“Me too,” said Travis. “Time for school.”
“Hey!” I called after them, “It’s all right, come back here. I’m not gonna let him out!”
Now what? Petey—or Belle, or whatever it was—fluttered in its jar. The sound was dry, ominous, morbid. I got ready for school, trying not to look at it, flinching every time it flapped. I’d have to let it out of that jar, I could see that, but I didn’t want to think about it. I spent most of the hours at school trying not to.
When I got home, I lingered downstairs and put in some extra piano practice, after which Mother ordered me upstairs to change my pinafore. I dragged myself up to my room and had a sudden spasm of anxiety as I put my hand on the doorknob: What if it had gotten out? Had I tightened the lid on the jar after opening it the last time? What if it was flying loose around the room? Then I caught myself. Calpurnia Virginia Tate. You’re being ridiculous. Are you a Scientist or aren’t you? Come on, now. It’s. Only. A. Moth.
All right. That did it. I peered around my door. There it hunkered in the jar, the same as I’d left it, too big to even turn around. It stirred, wings beating against the glass.
“Petey,” I said. “What am I going to do with you? I need to figure out what species you are. And I need to find you a bigger home.”
I pulled Granddaddy’s Taxonomy of the Insect World from my bookshelf and turned to the order Lepidoptera. Based on its color and ridiculous size, it had to be a Saturniidae of some kind. Differentiating between the most likely possibilities meant examining the specimen’s spread wings, but there wasn’t room enough in the jar. There was nothing for it, I’d either have to get it a bigger home or let it loose. I stared at it for a while. It wasn’t so bad looking once you got used to its freakish size. It did have cute feathery antennae. I had brought it this far. It was stuck in that jar because of me; I couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.
“All right, Petey, let’s go visit Granddaddy and see what he has to say.” I picked up the jar at arm’s length and carried it downstairs with him pulsating all the way.
I ran into Harry in the hall. He took one look at Petey and said, “Good heavens, is that your butterfly? It looks more like an albatross.”
“Ha,” I said, “ha.”
“Did you know it would turn into this?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” I said, breezily.
Harry eyed me and then said, “Let me look at him. He’s a prizewinner, isn’t he? If they had an entry for moths at the Fentress Fair, you’d take it, easy.”
An interesting thought. Along with the classes for hogs and cattle and home preserves, a category for moths. Which naturally led me to remember the pet division for children every year at the fair. Children showed up with their cats and dogs and parakeets, a bunch of boring, everyday pets. Why not something more interesting like, say, a giant moth?
“Say, Harry,” I said, “do you think I could enter Petey in the pet show?”
“He’s not much of a pet, Callie Vee,” he said, laughing.
“So what? Dovie Medlin showed up last year with her gold-fish, Bubbles, who wasn’t much of a pet, either. And it’s not as if they have to perform tricks or anything. All they have to do is sit there, and the judges come by and look at them. He’d get some extra points for being different, don’t you think?”
“That he would, but it’s months away,” he said. “How are you going to keep him alive? You can’t keep him in that jar.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out some housing for him. How long do moths live, anyway?”
Harry said, “I don’t know. You’re the naturalist. I’m guessing a few weeks.”
Mother walked out of the kitchen and came to a sudden halt, staring at Petey’s jar in disbelief.
“What is that thing you’ve got in there, Calpurnia?” she said, her voice rising.
I sighed. “This is Petey, Mother. Or,” I added with false cheer, “you can call him Belle, if you like.” As if a beautiful name could somehow cloak this grotesquerie. Petey rippled drily, and my mother took a step back. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“What happened to your . . . to your beautiful butterfly?” she said.
“He turned out to be not so much a butterfly as a moth, you see,” I said, holding the jar out to show her. She took another step back.
“I want you to get it out of here. That’s a moth, for pity’s sake. Imagine what something that size would do to the woollens!” I had forgotten that she and SanJuanna fought a perennial pitched battle with hordes of small brown moths for possession of our blankets and winter clothes, their trifling weapons of cedar shavings and lavender oil no match for the ongoing push of Nature.
“It doesn’t eat wool, ma’am,” I said. “At least, I don’t think it does. It may only eat nectar, or it may eat nothing at all, depending on its species. Some of them don’t feed at all in the adult stage. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
Mother raised her hands. “Do not, under any circumstances, let that thing loose in here. I want it out of the house. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She pressed a hand to her temple and turned and went upstairs.
Harry said, “Too bad. I’d have liked to see him in the pet show. Step right up, folks, come and see Calpurnia Virginia Tate and her giant pet moth!”
“Very funny. All right, I have to let him go, but I have to show him to Granddaddy first.” I went looking for Granddaddy in the library, but he wasn’t there. I could go out the front door and around the long way to the laboratory in back, or cut through the kitchen and face more revulsion and more explanations on the way. I tucked the jar under my arm and went through the kitchen. Viola took one look at me and said, “What you got there?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said and kept moving out the back door. Petey stirred in his jar. I wished he would keep still. I had grown used to his appearance, but that noise. There was something foreboding and primeval about it; it made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
Granddaddy was stooped over his ledger book when I found him.
“Hello, Granddaddy, look what I have,” I said, holding out the jar to him.
“My, my, that is certainly a hefty specimen you have there. I’ve never seen one so sizeable. Have you identified the family it belongs to?”
“I think he must be Saturniidae, or maybe Sphingidae,” I said, proud of my pronunciation.
“What do you plan to do with him?”
“I was going to enter him in the pet show at the Fair, but Harry thinks he won’t live that long, and you keep telling me he’s not a pet. And Mother wants him out of the house. So that means I can kill him and keep him for my collection. Or I can let him go.”
Granddaddy looked at me. We both looked at Petey, squashed in his jar. “He’s a handsome specimen,” Granddaddy said. “You may never see another like him.”
“I know.” I frowned. “You did warn me not to name him. But I’ve raised him this far. I don’t think I can kill him.”
AT DUSK, when we gathered on the lawn to await the first firefly, my brothers stood on the porch while I set Petey’s jar in the grass. Granddaddy watched from a rocker and sipped store-bought bourbon. I took the lid off the jar and stood back.
For a minute Petey huddled there without moving. Then he crawled over the lip of the jar and emerged from his glass cocoon. As he wobbled his way onto the grass, Ajax came trotting around the corner of the house. Petey stretched his quivering wings wide. Too late, from the corner of my eye I saw the dog charge, his ears flapping, thrilled with the prospect of a new game of fetch. Petey pulsed feebly into the air and came to rest a couple of feet away, with Ajax closing fast. He was going to swallow my best specimen, my science project, my Petey. Fury boiled within me. Stupid dog! I ran at him and screamed Ajax!—so loud that I startled myself. Who knew I had that much wind in me? The birds in the trees took flight, and Ajax hesitated. I lunged at his collar. But he leaped sideways, thinking that it was all a fine new entertainment. He pounced again and Petey rose again, chest-high this time, flapping like an awkward pullet testing its wings.