“Mr. Hayden your time with us is almost over,” the
nurse began. “Have you made any arrangements for when you’re released?”
2 “I’ve been thinking about that, Maria. I think I
need to go home,” he responded. “We both know that I don’t have much longer to
live anyway, and I’d like to see my folks one more time before the end.”
3 “Don’t say things like that, Hayden!” interjected
the young man in the bed next to his. “You can’t give up and lose your hope!”
“You’re right, Vern,” Hayden smiled. “We can’t lose hope.”
4 He was extremely weak and feeble when Hank and Doris
helped him onto the train. He had just had a bad coughing spell, and his
handkerchief was so splattered with blood that he had to throw it away and get
out a new one.
5 “The sanatorium sent a telegram to your parents.
They will be expecting you tomorrow,” Doris told him before they hurried off
the train.
6 Hayden laid his head back against the soft pillow
and stared out the window at an open boxcar on the tracks across the yard. As
the train pulled out of the station, he pictured his mother and sisters waiting
in Huntsville to see him.
7 For now, however, the vast Texas grasslands were the
reality in his window. They seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance.
8 He was so tired, but he had to stay awake. He felt
like he would never wake up if he closed his eyes.
9 Before long, the train pulled into another small
Texas town. As it came to a stop, he could see a Latino man running past the
ticket window at the depot. He wondered why the man was running, and where he
was going. He wondered too whether or not the man had a family, and what he did
to make a living.
10 Of course, Hayden had no way of knowing that the
man who had briefly traversed his field of vision was named Martin Salazar, and
that one of his descendants would play a significant role in the story of his
own family one day.
11 Hayden had been drifting in and out of
consciousness for hours when the train crossed the Mississippi River. He would
be home soon. If he could hold on just a little while longer, he would feel his
mother’s hand brush across his forehead and see Corene’s smiling face. But, as
the train swayed back and forth and continued toward its destination, Hayden
Hendrix slipped into a sleep from which he would never awake.
12 By the time it pulled into the station at
Huntsville, he had been unconscious for hours. Two attendants carried his
emaciated body from the train and helped his parents load him into a car.
13 It was good that Hayden couldn’t see Corene’s face.
She wasn’t smiling. Tears were streaming down Ann’s cheeks, and Virgil was
stone-faced and silent.
14 “We’ll take him to my house,” Mrs. Esslinger said
without waiting for a response that she knew would never come. When they
finally arrived at her home, she sent one of her neighbors to summon a doctor.
15 Ann sat in a chair beside the bed where they had
laid him out. Hayden’s breath was shallow now. She brushed her hand across his
forehead and whispered, “I love you, Son.”
16 She didn’t know that he had felt her hand and heard
her words. For Hayden, however, it was enough. He was home. He could rest now.
Ann watched him exhale, but she waited in vain for him to draw in another
breath. He was gone.
17 “Why?” she sobbed. “Oh, God, why?” She had already
lost John and Eva. Wasn’t that enough? Parents weren’t supposed to outlive
their children. It wasn’t fair.
18 Five days later, in a sharecropper’s house about 40
miles to the west of where Hayden had died, Mittie and Clip Miller welcomed a
new baby girl into the world. They named her Edna Earl, but she would be known
to everyone as “Doodle.”
19 Back in Huntsville, Ann had just finished burying a
third child, but she wasn’t finished with heartache. Within four years, Corene
would be dead too. How much more could a mother be expected to bear?
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