The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (5 page)

 

CHAPTER 4

DEVIL BIRDS

[The tameness of the birds] is common to all the terrestrial species.… One day, whilst lying down, a mocking-thrush alighted on the edge of a pitcher, made of the shell of a tortoise, which I held in my hand, and began very quietly to sip the water.

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, I was in the kitchen with Viola, petting Idabelle and generally getting in the way, when Travis came through the back door, beaming and carrying an old straw hat covered with a red bandanna, from whence issued rustling sounds.

“Hey, everybody, you'll never guess what I found!”

Viola looked up sharply. “Whatever it is, I don't want it in my kitchen.”

“What is it?” I said, with both interest and trepidation.

He whipped back the cloth like a conjurer to reveal two baby blue jays, scrawny, stringy, partially feathered, pink mouths agape, and ugly enough to turn sweet milk into clabber. They strained upward, quivering for food, emitting grating high-pitched cries.

Now, it wasn't all that unusual to occasionally run across a stranded young bird that had fallen or been dumped from the nest. But two? I found that … suspicious.

“You
found
them? Really? Where?”

Travis wouldn't meet my eye. “Down near the gin.”

Viola said, “I don't care where you found 'em, you get them nasty things out of here right now. Those are devil birds.”

As if to confirm her opinion, both birds threw back their heads, much too big for their wobbly necks, and screamed like, well, the devil. You wouldn't think such frail-looking organisms would be capable of such a racket, but this was how they begged for food from their parents.

Viola yelled over the noise, “Get 'em out of here.”

Travis chattered on our way to the barn. “I've heard they make good pets. Have you heard that? They say they're really smart, and you can teach them tricks. I've been thinking about their names. How about Blue for one and Jay for the other? Blue is this one here. Look, he's a little bit smaller. And Jay, well, he's a little bit bigger, but one of his wings looks kind of funny. I hope it's okay. But that's how you tell them apart. I wonder when they ate last? Do you think they'll eat chicken feed? Or will we have to dig for worms?”

“Travis, you know how Mother and Father feel about wild animals.”

“But these aren't even animals, Callie. They're birds. So it's different.”

“Not really. Birds are a class of vertebrate within the kingdom Animalia.”

“I don't know what that means, but boy, they sure are noisy.”

And boy, they sure
were
noisy. Their cries were an annoying sound halfway between a squeak and a screech, and about six octaves higher than I could sing. I followed him to the barn, where he looked for some kind of home for them. But the raucous cries of Blue and Jay quickly drew an attentive circle of the Outside Cats, eyes agleam and tails atwitch.

“They'll have to go into the chicken pen,” I said. “It's the only place they'll be safe.” The chicken pen had a stout roof to discourage cats, coons, and hawks. We filled a wooden box with combings from Snow White, Mother's favorite ewe, and put the birds in their new home. They aggressively demanded food without ceasing, being basically two oversized mouths attached to two undersized bodies. They stopped their terrible noise only long enough to choke down beakfuls of a soft mash of chicken feed, fluttering their wings in excitement.

“Do you think we should give them water too?” asked Travis.

“I reckon it can't hurt.”

Travis dipped his finger in the hen's basin, and then, wiggling his wet finger, let fall a couple of drops of water into each beak. The birds liked it. As far as I could tell.

The offended hens huddled on the far side of the enclosure and clucked in consternation. Finally, to shut the hatchlings up, Travis draped the bandanna over them and they fell quiet in the artificial dark.

But calamity struck the next morning when we found Blue, the smaller of the birds, dead. Its sibling ignored the corpse and screamed at the top of its lungs for breakfast. From Travis's reaction, you would have thought there was no greater tragedy in our family.

“I killed him,” Travis said, fighting back tears. “I should have sat up with him. Poor old Blue. I failed him.”

“No, you didn't,” I said in a vain attempt to console him. “It always goes that way with the runts. It can't be helped; it's the survival of the fittest. That's the way Mother Nature works.”

