If you have never seen one, a stone boat is a steel sled, about the size of a farm wagon bed, flat and low with a turned-up front. They stack it with concrete blocks, and the team drags it through the dirt as far as it will go, up to twenty-seven and a half feet. That’s a full pull.
Every team that makes a full pull at a weight goes on to the next weight. When no team can make a full pull, the one that went farthest wins.
There is no engine on a stone boat. No wheels. It is all dirt and steel and the horses. That is why I love it.
Herb Stolzfus was up in the announcer’s stand. He was seventy and had been calling the horse pull at that fair for over forty years. He had a voice like a feed bin full of gravel and he knew every team and the grandfather of every teamster.
When he read out the heavyweight entries at two o’clock, he came to mine and paused.
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“Jenna Rausch, driving Queenie and Belle,” he said into the microphone. “Now folks, some of you will remember those two. They’ve been pulling at this fair longer than some of these young fellas have been shaving.”
A few people in the grandstand clapped. I felt it in my stomach.
There were eight teams in the heavyweight class. They started the boat at eight thousand pounds.
Eli hooked for me. That is the job, if you don’t know it. The driver stands behind with the lines and brings the team up to the boat, and the hooker walks alongside holding the hook at the end of the evener, and the second the horses are in the right place he drops it onto the clevis on the boat and gets out of the way.
You get three tries to hook. A young, hot team will often blow a hook, lunging before the hookman has it set, and then you have to swing them around and come back.
The mares stepped up to the boat like they were walking into their stalls. Eli dropped the hook. I said, “Queenie. Belle. Get up.” They leaned, the boat slid, and they walked it twenty-seven and a half feet like it was a manure spreader.
The grandstand gave us a nice little round of applause, the kind you give a child at a piano recital.
Glen’s geldings went right after us. They came at the boat hot, both of them dancing, their heads up. The boy blew the first hook. On the second one he got it set, and those big roans hit the collars so hard the boat jumped, and they tore it down the dirt past the full-pull mark before Glen could even get them stopped.
The grandstand roared. Glen grinned up at them and lifted one hand.
Eighty-five hundred. Nine thousand. Ninety-five hundred. Two teams dropped out at ten thousand. One more at ten five.