The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate (6 page)

I worked hurriedly to finish my sketch before my subject flew away. I was shading in the finishing touches when the front door opened and Harry came out. “Pet,” he called, “it's breakfast.”

The startled bird took off and flew toward the live oaks bordering our lawn, where it landed on the ground. This surprised me. Then I thought about it. Of course, it wouldn't be a passerine, or perching bird, not with webbed feet like that.

“Harry, did you see that? What is it, do you think?”

But Harry had gone inside.

I made a quick check of my barometer before following him and noted that the pressure was down significantly. Was there something wrong with it? I flicked it with my fingernail but it held steady. Huh. Maybe you had to change the balloon from time to time to keep it fresh.

I went inside, and right at that moment, the wind picked up and slammed the door behind me with a loud crash. It meant nothing to me at the time.

Since it was a Saturday, I got my obligatory half hour of piano practice over with right after breakfast and then tracked down Granddaddy in the library. I tapped on the door, and he called out, “Enter if you must.” He sat at his desk reading
Thallophyta of North America
. I confess, fungi were not exactly my favorite subject, but as he always reminded me, all of life was intertwined and we could neglect no aspect of it. To do so indicated shallowness of intellect and shabby scholarship.

“Granddaddy,” I said, “can I use the bird atlas?”

“I believe the question is ‘
may
I use the bird atlas?' And the answer is, of course, you may. My books are your books.”

I left him to his work and pulled the weighty
Thompson's Field Guide to the Birds
from the shelf. I thumbed through it, briefly diverted by the stunning display of the peacock and the awkward form of the flamingo before coming to a section I'd never browsed before: Sea Birds of the Gulf of Mexico. For a girl who had never been to the seashore, this was interesting stuff.

“Gosh,” I said, poring over the pages.

“Calpurnia, I know you are capable of expressing yourself without resorting to popular exclamations. The use of slang betrays a weak imagination and a lazy mind.”

“Yessir,” I murmured. But my mind was not attending to him. I stared at an illustration of the bird I'd seen on the lawn. “Golly.”

“Calpurnia.”

“Hmm? Oh, sorry. Granddaddy, look at this bird. I saw one just like it this morning.”

He got up and looked over my shoulder. “Are you sure?” He frowned.

I opened my Notebook and showed him my sketch, saying, “It's the same one, isn't it?”

He compared the two drawings, his gnarled forefinger moving back and forth between them. He muttered, “The silhouette is correct, as is the gorget, and the primary and secondaries. And you're sure about this dark area here? Between the upper wing and the distal wingtip?”

“Yessir.”

“And there was no white window here on the wing?”

“No, sir, not that I could see.”

“Then it is a laughing gull, or
Leucophaeus atricilla.
Strange. A gull with a typical inland range of twenty-five miles, and yet here it is, two hundred miles from the coast.” He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and frowned at the ceiling, lost in thought. There was silence, except for the ticking of the mantel clock. I dared not interrupt his pondering. After a few minutes, he got up and peered at his own barometer on the wall. His expression was remote, and grave.

I said, “Is there something wrong with your barometer? There's something wrong with mine too.”

“No. There's nothing wrong with the barometers. But we must warn them. I hope it's not too late.”

A thrill of fear shot through me. “Warn who? Too late for what?”

He was deep in thought and did not answer. He put on his coat and hat, grabbed his walking stick, and headed for the door. What was going on? I trailed behind him, sick with anxiety. He walked briskly, casting uneasy glances at the sky and murmuring, “Don't let us be too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“A terrible storm might be coming,” he said. “I fear the worst. We must warn them on the coast. Your mother has family in Galveston, does she not?”

“There's Uncle Gus and Aunt Sophronia and their daughter, Aggie. That makes her my cousin, but I've never met her.”

“Your mother should telephone them right away.”

“Telephone? Galveston?” I marveled at the idea. We'd never done such a preposterous thing; the expense and inconvenience were unimaginable. I examined the plump cumulus clouds on the horizon, and although there were a lot of them, I saw no portent of doom. They looked like ordinary clouds to me.