Well, there was nothing for it but we had to have a funeral, interring “poor old Blue” in the patch of land behind the smokehouse that Travis had staked out as a sad little cemetery over the years for his unsuccessful projects. (I myself would have left Blue to the ants and beetles to strip down to the bone so that I could have a nice clean skeleton to study, but Travis looked too distraught for me to suggest it.)

We placed the carcass in a nest of shredded newspapers in one of my cigar boxes, a brightly colored one with a dancing lady in a red dress and mantilla. I almost apologized to Travis for not having something more somber, so contagious was his grief. He dug a hole and gently deposited the colorful casket in the dark soil.

“Callie, would you like to say some words?”

Startled, I said, “Uh, you go ahead. You knew him better than I did.”

“Okay, then. Blue was a good bird,” said Travis, choking up a little. “He liked his mash. He did his best. And he never learned how to fly. We'll miss you, Blue. Amen.”

“Amen,” I said, for want of something to say, wondering if you were allowed to pray over a dead bird.

He filled in the hole and tamped it down with the back of the shovel. Thinking we were done, I turned to go.

He said, “Wait, we need some kind of marker.”

We found a smooth river rock, and then he fretted over how to scratch the bird's name on it. The bell rang for breakfast, and I said, “You'll have to come back later.” I handed him my handkerchief and put my arm around him as we trudged back to the house.

At the table Mother took one look at Travis's swollen red eyes and said gently, “Darling? Is something the matter?”

“One of my blue jays died in the night,” he mumbled, eyes downcast on his plate.

“One of your what?” said Mother, cocking her head and fixing him with a bright beady gaze; she so resembled a bird that I almost giggled.

“I found two baby jays. One of them died in the night.”

“That,” said Mother, “is what I thought you said. But I can't believe my ears. How many times have we talked about this?”

“Ah,” said Granddaddy, choosing that moment to snap out of his usual mealtime musing. “The North American blue jay,
Cyanocitta cristata
, a member of the corvid family, which also includes crows and ravens, although the jay is strictly a New World bird. They are known to be intelligent and inquisitive and are excellent mimics who can often be taught to speak. Some experts consider them as intelligent as the parrot family. Many of the Indian clans view the jay as a trickster, mischievous and greedy but also clever and resourceful. You say you have one of these, my boy?”

Encouraged, Travis said, “Yessir, although it's just a baby.”

“In that case, it will bond with you, so you'd best be prepared to support it through its adult life, which could easily last a decade or more. Yes, indeed, they are quite long-lived birds.” He resubmerged himself in his scrambled eggs and deep thoughts.

Mother, clearly wishing to shoot daggers at Granddaddy, instead turned them on Travis.

“We agreed there would be no more wild animals, did we not?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And?”

“And … uh.”

I interjected on his behalf: “They're only babies, Mother. They both would have died if he hadn't picked them up. At least he saved one of them.”

“Calpurnia, keep out of this,” she said. “Travis can speak for himself.”

“Yeah, Calpurnia”—Lamar snickered under his breath—“let the little birdbrain speak for himself. That's if he doesn't start bawling.”

“And
you
.” She wheeled on Lamar. “Do you have something useful to add to this conversation? No? I didn't think so.”

Oh, Lamar, how had you become such a pill? And why? And more important, could anything be done about it?

Travis rallied his arguments. “I've got him in the chicken pen, Mama. He won't be any trouble in there, I promise.”

Did anyone else besides me notice the change in his form of address? He hadn't called her Mama since his eighth birthday. She visibly softened and said, “But, darling, they're
always
trouble.”

“Not this time, I promise.”

“You
always
promise.” Mother massaged her temples, and I could read in that gesture that Travis, the beamish boy, had won again.

Sure enough, Jay quickly grew attached to his master. He became more attractive as his feathers filled in and turned bluer, but his gimpy right wing was a problem. Every time Travis and I tried to splint it, Jay turned into an exploding ball of blue feathers in our hands, furious, flapping like mad, and screaming blue murder (ha!). It turned out that all the flapping we provoked was probably the best thing for the wing, and it slowly grew stronger. Even so, when he was finally ready to fly, I noticed that he always flew in a circle, the stronger left wing propelling him clockwise.

