The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

By the time the fireworks were set off, all of us were worn out. There was much laughter. There were tears and snits and several small bruises and scrapes, all the hallmarks of a grand party. Dovie got a black eye from running smack into another child’s fist. (It could easily have been my fist but it wasn’t, I swear.) This earned her much approval. Since she was generally esteemed an unbearable Miss Priss, this did her a world of good and earned her much approval.

That evening Mother took to her room with a large bottle of her tonic. Viola went to lie down with a cold cloth and a headache powder and was given an unprecedented two whole days off to recover. SanJuanna and Alberto shouldered the thankless burden of cleaning up. Alberto reported that when he led Sunshine back to her stall at the end of the day, she was too exhausted to try and bite him even once.

And Granddaddy’s gift did arrive at the end of the week, although we all came to wish soon enough that it had not. It came in a large crate with ventilation holes, always a promising sign in a gift. We assembled on the front porch and watched as Harry pried it open. It contained a scrolled wire cage, in which sat a gorgeous parrot. How on earth had Granddaddy known?

And it wasn’t just any parrot. It was an enormous, full-grown Amazon, three feet (excuse me—one meter) long from crest to tail feathers, with a brilliant golden breast, azure back, and wings of shocking crimson. We all stared at it in awe. Granddaddy had read about it in the Austin papers and had bought it from an estate sale, the bird having outlived its previous owner. It was the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen. And it looked like it could take your eye out without the slightest effort.

As we gaped at it, it reached through the bars with its great scaling beak and delicately opened the latch, then swung itself onto the top of the cage in a practiced move, despite the impediment of a thin silver chain that ran from one ankle to its gnawed perch. It preened a long iridescent feather, shook its head, raised and lowered its crest in a gesture that was somehow threatening, and turned to gaze at us with a perfectly round, yellow eye.

We were stupefied. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Mother looked at the creature with some alarm, but then, as if realizing its future was at stake, the bird broke into an amazing whistling rendition of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” complete with trills and cadenzas. Was this pure chance? Or had the bird somehow divined that my mother’s name was Margaret and that this was her favorite song? There was some cruel intelligence in its jaundiced eye that made me ponder this and made me grateful for the chain. His name was Polly, of course, and he was our birthday gift. What could my mother do?

So he stayed, at least for a while. He turned out to be as tetchy and irritable as he looked. With his huge beak and tremendous black claws, no one dared think of unchaining him from his perch. He intimidated all of us: parents, children, dogs, cats. Everyone gave his corner a wide berth except to feed and water him and change his paper. He had his own cuttlebone that he rubbed the sides of his beak against like a knife grinder honing his blade. I wanted to examine it up close but didn’t have the nerve. Polly didn’t seem to care that he was a friendless bird. He spent his days muttering dyspeptically to himself and singing naughty sea chanteys, with the occasional random earsplitting screech thrown in just to make you jump.

We took to covering his cage more and more often so that we could have some peace. I suspect everyone wanted to get rid of him, but no one had the nerve to come out and say it; we were waiting for some decent excuse to present itself because he was, after all, the Birthday Bird.

The decent excuse came during one of Mother’s afternoon teas when he cheerily greeted her guest, Mrs. Purtle, with the suggestion to “go bugger yerself.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it appeared that both Mother and Mrs. Purtle did. Within the hour, Polly was carried by Alberto down to the gin and given to Mr. O’Flanagan.

Mr. O’Flanagan was the assistant manager of the gin and a former merchant sailor, and he loved having a bird around. He had once kept an ancient raven, which he’d dubbed Edgar Allan Crow, and he’d labored for years to get the bird to speak the word nevermore. It remained mute until the day it squawked once and then fell off its perch from old age. Mr. O’Flanagan, on hearing that we had a real parrot that talked, was thrilled to take possession of Polly. Being an old salt himself, he took no offense in rough company. It turned out that he and the bird knew many of the same indecent songs, and they would pass the time when he wasn’t busy with customers by singing together, with the door shut, of course.

Polly was missed by no one in our house, including, I suspect, Granddaddy.

CHAPTER 21

THE REPRODUCTIVE