Saddles and Second Chances

The shop smelled of oil and hide and the kind of dust that seemed to find its way into the seams of things and stay there. Morning light slanted through the single front window, cutting a pale strip on the packed-earth floor, warming the wooden bench where Ava McKee worked. She set a steel rule down, tapped its edge with the heel of her hand, and watched the tiny sparks from the file fall like useless stars. Her hands were already stained with tannery brown; the knuckles carried faint scars that mapped a history of edges and needles and stubborn horses.

Ava had a ritual about coffee. Not the town’s thin brew sold at the saloon—she considered that an offense against beans—but a pot she boiled slowly on a little iron stove at the back, adding a pinch of bitter chicory that helped cut through the oil on her tongue. Outside, the baker’s oven exhaled sweetness—molasses pies cooling on a window ledge—and someone in the square had hung a line of laundry so that sun and wind made it slap like a pair of lazy flags. The bell of the stagecoach rang twice down the road, a hollow sound that let everyone know it had come and gone, and with it the day's errands.

She drove an awl through a strip of leather, fingers steady as a carpenter’s on a plumb line. The thread was waxed linen; she burned the ends and pressed them with a burnisher until they shone. Working was a kind of thought she trusted more than memory: the motion of needle, the pull of thread, the small sacrifices of hide trimmed and shaped until it fit the tree. A saddle that fit a horse snug and true made more than a comfortable seat; it calibrated temper and trust. She felt that in her shoulders and in how the wood of the tree took a curve.

“Morning, Ava.” Jonas “Jem” Pike ducked in with a grin and the air of someone who smelled of horses. He carried a rope halter looped over one arm and wore a shirt that had seen at least two seasons’ worth of grease.

“Aren’t you supposed to be out with cattle?” she asked, not looking up.

He shrugged and set a greasy palm on the bench. “Boss sent me on a scrounge. He said, ‘Find the woman who can keep a stubborn gelding from quitting life,’ and I think that describes you.”

She snorted. “I keep them from quitting their riders. There’s a difference.”

They traded small talk like people who had known one another long enough that the jokes landed soft. Jem had apprenticed for a spell under a farrier and had the kind of admiration that came with working for someone sideways—he watched, he carried, he asked the questions he could not yet answer. There was a domestic rhythm to the shop: jars of hand cream lined on a shelf, a battered lunch pail with a painted rooster, a stack of horsehair brushes stiff with use. None of it was grand, but it belonged. The town’s women called Ava a “practical sort” and meant it as compliment and rebuke in even measure.

Ava flexed her hands, shaping a new billet. Each cut needed an economy of motion; waste was something to be ashamed of. She could imagine the man who would sit heavy in this saddle—how his weight would press, where the leather must soften, where the latigo needed to bite. Trade was honest work: measure, judge, correct, finish. It was how she kept the ledger tidy and the shop open.