Voices out of Saigon (and its complete seven linking stories)

A riveting story, and Novelette, of notable achievement






By Poet Laureate

Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D.


Awarded the National Prize of Peru, “Antena Regional”: The best writer for 2006 for promoting culture (in Poetry & Prose)

Illustrations by the Author


Copyright © 2008
“Voices out of Saigon”
(…and other linking stories)
By Dennis L. Siluk Ed.D.


Recent Awards of:
Dennis L. Siluk


Awarded the Prize Excellence: The Poet & Writer of 2006 by
Corporacion de Prensa Autonoma (of the Mantaro Valley of Peru)

Awarded the National Prize of Peru, "Antena Regional": The best of 2006 for promoting culture

Poet Laureate of San Jeronimo de Tunan, Peru (2005); and the
Mantaro Valley (8-2007) (Awarded the (Gold) Grand Cross of the City (2006))

Lic. Dennis L. Siluk, awarded a medal of merit, and diploma from the Journalist College of Peru, in August of 2007, for his international attainment

On November 26, 2007, Lic. Dennis L. Siluk was nominated, Poet Laureate of Cerro de Pasco and received recognition as an Illustrious Visitor of the City of Cerro de Pasco, and Huayllay

“Union” Mathematic School (Huancayo, Peru), Honor to the Merit to: Lic. (Ed.D.) Dennis Lee Siluk, (Awarded) Poet and Writer Excellence 2007, for contributing to the culture and regional identity, Huancayo. December 1, 2007, Signed: Pedro Guillen, Director

The Sociologist School of Peru, Central Region granted to
Dr. Dennis Lee Siluk, Writer Laureate for his professional contribution in the social interaction of the towns and rescue of their identity. Huancayo December 6, 2007 —Lic. Juan Condori –Senior Member of the Sociologist School

The Association of Broadcaster of the Central Region, of Peru, nominated Dr. Dennis Lee Siluk Honorary Member for his works done on the Central Region of Peru; in addition, the Mayor of Huancayo, Freddy Arana Velarde, gave Dr. Siluk, ‘Reconocimiento de Honor,’ and ‘Personaje Ilustre…’ status (December, 2007).

El Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano Región Centro otorga el presente: “Diploma de Honor”, Al Dr. Dennis Lee Siluk por su valiosa contribución a la difusión de los valores culturales andinos. Huancayo – Peru, diciembre 28, of 2007Directora de Cultura Diana V. Casas R. and Alfonso Velit Núñez
Presidente del Consejo Directivo




Contents


Voices out of Saigon

There was a Lady

From the Hayloft

Early Morning Hounds

A Sad Boy

Louisiana Girl

Dr. Whitman
(In two parts, part two being:
‘Bishop’s Ploy’)



Note: in the back see “Other Books by the Author” and Index of, Names, Places, and Dates

See: Back Index for: Names, Dates and Locations


۩




Voices out of Saigon

Corporal Langdon Abernathy


Langdon Abernathy came into our company in August of 1969. Where from, I heard it was Fayetteville, North Carolina, so he said, I couldn’t swear on it, wouldn’t swear to it, or bet on it. But he was young then a man of nineteen, or at least nineteen-years old when I met him, because I remember him saying when he left, three years after he came, three years after we met, and his tour of duty was up, he was twenty-one, and he had reenlisted to stay in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, two times, that’s right, two times he reenlisted to stay in this hole, in this godforsaken land, he extended his duty for her, and he must had spent a year in the states in the Army before being stationed here at the 611. They were going to get married, those two, they even wrote each other, while thousands of miles apart.
He had fallen in love with a woman twice his age, or at least half his age, she was thirty-one years old, looked thirteen, small, and pretty as a jaybird. She caught my eye many of times, she knew it, but she wouldn’t admit it, I’m sure, if I’d had said so, and mentioned it to Langdon, well it would have been a fight, so I left well enough alone. She lived—off and on—in his hutch with him, had it sectioned off, the mess-hall (Army kitchen) sergeant allowed it, no one said a word about it, bore him a son in it, and that was a year before he left, went back to North Carolina. No one—not even him—ever met Vang’s parents, or for that matter, any of her relatives. She’d always say, “Day in Saigon, no time to come, make money, got to eat…”something like that.
The only ones she talked to at the mess hall were the clean up girls, Zuxin and her friend Ming, I suppose they were the only ones she trusted with her secrets, Vang was half Vietnamese and Hmong, and Zuxin and Ming Chinese I think. Ming still works in the mess hall, it’s the same one, the same girl that was here when Vang was here.
I heard she owned some property in Saigon, a house, that is all I heard at the time, and couldn’t put two and two together, so I said nothing, but Smile Judson, a friend from Alabama, he’s now out in the bush, he came in now and then for R & R (Rest and Recuperation), here at Cam Ranh Bay, stayed at those little houses over yonder, as he’d say, said he saw her in Saigon, with a family, heard her say, “You come to my house,” I didn’t say a word on this, didn’t know what it all entailed back then, and that was my secret from Langdon I suppose.
But before that event, I already knew something was up, fishy, and a few of us others here at the 611, had already listened to Zuxin talking to Smiley; he was talking a trifle more than loudly one night drunk, with her, and he liked her, and he got a little cold and ruthless—he could get that way when drunk, I had to backed him up a few times in a fight—anyhow, from a few tales told by Zuxin, who had told him during these bouts of drunkenness, Vang was no saint, and even and Ming agreed with that—both who had dealings with Vang, said some things I do not want to admit, and out of courtesy and consideration, and respect for the deceased, I will simply say, she had a few more affairs than she admitted to having, especially when Langdon went home the first year for a thirty-day leave, and came back, reenlisted to be with her.
So when his son was born, he felt responsible, never checked if the child was his, but it looked like his, I believe it was his, and when the boy could walk he looked even more like him, so like I say, he came back, and we all kind of felt it was for good, not necessarily for the better, that he’d marry her and stay in Vietnam, we all of course got surprised.

After the second year, when he was going home again, he was sending some letters, if not fits of rage back to his mother, she wanted him not to marry her, and come home, talk about it. He asked me what he should do, I said, and perhaps I should not have said it, because it did something to him, especially with Vang, call it unpardonable outrage, because she didn’t seem to care one way or the other, yet she seemed to be committed to him nonetheless, I said, “Let your mind be your conscious,” and I think he was going to stay in Vietnam, and marry her, but that unpardonable outrage came when she said, “No,” she wouldn’t marry him, not yet, or then anyhow. She said she wanted his mother to be happy with the marriage, and that perhaps he should go home and talk to her. She was digging into the family, digging up more hate ridden motives to bring home to his mother, he had attempted to put this to rest by saying he’d marry her, and in the proper time to give the child a worthy name, his will was offered and denied.
We were not surprised to hear he was coming back, but as a civilian. I learned this from a post card he sent me, here I’ll show you, I got it in my pocket, and I’ll read it:

“Serge, I struck one final blow fighting with my family, I am leaving them to be with Vang, she is with her family in Saigon, I hear, she is there because of her father’s death, Zuxin wrote from Saigon. My young one is doing fine, perhaps because he is my son, and strong as an ox. I will be leaving soon, father was acting as a mediator between me and mom, she has some kind of a premonition on this matter of me going back to Vietnam—it is not like I am running away from home, which I did when I was fifteen. When I return, come see me in Saigon, I will find a cheap hotel, your friend as always, Corporal Abernathy.”


