by Lisa Preston
“In a week’s time,” I told Guy, “she’s to go to the city and stay with her alleged mother. More than Bean may be coming to our place before winter if Abby gets packed off to her mama’s long term. We might take Liberty.”
He looked toward the Cascade’s powder rooms.
Then Guy tried to be up about things, pointing out how me being packed off to Texas to live with my daddy after mama’d taken me to California for a year, well, that turned out fine for me.
“Eventually!” I snorted. Guy knows things got way worse before they got better for me.
“But Abby’s older than you were then.”
I nodded. “She’s twelve going on either six or twenty, depending on her mood that particular—”
“Hey you!” Guy’s voice was too bright.
Abby rolled her eyes away from him, went to his big sink and slopped dishwater onto her sneakers as she scrubbed one of Guy’s super huge pots. She wouldn’t look at us, only grunted when I said hey. Her scowl looked permanently attached.
And Guy put on an expression a little bit like Abby’s when I leaned back from the saucer of spinach starters and allowed as to how I’d been thinking of something more rib sticking.
“But you said you wanted a snack.”
“I meant a, you know, meal-type snack.”
He spoke like he wasn’t inhaling enough air. “A burger.”
I looked right up. “Yeah, you bet,” and went to my stool at the lunch counter.
It occurred to me that the last time I was at the Cascade getting fed was when those gals, Melinda Kellan and Loretta Pritchard, were behind me, one wanting me to report in, the other warning me to watch out at the Buckeye. So maybe I went to the Buckeye with the wrong attitude. Maybe I was too suspicious, thinking about things Donna told me, trying to latch onto the thing that didn’t fit. My mind replayed all that had happened in two days’ work at the Buckeye, everything, and one little notion tried to wiggle up like a puppy wanting attention that first morning. My brain couldn’t grasp it though, as I itched about the end of my second day, Donna’s sudden, hot-iron hatred.
And then she goes accusing me of something I hadn’t done.
Yeah, she’d apologized, but don’t guilty people sometimes accuse others?
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. Donna shouldn’t ought to have given me the stink eye, should never have suspected me of having been on her patch. I’d never known Cameron Chevigny. He died before I came to Oregon, or at least before I came to Cowdry.
Guy brought me some French fries, crispy-edged, fat, sizzling, and wanting more salt. “Well?”
That’s when I knew what I had to do. I thought back to day one, finding stuff at the ranch, or her dang dog finding stuff just beyond the Buckeye. “That horseshoe.”
Guy was on with both barrels. “The weird one you’ve got in the truck door pocket? That you showed Melinda outside of the Country Store?”
“I watched Dixon Talbot shoe. He does one hoof at a time, like me. I’m going to cozy up to Mac.”
Guy gave me a look that is probably worn mostly by the institutionalized. Or Labradors. Kind of the I-Like-You-but-I-Don’t-Understand-a-Thing-About-You look.
I took a cranium-clearing couple of breaths and explained.
“Dixon Talbot and me and one other dude are the main full-timers right here in Cowdry. There’s supposed to be some new guy, and a few fellows from Gris Loup have a few clients who ride over here. And I could never check around with all the part-timers or folks who do their own, but Mac, over on the east side, does a pretty wide area. And you can figure how a horse could have been ridden onto that lease land from the national forest on the Gris Loup side, not the Cowdry side. There’s a trail head not too far from the Country Store.”
“I know it. That’s where Biff and I park when we run the Keeper Lake trails.”
“So maybe that aluminum shoe’s from one of Mac’s clients.”
Still, Guy had the look of a dog that wants the stick thrown.
“The tarts,” he said, and set the saucer of spinach thingies in front of me again.
“Huh? Look, if I watch him for a minute, I’ll know if Mac marks his outside branches. Really, that’s all I need to know.”
And then we both said, “You’re making me crazy,” and stared at each other.
This saying-the-same-thing-to-each-other has been happening more and more and it kind of spooks me. Not the way a hot-blooded horse spooks, more the good solid, Quarter Horse version of spooking. Like Red. The way Red spooks is a good cold-blooded type of being scared. A quail can blow out from under some bushes in the startling way that sends a lot of ponies to pieces, wild-eyed in fear of a monster. Red, he’ll just turn a casual head over, like he’s slowly thinking, huh, a monster. Then, with any luck, he’ll notice grass growing under his feet and he’ll opt for chowing down instead of sprinting a quarter mile. Guy and I have talked about that kind of thing lately—horse behavior—since this little horse-to-be of his is an Arab-Quarter and is likely to be hotter than Red. A few years down the road, Guy’ll be sitting more than his share of spooks. Until then, he can practice with his Intended, me, because he was still staring wide-eyed at my face.
