The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (24 page)

“That is Polaris, also called the Phoenician Star, also called the North Star. The other stars appear to wheel around it in the night sky due to the Earth's rotation, but that star remains in a nearly constant position. If you were to stand at the North Pole, it would be almost directly overhead. The axis around which the Earth rotates happens to point almost directly at this star, which explains why the star does not appear to move as our planet turns, once every day. Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays three hundred years ago, ‘I am constant as the northern star.' Once you know where north is, you naturally know where the other directions are as well. In the southern hemisphere, sailors cannot see the North Star and must use the Southern Cross instead. So no matter where in the world you are, no matter how lost you may be, these stars will guide you home. Sailors have always considered them lucky; this is where we get the expression ‘to thank one's lucky stars.'”

I thought of the Phoenicians and Egyptians and Vikings, brave men who had steered their ships by the very same star. It was as if their hands and hearts and voices reached across the centuries to a girl in Fentress, Texas, who had never seen the sea and probably never would. I felt a part of history and also, truth to tell, a bit sad.

“Now,” said Granddaddy, “the North Star does more than tell you the four cardinal directions. Sailors have used it for two thousand years to find their position at sea. But now we will measure our latitude. Look through the tube at the North Star.”

This was a bit tricky, what with the tube so narrow and the star so easy to lose from the wobbling aperture. Finally I had it.

“Good,” said Granddaddy. “Now, being very careful to hold still, keep the tube immobile while you read the angle marked by the string.”

I did as instructed and saw that the string hung at an angle of thirty degrees as marked on the cardboard. This meant that the angle between the horizon and the North Star was thirty degrees.

“We'll double-check our work,” he said. I measured the angle again.

“Yep, thirty degrees.”

He gave me a look, the one that meant: I know you know better.

“Uh, I mean yes. It is thirty degrees. But what good does that do us?”

“I'll explain inside.”

As we walked back to the house, a soft breeze sprang up and stirred my imagination. For a moment I was a pilot, sister to the many brave pilots of the past centuries, balanced on the prow of my ship, facing leeward through the endless black nights on the vast indigo sea, the freshening wind behind me, sailing the bounding main with only pinpoints of light to guide me. Stouthearted explorers all!

We returned to the library, and he showed me on the globe that we were in fact 30 degrees north of the equator. And if you set sail eastward across the Atlantic at this latitude, you would land in the Canary Islands, five thousand miles away. Granddaddy handed down his
Atlas of the World
, and I spent a few happy minutes reading about the lives of (what else?) canaries in the Canary Islands (surprise!).

“So, Granddaddy, what about longitude?”

“Solving the problem of longitude is considerably more difficult. It requires the use of an accurate timepiece. These days we take clocks for granted, but none existed a few hundred years ago. People told time by sundials or estimating the angle of the sun in the sky. The great sailors of the time were the Dutch and the Spanish and the Portuguese. However, the British government offered a vast sum of money to any inventor who could devise a timepiece that would keep accurate time under the difficult conditions at sea, thus solving the longitude problem. It took Mr. John Harrison more than thirty years, but he did it, giving the English a marked advantage on the seas. Just think: If Portugal had invented the clock a little earlier, we might well be speaking Portuguese at this moment instead of English.”

An interesting thought, but it was time for bed.

At breakfast the next morning, I happened to glance at Lamar as he gobbled down his oatmeal and realized with a jolt of fear that I still had his protractor. What if he needed it for his schoolwork? He'd raise such a stink about it being missing. If he suspected Travis, it was all over, as my younger brother would collapse like a house of cards with the merest breath of pressure from him. Fortunately, Lamar stalked off to school with his satchel and did not have to solve any geometry problems that day.

After school, Lamar and Sam Houston and some of their chums got together for a rousing game of baseball on the lawn, using old feed sacks filled with cottonseed hulls to mark the bases. They were short a fielder, so they enlisted Travis, whom they normally would have scorned. They hollered mild insults at each other and kept up an annoying rapid chant of
batter batter batter
whenever someone came up to bat. I figured that as long as I could hear their shouting, I'd be safe.

