Forging Fire

by Lisa Preston

  “There’s Jack and Joe with the flock.” Her observation sounded as natural as could be, but her face was stiff, tight and lined.

  I was holding Charley fast on my lap, and felt his muscles tighten as he spied the sheep. The ewes and lambs—one wearing a bell, the others with unencumbered throats—were spreading out in that bottomland far to the east. If Ivy had cut the engine, we might have heard the copper bell hanging on one big sheep. A good-sized donkey stood chewing on brush along the high side of the flock. A dark mule with a few white hip spots grazed among the sheep. Beyond her animals, we could see a few cattle in the haze over a rise on the property bordering the east.

  The roar of another four-wheeler came from below us. Not the cops’ machine, but I remembered that Ivy had at least a couple of those machines. Too many ranches use four-wheelers instead of horses these days.

  “I met that rancher next to your place,” I began, searching in my mind for something I hadn’t put my finger on. “Does he have a pup from—”

  Ivy waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, he’s a meanie.” And she laughed as though her assessment was comic-worthy. “I have no clue what his problem is, but he’s got it in for me. Don’t pay any attention to him or anything he says.”

  “He did say something kind of odd.”

  “He always does. He thinks I can’t run this place because I’m a woman, because we bought the place instead of inheriting it like a fifth-generation ranch family. Well, you know what he can do with that attitude.” She looked away from the neighbor ranch, giving it the back of her scalp while she narrowed her gaze at the road to her ranch’s front entry.

  Was that white vehicle we could barely make out by the gate another cop car of some sort? The air to the west looked smoky, but it was a mix of exhaust and the nitrous fertilizer that gets in the air over agricultural areas.

  Ivy peeled out, adding some pollution to the world. As we were about off the hill, a slick black Lexus SUV pulled in at the flagstone.

  “That’s my attorney.” Ivy goosed the throttle enough to whip my head and shove Charley harder against my chest.

  The space between Ol’ Blue and the bunkhouse that had been occupied by the beater green Bronco was empty. The other four-wheeler zoomed up, the burly rider spinning a brody then roaring back east, where he repeated the maneuver. It was Stuckey, I realized, riding for fun.

  Ivy frowned. “Gabe’s gone. And Robbie Duffman isn’t here yet. He’s supposed to be coming for shoeing, too. You’re going to shoe with Stuckey, right? Come on, Rainy.”

  A thought occurred, as I considered the absent Bronco. “Is it Stuckey’s day off?”

  She emitted a quick little giggle-snort. “Every day is Stuckey’s day off.” I looked at her. She gave a half shrug. “It’s just a joke. It’s what Gabe says.”

  I wondered if her shoer Robbie Duffman was avoiding the ranch and me, maybe because he’d been the one to hit me in the head and steal my dog, my tools, and Ol’ Blue.

  Chapter 16

  A GIANT TRUCK WITH TANKS OF propane and oil backed up to the cinder-block section on the far side of the barn, and a bearded man, clean-shaven in the mustache area, began unloading sacks of coal coke. I imagined Ivy had paid extra to motivate a Sunday delivery. After she let me off the four-wheeler and headed for the house, I went for the barn and saw Stuckey. Charley pushed himself hard into the back of my leg. Stuckey dusted himself from the dirt four-wheeling had coated him in, then paid the delivery-man in cash. Delivery Man didn’t tarry, just got in his truck and roared out.

  Stuckey and I dumped plenty of coke in the forge and lit her up. We’d need to wait for the heat to build, but Charley pushed himself into the far corner of the room while Stuckey fetched Ivy’s big Appaloosa mare.

  In order to shoe as close to the forge as possible, I had Stuckey bring the horse down the barn aisle, at the end that opened into the cinder-block add-on. Logistically, it was a shorter carry to bring my gear in from Ol’ Blue through what they called the smoke-house, rather than carry it all the way down the long barn aisle, so I went through the anteroom where the slaughtered pig had been hanging the day before and wondered who had dealt with the carcass and when. It was gone. The dark room had the scent of damp concrete. It had been hosed clean. I brought my anvil stand, hoof stand, and chaps in, placing the stand between the forge and the doorway to the barn aisle.

