The Setting Sun

There is a chill in the air as the battered pickup trundles into the driveway. Its engine coughs feebly as it brakes and halts before a faint, overgrown path. Plumes of soft dust curl around the vehicle, begin to drift and dissipate with the whispering autumn wind.
         
The driver sags into the cracked leather of his seat. An arm flops frail and lifeless out a window; his ancient, grizzled head sinks into his chest. His wasted countenance hosts not a trace of expression as he stares into his dashboard.
         
He sits there for a long time. The muddy amber beams of his headlights are only just beginning to show in the gently fading light. After a while he switches them off, then (as if on afterthought) reaches forward to cut the engine.
         
The door clicks open and he shifts his legs out of the cab. Fully half a minute elapses, though, ere he manages to get on his feet. His efforts are rewarded with a rending wave of pain as the arthritis shrieks into his nerves. But he rides that wave, as always he does; he sets his jaw, grits his dentures, squeezes his debilitating eyes shut. Slowly it passes, and finally he can turn to see…
         
He has emerged into a world boundless and magnificent, a dusk set awash in scintillating hues of gilt and copper. Vast tracts of gently rustling grass lie spread before him. The tips of their blades dance in the crimson fires of the westering sun, run for an eternity of space into the horizon’s dying splendour. Thither there is but a hint of mountain, regal peaks that are barely discernible amid the evening’s brilliance.
         
The immensity of his surroundings overwhelms him, and for many minutes he is lost in its contemplation. His eyes, clouded as they are with cataract and age, gleam but dully in the radiance; one can only surmise how much it is that he truly perceives. Nonetheless, let us at least grant him the liberty of trying, for he has driven for hours upon hours through miles of dark, rolling country to get here – driven more than he had for all of the past decade, and this in the face of his age and pains. But no constable had pulled him over, and here he was. Here, at the place he’d chosen to settle and die.
         
There is a sleepily rising knoll at the end of the path; upon it perches the silhouette of a modest house. The old man reaches into the back of his truck, grasps the first of the handful of possessions he has to his name – this one a faded wood-shell case – and begins to hobble towards his final abode. He has thus far in his existence refused to submit to a cane, and his exertions are well-nigh painful to watch.
         
Still, he makes it to the porch. He must, for there are a good deal more trips to endure before he gets everything inside. The prospect is hardly appealing, and so he gives the front door a miss. He will be retiring, for the moment at least, to the verandah.
         
When he reaches it he sets himself down, knees trembling, into a weathered chair. Then he looks out over the plain again, at the fields which stretch on forever, at the untold splendour, at the mountains so faint and stately and so, so far away. What lies beyond them sierras anyway? He longs to sail past this great expanse of space and over their peaks. Perhaps he will, soon.
         
He has lugged the case along and consigned it to his lap; he proceeds, now, to flick the latches open and lift the cover. With gnarled fingers he draws an old brass trumpet from within. The instrument glints listlessly in the sunset, the flare of its bell blemished, dinged, scratched. He peers into the dull plating and imagines he can see his face in there just like he could in times of old. It is just as well, he thinks, that he cannot – for the odds are he wouldn’t like how it’d changed since.

He grips the instrument like he used to… though he knows he can’t play the thing to save his old hide. He can barely hold it up now and anyway he’d never really got to be good at it. He’d learnt it all wrong and there are some things that just can’t be undone, not in the fleeting span of years that comprise the noon of a human life. All the same it’d mattered so much to him so long ago and now – on this day – just fingering the worn metal is a comfort of sorts.
         
Sitting in that chair he tries to smile, to be at peace and at one with all creation… but he quickly discovers that he cannot. Acres upon acres of hushed beauty stretch on before him but it is a sad, dark, pensive kind of beauty, the kind borne of sorrow and the closing of a long, long chapter. And somewhere out there beneath the vastness of deepening firmament, somewhere lost amid the silent grandeur of evening… is a face that has remained etched into his being. A face which, ironically, he no longer believes he can truly remember.
         
Oh, he will die here; this he knows full well. There are, of course, far worse places to succumb. His regrets and transgressions, they will fade with him… as will the sundered remnants of dreams that never were.
         
A tear winds its way down a wrinkled cheek and he sits there – just sits there motionless – as the sun slips ever closer to the horizon.