The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 8 MICROSCOPY

AFTER OUR NARROW BRUSH with the drippy Miss Goodacre, the house stayed discombobulated for weeks as Harry mourned and moped. I did keep my vow not to meddle, too, except for listening at the keyhole when Granddaddy had a talk with Harry in the library a few days later. Something about how the Law of Natural Selection, which always worked in Nature, sometimes inexplicably broke down in Man. Harry did seem a bit better after that, but it still took a while longer to get our old Harry all the way back. I wondered if Harry blamed our grandfather in some part for showing Miss Goodacre his carrion beetle exhibit. If that’s all it took to put her off my brother, she wasn’t worthy of him.

I could tell that Mother was relieved that the wretched Goodacre had gone. My mother’s usual attitude of noncommittal formality toward her father-in-law warmed to something approaching gratitude or maybe even affection. She enquired after his health at dinner and made sure he got the choicest cuts, although I don’t think he noticed.

Harry forgave me. After all, I hadn’t been able to prevent him from having his main chance with Miss Goodacre. I had put on my best party manners and was above criticism. Whatever happened that night hadn’t been my fault; I had given her no cause to flee from the house. And I was his long-standing favorite, his own pet, the one he had carried pig-a-back since infancy. I was flooded with relief to find myself his pet again.

THE SUMMER WORE ON. Sometimes my father would seek advice from Granddaddy about some aspect or other of the farm or the cotton gin. Father found it difficult to tear his own father away from his study of the natural world and make him focus on some point of commerce. Granddaddy had started the business and made it a success, but now he couldn’t be bothered. I thought it odd that my parents couldn’t understand how Granddaddy could have turned his back on his old life. Ever since he ’d told me about his bat, it made perfect sense to me.

“I don’t have that many days left,” he said as we sat together in the library. “Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn’t come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care.”

“Yessir,” I said. “I’ll do my best.” There was no chair for a guest, so I sat on the slanting footstool, supposedly a camel’s saddle. It didn’t look like any saddle I had ever seen, but it had a funny smell and was covered in lots of little beige hairs similar to a Chihuahua’s, so I guess it was real. I never tired of looking at Granddaddy’s things: his brass spyglass from the War; wide, shallow drawers containing rows of desiccated lizards, spiders, and dragonflies; an ornate black cuckoo clock that announced the quarter hours in a droll, cracked voice. A moldering blue rosette with tarnished print that read “Best Fat Stock, Fentress Fair, 1877.” Thick, creamy, parchmentlike envelopes from the National Geographic Society affixed with red wax seals. A carved wooden mermaid holding a pipe rack. Even the bearskin, with its gaping mouth. (The number of times I put my foot in that mouth, I can’t begin to say.) In the locked cabinet on the shelf above the prize book was the gnarly stuffed armadillo, the worst example of taxidermy I had ever seen. Why did he keep this, when all his other specimens were paragons of their species?

“Granddaddy,” I said, “why do you have that armadillo? I bet you could buy a much better one.”

“That’s true, I could, but I keep it as a reminder. That was the very first mammal I stuffed myself. I learned by correspondence course, which I advise against. If this path interests you, I suggest you apprentice yourself to a master. There are subtleties to the art that cannot be gleaned from merely reading a pamphlet.”

“I don’t think I want to learn taxidermy.” I poked at a shelf crammed with fossils and old bits of bone.

“A wise decision,” he said. “The smell alone is enough to discourage most novices from persevering. I have to say in my defense that the next armadillo was much better. So much better, in fact, that I sent it off to the great man himself as a token of the high esteem in which I held him.”

I was hefting a trilobite fossil and half listening. I was fascinated by the ordered ridges of stone that had once been the soft body of a sea animal.

“He had made a study of the South American armadillo, so I thought he should have a North American sample as well. After the armadillos, I took on a bobcat, which I’ll admit now was far too ambitious. I found the facial features quite difficult. I was trying to reproduce the snarl of the cat when it is disturbed in the wild. The poor creature ended up looking as if it had the mumps.”

How many million years old was the stonified creature I held in my hand? What ancient sea had it swum in? I had never even seen the ocean; I could only imagine the waves, the wind, the brine.

“Anyway, as a thank-you, the great man sent me the bottled beast you see on the shelf next to the armadillo. It is my most prized possession.”

“Excuse me?” I said, looking up from the trilobite.

