The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (22 page)

I cast one last longing glance at his books and turned to go. He said, “I leave my door open during business hours. You can come and read whenever you like.”

“Gosh, thanks!” This was turning into my lucky day.

“Although, come to think of it, some of that material is not appropriate for young ladies, so you'd better get your mother's permission.”

Well, maybe not so lucky after all.

I carried Idabelle home with a light heart and pondered where the mice had gone. And then it came to me in a thunderclap. How could I have been such an idiot not to see it sooner? Poor Idabelle. She was losing out to the king snake.

I took the cage into the kitchen, where Viola jumped up, tears welling in her eyes. “What's wrong with her? Is she dying?”

I'd never seen Viola so upset. The tide of our family affairs ebbed and flowed around her while she maintained, on the whole, a perfect state of equilibrium (albeit a low-grade grumpy one that applied to everybody and everything with the exception of Idabelle). I'd never seen her shed a tear before. And although she had scores of nieces and nephews, including Samuel, she had no children of her own, so I guess that made Idabelle her baby.

“She's fine,” I said. “She's hungry because there aren't enough mice about.”

“Hungry? That's all? Praise Jesus!”

“Dr. Pritzker said you should feed her sardines every day until she gains some weight and the mice come back.”

She wiped her eyes on her apron, saying, “I'll get her a can right now.”

“No, no, she just ate a whole tin. Wait until tomorrow or I swear she'll pop.”

“Praise Jesus,” Viola whispered, and clasped the cat to her bony chest. “My baby girl's home,” she crooned. Idabelle kneaded at her apron and purred at full volume.

Viola said, “What's wrong with the mice?”

Without thinking, I said, “It's the sn—oops.”

“The snoops? What's that?”

“Oh, nothing. It's just, uh, the natural fluctuation in the population.”

“I never knowed this to happen before.”

“Got to go,” I said, and left them to their joyful reunion.

Question for the Notebook: It sure is nice that
Felis domesticus
purrs, but what about lions and tigers, do they purr, too? And how would you ever find out?

That night “the snoops” reappeared in a most unpleasant way. Sir Isaac Newton had once again escaped from his dish, but this time had the bad luck to run into the snake, a primeval foe. I walked into my room to discover an epic battle taking place in the middle of the floor: newt versus snake, with the newt losing fast, being halfway down the snake's gullet at that point. Now, a fair fight doesn't offend me, but this? Newts being retiring and soft-bodied, the whole thing was a pretty one-sided affair that really got my dander up.

I leaped forward and grabbed Sir Isaac Newton's hind half and pulled. The snake pulled back. I yelled, “Gimme my newt, you rotten snake!” The snake refused and kept pulling, so I did the only thing I could think of: I reached over and flicked it on the snout. It recoiled and spat out its limp victim, then hightailed it for the baseboards. Sir Isaac stirred groggily as I wiped the snake spittle from him with my handkerchief. I spoke encouraging words to him and stroked him under his chin. He shook himself and, after a moment, looked none the worse for wear, so I slid him back into his dish and secured the lid. Good thing Aggie was at the general store getting a soda. If she'd been there she'd have croaked. Completely croaked.

Honestly, the drama in my life.

 

CHAPTER 18

GRASSHOPPER GUTS

[W]e observed to the south a ragged cloud of dark reddish-brown colour. At first we thought that it was smoke from some great fire on the plains; but we soon found that it was a swarm of locusts.… [T]hey overtook us at a rate of ten or fifteen miles an hour. The main body filled the air … “and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle:” or rather, I should say, like a strong breeze passing through the rigging of a ship.

A
ND SPEAKING OF DRAMA
, I gave a fair bit of thought to the “problem” of Travis's queasiness in the face of blood and guts, and how to fix it. I cornered Granddaddy in the library and posed Travis's dilemma to him.

“So, as I understand it,” he said, “you want to help, uh … Travis? Which one is he again?”

