The Saddle Left Half Finished

It made a small flat note, like a plucked string.

Somebody behind me said, “Oh,” very quietly. It was Hiram.

I did the next one. The cold was in my fingers, and it hurt in a way I will not try to describe. I did the next one anyway.

It took me an hour and forty minutes to stitch a seat that would have taken Hadley thirty. Nobody left. The potluck at the hall went on across the street without us.

Around the middle of it, Dewitt put a cup of coffee on the edge of the stand where I could reach it with my elbow. He did not say a word.

Pastor Ellingson stood the whole time with his thumbs hooked in his coat pockets. Hiram brought a folding chair for one of the old women. Somebody’s child came and watched the needles go through the leather and went away again.

When I drew the last stitch down and tied it off, I sat for a minute with my hands in my lap. I could not have lifted a cup.

“That’s the seat,” I said. “That’s all of it, except her name.”

I had thought about the stamp. Everett’s maker’s mark was in the drawer, the one he used on every saddle since 1979. I had held it that morning for a long time.

It was not mine to put on this saddle. So I left the skirt bare beneath the carving, and I let the town see that I had.

“A saddle is not signed by the one who oiled it,” I said. “It is signed by the one who made it. That is for her to decide.”

The Lutheran women went back to their dishes and did not say anything to me. That was a kindness.

Marit set a hand on my shoulder for a moment, and then she took it away. Hiram said, to nobody, “Well.”

It cost me something I will not get back. For five and a half years I had kept my pride in a safe place, and I took it out on a stool in the middle of Main Street and left it there.

It cost me the use of my hands for the rest of the week. It cost me the saddle, which was the only thing of that girl’s I had left in the world.

Dewitt gave me her address on a folded piece of paper. Marit boxed the saddle on Monday at the Cenex counter, in a feed carton packed round with horse blankets.

She put the address on in her own hand. Inside, I tucked a plain envelope with a note of mine. It said, I lied. You were good. It is yours. I will leave the light on.

The brown truck took it Monday. On Tuesday morning, Marit told me the tracking said it was on a porch in Billings by eleven forty.