The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“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.