The Return

When I got to Saigon, on a two week leave, Langdon was already there, he had his apartment, and I saw something unpleasant upon his naked body, his legs, groin area, naked chest. I guess he had been there going on a six-months before I arrived. It was just one big room, and square, furnished for the most part, with awkward looking furniture. The bed looked like he was sleeping alone a lot; it seemingly sagged too much in one place.
“We still haven’t got married Serge...” he told me.
“Have you seen much of your son?” I asked sitting down on a thin wobbly wooden chair.
The room looked as if it was peaceful, too ordinary, too peaceful, too lonely like, and so unlike Langdon.
“She’s working a lot, says she got to make money, I brought my savings, all $8,000-dollars of it.” He told me.
I just looked about, things cluttered.
“Make yourself at home,” he shouted, and he got out of bed, thin as a bean, and put a cloths line up, in a corner of the big room, and picked up a pillow, one of two from his bed, a blanket, and threw it at me, saying:
“This is home…Serge!”

Apparently she came and left when she wanted, and stayed only until she got what she wanted, he had paid the rent up for three more months at this point, three dollars a day or $75-dollars a month, or $300-dollars for three months. I suppose it was a deal, and he took it. He shouted out the window often that month, thinking this or that girl was Vang coming to see him, but the majority of times it wasn’t, it was a stranger, and he’d look at me odd, and say, “Woops,” and go back to having a beer or a shot of whisky, or some of that Japanese Sake, even a joint now and then.
There was a few times the first week, I saw him not moving, just paralyzed, said to me, I think it was to me, “Get these damn bugs off me!”
I never saw any bugs, but he did I guess, methodically building a case of insanity for himself.
Then one night, while drinking Vang keeping us company, she started flirting with me, she was different now, she didn’t care if he saw her flirt, and he flung the mattress on his bed out of the window, like an insane man. I hurried furiously to get it and bring it back before someone else got it, and when I returned, Vang was down the hall, walking into another room. At that point I realized she was only wearing an Army jacket of Langdon’s, and had told him she had to go to take a bath, in the hallway bathroom. I didn’t say anything, he had come too far to believe anything other than, elegance in her, and for me to say different, was only to bring in fretted rage.

I was real worried about Langdon; I mean I was scared for myself likewise, but I’d make sure when I got back to the 611, I’d get a blood test, and whatever else I needed to see if I had syphilis.
At least he, Langdon, didn’t have time to hide his sores from me. I looked at his hands and feet, they had a faint rash, the second week I was there, and his lips were getting sores on them little round sores, with the rash I just mentioned, reddish brown on the hands, palms, spots on his feet, he had a fever the whole month I was there at first I was dismayed, until I noticed swollen glands, a sore throat, headaches, weight loss—as I had seen all in the first week I was there: yes I told myself, he had the whole shebang of known symptoms to the disease, I hate to mention its name, and in perhaps the second or later stage it was for him, I got worried for myself, the pillow, the blankets he gave me, he slept on them, with those sores around his genitals, rectum, now even his mouth. I told him time and again to go get a blood test, but it was too late, his brain was damaged I swear it was, he had what they call developmentally delayed reactions, seizures at night and during the day, even in the mornings, and that ugly word dementia. But he said if he went for help, they would put him in the hospital and he would not see Vang, she’d run off to wherever she did at night—and he never knew where, and she never told him where—he never even knew she was married, and that her husband lived in Saigon (when possible, or allowable), with her and two other kids, besides his.
If Vang had Syphilis, it was in some kind of late stage recall period. I mean, she had it for sure, I would guess, and was unaware of it, but was now aware of Langdon’s situation, and therefore had to be aware of her’s; and in time, perhaps years or months, it would show up on her, like it had on Langdon. How could she not be?
I’m no specialist in disease analysis area, but it was becoming obvious, and the child, yes the poor little child, I wondered if Vang carried the child during her early stages of her disease, and during her pregnancy. If, the child would show some kind of signs, sores, I would have known, or had a good guess, but he didn’t and I saw that he didn’t but who knows.
I told Vang privately to bring her boy to get some penicillin, have a blood test, the same thing I told Langdon, and for her to do the same. She may have, I don’t know, she was a woman of reason, and Langdon, was turning out to be the opposite, a man no longer able to produce reason, he lived in a space in which he disseminated himself from the rest of us—as if he was a faint image a mile away, that last week I was there…!

Always Mother

His mother, Mrs. Caroline Abernathy, was always there for him, a good mother undeniably. But even she could only do so much. Say what you will, but he loved her, his mother, almost as much as he loved Vang, and now that I think of it, I wish I would not have said what I said, “Let your conscious be your guide,” for now it was his guide and he was not moving, he stayed in the apartment day and night waiting for Vang in case she came with that little one.
I made a call to his mother, went on the base to do it, told her all the unpleasant news I had to, how unintelligent her son was acting now, now that he had contracted her disease—or should I say virus—how he was mulling aimlessly over this Vietnamese girl, Vang. She was a little annoyed, and our voices faded back and forth, but she got the message, and I could hear her telling to her husband “This is an outrage, disgust …” and then her last fading words were, “I’ll be there within the week.” Hence, it did show in her voice, the dim light, questioning, contained rage, perhaps in the family tree, stubbornness and subtle effluvium for doing what is right, no matter how strained it my get you.
I had to do it, I had to go behind his back and call, although I was too late in the whole process, that is why I extended my leave a week, to wait for her, I was in high gear I suppose, and didn’t know how to slow down those last days. So I waited.
I wanted to tell him: listen Langdon, you don’t know her, and as you wait for her, she is at home with her husband who probably has taken all the money you sent, all the money you gave Vang when you were at the 611th Ordnance, and all the money you brought with you here, to Saigon. It is what I wanted to say, not what I said of course, I didn’t say anything of the kind, and just waited there for Mrs. Caroline to come.
He did say something to me, a day before his mother came, suddenly, and sharply, “Why you hanging around Serge?” And I said and I lied when I said it,
“I had an extra week, and thought you might like me to hang around.”
“Nonsense,” he told me point blank, “you got something up your sleeve!”
“Fine,” I said, “if you think so, what you think it is?”
“You’re waiting for me to die, so you can have Vang.”

At this juncture, Vang was long gone, and she was not coming back, she told me so, and she tried to tell Langdon. Although she did not tell him why, or about her husband—she was just leaving, and leaving for good, never would she see him again. She couldn’t watch him even vaguely fade into nothingness, into further insanity, it was becoming too much for her, his bones decaying inside his body, his infected sores with pus, his eyes red as dying roses, muscles aching, fatigue, the whole gamut of symptoms, —she couldn’t watch what she gave to him grow and bloom into a complete musing unbearable living corpse; it was too much a strain on her, and he was almost purely existing on air, insistent on air not food, for his existence and rough breathing.
“What? What did you say Serge?” asked Langdon.
“Not a word,” I said, I sat in a chair by the window, looking out it for Mrs. Caroline. The astonishment of his disease was gone. I felt sad he would not see Josue, his little boy again. It seemed to have wiped the smile off my face, that Mrs. Caroline was coming, then sudden and deliberate she was there, down on the sidewalk looking for the address then turned her head upward, looking up at me, I now was eye to eye with her, and her face facing my face, and both of us three stories difference in space, and she waved for me to come down,
“Wait there,” I said, Langdon, mumbling in the background,
“Tell Vang to hurry up, I’m waiting.”
He was like a little boy who, always was in a crisis state, if his mother was not around, in this case Vang, or so he acted.
Now shoulder to shoulder, Mrs. Caroline and I stood, stillness on her face, quietly we looked at each other,
“Your boy is up there, he doesn’t know you were coming, I dare not had told him, lest he move out and no one would be able to find him before you came.”
“I suppose he is in bad shape, he must be going through hell, and the one who gave him this disease, where is she?”
I gave her a dim look, swiftly trying not to look at her.
“Oh, of course, as I thought, unbearable for her to endure her creation; I guess it is a mother’s burden to have to endure, to bear –with a scowl I suppose. The fate she laid upon my son, out of pure indifference, shows me it was only her interested curiosity in him and his support; her survival needs were met, like a primitive Neantherdal that is all he was to her, perhaps her fate is simply delayed, I dare not speak out loud, what I am thinking in secret, lest I be cursed with the same fate.”
She pulled out a slender cigarette, lit it, as if to soften the grave anxiety that lied ahead. She looked up, and then with a sigh said,
“Ok, Serge,” looking at me straight into my eyes, she added, “isn’t that what he always called you? Should we go?”
I nodded yes, and we walked through the lounge area of the one star hotel.
“Incidentally, thank you ahead of time, it may get to be too much for me to thank you after,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

As she walked into the room, her face was now completely stunned, into complete immobility like a wooden mask, her mouth worn from over two decades of insuring her boy was healthy, and his nostrils red, as for his eyes—pupilless. He seemed as if he was numb,
“My god, is this what it does,” she said with a lowered head, pale eyes flickering at his outwardly reduced jaw, that looked red and enmeshed with sores all over his lips, now collapsing onto a chair she tried to hold her tears, caught her breath, he looked like a toothless, motionless savage.
“Well,” Caroline said, looking at her son.
“Mom…is that really you?”
“Yes, Langdon, it is me,” now the mesmerism left her, yet dumfounded for the moment she remained. She wanted to touch his face, but I had to tell her no, it was idiotic to do so, why put yourself into harms way. Then Langdon made an ultimate and courageous effort, his voice lit up, and he sat up on his bed, contained for the moment; an explosion of strength.
We both looked at him,
“I knew Serge was up to something,” we, that is, he and his mother smiled, and so did Langdon, although his seemed a bit mismatched for the occasion. I sensed his mother was thinking: here is my innocent little boy, turned into a slumbering and glaring diseased savage, and inside of her was outrage.
But that of course was how I foresaw her seeing it, which depends on who is doing the seeing, and the history behind, for me here was a man that made himself, half made himself into a sweeping gestured of a savage, had not God given him a mother who understood women, and warned him. But he let his conscious be his guide, and I suppose the reason I stayed so long was my conscious was guiding me.
I went outside of the room for a moment, and I heard Caroline curse violently, as they discussed her taking him downstairs in a wheelchair, there I waited for him in the lobby, and a taxi waited for him outside, she paid the taxi well to wait, and he sat on his fender counting on his fingers how much money he was making, waiting. If ever a mother or parent wanted to divorce themselves of their children, this was a good moment to do it, or to say, ‘I told you so,’ but she didn’t, she threw his arm over her shoulder, and they walked down those three flights of stairs, to the wheelchair, walked down them slowly, and her bend body, held his bony body secure.

I think I might have thought of suicide had I been him, and I think he did, but was too jealous to die with me around, thinking I would end up with Vang.
She stood behind him in the wheelchair, said,
“You want to take a whirl at getting into that taxi I have waiting for you?”
“You mean you have a taxi…go ahead,” he answered. She then pushed forward the wheelchair.
“We’ll escape everyone,” she said with a tear and a smile a pale gaze of apoplectic hidden rage.
Carefully she pushed the wheelchair out of the hotel onto the sidewalk, near the taxi, her teeth vanished from the open smile, and quietly she told the driver to help pick Langdon up, to set him in the back seat of the car, she wanted to be with him, realizing the front was easier.
“You want to take a whirl,” she said a second time, and he commented, “You already said that mom, I’m not quarreling.”
“Well, you can get plenty of rest when we get home,” she added.
Just as they were picking him up, I was in front of the car, Vang came walking down with her son Josue, and her husband and two other kids. They walked right by the car, my back to them, and she never even saw me, seemingly in a rush, she never saw Langdon either, but he saw her, didn’t say a word to his mother. I noticed the little boy had a little round red spot on the palm of his hand, as he walked by.
“Ah, Serge,” said Mrs. Abernathy, now just inside the car, “Maybe you’ll visit us in Fayetteville some day, thank you for all you’ve done.”
I nodded my head yes, and I noticed Langdon’s last look at Vang, as she turned a corner.
I saw her now with her elbows on her knees, she was praying, it was all she had left inside of her, she perhaps was telling the Lord: please accept this, I have nothing left. I think the Lord was saying—for I know for a fact he hears mothers’ prayers—: I have already given you him for a while longer; blindly you bear his wounds, and I believe it will be a short time before you two meet again.
For Langdon laid his head back, and with some kind of restoration of faith, a smile on his face appeared, and he died, just like that.




There was a Lady
(Story two)


Old Josh Jefferson Jr.


Mrs. Caroline Abernathy paced slowly in her front yard, coming up from her back yard. In the hot afternoon the huge, square house, the premises seemed peaceful, tranquil, as it had for almost one-hundred and fifty years, the old mansion was part of her husband’s family heritage, Cole Abernathy, whose grandfather came to North Carolina and built it, gave it to his son, whom gave it to Cole. They, like Cole had died in it, in turn they had expected their son, Langdon to die in it too, but he had been buried now, he had died in a taxi in Saigon, a year ago to this very month, October, 1972.
So very tranquil was the tranquil women of Abernathy’s family tree.
Caroline crossed the front yard towards the wooden fence, she now remembered how a year ago, this month about this time in the day, her son, in his early twenties died, and brought so much grief to his father his heart gave out. She remembered how Langdon and Cole would be throwing the football to one another, treading on the grass to catch it, even running on the front porch to catch it, how old Josh ((Josh Jefferson Jr., born 1890) (died 1972: 82-years old)) the negro stable man, would help him up on the horse, he was like a grandson to him, he worked for Cole’s father, and his father as well back before the turn of the century Josh Washington Jefferson (Born 1853-1903), Josh’s father worked for the Abernathy’s for fifty-years, perhaps more. It’s the way it was, family to family, thus, the house had seen a lot of Langdon Abernathy, and expected him to carry on the family saga, in that very house.
But he was dead now, and there were no more males to take on the legacy, and Mrs. Abernathy was past her prime, and her husband had died, and old Josh Jr. had died, all in one year—all the men were gone: Josh, Cole and Langdon, up in the family graveyard too, where the other family members were on their one-hundred acre plantation, on the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Caroline.
So all that was left in this big house was Caroline, her sister, Betty Presley ((former: Hightower )(younger sister by twelve-years to Caroline)) came up from New Orleans to stay with her, her younger sister by twelve years, but she never stayed long, her husband being in a wheelchair and all. She came up to the funerals three times in the past year, each time collecting cloths when she left, along with helping Caroline go through the hard times you might say. Thus, she lived in an unmanned house, at this point sleeping on the sofa, in a six bedroom mansion, and Betty tended to her needs for the last three months.
Caroline thought that was alright for her younger sister Betty to come and help, but felt she could take care of herself, looking out her big bay window, murmuring to herself,
“I really don’t need help.”
She was a strong woman for her short height, she being all of five-foot four inches tall, only fifty-years old; her husband was sixty-one when he died, a year ago. He told Betty to take care of Caroline, Caroline heard him on the phone say that, she also heard him say:
“You know what caused her to go into this semi state of silence, this frozen anger state the psychologist so calls it, you know why, I don’t need to tell you, and who knows what she is thinking, and she will no longer go see Doctor Wright down in Fayetteville, says he’s a quack, along with this and that. She’s always busy, but I know Caroline, she’s thinking, and it is about young Langdon’s girlfriend over in Vietnam, that Vang girl, and that three year old, or is two and half year old boy, Josue, of his, if it is really his, take care of her if I die please.”

Caroline said, “I’m going down to the creek,” to Betty; Betty thought nothing of it, she did that almost every day, it was quiet and near the graveyard, there one could contemplate or listen to the water to calm themselves, she even did that when Cole was alive, it was not like she had not done it before, in her mind she said: I love you Betty but I don’t need you, not really, I know how to do what I got to do, and where I got to go to do it, and how I will get there, I got there before, I can do it again. She was going to do, what Cole knew she might do, what she was warning Betty about. He just thought it, and he knew she’d some day do it, Betty still unaware of what, her brain unprepared, without comment, and then Betty saw a letter on the table, dinning room table, it read:
“Don’t follow me, I am going to disappear for a while, I do not need you, but if you wish you and your husband can stay on the plantation, I’ll return in a month or so, I need to take this sudden journey, and it will be a sudden return I expect. I will miss the early the October and November breeze though.” (Signed, ‘Your sister, Caroline.’)


Saigon

Well, Betty read the letter Caroline left for her, and she said, perhaps what Caroline expected her sister to say: ‘It’s her business where she’s going, I’ll just head on back to New Orleans.’ That’s what she said, and that is what she did. Caroline went onto Saigon, Vietnam.

Mrs. Caroline had a picture of Vang and the boy, and she went from market to market looking and talking to the locals, with her guide, Yang, it was all of a month before Yang said to Mrs. Abernathy,
“We no can find this Vang girl, maybe back in Cam Ranh Bay!”
“I’m not leaving, I’m not going to leave this place now, I got here and I’m staying until I find her, that trash, city trash.”
And they did find her, and they went to the little house she had near the U.S. Military Air Base, where she worked part time, cleaning the restrooms for the soldiers. Today she, Vang wasn’t working though, she was sitting at her table with her three kids, eating from rice from a bowl, rise with some greens, and to the side of her was a bowl of noodles—soup and chopsticks, and it looked like pork in the soup, but she remembered what her son said, it most likely was dog meat, and gave it a grin. There were a few old grubby looking military magazines, English, lying on the floor, reminders of her son, perhaps he gave them to her, so she thought.
Vang looked to the figures in her opened doorway, “What you do here,” she said, knowing who she was; she had seen pictures of her.
Now Yang stood inside the house by the opened window.
“I dont know’ya,” said Vang to Yang, as if to say: I don’t know Mrs. Abernathy, what do you want.
“My husband, he come back soon,” said Vang. Mrs. Abernathy grunted. The house was a low –ceiled house filled with an odd scent of spices. Sounds of the children, she didn’t understand. Outside the window was a busy street full of venders and people walking, and motor bikes whizzing by. Vang now sat erect wondering what to say. She stood up, and she stood to the shoulders of Mrs. Abernathy, who had a shawl of cashmere around her—no whiter than the rice Vang was eating. Caroline looked at Vang motionless, getting a profile of her face, and produced an interrogative expression.
“You killed my boy you know,” she said.
“No,” said Vang.
The aging woman looked stern at Vang, and the white boy beside her, “I don’t understand this all,” and she walked over towards the chair where the boy was standing.
“A right smart looking boy, he is,” commented Caroline, then gave Vang a cold and quiet look.
“You stop look at me like that, Mrs. Abernathy,” said Vang.
“I haven’t said anything yet, you see the truth in my face though,” Caroline said.
“Then you keep it to yourself, I don’t want to hear it, and leave my house, now!” Vang said.
Yang was looking out the window; taking in all the sights, avoiding the confrontation, the one that looked as if one was developing.

The Door

She walked quietly into the children’s bedroom; it was a little dark, passing the three beds, not a word coming from the two adults in the kitchen.
Josue, and the other two children stood close to Vang, they were talking in Vietnamese to her, Caroline could not understand; she walked around the room without a sound: touching the beds, her eyeballs holding back tears, she stopped by one bed, as if it had the scent of Josue on it, as if she knew it was his, or maybe it was her own son’s scent she smelled from the blankets. Suddenly her eyes lit up, the depression it once had, vanished for a moment, and she chanted something like a lullaby, not loud, and then moved about again. That faint little solitary glow, lingered on for the moment, fading though, like a dying candle. Then she turned, walked to the entrance of the bedroom door, swift and silent steps to the next door, the outside door that led into the street, she stood in its archway, she saw, as she turned about, Josue, her boy’s boy, lean toward his mother, talking, whispering something. Caroline did not remark, just stood in the doorway, not touching the sides or the jamb on either side, she was silent, said not a word to anyone, not the boy, the mother, or even Yang, just stood there, and Yang said “You better come with me now, Mrs. Abernathy unless you have to do something else here…” and she said—no longer looking at the family behind her, “I reckon so,” and she and Yang walked promptly out of the house, and off the premises.



…From the Hayloft
(Story Three)


Caroline, a day after she arrived back home, got back home from Saigon went out to the barn, a barn now horseless, manless, Negroless, childless. An old lantern sat on the steps leading up to the hayloft, she picked it up, lit it, it was dusk, mid-November, 1972. For a moment she thought she saw old Josh Jr., and Langdon—‘…ghosts perhaps,’ so she muttered; Josh taught him how to ride bareback—taught Langdon how to mount, ride bareback, without a saddle, he was but only nine-years old at the time.
She recalled the day Josh informed her about the night Langdon came into the barn at 2:00 AM, in the morning, thinking he was sleepwalking, but far from it. Josh Jefferson Jr., told her, told Caroline about that night, adding a few things each year to make it more interesting, so Caroline thought, but it was the truth, it was just Josh didn’t not want to let it all out at one time, he had his reasons.

The wind shut the large barn doors, no sound coming from the misty darkness in the barn, the darkness beyond the light’s glow. She was now, her mind was now, putting together, images, of that night, when Langdon came into the barn, asked Josh,
“I want to ride Dan, the old horse, no saddle or anything; I want to ride him around the barn, bareback.”
Josh looked at him strangely, the boy then said,
“Uncle Josh, teach me how to ride old Dan, I can’t sleep, it’s been on my mind for a while, it’s time I learn, I’ve been feeding him since the day I was born I think, now it’s time to ride him, pa thinks I’m still too young, but I’m not.”
Josh looked about, all the animals were waking up, the cow out in the corral, the mules and other horses in the barn, in the stalls next to Dan, all big-eyed and sleepy-eyed waking up.
“I suppose I is got to teach ya now, ya done woke up the whole darn barn, what ya pa goin’ to say if I tells him?”
“But you won’t I know it.” Langdon said.
“Hows ya know dhat?” replied Josh.
“Cuss I do…!” answered Langdon.
“Well, you knows more dhen me dhen.” And they started laughing, and Josh got the horse out, and Josh helped him onto Dan’s back, and Langdon rode the horse around the barn several times.
After the ride, Josh put Old Dan back into his stall, Langdon standing by, and Dan starts to whine and stomp his hoofs, like a mad bull.
“Hes like dhe mule, and you Langdon, an’ hes not goin’ a go back to sleep, jes like you!”
Caroline moved some, and began to stare at those dark shadows, beyond the light, thinking what Josh had said, told her: Langdon put hay in Dan’s stall, stood there an hour until he fell to sleep, thinking it was the thing to do, the proper thing to do, like it was the proper thing to do when he went back to Saigon to take care of his boy, his child, Josue, and marry his Vang, his indifferent and insensitive Vang, the one who deceived him, the Jezebel, the Delia that stepped into his life one day, and caused so many ripples within his family; never really wanting to see the family, never really having intentions to marry him, never really wanting him to come look for her in Saigon.
After Dan had fallen to sleep, even old Josh had fallen to sleep, the boy must had then went back to his bed because when Josh woke up, he was gone, so Josh told, Caroline; hence, the boy was gone, and everyone, animal and him, Josh, had been sleeping, the last thing he could remember, before he fell to sleep, everything was noisy, and now daybreak had arrived.



Unhurried, Caroline stood up from sitting on the wooden stairway leading up into the loft. She heard the sound of a hound, she opened the barn door, and there was Tabasco, Langdon’s dog, caked with mud. She had forgotten all this time about her, she disappeared six-months ago, sometime around when Cole died, her husband. She brought the dog with her to the house, gave him some beef jerky, and they both went back to the barn, her to reminisce, the dog to sit beside her, and reaffirm he was really home.
She thought: gee the dog must have lived off the land all this time. She could hear in the background, someplace out in the fields, a few other hounds yapping, under the moon’s light, stray dogs, those dogs folks let loose out of their cars to run wild in farms yards, so they don’t have to have any more responsibility: an out of sight, out of mind thing.
She wanted to go back to day dreaming, she was having some good memories, happy ones, and she had not been happy for a long time, but she was calm now, very calm, unhurried, the yapping of the dogs didn’t even bother her.
She lowered her head, it was nice to have a familiar face, she thought, even if it was a dog. Tabasco sat close to Caroline’s leg, perhaps feeling the warm blood, the scent of familiarity. Tabasco chewed away on that long thick piece of beef jerky, it was nice to be able to make her happy, Caroline thought, it was a long time since she made anyone happy.
She spoke to the dog, “Do you remember old Josh, he died also, just like Cole, just like Langdon, we are the only ones left. Sold the cow and old Dan passed on also, and sold the other horses. No more anybody’s for us Tabasco.”

Tabasco Yelping


Caroline now got thinking of Old Josh’s bad habit of chewing tobacco and spitting it out. Then she gazed at the dog—blank like.
“Don’t have kids Tabasco, you’ll just be hurt. What do you think about all this? Josh, and Dan, and Langdon and Cole; and then there is me and you, we survived them all.”
The old dog said nothing, legs a bit weak; she was comfortable for the moment. Not even a bark. She, likened to Caroline just sat there, not one little bark, just sat there chewing on that leather like piece of meat, happy to have it.
“Tabasco, that old man spat all that darn tobacco out, all over the place. Oh he’d do it carefully, as not to get it on the house, so I’d not see it, but boy you go to the corral, and you step in it as sure as you would cow dung.”
Then she laughed, and the dog looked up, if a dog could smile, she detected it as one, because she patted her on the head, and said,
“You understand, too well.”
“How silly them two were, Josh and Langdon, Cole never played with Langdon all that much, some football, he was always working, so it seemed.”

She stood up, stood without a word said, slowly as not to frighten the dog, without any change in inflection.
“Oh,” she said to the shaggy dog, “You’ll have to find a new home—pity, but I will not be here and everyone else is gone. You don’t need my pity, you’ll do just fine on your own, like you already have, so ‘Sho!’” she told the dog and the dog got up and walked over to one of the horses stalls, Dan’s old stall.
She was now looking at the dog, and she fell fast to sleep, “I wonder what she’s dreaming, Cole once told me dogs dream, and Josh confirmed it, something for survival reasons I think, a primitive thing.”
Now on top of the loft, she took a long piece of rope sturdy rope, tied it around a four by four beam, and then put the noose around her neck, and jumped off the edge of the loft, hung herself.
Hanging there, her fingers made a last jerk and she said, whispered to herself, ‘no more time to hate,’ and her throat and nostrils made a sound, and she was dead.

Epitaph

When the dog awoke at daybreak, the neighbors could hear the yapping cries of the dog, she left the stall, guarded the entrance to the barn, waited until the neighbors came, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley. Unknowing the profound emergency of the matter, it was midday before they arrived.




Early Morning Hounds
(Story Four)



She was in a dream, sleeping on the floor of that big mansion, “Let’s go Betty, let’s try it, jump…!” Caroline said.
“Fine,” Betty said out loud, still in a state on incongruous oblivion, her hand held out to grab Caroline’s, as if ready to jump. It was the first time, she had spent time, real quality time with her sister since they were kids, now Caroline was married, had her boy, Langdon, and Betty likewise.
The crew shouted for Caroline not to jump, and Caroline wouldn’t leave Betty, and Betty wouldn’t leave Caroline, they planned their trip together, two sisters holding each others hand—hand to hand—now shoulder to shoulder, they jumped, just like that, jumped onto the edge of the fairy boat, at the last minute, a crew man shouted, “You fools, you could have been killed,” the boat was a few feet off the dock area, ready to transport a hundred or so visitors over to Nantucket Island. But the dream was better than reality, because Betty got hurt in reality, not in the dream, skinned her left leg when she jumped those few feet, hung onto the railing of the boat, a dumb thing to do, but at the last minute they did it, and one crew man tried to shove them off, and Caroline hit him as the boat pulled away, and a few folks standing nearby yelled at the crew man, and he hightailed it out of sight.
But open the door to the boat he would not, so she did, because they were on the other side of it, the crew member didn’t help, and if there were any watching this happening besides the one who hightailed it out of there, they were not exposing themselves to be questioned afterwards, on the rights and wrongs of this. For Betty it was the one last, and profound adventure her and her sister had, she hung on to it like a hungry cat would to a dead mouse.
Betty moved restless on the floor of the living room, covered with blankets, it felt as if she was flat on the earth, but for some reason the air was crisp fresh, she had fallen to sleep in her dress, and she wanted to dream more, finish the dream, even if she had to help it along, thus: the boat shot away across the waters to Nantucket, they were now inside the large waiting room of the boat, clinging onto the chairs as the boat tugged its way across the choppy waters, looking at the shadow of the boat out of the window, and onto the glazed water, a few young men, looking at them, not men-of-war, but young college men, smiling in a floating quiet way, round young eyes, and then Cole jumped into the dream (Caroline’s dead husband), and Caroline said, “I lost my mate,” and Betty scolded her sister right there and then in the dream, “You fool, you damned fool, you should have shot Vang, been done with this iron-gray dilemma she put you into,” and then the quilt got tight over her body as she lay on that flat wooden floor—and woke up to an empty house of furniture, that she had sold the past few months (it was February, 1973).

The fire had gone out in the hearth, and it was complete darkness, she thought little to nothing on her husband in his wheelchair, at their home in New Orleans, only of her sister, had she triumph in killing Vang, this might not have happened, she might not have hung herself, what stopped her, I mean, she committed suicide instead of getting the culprit. So she thought as she lay there thinking.
She had to sell the house, and the land, she’d sell the land by plots, but after that then what? Christmas had passed, the New Year was gone. Then she heard the sounds of hounds running across the fields in back of the house: perhaps one is Tabasco, she thought, but she didn’t get up to check. The dogs were chasing the cats, whom where chasing the rats she conclude, trying to get back into her dream world, perhaps the rats were trying to corner one of them: all yelping at one another, screeching from the rats, and the hounds barked like wild deranged wolves, with rustic voices, and interwoven there was a faint voice of a dog, perhaps Tabasco. And there was nothing else to do this night but let the sounds penetrate her brain, let the haunting night emanates the sounds into her soul.
Betty Hightower, made no noise, just thought how funny life was, it stunned her the way events in her sister’s life turned out. She deserved more out of life, perhaps revenge; perhaps God would have looked around this one, overlooked it, had she killed Vang, knowing revenge was God’s preference, but he is forgiving. And she knew the old sayings: revenge destroys both parities the seeker and the victim. And the best revenge is success, and letting go and going forward in life is better than living with revenge which consumes you. But all these witty sayings just clutter the brain; she told herself, belongs to culprit, he wants you drowned in them, so you don’t go after him or her. They say heaven will get the bad guys later, or girls and thus, they will get their just reward, their due judgment, on judgment day, but we are on earth, and here we do things a little different, and if we wait for heaven, while on earth, we’ll have to fill up the attic with these evil doers, feed them, pamper them, wash their cloths and all. That is what she mumbled, that is what she was thinking.

Here was life, at its rawest, she felt, amazed outrage inside her head, building up as the hounds chased the cats and cats chased the rats, and the sounds penetrated Betty’s brain.

Here was a girl called Vang, six-thousand miles away, who brought misery to a whole family, altered the course in their lives, something no one expected, lest Caroline, and Betty—Betty whom was still in amazed outrage over something like this was tolerable without revenge.
Said Betty, talking out loud, staring at the ceiling, listening to the hounds, “You got to finish what you started, clean up another’s mess,” and she was thinking of the boat ride to Nantucket, “We’ll jump off the dock together, one more time,” she whispered to the wall. Then she heard a sound of a dog, it sounded like Tabasco, it sounded like rats were cornering him, and his barks, and their screeches, and she heard the noise outside the back screened-in door, and she ran with a gun she had found in the house, and she ran to the door, and opened it, and rats as big as fat cats stared at her as they tried to drag Tabasco away from the door—pulling ripping at his flesh. And she shot at the rats, five bullets, leaving one for Tabasco; he was viciously torn to shreds.
She then closed the door, said with a scent of vengeance, “I got them for you Tabasco! And now for Vang”

Saigon Bound

At daybreak, she went to the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, asked if she could borrow, or if she would loan out her help, Amos, the Negro who befriended Old Josh, all those years. He himself was 79-years old, but spry as a forty-year old. Mrs. Stanley saw him out by the corral, called to him, as he approached, he was muddier than usual, and put out his forearm to have Mrs. Betty Hightower shake it, instead of his muddy hands, and she did. She knew him from before, but not well.
“Mrs. Stanley agreed with me, if it is ok with you, to loan you out to watch the Abernathy Farm while I’m away. You’ll get paid the same and if you do both the watching and the farm work for Mrs. Stanley, which is up to you, you’ll make double.”

Well, the agreement was made, and Betty Hightower was on her plane to Saigon.

Morning in Saigon

Still carrying notes, she had made back in Fayetteville, on the location of Vang’s property in Saigon, notes she had gotten from Caroline, when they discussed her leaving for Saigon, she pulled them out of her purse, checked them out, followed the path they led, and they led to a rundown shack of a house, not a house in the sense of a house she was used to, it was close to the U.S. Military Air Base. You could hear the jets, and helicopters, and propeller planes taking off. And there she stood, like a motionless pillar, a figure in stone, and she again took her notes from her purse and checked them out along with a picture of Vang, it was the house, so she confirmed and the door was slightly open, she approached looked around it, turned about to see if any faces where checking her out, no one was around, no one that is that mattered, they were all whizzing by in cars and carts and motor bikes. She checked her purse out again, her knife, four-inch pocket knife was there, one Jason (her husband) used for fishing, cleaning fish. She dispersed the knife from her purse, held it in her hand, and entered the proprietress’ home, once in the house, all the outside sounds ceased, the horns of the cars and buses, the motor bikes tires on the pavement, the children, noisy children in bus’ and just voices in general, noise in general, city noise, the kind no one really pays attention to, it all seemed to have ceased. She entered the kitchen, it seemed to be the main room of the house, and then into a bed room, three beds, it was cold in there, an empty cold, it seeped into her veins, made her blood chilled, and she left just as abruptly as she entered it, and back she was in the Kitchen, and then onto the second bedroom.
She passed a shadow, a slumped shadow in a corner, but made no reply, and when it reappeared, with the little light seeping under the curtained window, she saw that it was a body, in a fetus position, a dead body, no motion, it had to be dead she quickly work out —she looked closer, it was waxy dead female. It was covered with bus and sores especially around her lips, legs, eyes “Vang,” she said, “it has to be her…!” and it was so terrifying, so sudden a shock, so awful, without concentration, or a plan, she caught her breath, and ran out of the house, and up a deserved street, no cars no folks walking, just three young men, and she cried, not for Vang, but for herself, it was so ugly, she was frightened out of the house, ascending that hill, away from everybody, The three men grabbed her, let her skirts lifted from her trim ankles, they put her hands over her mouth to hush her up, and she knew to be true, she would not survive the ordeal, they had knifes, and her hands were empty, only her purse strap around her shoulder, and that was tore from her, the knife once she held, must have dropped when she saw Vang, but she was not looking for it, she was quiet now—ready to believe.


The Sad Boy
(Story Five)


Lifting the bruised body of the women the police would find out later to be Betty Hightower, from Fayetteville, North Caroline, they checked out her purse for identification, and her passport was missing, perhaps stolen and would be sold on the Black Market, and then they found her wrist watch, surprised it was still on he took it off for safe keeping, and put it in his pocket.
Two young men, one with the watch in his pocket, picked her up, dropped her onto a wooden canvassed stretcher, one used for soldiers in WWII, it looked. The other helper, asked him to be a little more gentile, respectful to the dead. But the other’s comments were simple and to the point, “Let the dead be dead, the living got to eat, and I am getting hungry for lunch.”
They dropped the body like a Childs toy would have been thrown into a bedroom with a mother whom was fed up with picking up toys, or trash. Then the emergency vehicle she was took off, followed a curved road onto the morgue. It passed a sign that read: “U.S. Air Base this way…” and an arrow guided you in the direction.
The driver just drove, the one with the watch in his pocket, he was called Hai (Chien being the helper); hence, Hai was mussing with irrevocable astonishment a female would be wandering alone in this part of the city, especially an elder attractive female (she had several hundred dollars of travelers checks in her purse, and a gold ring on her finger, a diamond to boot). I suppose the driver was musing in the fact, didn’t anyone tell her the facts of life, was she so unseasoned to step into the abyss without looking. Whatever, it is exactly what she did. I suppose if she learned anything, revenge was perhaps not all it was made out to be. You have to have a plan A, B, and C would help.
The driver for the most part, was detached, just curious, as most people seemingly are, yet with some attention to the situation.

As they drove a little further, there was a child—perhaps three years old—a white boy, with inescapable cold blue eyes, as if waiting for its mother or father or anyone to feed him, care for him, to return for him. You couldn’t have mistaken him for anything other than who he was, he was different, he had round eyes, he was American looking, it had found—at such an early age—grief and despair; it was plagued looking, it had sores all over its body, its mouth, and hands and feet, its father must had left it there to die (not so uncommon, especially for a half-breed, especially when a father has to feed three, and it is cheaper to feed two); plus, it was to many, a reminder of the enemy, invading our country.
Kids were walking by the child, a few kicked dirt in its face, and those who stood by watching, took there turn after deliberation on: who would stop them, and discovered or came to the conclusion, no one, so let’s have fun. A few kids, older kids, took their cigarettes out of their mouths and burned the child’s legs, and when the child cried, they pressed harder on the cigarette, until its body gave in, and shut down.
That evening the child remained where it was left, by its step-father, but a shadow a sad showdown was the child, in a dark empty world alone. Had Betty been alive perhaps she would have said: ‘…this is what you get for being indecent, it is God’s revenge on the innocent, that we pelage with our guilt.’


Vang’s husband, Nguyen had given the boy his death certificate when he left it out in the dreary night; night being the time of destruction, where animals search the streets and robbers look for whatever. This would have been speechless for the likes of Langdon, his real father, and by morning the saga would be over, there would be no more links to the Abernathy name, no male links anyhow. Perhaps the husband, Nguyen, had the last laugh, and got the least blame, if one was to give out portions of blame, he got the least. He got his revenge, also, what Caroline started out to want, couldn’t do, and what Betty would have done, but it was done for her. Thus, wearily now, Nguyen, was treading almost like an old woman about the house, buried Vang in the back yard, took a few of her bones, ribs, and placed some into a open wooden coffin, so the fiends, the ghosts would not come back and haunt him, then he went into her room and cleaned it, the children crying hopelessly for someone to undress them, feed them, then he heard a knock on the door, it was Zuxin, and he played the persecuted father, and grieving husband, she would remain there, become his new wife, he had a way of persuasion.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Jason Hightower said, in his wheelchair back in New Orleans, “just perhaps,” he said to his daughter, now 19-years old,” it was all started because of a man, not Vang completely, but a man who was feeling he had a pointless journey in life, an empty man, with an empty life.”
Cassandra Hightower said in response—with a glance towards her father—now smoking a cigarette in his wheelchair,
“I don’t know much about what’s been going on in the Abernathy family but now it has jumped over to ours!”
The father expelled smoke, “No” of us saw it coming—but somehow, someway, Vang and her husband were invited into our house, perhaps by Langdon.”



Louisiana Girl
(Story Six)


Cassandra Hightower’s bedroom faced the empty wall, on the second floor of the house, in the hallway, her father whom almost lived in a wheelchair (because contracting polio when he was a kid) lived down stairs, seldom came up to her bedroom, or the second floor in general, his bedroom was centered towards the library, where he could, if tired, go easily to the bedroom from the library, which he used quite often. She’d tell her father this evening, it had been bothering her for a while (it was July, 1974, and her mother had passed on some four to five months now,
“Every time I get ready for bed, I look for mother; so far it still haunts me, her being gone. It’s hard to deal with, this grieving process you talked about before…that I can either grow through it or simply go through it, you said something like that anyway, or was it, if you don’t grieve it will come out sideways anyhow. Whatever you said, I can’t do it, her death has put me into a depression, and I can’t help it, and I don’t want to feel it, and I don’t want to deal with it. I wish she was here, she was always so very strong”
Jason Hightower, her looked up at her, hopelessly looked up at her pale face looking down, it was painted heavy with sorrow, “Why did she do it, go to Saigon, we’ll never know, sometimes we don’t know the other person like we think we do.”
“What was the matter with her? I mean, what she was thinking about while selling Aunt Caroline’s furniture, sleeping in that big old house, night after night!”

That evening Linda Macaulay (Girlfriend to Cassandra Hightower, 20-years old, 1974), came over to visit her, and they waited for the evening to darken, and was picked up by Henry, Cassandra’s new boyfriend, and they drove outside of Fayetteville, to a private location, parked the car, Linda in the back seat with her boyfriend.
“Give me a kiss,” Henry said, and with its tone, it sounded more like a demand.
“No,” was his answer, and Cassandra added, “there’s noting else to do but bring me back home, I’m tired, I want to go to bed.”
She of course was not really, really tired, just fatigued form the depression, trying to figure out things that had no answers, things that men do to others without a motive, plot, plan, things that happen suddenly because you are at the wrong place, at the wrong time, like her mother being rapped and killed in Saigon some months back.
With a deep sigh, Henry said, “Alright,” thinking, for the past four months, she’s been laying with every Tom, Dick and Harry, now why this?
Henry was eighteen, and Cassandra was two years older, and what he didn’t know, she was that just trying to keep herself busy, keep some sanity in her, she didn’t care for him, or any of the other boys—and perhaps they didn’t care about her, but she was not doing the wondering.
As far as she was concerned, she would never trust a man, she told her father, after his stated, statement, that perhaps Vang’s affair with Langdon was the cause, or more of the cause of Vang’s husband, Nguyen, because of her husband because her husband wanted what he wanted, and didn’t care what his wife had to do to get it and the consequence was, the long, long ripple effect, which was still in progress, all from Vang’s Husband, not Vang in particular.

When Cassandra got out of Henry’s car she asked herself—as he pulled away—asked herself, out loud standing in front of her big house, “Why do I do this? What is the matter with me? …and tomorrow what—and the tomorrow after tomorrow then what?”

She got to the top of the stairs in her house, her father was still awake, and it wasn’t all that late, 9:30 PM.
“So you like the young new boy….?” He said.
“Like who pa?”
“Henry, that’s his name isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah, I guess so,” she glanced at her father over the railing.
“You’re lying!” He said (after expelling smoke from his cigarette) “…you’re inviting many people into your life, you know that don’t you?”
“Come on now,” said Cassandra, walking back to the stairway-
“Are you afraid? What are you afraid of pa?”
Said Jason, “Tomorrow that is what I’m afraid of, yes, oh yes, tomorrow.”
This time she remained silent, neither did she lean over to hear what he was mumbling, but she heard it faintly anyhow, “I wonder what your mother would say if she knew about this new way of life, this lifestyle you are enmeshed in!”
Then she continued to walk to her hallway bedroom, she seemed to watch her feet as they entered the room, head deep down in emotions; she seemed plagued with ghosts, uncountable and unnamable ghosts, who were starting to possess her whole being.

In bed, the depressed Louisiana girl tossed lightly from side to side.
“At least I had my chance to sin,” she told herself, loud and clear, as if hoping her father might hear, even God. She had shame, but no regret, that she was no longer a virgin, her mother—rapped and stabbed—was engulfing her every conscious thought and subconscious like cancer cells racing across her body to paralyze it; she felt it was medicine, therapy, and she counted the cost.
“I don’t really want a man,” she told someone in the room, although no one was in the room, “how can I, how can anyone.”
I don’t know who she was talking to, perhaps her dead mother, maybe Caroline, but her father was down stairs reading newspapers, so it wasn’t him, and she was not talking loud.
“I suppose we should go down stairs and talk to Pa about selling the house, Abernathy’s house, it’s a big plantation, and perhaps I can go to Paris next summer if we can sell it. If I’m idle, idle too long I’ll go crazy. I only wish I was far away from all this, and not have to hear all those voices out of Saigon.”


Dr. Whitman
(Story Seven)

Part One of Two Parts

(From the Journal notes of Dr. Whitman)

I will have to try to tell about why Cassandra Hightower (daughter to Betty Hightower), and daughter of Jason Hightower, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, came to our Free-Standing Hospital, here in Prescott, Wisconsin, that Fall day in 1975. I mean, actually try to put it in this report, as clear as I can, and perhaps try to bridge the gap between the Hightower family and the Abernathy family, for both sisters are connected to Cassandra’s instability, her frozen anger that has put her into a state of disassociation with whom ever she has contact with, even her Senior Counselor I assigned to her, Don Hooker, I will use his words in much of he report.
Her father, Jason Hightower, cannot make anything out of it, why Cassandra is in such a state, a catatonic state. Talk therapy didn’t work for three weeks, tools of the counselor. He even had to have two guards by her, one inside her room, the other sitting outside her room in fear she’d take her life, like her mother’s sister did, Caroline Abernathy. It is—unfortunate, but true, that we find only in literature that the problems of the mind get solved easily over a paradoxical situation, as Cassandra’s mind navigated to. The human mind can be juxtapose only so long by or into the vortex of trauma then it shuts down, it is a survival technique.
This was the premise the Senior Counselor and I worked with: we needed to unthaw the mind, and give it reason, try to free it from its frozen anger; it was anger keeping it where it was. We had to make it wholesome again, tell it to let go, and go forward.

