Six Belgians Shod by Noon

I understood. He was giving Dustin his chance. Right there, in front of the whole valley in straw hats. Not to be shamed. To make it right, if he had it in him.

Dustin looked at me for a long time. Then he looked at the fence. He swallowed. “She can shoe,” he said, loud enough. His voice cracked on it.

“She was always better than me on the hinds. Her dad said so. I knew it. I said what I said because I was scared.”

Nobody on the fence said anything. But the oldest Yoder boy, standing by the rail, nodded once.

And a man at the end of the fence, one of the neighbors, took off his straw hat and put it back on, which I have since learned is about as much as you’ll get.

Dustin got back in his truck. He sat there a second with his hands on the wheel.

Then he rolled the window down and looked at Paisley. “You did good, bug,” he said. “Handing the nails.” She didn’t answer. She just held onto me.

He drove back down the lane slow. I watched until he turned onto the gravel road.

Then I let out a breath I’d been holding since March and found I was shaking all over, not just my hands.

Menno came over to my truck. He reached in his trouser pocket and took out a fold of bills and counted it onto my tailgate.

A hundred and eighty dollars a horse. One thousand and eighty dollars. Cash, the way the Amish pay.

“That’s more than Lavern charges,” I said. I knew what Lavern charged. Everybody did. “Menno, that’s too much.”

“Lavern does not bring his own borium,” he said. “And Lavern does not get done by noon.”

He pushed the money an inch closer to me. “Your father charged me too little for thirty years. I am settling his bill.”

I didn’t argue. I couldn’t have. I folded the money and put it in the front of my apron, and I put the two nails Paisley gave me in there with it.

Ivah rang the dinner bell then. The noon meal. The men on the fence climbed down, and some of them went up to the house, and some went home to their own dinners.

As they passed my truck, every one of them nodded to me.

Not a word. Just the nod. Nine men, nine nods. One of them, an old man with a beard to his belt, stopped and looked at the sixth horse’s hind foot for a long time.

Then he looked at me. “Good clinches,” he said, and walked on.

Ivah made us stay for dinner. Paisley and I sat at the long table with the family, and before anybody touched a fork, everybody bowed their heads for the silent prayer.

I bowed mine. I said thank you. That was the whole prayer.

I didn’t know yet what that morning had done. I found out over the next week.

The Yoder men talked. Not loud. The Amish don’t talk loud. But they talk farm to farm, at the end of church Sunday, at the sale barn, at the harness shop, over fences. The word went down that valley like water down a furrow.

On Monday, I got two calls from the phone shanty numbers. On Tuesday, four.

Wednesday, the man who’d canceled in March at the feed mill drove out to my house in person. He stood on my porch with his cap in his hands again.