“The bottled beast you see there on the shelf.”

I looked at the monster in the thick glass carboy, with its freakish eyes and multiple limbs.

“It is a Sepia officinalis he collected near the Cape of Good Hope.”

“Who collected it?”

“We are speaking of Mr. Darwin.”

“We are?” I couldn’t believe it. “He sent you that?”

“Indeed. Over his lifetime he carried on an extensive correspondence with many naturalists around the world and traded specimens with quite a few of us.”

“Granddaddy you’re kidding.”

“Calpurnia, I would never ’kid.’ And, for once, your mother and I are in agreement on this important point: The use of slang is an indicator of a weak intellect and an impoverished vocabulary.”

I couldn’t believe it. We had not just his book in our house, but a monster collected by Mr. Darwin himself. I stared at the thing and tried to make sense of its too many arms and legs.

“What is it?”

“What do you think it is?”

I made a face of exasperation. “You sound like Mother telling me to look up a word in the dictionary when I don’t know how to spell it.”

“Good. Another point of agreement.”

I edged up to the jar and tried to read the small paper tag hanging from a string around the neck of the bottle. The writing was old-fashioned and faded. I couldn’t read it, but it was a thrill just to know that Mr. Darwin had written it with his own pen in his own hand.

“Can I take it out of the jar? It’s hard to see, what with it being all squashed in there.”

“It is almost seventy years old and preserved in spirits of wine. I am afraid it will disintegrate if we remove it.”

I peered at it. Land? Sea? Or Air? Although there were many limbs, they looked rubbery and not substantial enough to bear any weight, so it had to be a swimmer. Sea, then. Except that there were no fins. How could it swim without fins? Hmm, a problem. And I couldn’t see any gills. Another problem. The eyes were oversized saucers. Why would they need to be so big? Answer: to see in the dark, of course. It had to live in areas of low light, which meant deep water.

I said, “It is some kind offish, and it lives near the bottom of the ocean. But it’s unlike any other kind offish I have ever seen. I don’t see how it locomotes, or how it breathes.”

“As far as you go, you are correct. It is unfair to expect you to surmise more, because it is, as you say, squashed in there. It is a cuttlefish. The family is Sepiida, the genus is Sepia. It locomotes by pulling water into a cavity in the mantle and squeezing it through a muscular siphon. The mantle also hides the gills. When startled by a predator, it releases a cloud of brownish black ink to obscure its escape. We use the calcified internal shell as an abrasive. Owners of captive birds sometimes give them the shell on which to sharpen their beaks.”

The thing fascinated me. It was a piece of history as well as an oddity. I touched a finger to the cool glass.

I LATER MENTIONED to Harry how interesting I found the bottled beast. Startled, he looked up from the book he was reading and said, “You’ve been in the library?”

“Yes,” I said, and added, “Granddaddy invited me.”

“Oh, well, in that case. Did you notice the ship in a bottle? I think that’s the most interesting thing, although I haven’t had a chance to get a good look at all his things. He got it from the Volunteer Fire Department years ago when he gave them money and bought the pump wagon. I’m hoping he’ll leave it to me in his will.” He looked at me curiously. “You seem to be spending a lot of time with him.”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you and that old man talk about?”

This made me wary. Harry didn’t so much worry me, but what if the younger brothers discovered that Granddaddy was a trove of weird and fascinating facts about Indian fighting, the larger carnivores, hot-air ballooning? I’d never have him to myself again.

“Um, things,” I said and flushed. I hated withholding anything from Harry. He turned back to his book, and I kissed his cheek. He stroked my hair absently. “You’re still my own pet, right?”

“That’s right,” I declared. “I am.”

It didn’t occur to me that others in my family also noticed I spent time with Granddaddy until Jim Bowie said, “How come you play with Granddaddy more than you play with me, Callie?”

“That’s not true, J.B. I play with you lots. And besides, Granddaddy and I aren’t playing. We’re doing Science,” I said, realizing as I spoke how pompous I sounded.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you study the world around you and you try to figure out how it works.”

“Can I do it too?”

“Maybe you can when you get to be my age.”

J.B. thought about this and then said, “I don’t want to. He’s scary, Callie. He hardly ever smiles. And he smells real funny.”

It was true. Granddaddy smelled like wool, tobacco, mothballs, and peppermint. And sometimes whiskey.

