Now with the dust from the trucks and cars and the factory, all the trees and shacks in Holly Springs took on the look of the blight. Long before the cement factory was built several miles down the road, Layton had fallen from the tree, but it had been because he was careless. The hot white dust clung to the smooth hard surfaces of the tree like powder. Layton watched the last car on the freight.

Uncle Joe had said that he wanted her to stay with him, but she had always refused.

Yes, he would do all that and then he would buy a car, come back to Holly Springs and take his grandmother to Illinois where his uncle Joe lived. He would save up all his money and come back to New York, give it all to his mother to help her. He thought of himself in a few years riding on a train or maybe even an airplane and being a soldier somewhere.

But that was two years ago and his brother had been killed over there. His brother had ridden on a train when he had gone off to Vietnam. He never knew if the white faces waving at him would ever make the engineer stop the train for him. He had always waved at the swift passenger trains, and many times when he went across the river and sat by the tracks, people on the train would wave back. But there was something about waving at a freight train that seemed dry and meaningless. How many times had he waved at trains? If he could live as long as the number of times he had waved, he knew, without counting them, that he would live to be as old or older than Granny Lincoln. Leaning out from the tree with his feet firmly set in the notch where the limb sprung from the body of the tree, and holding to the neck of the tree with his left hand, Layton raised his right hand at the train. Their aprons bulged with vegetables as they approached in the dust, an ancient silence walking beside them, a part of them, and yet, like them, a part of the land. The two old women wore wide straw hats, which cast long boatlike shadows in front of them. He claimed that his mother was born a slave and when she was a girl had seen Abraham Lincoln campaigning for the presidency. Nobody knew how old Granny Lincoln was except Granpa Fields. Fields, who lived in the cabin with her ailing husband and his mother, Granny Lincoln.

The freight still passed, its many-colored, many-shaped cars looking like the curious shapes of a puzzle.ĭown the road Layton saw his grandmother coming.

Echo tree henry dumas