We passed the cotton gin once owned by Granddaddy and now by Father. A row of old Confederate soldiers and Indian fighters rocked back and forth out front, arguing over past glories and defeats, pausing from time to time on the forward swing to spit tobacco. The ground around them was dotted with foul, shiny gobs that looked like dead brown slugs. Willy Medlin had the sharpest aim, despite being the oldest and most decrepit, maybe because he'd practiced the longest. He could hit a cockroach,
Periplaneta americana
, dead-on from ten feet, an accomplishment much admired by my brothers. The old coots hailed Granddaddy, who had fought by their side during the War, but if he heard them, he gave no sign.

We hurried to the Western Union office housed next to the newspaper and the telephone switchboard. The bell over the door signaled our arrival, and the telegrapher, Mr. Fleming, came out to greet us.

On spying Granddaddy, he drew himself to attention and saluted smartly, saying, “Cap'n Tate.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Fleming. No need to salute. We are both old men. The War is long over.”

Mr. Fleming stood at ease and said, “The War of Northern Aggression will never be over, Captain. The Cause is not lost! The South shall rise again!”

“Mr. Fleming, let us not live mired in the past. Let us be forward-thinking men.”

I had heard similar exchanges before. Mr. Fleming was easily riled up and could spew pure vitriol on the subject of Yankees. Under normal circumstances, it could be quite entertaining, but today was not a normal day.

Granddaddy continued, “We must hurry. I need to send three telegrams immediately.”

“Certainly, sir. If you'll pencil your message in this blank here, I'll get them out as soon as I can. Who are they going to?”

“The mayors of Galveston, Houston, and Corpus Christi. But I'm afraid I don't know their names.”

“That's not a problem. We'll address them to His Honor the Mayor, and that should do it. I know all the head telegraphers. We'll make sure they get delivered.”

Granddaddy wrote his message and handed it to Mr. Fleming, who peered at it through his half-moon spectacles and read aloud: “‘Seagull sighted two hundred miles from coast, stop. Evidence of major storm coming, stop. Evacuation may be necessary, stop.'” He lifted his glasses to his forehead and frowned. “That it, Cap'n?”

“That's correct, thank you. Galveston Island lacks a seawall and is the most vulnerable, so please send that one first.”

“This is mighty serious business. You really think they should get out because of a bird?”

“Mr. Fleming, have you ever seen a laughing gull in Caldwell County?”

“Well, no, I guess not. But it still strikes me as a pretty drastic measure. I'll bet they're used to big winds down there.”

“Not like this, Mr. Fleming. I fear a calamity of the worst magnitude.”

“You really saw a seagull?”

“My granddaughter saw one earlier this morning.”

Mr. Fleming cut his eyes sideways at me, and I flinched. I could read his thoughts, something along the lines of,
Evacuate Texas's largest cities on the word of a child? What madness is this?

Granddaddy continued, “There is evidence that the animals have some senses that we do not, which may warn them of natural disasters. There are many anecdotal accounts of such things. The elephants of Batavia are said to foretell tidal waves; the bats of Mandalay are said to predict earthquakes.”

Mr. Fleming spoke slowly. “Well … the lines are all jammed up right now. The price of cotton is swinging pretty good today, so there's lots of commercial traffic. I've got a bunch of buy and sell orders stacked up ahead of you. I'd say there's a couple of hours' wait.”

I had never heard Granddaddy raise his voice, and he did not do so now, but ice entered his gaze, and steel, his tone. He leaned over the counter and fixed Mr. Fleming with a piercing blue stare from beneath his bushy dragon eyebrows. “This, Mr. Fleming, is a matter of grave importance, possibly of life and death. Mere commercial transactions will have to wait.”

Mr. Fleming squirmed and said, “Well, Cap'n, since it's you, I'll move you up to the head of the line. Be another ten minutes, though.”

“Good man, Mr. Fleming. Your service in this time of need shall not be forgotten.”

