The Saddle Left Half Finished

At eighteen he put me on a bus to a business college. “It’s no trade for a girl,” he said. “I won’t watch it break you.” He thought he was loving me.

I have known for fifty years exactly what it feels like to be sent away from the thing you love by someone who calls it kindness. I knew it standing in that kitchen. I did it anyway.

She did not take the saddle. She left it on the third stand from the window, with the rawhide tree, the cut skirts, the half carved fenders and the unstitched seat, exactly as she had set it down.

I let it stand three weeks. On the first Sunday of June I walked down to the shop with a bundle of kindling to burn it.

I mean that. I was going to carry it out to the barrel behind the shop and strike a match and finish what the argument had started.

I put my hand on the seat. The leather was dry. Skirting needs oil or it checks and cracks like a creek bed in August, and my palm felt it beginning to go.

My hand knew before my head did. I could not let leather crack. It is the one rule I have ever been completely sure of.

I put the kindling down. I took the can of neatsfoot oil and the wool dauber from the shelf. I gave the skirts and the seat a thin coat, worked in with my palm, the way Everett taught me.

Not too much. Too much is a kind of drowning.

I told myself I had only done it because it would be a waste to ruin good hide.

I did it again the first Sunday of July. After that I stopped telling myself anything at all, and I just did it.

Every first Sunday of every month, after church and the potluck and the dishes, I took the key from my purse and walked down Main Street. I did not turn on the overheads. I lit the one lamp over the third stand and oiled a saddle nobody would ever ride.

Then I locked the door and walked home. I never told a soul. Not the pastor, not my son, not my friend Marit at the Cenex, who would have told the whole town by suppertime and meant it kindly.

A woman who sends a girl away and then sits up with her saddle in the dark does not get to be pitied. She gets to be ashamed.

When people asked about Hadley, I said she had chosen Billings. I let Rell Basin believe she had been ungrateful, a girl who turned her back on a good family trade.