I ran to my room to retrieve the protractor. Aggie was down in the parlor sewing more blouses. I slipped down the hall to the room Lamar shared with Sam Houston, looked this way and that to guard against potential witnesses, and crept inside.

I figured he'd keep the protractor in the tin trunk under his bed with his allowance and candy and other assorted treasures. I peeked out the window and, sure enough, they were thick in the middle of an engrossing play, shouting contradictory suggestions to Travis about where to throw the ball as Sam headed for second base, head down, arms pumping.

I pulled the trunk out, feeling guilty as a felon the moment I touched it. Meddling with one of the younger boys' things was deemed a misdemeanor, but interfering with Lamar's stuff would be a hanging offense. At least in his book.

The shouts on the lawn continued.

I opened the trunk. Before I touched anything, I took a moment to study the position of everything
in situ
, as Granddaddy called it, so that I could replace each item exactly as I'd found it. There were a cigar box similar to mine, two chocolate bars, and a small paper sack filled with cinnamon red hots. A pocket dictionary, a pen with a fine steel nib, a bottle of blue ink. An eagle feather, a broken windup clown from younger days, its innards now turned to rust, and the leather case containing his compass and ruler. I slipped the protractor into its slot and was closing the whole thing up, when I paused and considered the cigar box. Well, seeing I was here.…

I opened the box. There were a few scattered pennies and nickels. There were a couple of dimes and quarters. There was the ten-dollar gold piece Father had given him. And, right next to it, gleaming up at me, a five-dollar gold piece.

I froze in shock. My mind reeled. Was it mine? It had to be mine. Whose else could it be? But how could I tell for sure? I examined it closely, cursing myself for not having made some kind of scratch in the soft metal to mark it positively as my own. And unmarked, there was no telling for sure. Did that really matter? Of course not. He'd
stolen
it from me. But would Lamar commit such a heinous crime?
Don't be silly, Calpurnia, and stop concerning yourself with niceties. He
did
it
and you're looking at the proof. The only real question is: how to make him pay? Right?

I suddenly realized there was silence outside. Uh-oh. The front door slammed below me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Go! Without really thinking, I grabbed both pieces, restored the box and trunk to their previous positions, and ran down the hall to my room, clutching a heavy coin in each sweaty palm.

Back in my room, I looked around wildly for a secure hiding place. I couldn't put them in my money box under the bed. That was the first place Lamar would look if he indeed came looking. And the last place? Why, under the gravel in Sir Isaac Newton's dish, of course. No one—but no one—would think to look there.

*   *   *

F
OR THE NEXT TWO DAYS
, I lived in a miasma of fear and guilt (with, I confess, a dash of glee mixed in), wondering when Lamar would open his trunk. The burden of thievery was a heavy one and weighed me down with anxiety. But then, I kept telling myself, it wasn't thievery to steal your own property back from a thief. If it was your own property. Which it was. It had to be.

Lying awake at night, I plotted various ways of restoring Lamar's money to him—not that he deserved it, the louse. Some of these schemes involved returning it anonymously; others involved tipping my hand so he would know
—he would know
—it was me. But the choice was ripped from me when he charged down to lunch on Saturday, nostrils flaring like a bull, casting about wildly for the culprit. You could almost see the steam coming out his ears. He glared at each of us in turn. I screwed up my courage and struggled to maintain a neutral expression, refusing to quail beneath his frightful gaze. Prickles zinged across my skin.
Calpurnia
, I told myself strictly,
you will not break out in telltale hives and give the game away. You. Will. Not.
And amazingly, my skin calmed down.

Mother turned to Lamar. “Something the matter, darling?”

He was caught in a terrible bind and so choked with rage he could barely speak. Did he dare fess up? He spat out a vicious “no!”

We all gasped, and Mother recoiled in shock. Father thundered, “Lamar Tate. You will not speak to your mother in that tone of voice. Leave the table at once, sir. I will deal with you later.”

