The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 11 KNITTING LESSONS

THE LULA SYSTEM I’d devised ended up working well enough, at least for the next few weeks. I invited her over to play piano after school, and we learned a couple of popular duets at our mothers’ request. We knew we wouldn’t have to play them at the next recital. Or any recital, for that matter. Then I made the mistake of inviting her over to work on one of our Domestic Arts assignments together and Mother got a good look at her stitches. Lord have mercy, how could I have been so stupid?

“Calpurnia,” said Mother a few days later, in a tone I dreaded, “I think it’s time you graduated from knitting scarves to socks. There’s nothing like good, thick woollen socks made by a pair of loving hands. If we start now, you’ll have time to make a pair for all your brothers before Christmas, maybe even for Father and Grandfather, as well. Wouldn’t that be nice? Bring your knitting bag, and we’ll sit in the parlor.”

The pressure was on.

I sighed and put down my magnifying glass. I was in the middle of preserving a particularly nice specimen of Viceroy butterfly in a framed glass to hang next to Granddaddy’s specimens in the library, but it was raining outside and the delicate work was tough without direct sunlight.

Mother seemed pleased by the skeins of new wool that she pulled from her own bag, which bristled with needles of every size. The wool was a fine dark chocolate brown and bound in thick hanks. She sat with her hands out like paddles while I unwound the skeins and rewound them into a ball. Although I was not excited at the prospect of knitting socks, the rhythmic shuttling of the wool back and forth was hypnotic, and I grudgingly had to admit that there might be worse ways to spend a rainy day. Might be. Mother also seemed calmed and relaxed by this timeless domestic ritual; knitting always seemed to soothe her headaches, and she didn’t need such frequent doses of Lydia Pinkham’s.

The weather had cooled somewhat. Although it wasn’t warranted, a small fire of pecan logs popped in the fireplace to foster the illusion that summer was well past us. Travis wandered in with Jesse James and Billy the Kid. He dangled some wool before them and soon had them springing back and forth and tumbling on the carpet. Lamar came in and at Mother’s request put some Schubert songs on the gramophone.

“Let’s start with socks for Jim Bowie, shall we?” said Mother. “Some small plain ones. We’ll learn about patterns later. Cast on a row of, oh, let’s say forty stitches, and we’ll start at the calf.” She handed me four tiny knitting needles.

“Four?” I frowned. “What do I do with four?”

“You knit in a perpetual circle instead of turning back at the end of a row.”

Help! I was clumsy enough with two needles. This was going to be much worse than I thought. Mother made encouraging noises while I cast on the first row of my first sock. There were so many sharp needle points sticking out at unexpected angles that it was like juggling a porcupine.

“Look,” she said, “if you wrap the wool around your fourth finger like this, it’s easier to control the tension, and the stitches stay even.” I tried to do as she showed me, and to be truthful, the next row did look better. The one after that looked better still. I noticed that once you got into a certain rhythm, the stitches flowed down the needle so that you picked up the next one before you knew it.

“Now we begin to cast off to make it narrower toward the ankle. Yes, that’s right.”

Slowly—exceedingly slowly—the mess of wool in my hands began to take shape. The afternoon passed, and although I wouldn’t call it fun, it wasn’t as terrible as I had feared. At the end I had in my hand one small, funny-looking knitted brown thing. I held it up for inspection and decided that it looked more socklike than not. Mother seemed pleased with it. She said, “It looks just like the first one I made at your age.”

“Well, that’s that,” I said, packing up my knitting bag. “Done.”

“What do you mean, done? Where are you going?”

I looked at her, not comprehending.

“Let’s start on the next one,” Mother said.

“The next one?” I yelped. Was she crazy? It had taken me hours to make this one.

“Of course the next one, and kindly don’t raise your voice like that. What’s Jim Bowie going to do with only one sock?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to add, I don’t care. Maybe he can make a puppet out of it.

“And what about the other boys? And Father? And Grandfather?” she said.

