Six Belgians Shod by Noon

“Shauna, he says you can’t hold up a Belgian’s hind foot.” The man said it kindly, with his cap in his hands, standing at the tailgate of my truck in the gravel lot behind the feed mill.

It was the second week of March, and the wind off the bottomland had that wet bite to it that comes before the thaw.

I had a mule’s front foot in my lap and a rasp in my hand.

“Who says?” I asked, though I knew. I set the foot down easy and straightened up. The mule blew through her nose at the man like she knew too.

He looked at his boots. “Dustin. He was at the sale barn Thursday. He said a woman’s fine on a pony, but a Belgian will fold her up like a lawn chair. He said he’d hate to see you hurt.”

“Is that what he said? That he’d hate to see me hurt?” I kept my voice flat.

I had learned that from my dad, who never raised his voice at a horse or a man in forty years of shoeing both kinds.

“That’s what he said.” He turned his cap around in his hands one more time. “I’m sorry, Shauna. My wife worries. We’ll have Dustin do the team this spring. You understand.”

I told him I understood. He paid me for the mule, cash, forty dollars, and drove off slow like he was ashamed of the speed.

I wrote his farm’s name in my book and drew a line through it.

That made fourteen farms since the divorce. Fourteen lines in a book that used to be so full I kept a second one in the glove box for overflow.

My daughter, Paisley, was in the cab with the heater running, doing her spelling words.

She was nine, and she had seen me draw a lot of lines that winter. She rolled the window down.

“Was that another one, Mama?” she asked. She didn’t say another what. She didn’t have to. Children in a divorce learn to talk around things like they’re walking around a sleeping dog.

“That was another one,” I said. “Roll the window up, baby. You’re letting the heat out.”

She did, and I stood there in the wind a minute longer than I needed to, putting my tools away one at a time.

I want to say plainly who I am, because it matters to what came after. My name is Shauna Kuhl.

I am thirty-four years old. I have been shoeing horses for eleven years, and before that I held them for my father.

My father shod horses in Holmes County, Ohio, for forty years. He started when the Amish farms still ran mostly horses and there were three farriers for every one now.

He had big hands and a bad back and a laugh you could hear across a barnyard.

When I was Paisley’s age, he started me handing him nails. He’d hold out his hand without looking, and I’d put one nail in it, head first, the way he liked.

If I gave him two, he’d give one back without a word.

He died the winter Paisley was four. Heart. He went out to the shop one morning to light the forge and didn’t come back in.

I found him sitting on his stool with his hand on the anvil like he was just resting.

I married Dustin Kuhl when I was twenty-three. He was a farrier too, three years older, from the next county over, and he’d come to my dad’s shop to learn hot fitting. We worked out of a rented shop in town for years after.