Written for NaNoWriMo 2011, for mah own lovely Suh'th'n belle.
Per the (much appreciated) guidelines, this chapter has been edited for grammar and spelling, but...is still a NaNo. For wannabe-Twain-esque vernacular reasons, intentional misspellings/imaginary words in dialogue have been preserved.
Warning: This story contains ruthless amounts of cowboy references and is probably riddled with historical inaccuracies.
Disclaimer: Hanna is Not a Boy's Name and its characters belong to the amazing and talented Tessa Stone. I have merely borrowed them, dressed them up in silly costumes, and spent the month of November parading them around the prairie.
Chapter One: Scarlet O'Hara
It wasn't home.
Home was knee deep in greenery by this time of year the ground lush and full of life, pushing up against the carefully tended avenues that led to his home, somehow never quite spilling onto them. The trees would be heavy with cicadas, with honey-colored summer sunlight dripping from their leaves, and it would never be quiet. The world would vibrate through long days and into nights warm enough to swim in, even as the season began to lap up against its end, and meanwhile the fields would blossom into cauliflower-thick buds of white, aching for the fall and the harvest.
He could understand how they felt. His own heart was still amongst his luggage, yet to be delivered, and he could feel the pull of that distance.
The land around him now seemed so barren, full of parched yellow grass that made him think of winter, despite the late summer heat. He tried to imagine what those fields would look like the rest of the year, tried to tell himself that it had simply been ill timing. Nowhere could possibly persist in being this depressing. At least, he had to hope.
Previously, standing on his freshly whitewashed porch, he could have pointed out everything within view - the edges of his land were lost in gentle slopes and pretty treelines, so there had been nowhere visible from there that he had not explored. He owned no less land now a great deal more, in fact but this land was flat in all directions, fading out of sight against mountains the names of which he did not know, and there were probably not days enough in two lifetimes to get to know it all.
It was a large, empty, lonely sort of feeling.
"...Ah, well."
That was quite enough of that. There were more memories, of course, but not all of them were so pleasant. It was those less pleasant thoughts that had chased him far away from those pretty trees and those aching fields, out into the brown plains where no one knew him, and where even the unpainted wood of his new home faded into the landscape. So in the end there was nothing to do but make the best of it.
He stepped down from the porch and onto the dry ground, feeling the unusual hardness of it through the thin soles of his shoes. There was a great deal of dust in the air, and everything felt just a little bit dirty. He would, perhaps, have to reconsider his usual attire.
In the summer, when every effort had to be made to fend off the cloying heat, he preferred white. He was, at that moment, dressed in it from head to foot - the picture, he liked to think, of a respectable Southern gentleman. There were, after all, quite a lot of expectations back home, especially during this very social time of year, and disappointing those was...inconvenient, to say the least.
These things in mind, his suit was neatly tailored, a delicate linen affair that he could feel the prairie wind through, despite the shirt and vest beneath. This last - a subtly floral, cream-colored jacquard - was one of only two exceptions to his palette, the other being a neat black cross-tie held with a small silver pin. Even his cufflinks were lacquered to match - and he could sense those, too, picking up a thin film of Western dirt.
All the same, it was not the time to worry about that, either. He caught himself examining the already graying hem of his sleeve, and flicked it dismissively back to his side, starting off down the road ahead. There were no guests to receive, at least at present, and as far as he knew there was in general no one to impress. So he would just have to trust that even here, he would be able to find someone to do some adequate cleaning, and let things be for present. He was already dressed, and anxious to find something to do with himself, rather than stand on the porch trapped between an empty house and an empty landscape.
The pathway that led to the edges of his land was not the flat, paved avenue that twined beneath those remembered trees. It was smooth enough for feet or hooves but would probably present some problems for anything with wheels. It was not straight; it followed some imagined slope, or perhaps it wound around buildings that no longer existed, until it came to the long fence that bordered His and Theirs.
He watched the edge loom up as he made his way down the path, glancing this way and that occasionally, or trying to pick out the far-off buildings of his neighbors' homes. They were quite a ways out, but visible, if only in one direction. He could see them peppering the distance between himself and the mountains, surrounded by large tracks of long brown grass. This close, he could see that the grass was alive and well, just not the verdant green he was used to. It was a comforting thought, and he felt a bit better about things.
Of course it would have been ridiculous to attempt and walk the whole of his lands, especially without assistance and in this heat. But he would walk until he tired, and see what there was to see. It would give him some time to think.
He had a great deal to think about. The world had changed, and quite suddenly, and not in any way he had expected. His life had been a very constant thing - something he could be sure of, day to day. It had not necessarily been a life he had chosen, but it had been his, and he had enjoyed it.