  The barn wall by the doorway to the forge room had a tie ring, plus there were cross-ties hanging on each side of the aisle, but Stuckey just dropped the Appy’s thick cotton lead rope. The mare was the kind who would reliably ground tie. She had wise eyes, full of kindness and reserve. I stroked her neck respectfully and enjoyed her good scent. While I put my chaps on, I considered her hoof angles and wear.

  My work chaps—some call it an apron but the rest of us call them chaps, because who wants their work clothes to sound like a cook’s?—are homemade, Utah-style. Each leg is shaped like the state of Utah, then stitched together at the flap. According to the road map behind Ol’ Blue’s seat back, the flap covers everything north of Salt Lake City when talking the state and everything east, west, and over the jeans’ zipper when talking my shoeing chaps. And I’d stitched them right onto a good back support, with my four-dollar awl.

  Stuckey hadn’t put any leg protection on. Apparently, he just shod in his jeans. And he had no propane forge, yet they’d never used this wonderful old coke-burning forge.

  “Horseshoers can make good money,” he said.

  “Stuckey, this job isn’t going to please your folks, and it isn’t going to get you a lot of prestige with a whole lot of people. And you won’t get any better at anything they ever tried to teach you in regular school.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, like when they taught you the three Rs.”

  “If I could spell and use grammar, I might not become a shoer,” Stuckey admitted, “but then I wouldn’t get to learn horseshoeing neither.”

  A fella with logic like that has potential. As a shoer.

  I pointed at the microscope on the counter by the big sink in the forge room’s corner. “Where’d that come from?”

  Stuckey scratched his head. “Something to do with worming horses.”

  I nodded, happy, realizing I liked it when one person confirmed something someone else said. Then I frowned. Nobody goes around confirming what one person said with another unless there’s a basic lack of trust.

  “Is Ivy good to work for?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound conversational.

  Stuckey’s head bobbed up and down immediately. “She’s real good to us. On my vacation, she paid the tuition for me to go to shoeing school.”

  That information made my eyebrows take a quick hike up my forehead. My shoeing school had taken two years. Just how long a vacation did ranch hands get around here?

  I knocked the Appy’s left front shoe off in a few seconds of work with the cheapie rasp and third-class pull-offs Stuckey produced from the plastic bucket where he kept his tool collection. Then I waited and waited while Stuckey worked on removing the right front while he talked to me about both weeks of his shoeing school.

  A two-week wonder, Stuckey was.

  Two weeks of training does not a horseshoer make. I stepped through to the forge room, fetched my good hand tools and four fresh shoes, leaving a pair at the edge of the fire on my way to depositing my toolbox by the horse. I was away again in an instant for my last trip, hefting my 112-pound anvil from Ol’ Blue through the back of the smokehouse to my anvil stand, when a one-ton truck pulled up at the open end of the barn aisle.

  The Appaloosa tilted her head to look but didn’t so much as shift a hoof while she checked behind herself. However, the distraction proved more than my shoeing mentee could resist while I jumped in and removed both hind shoes, which are a little more dangerous than the fronts.

  “I’ll go see,” Stuckey strode down the barn aisle with interest while I got to work like a shoeing demon, trimming the mare as I
shed her old shoes, slipping a shoe back into the fire in between balancing the fronts, banging on hot metal and even getting the left fore nailed on.

  I was burning on the second hot shoe when Stuckey returned from his visiting with the male voices mumbling down at the open end of the barn in between grunting and hefting bales of hay, pausing only long enough to pass some smokes between them. Didn’t they know the taboo about smoking in a barn?

  “It’s the hay delivery,” Stuckey reported, now wearing a cigarette behind one ear. “They’ll stack it. Hey, you’re almost half-done.”

  “Yessir,” I said, releasing the hoof between my knees.

  “The last person I called ‘sir,’” Stuckey said, with an enormous grin, “was that big gal bucking hay. And it made her mad when I did it.”

  At my water bucket, I gave the shoe a good dunking. After I set the first two nails on the last shoe, Stuckey tapped the final nails in. I looked and considered the burly woman at the other end of the barn, slamming her hay hooks into big bales along with the man working beside her. She paid me no never mind, neither of the hay stackers did, but it looked like they had quite a bit of work in front of them. Ivy had ordered tons of sweet-smelling alfalfa-mix.

