The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

“Mother’s threatening to make me learn a new dish every week. It might not be so bad, except that you spend hours making it and then it’s all gone in fifteen minutes. Then you sweep up the kitchen and you scrub the counter and you have to start all over again without a single moment’s rest. What do you have to show for it? How does Viola stand it?”

“It’s all Viola knows,” he said. “And when something is all you know, it’s easy to stand it. There is one other thing she knows: Her life could be much harder. Viola is ‘house’ instead of ‘field.’ She has aunts and uncles in Bastrop chopping cotton with the short hoe and pulling the long sack.”

“Father won’t allow a short hoe on the place.”

“Do you know why not?” said Granddaddy.

“No sir, I don’t.”

“It’s because I provided him with the opportunity to spend a full day in the field with one when he was about your age. I hope he provides your brothers with the same experience.”

“Do you think he’d let me try it?”

“I doubt he would want to see his daughter out there.”

“Hmm. So what did you find today?”

He pulled his spectacles from his pocket and lifted his satchel onto the counter. “Here are some nice specimens of sangre de drago, or dragon’s blood. The Indians used it to treat gum inflammation. I did see an Oxalis violacea, but I think we have enough of those. And, look here, it’s a Croton fruticulosus, which I’ve never seen blooming this late before. You may have heard it called bush croton. Let’s try and root this one.”

The plants were nowhere near as interesting to me as the insects, and the insects were not as interesting as the animals, but Granddaddy had shown me how they were all dependent, one upon the other, and you had to study and appreciate all of the phyla in order to understand any one of them. So I peered at the wilted wisps he sorted with his finger and tried to learn something.

“Do you remember,” he said, “the hairy vetch we found a while back? The possible mutant?”

It had been an extremely boring plant, but I did remember it.

“Can you find it for me?” he said. “I think it’s still here somewhere. I haven’t had time to press it.”

I scuffled through the jars and envelopes and came up with it, an unprepossessing dried brown scrap.

“The mootant,” I said. “Here it is.”

“The correct pronunciation is ‘mew-tant.’”

“How do you spell that? And please don’t tell me to look it up.”

“Just this once. It’s M-U-T-A-N-T.”

“I think my pronunciation is better,” I said. “Mootant. What is it? What does it mean?”

“Mr. Darwin discusses it in some detail. Have you not reached that chapter yet?”

I felt comfortable enough with him to admit how difficult I found the reading. “I’m still studying the chapter on Artificial Selection. It’s taking me longer than I thought. It’s dense reading.”

“For someone of your tender years, I suppose it is,” he mused, while inspecting the jar. He opened it and tipped the sample out onto a fresh square of blotting paper. “Hand me the magnifying glass, will you?” he said.

He studied the mootant for a full minute and then said, “Humh.” Now, this in itself was odd. My grandfather normally spoke in complete sentences.

“Humh?”

“Let’s go outside and look at this.” It was still overcast, but the light outside was better than the gloom of the laboratory. We went out and he looked at the plant through the magnifying glass for a long time. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“What is it, Granddaddy?”

Pensively he said, “I don’t really know.” This was even odder. He always knew everything. “There appears to be a small uncinate leaf dependent from the main node, but it’s difficult to say, as it’s so desiccated. I don’t remember this in any of the descriptions. And I don’t recall seeing it in any of the drawings, and we have some excellent ones in Dr. Mallon’s atlas.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It’s so dried out it’s hard to say. It may be an aberration, it may be nothing.” He looked at me. “Or it may be that we have found an entirely new species.”

“No,” I breathed.

“It’s possible. Let’s sit down and have a drink and think about this.” We went back into the laboratory, and he put the weed in the middle of the counter, then sank into his armchair, the springs echoing in a way that normally would have made me giggle. He stared at the vetch.

“There is a bottle for special occasions on the top shelf in the corner,” he said. “Reach it down for me, will you? There’s a good girl.”

The heavy green glass bottle was covered with the dust of ages. The brittle label read KENTUCKY’S FINEST BOURBON WHISKEY and showed a picture of a curvetting thoroughbred.