The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 9 PETEY

AS THE SUMMER WORE ON, I spent more and more time studying Science and less and less time practicing the piano. This turned out to be unwise in the long run, since each time I missed practice I had to make up the time and pay for it with an extra half hour. On Saturday, after playing for a whole two hours (!), I made my escape with my Notebook and tapped on the library door.

“Enter if you must,” Granddaddy called out. He was examining some plates in The Atlas of Microscopic Pond Life.

“So you have finished with your cultural obligations for the day?” he said, without looking up, and I realized that with the transoms open he could, of course, hear me thumping away in the parlor across the hall. “I do like the ‘Water Music,’” he said, “and I hope you won’t grow so tired of learning it that you put it aside for the rest of your life. That’s the great danger of too much piano practice. I hope Margaret understands that.”

“Mother says I can go back to a half hour tomorrow. Oh,” I said, looking at the plates over his shoulder, “that’s what I drew, isn’t it?” I opened my Notebook to the illustrations I’d made of the microscopic river creatures. My ancient mace looked like the one in the text. “Volvox,” I read, “it’s Volvox. Is that how you say it?”

“That’s correct. Such a satisfying form. I admit I have a special weakness for it amongst all the Chlorophyta.”

“Look,” I said, “here’s another one.” My drawings were up to snuff. I was very pleased with myself.

“Go ahead and label each of them in your book,” Granddaddy said, “and note the page in the atlas so you can find them again.”

I decided to use ink instead of pencil, which made the whole process nerve-racking, but I ended up with only one tiny blot.

Then I said, “Granddaddy, what should I feed Petey?”

“Who?” he said.

“Petey. The caterpillar.”

“Calpurnia, must I give you the answer in a spoon like a baby? Surely you can figure it out on your own. Think about the problem. Do you remember where you found him? What sort of tree was he living on?”

“Ah,” I said, and went out to find leaves of the same kind we’d abducted Petey from. That made sense. A caterpillar’s job was to eat, so naturally he wouldn’t be found wasting his time lounging about on something he didn’t like. Petey curled into a fuzzy comma when I put the leaves in his jar. I replaced his narrow twig with a larger-branched one for exercise and diversion, should he feel the need. I set his jar on my dresser between the hummingbird’s nest and a bowl of tadpoles I was studying. My dresser was getting crowded. A half hour later, when I looked again, Petey was munching on his foliage and seemed happy enough, but with a caterpillar how can you tell for sure?

I checked on him again before bedtime, and he was motionless, stretched full-length along his twig. He appeared to be asleep. At least, I hoped he was only asleep. I looked to see if he had eyes, and if they were closed. Both of his ends looked the same, but when I inspected him with a magnifying glass, I found two shiny black dots buried deep in the fur at one end. Those had to be his eyes, didn’t they? He didn’t appear to have eyelids.

Question for the Notebook: Why don’t caterpillars have eyelids? You would think they would need them, spending their days in the sun as they do.

Travis inspected him the following morning and raised a good point I hadn’t considered when he said, “Why did you call him Petey? How do you know he’s a boy?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find out when he hatches. I don’t know what kind of butterfly he’s going to be, either.”

More Questions for the Notebook: Do caterpillars come as male and female? Or do they turn into male or female while they’re asleep in their cocoons? Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren’t given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.

MOTHER DISLIKED Petey’s presence but tolerated him because he would eventually turn into something beautiful. Mother yearned for Beauty in her life. She supported the Lockhart Chamber Orchestra and took us once a year to the ballet in Austin. It took us half a day to get there on the train, and we would spend the night at the Driskill Hotel; there we would have ice cream floats at the fountain and afternoon tea in the Crystal Room.

Every month she pored over her magazines that came in the mail—The Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s. From these she made patterns, cutting and sewing silk flowers that she arranged in the parlor. Although we had fields full of wildflowers blooming in the spring, she never arranged those. Sometimes I would pick a handful of them and put them in a pitcher by my bed. They looked nice but they were good for only a day or two. Then they didn’t so much wilt as disappear. You were left with a vase full of smelly water.