  Stuckey and I finished the mare together. It was clear he’d never done hot shoeing, and certainly never worked fast enough to earn any money at this. After he led the Appy away, Stuckey fetched Decker, the bay I’d ridden that morning and the day before.

  “Decker’s not due,” I said. I’d checked the horse’s feet as a matter of course before I ever mounted up yesterday. “What about that chromey colt in the end stall on the other side of the aisle?”

  Stuckey fetched another halter and brought back the flashy chestnut with a flaxen mane and tail, and long, chipped hooves. He whoa’d it where the Appy had been, within a stride of my tool-box. I left the forge and considered the straight legs in front of me, the strong, but untended hooves.

  “Good-looking horse,” I said. The colt was nicely proportioned, perfect angles in the geometry that creates a good hip and shoulder, with straight legs, but it was his white face and four white stockings that stretched up well above his knees that most people would have noticed. I thought of the fourth horse I’d seen on this ranch. “Does that buckskin belong to Gabe?”

  Stuckey gave a vigorous shake of his head. “It’s Ivy’s. Everything is.”

  Ivy liked flash. That bright blood bay Decker was the plainest horse on the property. It had taken me too long to notice.

  “Who put those last shoes on the buckskin?” It was a good job, those clipped shoes, egg bars on the front, making me think someone thought the horse had a little navicular.

  “He came that way. He’s new.” Then Stuckey asked, real bright-like, “You got horses?”

  It would have taken me four heats to get that buckskin’s shoes shaped, then forge welded. Jeez, I’ve got to get a new forge. Sometimes, I’m embarrassed by my beater hotbox, especially now that I’m a much better established shoer than when I first became a real journeyman. Now I buy better rasps that last a good forty horses and have Cadillac-quality nippers. But, oh, my forge. Slow to heat, slow to cool, inconsistent, and clumsy to boot. I’d relined it with new fire brick, but it didn’t help enough. I’d bought it used, and it’s plainly been used hard and was never that great a forge to begin with. For next-level work like building egg bars and heart bars and needing to pull clips, my forge does an only okay job. I long for an ass-kicking—oops, fanny-frying, is what I mean—super good, fast-heating, efficient, larger-capacity professional forge. Doesn’t everybody?

  Horse folk can understand a conversation drawn out over a forge, and I answered about my horses after working metal. “A good Quarter Horse. A young Quarab. Plus, we’re letting a Belgian rehab at our place.”

  “What was that middle one you said?”

  “Quarab. Half Quarter Horse, half Arab.”

  “An Arab?” Stuckey pronounced the breed “AY-rab,” like a dirty word, the way some folks say EYE-talian.

  “Truth is, he’s not my horse anyways, he’s my fiancé’s.”

  A burly male voice hollered down the barn aisle, making several horses snort and whirl in their stalls and the run-out paddocks. “Yo, Stuckey? Yo!”

  “Smokehouse,” Stuckey hollered back, his voice echoing a bit in the cinder-block cell encasing us.

  A black cowboy hat poked through the top of the doorway, followed by a young man’s friendly, unshaven face. He looked barely able to legally buy alcohol. “Hey Stuckey, when’d you get out of jail?”

  Stuckey shot me a look. “He’s joshing. I ain’t been in jail. Not really. Just the weekend.”

  Black Hat grinned, eyed the fire in the open forge, and tipped his hat at me. “Robbie Duffman. Folks call me Duffy.”

  I offered my right paw. “Rainy Dale.” I made myself act all casual as I waited to see his tools. If he’d been the one to attack me at the bull sale, and if he’d seen Ol’ Blue when he pulled up to Ivy’s barn, he might be smart enough to not pull out my stolen track nippers, crease nail pullers, or nail cutters. Rasps are more generic, but mine are a top-of-the-line brand. I’d wait this out.

  Duffy said, “Gabe called. Said you guys were going to light up the forge.”

  Hard to describe the scent a good coke fire makes, and maybe only a horseshoer would understand that heat can have a scent, but all of us who like to move metal and outfit a hoof just exactly right are drawn to lighting up an open forge.

