The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (28 page)

And by the way, I know for a fact that Aggie made a trip to the post office first thing Monday morning on her way to school.

 

CHAPTER 22

THE VALUE OF LEARNING NEW SKILLS

A small frog, of the genus Hyla, sits on a blade of grass about an inch above the surface of the water, and sends forth a pleasing chirp: when several are together they sing in harmony on different notes. I had some difficulty in catching a specimen of this frog. The genus Hyla has its toes terminated by small suckers; and I found this animal could crawl up a pane of glass, when placed absolutely perpendicular.

G
RANDDADDY'S LESSON PLAN
next called for a frog, and we fortuitously came across a good-sized one at the inlet, not long dead, floating with its pale belly up. It was a
Rana sphenocephala
, the southern leopard frog, so named because of its distinctive dark spots. On inspection, the cause of death was not obvious.

“Will it do?” I asked Granddaddy. It looked only a little worse for wear.

“It will do,” he said.

“I wonder what killed it?”

“Perhaps you shall find out when you do your autopsy,” he replied.

We carried the frog back to the laboratory in my old fishing creel and pulled out the dissecting pan and tools. I was taking a real step up the evolutionary ladder, advancing to phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, meaning the frog had a backbone and spinal cord in common with humans, unlike the earthworm. And speaking of earthworms, where was Travis? He had agreed to watch this procedure. I fretted momentarily over whether I should retrieve him, then figured the time and trauma would not be worth it. It would be challenge enough to force him to study the results. And that boy wanted to be a veterinarian? How was that supposed to work?

Following Granddaddy's instructions, I turned the frog on its back and pinned each foot to the wax. I made an H-shaped incision the length of the belly through the smooth but tough skin and carefully pinned it back, then repeated the process through the substantial layer of muscle. There lay the innards: the surprisingly large liver, the tiny pancreas and wormlike intestines, the saclike lungs, the kidneys.

“Regard the heart,” said Granddaddy, pointing it out with tweezers. “It comprises only three chambers, unlike the mammalian and avian hearts, which each have four. The frog heart mixes oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood before pumping it around the body; it is therefore not as efficient as the hearts of birds and humans, which pump only oxygen-rich blood, providing the organism with greater energy.”

We concluded with the kidneys and cloaca and ovaries, showing the frog to be female, although no eggs were present. Perhaps a real herpetologist could have figured out the cause of death, but I found nothing obvious to explain it.

I took the tray to Travis in the barn, where he was sitting on a stool and entertaining the barn cats with a bit of string. He saw me coming and said, “Oh no. What is it this time?”

“Remember I told you we were moving up the evolutionary ladder? Well, we've made it to our first vertebrate. It's a leopard frog. You've seen them at the river.”

I showed him the tray.

“Ooh.” He moaned and put his head between his knees. But he didn't throw up and he didn't faint. I decided to call this progress of a sort.

We moved on to a stillborn baby rabbit, one of Bunny's progeny, and this time I insisted he watch. I tied the tiny pathetic creature on its back on a board and secured the paws with twine. Then I took a sharp pocketknife and made a careful incision down the chest and belly. I looked up in time to see Travis's eyes roll back in his head. I dropped the knife and caught him as he crumpled to the straw.

It turned out that my brother, who loved animals—or at least their exteriors—to distraction, could not, when faced with their interiors, maintain consciousness.

*   *   *

A
FTER A LIFETIME
of waiting, my type-writer ribbon finally arrived. I almost missed it, thinking the parcel on the hall table was one of the dime novels that arrived for Lamar twice per month.

I ran upstairs with my ribbon and found Aggie writing another of her interminable letters to The Lump (my private name for Lafayette). How she could wring such long missives out of such an uneventful life was beyond me.

“It's arrived, Aggie!” I panted.

She didn't even look up. “What's arrived?”

“My ribbon. We can start my lessons now.”

“Oh, that.” She stretched and yawned. “All right. Tomorrow.”

“What about now?” I said, champing at the bit.

“I'm busy.”

“You're only writing a letter.”

“I'll have you know,” she sniffed, “it's a very important letter. Maybe the most important letter of my life.”

“Really? Then why don't you type-write it and I'll watch?”

“No, it's private. Go away.”

“I
can't
go away. This is my room.” At least it used to be.

“Well, it's my room too. Go away and draggle in mud puddles with your grandfather. That's what you two do, right?”

I didn't like her tone. I also couldn't deny it. Putting the best face on it, I said with stiff dignity, “We study all forms of Nature, all the way from pond water up to the stars.”

She snorted. I thought furiously and said, “And besides, you're related to him
too
, you know. He's your … he's your”—and here I sketched a quick genealogical map in my mind—“your great-uncle.”

I could tell by the startled look on her face she'd never thought of this. She came back with, “Only by marriage. Not by blood.”

“Still counts,” I said, “so you might be a bit nicer about him.”

“Hmpf.”

The next day she pulled the precious Underwood out of the wardrobe and set it on the desk. She removed her ribbon and threaded mine through various struts, saying, “Watch closely. I don't want to repeat myself.” Then she rolled a clean sheet of paper into the machine and rapped out smartly:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Leaning over her shoulder, I said, “Why did the fox do that? Did the dog not mind it? I'd think any self-respecting dog would mind.”

“No, silly, it's a typing exercise. It's one single sentence with all the letters of the alphabet in it.”

I was too excited to take offense, and I also didn't want to contradict her by pointing out that there was no
s
in the sentence; you'd have to make either the dog or the fox plural. We switched places and I sat in the chair. She showed me how to place my hands at the “home position” and, with great excitement, I was off and running.

