The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“It is the flag that signifies yellow fever—a sign to stay away. Yellow fever carried off thousands, whole regiments, maybe as many as Federal fire. I tied the jack to my tent with a leather cord. Then I slashed a hole in the roof. I knew my bat would be safe and undisturbed for a while. I could do no more than this.

“I was overcome with sadness as I bid good-bye to my bat. Yet earlier I had set fire to a mountain of arms and legs and felt nothing. I had thrown the boy from Elgin into a trench with all the others. And I felt nothing.

“It took me eighteen days to make Elgin. I gave the news to his mother and sisters in their front parlor. I told them their boy had died a hero. I didn’t tell them that his death meant nothing in the end. They told me they were honored I had come. I stayed with them for three months to get the corn in and make the place right. I sent word to your grandmother that I would be home later—I don’t think she ever forgave me for not coming to her directly. But we got the crops in, each taking a turn behind the mule, even down to the youngest.”

My grandfather looked at me in surprise. “Why, you are the same age she was.”

I thought of walking behind the mule like our field hands. They were grown men with thick forearms and huge, cracked hands; depending on the season, they were covered in gray dust or black mud. I couldn’t imagine it.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He wiped his face and looked so old it scared me. “You are too young to hear it.”

I came up and leaned against him, and he put his arm around me. We stood that way for a minute. He kissed me on the forehead.

After a few minutes, he said, “Where were we? Ah, yes. Fetch me that filter, won’t you?”

I got him his filter, and we worked on with no more talk.

I THOUGHT OF THE DODDERING old war veterans who sat along the gallery in front of the cotton gin and spat their tobacco and bored everybody with the same stories they’d been telling for decades. Their grandchildren had stopped listening to them years ago. I passed them every day.

Feverish moths of various sizes batted against us before launching themselves at the lamps again and again. One of the fuzzy ones got tangled in my fringe and tickled me unbearably. I plucked it from my hair, pulled back the burlap curtain, and chucked it out into the night. It promptly and enthusiastically flew back in my face, as if gusting in on a high wind. I sighed. One thing I had learned for sure: You could not win when it came to class Insecta, order Lepidoptera.

We would have to make a study of it, my grandfather and I.

CHAPTER 4

VIOLA

We may conclude . . . that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others.

IF I’D BEEN PAYING attention, I might have noticed that Viola gave me a funny look whenever I headed out the back door to Granddaddy’s laboratory. Viola had been with us forever—since even before Harry was born—ringing her handbell at the back door to signal to those working outside to come to dinner and then banging a small brass gong at the foot of the stairs (which Mother thought more genteel inside) to signal those of us upstairs in our rooms. Mother would have liked her to use the gong outside as well, but with my brothers and me scattered from the gin to the river, we would never have heard it. And we were expected to be on time for dinner, washed and brushed, or else.

I had never thought about where Viola came from; she had always simply been there, punching down dough, peeling apples, preparing huge roasts in winter and frying up mountains of chicken in summer. No one, not even Mother, crossed her in the duchy of her kitchen. In between meals, she could be found inspecting the hens or the hogs or the vegetable patch to see what was next on the menu, or sitting at the kitchen table with a chipped mug of coffee at her elbow, resting up before the next mammoth meal.

She must have been somewhere in her forties. She was handsome, wiry, always wearing a wash-print dress and long apron, a clean kerchief binding her hair. She was slender but had a surprisingly powerful grip when she grabbed your arm to force your attention. She lived by herself in the old slave quarters out past Granddaddy’s laboratory, and though it had once housed a dozen or so slaves, it was the perfect size for one person. At some point a bare plank floor had been installed over the packed dirt. She had a woodstove for winter and a zinc sink with her own pump.