I counted up. There were the six brothers plus Father and Granddaddy, and they had many feet amongst them. So that meant there was also tomorrow, and the day after that and the one after that. My mind reeled. There was my whole life for you, socks stretching all the way to the infinite horizon, a yawning valley of knitting tedium. I felt sick.

“Please, Mother,” I said in pathetic tones, “let me do it tomorrow. I think my eyes are strained.”

She looked so concerned at this that I realized I must have touched a nerve. Perhaps the addition of spectacles to her only daughter’s not-so-promising features didn’t bear thinking about. This was a small but handy nut of knowledge, and I stored it away for future use. Also, perhaps I could cultivate sick headaches.

“All right,” she said, “that will do for today.”

I grabbed my knitting bag and got out of there before she could think of some other homegrown skill for me to learn. I took my bag to my room and then dashed downstairs and out to the darkened laboratory, but Granddaddy wasn’t there. He was probably out collecting plants. Rainy days were a good time to collect plant specimens, which was just as well, as it was impossible to find animal or insect life, all of which melted away in the rain and stayed away until the sun came out again. I lit one of the lamps and sat in his shabby sprung armchair, contemplating the rows of glinting bottles. The lulling rain pattered overhead.

I awoke to Granddaddy hanging his dripping oilskin on a nail.

“Good afternoon, Calpurnia. Are you keeping well?”

“Yes, sir, but I’m tired out from all the knitting I had to do today.”

“And how do you like knitting?”

“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” I admitted, “but there’s such a lot of it. I’m supposed to knit socks for everyone before Christmas, and that’s a tremendous number of socks. I’m hoping you like yours plain because I haven’t learned any patterns yet.”

“I like my socks plain. I never learned any patterns either.”

“You can knit?” I asked, amazed.

“Oh, yes, and darn too. Several of the men in my regiment were accomplished knitters.”

He saw the look on my face and went on, “We had to be self-sufficient in the field. If you needed a new sock, you made it yourself. There were no wives or sisters—or granddaughters, for that matter—to look after us, and parcels from home seldom got through. I remember one sergeant writing home at Christmas, asking his wife to send him a new pair of rabbit gloves. They arrived in the middle of the following summer, and by then he’d lost two fingers to frostbite. But he kept his thumbs, so he was happy about that. There was, of course, the problem of the empty fingers in the gloves. They interfered with his rifle grip, but he lopped them off at the knuckle and sewed them flat. Made a neat job of it, if I remember.”

“Self-sufficient.” I thought about this for a while. If our soldier boys had learned to knit, if my grandfather had learned, maybe it wouldn’t kill me to learn.

He looked at me. “I imagine that your mother is hoping you learn cookery, as well. We had to cook for ourselves, too.”

“Granddaddy, are you trying to make me feel better?”

He smiled. “I suppose I am.”

“Mother’s threatening to make me learn a new dish every week. It might not be so bad, except that you spend hours making it and then it’s all gone in fifteen minutes. Then you sweep up the kitchen and you scrub the counter and you have to start all over again without a single moment’s rest. What do you have to show for it? How does Viola stand it?”

“It’s all Viola knows,” he said. “And when something is all you know, it’s easy to stand it. There is one other thing she knows: Her life could be much harder. Viola is ‘house’ instead of ‘field.’ She has aunts and uncles in Bastrop chopping cotton with the short hoe and pulling the long sack.”

“Father won’t allow a short hoe on the place.”

“Do you know why not?” said Granddaddy.

“No sir, I don’t.”

“It’s because I provided him with the opportunity to spend a full day in the field with one when he was about your age. I hope he provides your brothers with the same experience.”

“Do you think he’d let me try it?”

“I doubt he would want to see his daughter out there.”

“Hmm. So what did you find today?”

