Wild Life Read Online Free Page B

will do you some good.”
    â€œWhat’s ‘yearn’?” Jules whispered to Stuband, and Stuband, who is an amateur reader and has taught himself the rudiments of vocabulary, said, “It’s to pray after something.” George corrected him mildly. “Ma doesn’t pray. She’s a Freethinker.” Stuband then said, “It’s to set your heart for it,” and got to the real point: “School’s called off if it snows.”
    This brought a light into the faces of the two youngest, quite as if the news pertained to the moment, though an entire Sunday divides them from their next possible encounter with the schoolhouse. In these isolated precincts the school term is intermittent at best, commencing when a teacher can be found and ceasing when one cannot, so my sons have become more than a little spoiled from home schooling. When the six of us are left to our own devices, I teach the children Thucydides & Co. in the mornings, and then—having encouraged them to form museums, to collect fossils and butterflies and to dissect worms—I let them run wild in the woods and fields for the rest of the day while I scribble, which is, more or less, the curriculum famously advocated by Seton and his fellow Woodcrafters as being advantageous to the active minds and bodies of the young.
    Melba at last brought round my plate, and while I bolted down the cold roast and mashed potatoes, the lima beans, the new bread and butter, the boys brought up memorable snowfalls and then memorable teachers. The Island School, having lost a string of teachers to the custody of lonely bachelors, has lately taken to hiring girls whose principal qualification is their seeming unsuitableness as brides—hard-featured and repellent girls of vicious disposition and shiftless intelligence. I expect my sons to become wise through teaching one another the canny sufferance of inept teachers.
    Stuband kept out of this discussion—he has a quiet center, which I suppose is due to the difficulties of his life—but then he cleared his throat and made an attempt to speak across the boys to me. “I’m glad to see the sky clear off some,” he said. “There’s no good to plow while this rain keeps up.” He said this in an interested way, but one of his shortcomings is a notable lack of conversational themes. The boys were arguing about whether Miss Parrish kept a thumbscrew in her desk drawer, and whether the little vial in the deep pocket of her duster contained itching powder or arsenic, and I’m afraid my ear must have been taking this in with somewhat more attention than poor Stuband’s weather talk. He went a few words further, seeming to speak to the fork as he pushed it along the edge of his empty plate; and then reversing his fork to travel the opposite way around the china, the poor man lapsed silent.
    In the following silence—well, not silence, as the older boys began to give the younger an elaborate account of a girl whose fingernails had turned black from a teacher’s hammering them with a handy piece of stove wood—I studied the shape of Stuband’s big gray mustache, a smoothly down-turned and pleated crescent very like the horns of an Arctic musk ox, and when he became aware of this, he looked up. There are times when I feel under his scrutiny: as if he has taken me into his hands like a book and is studying the pages.
    I was driven to say, “You know, Stuband, there are some very strange things going on in the world today, and the world is flying forward just as fast as it can.” His look became startled, so that I was freed to plow ahead. “Encke’s comet,” I said. “Blindness cured by a miraculous drug. Moons circling Jupiter. A tunnel under the Hudson River. We shall soon be piping natural gas from the sloughs into our houses for lights and for cooking.” I then began at some length on the
future of agriculture: in