The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate Read Free

bet he’s hungry. D’you have any worms on you?”
    â€œI’m fresh out.” This wasn’t exactly true. I had one giant worm left in my room, the biggest one I’d ever seen, but I was saving it for my first dissection. Granddaddy had suggested we start with an annelid and work our way up through the various phyla. I figured, the bigger the worm, the better to see its organs and the easier the dissection.
    Nevertheless, I applied myself to the problem of Armand. He was a ground dweller and an omnivore, which meant he would eat all different kinds of animal and vegetable matter. I wasn’t in the mood for digging grubs, and it would take forever to trap enough ants to make him a decent meal, so I said, “Let’s go see what’s in the pantry.”
    We ran to the back porch and into the kitchen, where Viola sat resting between meals, drinking a cup of coffee, Idabelle the Inside Cat keeping her company in her basket by the stove. Viola paged through one of Mother’s ladies’ magazines. She couldn’t read or write but enjoyed looking at the latest fashionable hats. One of them had what appeared to be a stuffed bird of paradise perched in a nest of tulle, one wing swooping artfully over the wearer’s brow. I thought the hat thoroughly ridiculous, along with being a terrible waste of a rare and wonderful specimen.
    â€œWhat do you want?” Viola said, not looking up.
    â€œOh, we’re just a little hungry,” I said. “We thought we’d see what’s in the pantry.”
    â€œAll right, but don’t you touch those pies. They’re for supper, you hear?”
    â€œWe hear.”
    We grabbed the first thing at hand, a hard-boiled egg, and ran back to the barn.
    Armand sniffed at the egg, rolled it around with his claws, and then cracked it open. He ate with messy enthusiasm, grunting all the while. When he’d finished, he retired to the far corner of his cage and resumed his hunched, miserable posture. I stared at him and thought about his environment. He lived in the ground. He was nocturnal. Which meant he liked to sleep in a burrow all day. But here he was in broad daylight without a burrow for protection. No wonder he looked unhappy.
    I said, “I think he needs a hole in the ground, a burrow to sleep in.”
    â€œWe don’t have one.”
    â€œIf you let him go,” I said hopefully, “he could make himself one.”
    â€œI can’t let him go. He’s my Armand. We just have to make one for him.”
    I sighed. We cast about for materials and found a pile of old newspapers and a scrap of blanket used to wipe down the horses after their day’s work. We put these items in the cage where Armand did his usual sniffing routine and then started industriously shredding the paper. He hauled it, along with his blanket, to the back corner of the hutch and, within minutes, had built himself a nest of sorts. He pulled the blanket over himself and thrashed this way and that. Then he grew still. Faint snores emanated from the mound.
    â€œThere,” Travis whispered, “see how happy he is? You’re so smart, Callie Vee. You know everything.”
    Well, of course this puffed me up quite a bit. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all to keep Armand. (Or Dilly.)
    *   *   *
    T HAT NIGHT we lined up to receive our weekly allowance from Father. We stood outside his door in order of age, and he called us in one at a time, doling out a dime apiece to the older boys; the younger boys and I each got a nickel. I understood the reasoning behind this—sort of—but looked forward to the day when I reached dime age. The small ceremony concluded with him admonishing us not to spend it all in one place, which most of us did right away at the Fentress General Store on jujubes, taffy, and chocolate. Father’s point was to teach us the value of saving money, but what we learned instead was how to