He pulled his spectacles from his pocket and lifted his satchel onto the counter. “Here are some nice specimens of sangre de drago, or dragon’s blood. The Indians used it to treat gum inflammation. I did see an Oxalis violacea, but I think we have enough of those. And, look here, it’s a Croton fruticulosus, which I’ve never seen blooming this late before. You may have heard it called bush croton. Let’s try and root this one.”

The plants were nowhere near as interesting to me as the insects, and the insects were not as interesting as the animals, but Granddaddy had shown me how they were all dependent, one upon the other, and you had to study and appreciate all of the phyla in order to understand any one of them. So I peered at the wilted wisps he sorted with his finger and tried to learn something.

“Do you remember,” he said, “the hairy vetch we found a while back? The possible mutant?”

It had been an extremely boring plant, but I did remember it.

“Can you find it for me?” he said. “I think it’s still here somewhere. I haven’t had time to press it.”

I scuffled through the jars and envelopes and came up with it, an unprepossessing dried brown scrap.

“The mootant,” I said. “Here it is.”

“The correct pronunciation is ‘mew-tant.’”

“How do you spell that? And please don’t tell me to look it up.”

“Just this once. It’s M-U-T-A-N-T.”

“I think my pronunciation is better,” I said. “Mootant. What is it? What does it mean?”

“Mr. Darwin discusses it in some detail. Have you not reached that chapter yet?”

I felt comfortable enough with him to admit how difficult I found the reading. “I’m still studying the chapter on Artificial Selection. It’s taking me longer than I thought. It’s dense reading.”

“For someone of your tender years, I suppose it is,” he mused, while inspecting the jar. He opened it and tipped the sample out onto a fresh square of blotting paper. “Hand me the magnifying glass, will you?” he said.

He studied the mootant for a full minute and then said, “Humh.” Now, this in itself was odd. My grandfather normally spoke in complete sentences.

“Humh?”

“Let’s go outside and look at this.” It was still overcast, but the light outside was better than the gloom of the laboratory. We went out and he looked at the plant through the magnifying glass for a long time. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What is it, Granddaddy?”

Pensively he said, “I don’t really know.” This was even odder. He always knew everything. “There appears to be a small uncinate leaf dependent from the main node, but it’s difficult to say, as it’s so desiccated. I don’t remember this in any of the descriptions. And I don’t recall seeing it in any of the drawings, and we have some excellent ones in Dr. Mallon’s atlas.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It’s so dried out it’s hard to say. It may be an aberration, it may be nothing.” He looked at me. “Or it may be that we have found an entirely new species.”

“No,” I breathed.

“It’s possible. Let’s sit down and have a drink and think about this.” We went back into the laboratory, and he put the weed in the middle of the counter, then sank into his armchair, the springs echoing in a way that normally would have made me giggle. He stared at the vetch.

“There is a bottle for special occasions on the top shelf in the corner,” he said. “Reach it down for me, will you? There’s a good girl.”

The heavy green glass bottle was covered with the dust of ages. The brittle label read KENTUCKY’S FINEST BOURBON WHISKEY and showed a picture of a curvetting thoroughbred.

Granddaddy poured himself a full measure and downed it in one gulp. He repeated the process, then poured a third time and handed the glass to me. I shuddered at the memory of my first glass of whiskey (might cause some coffing—indeed). But he was so lost in thought that he didn’t see me trying to wave it away. I took it from him and set it aside. I waited, breathless.

After a long time he whispered, “Well, well. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.” He looked up. “And here we are.”

“Are you sure?” I whispered back. “How do we really know for sure?”

“We must find a fresh specimen and root it right away. We must make a detailed drawing. We must mark the precise spot we found it on the map. We must photograph it to send to the Smithsonian, perhaps a cutting later on. And then we’ll see.” He took a deep breath. “Do you care for another drink?”

“No, thank you, Granddaddy, but you go right ahead,” I said, handing him back his glass.

“I believe I will,” he said. “Yes, I believe I will.”

He had his drink, and we regarded each other. “Now to work,” he said. “Let us gather a fresh one so we can complete our documentation. And we need several others like it so that we have a good sampling. Where did we find it?”

