The Maker Stamp Under the Saddle Fender

I built that saddle the year before she was born, when I was twenty-six and did not know anything. The ground seat is a little high on the left.

The basket weave drifts about an eighth of an inch on the right fender. The oak leaves look like a child drew them.

It is the worst saddle I ever made. I have been offered real money for it three times, and every time I have said no, because it is the only one I would never sell.

“I’ve known it was there since I was six,” Hailey said.

“I used to crawl under it on the saddle rack in the barn and lie on my back and read it. I thought the number meant you loved it the most.”

I put my hand on the fender, on the stamp. The leather was warm from her horse.

My hand looked old to me, all of a sudden, old and stained from eighteen years of dye and oil, and I thought about the girl who had struck that number into it with a borrowed maul.

“It does mean that,” I said. “It means I loved it first.”

“You didn’t have to prove anything to me,” she said. “I want you to know that. Not today, not ever.”

I could not say anything for a minute. The gelding blew in my lemonade again.

Hailey laughed at him, and I laughed too, and wiped my eyes with the back of my wrist like I had dust in them, which in that arena I could have.

Then she reached into her shirt pocket and handed me a little spiral notebook, the kind she uses for her orders at the store counter on Saturdays.

“For your list,” she said. “You’re writing on a check, Mom. That’s crazy.”

I copied the names off the back of the check into her notebook, standing at the fence. Then people kept coming.

A woman whose father had ridden a saddle of mine for ten years before he passed and who wanted one for her husband. Two brothers who ranched together and wanted matching seats. A man from Bassett who had sat in Wade’s saddle at the trailers and did not want to get off.

Wade came by again after his team finished the branding. He did not apologize, because he had nothing to apologize for, and I told him so.

He just leaned on the rail and looked at Hailey’s notebook.

“You’ve got a list,” he said.

“Hailey made me get a notebook.”

“Put me down for one more,” Wade said. “For my wife. She’s been riding my old one. I’d like her to have a number of her own.”

I wrote it down. Lemke. Wife’s saddle. Oak leaves, she likes oak leaves. He tipped his black hat and led the bay back toward the trailers.

The sun was getting long by then, the way it does in September out here, the grass going gold along the tops of the hills and the dust in the arena hanging in the light like it does not want to come down.

I stood at the pipe fence with my lemonade gone warm and Hailey’s notebook in my hand, and I counted the names one more time, out loud, the way I had counted the listings in my shop.

One, two, three, all the way to eleven. Eleven saddles with my name on them, every one sold before I had cut a strap.

I had eleven new orders by the time they ran the steers.