The Saddle on My Brother’s Kitchen Table

The saddle rack in Dad’s shed was empty, and for a second I honestly thought I had walked into the wrong shed.

I was forty-four years old, standing in the doorway of a building I had been in and out of since diapers, with a can of cat food in my hand.

But there was Dad’s vise on the bench, his calving chains on their nail, his good bridle with the split reins looped just so. There was the old yellow tomcat coming out from under the bench to complain at me.

And there was the rack he built out of a cedar post and a length of two-by-six the year he bought the saddle, with a dark shape worn into the wood where it had sat ever since.

Nothing on it but a saddle blanket, folded.

It was Friday. We had buried him Thursday.

I set the cat food down. I put my hand on the rack. The wood was cool and slick. There were two clean spots in the dust on the floor, right where the stirrups always hung.

Somebody had folded that blanket. A thief does not stop to fold the blanket.

And I knew who folded like that, corners squared and the fold turned to the wall, because the same man taught both of us.

I fed the cat. Then I went in the house.

Dad’s place was a little two-bedroom on the east edge of Mooreland, ten miles out of Woodward, that he bought when he came off the Miller ranch for good. He had cowboyed for the Millers forty years, and when his knees finally quit he moved to town with a pickup, a recliner, and that saddle.

He kept every piece of paper he ever got in a red coffee can on top of the icebox. Feed tickets. Vet bills. The receipt for Mama’s headstone. If you were in that family and you had a paper that mattered, that’s where you put it.

So that’s where I looked.

It was right on top. A yellow slip about the size of a bank deposit ticket.

Hale’s Pawn and Gun, Woodward, Oklahoma.

One western saddle, roping, used, with rear cinch.

Amount financed, $300. Finance charge, $50. Total due, $350, on or before the twenty-ninth of October.

And at the bottom, in the square, careful printing he has had since the second grade, my brother’s name. Randy.

It was dated Tuesday.

I sat down in Dad’s recliner with the ticket in my lap and worked it out.

Dad died Monday morning in that very chair, with the television on and his boots off. The neighbor, Jeff, found him when he didn’t come out for the paper. Tuesday at ten, Randy and I sat side by side in the funeral home in Woodward and picked the plainest casket they had. Dad’s burial policy came up $800 short of the total, and the man said, very kindly, that they would need the difference before the service.

I wrote a check. I remember being proud of him.

That was ten o’clock Tuesday morning. The ticket said Tuesday afternoon.

So my brother had walked out of that funeral home, driven the ten miles back to Mooreland, let himself into Dad’s shed with the key off the nail, carried our father’s saddle out to his truck, folded the blanket, and driven it straight back to Woodward. And then he had come here, into this kitchen, and put the ticket in the coffee can.

Two days later he stood beside me at the grave in Dad’s own bolo tie and shook every hand in the county.

I wanted to drive out to his place and throw that ticket in his face. I had the truck keys in my hand. I got as far as the porch.

What stopped me was the coffee can.

A man who means to get rid of a thing does not file the ticket where his sister will find it. He put it where the important papers go. Some part of him was treating it like a bill that would get paid.

That didn’t make it right. But it made me sit back down.

Scott got home from the feed mill a little after five, dusty to the eyebrows the way he always is, and I let him wash up and eat before I laid the ticket beside his plate.

My husband reads everything twice. He read it twice.

“Three hundred,” he said. “That saddle would bring a thousand from a stranger.”

“It isn’t for sale to a stranger.”

“No.” He turned the ticket over and looked at the back, where the fine print was. “He’s got till the twenty-ninth. He might be planning to get it.”

“With what? If he had three hundred dollars he wouldn’t have needed three hundred dollars.”

Scott let that sit.

“You going to call him?”

“I want to.”

“Then call him.”

“And say what?” I got up and ran water in the sink for no reason. “I call him, I light into him, and he hangs up on me. Or he doesn’t hang up, and he says something he can’t take back, and I say something worse. Then we’ve got Dad one day in the ground and his two kids not speaking, and the saddle is still sitting in Woodward with a tag on it.”

“All right.”

“And here’s the other thing.” I turned the water off. “It’s half his. Dad never said who got it. Randy didn’t steal anything from me. He had as much right to carry it out of that shed as I did.”