Petey disregarded the world around him; in fact, he disregarded everything except the bundles of leaves I brought him daily. He ate and slept and ate and slept, and in between bouts of eating and sleeping, he ejected many tiny, compacted green bales from his hind end. This meant I had to spend part of each day cleaning up his quarters. I hadn’t signed up for this, and I soon grew tired of it, but I kept telling myself it would all be worth it when he turned into a magnificent butterfly. He grew unbelievably fat, as thick as a sausage. One day I brought him the wrong kind of greenery, and he sulked and wouldn’t eat it. I was ready to jettison him outside for all the trouble he put me to. Plus, he didn’t make a very entertaining pet.

When I mentioned this to Granddaddy, he chastised me by saying, “Remember, Calpurnia, Petey is not your pet. He is a creature in the natural order of things. While it is easy to be more interested in the higher-order animals, and I must confess I myself am guilty of this weakness, it doesn’t mean we can neglect our study of the lower orders. To do so indicates a lack of purpose and a shallowness of scholarship.”

So, all for Science, I cleaned up caterpillar poop. Then Petey went off his feed again for no good reason. I checked his forage, and it was the right kind, but he wasn’t interested. I thought, You spoiled, sulky caterpillar, I should throw you out on the lawn. You can take your chances with the birds and see how you like that, mister.

To my surprise, when I woke up the next morning, I found that he had his cocoon well under way. So he hadn’t been pouting after all; he’d been resting up and planning for his labors. I had come close to throwing out a blameless caterpillar.

All day long, he squirted a fine gray thread from his front end (I think), and busily tangled it this way and that, fashioning a messy cocoon with odd bits of thread sticking out here and there. It looked like slapdash work. His knitting was no better than mine, which made me feel some sympathy for him. He slowly sealed himself up in his capsule like an Edgar Allan Poe caterpillar.

“Good night, Petey. Sleep well,” I bid him. Petey stirred and then settled one last time in his self-made prison. The cocoon didn’t move for two whole weeks while Petey went about the slow, magical business of rearranging his parts in his sleep. There was something gorgeous and mysterious about it, but it was also somewhat revolting if you thought about it too closely. It made me think of Life. And Death.

I had never seen a real live dead person. The closest I had come was a daguerreotype of my uncle Crawford Steele, dead at age three of diphtheria, wrapped in swathes of white lace. You could see some of the whites of his sunken eyes, so you knew that he wasn’t asleep, that things were not all right. I went to Harry and asked, “Harry, have you ever seen a dead person?”

He said, “Uh, no. Why are you asking?”

“No particular reason.”

“Where do you come up with these things? You scare me sometimes.”

“Me? Scare you?” The thought of me scaring my biggest, strongest brother was laughable. “I was thinking about Petey moving his parts around, and that made me think of living things, which made me think of dead things. So the next time there’s a funeral in town, will you take me?”

“Callie Vee. ”

“There’s nothing creepy about it. It’s scientific interest. Backy Medlin looks kind of decrepit to me. How old is he, do you reckon?”

“Why don’t you go down the street and inspect his teeth?”

“That’s a good one, Harry, but I doubt he has any left. He’11 go soon, don’t you think?”

I passed Backy Medlin every day on my way to and from school. He sat with the other codgers on the gallery of the gin, rocking and spitting and interrupting each other’s stories of the War and griping at each other that, no, it hadn’t happened that way, it had happened this way. And so on. (Backy’s name came from his prodigious use of chewing tobacco and his poor aim at the spittoon. He spat frequently, randomly, mightily. A constant foul brown rain pattered down on the dust around him, and you had to keep a sharp lookout.) No one paid the men the slightest attention anymore. Sometimes even they got sick of yakking and turned to dominoes, playing with an old carved set with dots so stained from a million games that they were nearly indecipherable. The tiles clacked pleasingly, and every now and then one of the old men would exclaim “Ha!” and you knew he had thrown down a particularly good one.

“So will you take me to Backy’s funeral?” I said.

Harry said, “Really, Callie, this isn’t very nice talk.”

“I’m not wishing him to die. I’m just curious. Granddaddy says that a curious mind is a pree . . . is a perk—”

“Prerequisite?”

“Yes—that—to a scientific understanding of the world.”

“Fine. But have you done your piano practice yet? Miss Brown comes tomorrow.”

“You sound like Mother. No, I haven’t done it yet, and yes, I’ll do it. Harry, how many years will we have to take lessons? I’m getting tired of it, aren’t you? Why don’t some of the others take piano for a while? I have better things to do.”

“Better things to do with Grandfather, you mean.”

