The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (26 page)

“I started thinking that Scruffy needs the company of other dogs. So last week I took him to that empty lot behind the Baptist church where the town dogs like to meet, and I tried to introduce him. But for some reason they bared their teeth and chased him away. I guess they could tell he's not one of them, at least not a hundred percent. It's not fair, Callie—he didn't ask to be born half dog and half coyote, you know. It's not as if he could help it. And he couldn't help making his living on chickens.”

I considered Scruffy's well-developed taste for poultry, and how it would probably doom him in the end.

Travis continued, “The next night I was visiting him at dusk when we heard the coyotes howling, way off in the distance. You know that high-pitched
yip-yip-yip
they make when they're gathering to hunt? Well, he pricked up his ears and got this wild look in his eye. That's when I realized he belonged with the coyotes! Why hadn't I thought of it before? They're such a scruffy lot, he'd fit right in, all sniffing and playing and hunting together. I even had a dream that same night that they made him the leader of their pack. So I started paying attention to where they gathered, and I found out that sometimes they meet on the far side of the river, just below the bridge. I sneaked out a couple of nights and took Scruffy over there, but we didn't see them.”

I was impressed with Travis's resourcefulness, and how he had seemingly solved the Scruffy problem on his own.

“Last night was the third night we went to look for coyotes. We were walking along the river at dusk, and suddenly they were there, really loud and close by. When Scruffy heard them, he got that wild look in his eye again, and I knew that he belonged with them. I was awful sad, but I hugged him and told him, ‘Good-bye, Scruffy. Your pack is waiting for you. They are your family now. This is your destiny.' He lit off in their direction.”

Travis wiped his eyes, and I put my arm around him.

“I wanted to see the happy reunion so I chased after him in the moonlight and got scratched by all these prickle bushes. But it's a good thing I followed him, 'cos I could hear growling and yelping something fierce up ahead, and by the time I got there, three of them had him surrounded and were beating him up bad, just tearing into him. They were trying to
kill
him, Callie. They hated him. They wanted to
eat
him. But it's a good thing they're afraid of humans. I picked up a big stick and some big stones, and I chased them off just in time.”

Travis wiped his eyes again. “Poor old Scruffy. He just wants to be part of a pack. But the dogs don't want him and the coyotes don't want him, and people only want to drown him or shoot him. Plus he's an orphan, kind of, and he lost all his brothers and sisters.”

“Poor old Scruffy,” I said, and meant it. I'd never known a creature to start out in life with Fate so cruelly stacking the odds against it. “Is he … is he gone?”

“He's back at his den,” Travis said, perking up. “I guess I get to keep him.”

I thought about this, and it struck me as fair enough. For although Fate had initially dealt Scruffy a rough hand, she was more than making it up to the coydog by giving him Travis.

“Nobody wants him but me,” he said. “I guess that
I'm
his pack.” He looked at me shyly. “You can be part of our pack too, if you want.”

I could say nothing in the face of this except, “Okay. But he still has to be a secret, you know.”

Lord, the secrets were piling up.

 

CHAPTER 21

SECRETS AND SHAME

The geology of Patagonia is interesting.… The most common shell is a massive gigantic oyster, sometimes even a foot in diameter.

A
S I BRUSHED MY HAIR
one hundred strokes at bedtime, I asked, “What is the sea like, Aggie? And the beach, what is that like? What about seashells? Is it true that you can just walk along and pick them up for free, or do you have to pay for them?”

“Pay? Don't be silly—who would you pay?”

“I don't know. That's why I'm asking.”

“You pick up whatever you want, although why you'd bother, I don't know.”

“For a shell collection, of course.” One of my resolutions last New Year's Eve had been to set eyes on the ocean—any ocean—before I died, and since there was considerable doubt that this would ever happen, a shell collection would be a valuable thing to get my mitts on.

Aggie said, “I can't imagine why anyone would want a bunch of dirty old shells.”

I found this conversation discouraging but persevered with, “Have you ever seen a dolphin? I've read all about them. They're mammals, you know, warm-blooded. Not fish at all.”