“What?” I demanded.
“Well, see, I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I wondered was if you liked the spinach tarts. What do you think of them as a starter?”
I grabbed the bridge of my nose because it’s a break from twisting my ponytail and easier on my hair in general.
Not a starter. An appetizer. It’s an appetizer, it’s an appetizer, my brain hollered.
But not Rainy, not me. No. I was calm, took a bite, then lied like a dog. “Good appetizer. Interesting.”
That seemed to please him, so clearly, worth all my good effort. But man, a lifetime of this will wear me out, I can see it coming.
Bless the boy, Guy did a little work. “Well, what were you talking about?”
So I explained to him about the habit some shoers have of marking the outside branches of the shoes as they’re made, so the two fronts can be distinguished easily from each other and the two hinds can be distinguished at a glance.
Then I wondered if he forgot I’d found the shoe while working out on the Buckeye. So I added, “It didn’t belong on the Buckeye.”
“You just said you found it on the Buckeye.”
Details like a double-aught, aluminum, slight squiggle in the shape, well that’s all wasted on Guy, but I spent these specifics just ’cause I had ’em to spend. It was like Monopoly money, can’t keep it, so might as well shell it out, bits of knowing like the peculiarities of the shoe. And Guy was trying to grab onto it all, gotta love him for it. By now, he can tell my hammers apart and identify all the other tools in my box, too.
With real proper thought, he furrowed up his skull over the horseshoe in the Buckeye’s lease land and puzzled with me on the whys and whens of that shoe lying there. “Suppose the gate’s locked? How would someone have gotten there on a horse?” he asked.
“I don’t think it’s ever locked. But maybe that horse wasn’t ridden through Buckeye land anyways. Maybe it came across the federal lease land in the first place, from the other side, without riding through the ranch proper.” My suggestion deserved some consideration, even though I’d given it none.
“And if not, if someone rode through the Buckeye to the land beyond the shed you say has the gate, well, someone could have broken through a wire fence anywhere.”
We nodded together on his figuring. Laying down a fence is just about as old a way to get through a wire fence as the fences themselves. That is, if the fences were invented in the morning, pulling staples and standing on the strands as a means of moving stock over a wire fence was figured out by afternoon.
I had stuff to figure out, to nail down, this afternoon myself. The day had time enough left for me to woozle with another shoer or the sheriff, but probably not both. I was ready to prioritize in favor of the shoer. Maybe later, a
fter I’d chased Mac down, I could get with the law then.
Guy brought me a burger with thick sliced onion and pickles on the side. “What’s bugging you, Rainy?”
I dug in, shaking my head, liking that he had a sense of something scratching at me even though I couldn’t name it. I could name plenty of things and did. Our wedding. Abby Langston’s situation. Donna, and stuff at the Buckeye. But there was more. “I can’t place it.”
“Think we’re going to have to testify?”
We. Sure, it’d be a we. And the boy doesn’t evidence my trepidation at the prospect. He’s steady and sure, as ready for the never-tried as he was the night he went into that battle with me. The night he asked me to marry him. Took me a week before I said yes. Couplehood is a notion that could take me. I’m still growing into it. Nowadays, I’m forever giving other couples a study and deciding how to go about this business of hitching up with Guy for the duration. I think each has to have a future to offer up. Someday, Guy would break from the Cascade, have some other eatery iron in the fire. He’d almost pulled it off once already but the deal hadn’t yet panned out. I’ll be fixing horse feet as long as I can, and I’ll only get better at it. Maybe Guy and me won’t be taking up space in the future’s history books on shoeing and cooking but we’ll have our crack at the trades.
And maybe someday soon, we’d pick a day and—no, let’s think about one thing at a time, not consider a whole pie when a slice will do.
Going back to the comparison of couples of the world, I thought about the he-man wearing the reserve deputy uniform and his better half.
Turning on my twirly stool, I couldn’t help but think that finding out who made that horseshoe would tell me who lost it. Anyone riding on the back of the Buckeye had to access the land either from the ranch itself, the federal land bordering the north and east sides, or from Stan Yates’s property. I was going to check with every shoer until I placed that squiggly little aluminum horseshoe. Because Dixon Talbot is sticky enough with me that he likely wouldn’t have given me a straight answer, I’d had to watch him work to know he didn’t mark shoe branches as he worked. How many would I have to watch? I tried to think of east side shoers nearer to Gris Loup that I should check out.