“You remember, Granddaddy. He's the one who raised the turkeys last year and got so upset about killing them.”

“Ah, yes. Quite the charade, as I recall.”

“Yep. I mean, yes.”

Travis had been so wrought up about us eating his pets that the night before they'd met their doom, Granddaddy and I had altered their appearance with paint and scissors to convince him that we had traded with the neighbors for different birds. The turkeys had not been happy about their transformation, and I still bore a small scar on my left elbow as a souvenir. (The things we do for the brothers we love! I wouldn't have done it for Lamar in a million years.)

“And you want to help him get over his, shall we say, squeamishness? Do I have that right?”

“Yessir.”

“May I inquire exactly why?”

“He wants to be a veterinarian, so he needs to be able to work with innards and blood and things like that. But he's not at all tough like me. He got nauseated when I showed him my earthworm.”

“Did he, now?”

“Yes, but it didn't bother me. I have a cast-iron stomach, you know.”

“Indeed you do.”

I practically glowed under this high praise.

He thought for a moment. “An interesting conundrum. I suggest we expose him to progressively more vivid and complex examples of dissection. In this way we can slowly accustom his nervous system to greater degrees of explicitness, so as not to cause too great a shock. At the same time, this will offer you a good opportunity to learn more about anatomy. We shall proceed upward through the invertebrates to the vertebrates and perhaps finish with some small mammal. I leave it to you to instruct him from there. Tomorrow we shall work on the American grasshopper,
Schistocerca americana
.”

The next day, I caught a big yellow grasshopper in my net. I took it to Granddaddy in the laboratory, where we euthanized it humanely in a killing jar. As we began, he said, “We are dissecting an insect at the top of the invertebrate ladder. Observe. Describe. Note. Analyze.”

I did so, remarking on the two large compound eyes, the three minuscule simple eyes (so small as to be almost invisible), the two sets of wings, the three sets of legs. The large eyes gave the insect a wide field of vision that made it difficult to creep up on; without the long-handled net, I'd never have snagged it.

Under his instruction, I dissected and pinned the various parts. There were no lungs but rather spiracles, a set of tiny holes along the abdomen that acted as bellows to draw air directly into the body. There was also an open circulating system where blood flowed freely through open body cavities rather than a closed system with the blood contained in blood vessels. (As in, for example, man.) I made a few sketches and took careful notes.

When finished, I covered my dissecting tray with cheesecloth and carried it out to find Travis. I tracked him down at the pigpen, where he was scratching Petunia between the ears with a stick.

“Look,” I said, pulling back the cloth and showing him the bright yellow shards strewn across the black wax. “This is the grasshopper we did this morning.”

“Uh,” he said.

“Travis, you have to look. Granddaddy says this will help you.”

“Uh.”

Now, I'll admit that to a beginner the sight of a dismantled grasshopper might be a little disconcerting, but really, the boy needed some grit. And how was he to get it without my help?

“Stop scratching that pig and take a look.”

He reluctantly stopped, glanced over briefly, and swallowed hard.

“You can touch it,” I said in encouraging tones, stirring around a couple of the large muscular hindlegs. “It won't bite, you know.”

He took a deep breath through his nose and turned pale.

“See how this set of legs is specially adapted for jumping? And look at these big eyes here—that's one reason they're so hard to catch. Here, hold the tray.”

“That's okay, I can see from here.”

“Take. The. Tray.” I shoved it at him.

He took it but averted his gaze. His hands trembled a little.

“Do you want to be an animal doctor or not?”

He gulped. “I do. At least … I think I do.”

“Then you're going to stand here and look at that thing. I'm not kidding.”

“I don't think I can do it, Callie.”

“Yes, you can do it, because I'm going to stand right here beside you. All right?” No answer.

“I said, ‘all right?'”

“I guess.”

“Look, here are the maxillae and mandibles for crushing food.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And here are the antennae, and here are the cerebral ganglia. They're a sort of primitive brain.”

“Yep.”

