The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

The Shoes

The thing Rudy did not know that Saturday was that Gideon had practiced all summer.

It started in June.

I was digging through the back corner of my shop for a set of tire chains I did not need and found an old coffee can I had not opened in twenty years.

Inside were my grandpa Wiebe’s horseshoes. Four of them, real pitching shoes, the heavy kind, two and a half pounds apiece.

The paint was long gone. The steel had gone dark and smooth where his hand had held them.

My grandpa farmed near Freeman.

He pitched horseshoes at every church picnic in Hutchinson County for fifty years, and he taught me in his yard when I was about Gideon’s age, on summer afternoons after the haying was done.

I held one of those shoes and I could feel his hand on my shoulder. I could hear him telling me not to throw it, to pitch it. “The shoe does the work if you let it,” he used to say. “You just give it a good start.”

Gideon came in looking for me about then. He saw the can and asked what it was, and I told him. Then I asked him if he wanted to learn.

He looked at his right foot first. I saw him do it. Then he looked at me and said, “Grandpa Rudy says my legs aren’t built for it.”

“Horseshoes isn’t a leg game,” I told him. “It’s an arm game and a head game. My grandpa had a bad hip the last thirty years he pitched, and he still beat everybody in the county.”

That was close enough to true. Grandpa’s hip was bad for maybe the last ten.

But Gideon picked up a shoe, and I paced off forty feet behind the machine shed, and I drove two old stakes into the dirt with a sledge.

The first week he could not reach the far stake. The shoes are heavy for a boy and forty feet is a long way.

He kept trying to step into it hard with his right foot, and the right foot would not take the weight.

So we changed it. I had him stand with his weight on his left and take one short, smooth step instead of a long one.

Grandpa did it that way himself after his hip went. It turns out you do not need much step at all.

By the end of June, he was reaching the stake. By the middle of July, he was landing near it.

The first ringer he ever threw, he dropped the other shoe in the dirt and just stood there with his mouth open.