“How can they not be fish?” she said. “They live in the water. They have to be fish.”

I stared at her in disbelief. For a girl who was privileged enough to live by the sea, she was dismally stupid about it.

I sighed and said, “Does the sun not sparkle on the dancing waves?”

She cast me a look. “Where'd you get
that
from?”

“Um, I read it somewhere.”

“Right. Okay, well, I suppose you could say that's true when the weather's nice.”

I said, “Tell me about the waves.”

She looked perplexed. “The waves wash stuff up on the sand.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, rotten fish, dead seagulls, driftwood, old seaweed, junk like that. And pee-yoo, it really does stink sometimes. Although once I found a glass fisherman's float, and once I found an empty bottle of rum that had floated all the way from Jamaica.”

“Gosh! Was there a note in it?”

“No.” She yawned.

“But did you keep it anyway? I'd love to have something like that.”

“Whatever for? It's only a bunch of old junk.”

The conversation was definitely not going as I'd hoped, but I pushed on. “Tell me about the tides.”

“What's to tell? The tide comes in for a while and then it goes out again. Sometimes you can hear it.”

“It has a sound? What does it sound like?”

“Well, when it's quiet, it makes a noise like this:
shoosh-shoosh
. Sometimes it's loud, when the waves crash on the rocks and make a big racket. It just depends.”

“What does it depend on?”

She looked at me as if I were speaking Chinese. “How would
I
know?”

Her attitude struck me as very unsatisfying. How could she not know, how could she not find out, how could she not care? I wondered if something else had gone wrong with her in addition to her anemia and neurasthenia. Maybe she'd been injured in the Flood in some other way that didn't show. Maybe she'd been hit on the head and had all the curiosity knocked out of her. Question for the Notebook: What causes the waves? And the tides? Discuss further with Granddaddy.

The next day, a small package arrived for her and, casually loitering over the mail, I noted that the return address was one “L. Lumpkin, 2400 Church Street, Galveston.” Who, or what, was an L. Lumpkin? I was about to carry it up to her when she dashed in from outside and fell on the parcel like a stooping falcon, clutching it to herself, face alight. Then she wheeled without a word and pelted up the stairs at full speed.

Goodness. How terribly rude. And how very interesting.

I found her in our room wrestling with the hairy twine holding the package together. In exasperation, she screeched, “Scissors! Get me scissors!”

I ran downstairs to retrieve the pair in my knitting bag in the parlor, but by the time I got back, she had managed to pull the package apart. Inside was a box that she placed on the desk and opened reverently. Inside this box was a smaller box and a letter. Hands clasped to her bosom, she paused to savor the moment, whatever it was.

I made the mistake of murmuring, “What is it?”

She turned on me. “What does it take to get some privacy in this house? Get out!”

Offended, I said, “There's no need to yell. I can certainly tell when I'm not wanted.” I left in a state of wounded pique, my feelings lacerated but my head held high. Here I'd been thinking we were friends of a sort.

I went downstairs and made the mistake of pacing the hallway, where Mother managed to snag me for piano practice.

As Aggie and I got ready for bed that night, she said, “Callie, where's the hairbrush?”

I plunked it down in front of her. A few minutes later, “Callie, have you seen the pumice stone?”

I plunked that down too, and was treated to the sound of her rasping her heels for five minutes.

“Callie, what have you done with the—”

“Nothing! Whatever it is! Find it yourself—I'm not your maid.”

A frosty silence prevailed. I could tell she was bursting to tell me something but we studiously ignored each other until it was almost time to blow out the lamp. Finally she said, “All right. Can you keep a secret?”

Offended, I retorted, “Of course I can. I'm not a child, you know.”

“Do you swear not to tell? Hold up your right hand and swear.”

I did so, but even this seemed not to satisfy her and she said, “Wait, where's my Bible?”

“Really, Aggie.”

She pulled her Bible from the wardrobe and made me place my right hand on it. Oh, serious business indeed. If you broke this kind of promise, didn't that mean you would go to H_ll? But what if you were tortured with hot pokers and flogged with the nine-tailed cat until you told? Would you be excused in that case? My knees trembled a little, as did my voice.

