The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Petey,” I said. “What am I going to do with you? I need to figure out what species you are. And I need to find you a bigger home.”

I pulled Granddaddy’s Taxonomy of the Insect World from my bookshelf and turned to the order Lepidoptera. Based on its color and ridiculous size, it had to be a Saturniidae of some kind. Differentiating between the most likely possibilities meant examining the specimen’s spread wings, but there wasn’t room enough in the jar. There was nothing for it, I’d either have to get it a bigger home or let it loose. I stared at it for a while. It wasn’t so bad looking once you got used to its freakish size. It did have cute feathery antennae. I had brought it this far. It was stuck in that jar because of me; I couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.

“All right, Petey, let’s go visit Granddaddy and see what he has to say.” I picked up the jar at arm’s length and carried it downstairs with him pulsating all the way.

I ran into Harry in the hall. He took one look at Petey and said, “Good heavens, is that your butterfly? It looks more like an albatross.”

“Ha,” I said, “ha.”

“Did you know it would turn into this?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” I said, breezily.

Harry eyed me and then said, “Let me look at him. He’s a prizewinner, isn’t he? If they had an entry for moths at the Fentress Fair, you’d take it, easy.”

An interesting thought. Along with the classes for hogs and cattle and home preserves, a category for moths. Which naturally led me to remember the pet division for children every year at the fair. Children showed up with their cats and dogs and parakeets, a bunch of boring, everyday pets. Why not something more interesting like, say, a giant moth?

“Say, Harry,” I said, “do you think I could enter Petey in the pet show?”

“He’s not much of a pet, Callie Vee,” he said, laughing.

“So what? Dovie Medlin showed up last year with her gold-fish, Bubbles, who wasn’t much of a pet, either. And it’s not as if they have to perform tricks or anything. All they have to do is sit there, and the judges come by and look at them. He’d get some extra points for being different, don’t you think?”

“That he would, but it’s months away,” he said. “How are you going to keep him alive? You can’t keep him in that jar.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out some housing for him. How long do moths live, anyway?”

Harry said, “I don’t know. You’re the naturalist. I’m guessing a few weeks.”

Mother walked out of the kitchen and came to a sudden halt, staring at Petey’s jar in disbelief.

“What is that thing you’ve got in there, Calpurnia?” she said, her voice rising.

I sighed. “This is Petey, Mother. Or,” I added with false cheer, “you can call him Belle, if you like.” As if a beautiful name could somehow cloak this grotesquerie. Petey rippled drily, and my mother took a step back. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“What happened to your . . . to your beautiful butterfly?” she said.

“He turned out to be not so much a butterfly as a moth, you see,” I said, holding the jar out to show her. She took another step back.

“I want you to get it out of here. That’s a moth, for pity’s sake. Imagine what something that size would do to the woollens!” I had forgotten that she and SanJuanna fought a perennial pitched battle with hordes of small brown moths for possession of our blankets and winter clothes, their trifling weapons of cedar shavings and lavender oil no match for the ongoing push of Nature.

“It doesn’t eat wool, ma’am,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it does. It may only eat nectar, or it may eat nothing at all, depending on its species. Some of them don’t feed at all in the adult stage. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

Mother raised her hands. “Do not, under any circumstances, let that thing loose in here. I want it out of the house. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She pressed a hand to her temple and turned and went upstairs.

Harry said, “Too bad. I’d have liked to see him in the pet show. Step right up, folks, come and see Calpurnia Virginia Tate and her giant pet moth!”

“Very funny. All right, I have to let him go, but I have to show him to Granddaddy first.” I went looking for Granddaddy in the library, but he wasn’t there. I could go out the front door and around the long way to the laboratory in back, or cut through the kitchen and face more revulsion and more explanations on the way. I tucked the jar under my arm and went through the kitchen. Viola took one look at me and said, “What you got there?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said and kept moving out the back door. Petey stirred in his jar. I wished he would keep still. I had grown used to his appearance, but that noise. There was something foreboding and primeval about it; it made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.

Granddaddy was stooped over his ledger book when I found him.

“Hello, Granddaddy, look what I have,” I said, holding out the jar to him.