The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

All day long, he squirted a fine gray thread from his front end (I think), and busily tangled it this way and that, fashioning a messy cocoon with odd bits of thread sticking out here and there. It looked like slapdash work. His knitting was no better than mine, which made me feel some sympathy for him. He slowly sealed himself up in his capsule like an Edgar Allan Poe caterpillar.

“Good night, Petey. Sleep well,” I bid him. Petey stirred and then settled one last time in his self-made prison. The cocoon didn’t move for two whole weeks while Petey went about the slow, magical business of rearranging his parts in his sleep. There was something gorgeous and mysterious about it, but it was also somewhat revolting if you thought about it too closely. It made me think of Life. And Death.

I had never seen a real live dead person. The closest I had come was a daguerreotype of my uncle Crawford Steele, dead at age three of diphtheria, wrapped in swathes of white lace. You could see some of the whites of his sunken eyes, so you knew that he wasn’t asleep, that things were not all right. I went to Harry and asked, “Harry, have you ever seen a dead person?”

He said, “Uh, no. Why are you asking?”

“No particular reason.”

“Where do you come up with these things? You scare me sometimes.”

“Me? Scare you?” The thought of me scaring my biggest, strongest brother was laughable. “I was thinking about Petey moving his parts around, and that made me think of living things, which made me think of dead things. So the next time there’s a funeral in town, will you take me?”

“Callie Vee. ”

“There’s nothing creepy about it. It’s scientific interest. Backy Medlin looks kind of decrepit to me. How old is he, do you reckon?”

“Why don’t you go down the street and inspect his teeth?”

“That’s a good one, Harry, but I doubt he has any left. He’11 go soon, don’t you think?”

I passed Backy Medlin every day on my way to and from school. He sat with the other codgers on the gallery of the gin, rocking and spitting and interrupting each other’s stories of the War and griping at each other that, no, it hadn’t happened that way, it had happened this way. And so on. (Backy’s name came from his prodigious use of chewing tobacco and his poor aim at the spittoon. He spat frequently, randomly, mightily. A constant foul brown rain pattered down on the dust around him, and you had to keep a sharp lookout.) No one paid the men the slightest attention anymore. Sometimes even they got sick of yakking and turned to dominoes, playing with an old carved set with dots so stained from a million games that they were nearly indecipherable. The tiles clacked pleasingly, and every now and then one of the old men would exclaim “Ha!” and you knew he had thrown down a particularly good one.

“So will you take me to Backy’s funeral?” I said.

Harry said, “Really, Callie, this isn’t very nice talk.”

“I’m not wishing him to die. I’m just curious. Granddaddy says that a curious mind is a pree . . . is a perk—”

“Prerequisite?”

“Yes—that—to a scientific understanding of the world.”

“Fine. But have you done your piano practice yet? Miss Brown comes tomorrow.”

“You sound like Mother. No, I haven’t done it yet, and yes, I’ll do it. Harry, how many years will we have to take lessons? I’m getting tired of it, aren’t you? Why don’t some of the others take piano for a while? I have better things to do.”

“Better things to do with Grandfather, you mean.”

“Uh, yes.”

“I asked you once before and you never answered me. So, what do you talk about with him?”

“Golly, Harry, there’s everything to talk about. There’s bugs and snakes, cats and coyotes; there’s trees and butterflies and hummingbirds; there’s clouds and weather and wind; there’s bears and otters, although they’re getting harder to find around here. There’s whaling ships, there’s—”

“All right.”

“The South Seas and the Grand Canyon. The planets and the stars.”

“Okay, okay.”

“There’s the principles of distillation. You do know he’s trying to turn pecans into liquor, right? Although it’s not going so well, but don’t say I said so, okay?”

“Got it,” said Harry.

“There’s Newton’s laws, there’s prisms and microscopes, there’s—”

“Got it, I said.”

“Gravity, friction, lenses—”

“Enough already.”

“The food chain, the rain cycle, the natural order. Harry, where are you going? There’s tadpoles and toads, lizards and frogs. Don’t go away. There’s something called microbes, germs, you know. I’ve seen them through the microscope. There’s butterflies and caterpillars, which brings us to Petey; let’s not forget about him. Harry?”