The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

I enlisted my brothers, and we started looking for replacement birds. Nearly everyone in town raised a few chickens, but turkeys were less common, being bigger and having a more pronounced tendency toward meanness, except of course for Travis’s birds. We checked with our classmates, with the mayor, with Alberto, who came from a huge family of brothers and sisters and cousins at the other end of town. We put up a small handwritten notice at the newspaper office and made sure that old Backy Medlin, the gin’s most maundering gossip, knew what we were looking for. I even bribed Lamar to go to the post office and tell Postmaster Grassel so that I wouldn’t have to see the man.

It was a great plan, or at least a decent one. And absolutely nothing happened. As the day approached and Travis became more and more distressed, I went to Granddaddy in the library and explained the problem.

“Which one is Travis again?” he said.

“He’s the ten-year-old. The one who’s been crying all the time lately.”

“Ah. So that’s what’s wrong with him. I thought perhaps he had worms.”

“Not that I know of. Mother’s always giving us purgatives. We’ve got to help him, Granddaddy.”

“Calpurnia, our whole existence on this earth is a cycle of life and death. That is a fact. There is no stopping it.”

“You’re not going to help,” I said and turned to go. “And you with your bat. If we were going to eat your bat for Thanksgiving, instead of turkey, you’d do something about it.”

“Calpurnia,” he said, “is it so important to you?”

“Not to me, it isn’t,” I said. “But it is important to Travis. So I guess that makes it important to me.”

“Well, then.”

THE FATEFUL DAY drew close, and I went to my brother. “Travis,” I said, “I have found you three substitute turkeys. I’ve found a man who’ll trade. But you can’t watch. You have to say good-bye to them tonight. It’s better this way, do you understand?”

“No,” he said miserably. “I don’t understand any of it. It’s no good.”

“We have to do it this way,” I said. “You have to trust me.”

Travis sat in the pen that afternoon until dusk. I could see him from the window upstairs in the back hall. Finally, he gave each of the birds a hug, pressing his face deep into their feathers, then tore himself away and ran into the house. Sobbing, he ran past me and slammed the door to his room.

Next morning, looking down at the pen, you could see there were three new turkeys. They were a different color from ours, and they had fewer tail feathers, as if they’d been fighting, but Mother was happy enough to see that they looked about the same size and weight as our old ones. Alberto went out early and chopped off their heads on the chopping block, and SanJuanna plucked and singed them clean. I noticed them conferring over the dead, naked turkeys on the back porch, speaking low in Spanish.

By noon, Viola had her choice of bird to put in the oven. SanJuanna and I sat in the pantry and polished the good silver. Then we pulled the pink floral china that Mother had inherited from her mother out of its straw-filled crate and wiped it all down. Viola clanged about in the kitchen nonstop for hours with a plug of snuff in her lip, bringing forth our massive dinner out of clouds of steam. Travis stayed in his room the whole day, and no one had the courage to drag him out.

Finally, by six o’clock, the house redolent of enticing smells, Viola rang her bell at the back door and pounded the gong. Travis came out of his room and trooped silently in to dinner with the rest of us. Nobody looked at him.

Father said a grace of thanks that felt like it went on forever and then he carved the enormous bird. I studied the pattern of pink roses on my plate. Travis kept his head down. He didn’t speak a word; he didn’t cry. We passed the platter of turkey self-consciously and did our best to pretend he wasn’t casting a wet tarpaulin over our entire feast. Mother excused him from holding up his conversational end. He never noticed that I bore some substantial scratches on my arms and that Granddaddy’s nails were rimmed with crescents of dark paint.

We slowly plowed our way through the turkey, the giblet-and-smoked-oyster stuffing, the braised sweetbreads, peppery venison sausage, sweet glazed yams, crusty roasted potatoes in their jackets, buttered limas and wax beans, velvety corn pudding, tart stewed tomatoes with okra, cabbage with chunks of sugar-cured pork, puckery pickled beets, creamed spinach-and-onion compote. For dessert we had a pecan pie, a lemon pie, a mincemeat pie, and a tart apple pie (my only contribution, made by me two days prior to keep me out of Viola’s way on the big day itself), all grandly displayed on the sideboard. Despite the pall hanging over us, small pockets of spontaneous merriment broke out here and there.