I picked up the jar and looked at the label. And there, under “mootant,” where I always marked the location the way he’d taught me, was . . . nothing. The earth tilted under my feet. I stopped breathing. My vision grew dim. I looked away for a second to give my deceitful eyes a chance to stop their trickery, to see what had to be there. I blinked hard and looked again at the label. There was nothing.

With great effort of will, I gasped for breath and air rushed into my lungs.

“Calpurnia, are you all right?”

I puffed like a landed catfish, “Uh-noh, uh-noh, uh-noh.”

He stood up. “I agree, it’s an overwhelming moment. Perhaps you should sit down for a minute. Sit here,” he said, and gave me his chair.

I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I couldn’t tell him.

“Shall I get your mother?” he said, with consternation.

I shook my head and got control of my breathing. “No, sir.”

“Do you need some whiskey?” he said.

“No, sir!” I shouted, throttled with fear.

“Be calm,” he said, “and tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s the vetch,” I cried. “I didn’t write it down. It’s not there.”

He picked up the jar and looked at it. “Oh, Calpurnia,” he said, softly. “Oh, Calpurnia.” Each mild word was like a blow across my face.

I put my head in my hands. “I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. “I’ll find it, I’ll find it!”

“How did this happen?” he said.

“I know what you taught me,” I wept, “I know. We were coming back from the river. I was thinking about Ajax’s turtle. I was thinking about the survival of the fittest.” I wrenched my handkerchief from my pocket. “Oh, I’ll find it, I promise. Please don’t be mad at me, I will find it.”

“Yes. Of course you will,” he said quietly.

“I’ll go right now.”

“Calpurnia, it’s getting dark.”

“If I hurry,” I said, jumping up and grabbing the jar. “Where’s a pencil, I need a pencil, I’m sure there’s a pencil around here somewhere,” I gabbled.

“Stop. It’s too late tonight. We’ll have to go tomorrow. Sit down and calm yourself. Think back. You said we were coming back from the river,” he prompted.

I sat down again.

“Close your eyes,” he said, “and see it in your mind.”

I closed my eyes, but I was too overwhelmed to concentrate. I listened to his words and tried to slow my breathing. “We were using the microscope. At the inlet.”

“I remember,” said Granddaddy. “Breathe deeply. Be still and think. We were coming back from the inlet.”

“We were coming back from the inlet,” I echoed. “That’s right, Ajax had caught a turtle, the only time he’s ever done that. I remember taking it from him. You led him away so I could let it go. There’s . . . there’s something else about Ajax . . . but I don’t remember what it is.”

“I’m sure you will remember,” he said. His voice calmed me.

Ajax and the mootant. The mootant and Ajax. I knew I was on the right track. One had something to do with the other, but what? I cast about through the trails of my memory like a hunting dog trying to pick up a lost scent. This way, that way, all blind leads. What had Ajax been doing? It seemed like something annoying, but then he was always doing something annoying in his bumbling, good-natured way, so that was no help at all. Hadn’t he been out wooing Matilda? But then what?

“Oh,” I moaned, “I can’t think of it. It’s in here somewhere”—I smacked myself on the forehead—“but I just can’t find it.”

“I think, Calpurnia, that it’s something you’re going to have to sleep on. We will find it. We have to find it. Even if we must examine every green growing thing on this section.”

Somberly he regarded the mootant jar. Then he sighed once, and even though I saw no blame in his face, I thought my heart would shatter. I resolved then and there that I would crawl on my hands and knees across our six hundred acres with a magnifying glass if that’s what it took, for as long as it took. We closed up the laboratory and walked back to the house in silence. Never had I felt so wretched.