J.B. went on, “He’s not very jolly. My friend Freddy has a jolly grampa. And where’s our other grampa? Don’t we get two? Freddy has two, so how come we don’t have two?”

“The other one died before you came along. He caught typhus and then he died.”

“Oh.” He thought about this. “Can we get another one?”

“No, J.B. First he was Mother’s father, and then later he caught typhus and died.” J.B. looked perplexed by the idea that his own mother had once been a child herself.

“Why can’t we get another one?”

“It’s hard to explain, J.B. One day you’ll understand,” I said.

“Okay.” Whenever I told him this, instead of becoming infuriated like Sul Ross, he always accepted it on faith. He put his arms up for a kiss.

“Who’s your favorite sister?” I said.

“You are, Callie Vee.” He giggled.

“Oh, J.B.,” I breathed into his silky hair, overcome by his sweetness.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll play with you more often, okay?” I did mean it when I said it.

“’Kay.”

But I had so much work to do following that singular day when, floating in the river and looking at the sky, I’d been struck by a thunderbolt of understanding about grasshoppers and—really—the world itself. By the time I’d clambered up the riverbank, I had been transformed into an explorer, and the first thing I’d discovered was another member of my own odd species living at the other end of the hall. There was a living treasure under our roof, and none of my brothers could see him.

“ARE YOU COMING, Calpurnia?” Granddaddy called.

“Yessir, coming!” I galloped down the hall into the library with a fishing creel over my shoulder. It was an old wicker one of Granddaddy’s with hardly any fishy smell left. It was full of my Notebook, collecting jars, a cheese sandwich, a corked bottle of lemonade, and a waxed paper twist of pecans.

“I thought we’d use the microscope today,” he said, securing it in its case and nestling it in his haversack. “It’s an old one, but the lenses are nicely ground, and it’s still in good condition. I expect you have newer ones at school.”

A microscope was a rare and valuable thing. We had no microscopes at school. I was willing to bet I was looking at the only one between Austin and San Antonio.

“We don’t have any at school, Granddaddy.”

This gave him pause. “Is that so? I don’t understand the modern educational system at all.”

“Neither do I. We have to learn sewing and knitting and smocking. In Deportment, they make us walk around the room with a book on our heads.”

Granddaddy said, “I find that actually reading the book is a much more effective way of absorbing it.” I laughed. I’d have to tell Lula that one.

“What are we going to study today?” I asked.

“Let us examine pond water for algae. Van Leeuwenhoek was the first man to have seen what you will see today. He was a wool merchant, much as I was a cotton merchant.” He smiled. “So, you see, there is something to be said for the inspired amateur. What he saw was unimaginable. Ahh, I remember well my first look. It was like falling through the lens into another world. Do you have your Notebook? There will be much to record.”

“Got it.”

We walked to the river. On the way, we stirred up a herd of deer that crashed away through the underbrush and disappeared in two seconds flat. This of course raised the subject of deer and something Granddaddy called the food chain and each animal’s place in the natural order.

We came to a shallow blind inlet ringed by a thick fringe of mossy green growth. The cooler air and stagnant water smelled of mud and rot. Frantic tadpoles zigzagged away from our shadows; some good-sized creature splashed into the water upstream from us, an otter, maybe, or a river rat. A pair of swallows rushed by, skimming for insects a few inches above the water.

We set down our satchels, and Granddaddy unpacked the microscope and assembled the barrel and the lenses, each of which had a cunning nesting place in the velveteen-lined box. He showed me how the pieces fit together. “Here, you do it,” he said. The brass cylinder felt cool and heavy in my hands. I knew I was being trusted with something precious. Then he placed the case on a flat rock and balanced the microscope on top of it.

“Now,” he said, handing me two thin pieces of glass, “choose your droplet of water.”

“Any droplet?” I asked.

“Any one will do.”

“There are so many to choose from,” I said.

He smiled. “You will see more interesting things the closer your sample is to the green river plants growing here.”

I bent and dipped my fingertip into the water, picking my droplet, then let it fall on one piece of glass. He instructed me to put another slip of glass on top.

“Now place it here on the platform,” he said. “That’s right. The tricky part is to turn this reflector so that it catches the sunlight at the best angle. You want enough light to illuminate your subject but not so much that the details get washed out.”

