The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (9 page)

I carried my worm out to the laboratory and found bottles of alcohol and water. I mixed up nine parts of water to one part of alcohol and dropped in the worm. It twitched only once and sank slowly to the bottom. Granddaddy joined me a few minutes later. From under the counter, he pulled out a shallow metal pan and a package of wax. He led me through the slow process of melting the wax, adding some black soot to make for a contrasting background, and then pouring it into the pan.

While the wax cooled, he sat and read
Posner's Reptiles of the Greater Southwest
in his ancient shabby armchair with the stuffing exploding in all directions. I perched on my stool and read a pamphlet called “Dissection Guide to the
Lumbricus terrestris
.”

The wax finally hardened, and we began. Granddaddy handed me a jar of pins and a magnifying glass and his pocketknife, saying, “You will need these.”

I placed the worm on the wax and was about to make the first long cut when he stayed my hand. “Stop a moment. Let us begin with observation first. What do you see?”

“Uh, a worm?”

“Yes, of course.” He smiled. “But describe what you see. Is one end the same as the other? Is one side the same as the other?”

“This end is different from that one,” I said, pointing. I rolled the worm gently with my finger. “And this side is flatter than the other.”

“Correct. The front end is indicated by the prostomium, and the back end by the anus. The rounder side is the dorsum, or back, and the flatter side is the ventral surface, or belly. Now take the magnifying glass and look at the ventral surface.”

I squinted and saw many tiny bristles.

“Those are the setae, the means of locomotion,” he said. “Now palpate them.” I ran the pad of my finger over them; they felt slightly rough to the touch.

“Now carefully cut along the dorsal side.”

I made a long cut from end to end along the back, then pulled the sides apart and pinned them to the wax as instructed.

We started at the head and worked our way along, examining the pharynx and the crop and the gizzard.

“Worms have no teeth, so after ingesting their food, they store it here in the crop. Right behind it is the gizzard, which contains fine grit that grinds up the food before it passes down the intestine. Your subject is drying out. Sprinkle it with a little water.”

I did so, then asked, “Is it a male worm or a female worm?”

“It is both.”

I looked up in surprise. “Really?”

“When an organism contains both male and female organs, it is called a hermaphrodite. Such an arrangement is not unusual in the flowering plants, mollusks, slugs, snails, and other invertebrates.”

He led me through the rest of the dissection, pointing out the five aortic arches that served as five primitive hearts, then the reproductive organs, the nerve cord, and the gut. In this way I learned that an earthworm is essentially one long intestine through which passes soil, decaying leaves, and manure, emerging in an enriched state that promotes the growth of plants.

Granddaddy said, “We owe this humble tiller of the soil a great deal. Mr. Darwin hailed them as one of the most important animals in the history of the world, and he was right. Most plants on earth are indebted to the worm, and we in turn rely on the plants for our very existence. Think on the number of plants you ate at breakfast this morning.”

I'd had flapjacks with syrup, so no plants there. I was about to say so but I could tell from his expectant expression that this would probably be wrong.

I stopped and thought. Flapjacks. Ah, made from flour, which came from ground-up wheat, so there was one plant. And the syrup came from tapped maple trees in New England, which we flavored with our own pecan extract, so there were two more.

“My whole breakfast was plants,” I said, “except for a little butter, which comes from cows, who eat plants. So I suppose when we say the blessing, we should also give thanks to the worm, right?”

“It might be fitting,” he said. “Without the lowly annelid, our world would change for the worse.”

When we were through, I ran to Travis and showed him my work. “Look,” I said. “Did you know a worm has five hearts? These little pale pink things right here are the main blood vessels. Isn't that interesting?”

He looked and said, “Uh … sure.”

“And this is its brain, this little gray dot next to the mouth. Can you see it?”

Now, I admit it was rather dried out by that point and perhaps not the prettiest sight in the world, and maybe it smelled a little bit, but I didn't expect him to turn pale and back away.

