Six Belgians Shod by Noon

He went quiet. I waited. Out the kitchen window, Paisley was on the porch steps, tying her shoe, pretending not to listen. She was not good at pretending.

“I have heard what is being said,” he said finally. “About a woman and a draft horse. So I will ask you straight, Shauna, because your father was a straight man. Can a woman shoe a Belgian?”

I thought about my father’s hand coming out for a nail without him looking. “Saturday at sunup,” I said.

“All six,” I said. “I’ll bring my own shoes. Have them caught and brushed, and I’ll need two boys who aren’t afraid to hold a lead.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “My boys are not afraid of much,” he said.

“Saturday at sunup.” And he hung up, the way the Amish do, with no goodbye, because the business was done.

I stood there with the phone in my hand. Paisley came in from the porch with one shoe still untied. “Are we going?” she asked. “Can I come? It’s Saturday. No school.”

“You can come,” I said. “But you’ll have to work.” Her face lit up like I’d told her we were going to the fair.

The rest of that week I got ready the way my dad taught me. I went through every tool in the truck.

I put a new edge on my hoof knife and checked the jaws on my nippers. I swept the forge and checked the propane bottle twice.

Draft shoes are not like riding horse shoes. A Belgian’s foot can be the size of a dinner plate.

I bought keg shoes in the big sizes, steel, with clips, and sat up two nights in my dad’s old shop corner at the house, brazing borium on the heels.

Borium is tungsten carbide grit in a brass rod. You melt it onto the heels so the horse can grip the road.

Amish horses walk a lot of blacktop, and a plain steel shoe on wet asphalt is like a skate. My dad never sent a team out on the road without it.

I counted out nails. Big ones, draft nails, eight to a shoe, ninety-six for the job, and I put in a box of extra because you always bend a few.

Paisley helped me count them into coffee cans by the stove. She did it twice to be sure.

On Friday, I went by the feed store for a bag of feed for our own two horses.

Jettie was at the counter. She looked at me over her glasses. “I hear you’re going to the Yoder place tomorrow,” she said.

“How’d you hear that?” I asked. It had been three days. I hadn’t told a soul but Paisley.

“Menno’s oldest boy was in for oats,” she said, and she smiled a little. “Honey, the whole valley knows. There’s men planning their Saturday around it.”

She bagged my feed and charged me for half of it, and I let her.

That night I didn’t sleep. I lay there doing the math. Six horses, four feet each, twenty-four feet.

Fifty minutes a horse, if everything went right. Sunup was about a quarter to seven. That got me to noon with almost nothing to spare.

I got up at four. I made Paisley’s lunch and mine and filled a thermos with coffee and another one with hot chocolate.

I woke her at five and she was dressed in four minutes, which was a record that has never been broken.

We drove out in the dark, but by the time we turned onto the gravel road below the Yoder farm, the sky was going pink over the ridge.