Goodbye, Texas

“If your mother didn’t run away when you were born,” Woodrow’s aunt tells him, “she’d be here to take care of you now.” Aunt Clara pauses a beat.

“I never liked her,” Clara Earthmen says. “Never. I never trusted her.”

Clara takes Woodrow’s hand. She and the boy move to the shade beneath the wide branches of a cottonwood.

Clara stands with her back to a cool headstone and looks down at the rows of white crosses and the crowd of black-suited mourners and the open hole where her brother now lies. The preacher has closed his Bible. At the edge of the grave a man in an ash-colored suit picks up two handfuls of dirt and drops them in slow motion onto the head of the coffin.

Aunt Clara looks again at the boy. He isn’t crying. This funeral is the end result of a long illness. He has no tears left.

“I don’t like it,” the big woman says. “What’s the matter with my home? I’m not good enough to raise my own brother’s son? You have to go and live with white people?”

In response the boy’s face is smooth and impassive. He is as expressionless as his father in the grave—except Woodrow’s eyes, which are wide open and gleaming. 

He looks down the hill at the expanse of graves where generations of his father’s family rest, almost back to slavery. Before that they buried under shade trees wherever they could be found. Woodrow’s father used to warn him about playing around the old oaks near their house especially—cautioning him “to show some respect for your own people,” underfoot. 

He blinks now and looks up at his aunt.

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, it’s not right. It’s not natural. I promised your father. He made me promise. But that doesn’t make it right.”

Behind her a squirrel jumps from a tree branch onto a marble headstone. The squirrel stands on its hind legs and raises both paws to its mouth and wiggles its nose. Woody’s mood changes for the first time, day or night, in four months. The animal looks as if it’s making faces behind Aunt Clara’s back and the boy makes a mistake because of it. He laughs.

Aunt Clara grabs his shoulders. He doesn’t resist. Woodrow relaxes his whole body and allows his aunt to shake him.

“Don’t laugh at me! As long as you black don’t you ever laugh at me!”

Her nostrils flare and for a moment her eyes bulge from her face. He wants to laugh again, this time at his aunt not the squirrel, but Woodrow knows that would be wrong. Besides, Aunt Clara’s seizures generally only last a moment. He knows that.

When her breathing returns to normal she opens her going-to-church purse, which matches her going-to-church hat and her going-to-church shoes, all of which are black. She has two going-to-church dresses however, black for sad events like today and a red one for weddings and church services when she expects to speak in tongues and she knows all eyes will be upon her. Clara’s hand reaches now to the bottom of the black bag and pulls out a fifty-dollar bill. She puts the money in the boy’s hand.

“That’s for you. If those white people ask you to do something you don’t want to do, something nasty, you remember you got money of your own and you tell them no.”

The boy puts the fifty dollars in his pocket.

“Not there, fool. Put it in your sock.”

Woodrow folds the money into a square the size of a postage stamp. He lifts his left foot and for balance rests his right hand on a headstone, belonging to a C.B. “Trey” Johnston, who died in 1938 and was almost certainly white because this is the white side of the cemetery, up on the hill among the trees, while blacks who use the cemetery at all, even today, are relegated to the flatland below, in the sun. 

He pushes the fifty dollars between the brown cotton of the sock and his skin.

“If you’re going to live with those white people,” Aunt Clara tells him, “there are some rules that I want you to follow.”

“It’s only Oklahoma, Aunt Clara,” the boy objects. “I’ll just be across the state line. You can even see it from hill behind Mr. Montford’s house.”

Clara stares at Woody like he’s an idiot. She loves him, he knows, but he also knows she believes he has no common sense. 

“Why you think they call this town ‘Goodbye,’ son? Why you think no one calls it Wilmot like it says on the map?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Clara. I never thought about that.”

“Because no black person ever comes back. Not to Texas, nor to this damn town either. People are born here to leave. That’s what your mother said, I was standing right there when she walked out, ‘I’ll just be in Oklahoma,’ she told your father. We never saw her again either.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There are four rules, I was saying.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“First, don’t eat with them.”

“But Aunt Clara—”

Her nostrils start to flare again, a bad sign. She puts her hands on her wide hips.

“You aren’t so old that I can’t whip your ass.”

Woodrow breathes deep. He’s been through something similar with his aunt before, usually about once a day. He knows how to handle her, however. In a mouse-low voice he says, “But Aunt Clara I’ll be living with them. I have to eat with them.”

The big woman considers that for a moment. “Well,” she says, “be sure to wash your hands after.”

“You mean before.”

“I mean after. I don’t care what germs you taking to their table, I care about the disease you taking away.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Second, don’t fornicate with their women.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“For-nah-cate.”

Clara Earthman’s eyes narrow. She looks closely at her nephew.

“How old are you, Woody?”

“I’m fifteen next month.”

“Third,” Aunt Clara says, “wipe the toilet bowl when you sit down. I can’t emphasize enough that you never know what kind of illness those people got.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Clara takes the boy’s head in her hands. She presses her own face up to his, then steps back.

“Fourth and most important, whatever you do—”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Don’t forget you black.”

