He had watched it happen all over the west. The little shops closing, the hand trades going dark, one lamp at a time. The young men driving to the city for work, and the old men sitting alone in rooms that used to be full. He had played a hundred men who lived in towns like this. He had just never gotten used to watching the towns themselves go quiet.
He crossed the street. He went in. The bell rang. Eli looked up from his crate, expecting the salesman again. He saw a tall stranger filling the doorway with the light behind him, hat in his hand. “You still take work?” the stranger asked. Eli set down the bridle. “Depends who’s asking.” The stranger stepped in, and in the lamplight, Eli saw the face that half of America saw at the picture show on Saturday night.
He did not say the name. Men of Eli’s kind did not make a fuss, but his old hands went still. Wayne did not make a fuss either. He walked the shop slow. He ran a thumb along the tooling on a finished saddle, feeling the cut of the rose. He had handled a thousand saddles. He had not handled one like this in 20 years.
He turned the stirrup in his hand. He looked at the stitching, the tight even line of it. No machine stutter, no skip. He looked at the way the skirt had been beveled and burnished by hand until the edge shown like dark glass. He knew what he was looking at. He was looking at 50 years. Machine can’t do that, Wayne said quietly. It was not a question.
No, Eli said, it can’t, but it’s cheaper, and that’s the whole of it now. Cheaper isn’t the whole of anything, Wayne said. He set the stirrup down gentle. Folks just forget that for a spell, then they remember. Hope they remember before I’m in the ground, Eli said. There was no bitterness in it, only the plain truth of a tired man.
Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Wayne kept moving through the shop. He looked at the crate of folded bridles, half packed, a life half buried. He looked at the salesman’s card lying face up on the bench. He picked it up. He read the name, the catalog company, the promise of $40 saddles, a dozen to a crate.
Then he set it back down on the bench, face down, the way you turn over a card you are done with. Man came by this morning, Eli said. It was not a question, but he wanted the stranger to understand. Wants the building, says nobody pays for the work anymore. Man like that’s always coming by,” Wayne said. “Somewhere, some town, always has a catalog.
” He did not look up. “Doesn’t make him right.” And then he looked up. High on the back shelf, above the lamp line, sat a saddle alone under a gray dust sheet. Older than the others, set apart the way you set apart a thing you cannot sell and cannot throw away. “That one,” Wayne said, “bring it down.” Eli did not move for a moment.
“That one’s not for sale.” “Bring it down anyway.” Eli climbed the short ladder and lifted the saddle off the high shelf and the dust came off it in the window light. He set it on a stand and pulled the sheet away. It was dark oiled leather gone soft with age. The wild rose ran across it in a pattern Eli had cut when his hands were 40 years younger.
The seat was worn pale where a man had ridden it a thousand miles and riveted to the cantle was a small brass [music] plate, dull now, but Wayne leaned in close and read it. He went very still. The plate carried a name, the name of an old Western star. A man with an honest face and a particular way of standing, one hand crossed to his opposite arm.
A man who had been dead 11 years, a man John Wayne had idolized since he was a boy in a nickel theater, whose walk he had copied, whose voice he had copied, whose lonely way of holding his own arm Wayne had borrowed for the last shot of a picture he made just two years before. With that man’s widow standing right there behind the camera, both of them in tears.
Harry Carey, the man who had shown a young green nobody actor named Marion Morrison how to stand in front of a camera and mean it. The man who, more than any director, more than any coach, had taught him what a Western hero was supposed to be. Quiet, steady, slow to anger and slow to leave. Everything the world would one day call John Wayne, Harry Carey had been first.
And here was his saddle. Made by these two old hands, sitting under a dust sheet in a shop that was 9 days from being sold for lumber. “You made this.” Wayne said. His voice had changed. “Long time ago.” Eli said. “19 and 36. He came through with a show, ordered it special. Wanted the rose. Said a saddle ought to be the prettiest thing a working man owns.
” Eli almost smiled. “Rode it in two pictures. Then he passed and the family sent it back to me. Said it ought to come home to the hands that made it. I never could put a price on it. So it sits up there.” Wayne stood with his hat in both hands. He did not move. 1 second. 2. 3. 4. A man who had crossed deserts on a horse for the camera, who had stood his ground in a hundred gunfights that meant nothing, stood now in a quiet shop and could not find his voice.
He had spent his whole life learning to be the man Harry Carey was on a screen. He had borrowed the walk. He had borrowed the way of speaking slow. Two years ago he had ended a picture with Carey’s own gesture, that lonely cross of the arm. And he had done it looking at Carey’s widow. And he had not been acting.
And here, on a dying street in Wyoming he had no reason to be on, were the very hands that made the saddle Harry Carey rode. About to be crated up and sold for the lumber in the walls. The road had not brought him here by accident. That is what he would think about later driving north. A hot engine on a road he never took.
In a town he never planned to stop in. Some debts find a way to come due. Have you ever found something you thought was gone for good right at the moment you’d stopped looking. It does something to a man, doesn’t it? Wayne could have bought the saddle. He could have written a check big enough to ease the old man’s winter and driven north and felt good about it.
That is what a kind man does. He could have done that and walked away, but instead he set his hat down on the bench and he asked a question. “What would it take,” Wayne said, “to keep these doors open?” Eli shook his head. “It’s not the money, son. It’s that nobody wants the work. A shop’s not a shop without work.
” “Then I’m bringing you work.” Wayne had a picture starting in a few months. A cavalry story. A company of riders. Every man in it needed a saddle, a bridle, a set of tack, and the studio bought that gear by the crate from a warehouse in California. Machine-cut. All the same. All forgotten the moment the camera turned away. “Not this one,” Wayne said.