“He didn’t have the right to hock it without telling you.”

“No. He did not.”

Scott folded the ticket along its crease and slid it back across the table. In twenty-two years I have never had to ask him to stay out of my family’s business or to step into it. He waits to see which one I need.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I want it home. Before anything else. I want it out of that building.”

“Then go get it.”

So I got down the egg jar.

I keep about thirty hens, and I sell eggs at three dollars a dozen to the women at church and the girls I work with at the care center, where I cook. The money goes in a quart jar on the shelf over the stove, and I don’t touch it except for Christmas. I dumped it out on the table and Scott and I counted it together, ones and fives mostly, soft as cloth and smelling a little like the henhouse.

A hundred and twenty dollars. Forty dozen eggs.

Then I got the envelope out of my Bible. I’d picked up two weekend doubles in September, and I had been setting the extra aside for front tires on my car. Two hundred and thirty.

I put the two piles side by side.

“That’s three fifty,” Scott said.

“That’s my tires.”

“I’ll rotate them. They’ll go till Thanksgiving.” He reached for his wallet. “Or let me put in half.”

“No. Thank you. This one’s mine.”

He put the wallet away without arguing, and I loved him for that too.

Hale’s opens at nine on Saturdays. I was in the lot at ten till.

It’s a long room with a glass counter down one side, deer rifles on the wall behind, and three rows of tools that tell you exactly how the oil patch is doing. When there’s work, the shelves are thin. That morning they were full.

He looked at me over the glasses. “You’re Gene’s girl.”

“Yes sir. Tammy.”

“I was sorry to hear. I’d have come Thursday but I can’t close.” “He was as good a hand with a rope as I ever watched.”

“Thank you.”

I laid the yellow ticket on the glass. Then I laid my driver’s license beside it.

He looked at the ticket a good while. He didn’t act surprised.

“That’s your brother’s name on it,” he said.

“I know it is. Can I redeem it, or does it have to be him?”

“Whoever holds the ticket and shows me who they are gets the goods. That’s how the state has it.” He pulled a ledger toward him. “I’ll write your name and your license number beside his, so there’s no question later who took it out.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Three fifty.”

I’ll admit I had hoped. “It’s only been four days.”

“I know it.” He took the glasses off. “A month’s charge is a month’s charge, first day or the thirtieth. I don’t set it, and I can’t shave it on a ticket that isn’t in your name. If your brother ever wants to know what was paid, I want my book to say exactly what his ticket says.”

I counted it out on the glass. The overtime money in twenties, the egg money in its ones and fives. He counted it behind me, stamped the ticket paid in red ink, and handed it back.

Then he went into the back, and I heard his steps on a wood floor, and I heard it before I saw it. The creak. There is no sound like an old saddle being lifted. It’s like a porch swing and a pair of boots at the same time.

I had to put my hand flat on the counter.

It’s not a pretty saddle. It’s a plain brown roping saddle, built heavy, forty pounds if it’s an ounce, with a tree made to hold a steer on the end of a rope. No silver. A little basket stamping on the skirts, worn nearly smooth. The seat is dark and slick as a creek rock from one man’s Wranglers. The horn is wrapped in strips of black rubber cut from an inner tube, and the rubber has a groove burned in it where his rope ran.

And the off stirrup is wrapped in rusty baling wire.

It smelled like him. Neatsfoot oil and horse sweat and dust, and under that the cab of his pickup.

“I kept it in back,” Mr. Hale said. “I don’t put a man’s saddle out on the floor before the date, and I wouldn’t have put this one out after. I told your brother that. I told him, you get in a bind on the date, come see me, I’ll hold it.”

“What did he say?”

“Said he’d be here before the date.” He set it down on its fork, horn to the floor, gently. “He sat out there in his truck twenty minutes before he came in. I watched him through the window. I thought sure he’d drive off.”

“Tammy.” Mr. Hale rested his hand on the cantle. “I’ll tell you something, and you can do what you want with it. This is the second time this saddle has been in my back room.”

I looked at him.

“January of 1982. My daddy ran the place then, and I was fifteen, sweeping this floor. Gene came in with that saddle over his shoulder. He had a baby coming and the hospital wanted money down.” He nodded at the rack of ledgers behind him. “It’s in the old book if you want to see it. He got it back out in March, soon as he’d put together enough day work.”