Woodrow is wearing one of his father’s two going-to-church suits, both charcoal. It fits him in length but not really in the waist. He looks now at his arms hanging at his sides. He can’t tell where the dark sleeves of the coat end and the skin of his hand begins.

“No ma’am. I won’t forget that.”

At home there’s no one in the kitchen. That’s unusual. 

Woodrow’s street clothes are hanging on a chair at the breakfast table, laid out for him, his aunt’s apron laying on the table in front of the chair. He slips out of his father’s suit right there. Woody wonders for a moment whether he’ll need it where he’s going but, needed or not, he decides the suit stays. The fifth rule Clara Earthman didn’t mention is don’t look back. 

Woodrow has more sense than he’s given credit for and he knows that, at the beginning at least, the fewer reminders of Goodbye the better. He does take a last look around, though. In some ways his life up until that moment has been lived in his aunt’s kitchen. The sink is half-full of dirty dishes, he notices. That’s not like Clara Earthman but this has been an exceptionally hard day for her, and the worst is yet to come.

Woody washes everything and leaves the dishes to dry. He actually likes to do the washing up. He has always liked the feel of warm soapy water and right now, more than anything else, he needs to do something he likes even if it’s only the dishes. Woodrow dries his hands and moves down the hallway leading to the living room. 

He goes as slowly as he possibly can. Along the corridor he passes the two bedrooms belonging to his cousins: In each room there are three beds, arranged together in a wide T, boys on one side, girls on the other. There’s not enough closet space to hang all the clothes and a nylon line has been tied from one wall to another in front of the bedrooms’ back windows. 

The beds themselves are made, the shelves neat and ordered like in a military barracks. That is why he’s going to live in Oklahoma. There’s no room for him here. 

The cost of staying with his aunt and uncle is “prohibitive,” his father said when he explained it all. Woodrow liked the word prohibitive when he heard it, the sounds is clean and technical and he intends to work it into future conversation—whenever he needs to describe the reasons for anything that can’t or shouldn’t be done. It’s prohibitive.

Clara and her husband have three and a half jobs between them, there’s barely money to feed another mouth, much less provide for college. The oldest child, named Darnell, is away at a low-tier state university in Huntsville and the expense is already breaking the family budget. The biggest attraction of Oklahoma is money. Woody’s dad knew Jim “Junior” Prescott in the Army, back in the day, and the two men stayed in touch through the years and the Prescotts are said to be wealthy, not just by Goodbye’s standards, which doesn’t mean much, but by the standards of Oklahoma City which means a good deal more. Woody looks up at the wall clock in Janelle, Jordanne and Joilene’s room. 

“It’s show time,” as his father used to say to announce a required task, even if unpleasant—especially if unpleasant. Woody moves on toward the living room, to join his new family. If anyone asked him how he feels he would have to say he doesn’t know yet. He’s fearful but he’s also practical and he senses the importance of the opportunity his father is offering him from the grave.

Woodrow pauses at the doorway to the living room as if he already knows what he will find inside. He takes another step. 

Candace and Jim Prescott (“Call us Candy and Junior!”) are sitting on the sofa near the door. They are immobile, stone-like, as if they’ve been there for centuries. On the other side of the room Aunt Clara is standing next to the coffee table, her arms folded across her chest, not a good sign but not an unexpected one either. This isn’t going to be easy for anyone, Woody tells himself, but the quicker the pain passes, the less there is to feel. With that realization, Woody now knows he’s becoming an adult. 

He walks by the Prescotts with barely a nod. That introduction has been made; they were at the church service. If Junior and Candace have any sense they know that this needs to be quick and he hopes they’ve already taken the precaution of loading his bag in their car. Every delay means more pain and Woody has decided to be proactive.

Clara Earthman’s hugs are renowned as a form of assault. She is a big woman with a low center of gravity and she wraps her arms around people and squeezes until not only the air is gone but so is the blood. When Woody was younger and shorter, Clara’s bosom nearly suffocated him on more than one occasion.

She knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s her way of exacting an emotional toll and Woodrow is sure that is what she’s going to do here—but instead of avoiding her he goes straight at his aunt and gets his arms around her and squeezes as tight as she squeezes him. He discovers he’s the stronger of the two. Clara Earthman drops her arms first. That’s it. A big kiss and he’s moving for the door, the Prescotts trailing in his wake.

Woody’s dad described his former Army buddy as a get-to-the-gravy-while-it-is-hot kind of man and Junior seems to have the same expedient instincts about escaping danger, which means leaving Clara Earthman behind as quickly as possible. It’s like Woodrow and Candace and Junior are leaving the scene of a crime, moving fast but trying not to look overly suspicious.

At the curb, an expensive SUV. The trunk is still open in case Woody had something else to bring, which he did not, and Junior Prescott moves now to close it and then swing around to the driver’s door. Woody opens the passenger side for Candace, chivalry she did not expect—then throws himself in the back seat. By the time Woodrow closes the back door behind himself, it seems they’re already on the outskirts of town.

“That was easier than I expected,” Junior says.

Woodrow breaks the fifth rule, which was self-imposed. He turns around and kneels on the seat and looks through the back window at his disappearing past. 

“Not as easy as you think,” he says to himself.

And then the tears begin to flow.