Cousin Robert was never a handsome man.
Folks said it was really a shame that his oldest girl took after him, with her mother a beauty. But then, she was going to be a vet, not Miss Texas so what difference did it make?
After a family funeral, Robert pulled me aside.
“You remember asking me about your Dad? There’s something you should see.” He picked up the keys to his pick-up.
“I don’t have room to haul you all, but follow me down the road. It won’t take long.”
Nothing would take long at the speed he drove. Wouldn’t you think a seventy-five-year-old county commissioner would drive less than eighty miles an hour on those back-country, pine-lined, snaking roads?
“Can you still see him?” My husband squinted against blinding sunlight.
“I can still see the dust cloud.”
“Don’t lose him, for God’s sake, we’ll never find our way back to town.”
Doing my best to keep up, I remembered family visits when I was still living at home. After the obligatory cup of coffee with all the relatives, Dad and Robert would steal away to the barn. What they talked about there, none of us knew. They were not of a generation of men who talked about themselves.
Robert whirled into an even smaller side road, stopped at a gate and blew his horn. A wizened wizard in overalls limped out to open the gate and then close it behind us. He clambered into Robert’s pick-up, and we followed at a much slower pace to a weather-tight shop.
Climbing out of the car, we followed the men inside to an immaculate workplace where gleaming band saws vied for space with planers and joiners. Old carriages, stage coaches and wagons in various stages of restoration crowded the floor. Smells of sawdust and varnish floated through the spokes of vast wooden wheels that lined the walls.
“Here it is. Almost restored.”
The gleaming black body rested on four scarlet wheels, their brilliant color echoed in the upholstery.
“There wasn’t any gasoline during the war,” Robert mopped his face with a blue bandana, “but we didn’t let that stop us from going out. Your Dad had a chestnut horse, and he and I and our buddy Tom Ben put this together after school to ride around in. Jeff here restores buggies as a retirement hobby.”
I waited to hear more – stories of their adventures, or details of the restoration, but for Robert, seeing the surrey said it all.
Smiling, he walked over and patted the leather seat.
“Good times,” he said.