I said, “Don't you want to see it? And look at these nerves, these tiny gray strings. Pretty interesting, huh?”

He turned paler and said, “Uh, I think I forgot to feed Bunny.” And with that, he dashed away.

 

CHAPTER 8

A BIRTHDAY CONTROVERSY

A small sea-otter is very numerous; this animal does not feed exclusively on fish, but, like the seals, draws a large supply from a small red crab, which swims in shoals near the surface of the water.

O
CTOBER, THE
B
IG
B
IRTHDAY
M
ONTH,
loomed ahead. We called it that because Sam Houston, Lamar, Sul Ross, and I shared it as our birthday month, and we all looked forward to it with breathless anticipation.

There was no forgetting the marvelous mayhem of the previous year when all four of our parties had been combined into one grand bash to which the whole town had been invited, with every kind of pie and ice cream known to man, and root beer floats, and pony rides, and croquet and horseshoes and sack races and prizes, and a towering cake aflame with forty-nine candles (the sum of our years), and birthday hats and crepe paper streamers, and even fireworks at twilight. A splendid day all around.

But there was still no news about when Father and Harry might return. Word came that they spent long weary days working like slaves from can't-see to can't-see, clearing the roads of debris, pushing the horses and themselves to exhaustion. They labored alongside volunteers and hired men who'd poured in from all over the South to restore some semblance of order. There was talk of building a seawall to protect the town from future floods. There was talk of raising every house still standing onto ten-foot stilts, an astounding feat of engineering never before contemplated in the entire State of Texas.

The newspaper headlines I sneaked a peek at read: Looting Controlled. Rebuilding Continues. Thousands Still Missing. Bodies Buried at Sea.

I resolved to read no more.

Despite the good news about our relatives, a pall of anxiety still hung over the house, causing me to worry that there might be no celebration this year. And if we took the unprecedented step of skipping birthdays, what about Halloween? And Thanksgiving? What about—oh Lord—what about
Christmas
? Could one possibly skip Christmas? Was that even
legal
? Gah. It was too depressing to think about.

But think about it I did, and I called a meeting on the front porch with the other celebrants, Sam Houston, Lamar, and Sully.

Lamar arrived late and demanded rudely, “What do you want? You're interrupting my reading.”

(“Reading,” in this case, referred to dime novels, those cheaply printed books packed with lurid and predictable tales of derring-do involving a brave and strong young man saving the day for the Pony Express, or a brave and brawny young man saving the day for the Texas Rangers, or a brave and strapping young man saving the day for the Pinkerton Detectives. Endlessly enthralled by these stories, my brother could be accused of many things but not an excess of imagination.)

“Lamar, you really are the limit.” I turned my attention to the others. “Has it not occurred to any of you birthday boys that maybe we won't have a party this year?”

I was not prepared for the level of general outrage this provoked.

“What?”

“Why not?”

“What are you
talking
about?”

“Why do you think?” I said, amazed at their obtuseness. Were all boys like this or just the ones I was unfortunate enough to be saddled with? “Mother is sad about Father and Harry being gone, and Uncle Gus and Aunt Sophronia losing their house, and her friends still missing, and all the people in town in mourning.”

Sam Houston said, “That's true. She's drinking more than usual of her tonic. She takes her normal dose and then she takes another dose when she thinks no one's looking.”

“But why should that mean no party?” demanded Lamar.

“Because you don't celebrate when people are in mourning. And because it's such a lot of work for Mother and Viola and everybody,” I said. “I guess you were too busy having fun last year to notice how much work it was.”

Silence fell. I could see we were all thinking the same thing but no one wanted to say it.

The pill finally said it: “So, what about it? How do we make sure we get a party?”

“And presents?” said Sam Houston.

“And cake?” said Sul Ross, who was about to turn nine and who always,
always,
got sick on cake.

They stared at me as if I had caused the problem.