“And look at the pattern of the veins in this wing. Every species of grasshopper has its own unique arrangement—did you know that?”

“Nope.”

He kept glancing away, and I reminded him each time to stay focused on the tray. The tremor in his hands finally subsided but the color did not return to his cheeks. We must have stood there for a good five minutes before I finally said, “That's enough for today.”

“Okay, thanks!” He shoved the tray at me and bolted for the barn, no doubt to hug Bunny and sink his cheek deep into the soft white fur, his standard ritual of comfort.

I looked at Petunia and said, “I'm not sure he can do it. He's already having trouble with a
grasshopper
.” The pig grunted sociably in reply, but I couldn't tell if she agreed with me or not.

*   *   *

A
ND SPEAKING OF
T
RAVIS
and dilemmas, he confessed to another on our way home from school when I asked him, “Has the coydog finally run off, or are you still feeding it?”

“You mean Scruffy?”

Uh-oh. “Travis, we agreed you wouldn't name him. Right?”

“Well, I figured it couldn't hurt. And everybody needs a name. Come and see him with me. He's looking real good, better and better all the time.”

He led me down the bank, calling softly, “Scruffy, here boy, good doggy.”

Out of the bushes came not the wreck that I remembered but something that looked in the main like, well, a dog. The eyes were bright, the nose moist, the expression happy. He still limped, but less than before. Yes, I had to admit it, he looked like your usual
Canis familiaris
of the small-to-medium, brownish-reddish variety. He approached Travis with his ears folded submissively and his tail wagging, but stopped in his tracks when he saw me.

“It's all right, Scruffy,” said Travis. “We've brought you your lunch.”

Travis put down a sandwich, and Scruffy, deciding I was not a threat, approached us and wolfed it down. I studied him. Up close, he actually looked more like a coyote than a dog, with a long, narrow snout and a bushy coyote-like tail. He finished his food, licked his chops, and looked at us expectantly.

“That's all there is today, boy. I'll bring you more tomorrow.” Travis turned to me and said, “Hey, Callie, watch this.” He turned back to the coydog. “Scruffy, sit.”

Scruffy sat.

My mouth flopped open. Then Travis did something else. He patted Scruffy and was rewarded with a lick on his hand.

“You shouldn't touch him,” I warned. “Who knows what kind of diseases he has?”

“Oh,” he said airily, “if he had any diseases I would have caught them a long time ago. He lets me pet him and pull the ticks off, and he loves it when I brush him.”

So much for warnings from a concerned sister.

“Do you want to pet him? He won't hurt you.” Travis beamed at me with the full force of his happiness, before which so many were powerless.

I held out my hand to Scruffy. He sniffed it carefully and then rewarded me with a small lick. I tried not to think about the possible germs involved and gave him a pat on the head.

“See?” said Travis. “He's just as tame as can be.”

I looked at my little brother and decided that, painful as it might be, I had to speak up as the voice of reason. “Look, Mother says we have too many dogs, and Father only wants a purebred hunter. And your history with Armand and Jay and Bandit means your reputation with wild pets is at an all-time low.”

“But he's not wild. He's only half wild.”

“I know, and if you want to keep feeding him, that's one thing. But you can't bring him home. They'll never accept him, not in a million years.”

He sighed, a deep shuddering sigh hauled up from the depths of his being.

“So let him stay right here,” I said. “He has his den to live in and you to feed him. You can visit him every day. He can be your secret pet.”

Travis scratched behind Scruffy's ears and finally said, “Okay. I guess.”

“And be sure you feed him enough so he's not hunting chickens. That's the last thing either of you needs. Come on, I have to get home for piano practice.”

He reluctantly hugged Scruffy good-bye, and then turned to wave at him from the top of the bank. I worried about that boy. And his coydog.

 

CHAPTER 19

NAVIGATING THE INNER AND OUTER WORLDS

While sailing … on one very dark night, the sea presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle. There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of the heavens.