The Spectator Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

till I learned how to scratch dead leaves over what I didn’t want to see.
    That was the way it was until my only son, Curtis, who had been nothing but anguish from the time he was breech-born, fell from or let go of his surfboard on the beach at La Jolla. He died an over-age beach bum, evading to the last any obligation to become what his mother and I tried to make or help him be, and like my mother’s, his death lay down accusingly at my door. He was my only descendant, as she was my only ancestor, and I failed both. Chop, chop, there went both past and future. At fifty I had my second crisis—it is remarkable how apt bacteria and other agents of the moral sense can be, how readily they infect and afflict us when we need affliction. This time it was the myocarditis. But all the time while I was wondering if my clock would stop, I felt inside me somewhere, adjacent to or below the ailing heart, a hungry, thirsty, empty, sore, haunted sensation of being unfinished, random, and unattached, as if, even if the heart were working perfectly, there was nothing there for it to run.
    Marcus Aurelius and all, I have never stopped feeling that way.
    Sitting in the bedroom under three hundred watts of contemporary illumination, I found myself reading about the afternoon when Astrid’s brother, Count Eigil Rødding, showed me his museum. Everything in it had been found on his estate. Dig anywhere on that island, and below the picnic plastics of the present you ran into the age of iron, and below that the age of bronze, and below that the age of polished stone, and below that the age of chipped stone, and still below that the age of antler and bone. All of it, straight down from the fourth millennium B.C., was undiluted Danish.
    That impressed me, deracinated as I was. I suppose that an Indian on an Ohio mound might have the sense that down under him his own ancestors went in layers, generation below generation, all of them as native as the corn. But all other sorts of Americans, even those whose families have been on this continent for many generations, seem to me deprived, hanging around the national parks that enclose other people’s archaeology, or else, like me, tourists in a private graveyard hunting hopefully for their own names.
    All those sword blades rusted to brown pizzles, all those drinking skulls and bowls, all those horn spoons and homed helmets, all those bronze axes and stone spearheads and antler flensing tools, were nothing to me but curios. I wanted to own a past the way Rødding owned his. Though I was watchful with Astrid’s brother, I envied him at least as much as I was suspicious of him. He had a lot of things I didn’t especially covet and one I coveted very much: he belonged to something.
    His prize exhibit was under a big bell jar on a table in the middle of the room. When it was first dug up, and the air hit it, it had begun to crumble, and Rødding had rushed it to Copenhagen to get the museum there to put it under glass. Deteriorated or not, it was recognizably human. It lay curled on its side with its knees drawn up, a small, shrunken man with a bent nose and high cheekbones. An odd, cocky, Robin Hood sort of leather hat was on its head. Rawhide cords bound its hands and feet, a rawhide strangling-cord was twisted into the neck under the ear. Its eyes were closed. On its mouth was what must have been the grimace it made when the cord was tightened, but it looked like a whimsical, knowing smile.
    While we were looking at it and talking about it, Rødding for a joke claimed it as his ancestor. I looked at him—he figures as the Prince Orgulus, or Dragon Error, or maybe the windmill, of this romance—and damned if he didn’t look like it, with the same little smirking smile. Shrink him and dry him out, and he could have been the relative that he claimed to be. Maybe, in fact, he was. That was what a real past could do for you.
    Just about then I had an idea. I got