Six Belgians Shod by Noon

You set it on hot for a second to see where it burns. The smoke comes up sweet and bitter.

The burn mark shows you where the shoe isn’t sitting flat. I took it back to the anvil and shaped it, a few blows here, one there.

Then back to the foot. On again. Smoke. Off. Back to the anvil. Then into the water bucket, hissing.

Then the nails. I held out my hand without looking. Paisley put one nail in it, head first.

Just one. I drove it, bent the point over, and held out my hand again. One nail.

My dad used to hold his hand out like that for me. I never told Paisley how.

She’d watched me do it with my own nails a hundred times, from the cab, from the porch. She just knew.

“Eight a shoe, Mama,” she said, low, so only I could hear. “I’m counting. You have five more.”

I nodded and drove the next one, and I had to blink a little because of the forge smoke.

You drive the nails out through the wall. The point comes out the side, and you wring it off with the claw of the hammer.

Then you clinch the stubs down flat and rasp them smooth. Then the next foot.

The first horse took fifty-four minutes. I looked at my dad’s old watch, which I wear on a leather band.

Four minutes over. I didn’t say anything. I wiped my hands on the apron and went for the second horse.

The oldest Yoder boy brought her up. A mare, a little smaller, with a white blaze and a mean eye.

He held her lead short and talked to her low in Dutch. He was maybe twenty, and his hands on the rope were steady as a post.

“She kicks,” he said in English, just to me. “Lavern says she kicks at the start. Then she’s good.”

He didn’t say it like he expected me to quit. He said it like one worker to another.

“Thank you,” I said. “Hold her head up a little.” He did. She kicked once at the start, right when I picked up the first hind, a quick snatch backward.

I went with her and didn’t let go, and she stopped. Then she was good.

Between the first and the second horse, a neighbor had walked over from the next farm. By the second and the third, two more men had come up the lane on foot.

I didn’t look up to count. I could hear the fence rail creak as they leaned on it.

Around nine, Menno came over with a tin cup of water. He held it out and I drank it all at once.

Then he went back to the pump and filled another cup and handed it up to Paisley in the truck bed.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Paisley said, “Thank you, sir,” and drank it with both hands like it was a sacrament, and Menno’s beard moved in a way that told me he was smiling under it.

The second mare took forty-eight minutes. The third horse, a big young gelding with feet like skillets, took fifty-one.

I was making it up. I could feel it. My hands knew the work, and the work didn’t care who was holding the hammer.

By the fourth horse, there were nine men on that fence. I counted once when I went back to the forge, just a glance.