The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

Her long dark hair was in one thick braid down her back, the way she wears it to ride. She stood up straight and she gave her speech about the ranch.

When she got to the part about the neighbors who come help at branding, I heard the grandpa next to me make a little sound in his throat.

When she finished, he leaned over and said, “That’s Amos Briggs’s granddaughter, isn’t it.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Thought so,” he said. “She’s got his hat.”

The horsemanship was in the afternoon, in the main arena. That’s the part that matters most, everybody says. You can practice a speech in a mirror. You can’t fake riding.

I got up in the grandstand at a quarter to two. It’s a small grandstand, metal bleachers, maybe four hundred seats, with a tin roof over half of it and the other half open to the sun.

Metal pipe fences around the arena. The dirt had been worked and watered that morning, but the sun had already baked the top of it dry.

And here’s what I noticed, sitting down. The grandstand was fuller than I’d ever seen it for a queen contest.

Usually it’s mothers and grandmothers and a few bored little brothers. That day there were men up there. Old men, in their good shirts, with their hats on.

Gentry was there, three rows down from me. Eldon was there, who used to buy calves off Amos every fall.

Sylvester was there, who was a brand inspector for thirty years. Dempsey and Marlin’s uncle and two men I didn’t even know by name.

They’d driven in from all over the county in the middle of haying.

Marlin sat down next to me. He’d come in from the hayfield with chaff still in his collar. He didn’t say anything.

He took my hand, which he does about twice a year, and held it on the hot bleacher between us.

Renee was at the announcer’s stand with the microphone. She had a clipboard and a bottle of water and her sunglasses on.

She called the girls in one at a time to ride their pattern, and she read a little bit about each one from the card they’d filled out.

The first three girls rode beautifully. Their horses were finished horses, shining like glass, and their saddles caught the sun.

One of them had silver on her saddle that threw light all the way up into the stands.

You could see the money in those horses, and you could also see the girls had worked.

Then it was Kaycee’s turn.

She rode in through the gate on Dot, at a walk. Old Dot, with her white snip and her eighteen years.

Gentry’s wife’s saddle, old and worn and oiled dark. The turquoise shirt. And on her head, sitting snug on its strip of newspaper, a sweat-stained tan Stetson that half the men in those stands had seen every week of their lives for thirty years.