Chapter 4: Mom's Saddle

Abel Kessick pulled me into the empty feed room and shut the door before I could say a word.

Then he hugged me, hard, with his cap crushed between us and his whole thin body shaking.

"Nine years," he said into my hair.

"Nine years, and I never had an address."

"I didn't have one either."

"You've got a different face."

"I've got the same one with less hair."

He laughed, wet and cracked, and held me out at arm's length.

He looked at the scar over my eyebrow.

"A fall?" he asked.

"A bad horse at Charles Town.

"I was twenty-one."

"You still sit like her."

I didn't answer, because I couldn't.

He wiped his face on his sleeve, crossed the room, and pulled a grain bin away from the wall.

Behind it lay a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with baling twine.

"I took it the morning after," he said.

"Mrs. Redmond was going through the tack room with a box.

"She was clearing out everything that had your mother's name on it."

He untied the twine.

Inside lay my mother's saddle.

Brown leather, worn pale where her knees had been, her initials on a brass plate behind the cantle.

I put my hand on the seat.

It was still shaped like her.

I had thought I'd cry, and I did not.

I stood with my palm on that leather and felt something settle in my body, slow and cold and clear.

"You kept it nine years," I said.

"In a bin."

"I oiled it every spring.

"I'd have given it to you if I'd known where you were."

"Abel."

"Yes."

"Tell me what you saw."

He pulled a feed bucket over and sat on it, heavily.

"I never told anybody the whole of it," he said.

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