DO YOU THINK there was any sleep for me that night? I lay flat in bed like a corpse, unable to generate the energy to toss and turn. Question for the Notebook: How could Calpurnia Virginia Tate be so stupid? An excellent question, that. My grandfather had taught me to note the location of every specimen, and I had done so, right up to the one moment—the only moment—when it truly mattered. Another Question for the Notebook: How could I expect him ever to forgive me? Again, an excellent question, Calpurnia. Perhaps he won’t forgive you. Perhaps he won’t be able to bear the sight of you. In which case, you’re done for.

I got up in the morning with huge, dark half-moons under my eyes; Mother regarded me with some alarm. I was unable to look at Granddaddy at breakfast.

School was an agony of exhaustion and nervous tension. I came perilously close to snapping at Miss Harbottle and being sent to the Corner of Shame for the rest of my natural life when she made me go to the board and solve a long division problem. Which I got wrong.

At recess, Lula said, “Callie, what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, Lula, I’m fine!” I shrieked. She backed away from me and went off to play with that simp, Dovie Medlin. “Hey, Lula, I’m sorry. Come back,” I called out, but Miss Harbottle rang her bell.

I dragged myself home at the end of the day, lagging far behind my brothers, who had given up trying to cajole me out of my mood. I thought about Ajax as I trudged along. If only I weren’t so exhausted, maybe I could get my brain to focus. The stupid dog was the key to it all. I’d taken his turtle away from him. We’d walked away from the river. I’d hauled on his collar. Because. Because. Because he’d stuck his nose in a big hole.

“Yes!” I screamed and my brothers turned around to look at me. I jumped up and down and screamed, “Yes! The badger, the badger! I know where it is! I know where the vetch is!” I ran up to Lamar and Sam Houston and shoved my schoolbooks into their hands. “Take my books home for me, I’m going to find the mootant!” And I ran into the brush, heading for one of the deer paths.

“What are you doing?” Lamar called out. “What’s a mootant?”

But I was too busy crashing through the brush, my heart pumping yes yes yes as I ran. It had been the biggest badger hole I’d ever seen, so big I’d meant to come back and investigate it further. Granddaddy had found the vetch a few yards away, hadn’t he? I could find it, I would find it. The world was mine. My grandfather would be mine again.

Three hours later, scratched, blistered, thirsty, I stepped in said badger hole in the gathering twilight and almost snapped my ankle in two. I also woke the badger. He responded with an irritable hissing and thumping from deep in his burrow, causing me to pull my leg out of there double-quick, despite the pain.

There wasn’t much time left. Soon it would be too dark to see, and besides, the badger would be emerging soon to make his rounds, terrorizing the local moles and gophers. A grouchy badger was something to be avoided. I hobbled a few feet away and thought. We had been coming from the river. We had been heading toward the house. So that meant we were traversing . . . that way. I set off limping, eyes fixed on the ground. And there—right there—was a small green clump of possible vetch. I fell to my knees, praying let this be it, this has to be it, please let this be it. I scrabbled in the hard-packed dirt with my fingernails, loosening the soil to free up the roots as much as possible, cursing myself as an idiot for not bringing a trowel and a jar of water.

Panting with anxiety, I got it out of the earth after a good five minutes’ work. Most of the root was intact. I sank back onto my heels, drained, ignoring the pain in my ankle. I would have rested longer except for the indescribably rank smell and loud snuffling coming from a few feet away. I turned and saw the badger trundling toward me.

I made good time for a crippled girl bearing a priceless treasure.

VIOLA RANG her bell on the back porch as I reached the driveway. There’d be trouble for arriving late to dinner, especially since I was so filthy, Arriving late for dinner was a serious offense in our house, but if I went in right away, there’d be explanations and delays and cleaning up to deal with, all postponing the critical moment of putting the vetch in water. I drew back under the trees and skirted around the house to the laboratory, adding to my tardiness and the repercussions I’d have to face at the table.

