The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Ah,” I said, and went out to find leaves of the same kind we’d abducted Petey from. That made sense. A caterpillar’s job was to eat, so naturally he wouldn’t be found wasting his time lounging about on something he didn’t like. Petey curled into a fuzzy comma when I put the leaves in his jar. I replaced his narrow twig with a larger-branched one for exercise and diversion, should he feel the need. I set his jar on my dresser between the hummingbird’s nest and a bowl of tadpoles I was studying. My dresser was getting crowded. A half hour later, when I looked again, Petey was munching on his foliage and seemed happy enough, but with a caterpillar how can you tell for sure?

I checked on him again before bedtime, and he was motionless, stretched full-length along his twig. He appeared to be asleep. At least, I hoped he was only asleep. I looked to see if he had eyes, and if they were closed. Both of his ends looked the same, but when I inspected him with a magnifying glass, I found two shiny black dots buried deep in the fur at one end. Those had to be his eyes, didn’t they? He didn’t appear to have eyelids.

Question for the Notebook: Why don’t caterpillars have eyelids? You would think they would need them, spending their days in the sun as they do.

Travis inspected him the following morning and raised a good point I hadn’t considered when he said, “Why did you call him Petey? How do you know he’s a boy?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find out when he hatches. I don’t know what kind of butterfly he’s going to be, either.”

More Questions for the Notebook: Do caterpillars come as male and female? Or do they turn into male or female while they’re asleep in their cocoons? Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren’t given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.

MOTHER DISLIKED Petey’s presence but tolerated him because he would eventually turn into something beautiful. Mother yearned for Beauty in her life. She supported the Lockhart Chamber Orchestra and took us once a year to the ballet in Austin. It took us half a day to get there on the train, and we would spend the night at the Driskill Hotel; there we would have ice cream floats at the fountain and afternoon tea in the Crystal Room.

Every month she pored over her magazines that came in the mail—The Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s. From these she made patterns, cutting and sewing silk flowers that she arranged in the parlor. Although we had fields full of wildflowers blooming in the spring, she never arranged those. Sometimes I would pick a handful of them and put them in a pitcher by my bed. They looked nice but they were good for only a day or two. Then they didn’t so much wilt as disappear. You were left with a vase full of smelly water.

Petey disregarded the world around him; in fact, he disregarded everything except the bundles of leaves I brought him daily. He ate and slept and ate and slept, and in between bouts of eating and sleeping, he ejected many tiny, compacted green bales from his hind end. This meant I had to spend part of each day cleaning up his quarters. I hadn’t signed up for this, and I soon grew tired of it, but I kept telling myself it would all be worth it when he turned into a magnificent butterfly. He grew unbelievably fat, as thick as a sausage. One day I brought him the wrong kind of greenery, and he sulked and wouldn’t eat it. I was ready to jettison him outside for all the trouble he put me to. Plus, he didn’t make a very entertaining pet.

When I mentioned this to Granddaddy, he chastised me by saying, “Remember, Calpurnia, Petey is not your pet. He is a creature in the natural order of things. While it is easy to be more interested in the higher-order animals, and I must confess I myself am guilty of this weakness, it doesn’t mean we can neglect our study of the lower orders. To do so indicates a lack of purpose and a shallowness of scholarship.”

So, all for Science, I cleaned up caterpillar poop. Then Petey went off his feed again for no good reason. I checked his forage, and it was the right kind, but he wasn’t interested. I thought, You spoiled, sulky caterpillar, I should throw you out on the lawn. You can take your chances with the birds and see how you like that, mister.

To my surprise, when I woke up the next morning, I found that he had his cocoon well under way. So he hadn’t been pouting after all; he’d been resting up and planning for his labors. I had come close to throwing out a blameless caterpillar.