“Callie Vee. ”
“There’s nothing creepy about it. It’s scientific interest. Backy Medlin looks kind of decrepit to me. How old is he, do you reckon?”
“Why don’t you go down the street and inspect his teeth?”
“That’s a good one, Harry, but I doubt he has any left. He’11 go soon, don’t you think?”
I passed Backy Medlin every day on my way to and from school. He sat with the other codgers on the gallery of the gin, rocking and spitting and interrupting each other’s stories of the War and griping at each other that, no, it hadn’t happened that way, it had happened this way. And so on. (Backy’s name came from his prodigious use of chewing tobacco and his poor aim at the spittoon. He spat frequently, randomly, mightily. A constant foul brown rain pattered down on the dust around him, and you had to keep a sharp lookout.) No one paid the men the slightest attention anymore. Sometimes even they got sick of yakking and turned to dominoes, playing with an old carved set with dots so stained from a million games that they were nearly indecipherable. The tiles clacked pleasingly, and every now and then one of the old men would exclaim “Ha!” and you knew he had thrown down a particularly good one.
“So will you take me to Backy’s funeral?” I said.
Harry said, “Really, Callie, this isn’t very nice talk.”
“I’m not wishing him to die. I’m just curious. Granddaddy says that a curious mind is a pree . . . is a perk—”
“Prerequisite?”
“Yes—that—to a scientific understanding of the world.”
“Fine. But have you done your piano practice yet? Miss Brown comes tomorrow.”
“You sound like Mother. No, I haven’t done it yet, and yes, I’ll do it. Harry, how many years will we have to take lessons? I’m getting tired of it, aren’t you? Why don’t some of the others take piano for a while? I have better things to do.”
“Better things to do with Grandfather, you mean.”
“Uh, yes.”
“I asked you once before and you never answered me. So, what do you talk about with him?”
“Golly, Harry, there’s everything to talk about. There’s bugs and snakes, cats and coyotes; there’s trees and butterflies and hummingbirds; there’s clouds and weather and wind; there’s bears and otters, although they’re getting harder to find around here. There’s whaling ships, there’s—”
“All right.”
“The South Seas and the Grand Canyon. The planets and the stars.”
“Okay, okay.”
“There’s the principles of distillation. You do know he’s trying to turn pecans into liquor, right? Although it’s not going so well, but don’t say I said so, okay?”
“Got it,” said Harry.
“There’s Newton’s laws, there’s prisms and microscopes, there’s—”
“Got it, I said.”
“Gravity, friction, lenses—”
“Enough already.”
“The food chain, the rain cycle, the natural order. Harry, where are you going? There’s tadpoles and toads, lizards and frogs. Don’t go away. There’s something called microbes, germs, you know. I’ve seen them through the microscope. There’s butterflies and caterpillars, which brings us to Petey; let’s not forget about him. Harry?”
I AWOKE in the morning to a tiny skritch-skratch sound like the noise a mouse makes in the wall, only it was coming from Petey’s jar. It was too dark to see, so I pulled back the curtain and set his jar in the windowsill. His cocoon pitched this way and that. As the room grew lighter, he thrashed and chewed away and either didn’t notice my face pressed up against his jar or didn’t care. Finally, he had a good-sized hole in one end of his cocoon, and what had once been Petey slowly strained its way out with a mighty effort.
And there, instead of the lovely bright creature I’d imagined, crouched an odd-looking thick-bodied butterfly with damp, tightly furled wings. It shook, struggling to uncrimp itself. I could see that it wasn’t my Petey anymore. I would have to find a new name for it. Something to reflect its long-awaited splendor. Something like . . . Fleur . . . since it lived on nectar, or maybe Sapphire, or maybe Ruby, depending on the final color of its wings. I left it to its work and went down to breakfast.
At the table I announced, “Petey hatched. He’s busy drying off his wings.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Mother. “What color is he?”
“I can’t tell yet, ma’am. He’s still puckered up. But he definitely needs a new name now that he’s not Petey the Caterpillar anymore.”
“Children?” said Mother, “do you have any suggestions?”
Sul Ross, the seven-year-old, proclaimed, “We should name him . . . we should name him . . . ,” he struggled, “. . . Butterfly.”
“That’s nice, dear,” said Mother.
“How about Belle,” said Harry, “for beauty.”
“That’s nice, Harry. Any other suggestions?”
Granddaddy said, “You might want to wait and see what it looks like first.”
I thought this an odd statement. But if anybody knew his butterflies, it was Granddaddy, so I figured he had some reason for making it.
“Yes,” I said, “let’s see what he looks like before we name him, although Belle is a good idea.” Sul Ross looked crestfallen, and I added, “And Butterfly is good, too, Sully. Maybe I’ll call him Belle the Butterfly.”
“Is it a him or a her, Callie?” said Travis.
“No idea,” I said, tucking into the flapjacks.
“Kindly don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Mother.
After breakfast I ran up to my room with the three younger boys on my heels debating what to christen our new charge. And there in all his glory was Petey, or Belle, stretched wide on his twig, enormous wings filling his jar. He was huge, he was pale, he was fuzzy all over. He was the world’s biggest moth.
“That sure is a funny-looking butterfly,” said Sul Ross. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s not a butterfly, Sully,” said Travis. “It’s a moth. Callie, did you know it was going to be a moth?”
“Um,” I said, taken aback by his size, “not really.”
“Gosh, I’ve never seen one that big,” said Travis.
“Me neither. He’s kind of creepy,” said Sul Ross, “don’t you think?”
“Uh. . . .” It’s true, he was kind of creepy, but I would never admit it. I had no idea moths could get to be that size. And this one was only a newborn.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Travis.
“I’m going to study it, of course,” I said, wondering what on earth I would do with this monster.
“Oh, okay. So what are you going to study?”
“Um, its . . . um, eating habits, that sort of thing. Its mating habits. Right. Yep, there’s territory, wingspan, things like that.”
“Are you going to have to touch it?” said Sul Ross. “I sure wouldn’t want to touch it.”
“Maybe not yet,” I said. “It’s barely born. It needs time to get used to things.”
“You better find a bigger jar fast, Callie. It’s going to bust out of that one.”
“I don’t think they come any bigger.”
“Maybe you could let him fly around your room,” said Travis.
Not likely.
“Eeeuuuw,” said Sul Ross, backing up. “I gotta go.”