  Stuckey poked the fire with my tongs. “Duffy went to the same shoeing school as me.”

  “At the same time?” I pulled the tongs out of the coals. Tongs are meant for grabbing a horseshoe. No tool should just cook in a coke fire. I can’t cotton to tools being mistreated or misused.

  Duffy waved the idea away like a buzzing fly. “I went last year. Been working on my own ever since. Me and Stuckey were going to be partners.”

  When he said “partners” I wondered for a split second if he meant, well, like wink-wink partners. Good for them. I didn’t need to be distracted and yet something else he said drug my mind from what I ought to have been paying attention to. “You got out of school last year?”

  With a nod, this Duffy character owned up to my accusation.

  “Got good tools?” I asked.

  “Some.”

  With a good metallic clunk, he dropped the foot-and-a-half chunk of railroad track he’d had tucked under his left arm. I realized it was what he used for an anvil. I’d been precious low on tools myself when I first started. This new punk was a lot like me a scant few years back, but maybe nicer. Not that I’m so mean, but managing not to say anything smart-alecky about Duffy’s worldly experience took some effort. For sure, I’d need to bide my time to get a glimpse of his hardware. I cleared my throat and dealt with the other problem.

  “I don’t want to step on your toes,” I said. “I owed Ivy a favor ’cause she let me stay here last night and fed me, too. If my shoeing for her means taking food off your table, then I’ll step aside.”

  Duffy’s head shake made it plain he took no offense to another shoer being there. “Nah, it’s not like that. We can all pitch in.”

  Chromey threw a fit about having his feet handled. Not kicking, but dancing away, shuffling, and yanking his hooves from our hands no matter who tried which hoof.

  The colt was spoiled, not standing politely when vehicles came and went beyond the barn aisle, taking little nips like no one had ever taught him enough manners to stand with patience while his feet were worked on. The second time he made to put his teeth on me, I growled like a truly put-out demon and popped him with my hand cupped against his shoulder to make a good loud clap. We had no more of that nipping business, but still had a dancing horse. It was bad enough for me leave the barn to get my secret weapon from Ol’ Blue. When I brought my roll of duct tape back through the smokehouse, I made a ten-inch strip mostly doubled up and pressed the short sticky end to Chromey’s nose, letting t
he long chunk of tape dangle over his muzzle. He found his manners and stood like a champ. After I cleaned Chromey’s left front, Stuckey set to cleaning out the other hooves. I’d have rather trimmed that first foot as long as I had it between my knees.

  “What the hell’s that all about?” Duffy pointed at the duct tape strip dangling off the now-placid Chromey’s velvet nose.

  “No one knows,” I admitted. “But sometimes it just works.”

  Duffy moved to the colt’s hind end, waiting for a turn.

  This was going to take a while.

  I’d about decided that Chromey was bored, too, as the employees here seemed to use four-wheelers a lot more than horses for their ranch work. Duffy didn’t have crease nail pullers or nail cutters handy to remove a shoe, but then, we weren’t pulling old shoes off Chromey. The rasp he used was second rate, though.

  “You have to get it flat,” Duffy reminded Stuckey while he took uneven chunks out of Chromey’s toe with a pair of Diamond nippers he brought from his truck.

  “You’re young enough to know everything,” I told him. The oldtimey ranch shoer I had worked with for a year had said it to me, and I’d been itching to use it on someone ever since. So, I dished it out. But I was supposed to be mentoring, so I talked aloud about medial-lateral balance and bringing the heels back and debriding the seat of the corn. Though these boys were smarter and more experienced than a box of nails, it took some work to notice the fact.

  “Saw the cop cars,” Duffy said. “Gabe said someone like found a body or something out on the ranch somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” Stuckey said.

  “That’s kind of cool.” Duffy’s judgment came with another grin. “They figure out who it is?”

  Stuckey wiped his forehead as his words burst out. “Man, this morning when I heard a body got dug up, I thought …” He stopped himself and frowned. “Gabe said they think it’s a guy who used to work here. Vincent.”

  I paused in trimming and balancing Chromey’s left front hoof. “Wasn’t his name Vicen—”