The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

She didn’t do that this time.

She set down the microphone. She picked up the big rosette ribbon, with its long streamers, and the buckle in its box.

She came down the steps of the announcer’s stand and ducked through the pipe gate into the arena, and she walked out across that hot dirt in her good boots, by herself.

It was a long walk. The arena isn’t big, but it was a long walk. I watched her the whole way.

She had her chin up, and she was walking straight, and by the time she got halfway across, I could see she was crying behind those sunglasses.

The grandstand went quiet again. Everybody knew. Everybody in that county knew Renee Briggs, and knew Amos, and a good many of them had heard about the porch and the forty-dollar hat, because the feed store hears everything.

They all knew what that walk cost her.

She reached Dot and stopped. Dot put her nose down and snuffed at Renee’s shoulder, the way she does, and Renee put her hand flat on the mare’s neck.

She stood there a minute. Then she looked up at my daughter.

“Kaycee,” she said. I was too far away to hear it then. Kaycee told me later what she said, word for word, and I believe her, because Kaycee doesn’t make things up.

“I was wrong,” Renee said. “I was wrong on the porch and I was wrong every day since. I’m sorry, honey. You rode better than anybody out here. And you rode it in my daddy’s hat.”

Kaycee said, “It’s okay, Aunt Renee.”

“It’s not,” said Renee. “But thank you.”

Then Renee reached up. Kaycee leaned down out of the saddle, a little, the way you’d lean down for a kiss.

And Renee took off her sunglasses and put them in her shirt pocket, so she could see what she was doing.

She said something else then, so quiet that Kaycee almost didn’t catch it. She said, “He used to take it off right here, to wipe his forehead. Right here, every time. You can see where his thumb went.”

She touched the crease in the front of the hat, the one Amos had pinched ten thousand times.

Then she unpinned the little brass pin from the back of the rosette. She looked at the hat for a second, at the sweat stain and the old band and the strip of sale barn newspaper peeking out of the inside, and she put her other hand on her brother’s daughter’s knee to steady herself.

The old men stood up again in the grandstand, every one of them, and this time they didn’t take their hats off. They just stood.

And Gentry said, loud enough that I heard it three rows up, “There you go, Renee. There you go.”

And out in the middle of that hot July arena, with the whole county watching and her father’s old mare standing quiet beneath them, Renee Briggs pinned the horsemanship ribbon on the band of Amos’s hat.