Lamar scraped back his chair and stormed from the room. Father said to Mother, “What's wrong with that boy?”

She murmured with a catch in her voice, “I have no idea,” and for one awful moment, I thought she might cry. In an attempt to restore order, we went back to our chicken and dumplings, which now tasted like ashes. Then someone asked someone else to pass the rolls and was asked in turn to pass the gravy, and slowly, ever so slowly, we resumed a conversation about nothing at all. The only one eating with gusto was Granddaddy, and he, the sharpest observer at the table, regarded me thoughtfully as he chewed.

Lamar, banished to his room, had no dinner that night, and also suffered three hard licks across the palm delivered by Father with a leather quirt. Travis felt sorry for Lamar and asked me if we should smuggle him some food. When I said no, Travis no doubt thought me mean, but I couldn't let on that I knew about the chocolate bars in Lamar's trunk.

I wisely stayed out of Lamar's way, worried that my facade of innocence would crack if he attacked me. But what could he do? He was stuck in a trap of his own devising. To finger me to the authorities (in this case, Mother and Father) would only give himself away as a bigger thief than me.

I did feel a little bad for him and thought about how to return his money now that he'd been punished, even if that punishment had been not for the theft itself, but rather the indirect consequences of it, his awfully cranky behavior.

For three days, I schemed and plotted and brooded like Napoleon in exile on Elba, and then I had it.

I enlisted Travis as my lieutenant and dispatched him to bring Lamar to me behind the barn next to Petunia's pen. (And lest you accuse me of violating the rule against naming food animals, J.B. had christened her, thinking it a great joke to name a mud-slathered beast after such a pretty flower. This particular Petunia was really quite a nice pig and enjoyed having her poll scratched with a stick; I had to admit I was going to be a bit sorry to see her go. Even though named, she was destined for the oven, the pot, and the smokehouse, to be replaced by yet another smaller, younger Petunia the following year.)

I leaned on the fence, tossing her potato peels, one of her favorite between-meal snacks. She grunted in appreciation and even caught a few of them on the fly like a pet dog. Lamar approached, Travis trailing behind and looking apprehensive; I'd told him he had to stay and witness the proceedings.

“Whaddya want?” Lamar growled, ever the ray of sunshine.

“You might try being nicer to me, Lamar,” I said, tossing Petunia some more peelings. She rooted in the muck and snorked her appreciation.

“Why should I be nice to you? You're only a stupid girl. I got no reason to be nice to you.”

“Oh,” I replied, all sweetness and light, “I think you do.”

He scoffed, “Gimme one good reason why.”

“All right, I'll give you one,” I said, reaching into my pinafore pocket. “In fact, I'll give you ten.”

I held up the coin so that he could see it clearly and no mistake. His frown turned momentarily to pale confusion, then to red stupefaction as he registered what it was, and then to purple rage as he realized how I'd got it. The rapid progress of expressions—and colors—across his face was one of the highlights of my life.

“Give it back,” he choked. “Give it back, or I'll tell Father.”

“You can't,” I replied, all calm and collected. “Because then I'll tell him you stole my money first. How many licks will that be worth, d'you think? The five you stole? Or a full ten? Or maybe he'll add them up to make fifteen. What d'you reckon?”

The look on his face was priceless. Strangely, the more perturbed he grew, the more calm and collected
I
grew. Travis, our witness, twitched in anxiety.

Lamar, thinking himself cunning, switched tactics. “Come on, Callie,” he pleaded. “There's no reason to be like that. Won't you please give it back? Please?”

“Well,” I said, “since you put it like that, okay. Here it is.” And with that, I tossed the coin high into the air. Time magically slowed, and the three of us watched the coin sailing, sailing, sailing over the fence, gleaming majestically in the sun. And just for that moment, I was transformed from a half citizen into a full citizen—no, a soldier—no, an
entire army
—of justice and vengeance for all the other half citizens in the world.

The coin landed with a plop in the middle of the pigpen. In a large pool of semiliquid dung.