“Uh, yes.”

“I asked you once before and you never answered me. So, what do you talk about with him?”

“Golly, Harry, there’s everything to talk about. There’s bugs and snakes, cats and coyotes; there’s trees and butterflies and hummingbirds; there’s clouds and weather and wind; there’s bears and otters, although they’re getting harder to find around here. There’s whaling ships, there’s—”

“All right.”

“The South Seas and the Grand Canyon. The planets and the stars.”

“Okay, okay.”

“There’s the principles of distillation. You do know he’s trying to turn pecans into liquor, right? Although it’s not going so well, but don’t say I said so, okay?”

“Got it,” said Harry.

“There’s Newton’s laws, there’s prisms and microscopes, there’s—”

“Got it, I said.”

“Gravity, friction, lenses—”

“Enough already.”

“The food chain, the rain cycle, the natural order. Harry, where are you going? There’s tadpoles and toads, lizards and frogs. Don’t go away. There’s something called microbes, germs, you know. I’ve seen them through the microscope. There’s butterflies and caterpillars, which brings us to Petey; let’s not forget about him. Harry?”

I AWOKE in the morning to a tiny skritch-skratch sound like the noise a mouse makes in the wall, only it was coming from Petey’s jar. It was too dark to see, so I pulled back the curtain and set his jar in the windowsill. His cocoon pitched this way and that. As the room grew lighter, he thrashed and chewed away and either didn’t notice my face pressed up against his jar or didn’t care. Finally, he had a good-sized hole in one end of his cocoon, and what had once been Petey slowly strained its way out with a mighty effort.

And there, instead of the lovely bright creature I’d imagined, crouched an odd-looking thick-bodied butterfly with damp, tightly furled wings. It shook, struggling to uncrimp itself. I could see that it wasn’t my Petey anymore. I would have to find a new name for it. Something to reflect its long-awaited splendor. Something like . . . Fleur . . . since it lived on nectar, or maybe Sapphire, or maybe Ruby, depending on the final color of its wings. I left it to its work and went down to breakfast.

At the table I announced, “Petey hatched. He’s busy drying off his wings.”

“Oh, wonderful,” said Mother. “What color is he?”

“I can’t tell yet, ma’am. He’s still puckered up. But he definitely needs a new name now that he’s not Petey the Caterpillar anymore.”

“Children?” said Mother, “do you have any suggestions?”

Sul Ross, the seven-year-old, proclaimed, “We should name him . . . we should name him . . . ,” he struggled, “. . . Butterfly.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Mother.

“How about Belle,” said Harry, “for beauty.”

“That’s nice, Harry. Any other suggestions?”

Granddaddy said, “You might want to wait and see what it looks like first.”

I thought this an odd statement. But if anybody knew his butterflies, it was Granddaddy, so I figured he had some reason for making it.

“Yes,” I said, “let’s see what he looks like before we name him, although Belle is a good idea.” Sul Ross looked crestfallen, and I added, “And Butterfly is good, too, Sully. Maybe I’ll call him Belle the Butterfly.”

“Is it a him or a her, Callie?” said Travis.

“No idea,” I said, tucking into the flapjacks.

“Kindly don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Mother.

After breakfast I ran up to my room with the three younger boys on my heels debating what to christen our new charge. And there in all his glory was Petey, or Belle, stretched wide on his twig, enormous wings filling his jar. He was huge, he was pale, he was fuzzy all over. He was the world’s biggest moth.

“That sure is a funny-looking butterfly,” said Sul Ross. “What’s wrong with him?”

“It’s not a butterfly, Sully,” said Travis. “It’s a moth. Callie, did you know it was going to be a moth?”

“Um,” I said, taken aback by his size, “not really.”

“Gosh, I’ve never seen one that big,” said Travis.

“Me neither. He’s kind of creepy,” said Sul Ross, “don’t you think?”

“Uh. . . .” It’s true, he was kind of creepy, but I would never admit it. I had no idea moths could get to be that size. And this one was only a newborn.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Travis.

“I’m going to study it, of course,” I said, wondering what on earth I would do with this monster.

“Oh, okay. So what are you going to study?”

“Um, its . . . um, eating habits, that sort of thing. Its mating habits. Right. Yep, there’s territory, wingspan, things like that.”

“Are you going to have to touch it?” said Sul Ross. “I sure wouldn’t want to touch it.”