I fumbled with the reflector and put my eye to the barrel, sure that something momentous was about to appear. What I saw could only be described as a field of pale gray fog. It was supremely disappointing.

“Um, Granddaddy . . . there’s nothing here.”

“Take the focus knob, here”—he took my hand—“and slowly turn it away from you. No, don’t look up. Keep looking while you turn.”

An awkward exercise.

“Do you have enough light?” he said. “Don’t forget your reflector.”

Then it happened. A teeming, swirling world of enormous, wriggling creatures burst into my vision, scaring the daylights out of me.

“Ook!” I cried and jumped back, almost overturning the whole apparatus. “Hewww,” I said, steadying the microscope. I looked up at Granddaddy.

“I take it you saw your first microscopic creatures,” he said, smiling. “Plato said all science begins with astonishment.”

“My goodness,” I said and looked through the eyepiece again. Something with many tiny hairs rowed past at high speed; something else with a lashing tail whipped by; a tumbling barbed sphere like a medieval mace rolled past; delicate, filmy ghostlike shadows flitted in and out of the field. It was chaotic, it was wild, it was . . . the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

“This is what I swim in?” I said, wishing I didn’t know. “What are these things?”

“That’s what we’ll find out. Perhaps you should sketch a few of them so we can identify them later from the texts.”

“Sketch them? But they’re moving so fast.”

“In truth, it’s a challenge. Here’s a pencil.”

I perched next to the scope and looked and sketched and looked and sketched as best I could. After a while, I noticed that some of the creatures started reappearing, which made drawing them easier. Granddaddy hummed Vivaldi and puttered nearby with his straining net. I chewed my pencil and frowned at my artwork, which consisted of awkward, blobby forms scattered across the page.

“I’m sorry to say that these aren’t much good,” I said, showing my page to Granddaddy.

“As artwork goes, you are entirely correct in your appraisal. But the more important point is this: Are these representations true enough so that you can match them with the examples in the atlas once we get back to the library? If that is the case, then you have done an acceptable job.”

“I think I might be able to tell,” I said, “but I’m not sure I can ever swim in the river again.”

“All these creatures are completely harmless, Calpurnia, and they have enjoyed the river for many more eons than you. In addition, console yourself with the thought that you swim in the river proper, and these animals are not happy in flowing water.”

“All right,” I said. But still.

The bushes rustled, and Father’s dog Ajax trotted up, pleased with himself for having found us. He had no doubt been out courting Matilda, Mr. Gates’s bluetick hound, she of the unique yodeling cry that could be heard all over town. He greeted us in turn, nosing us for a pat, then splashed into the shallows and slurped at the brackish water. A fist-sized turtle plopped off a rotting log and Ajax charged clumsily after it. He enjoyed the game of chasing turtles and other small river creatures, but I’d never seen him actually catch anything aquatic. He was, more properly, a specialist in avian studies. But this time he surprised me by ducking his whole head underwater and coming up, startled, with an equally startled turtle in his mouth.

“Ajax,” I said, “what are you doing? Stop it. Put that back where it belongs.”

He pranced back to us, pleased with himself, and dutifully laid the turtle at our feet before shaking water all over us. He sat and looked up at me expectantly.

“He thinks he’s doing his job,” said Granddaddy. “You had better praise him or all your father’s training will be for nothing.”

“Oh, Ajax. Good boy, I guess.” I gave him a pat. “What are we going to do with your turtle? Travis already has one in his room, and I doubt that Mother will tolerate another. Perhaps you should hold his collar while I let this one go.”

“I’ll walk him up the bank,” said Granddaddy. “He shouldn’t see you letting it go, or he will come to question the purpose of his work and eventually grow disheartened.” He led Ajax away, and when they were both out of sight I inspected the turtle. Why had it allowed itself to be captured by such a large, dumb land creature? Was it old? Was it sick? There was nothing obviously wrong with it. It looked like every other turtle in the river. Maybe it was simply stupid. Maybe it was better that it died so that it wouldn’t produce more generations of stupid baby turtles. But too late, I had interfered and thus made myself responsible for its safety. Wondering if I was, in my own small way, promoting the survival of the unfittest, I pushed it into the water, where it disappeared in a wink.

“It’s all right,” I yelled over my shoulder. “You can let him go.”

I climbed up the bank after them, and Ajax met me at the top, sniffing at me for his turtle. “It’s gone,” I said, showing him my empty hands. “See?” I swear he understood me because his ears drooped and he turned away.

