“Granddaddy,” I said, “why do you have that armadillo? I bet you could buy a much better one.”
“That’s true, I could, but I keep it as a reminder. That was the very first mammal I stuffed myself. I learned by correspondence course, which I advise against. If this path interests you, I suggest you apprentice yourself to a master. There are subtleties to the art that cannot be gleaned from merely reading a pamphlet.”
“I don’t think I want to learn taxidermy.” I poked at a shelf crammed with fossils and old bits of bone.
“A wise decision,” he said. “The smell alone is enough to discourage most novices from persevering. I have to say in my defense that the next armadillo was much better. So much better, in fact, that I sent it off to the great man himself as a token of the high esteem in which I held him.”
I was hefting a trilobite fossil and half listening. I was fascinated by the ordered ridges of stone that had once been the soft body of a sea animal.
“He had made a study of the South American armadillo, so I thought he should have a North American sample as well. After the armadillos, I took on a bobcat, which I’ll admit now was far too ambitious. I found the facial features quite difficult. I was trying to reproduce the snarl of the cat when it is disturbed in the wild. The poor creature ended up looking as if it had the mumps.”
How many million years old was the stonified creature I held in my hand? What ancient sea had it swum in? I had never even seen the ocean; I could only imagine the waves, the wind, the brine.
“Anyway, as a thank-you, the great man sent me the bottled beast you see on the shelf next to the armadillo. It is my most prized possession.”
“Excuse me?” I said, looking up from the trilobite.
“The bottled beast you see there on the shelf.”
I looked at the monster in the thick glass carboy, with its freakish eyes and multiple limbs.
“It is a Sepia officinalis he collected near the Cape of Good Hope.”
“Who collected it?”
“We are speaking of Mr. Darwin.”
“We are?” I couldn’t believe it. “He sent you that?”
“Indeed. Over his lifetime he carried on an extensive correspondence with many naturalists around the world and traded specimens with quite a few of us.”
“Granddaddy you’re kidding.”
“Calpurnia, I would never ’kid.’ And, for once, your mother and I are in agreement on this important point: The use of slang is an indicator of a weak intellect and an impoverished vocabulary.”
I couldn’t believe it. We had not just his book in our house, but a monster collected by Mr. Darwin himself. I stared at the thing and tried to make sense of its too many arms and legs.
“What is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
I made a face of exasperation. “You sound like Mother telling me to look up a word in the dictionary when I don’t know how to spell it.”
“Good. Another point of agreement.”
I edged up to the jar and tried to read the small paper tag hanging from a string around the neck of the bottle. The writing was old-fashioned and faded. I couldn’t read it, but it was a thrill just to know that Mr. Darwin had written it with his own pen in his own hand.
“Can I take it out of the jar? It’s hard to see, what with it being all squashed in there.”
“It is almost seventy years old and preserved in spirits of wine. I am afraid it will disintegrate if we remove it.”
I peered at it. Land? Sea? Or Air? Although there were many limbs, they looked rubbery and not substantial enough to bear any weight, so it had to be a swimmer. Sea, then. Except that there were no fins. How could it swim without fins? Hmm, a problem. And I couldn’t see any gills. Another problem. The eyes were oversized saucers. Why would they need to be so big? Answer: to see in the dark, of course. It had to live in areas of low light, which meant deep water.
I said, “It is some kind offish, and it lives near the bottom of the ocean. But it’s unlike any other kind offish I have ever seen. I don’t see how it locomotes, or how it breathes.”
“As far as you go, you are correct. It is unfair to expect you to surmise more, because it is, as you say, squashed in there. It is a cuttlefish. The family is Sepiida, the genus is Sepia. It locomotes by pulling water into a cavity in the mantle and squeezing it through a muscular siphon. The mantle also hides the gills. When startled by a predator, it releases a cloud of brownish black ink to obscure its escape. We use the calcified internal shell as an abrasive. Owners of captive birds sometimes give them the shell on which to sharpen their beaks.”
The thing fascinated me. It was a piece of history as well as an oddity. I touched a finger to the cool glass.
I LATER MENTIONED to Harry how interesting I found the bottled beast. Startled, he looked up from the book he was reading and said, “You’ve been in the library?”
“Yes,” I said, and added, “Granddaddy invited me.”
“Oh, well, in that case. Did you notice the ship in a bottle? I think that’s the most interesting thing, although I haven’t had a chance to get a good look at all his things. He got it from the Volunteer Fire Department years ago when he gave them money and bought the pump wagon. I’m hoping he’ll leave it to me in his will.” He looked at me curiously. “You seem to be spending a lot of time with him.”
“Sometimes.”
“What do you and that old man talk about?”
This made me wary. Harry didn’t so much worry me, but what if the younger brothers discovered that Granddaddy was a trove of weird and fascinating facts about Indian fighting, the larger carnivores, hot-air ballooning? I’d never have him to myself again.
“Um, things,” I said and flushed. I hated withholding anything from Harry. He turned back to his book, and I kissed his cheek. He stroked my hair absently. “You’re still my own pet, right?”
“That’s right,” I declared. “I am.”
It didn’t occur to me that others in my family also noticed I spent time with Granddaddy until Jim Bowie said, “How come you play with Granddaddy more than you play with me, Callie?”
“That’s not true, J.B. I play with you lots. And besides, Granddaddy and I aren’t playing. We’re doing Science,” I said, realizing as I spoke how pompous I sounded.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you study the world around you and you try to figure out how it works.”
“Can I do it too?”
“Maybe you can when you get to be my age.”
J.B. thought about this and then said, “I don’t want to. He’s scary, Callie. He hardly ever smiles. And he smells real funny.”
It was true. Granddaddy smelled like wool, tobacco, mothballs, and peppermint. And sometimes whiskey.
J.B. went on, “He’s not very jolly. My friend Freddy has a jolly grampa. And where’s our other grampa? Don’t we get two? Freddy has two, so how come we don’t have two?”
“The other one died before you came along. He caught typhus and then he died.”
“Oh.” He thought about this. “Can we get another one?”
“No, J.B. First he was Mother’s father, and then later he caught typhus and died.” J.B. looked perplexed by the idea that his own mother had once been a child herself.