“I swear not to tell.”

“And
neve
r to tell at any time, now and forevermore.”

“
Never
to tell, now and forever. Amen.”

Her whole face relaxed, and she smiled in a way I'd never seen before. Why, she wasn't bad-looking at all, a fact obscured by her habitual ill temper and all the worry and woe she carried about on her shoulders.

Mother had given her a carpetbag to replace the gunnysack she'd first arrived with, and she retrieved from it the small box I'd seen earlier. She bade me sit at the desk and handed it to me with great care.

I opened the box to find a cased photograph of a young man of twenty or so, trussed like a turkey in a tight suit and stiff collar, his hair plastered flat for the grand occasion of having his portrait made.

“There he is,” she whispered, her expression going all soppy the way Harry's had when he'd wooed his first girlfriend.

I studied the pale moonish face, the skimpy mustache, the slightly buck teeth, the struggling beard.

“Isn't he marvelous,” she breathed in a voice clotted with deep emotion.

Well … no. He looked rather like a smelt. To be charitable, some of this was probably due to having to hold his breath and freeze in place for the photograph, but some of it looked like an actual deficit in personality. I'd heard Granddaddy say there was no accounting for other people's taste, and here was living proof.

“Who is he, Aggie?”

“Why, that's Lafayette Lumpkin, of course. He's my beau. But nobody knows, and you mustn't tell.” She squeezed my shoulder with an iron grip.

“Ow, that hurts. I
won't
. I
promised.
How'd you meet him?”

“He used to work as a bookkeeper in Poppa's store. But then he asked to walk me home, and Poppa fired him the very next day on some trumped-up charge. But he didn't do anything wrong. Poppa just wanted him out of the way.”

“Why?”

“Poppa says his family comes from the wrong side of the tracks, and maybe they do, but I don't care a whit. Lafayette is a self-made man,” she said proudly. “He learned accounting through a correspondence course, you see, and has made every effort to better himself, but it's not enough for Poppa, who's forgotten that he pulled his own self up by his bootstraps. He thinks I should marry a Sealy or a Moody or one of the other first families of Galveston. They're all rich as Croesus, but I spurn their advances.”

She picked up the photo and hugged it to herself tenderly. Her gaze softened, and her voice went all dreamy. “My heart belongs to Lafayette.”

Now, this was all very romantic, but exchanging secret letters with a man without her parents' approval was a dangerous game, one that could only end in trouble and tears. No wonder she swooped on the mail every day before anyone else could get a look at it.

“He's asked for my photograph—isn't that sweet? But I lost the only one I had in the Flood.”

“There's a photographer in Lockhart, Hofacket's Portrait Parlor. Granddaddy and I went there and had our photograph made with the
Vicia tateii
.”

She gave me an odd look. “You had your photograph made with that plant?”

“Of course. They say it's important to memorialize special occasions.”

“They're referring to weddings and christenings and suchlike. Not plants.”

“I'll have you know that finding a new species is a very important occasion. Look,” I said, opening the desk drawer and pulling out the portrait of Granddaddy, myself, and our discovery. “Look there,” I said, pointing proudly.

“That's it?” she said with a touch of scorn, and tossed the photo aside as if it were nothing. Nothing. Most of the goodwill she'd been banking with me evaporated, and I sank into a snit. My photo of the vetch was every bit as important to me as Lafayette Lumpkin's was to her. And though I'll admit that the plant looked bedraggled and unprepossessing, suffering as it was that day from heat stress, still, it was a brand-new species and deserving of respect. There was just no interesting some people in the most important things.

“Wait a moment,” she said, picking up the photograph and examining it keenly; I watched her absorb its significance as both a scientific and historic document. The light dawned within her. How gratifying. Up until this moment, she'd viewed me at best as a somewhat strange companion, at worst, an annoyance. Now she would take me seriously. Now we would have stimulating discussions on other subjects besides money. Now we could be explorers together. She tapped the embossed gold seal in the lower left corner that read
Hofacket's Fine Portraiture.