Granddaddy took a chair and stared into space. I felt too jittery to sit still on a bet. Since nothing was going to happen for a spell, I ran across the street to the gin, where Father was conducting business in his glassed-in office. He waved at me briefly through the glass. The place was a hive of activity as usual, engaged in the never-ending business of separating the cotton from its seeds and packing the fiber into huge bales for shipment downstream. The thrumming of the great leather machinery belts, the deafening noise from the floor, the shouting of orders back and forth, all of it served only to increase my tension. I wandered into the relative quiet of the assistant manager's office to study the resident bird, Polly the Parrot, from a safe distance.

Polly (it seemed that all parrots were named Polly, regardless of gender) was a three-foot-tall Amazon parrot that Granddaddy had bought for my twelfth birthday, the most gorgeous bird anyone had ever seen, with a golden chest, azure wings, and crimson tail. He was also touchy and irritable, unfortunate personality traits in a bird possessed of such an alarming beak and tremendous claws. He had proved so disturbing a presence in our house that, to everyone's relief (including mine), he'd been donated to the gin's assistant manager, Mr. O'Flanagan, an old salt who dearly loved a parrot. They were known to sing rude sea chanteys together behind closed doors.

I compared the gull with the parrot, both so far from home, one displaced by Nature, one displaced by Man. Did Polly dream of tropical climes? Did he dream of lush jungles filled with sticky ripe fruits and tasty white grubs? Yet here he lived chained to a perch in a cotton gin in Fentress, Texas, and I was technically part of the reason. For the first time, I felt sorry for him.

I took a cracker from a bowl on the desk and gingerly approached him. He fixed me with his fierce yellow eye and yelled, “Braawwkk!” I gulped and slowly extended my peace offering to him, pincered between the very tips of my fingers. Fingertips that might not be mine for long. I whispered, “Polly want a cracker?”

He extended a terrifying claw, and I suddenly questioned my own sanity. Was I completely
mad
? Retreat now with all digits intact! But he plucked the cracker from my trembling hand with surprising gentleness, then said in his nasal otherworldly voice, “'Ank you.”

I blinked at him. He blinked at me. Then he delicately nibbled his treat, as precise and genteel as any fancy lady at a society luncheon. So. We had a truce of sorts.

Mr. O'Flanagan came in and greeted us. “I see you're talking to Polly. Polly's a good bird, aren't you, my lad?” He ruffled the feathers on the back of the bird's neck, a move I thought would surely irritate him, but he only leaned into Mr. O'Flanagan's hand, muttering liquid sounds of pleasure. I marveled at this side of Polly and figured that maybe we could be friends too. But far more pressing matters awaited, and it occurred to me that Mr. O'Flanagan could help.

“Sir? Mr. O'Flanagan? You've sailed around the world, haven't you?”

“I have that, my girl. I've seen the sun rise over Bora-Bora; I've seen the beacon fires at Tierra del Fuego.”

“Is it true…” I hesitated, torn about questioning Granddaddy's judgment. But so much was at stake, including my own peace of mind.

“Yes, darlin'?”

I plunged ahead. “Is it true that the animals can predict a coming disaster?”

“I believe they can, my dear. Why, once when I was in New Guinea, I saw the snakes fleeing their homes in great numbers only an hour before an earthquake struck.”

Relief washed over me. I dashed from the room, crying “Thank you!” over my shoulder, and was gone.

I got back to the telegraph office in time to catch Mr. Fleming enter his call sign on the “bug” and begin rattling off the first message. I craned over the counter to watch, fascinated by this miraculous ability to instantaneously “talk” to someone hundreds of miles away. His fingers bounced on the bug, clicking out the shorter dots and longer dashes, sending actual language sparking along an electrical wire at the amazing speed of forty words per minute. It was a wonderful tool, and I coveted one of my own. Perhaps one day in the future we would each have our own personal telegraphs and shoot messages back and forth to our friends along an electrical wire. Far-fetched, but still a girl could dream.