The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

“Can I, Mom?” she said.

I couldn’t answer her right away. I looked down at the saddle blankets stacked on the rack until I could trust my voice.

The hat still smelled like him, I knew without even leaning close. Leather and sweat and the Copenhagen he swore he quit.

“Ask your dad,” I said.

Marlin came in from the corral a few minutes later with a bucket of grain. He stopped in the doorway.

He looked at his daughter and he looked at his father’s hat in her hands, and his face didn’t move at all, which is how I knew how much it was moving inside.

He nodded once. Just once.

Then he set the grain bucket down and went back outside, and he stood by the pickup with his hand on the tailgate for a long, long while, looking off toward the pasture where Amos used to check heifers.

Kaycee and I didn’t follow him. Some things a man needs to stand by a truck for.

When he came back in, he cleared his throat and said, “It’s too big for her.”

“I know,” said Kaycee. “I’ll fix it.”

She fixed it the way Amos would have. She folded a strip of newspaper, the sale barn report from the weekly paper, and tucked it up inside the sweatband until the hat sat snug on her head and didn’t wobble when she shook it.

Amos used to do the same thing with his hats when they stretched.

Then she took the folded entry form out of her shirt pocket, smoothed it flat on the kitchen table, and wrote “Dot” on the line for the name of the horse.

I wrote the check for seventy-five dollars, which was the entry fee, and I didn’t let myself think about what else seventy-five dollars could have bought that month.

The saddle was the next problem. Kaycee’s own saddle was a youth saddle she had outgrown two summers back.

Amos’s saddle had gone to Marlin’s cousin down south, by Amos’s own wishes, years before he passed.

We had a ranch saddle Marlin used, but it was a big roping saddle and far too heavy for queen work.

That was when our neighbor stepped in. Gentry lives three miles down the county road. He is seventy-six and still runs his own yearlings, and he rode with Amos on every spring gather for forty years.

He came by one afternoon to return a post driver and saw Kaycee loping Dot in the round pen.

“Heard you’re entering the queen contest,” he said to me, leaning on the fence.

News travels faster than weather out here. I don’t know who told him. Probably the feed store. Everybody tells the feed store everything.

“She is,” I said.

“Heard Renee told her not to.” He spit to one side, politely. “Heard about the forty-dollar hat.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to.