The Maker Stamp Under the Saddle Fender

“Wade,” I said. “Lift the left fender.”

He gave me a funny look under that black hat.

Then he looked down at the saddle, and back at me, and he must have seen something in my face, because he did not ask why.

He took hold of the left fender by the bottom edge, near the stirrup, and folded it up and back toward the seat, so the underside faced him.

The leather on the underside of a fender is smooth and pale where it rides against the horse.

He bent down to look. The bay shifted, and Wade put a hand on his neck and said easy, and kept looking.

The front rows of the bleachers had gone quiet watching him. A kid with a snow cone stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.

He read it out loud. I do not think he meant to read it loud.

I think it came out of him the way my counting had come out of me in the shop.

“T. Haverkamp,” he said. “Valentine, Nebraska. Number 207.”

He looked at the stamp a long time. Then he ran his thumb over the number, slow, the way you would feel a brand on a calf to see if it took.

Then he looked at me.

“You built this,” he said. It was not a question.

“I built it in March,” I said. “There was snow on the shop roof. There’s an acorn on your right rear jockey because I was in a mood.”

Wade let the fender down and walked around his horse and looked at the right rear jockey. He stood there a while.

Then he looked up at the announcer’s stand, a plywood booth on stilts at the end of the arena, where the ranch rodeo has been called by the same man for twenty years.

He did not say anything else to me. He gathered his reins and led the bay up the arena to the stand, walking, not riding, with the whole front row of bleachers watching him go.

The announcer is Duane, who ranches west of town and has a voice like a stock trailer coming down a washboard road.

Wade said something up to him. Duane leaned over the rail and listened, and then he handed the microphone down on its long cord.

Wade stood in the dirt below the stand with the mic in one hand and his reins in the other.

“Folks,” he said, and the speakers on the light poles crackled.

“Sorry to hold things up. I won’t be long. Most of you know I bought a saddle off the store website last spring. Store-made, it said. Built by Clint.”

The bleachers got very still. You could hear a horse stamping at the trailers.

“I’ve been bragging on it all summer,” Wade said. “Some of you have heard me. I just looked under the left fender, because Tess Haverkamp asked me to. It’s got her stamp on it. Her name and her number. Tess built my saddle.”

“If anybody else here bought one of those store-made saddles this last year,” he said, “you might go lift your left fender. That’s all. Go on, Duane.”

He handed the mic back up. Duane held onto it a second, looking at Wade, and then he said into it, in his washboard voice, “Well. All right. Next team in the sorting is from up by Cody. Give them a hand.”