On the first Sunday of this November I carried a saddle stand out of my shop and set it on the sidewalk of Main Street, in front of everybody coming out of church.
It was cold and bright, with a skiff of old snow along the north side of the feed store. The whole town was about to walk right past me on the way to the potluck at the veterans hall.
That was the point. I had spent five and a half years doing one thing in the dark. I meant to do the last of it in the open.
On the stand sat a youth saddle with a twelve inch seat. The rawhide tree was covered, the skirts were cut, the fenders were carved with little round tansy blossoms, and the seat was not yet stitched.
It belongs to my granddaughter Hadley. I am the reason she does not live in this town anymore.
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I will tell you how I came to be standing there with two needles and a length of waxed thread. But I have to tell you what I did first, because if you meet the good part before the bad part, you will think better of me than I earned.
My name is Thora Benneville. I am sixty-eight years old. I run a saddle and leather repair shop on Main Street in Rell Basin, Montana.
The sign at the county line says we have 412 people. I would put it nearer 380.
We have a Cenex station, a grain elevator, Our Savior’s Lutheran, a veterans hall with a gravel lot, the Stockman Bar, a feed store, and us. Benneville Saddlery.
The shop is one long room with a tin ceiling and a plank floor that has taken forty years of neatsfoot oil and has stopped noticing. Four saddle stands stand in a row down the east wall like patient animals.
My husband Everett built the place in 1979. He used to say the smell of leather and hot wax was the only advertising we ever needed.
Our son Merritt did not take to leather. He drove truck in the oil patch in North Dakota, and his wife left for Arizona when their daughter was eight.
When Hadley was eleven, Merritt brought her down to Rell Basin for one summer. She never really left.
She sat on a nail keg by Everett’s bench and watched his hands. She had her father’s silences and her grandfather’s eyes, a gray that goes almost green under a lamp.
By fall she was sweeping without being asked. At fourteen, Everett put a round knife in her hand, the old one with the rosewood handle.
“Cut away from yourself and let the knife do it,” he said.
She cut a strap in one pull and looked up at him like she had been handed a key.