The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

It is not a rich place. It is the kind of place where you buy your jeans at the feed store and your truck has two hundred and eighty thousand miles on it, and you pray for rain in May and against hail in July.

We make it, most years. Some years we make it on my job at the school cafeteria in town.

Marlin’s father was Amos Briggs. If you lived in our county for any length of time, you knew Amos, or you knew somebody he had pulled out of a ditch, or helped brand, or lent a bull to when theirs went lame.

He was the kind of man the whole sale barn stood up for.

Amos died two years ago in March, in his own bed, with calving season going on outside the window. He was eighty-one.

I won’t say more about that than I have to. It was hard, and it was also his time, and he knew it, and he told Marlin where everything was before he went.

He left behind a ranch, a dog, a pair of boots, and a tan Stetson he had worn for thirty years.

That hat had a sweat stain that went clear up past the band, and a crease in the front where he had pinched it with the same thumb and finger ten thousand times.

After he passed, Marlin hung the hat on a nail in the tack room, right by the door where Amos always hung it. Nobody wore it.

Nobody moved it. We’d walk in for a halter and there it would be, and some days that was a comfort and some days it was not.

Renee is Marlin’s older sister by five years. She married young and moved away to the city, and it didn’t work out, and she came home with her daughter Gussie when Gussie was in third grade.

She went back to her own name, Briggs, and she has been back in the county ever since.

I want to be fair to Renee. She is a hard worker. She keeps books for half the businesses on Main Street.

And for nine years now she has been the coordinator of the county rodeo queen contest, which is a lot of unpaid work for a woman who already works too much.

She organizes the judges, the sponsors, the schedule, the sashes, the buckles, the banquet. She runs it straight.

I have never once heard anyone say Renee Briggs played favorites, not even the mothers of girls who lost, and those mothers will say anything.

Gussie entered that contest twice, at seventeen and at nineteen. Both years she rode a good ranch gelding in a plain saddle, and both years she lost to girls whose families had bought a finished horse, a silver show saddle, and a coach from out of state. Gussie cried in the truck both times.

I remember the second year. Renee stood at the arena gate with her clipboard and her microphone and announced another girl’s name, and then she went behind the bucking chutes and I saw her shoulders shake.