Something to Be Desired Read Online Free PDF

thing he could find, a back number of a gardeners’ magazine, an October issue. Inside, and perhaps it was his mood, he discovered that nothing is more autumnal than a bad writer discussing apples. And too, there was something about wild geese mating for life that made him wish to return to waterfowling and shoot till his barrels were hot.
    Things started to become more final to him as the plane flew north. There was nothing beneath it but ocean, and in a short while the sun went down. When you are drafted in wartime, he thought, it must feel like this. You are called and you will serve. No, that wasn’t quite it. The point was, he longed to feel the fatality of his action. When he had given his boy a hug, it was clear that with little more emphasis the child would fall straight into the middle of this. So their departure was without emphasis, staged as a clear fork in the road. They would be moved by forces to differing sections of the grid.
    In any event, the process of stain had begun; he would not have known what to call it as it sank deeper inside him, nor been able to assess the turbulence and damage that was to come; but it was certainly shame.

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    Later he would think it was early in the morning. He was going back some, but it would have had to have been before breakfast. He remembered he could smell someone cleaning a cat box at the hired man’s, and there was an empty barbecue-chip bag, the big size, flapping away in the sage that grew to the door. Toward the house, a cat was curved over the wheel of the manure-spreader, staring for mice in the shadows under the box. And there was a sprinkler whirling on a yellow stool out in the garden; he supposed it must have run all night. It had taken Lucien nearly a month to make it from the county courthouse to here, an hour’s drive. Lucien’s unexpected appearance at Emily’s hearing had been their longest and most intimate time together in all those years.
    Lucien pressed the door shut on the sedan. There were willows alongside the garden, and birds continually speared down from them into the berries. There were numerous signs she was taking care of the place. He had put all he could borrow into making her bail; so these small sedentary indications were important. Still, it would take more than that to assure her being around on trial date.
    The heat wave had gone overnight into the first edge of fall; the Crazies had come out of the shimmer and stood clear and separate above the foothills. Lucien was going to be there until the trial in late fall. He had an assortment of sporting trifles and equipage: rod, rifle, shotgun and a small pointer bitch curled in thesedan, a dog perfectly trained for the silence of the high plains hotels he had frequented. Such hotels exclude the barking, ill-mannered dog, some any at all. For the latter, Lucien had prepared the dog, Sadie, by teaching her to travel short distances, silently, in the bottom of his duffel. Her reward was silent dancing behind the locked door of the room, for high-protein baby snacks from the grocer. Watching her soar amiably past the television and the cheap furniture for midair interceptions of miniature sausages always prepared Lucien for the long sleeps he required to stalk the plains by day. It consoled him as his solitude deepened.
    Lucien realized the hired man was looking at him. He must have been thereabouts all along, as he came up past the log chicken house with a border collie close at heel and silent. He was a tall man in his thirties with a mustache waxed off to points, and severely undershot boots. He was what they called around there “punchy”-looking—from cow-puncher, not punch-drunk. It was pretty clear he wasn’t going to say anything. So Lucien told him who he was there to see, and he said about what. And Lucien told him that he had made Emily’s bail. The man indicated the house.
    Lucien must not have been comfortable, because instead of going directly to the house, he began