Jay lived mostly in the pen, but sometimes Travis would take him for a “walk,” and Jay would either ride on his shoulder or flap from tree to tree alongside. Jay became a good mimic. He learned to cackle like the hens and crow like our rooster, General Lee, driving the normally prideful bird to distraction so that he fretfully paced the yard, seeking his invisible rival in vain.

Jay's plumage grew beautiful; his voice did not. When he was separated from his boy-god, he screamed down the heavens in rage; sometimes we could even hear his strident calls as we sat at the dining table, a good fifty yards or so from the pen. We all pretended not to notice.

Travis started giving Jay a weekly bath in a shallow pan of warm water, and the bird thrashed about in great delight. They spent more and more time together out of the pen. We grew used to seeing Travis with streaks of white on his shoulders, to our maid SanJuanna's vexation. He even took Jay to show-and-tell at school, where he proved to be a big hit, although Miss Harbottle flinched every time he screamed or flapped, fearing for her black dress and lofty coiffure, with good reason.

Jay took special delight in taunting the cats, but for some reason, he particularly singled out Idabelle, swooping down and screeching at her whenever she went outside to take some sun. Viola told Travis more than once, “You keep that devil bird away from my cat.”

Then, of course, the calamitous, the gruesome—and the entirely predictable—happened. Idabelle ran through the back door bearing a limp bundle of blue feathers in her mouth.

Now, you can't exactly fault a cat for eating a bird, can you? That doesn't seem fair; it's just the way Nature goes. There wasn't much to bury, only a wing and a handful of tail feathers.

I'd never attended an actual funeral (and by that I mean for a real person) and had always wanted to see one, but after our ceremony for Jay, I changed my mind. Travis's grief was terrible to behold. And although I felt disloyal for thinking so and would never have said it aloud, I suspect that all the rest of us were relieved to see the end of Jay.

 

CHAPTER 5

RARA AVIS

The jaguar is a noisy animal, roaring much by night, and especially before bad weather.

I
WOKE UP
with a small thrill of anticipation coursing through my veins. It took me a moment to remember why, but then it came to me: I was due to crack open a new Scientific Notebook. I'd jammed my first one chock-full of many Questions, a few Answers, and various observations and sketches. It had been my faithful companion for the past year, and it included my notes about the brand-new species of hairy vetch that Granddaddy and I had discovered, the
Vicia tateii
. Maybe one day the book would be an object of scientific and historic interest. Who could say?

But now it was time to bid adieu to the old one and start the cheerful new red one Granddaddy had given me. I opened it and inhaled the smell of fresh leather and paper. Could anything top the promise and potential of a blank page? What could be more satisfying? Never mind that it would soon be crammed with awkward penmanship, that my handwriting inevitably sloped downhill to the right-hand corner, that I blotted my ink, that my drawings
never
came out the way I saw them in my head. Never mind all that. What counted was possibility. You could live on possibility, at least for a while.

I crept downstairs, avoiding the treacherous spot in the middle of tread number seven that cracked like a pistol shot. The house was just beginning to stir. If I hurried, I could have some time alone to myself. I eased the front door open and stepped outside into the freshness of the morning to make my notes.

And there, to my surprise, stood a strange gray-and-white bird on the front lawn. It was about the size of a chicken but of an entirely different shape. The plumage was sleek; its beak was curved and wicked and reddish in color; its legs were yellow and ended in, of all things, webbed feet. So it was a bird that could swim as well as fly. And that beak, it didn't look as if it was meant for picking fruit or catching bugs, but rather for tearing flesh. So, a carnivorous bird? A flesh-eating duck? I sat down on the porch, moving slowly and quietly so as not to alarm it. I opened my new book and wrote,
Saturday, September 8, 1900. Vy cloudy, SW winds. Strange bird on lawn, looks like this: