"Abernathy's Park!" (Flash Fiction)

“Abernathy’s Park!”


“Caroline Abernathy had not always been a country girl. But the time when she wasn’t, or hadn’t been, was back around 1937, and to be honest, it was only for a five-year period, between her fifteenth and twentieth birthdays, when she attended college, such a short period, folks she knew on the plantation, and down in Fayetteville, who were fifty or older, back in 1972, only remembered her being gone, and many of her old friend forget she had ever left North Carolina; because she had stayed at the plantation some twenty-two miles from the city all those other years, after she got married.
“She was a young woman then, attending a New York City-university, her father had gone to Colombia University, and his brother to Harvard, and her, to the city’s college. Everyone, that is—everyone in her family, believed she didn’t need an expensive education, simply to get married and have kids, but she persuaded her father, and grandfather that it was more than a mere formality for the family, it was tradition they get a good education.
So they paid her tuition for five years. One extra year for her Masters Degree in public relations, in which she was convinced that she would go on to get her doctorate. Actually she declined to continue, meeting Cole Abernathy, and marring him, that following spring, and brought out to what she felt at time his family’s remote plantation.
She never felt the victim, rather an overconfident wife, and well done job at school, that would help with the business her husband was in thereafter, and calling her new life –with child—a great success in all conquered areas.
Now, at fifty years old (in 1972), the story itself was old and unoriginal, she had told it to herself a hundred times, and her dead husband, who died of a heart attack because of her son’s death six-months prior to his, whom died of syphilis, given to him by his Vietnamese wife, Vang—your mother, then living with her original husband—a bigamist—in Saigon, it all was too much. That was why this country girl went into the barn, behind her Mansion, in 1972, and hung herself. Her imagination darted every which way, I remember it quite clearly. She even went to Saigon to kill Vang, had a knife in her purse, found her with her grandson—you, confronted her, and on her prowess behavior, in being able to hide two husbands from one another, or at least one from the other, then tired of reason, looking at her grandson, something forbid her to kill Vang, the predictable elopement took place, she ran back home, to that barn and hung herself, the final escape.
She now is buried in that little patch of a cemetery in the back fields of her once, 1200-acre plantation, with Cole, her husband, and Langdon, her son, and Josh, who died just before she hung herself, Josh Jefferson Jr., a black workman, who had labored on the plantation most all his life.
And a neighbor named Mrs. Stanley, who was first on the scene, heard her dog barking from inside of the barn, who had woke up to find her hanging, she called the doctor and the sheriff, and the account was settled, and Betty Hightower, from New Orleans, her younger sister, came to settle what needed to be settled in the estate.
“A few people came to claim money, and even the property, but the will was specific, Betty got it all, and that about how it was Mr. Josue Abernathy,” said Mr. Wright, the lawyer who handled the Abernathy case, adding, “you needn’t have come all this way from Saigon, I mean its been twenty-years since your grandmother died.”
“What happened to Betty Hightower?” asked Josue.
“It all was a mess back then, she went to finish what Caroline couldn’t do, and in the process was rapped, and died a mile away from your mother’s house. Her husband had died, and her daughter, likewise.”
“Well,” said Josue, “where did all the money go?”
“To all of us in this county, we paid for a park with the money, and we even named it after her ‘…Abernathy’s Park!’ I hope you don’t wish to fight the whole county on this matter?”
He stood up. And the attorney merely rose slowly and bowed to his client, and said, “That will be $500-dollars sir.”
“What…” said Josue?
“I don’t work free!” said Mr. Wright.
“What if I challenge the will?” said Josue.
“That would be your second mistake.” Said the attorney, and Josue wrote out a check right then and there.


8-24-2008