I worked the stiff strap loose, flipped the flap back, and looked inside, and I sat right down in the dirt by the barn, because that old saddlebag my father carried every day of his working life, on his horse and in his truck, always within arm reach, was full of letters. And they were love letters. And they were between my father and my mother.
My daddy was a hard man. A cowboy, tough as an old saddle and about as talkative, a man I never once in my life heard say a soft word, not to me, not to my mother, not to a living soul. He showed his love by fixing your truck at midnight and never once mentioning it. He was not a man of words, everybody knew that about him. Everybody was wrong.
Because there in that saddlebag was thirty years of the most tender words you ever read, and every last one of them was in my daddy own hand. He wrote to my mother. All those years he could not say it out loud, he was writing it down, and giving it to her, in secret, letters slipped in her Bible and under her pillow and in her coat pocket, and she saved every one, and when she passed he took them all back and carried them with him, on his horse, in his truck, always within reach, so that he would never once be without her.
And it turned out she wrote him back the very same way, because in with his letters were hers, and I read my quiet, buttoned-up parents court each other and love each other and grow old together in ink, a whole secret romance running underneath the plain hard life I watched them live, and I never had the first idea it was there.
I cannot say these things to your face. I do not know why. My own daddy could not either. But I can write them down, so I will. You are the best thing that ever happened to a hard old man, and I have loved you every day since I first saw you across that dance floor, and I will go on loving you after I am dead, which will not be long now. Wait for me. I am coming. That was the last one, written after she was already gone, written to her anyway.
I sat in the dirt by the barn where I grew up and cried for the two of them, my mother and my father, who loved each other like something out of a song for fifty years and never once let their own children see a bit of it, because the saying of it out loud was the single thing that hard old cowboy could not do.
He is buried right next to her now, out on the place they worked their whole lives. I put the letters back in his saddlebag and I buried it with him, all those tender words going down into the ground with the hard man who could only ever write them and never speak them, so that he would have her with him still, always within reach, the way he kept her every day he breathed. Wait for me. I am coming. I like to think he finally got there.