“You can't blame me for this,” I said. “I'm only bringing it up.”

“What do we do?” Sam Houston asked. More silence.

Finally I said, “I'm not really sure there's any fixing it.”

Sul Ross said plaintively, “Can't you talk to her, Callie? She's a girl and you're a girl, maybe she'll listen to you.”

Lamar grunted. “Callie's a
dumb
girl—don't forget that part. And Mother's never listened to her before, so why should she now? I'll do the talking.”

“No!” I shouted. “You'll botch it for sure.”

“All right then, Miss Smarty, you fix it. And don't you botch it or I'll push you down in Petunia's sty.”

“I'd like to see you try it.”

Despite my brave talk, I wouldn't have put it past him to chuck me into the pig wallow. Lamar seldom thought of consequences, as in, for example, the endless heck to pay if he actually did such a thing.

We agreed to meet again in an hour, and I went to my room to gather my wits before facing Mother. I finally decided that the strongest pleading would be to point out how much the boys were missing Father and Harry (although, in truth, I didn't see that much evidence of it), and that it would cheer us all up to have a celebration. Now, this wasn't an out-and-out lie, but it wasn't really the truth, either. And the more I thought about it, the less like the truth it sounded, and the more insistently the nontruthful part of it elbowed its way into my conscience, filling it with a gloomy gray fog.

Buck up, Calpurnia. Time to locate your target.

I made my way downstairs. In the dining room I noticed, as if for the first time, the portrait of my parents taken twenty years before on their wedding day. I'd never paid much attention to the photo except to remark that the fashions of the time, especially Mother's ridiculous bustle, were now laughably out-of-date.

Now I stopped and studied the portrait. How tall and proud my father stood in his best suit, how beautiful my mother looked in her gown of Brussels lace, her crown of wax flowers, her long veil cascading all the way to the floor like a misty waterfall. Their expressions were severe due to the length of time they'd had to pose frozen in place, but still, there was something of hope for the future in their gaze, the anticipation of happiness in their newly entwined lives.

And they'd been happy, hadn't they? Why, look how they'd evolved and what they'd become: pillars of the community, parents of seven impressive offspring (all right, six if you didn't count Lamar), owners of a thriving cotton business and the biggest house in town, esteemed and respected by all. They'd found their own recipe for happiness, and it suited them. Didn't it?

I went into the parlor. Mother had fallen asleep in her chair with her mending basket at her feet, a torn shirt in her lap. With her chignon askew, she looked disheveled, an unusual state for a woman normally so smoothed down and buttoned up. I studied the deepening lines in her face and the new threads of gray in her hair and felt a surge of pity. When had she started to look so haggard? Her careworn appearance almost derailed me.

She gasped and woke up blinking. “Why, Calpurnia, I must have dozed off. You can do your piano practice now. You won't disturb me.”

“I can do it later,” I said. “I … I wanted to talk to you about everybody's birthday.”

Her expression clouded over, which I did not find encouraging. Not at all. But I fumbled ahead with my prepared speech.

“You see, the boys are missing Father and Harry. I thought perhaps … that is, we thought … well, a big birthday party would cheer us all up.”

She frowned. I hurried on. “It would give us all heart, don't you think, and we could—”

“Calpurnia.”

“Invite only our closest friends. We wouldn't have to invite everyone in town like last year, since it was such a lot of work, I know it was, really, and we could—”

“Calpurnia.”

Her voice, low, quiet, dispirited, stopped me in my tracks.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Do you think it right and proper that we should have a celebration when so many lives have been lost? Can you really stand there and tell me that?”

“Uh…”

“It would be unseemly in the extreme.”

“Uh, well…”

“What with so many dead, and so many survivors living in wretched conditions, and poor Uncle Gus and Aunt Sophronia and Cousin Aggie having lost everything. It's beyond imagining, what they must have gone through. And think what your father and brother must be going through. Such a nightmare. So much sadness.”