Six Belgians Shod by Noon

A woman calling around saying she can too hold a Belgian’s foot sounds like a woman who maybe can’t. My dad would have said the work talks or nothing does.

So I took the small jobs. Trail ponies for the town families. A mule at the feed mill.

Two lesson horses for a 4-H club that met in a church basement. A miniature horse named after a candy bar that bit me twice.

Paisley noticed. She stopped asking for the cereal with the cartoon on the box.

She started packing her own lunch, peanut butter and a sleeve of crackers, so I wouldn’t have to buy the school one.

One night in late March, I came in from the barn and found her at the kitchen table with the client book open.

She had a pencil and was counting the lines through names. She looked up when she heard the door.

“Mama, there’s fourteen crossed out,” she said. “And nine left. Most of the nine are ponies.”

She said it the way you’d read a weather report. Then she asked, “Is Daddy the one crossing them out?”

I sat down across from her. I thought about lying. I didn’t.

“Daddy’s been telling people I can’t do the big horses,” I said. “He’s behind on some bills, and he’s scared. Scared people say things.”

She thought about that. She had his chin and my dad’s eyes, and when she thought hard, she looked like both of them at once.

“But you can do the big horses,” she said. “I’ve seen you.”

“I can,” I said. “Grandpa taught me.” She closed the book and pushed it back across the table to me, careful, like it was something that could break. Then she went to bed without being told.

I sat at that table a long time. I said a prayer that wasn’t much more than please.

Then I turned off the light and went to bed myself, and I didn’t sleep much.

The phone rang on a Tuesday, the first week of April. It was a number I knew, the shared line from the phone shanty at the end of the Yoder lane.

The Yoders were Amish, and they kept a phone in a little wooden shed by the road.

“Shauna Kuhl?” a man’s voice said. It was a deep voice, slow, with the Pennsylvania Dutch rounding off the edges.

“This is Menno Yoder. Your father shod for my father, and then for me, a long time.”

“I remember, Menno,” I said. I did. I had been to his farm as a little girl.

I remembered a white barn, a dinner bell on a post, and his mother giving me a sugar cookie as big as my hand.

“Lavern broke his arm,” he said. Lavern was the farrier who’d been doing the Yoder horses since my dad died.

“He fell off a hay wagon Saturday. He’s in a cast to here.” I could hear him put his hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. And I was. Lavern was a decent man, near seventy, who’d told me once at a horse sale that my dad was the best hot fitter in three counties.

“Plowing starts in two weeks,” Menno said. “Maybe less if this weather holds. I have six Belgians. They all need shoes before they go in the field. They walk the blacktop to the back forty, and they need the borium on the heels.”