“Maybe not yet,” I said. “It’s barely born. It needs time to get used to things.”

“You better find a bigger jar fast, Callie. It’s going to bust out of that one.”

“I don’t think they come any bigger.”

“Maybe you could let him fly around your room,” said Travis.

Not likely.

“Eeeuuuw,” said Sul Ross, backing up. “I gotta go.”

“Me too,” said Travis. “Time for school.”

“Hey!” I called after them, “It’s all right, come back here. I’m not gonna let him out!”

Now what? Petey—or Belle, or whatever it was—fluttered in its jar. The sound was dry, ominous, morbid. I got ready for school, trying not to look at it, flinching every time it flapped. I’d have to let it out of that jar, I could see that, but I didn’t want to think about it. I spent most of the hours at school trying not to.

When I got home, I lingered downstairs and put in some extra piano practice, after which Mother ordered me upstairs to change my pinafore. I dragged myself up to my room and had a sudden spasm of anxiety as I put my hand on the doorknob: What if it had gotten out? Had I tightened the lid on the jar after opening it the last time? What if it was flying loose around the room? Then I caught myself. Calpurnia Virginia Tate. You’re being ridiculous. Are you a Scientist or aren’t you? Come on, now. It’s. Only. A. Moth.

All right. That did it. I peered around my door. There it hunkered in the jar, the same as I’d left it, too big to even turn around. It stirred, wings beating against the glass.

“Petey,” I said. “What am I going to do with you? I need to figure out what species you are. And I need to find you a bigger home.”

I pulled Granddaddy’s Taxonomy of the Insect World from my bookshelf and turned to the order Lepidoptera. Based on its color and ridiculous size, it had to be a Saturniidae of some kind. Differentiating between the most likely possibilities meant examining the specimen’s spread wings, but there wasn’t room enough in the jar. There was nothing for it, I’d either have to get it a bigger home or let it loose. I stared at it for a while. It wasn’t so bad looking once you got used to its freakish size. It did have cute feathery antennae. I had brought it this far. It was stuck in that jar because of me; I couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.

“All right, Petey, let’s go visit Granddaddy and see what he has to say.” I picked up the jar at arm’s length and carried it downstairs with him pulsating all the way.

I ran into Harry in the hall. He took one look at Petey and said, “Good heavens, is that your butterfly? It looks more like an albatross.”

“Ha,” I said, “ha.”

“Did you know it would turn into this?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said, breezily.

Harry eyed me and then said, “Let me look at him. He’s a prizewinner, isn’t he? If they had an entry for moths at the Fentress Fair, you’d take it, easy.”

An interesting thought. Along with the classes for hogs and cattle and home preserves, a category for moths. Which naturally led me to remember the pet division for children every year at the fair. Children showed up with their cats and dogs and parakeets, a bunch of boring, everyday pets. Why not something more interesting like, say, a giant moth?

“Say, Harry,” I said, “do you think I could enter Petey in the pet show?”

“He’s not much of a pet, Callie Vee,” he said, laughing.

“So what? Dovie Medlin showed up last year with her gold-fish, Bubbles, who wasn’t much of a pet, either. And it’s not as if they have to perform tricks or anything. All they have to do is sit there, and the judges come by and look at them. He’d get some extra points for being different, don’t you think?”

“That he would, but it’s months away,” he said. “How are you going to keep him alive? You can’t keep him in that jar.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out some housing for him. How long do moths live, anyway?”

Harry said, “I don’t know. You’re the naturalist. I’m guessing a few weeks.”

Mother walked out of the kitchen and came to a sudden halt, staring at Petey’s jar in disbelief.

“What is that thing you’ve got in there, Calpurnia?” she said, her voice rising.

I sighed. “This is Petey, Mother. Or,” I added with false cheer, “you can call him Belle, if you like.” As if a beautiful name could somehow cloak this grotesquerie. Petey rippled drily, and my mother took a step back. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“What happened to your . . . to your beautiful butterfly?” she said.

“He turned out to be not so much a butterfly as a moth, you see,” I said, holding the jar out to show her. She took another step back.

“I want you to get it out of here. That’s a moth, for pity’s sake. Imagine what something that size would do to the woollens!” I had forgotten that she and SanJuanna fought a perennial pitched battle with hordes of small brown moths for possession of our blankets and winter clothes, their trifling weapons of cedar shavings and lavender oil no match for the ongoing push of Nature.