Ples Tibenoch was the type of man who had been born into his life. Of course everyone was, in their way, but he would not imagine so completely. Most people made decisions, somewhere along the line. Even a man from a long line of carpenters was still just a carpenter, and if he decided to become a baker, the ripples that resulted would be small. Perhaps his father would be disappointed; perhaps his wife would berate him occasionally after dinner, but that was all.
It was different to inherit a title; it was different to inherit a home, a business, a staff. Especially if that staff, too, had been largely born and not hired into their work. You could not leave that so easily, not without changing a great deal more than you could ever plan for. And so from the moment of his birth - being a boy, and as it turned out, an only child - Ples had been groomed for his position, and advised of his responsibilities. From his birth, he had known what was expected of him, and while he had not always enjoyed it, he had generally performed very well.
And then -
Well, suffice to say that under very special circumstances, it was possible for such a man to change professions. It had not been easy, nor pleasant, and he wondered not for the first time what would become of the people he had left behind. His mother had long since moved to a cold city, far North and in the opposite direction - a place it took a letter a week to get to so as of a few days before, there were no longer any Tibenochs in the house that had so long held their name.
He did not care to know whose house it would be now - he had left the sale and all the business of the estate in other hands. Or rather, whether he cared or not, he did not know, and would not. There was no looking back, no checking in. There could not be, because correspondence required a return address, and that he would give to no one.
He shook the train of thought. He had problems of his own, and he had decided weeks before that there was nothing to be done about it.
He was entering an entirely new business, although it was still a business, and so he was convinced the basics remained the same. Strange to think he'd be relying on the whims of animals to bring in a profit, though. Plants seemed so much more docile, more predictable, and of course the same went for people, at least as compared to a literal herd of cows. He was not entirely certain, despite all his reading, exactly what one did with them. By all accounts you simply did your best to keep others from making off with them, and for the most part just let them do as they would, and hoped that nature would take its course.
It was a very strange thought. Of course he himself had had little to do with the daily tending of his fields, but he had walked down those broad lanes, had watched those plants grow each year from sprout to full, leafy maturity, and he knew how to discern what he ought to have someone else do, if nothing else. And plants were, one had to hope, in exactly the same place from day to day, at least barring human interference. You could chart and count them, you could track their growth. How one could keep track of a mess of almost wild cattle, he had no idea.
It was going to make bookkeeping rather difficult.
Shaken again from his musings, he looked around. He had come quite a ways, he realized as he looked back. He could no longer make out where the pathway was amongst the grass - but then again that might just have happened more quickly than one might expect, in this flat, mostly unmarked land. Something would need to be done about that, too - if not foliage, then perhaps some posts, to show the line of the drive up to the house. Even in this sort of place, some things just would not do.
There were coming to be quite a lot of thoughts stacking up inside his mind, and he had neglected to bring anything to jot them down on. But he was faced with nothing but time, really; he could feel it ticking away into the emptiness, a void with no social obligations to speak of, not yet. Not even anyone to call upon, just now.
"More's the pity," he said to himself, pursing his lips. He ran a hand back through his hair, and he could feel the weight of the dust in it. It would be more than time for a bath when he went inside.
One step at a time.
Ordinarily he might have trailed his fingers along the fence as he walked, but this one was made of clawed wire - to keep the eventual animals in, he supposed, or perhaps to keep other things out. The thought made him a bit uneasy, and so - as he was beginning to feel the soil on his clothes anyway - he cut back across the broad fields towards the ranch house. He would need, soon, to collect a staff, although he had heard it was not as difficult to find one as to keep it - and for the first time in his life he might have to lock his doors against them.
For the moment there was only himself, but for all his fine breeding he could at least run a bath. They'd offered to send someone, but he had wanted to be alone, at least at first. Had to see, in fact, just how alone he could manage to be, because for all that the New World was spreading rapidly out towards the far coast he was not sure even that would be far enough, if -
- hot water.
Hot water and soap, and everything would be so very much improved. He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it neatly beside the door, easing that closed behind him and sliding the lock into place. It was already beginning to feel like a familiar action, although heretofore not one he'd often bothered with. Too many people had too many keys, back home. Now there was only one, at least to this door. He touched his hand briefly to the pocket of his slacks, feeling for the small, reassuring shape of that key. It was a new nervous habit, to match the way his other hand flickered so often towards the pocket of his vest, and its precious contents.
His shoes clicked down the hallway, and maybe he imagined the echo, but all the same the house felt just as empty as the land around it. It was much smaller than his previous home - after all, he intended to live mostly by himself - but the individual rooms felt larger. They were low-ceilinged and broad, full of straight lines and, at the moment, empty space. He would clutter them soon enough, he supposed. Things would start arriving as early as the next day - brand-new ordered furniture, none of it familiar, although all of it would be his. In name, anyway.
He wasn't sure if the tightness in his chest was anticipation or anxiety. Whatever the feelings, though, he had to remember that despite all appearance to the contrary -
This was, in fact, home.
At least for now.
