Harold Brandt switched off his little flashlight, lowered the glovebox door to my kitchen table as gently as a sleeping child, and drew a breath. “Mr. Tate, inside this seam, someone scratched five signatures with a nail,” he said. “Under them is a date, July of nineteen fifty seven, and the words Ozark Troubadours. The first name is Dewey Ray Calhoun.” He looked at me with shining eyes. “Dewey Ray was a singer from Carthage who recorded one song, Highway Sixty Six Heartache, that sold a million copies. He vanished from public life in nineteen fifty eight, and his car was never found. This is his car, Mr. Tate. Or the door of it.” I am Wesley Tate, fifty two years old, and I sat down hard.
He explained the rest in the careful voice of a man who has waited a long time to say it. The Bel Air was stolen in Tulsa in the fall of 1958. In 1959, Jedediah bought a wrecked Chevy from a salvage yard on the edge of town, painted it, and found the signatures when he took the glovebox apart. He wrote to a collector in Scottsdale in 2019, because he was afraid to be the man who sold the lost car of a singer for money. He kept the door on his own shelf for sixty years. Then he left it to the grandson who swept his floors every summer without being asked.
My phone buzzed on the table. It was my cousin Trent, who had seen the rented Tahoe in my driveway from across the road. Within ten minutes, both he and Michelle were at the kitchen door, still in their Sunday clothes from a lunch in town. Harold stood politely and told them what he had told me. I watched their faces change. Trent turned the color of putty, and Michelle sat down on the nearest chair and stared at the glovebox door. “Nine hundred thousand dollars,” Harold said quietly. “At auction. Perhaps more.”
An old turquoise glovebox door gave one body shop grandson the length of an afternoon to bring his cousins back to the truth in Joplin.
I gave my terms with my hand resting on the cold turquoise metal. “Trent. Michelle. I am going to say this one time. Granddad left a letter with Mr. Brandt, and it says that the door belongs to the daughter of Dewey Ray Calhoun, Loretta, who lives in Carthage and is eighty one years old, if she wants it. If she does not, it is mine to sell, and half of the money goes to her anyway. The other half I am going to use to reopen the shop on Range Line Road and teach kids how to sand and prime and paint. I will not sell this door for a boat.”
Michelle began to cry, quietly, with her hand over her mouth. “Wes, I laughed at the reading,” she said. “Grandpa always looked at you when you came in, like you were the one thing he got right. I was jealous my whole life, and I took it out on you.” She wiped her eyes. “I have not paid my mortgage in four months. I thought the cash would save me, and when I saw you with that glovebox on the shelf, I hated you for being the one who had something he loved.” Trent said nothing. He stared at the floor.
But greed is quicker than shame. Trent suddenly lunged across the table, seized the glovebox door in both arms, and ran for the back door, saying he was going to have it appraised by his own man in Springfield. He got onto the porch. Harold Brandt, who was sixty three years old and built like a retired quarterback, moved with surprising speed and blocked the steps. My next door neighbor, Mr. Okafor, stepped out of his garage with a rake in his hands. And Michelle, to my enormous surprise, stood behind her brother and said, “Trent, put it down.”
Trent stopped on the porch, with the old turquoise door clutched against his chest and the October sun on his face. A mockingbird sang in the yard. He looked at his sister, who was crying, and at me, and at the sagging steps where he and I had played as boys. His arms loosened. He walked back into the kitchen like a man carrying a sleeping child and laid the door on the table with great care. “Wes,” he said, in a rough, small voice, “I lost the dealership in March. I did not know how to tell anyone.”
The consequences were kinder than anything my cousins had earned. Loretta Calhoun, a small bright woman in a cardigan, wept when she touched the signature of her father and chose to sell the door. It brought one million one hundred thousand dollars at auction in Scottsdale, and half went to her. Trent came to work at the new shop on Range Line Road, sweeping the floor as I had at nine, and Michelle did the books. After a year, neither of them could say a word about it without smiling.
In the name of my grandfather Jedediah, who passed in December, I started the Jedediah Tate Fund. It pays for tuition and tools for young people learning auto body repair and painting, in Jasper, Newton and McDonald counties. In the first year we enrolled twenty two students at the new shop and gave out fifteen toolboxes. One was a sixteen year old girl from Webb City who had never held a sander, and who laid her first coat of primer on a fender and stood back in the sun with her hands on her hips.
On a Friday night in October, the whole town went to the football game, and I closed the shop early. Trent and Michelle and I stood by the open bay door and looked at the sign over our heads, which Loretta had painted herself, in red letters on a white board. TATE AND CALHOUN BODY SHOP. On a shelf above the workbench sat the glovebox door of a Bel Air, a perfect copy that a local woodworker had made, with the five signatures traced by hand. Michelle slipped her arm through mine. “Granddad would have liked it,” she said.