“It doesn’t eat wool, ma’am,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it does. It may only eat nectar, or it may eat nothing at all, depending on its species. Some of them don’t feed at all in the adult stage. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

Mother raised her hands. “Do not, under any circumstances, let that thing loose in here. I want it out of the house. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She pressed a hand to her temple and turned and went upstairs.

Harry said, “Too bad. I’d have liked to see him in the pet show. Step right up, folks, come and see Calpurnia Virginia Tate and her giant pet moth!”

“Very funny. All right, I have to let him go, but I have to show him to Granddaddy first.” I went looking for Granddaddy in the library, but he wasn’t there. I could go out the front door and around the long way to the laboratory in back, or cut through the kitchen and face more revulsion and more explanations on the way. I tucked the jar under my arm and went through the kitchen. Viola took one look at me and said, “What you got there?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said and kept moving out the back door. Petey stirred in his jar. I wished he would keep still. I had grown used to his appearance, but that noise. There was something foreboding and primeval about it; it made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.

Granddaddy was stooped over his ledger book when I found him.

“Hello, Granddaddy, look what I have,” I said, holding out the jar to him.

“My, my, that is certainly a hefty specimen you have there. I’ve never seen one so sizeable. Have you identified the family it belongs to?”

“I think he must be Saturniidae, or maybe Sphingidae,” I said, proud of my pronunciation.

“What do you plan to do with him?”

“I was going to enter him in the pet show at the Fair, but Harry thinks he won’t live that long, and you keep telling me he’s not a pet. And Mother wants him out of the house. So that means I can kill him and keep him for my collection. Or I can let him go.”

Granddaddy looked at me. We both looked at Petey, squashed in his jar. “He’s a handsome specimen,” Granddaddy said. “You may never see another like him.”

“I know.” I frowned. “You did warn me not to name him. But I’ve raised him this far. I don’t think I can kill him.”

AT DUSK, when we gathered on the lawn to await the first firefly, my brothers stood on the porch while I set Petey’s jar in the grass. Granddaddy watched from a rocker and sipped store-bought bourbon. I took the lid off the jar and stood back.

For a minute Petey huddled there without moving. Then he crawled over the lip of the jar and emerged from his glass cocoon. As he wobbled his way onto the grass, Ajax came trotting around the corner of the house. Petey stretched his quivering wings wide. Too late, from the corner of my eye I saw the dog charge, his ears flapping, thrilled with the prospect of a new game of fetch. Petey pulsed feebly into the air and came to rest a couple of feet away, with Ajax closing fast. He was going to swallow my best specimen, my science project, my Petey. Fury boiled within me. Stupid dog! I ran at him and screamed Ajax!—so loud that I startled myself. Who knew I had that much wind in me? The birds in the trees took flight, and Ajax hesitated. I lunged at his collar. But he leaped sideways, thinking that it was all a fine new entertainment. He pounced again and Petey rose again, chest-high this time, flapping like an awkward pullet testing its wings.

“No!” I screamed, and this time Ajax heard a word he recognized. Puzzled, he looked at me with Petey between his front paws. This was all fine sport, wasn’t it? His job was to retrieve flying things, wasn’t it? I rushed at the dog again, when Petey, with a mighty effort, launched himself into the air and in that split second was transformed from an ungainly land-bound dweller into something else, a creature of the wind, a citizen of the air.

I watched in amazement. Petey looked like he’d been flying forever. Ajax huffed and pulled at his collar, and I let him go. There was no catching that moth now.

“Wow!” exclaimed my brothers. “You did well, Callie.” “I thought that moth was a goner, for sure.”

Granddaddy raised his glass in salute as Petey disappeared into the scrub.

Later that night, I sat on the front porch by myself as it grew dark, delaying bedtime as long as I could, until all I could see was the last of the white lilies along the front walk. They glowed in the dark like pale miniature stars fallen to earth. Then something whizzed past me through the air, making straight for them, where it set up a commotion, thrashing around inside one flower after another. It sounded like a hummingbird, but I couldn’t see it. Did hummingbirds fly at night? I didn’t think so. Could it be a nectar-eating bat? I didn’t know, and even though I couldn’t see for sure, I decided that it had to be Petey. At least, I told myself so.

I preferred a happy ending.