I was born the ninth of February, 1982.

“That baby was me,” I said.

“I figured it was.”

“He never told us.”

“No, I don’t expect he would.” Mr. Hale put his glasses back on. “But he didn’t come in alone. Your mother came with him. She stood right about where you’re standing, and she held his hat.”

He carried it out to my truck himself. He stood it in the back seat on its fork, on the folded blanket I had brought from the shed, and he tucked the stirrups so they wouldn’t swing.

“The tag’s still tied on the saddle string,” he said. “You’ll want to cut that off.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

I drove home with the windows rolled up so I could smell it. Three miles out of Woodward I pulled over at a section road and cried into the steering wheel, which I had not done at the funeral.

I spent Saturday afternoon on the back porch with a rag and a tin of saddle soap.

It didn’t need it. I just needed my hands on it.

When Randy and I were little, the best thing in the world was to be allowed to lift the near fender and look underneath. On the rough side of the leather, where nobody would ever see, Dad had scratched two marks with a horseshoe nail.

R 79.

T 82.

The years we were born. He did Randy’s the week he came home from the hospital, and mine, I now understood, sometime after March.

I lifted the fender to soap under it, same as I’d done a hundred times.

There were four marks.

Below ours, newer, the scratches still pale against the old leather.

C 12.

L 15.

Cody and Luke. Randy’s boys.

Dad never told a soul. He just went out to the shed with a nail, twice, when each grandson was born, and wrote them into the one thing he owned that was worth passing down.

I sat on the porch step with the fender across my knees until Scott came out and sat down beside me. I showed him. He ran his thumb over the four marks and didn’t say anything for a while.

“Randy know about those?” he said.

“I don’t think anybody does.”

Then I picked up my sewing scissors, because there was still that tag.

It was a little paper tag on a loop of white string, tied to the saddle string behind the cantle. Hale’s Pawn and Gun, it said, and a number in ballpoint. 4417.

I had the scissors open around the string.

I didn’t cut it. I closed the scissors and put them back in my pocket.

I had already decided two things. I would not tell one lie about that saddle, and I would not start a fight in front of those boys. If nobody asked, then nobody asked, and Randy and I would settle it some other day.

But I wasn’t going to tidy it up for him either.

“You’re leaving that on,” Scott said.

“I am.”

“All right,” he said, and went to check the oil in the truck.

Randy had asked us to Sunday dinner back on Thursday, at the meal the church ladies put on after the graveside. “Y’all come eat Sunday,” he’d said. “The boys need people around.” I had said we’d bring a pie.

After church I changed into jeans and my denim shirt, since I knew what I’d be carrying, and Scott drove us the six miles north.

Randy rents the old Baker farmhouse, a white two-story with a stock pen and a windmill that doesn’t turn anymore. He’s had the boys by himself for four years, since their mother moved to Amarillo. He drives a water truck for an oilfield service outfit. He packs those boys’ lunches and he has never missed a school program, and I want that said plainly before I tell the rest.

What I didn’t know that Sunday was that his hours had been cut from fifty a week to thirty-two since August. I didn’t know his rent was $650 and due on the first. I didn’t know that on the last Monday of September, the day our father died, my brother had $750 to his name.

Four hundred to the funeral home left three fifty. He was three hundred short.

I only knew what the yellow ticket said.

Scott parked by the propane tank. I got the saddle out of the back seat and up on my hip, horn forward, and it about pulled my arm out of the socket. The stirrups knocked my knee all the way up the porch steps. Scott carried the pie in one hand and held the screen door with the other.

“You sure?” he said, low.

“Hold the door.”

The kitchen smelled like chili and cornbread. Randy was at the stove with his back to us, stirring. Cody and Luke were already at the table in their T-shirts, Cody tipped back in his chair, Luke building something out of crackers.

“Hey, Aunt Tammy,” Luke said. And then, “Whoa.”

I set it on the end of the table, between the cornbread and the butter. I set it on its side, easy, but the cinch ring swung down and hit the wood like a dropped spoon.

Randy turned around.

I watched him see it. I watched his eyes go from the saddle to the little white tag to me, and I watched every drop of color go out of his face and then come back twice as dark.

He didn’t say a word.

Neither did I. Not to him.