Except that I wasn't. Learning to type turned out to be tedious and dreary, not at all the magical experience I'd imagined. I'd been a bit worried that Aggie might not commit herself fully to the project, but I needn't have. She was true to her word and gave me terribly boring exercises (rather like piano scales) and checked on my progress daily, even grading my efforts like a real teacher.

We started with
ASDF
. Not even a real word. The keys kept sticking together, and I spent more time unsticking them than actually typing. Really, the only fun part was the small satisfying
ding!
at the end of a line, the bell warning you that you were reaching the edge of your paper. Then it was time to whack the return lever as hard as you could, sending the carriage crashing back to the beginning of a fresh line.

“Keep the fingers arched as if you're playing the piano,” she reminded me about a million times. “Don't let your fingers collapse.” I complained about these exercises bitterly but only under my breath. After all, the whole endeavor was my idea and involved considerable cash outlay, so I could hardly gripe about it to her or anyone else.

Aggie grumbled that my constant practice was getting on her nerves, a reasonable complaint, so I moved a chair and small table into the trunk room. I spent a half hour in there every day, pecking and clacking,
ASDF
,
ASDF
,
ASDF
. Then I moved on to
FDSA
. This was progress? Finally we moved on to real words, improvement of a sort but not as exciting as it sounds. I typed
cat
and
mat
and
sat
until I thought I would scream. It was worse than the
McGuffey Reader
. Then I moved on to
sad
and
lad
and
mad
until I thought I would scream. The trouble was that my left little finger, by far the weakest, had to hit the
a
, a letter that, if you examined any sentence at random, lurked everywhere; you couldn't get through a single line without it. This meant all of my
a
's were quite a bit fainter than the other letters, giving the lines a mottled look and marring their precise symmetry. Still I persevered. And I improved.

So engrossed was I that I did not notice my brothers crowding the trunk room doorway, staring at me. I looked up, startled.

“
What?
” I said.

“Uh, nothing. We just wondered about the noise.”

“Well, if it bothers you, shut the door.”

At the start I sounded like this:

Clack …

Clack
 …

Clack
 …

Not too much later, I sounded like this:

Clack … clack … clack …

And not too much after that, I sounded like this:

Clackity clackity
DING! CRASH!

After weeks of this, I went to Granddaddy in the library and said, “Do you have a letter you need to send? I'm practicing on the type-writing machine.”

“Ah,” he said, “another giant stride forward into the new century. Here is a rough copy of a letter I was about to write in pen. See how you go with it.”

I rushed back to my “office,” took out a piece of pristine white paper, and rolled it onto the platen. For a moment, I paused with my fingers above the keys so that I would remember my first real typing job, then began.

Dear Professor Higgins,

Enclosed please find a few seeds of the
Vicia tateii,
which you have reqested. I thank you kindly for the
Vicia higgenseii
seeds received by post earlier this week. They arrived in good condition. I look forward to germinating your specimans, and entering into a fruitful exchange of ideas regarding the conparative anatomy and physology of the two.

I remain, sir, faithfully yours,

Walter Tate

Fortunately I read it over to make sure there were no mistakes and discovered four of them! Ack, what a mess! My first formal commission, and I had botched it. I carefully typed it over, checked it twice, then ran to the library.

Granddaddy read it with me leaning over his shoulder. He signed it with his ink pen, blotted his signature, and beamed.

“Marvelous! Why, it wasn't all that long ago we communicated by pressing a sharp stick into a wet slab of clay. Truly the machine age is upon us. Well done. Here,” he said, reaching into his waistcoat pocket, “a little something for your trouble.”

I backed away. “Oh no, Granddaddy, I couldn't.” The thought of taking a dime from this man who had given me so much shocked me. He'd given me my life, really. He'd opened my eyes to the empire of books and ideas and knowledge. He'd opened my eyes to Nature; he'd opened my eyes to Science. From others I would take a dime, but not from him.

“I couldn't possibly,” I protested. “But I'll take the letter to the post office right now, if you'd like.”

“I'd like that very much,” he said, pulling a stamp and an envelope from his desk. “And when the days lengthen, we will germinate these seeds together and see what we come up with.”

I ran to the post office. And then I ran to Dr. Pritzker's office, eager to share my new skill with him. He was out on a farm call, so I spent a happy hour on one of the hard chairs reading about the treatment of spasmodic versus flatulent colic in the equine.

 

CHAPTER 23

MY FIRST SURGERY

In conclusion, it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.… But I have too deeply enjoyed the voyage, not to recommend any naturalist, although he must not expect to be so fortunate in his companions as I have been, to take all chances, and to start, on travels by land if possible, if otherwise, on a long voyage.

D
R.
P
RITZKER
was at first rather skeptical about typed labels, but after I ran up a batch to show him, he changed his mind.

“That looks very professional, Calpurnia. You're hired. I'll pay you a penny apiece.”

Now, this may not sound like a lot of money, but Dr. Pritzker, being the only vet for miles around, was in much demand and prescribed at least a dozen drenches and salves and powders every day, all requiring a label. I calculated on the spot that I could make at least fifty cents per week!

“Yessir!” I said, and stuck out my hand. We shook on our deal, which for some reason amused him.

I got better and better on the type-writer, and made fewer and fewer mistakes, and made more and more money. But now I had to face the problem of the machine being at home, when I really needed it at Dr. Pritzker's office. I had worked out a system in which I would run to his office the moment school let out, run home and type up the labels he needed, and then run them back. All this running back and forth was proving tiresome. But what to do? Buying a machine was out of the question as they were prohibitively expensive. But maybe I could … rent one.