[Chapter 1 - "Adjustments"]
"Talk, damn it. Can't ya hear?!"
There hadn't been time for adjustments on her part because they remained unknown. On his part there hadn't been time because he made adjustments for no one. She was there on his ranch without any form of documentation and absolutely nothing to say.
It drove him mad.
"Who sent ya?" He was full of suspicion she could not understand. "Where'd ya come from?" He pressed; his rifle at his side while one hand held a knife and the other hand held an apple. "What'd ya come for?" He stilled his hand, the blade of the knife stopping right inside the apple's core. "Speak. Damn it, speak!"
She sat there in the far corner. Her eyes wide with wonder. Everything near her strange, everyone near her cold. 'Why had she been found there?' she had wondered after her first night there.
"Ya don't speak. Ya won't eat." He muttered ruthlessly as he worked the knife through the fruit the rest of the a way. One half of the crisp apple he devoured in two greedy bites. The other half he placed on the wooden table to the side of him; his eyes challenging her to make any kind of sound.
She did not because she simply could not.
Percy knew his father was up to something and with just the right amount of liquor in him, he always found the courage to ask.
"What's my good ole Pa up to these days?" He began one night as he drunkenly sat in tall grass that grew so close to the marker that divided his father's land.
"Jesus, Percy." He growled as he began loading his gun. "Didn't I give ya orders?"
"To what? Tend to the cattle?" He began laughing stupidly. "Pa, I ain't got no business wrestlin' cattle. I'm too good for that."
"Good for nothin' piece of shit..." He snapped the gun close. "If your ma was here to see-"
"Yeah, well, she's not." His face now serious, but the corners of his mouth twitching with delight only brought on by booze and by power. "Ya saw to it, too-"
"...the hell ya talkin' 'bout?" His expression pained. "ya know damn well she had gotten ill."
"I never did see it, but I've heard the stories—sure."
He steadied his arm preparing for the rumble that would come after he pulled the trigger. When it was all over he stood there looking into the distance.
"Ya know I never did understand the reason why ya fired all them bullets just to watch 'em go nowhere." He stood behind his father a little, his hand gripping drunkenly on his father's shoulder. "Ya say you've shot a whole mountain of men, but after seeing something like this?" He made a tsking sound with his tarnished mouth, "...ya just don't seem to be the type, Pa, 'cause all you're doin' is wastin' bullets."
"Quit talkin'!" He had grown tired. "Pull yourself together and git back to ya job."
He laughed unphased by his father's incredible disgust of him. "Sure, Pa." He snorted as he turned around and stumbled in the direction he knew like the back of his hand. "Whatever ya say, Pa."
He stood there watching his own blood relative wander aimlessly through the field like he wandered aimlessly through his life. It made his stomach turn, but his empty heart blocked any upchuck from spilling from his mouth. Turning around he fired a few more times before he began to feel the pressure on his shoulder.
If she had had any idea of what being a prisoner felt like she might have felt that way on and off throughout the times she spent alone, free to roam around throughout the few rooms he had left open to her. There hadn't been any ball and chain attached to any part of her body nor had there been steel bars that decorated his windows, but there had still been something inhuman to the set-up he had left her to breathe in.
It tore at his insides in small doses; split seconds of difficult shame, but his heavy heart and his narrow mind forced him him to remind himself of who she could be and what her purpose was for not only being on his land, but for making herself known to his naked eyes. She could be trouble and if there was one thing he did not tolerate, it was trouble—trouble against him and his people, whether they took honor in being related to him in any sense of the word or not.
He had been forced to give her the apple when he had arrived home after he had gone shooting. The last thing he needed or wanted was a dead, unknown woman on his hands. He was sure he could dispose of her body without anyone from town seeing him, nor questioning him, but whatever that thing was inside of him—that thing that always served as a constant reminder to whatever that was left inside of him of being human, would haunt him—it would break him eventually, and he certainly could not have that. He certainly could not break.
Percy was nowhere to be found inside or out. He hadn't grown alarmed, he knew his son spent enough time, enjoyably, hanging around the saloons and disrupting the peace to ever think about straying far from town He ruled the town respectfully with an iron fish, but his son ruled it shamefully with the family name.
"Ya eat, but ya won't speak." He shook his head at her while striping off his coat. "...dunno what I'm gonna do wit ya..." He hummed to himself while hanging coat over a wooden chair. "...dunno how much more of this I can take..." He pulled at the bandana around his neck. It was dirty and damp with sweat. "Ya won't tell me your name. Ya won't do what I say—won't come when I call." He balled the material in his rough hands all the while looking towards the ground, his mud covered boots staring back at him. "I'm not gonna let ya go until ya tell me what ya came for." His tone was as rough as it had been earlier that day, but this time there had been a slight shakiness to it that indicated to him that he was nervous about this entirely new kind of situation whether she picked up on it or not.
He turned to look over his shoulder. When he locked eyes with her, she held the same expression. This time though her lips had been parted slightly. It was the hunger for food—any kind of it so long as it was more.
He turned his back to her. Ignoring his coat, he went over to a side door that had been part of the room. Pulling it open he disappeared from it and returned moments later with a few logs. Placing them inside his fireplace, he stuck a match against a stone and held it near to the dried leaves and dry twigs until they caught.
Rolling his sleeves up, he disappeared into the other room. To him it was known as a kitchen, to her it had been known as a place where she could find water and some darkened liquid she had curiously kept away from. Using some water that had been left in a large glass jar, he scrubbed at his filthy hands. All the dirt and germs from a day out and about washed away from his skin and circled the rusty drain.
Meal time had never been a problem in his household. He had the fresh meat of his own cattle. The juice from his own cactus. The vegetables from his own garden. The fruit from his own trees. The water from his own well. Never once had he ever gone hungry, at the same time, never once did he offer any of his richness to the poor.
Now though, with the scent of his food cooking from the help of his water that he had ordered a few of his workers to fetch from his well in the blazing sun earlier that day, he had set out to feed someone who, for all he knew, was poor.
"Go on. Eat it." He placed the bowl across from him on a wobbly wooden table he constantly reminded himself to fix. "It's good. Hot, but good." He commented on his own food without having tasted it yet. It was his ego that insisted that everything he took the time for was simply the best.
She hadn't moved though, even as he chopped away at the contents of his own bowl.
"I said go on—eat it!" His voice louder now. "Damn it..." He growled, leaving his bowl behind and grabbing hers along with the unsecured wooden table. "Ya don't deserve this." He said before setting it down in front of her, "But I ain't gonna watch ya starve—so go on, take it." He tapped the spoon a little. "Eat it."
She sniffed the air in front of her. After a second, she went to reach for the spoon. Taking it out of the bowl she looked at it curiously. She had seen him put it in his mouth every time he had stuck it in his bowl, so a moment later she did what she remembered seeing. To him she had gotten the message that the food had been for her, but in her mind she had felt as if a tiny window had been opened on the inside—one that allowed this knew found knowledge to breeze in and give her a bit of light.