Six Belgians Shod by Noon

I won’t make Dustin a monster. He wasn’t one. He was a good farrier with a short temper and a long pride, and he hated being second.

He hated that some farms called for me by name and asked if I could come instead.

When we split, it was quiet. No yelling. He said he couldn’t live with a woman who outworked him.

I said I couldn’t live with a man who kept count. We were both right, I guess, and that is a sad way for a marriage to end.

He kept the shop lease, because it was in his name by then. I kept the old truck with my dad’s portable forge and anvil bolted in the bed.

We split the client book down the middle, by handshake, at the kitchen table.

That handshake lasted about six weeks.

Then the calls started drying up. First one farm, then two. At first I thought it was the season.

Then a woman at the feed store counter, a kind lady named Jettie, leaned over the scale and told me what Dustin had been saying.

He wasn’t saying it to me. He never said a word of it to my face.

He said it at the sale barn, at the hardware store, at the end of church lanes on Sunday when the men stood around the buggies waiting on their wives.

A woman’s fine on a pony. A Belgian will fold her up. Her dad did the heavy work for her. She’ll get one of your boys hurt holding a foot she can’t hold.

It was the last one that worked. These were men with sons. They didn’t want a son hurt.

They weren’t cruel men. They were careful men, and Dustin knew exactly which fear to put his hand on.

I knew why he did it, too. I found out from a man who owned the building his shop was in.

Dustin was three months behind on his rent. His half of the book wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, and my half was.

That is a reason. I understood it. I have been afraid of the rent myself.

But a reason is not an excuse, and what he did was take food off his own daughter’s plate to put it on his landlord’s desk.

He was behind on the child support too. Two months by March. I didn’t push it.

I figured a man can’t pay what he doesn’t have, and I didn’t want Paisley to hear her daddy’s name said in a hard voice.

People asked me why I didn’t do something. My cousin asked if I couldn’t sue him for slander.

A man at church said I ought to put an ad in the paper. A friend said call every farm and tell them he was lying.

But you can’t sue a man for talk, not out here, not over a few words at a sale barn that nobody wrote down.

And I had a nine-year-old to feed, not a lawyer to pay. Every dollar I would have spent proving it was a dollar out of her lunch money.

And calling the farms? I tried it once. I called a man I’d shod for six years and told him Dustin wasn’t telling the truth.

He was polite. He said he’d think about it. I never heard from him again.

When you defend yourself out loud against a thing like that, it starts to sound true.