The Saddle Left Half Finished

I went home and did not sleep.

I thought about the phone, and I knew I could not do it. If I called, she would hear that smooth voice in the first breath, and she would be right to hang up.

I thought about a letter. I had burned three. A letter lets you say sorry in a room alone, and I had been saying everything in rooms alone for five and a half years.

What I had done to her I had done in the lamplight with the door shut. And what I had done to her name I had done in front of the whole town.

Somewhere around four in the morning I knew what I would do. I did not like it. That was how I knew it was right.

I took the saddle off the third stand the next morning. I turned it over under the light and looked at it for the first time like a saddle and not like a grave.

Sixty-five coats of oil had kept every inch of it alive. The rawhide shone like a polished table. Not one stitch of her carving had checked.

I had never touched the seat with a needle. I had never once been tempted. That was hers.

But it needed to be finished, and I could not ask her, and I would not let it sit one more year like a question.

So I did the work for the rest of it, in the evenings, with Dewitt at the next bench saying nothing. I cut the stirrup leathers from a side of skirting I had been saving for years without being able to say what for.

I wrapped the horn. I set the rigging and tried it three times on the stand, until Dewitt put his finger on a ring and said it was a quarter inch off. It was.

My hands hurt. I did it anyway, with ice in a bowl at the bench and a wool glove on my left hand between sessions.

I left the seat. A saddle seat is stitched with two needles, one on each end of a length of waxed linen, passed through the same hole from opposite sides. The pull is everything. A loose stitch gives. A tight one sets in the leather and holds for sixty years.

Everett always said mine sang. That was the one thing I could do that Hadley could not do as well, and it was the one thing I had told her she had no business doing at all.

I asked Marit to bring a card table and a thermos to the sidewalk after church on the first Sunday. She asked why. I said I wanted to do some work in the sun.

She looked at me for a long moment. She is not a stupid woman. She brought two thermoses.