“It’s gone, Ajax, I’m sorry. Come here and be a good dog.” I ruffled his coat and thumped his sides the way he liked, even though I knew I would stink like a wet dog for the rest of the day. “There’s a good boy. You’re a good boy.” This cheered him up some, and he forgave me enough to walk with me while we caught up to Granddaddy.

Ajax found the biggest burrow I’d seen in a long while. It looked and smelled like a badger’s hole, and badgers were getting rare in our part of the world. He amused himself by sticking his muzzle deep inside and sniffing in excitement.

“What do you see there?” I called out to Granddaddy, who peered with interest at a small, uninteresting plant. “Come on, Ajax.” I hauled on his collar to keep him from losing the end of his nose to a swipe from the burrow’s notoriously irritable tenant.

“Vetch,” said Granddaddy. “It looks like hairy vetch, but it may be a mutant. Look, it’s got this odd dependent leaf at the bottom.” He pinched off a couple of inches of stalk and handed it to me. “Let’s save that one.”

A boring plant, but I put it in a jar and printed HAIRY VETCH (MOOTANT?) on the label.

He said, “I’ve also got a woolly caterpillar over here. Have you ever raised one of these?” He held up a twig on which squirmed the biggest, fuzziest caterpillar I’d ever seen, a good two inches long. (Or, more properly, five centimeters. Granddaddy had told me that true scientists used the Continental system, which would soon come into widespread use in America.) The caterpillar was covered in dense fur that looked as plush and inviting as a cat’s pelt, but I knew better than to stroke it. I’d been told my whole life that woolly caterpillars would sting you badly. I just didn’t know if it was a little badly or a whole lot badly.

“What kind is he?” I asked.

“I’m uncertain about the species,” he said. “There are several that look alike to the naked eye, and you can’t know what you’ve got until it emerges as the winged imago.”

“So how bad is their sting?”

He said, “I suppose you could touch him and find out. Which raises an interesting point: How far are you willing to go in the name of science? This is something for you to ponder.”

Well, maybe. Or maybe I could give one of the younger boys a penny to touch it for me. But then I considered the price I’d have to pay later with Mother. Definitely not worth it.

“Let’s take him home, and I’ll raise him,” I said. “I think I’ll call him Petey.”

“Calpurnia, you will find it a bad idea to give names to your experimental subjects.”

“Why?” I said, dropping Petey and his twig into the biggest Mason jar we had, quart-size, with holes punched in the lid.

“It tends to spoil the truly objective observation.”

“I’m not sure what that means, Granddaddy.”

But he was lost in thought over some animal tracks. “Fox, I think,” he murmured. “With a couple of kits, by the look of it. That’s encouraging. I thought the coyotes had got them all.”

By the time we got back to the house, we found that Sam Houston and Lamar had brought home a startling catfish that weighed forty-five pounds on the gin scale. Its huge, frowning mouth was framed with lashing barbels as thick around as pencils. It was a fright to look upon. The biggest of these fish didn’t fight the hook much, so my brothers did not count them good sport. The main challenge was hauling them out of the river and lugging them home without touching the poisonous spines on their fins.

That night we had big chunks of it for dinner, rolled in cornmeal and deep-fried, its white flesh still tanged with the undertaste of mud that didn’t seem to bother anybody else. I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t even want to see it. It was as big as J.B. I mean, the size of that thing. It was big enough to take my whole leg in its mouth, and me swimming in the river every day. I pictured it grabbing me and dragging me down to the bottom, holding me there too long, or maybe long enough, depending on whether you looked at it from my perspective or the fish’s. My family would find me later, my hair swirling about like tragic Ophelia’s. Or maybe they wouldn’t find enough good-sized pieces to justify the cost of a funeral; maybe they would only find my chemise. Would you have a casket and a ceremony for just a chemise? Probably not. But how about a limb? Hadn’t General Jackson’s arm been given a full funeral ceremony? Or how about a head? I guessed a head would do it.

With that, I decided that I had analyzed the matter enough and did my best to think no more about it. Still, for months after that, when I stepped into the river, I thought of that Leviathan at one end of the scale waiting to mutilate me and the swarming microscopic creatures at the other end waiting to insinuate themselves. It was too bad, but sometimes a little knowledge could ruin your whole day, or at least take off some of the shine.