The Saddle Left Half Finished

I stood at my own bench and felt something go cold in my chest. I told myself it was nothing.

She was good. I want to say that plainly, because of what I later said to her. She was better than I was at fourteen, and I was better than most of the men in three counties.

She could bevel a strap so clean you would run your thumb along it twice to check it was there.

At seventeen she took down a small youth tree and asked, “Grandpa, can I build this?”

Everett said a first saddle ought to be small enough to finish before you lose your nerve.

She made it for no rider in particular, only for the making. Over one winter she covered the tree in rawhide, cut the skirts, set the rigging, and started the carving on the fenders.

At the center of each spray she put a little round flower. She said it was a tansy, because it grew in the ditch behind the elevator and nobody else liked it.

The seat was not stitched. The stirrup leathers were not made. She had a few weeks of work left, and she was as happy as I had ever seen anyone.

Then, in March of 2021, Everett died at his bench.

He was seventy-one. He had a heart that had been talking to him for two years, and he had told it to hush.

He was edging a latigo. Dewitt, at the next bench, said he did not make a sound. He set the edger down gently and put his head on his arm.

I was in the back with the books. I heard Dewitt say my name in a way I had never heard it said, and I knew from the one syllable.

I did the supper in the church basement. I thanked every rancher who had ever bought a saddle from Everett. I opened the shop the next Monday.

Then I opened the ledger, and the ledger was bad. The custom orders had dried up the way they do when the old customers go and the young ones buy a factory saddle off the internet for a third of the price.

The shop was making about enough to pay the electric and Dewitt.

I looked at that ledger. I looked at that quiet girl hunched over her work at the third stand the way her grandfather used to. And I saw the next forty years laid out in front of her like a road in the dark.

It was a Tuesday in May, after supper. The lamps were on over the benches.

She stood at the saddle stand in her apron with a rag in her hand and said, not looking at me, “Grandma, I wrote to Bozeman. I told them I’m not coming in the fall. I’m going to stay and finish. I want the shop.”