Mr. Hightower came in a wheelchair to the hospital, I think he should not have come at all. She could have been sent on alone, and he came with a young lady by the name of Linda Macaulay, Cassandra’s girlfriend, they both really wanted to see him, and she wheeled the wheelchair through the doors of the hospital. I still don’t believe he ever understood the real problem with his daughter, oh perhaps the situation, but that is always the surface, the face of it, not the wound, that is the real problem, and it is under the surface, under the flesh, deep in the mind, in this case.
She slept in that chair in her bedroom many of nights, the nights he didn’t he stayed in a local hotel, with that Macaulay girl. No one could keep him from affirming the fact, she was not as ill as she really was, thinking she was putting on an act at times, actually I think he was gambling wither her prognoses. To a court and jury, he would have been guilty of intrusion, but we tried to accommodate him, and at times he seemed to be the patient; I think at times also, he wanted to enter a plea of mental incompetence on my helper, the Senor Counselor.
It all started of course, after the killing of her mother, Mrs. Betty Hightower, when she was brought to the hospital, she could not even remember her mother’s name. She couldn’t name the victim, even after Hooker made many suggestions and prompting to the mother’s name, she didn’t look alive, but of course was alive, just staring at and into nothingness.
Mr. Hightower never denied she did not need help, it was his insistence, we were not helping her properly, he was eager to have her put back together, as she once was: sympathetic for her present condition, I don’t know, I could not make heads or tails out of his flat emotions, because he refused to listen most of the times to our so called hypothesize analysis, he figured she was using this opportunity to get away from him and his logic, I told him, she was at that, escaping, hitherto at the hospital, and between him and the living world outside of his house, where his mother had died, and all the trouble with the Abernathy family, she was escaping it all.
Ponder he did, and became emerged in his daughters treatment, it would seem to me, knowing all the facts of the family, all the way back to the death of Langdon Abernathy, and his mother Caroline, and her sister Betty, one by disease, the other two by suicide, and raping and stabbing, it would seem to me, this almost innocent mind, uncultivated in such violent actions, once impenetrable, became penetrated over an 18-month or so, period, perhaps it goes back three years, but the snake that infected her mind with the final bite, was her mother dying in Saigon, and her imagination playing the horror of it out on a daily bases. Call it a tale untold, for the very fact she only knew the results, not how her mother had to endure, and that, yes I believe that was the final bit of the snake, a fiercely solitary bite in the mind, loaded with venom.

But they were gone on the day we decided to give her electric shock to bring her out of her frozen state, that Linda girl, had come in to take her out to the river and walk with her, we felt it was ok, and Mr. Hightower knew if he demanded her to be released, we might not do it, and thus, she and he and the Macaulay girl are back in North Carolina I suppose.
I have simple notified the authorities, and sent a telegram to the family that we would not be responsible for whatever occurs at this juncture with Cassandra Hightower. In my own feelings, which I hate to express, for I want to be open minded, and professional, but I feel this family, has outlasted so much corruption and injustice, and Cassandra is the last link, and is afraid, he father that is, afraid, she will vanish, completely false, but to his mind true: that she will inscrutable vanish if taken out of his sight for very long. In short, I told him in the message to watch her carefully, sometimes, the need for escape is so strong because the way through the door to recover seems undoable, and she might resort to harsh measures.


Bishops Ploy
(Part two, to Dr. Whitman)

So that was that, the good Doctor and Senior Counselor could do no more, nothing to help Cassandra, left it alone, feeling it was better that way, better for the hospital, for the father, not sure about Cassandra—if it was for the better, but it would have been a long court ordeal, and she was not the only one in need at the hospital, so the doctor would tell Mr. Hooker, and he was right when he sent the letter to Mr. Hightower, that he felt helpless in helping his daughter with his daily presence, and trying to have her brought back to the hospital. Hence, he felt he had to let go, and he let go.

It was the Christmas season, the first of December, of 1976; Linda Macaulay took Mr. Hightower shopping in Fayetteville, Linda had taken a liking for the old man, whom was really only fifty-six years old, and had the money from selling of the plantation that had belong to the Abernathy family, he had sold it for a handsome price, and she, Linda now was twenty-one. They shared the same bedroom, and she bought what she wanted.
Linda was the optimist, always telling Jason his daughter would be fine now that she was home, even though this Christmas season she was left alone a lot. And the good doctor was right about the evil that plagues a sick mind. Right about evil that it will creep into the mind, easy or not easy, and she thinking about the one thing Dr. Whitman warned them about. Jason Hightower did not plan ahead either, he just had unbounded faith that she would be ok, and Linda reinforced it.
The on looker, unprofessional bystanders, perhaps might have said, and a few did say, the two: Linda and Jason simple left Cassandra, to suffer, and knew themselves little about suffering, like somebody unconscious to the real facts, she was breathing, and sleeping, but they did the see the grief, just grief for the sake of grief. This is what the neighbors were saying, not sure if it soaked into the ears of Linda and Jason, but they must had got some of that information into their heads, impossible not to.
Anyhow, they even stopped speaking to her, thinking Cassandra, she wanted to be alone, because she seldom moved, and then on Christmas Day they heard a shot…Jason and Linda—along with a few neighbors (who now were saying “I told you so”).
Jason and Linda were cooking the turkey in the kitchen when the shot was fired, he knew the sound of the gun, it was Caroline’s gun, Betty brought it home from the Abernathy plantation before she went to Saigon. It was a Smith and Wesson, 38-Special, he shot it himself in the backyard trying to scare the squirrels.
“The foolish girl,” said Jason to Linda, looking up at the ceiling, as if the bedroom was under the kitchen, and it wasn’t, and told Linda to hurry on up stairs to see what had happened, as he sat in his wheelchair in computation, working out what had just taken place; indeed, was she capable of such an act, this filled his mind, this scarcely could have matched his imagination.
Jason made his way into the small elevator to the top of the stairs, thinking if he could save her, he’d try, maybe she wasn’t dead.
When he looked the archway, into the bedroom his daughter was sitting up on the bed—erect the gun still in her hand, right hand, Linda standing by the doorway, Cassandra had put the four-inch barrow of the gun into her mouth, and pulled the hammer back, and then the trigger, it blew the side of her face off, her teeth were showing, and gums, flesh hanging like threads all the way down from her lower eyelid on the right side of her face onto the bone of her jaw.
Linda thought: how painful and shameful all this was, too unpleasant, too blunt for her to endure, she got nausea, almost fainted, looked at Jason Hightower, his money looked good, but now what. Her hands gripped the wheelchair, motionless she stood by Jason, “Pretend,” said Jason, “that she looks ok, I fear she’ll kill herself if she looks in a mirror.”
“No thanks, Mr. Hightower, I’m leaving, I can’t take this from here out you’re on your own.” And she meant it. And she meant it, as Jason seemingly accepted it, or so it seemed as anticlimax, to a father who tried his best to protect his daughter.
“Go then,” said Jason, “Never mind me, I survived before too, didn’t I.”
Linda looked at him as she left, it was a rhetorical statement-question to her, she never answered it, she just stood a moment, stared at what, and whom she had slept with, grabbed and left, although she didn’t leave without taking her new watch, and peal ring, and a thousand dollars worth of new cloths.
Jason mumbled to himself: ‘How do you know what to do, or should not do? I’m just a human being, left home in a wheelchair, dependent on people; how do you know, everyone is suppose to be here, but no one is, just me, tonight there will be nothing else to do…” and he looked over at Cassandra, and grabbed her sleeping pills, took them all, almost a bottle full, went to sleep, right there, right in his wheelchair and never woke up to hear the second shout of the gun go off.


The End to the Stories