The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Of course I do. We’re studying Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, and Penmanship. Oh, and Deportment. I got an ‘acceptable’ for Posture but an ‘unsatisfactory’ for Use of Hankie and Thimble. Mother was kind of unhappy about that.”

“Good God,” he said. “It’s worse than I thought.”

This was an intriguing statement, although I didn’t understand it.

“And is there no science? No physics?” he said.

“We did have botany one day. What’s physics?”

“Have you never heard of Sir Isaac Newton? Sir Francis Bacon?”

“No.” I wanted to laugh at this ridiculous name, but there was something about Granddaddy’s expression that told me we were discussing mighty serious business and he would be disappointed in me if I didn’t take it seriously, too.

“And I suppose they teach you that the world is flat and that there are dragons gobbling up the ships that fall over the edge.” He peered at me. “There are many things to talk about. I hope it’s not too late. Let us find a place to sit.”

We resumed our walk to the riverbank and found shade under a hospitable tree in the pecan bottom. Then he told me some stupefying things. He told me about ways in which you could get to the truth of any matter, not merely sitting around thinking about it like Aristotle (a smart but confused Grecian gentleman), but going out and looking with your own eyes; about making your Hypothesis and devising your Experiment, and testing by Observation, and coming to a Conclusion. And then testing the strength of your Conclusion, over and over. He told me about Occam’s razor, about Ptolemy and the music of the spheres, and how everyone had been all wrong about the sun and the planets for so many centuries. He told me about Linnaeus and his system for naming all living things in Nature and how we still followed this system whenever we named a new species. He told me about Copernicus and Kepler and why Newton’s apple fell down instead of up. About how the moon is always falling in a circle around our Earth. About the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning and how Sir Francis Bacon of the peculiar name got it right. Granddaddy told me how he had traveled to Washington in 1888 to join a new organization of gentlemen who called themselves the National Geographic Society. They had banded together to fill in the bare spots on the globe and to pull the country out of the morass of superstition and backward thinking in which it floundered after the War Between the States. All of this was heady news of a world far removed from hankies and thimbles, patiently delivered to me under a tree amidst the drowsing bees and nodding wildflowers.

The hours passed, and the sun moved overhead (or to be correct, we moved below it, rotating slowly away from the day and toward the night). We shared a thick cheese-and-onion sandwich and a wedge of pecan pie and a canteen of water. Then he took a couple of nips from his silver flask, and we napped awhile as the insects buzzed and ticked and the dappled shade shifted around us.

We awoke and dipped our handkerchiefs in the river to refresh ourselves, then poked our way along the bank. I caught various crawling and swimming and flying oddities at his direction, and we examined them all, but he kept only one insect, putting it in a Mason canning jar with holes poked in the lid, which I knew had come from our kitchen. (Viola constantly complained to Mother that her jars were disappearing, and Mother in turn always blamed my brothers, who were—as it turned out for the first time in recorded history—blameless.) There was a small, neat paper label pasted on the jar. I penciled the date and time of collection on it as instructed, but I didn’t know what to put for the location.

“Think about where we are,” Granddaddy said. “Can you describe it concisely so that you can find this spot again if you have to?”

I looked at the angle of the sun through the trees and thought about how far we had walked. “Can I put one half mile west of the Tate house, near the three-forked oak?”