The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page A

gospel of Evelyn Wood through the world. Hamlet in twelve minutes, Tolstoi in twenty. My eye, ranging down the page, saw something coming that I didn’t want to get into—some of the breast beating and the Why, why, why, where did I begin to do it wrong, how did I manage to destroy the one person, besides Ruth, to whom I wished only to be kind and loving? I would have given him a kidney if he had needed it, they could have transplanted my heart. So I became his schoolmaster and his jailer and his judge.
    I was not going to read all that to Ruth. Maybe I will go back and read it over, maybe I will read it many times, and maybe in tears, but I wasn’t going to dump it on her. With only the most momentary hesitation, I flipped that page and turned it under, and when I glanced up briefly I saw that she understood exactly what I had done.
    I went on reading, though what followed wasn’t much more cheerful than what I had censored.
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    Once in college, trying to determine some optical truth or other, we taped distorting spectacles on a laboratory chicken and threw her some feed. At first she would cock her head, take aim, and miss a grain of corn by as much as an inch, but after a while she learned how to correct for the astigmatism we had imposed on her, and once she got the hang of it she was as accurate as ever with either eye.
    Well, right now, while Ruth sleeps and I do not, and this queasy ship carries us through the undiminished seas, I feel like a grain of corn, with the Great Chicken of the Universe standing over me taking aim. I don’t know whether she has binocular vision or not, she may be blind in both eyes for all I know. But she is not going to miss me when she pecks. I have made a point of not believing in distorting spectacles. Any hen worth a dollar can recover from them in a few hours. Bertelson probably thought he had her whammied with his sixty-five years of piety, and look what happened to him.
    Moral: You can’t trust optics, but you can depend on appetite.
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    Again I looked across at Ruth. She made a rueful, sympathetic smile, and her eyes were shiny. She obviously wanted to pat me and kiss me better. “Poor lamb,” she said. “You were so miserable, and fighting yourself so. I guess I was so miserable myself on that voyage I didn’t realize how bad it was for you.”
    Often I submit to her sympathy. I depend on it, in fact. But right then I chose to be flippant. “Despite all my efforts,” I said. “I wore my bruised spirit in my buttonhole, and took frequent whiffs, and turned up my eyes, and you never noticed.”
    â€œBut you didn’t. You didn’t let on to me. You kept it to yourself.”
    â€œAnd why not?” I said. “That’s the beauty of a journal. That’s where you meet the really sympathetic audience.”
    She understood that, too, and it annoyed her. She pulled Catarrh down from under her chin a little too impatiently, and had to disengage his claws from her dressing gown. “Why do you have to jeer?” she said. “Whenever you give away your feelings the least little bit, you have to jeer and cover up.”
    Trapped in my own role, I said, not very originally, “Beneath this harsh exterior beats a heart of stone.”
    She stared at me as if she couldn’t believe me, and the longer she looked at me the more irritated she became. She is not a hard woman to exasperate, especially when I shy away from being comforted or mothered. “Sometimes I think you should take your own advice,” she said.
    â€œWhat advice?”
    â€œTo suffer fools more glady. Beginning with yourself.”
    Having said that, she obviously found herself furious. She startled herself, I think, with her own vehemence. I might easily have said something that would have wounded and frustrated her even more. After forty-five years we can still, if we let ourselves, bristle and bump one another around like a