The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

“A hundred bucks says you can’t beat me,” my father-in-law said, and he said it loud enough for every lawn chair in the side yard to hear him.

He was standing at the north stake with a horseshoe in each hand, the way he had stood at that stake every Labor Day weekend for thirty years.

He was grinning at my son.

My son was twelve years old, and he had just limped across the yard to the pit with a horseshoe of his own, because his cousins had all finished their games and nobody else was left to play.

Rudy Stoltz is seventy-four. He farmed wheat and corn west of Mitchell, South Dakota, his whole life, and he is the kind of man who still calls the evening meal supper and still checks the sky before he checks the radio.

He rents the land out now and lives in a little house in town.

He has also won the Stoltz family reunion horseshoe tournament every single year since 1996.

That is not a figure of speech. My wife’s uncle Emmett keeps the record on a chalkboard, and he keeps it honest.

Rudy is proud of that streak. He brings it up at Christmas. He brings it up at funerals, if the funeral runs long enough.

He likes to say a man ought to be good at one thing, and that his thing is horseshoes.

He also likes to needle the grandkids. He calls it toughening them up.

Most years it is mostly harmless, a little teasing about a dropped ball or a bad haircut, the kind of thing a kid laughs off by supper.

This year he picked my son.

“Your legs aren’t built for this game, bud,” he said, and a couple of the older men laughed, the way men laugh when they are not sure if they are supposed to. “But I’ll make it worth your while. A hundred bucks says you can’t beat me.”

My name is Hal Wiebe. I am forty-eight, and I drive a propane delivery truck for a co-op out of Mitchell. I have been married to Rudy’s only daughter for nineteen years.

I want to tell you about that afternoon and about the week after it.

I want to tell you about a green board and sixty names. Mostly I want to tell you about my boy.

The Boy

Gideon was born with a clubfoot on his right side.

When the doctor in Sioux Falls told us, my wife cried in the car the whole way home, and I drove with both hands on the wheel and did not say much of anything.

They put him in casts at two weeks old. Then came a brace, a bar between two little shoes, that he had to sleep in for years.

Then the foot started turning in again when he was five, and they did a tendon surgery.

The second surgery came when he was eight. That one was harder.

He spent most of a summer in a wheelchair, and then a walking cast, and then a long, slow spring of physical therapy twice a week in town.

The foot works now. He runs, after his fashion. He plays catch. He does his chores.

But his right leg is a little shorter and a little thinner than his left, and when he walks, he limps. He always will.

He does not like to talk about it. He does not like when people stare, and he likes it less when they look away too fast.

Mostly he would rather you just let him keep up.

Rudy has never been mean about the foot, exactly. But he has never let it go either. “How’s the hitch in your giddyup,” he would say. Or he would call him Slowpoke at the Fourth of July parade.

My wife asked him to quit it, more than once. He would laugh and say the boy needed some hide on him. “Nobody’s going to go easy on him out there,” he told her. “Better he hears it from me first.”

That was Rudy’s way of seeing the world.

It was not the way I saw it, but he was her father and the boy’s grandpa, and I had learned to pick my spots.