She spread her soft, white hands in a gesture that indicated quite clearly that she had nothing more to offer on the subject. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Albert. It’s over. I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
His mind was locking up again. “Wow,” he said quietly, the hurt coating his voice with a quavering thickness. “Louise … I love you.”
“I’m sorry.”
Then, with nothing more than a defeated shrug, she stood up and walked away.
And as Albert Stark sat among the long shadows that striped the golden glaze of the dying afternoon, he knew his life was over.
The sunset streaked across the Arizona sky, its miles and miles of titanic painted strokes illuminating the distant mesas, turning them a velvety pink. To an observer visiting the territory for the first time, the nightly visual feast would have been a breathtaking sight to behold. And though the spectacle was a regular one for him, viewed every evening from the front porch of his little farmhouse, Albert himself was not immune to its eye-popping chromatic sumptuousness. Tonight, however, he took no notice.
He rode toward his farm, stricken by a deadness of limb that twice nearly caused him to fall off his horse. Luckily for Albert, however, Curtis had been with him for almost eight years, and never was there a more reliable animal. Any horse will adapt to the rhythms of its rider, but equestrian skill had deftly avoided Albert; he was unbalanced and uncoordinated. His friends had all assumed that enough years in the saddle would solve the problem, but he simply had never improved.
But Curtis had. The horse would instinctively adjust his own weight to accommodate Albert’s lapses, an astonishing mark of intuitive protectiveness that made Albert love him more than he loved any human being.
Except, of course, Louise.
Her face hovered before him all the way home, the ghost of a severed appendage. In the image, she burst forth with an amaranthine smile that spoke lovingly of every shared experience now rendered hollow. That Louise still exists somewhere, he told himself. I just have to find her. Only when he neared the farm did he begin to emerge from the delusional haze. The bleating of his sheep jerked him back to reality with a sharp stab of sound.
Albert grappled for control of his catatonic stare, and surveyed his withering corral. The wooden fences were crumbling and badly in need of repair. And, as usual, there were sheep all over the place. Some were inside the corral, others were out in the yard, and, sure enough, there was Bridget, looking lost and confused up on the roof. For the life of him, Albert could not figure out how the fuck she kept getting up there. In his mind, he could hear Louise’s admonishing voice. She may have been wrong to dump him, but she was right about one thing: He was a shitty sheepman.
Albert shuffled into the farmhouse and hung his hat on the wooden peg next to the door. His mother and father, Elsie and George, glanced up from their wooden chairs on the other side of the room. For as long as Albert could remember, they had sat in those chairs all evening, every evening, Elsie sewing and George reading the Bible. And with both of them in their early seventies, that didn’t seem likely to change.
“You’re late,” his father grunted.
“For what?” Albert asked.
There was a pause. “Fair enough,” his father answered, and returned to his scripture.
That would be the extent of the evening’s conversation. All in all, a lively, textured discussion compared to most nights.
Albert retreated into his dark little room and knelt down to reach under the bed. He pulled out a small, unmarked wooden box and carried it out to the front porch. The sun was sinking fast below the horizon. Albert lit a kerosene lamp and placed it next to the rickety old rocking chair that probably had only another six months left before it collapsed beneath some unlucky behind. He sat down and opened the box.
Inside were sepia-toned memories: the grand history of the great lovers Albert Stark and Louise Daniels. In actuality, there were only three pictures, but since photographs were hard to come by, Albert considered it a treasure trove. As he stared longingly at the shadows of better days frozen in time, he heard the approaching clip-clop of hoofbeats. He looked up and saw Edward and Ruth approaching in their tottery little buggy. A happy couple, he thought, with a twinge of resentment, then quickly and silently chided himself for the unwarranted burst of negativity. These were his friends, and they wanted to help. Nonetheless, his reaction was only human: To the man in a secure relationship, love was a bountiful feast to be enjoyed by all in attendance. But to the man without a companion, the feast was watched bitterly from outside through a frosted window, with the growl of a starving belly gurgling up from below.