The laboratory was dark. There were several empty jars and a carafe of drinking water on the counter. I filled a jar with water and put the vetch into it, thinking, Please let this be the right one. If it’s not, I’ll have to kill myself. Either that, or run away from home. I walked to the back door, trying to remember how much money was in the tin box hidden under my bed. At last count, I’d saved twenty-seven cents for the Fentress Fair. I couldn’t run very far on twenty-seven cents. Best not to be pessimistic, Calpurnia. It has to be the one.

I got through the back door just as Viola pulled the roast from the oven. SanJuanna stood ready to take it into the dining room.

“You late,” Viola said. “Warsh up in here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Is Mother mad?”

“Plenty.”

I pumped water at the kitchen sink and attacked my hands with the nail brush.

“Sorry.”

“You said that already.”

I looked down at my torn, dirt-stained pinafore.

“Take that off,” Viola said. “Nothing you can do. Go get in there.”

I took it off and hung it on the hook by the sink and hobbled into the dining room hiding behind SanJuanna and the roast. I may have exaggerated my lameness a tad. Conversation stopped. I ducked my head and murmured “pardon me” as I took my place. My brothers looked expectantly back and forth between me and our mother.

“Calpurnia,” said Mother, “you are late. And why are you walking like that?”

“I stepped in the world’s biggest badger hole, and I think I hurt myself. I’m sorry I’m so late, Mother, I truly am. It took me ages to get back, what with being so injured and all.”

“See me after dinner, please,” said Mother.

The older boys went back to eating, disappointed by the lack of a public scourging, but the baby, Jim Bowie, said, “Hi, Callie. I missed you. Where have you been?”

“I’ve been collecting plants, J.B.,” I said in a loud, exuberant voice. Both my mother and my grandfather looked up. “And then I stepped in the badger hole,” I added. “Maybe my ankle’s broken.”

“Really?” said J.B. “Can I see? I never saw a broke ankle.”

“Later,” I muttered.

Mother turned her attention back to her plate, but Granddaddy continued staring at me. I was about to bust a gut.

I turned to Jim Bowie and said, “J.B., I might have found something special, a special plant. Yes, indeedy. I left it out in the laboratory. I’ll show it to you later, if you want. Best not to play with your peas like that.”

I peeked at Granddaddy, He was still staring at me with intense concentration. We started the meat course. The port bottle was still a good thirty minutes away, but then Granddaddy did something unprecedented in the entire History of Dinner: He left before the port. Rising from the table, he patted his beard with his napkin, bowed to my mother, and said, “Another fine dinner as usual, Margaret. Kindly excuse me.” He walked out through the kitchen, leaving us all gaping in his wake. I heard the back door close behind him and his boots on the steps. None of us had ever seen anything like it. My mother collected her wits and glared at me.

“Do you have anything to do with this?” she said.

“Not I.” I kept my eyes on my plate.

“Alfred,” Mother said, turning to Father for information, “is Grandfather Walter feeling all right?”

“I believe so,” Father said, looking perplexed.

Seeing an opportunity, Jim Bowie, still playing with his peas instead of facing up to the ordeal of eating them, said, “Please, Mother, may I be ex—”

“No, you may not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But Grandfather is ex—”

“Stop it right now, J.B.”

The rest of dinner passed in silence. I was made to sit at the table for a whole hour after they left and SanJuanna cleared up, and I missed the firefly competition. Who cared about that? But not being out in the laboratory was killing me. I caught myself wringing my hands, something I’d only read about in overwrought sentimental stories. I was out of my chair and limping through the kitchen before the clock stopped bonging. Viola was feeding Idabelle the Inside Cat while SanJuanna washed the dishes.

“Listen, you—” said Viola as I crashed out the back door and came to a screeching halt. There, sitting on the back steps in the dark, stroking one of the Outside Cats, sat Granddaddy, smoking a cigar and staring at the sky. From the kitchen behind us came the homey noises of the crockery being put away. From the darkness came the chitter of some night-flying bird. I stood there a moment, my whole world hanging in the balance.

“Calpurnia,” he said, “it’s such a lovely evening. Won’t you join me?”