in red and black and yellow, which meant it was either the deadly coral snake or the harmless king snake. One could kill you; the other was a nonlethal imposter. My mind feverishly searched for the old rhyme about how to tell the two apart. How did it go? The snake gaped at me, inches from my hand. How did it go?

  Okay, Calpurnia, now would be a really good time to remember, especially since your life depends on it. Okay, okay. The secret’s in the order of the bands. Okay. Black on yellow—no, wait, that’s not right, it’s red on yellow. Red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack. Is that right? Please let that be right.

  I stared wide-eyed in the gloom, straining to see, and there was a red band between two black bands. Red on black. I double-checked along as much of the body as I could see. The red bands were surrounded by black bands in every case.

  Ha! Imposter!

  It was a benign snake that had cleverly evolved over the eons to resemble a dangerous one, thus purchasing itself protection from predators. Granddaddy had once told me about certain tasty butterflies that had evolved to resemble bitter inedible ones, calling this process “mimicry.” An interesting way for a species to get a free ride on the reputation of another. But wasn’t this a form of lying? Question for the Notebook: Does Nature tell lies? Something to think about.

  I relaxed and felt a lot more friendly toward the snake, which seemed to relax too; it tasted the air with its tongue. How had he ended up in my chest of drawers, so far from his natural home? The poor thing was no doubt mighty confused. I’d have to repatriate him to his normal environment under a rotten log where he could make his living on mice and other small unfortunates. I reached for him, and he hissed at me. I pulled my hand back. No point in being bitten, even with tiny teeth and no venom.

  I cast about for a bag or a sack in which to transport him. I pulled my pillow slip from my bed and turned back just in time to see the tip of his tail disappearing into a gap in the corner baseboards.

  Oh, wonderful. I sincerely hoped he could find his own way out of the house, for even though I was no longer afraid of him, he wasn’t my idea of the perfect roommate.

  As I was drifting off to sleep the next night, I heard a faint scratching noise. I opened my eyes to see the snake gliding across the floor through a patch of moonlight, a tiny inert bundle in its mouth, possibly a mouse, scared stiff. My heart went out to the little creature, and for a moment, I entertained the idea of trying to save it, but the snake was only being a snake, after all, and deserved his dinner like the rest of us. This was an example of “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in the words of one Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a famous writer whom Granddaddy often quoted. It meant that animals had to both eat and be eaten in turn on the great revolving wheel of life and death. And there was nothing to be done about it.

  My next lesson served to point this out. Granddaddy called me into the library and told me it was time for my first dissection. We would start with the large earthworm I’d been saving for this very lesson. He said, “Galen and the early natural philosophers thought you could understand anatomy and physiology simply by studying an animal’s exterior. All nonsense of course, but this misguided notion persisted for centuries. It wasn’t until the 1500s that Andreas Vesalius finally showed that the interior is at least as important and interesting as the exterior. His early dissections of man are still marvels of both Art and Science. Do you have your specimen?”

  I held up a canning jar containing an inch of damp soil and the giant night crawler I’d been saving. Despite all my efforts to remain detached and objective, I did feel a little bad about killing this nice big worm. Living on a farm, I had of course seen plenty of plucked turkeys and skinned rabbits and butchered hogs, but Alberto generally dispatched these creatures. They were killed so we could eat them. Their demise was necessary for our own survival. And even though I was dissecting a lowly worm, and even though I had probably inadvertently killed and maimed hundreds of them beneath my feet over the years, I was now going to kill one intentionally to satisfy my curiosity. I felt that apologies were in order.

  “Sorry, worm,” I whispered, “but it’s for Science, you know.”

  The worm had no vote in the matter and remained silent.

  Granddaddy said, “There is no need for cruelty. Be sure you dispatch your subject as humanely as possible but in a way that will also preserve its architecture.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You will need to immerse it in a beaker of ten percent alcohol for a few minutes. You will find what you need in the laboratory. Once you have done that, we will prepare your dissecting tray.”

  I carried my worm out to the laboratory and found bottles of alcohol and water. I mixed up nine parts of water to one part of alcohol and dropped in the worm. It twitched only once and sank slowly to the bottom. Granddaddy joined me a few minutes later. From under the counter, he pulled out a shallow metal pan and a package of wax. He led me through the slow process of melting the wax, adding some black soot to make for a contrasting background, and then pouring it into the pan.

  While the wax cooled, he sat and read Posner’s Reptiles of the Greater Southwest in his ancient shabby armchair with the stuffing exploding in all directions. I perched on my stool and read a pamphlet called
“Dissection Guide to the Lumbricus terrestris.”

  The wax finally hardened, and we began. Granddaddy handed me a jar of pins and a magnifying glass and his pocketknife, saying, “You will need these.”

  I placed the worm on the wax and was about to make the first long cut when he stayed my hand. “Stop a moment. Let us begin with observation first. What do you see?”

  “Uh, a worm?”

  “Yes, of course.” He smiled. “But describe what you see. Is one end the same as the other? Is one side the same as the other?”

  “This end is different from that one,” I said, pointing. I rolled the worm gently with my finger. “And this side is flatter than the other.”

  “Correct. The front end is indicated by the prostomium, and the back end by the anus. The rounder side is the dorsum, or back, and the flatter side is the ventral surface, or belly. Now take the magnifying glass and look at the ventral surface.”

  I squinted and saw many tiny bristles.

  “Those are the setae, the means of locomotion,” he said. “Now palpate them.” I ran the pad of my finger over them; they felt slightly rough to the touch.

  “Now carefully cut along the dorsal side.”

  I made a long cut from end to end along the back, then pulled the sides apart and pinned them to the wax as instructed.

  We started at the head and worked our way along, examining the pharynx and the crop and the gizzard.

  “Worms have no teeth, so after ingesting their food, they store it here in the crop. Right behind it is the gizzard, which contains fine grit that grinds up the food before it passes down the intestine. Your subject is drying out. Sprinkle it with a little water.”

  I did so, then asked, “Is it a male worm or a female worm?”

  “It is both.”

  I looked up in surprise. “Really?”

  “When an organism contains both male and female organs, it is called a hermaphrodite. Such an arrangement is not unusual in the flowering plants, mollusks, slugs, snails, and other invertebrates.”

  He led me through the rest of the dissection, pointing out the five aortic arches that served as five primitive hearts, then the reproductive organs, the nerve cord, and the gut. In this way I learned that an earthworm is essentially one long intestine through which passes soil, decaying leaves, and manure, emerging in an enriched state that promotes the growth of plants.