THE SADDLE

741 words


Peggy picked up an unmatched, porcelain tea cup set. Stuck a one dollar price tag on the set and stacked it on top of another set. It was beginning to look like an artists greeting card. A tilting stack of cups and saucers.

Weeds tickled her sandaled feet as she moved to the next table of garage sale items.
Weeds on land blemished by the family shootout that had killed everyone in the family except herself and Hank.

He had been sixteen and the only one left with a smoking gun when the Sheriff arrived.

***

Inside his cell Hank read the classified section of the local paper.
Right there in the classified section was their homestead garage sale.
Why hadn’t Peggy told him she was selling out.

“Everything must go,” the ad read.
Hank knew it would take a year of garage sales to denude the house, the barn, the sundry sheds. Stuff. Good stuff, Medium Stuff, Valuable Trash, Disgusting Trash.

He had to get to her before she sold the saddle.
She had only been ten, she didn’t understand.
Why couldn’t she wait another 6 months.

Because the charge had been manslaughter and he was a juvenile at the time of his crime, he had gotten lucky. Minimum security prison with outside privileges. It wouldn’t be hard to get to her, but at what cost. Walking away now would put him back in here for another five at least.

The next morning he walked away from his volunteer duties at the half-way house.
Simple as that. If he was fast, he could walk right back in. If he was lucky.

When he arrived at the farm, there were people all over the place. Rummaging through boxes of old clothes out front and local farmers examining the old tractor, wandering in and out of the barn with arm loads of horse tackle and tools. There was so much. Three generations of Abbots and it had come to this.

The family was never honorable nor well-liked. But they could work the land and it had flourished. Until the shootout.

The crowds were getting bigger and more aggressive, shuffling each other for the good stuff. Hank made a bee line for the barn, terrified the saddle would be gone.

He had been gone almost 10 years and he had changed from a 16 year old boy to a muscular man. Farms had sold, neighbors had changed while he was gone and no one seemed to recognize him. He snatched up his uncle’s sweat stained Stetson and cramed it low on his brow.

A quick search didn’t produce the saddle. He had to find Peggy. Find out who bought it, if she even remembered.

He found her wearing their mother’s apron, the pockets bulging with green bills. She had sold a lot of stuff. But there was tons more. He stepped up behind and whispered in her ear a childhood joke. “Why did the pony have to gargle?” He held her steady by the apron strings, “Don’t turn around.” She smiled at the housewife who was handing her a twenty. They nodded at each other and there was a break in the line. “Because it was a little horse!”

He pulled her backwards through the screen door into the kitchen.

“Hank…what have you done?” She gave him a big hug.

“Peggy, I don’t have to time for this. I need to know what happened to Dad’s saddle. Did you sell it yet?”

“No, I haven’t seen it.”

“It’s not in the barn. I looked.”

“It could be anywhere. Everything has been a mess ever since you left…..”

“Do you remember how Pappy used to carve on everything that was wood?

“Yes?”

“Well he carved numbers in the wood under the leather on Dad’s saddle. Numbers that open a safe that holds our inheritance.”

“The deed to this place? I don’t want it, Hank ! This place is nothing but a hoarder’s nest. Look around you.” She jerked away from him.

“It’s not a deed. It’s cash money. He meant it just for you and me.”

“Well, there’s no one else left to get it, now is there?”

“Peggy…you don’t know the whole story. You were just a child.”

“And you weren’t?”

“Let’s not go there.”

Someone was beating on the screen door. “Anybody mind’n the store? How much for this here saddle. Found it under a pile of junk in the goat shed.”