Another thing bugged me—badly. Why did Cameron Chevigny roll his tractor, for crying out loud? Hadn’t he driven that hogback a gajillion times? Didn’t he know how to do it safe, up the long finger? Wasn’t it daylight? It almost didn’t make sense, him dying by rolling a tractor.
Then I remembered those relics on the shelf in the Buckeye barn—broken tools, a rusty old spur, a busted coffee mug, the pistol-sized shell casing. And I remembered Donna sliding the shotgun in the scabbard, saying it was the only artillery she and her husband ever had. If they had a pistol shell casing, then they had a pistol. Had Donna lied to me? Either that or someone else fired a pistol on her ranch.
Chapter 12
LYING’S GOT NO PLACE IN MY life. I’m a truth teller and truth’s all I want to be told.
It was time to get some answers. There were a couple of shoers at the east end of Butte County, one name of MacGillary, another called Browne, who were going to get a visit. I don’t get over that way much and they know I work hard on the west side, so we’re not stepping on each other’s toes any and we have a nodding kind of acquaintance.
MacGillary’s always called Mac. I don’t know if his parents didn’t bother blessing him with a given name or if he didn’t have parents or what. He doesn’t work the same way I do or I don’t do things just like him, but we do get to the same place when we’re done. Plus, Mac would probably know if there was a new horseshoer on the east side of the county.
Doc Quartercrack he’s not. Mac’s more than good enough, from what I’ve seen of his work, that is, his clients’ horses’ feet that I’ve gandered at a rodeo or two. But I hadn’t ever watched him work enough to know what I wanted to know. I had to go to Gris Loup and jaw with the sheriff anyways. I know we’ve worked on each other’s clients’ horses when circumstances warrant it. Last rodeo I was at, I helped an owner who’d torn off a front shoe in the team roping in time for him to rope another round in the finals, and that was a Mac client. I’ve got a couple clients that ride with that Outfitters group, that go teepee and RV camping every equinox and solstice. Mac helped them out when they lost a shoe coming in from one of the big trail rides they do over on the east side.
At a recent rodeo, a client of Mac’s had pulled off a shoe and couldn’t find the missing shoe, sad to say. The fairgrounds are littered with them, no doubt. A thrown shoe is find-able after a show but right then when it’s needed, they can be precious to spot. I’d made a new one for that owner and got a giggle out of the notion that one of Mac’s horses was wearing my steel. It’d give me reason enough to rib him, a way to start a conversation without being too weird about what I really wanted.
Putting off the other errand for later, I found Mac working at a Gris Loup barn that’s mostly the property owner’s horses, though it’s got a few stalls rented out. Hadn’t taken much time at all to track him down there and now I sauntered up like it was all happenstance, watching him work on the dirt in front of wide barn doors. A black grade horse stood at a hitching rail, no owner in sight. Mac’s forge was blowing good and his anvil strikes rang out.
He’s one of those who doesn’t cut his clinches when he goes to pull old shoes, which always makes me flinch when I see it, but that’s just his way. Guess most of his clients squeeze all the metal they can off a set of shoes, have the very old fashioned, penny-pinching twelve-week schedule and those clinches are pretty scarce by that time. Anyways, Mac does that and a couple other weird things, like he pares the sole with one jaw of his nippers.
Old timey shoers like Mac do everything at once though, pull all four old shoes, trim all four feet, shape all four new shoes.
He gave me a nod and my name, “Rainy,” then bent back under the horse.
That was supposed to be understood as “good morning.”
“Morning,” I said. That was our general howdy and then we did the usual ribbing, but his mind was where it ought to’ve been, at his anvil, banging a toe flatter. I did some waiting.
After a bit more time than good manners called for, Mac said, “Something I can do you for?”
“I was gonna ask if you remember this shoe.” I pulled the funky aluminum horseshoe from my hip pocket. I’d knocked dirt off with my clinch cutter and taken the nails out after I studied their skew to understand from which way the horse had mis-stepped to pull it off. I hadn’t straightened the twist from the shoe either. That twist and the nails’ skew had told me the shoe was ripped from the outside.
Most horses yank off a front shoe by stepping on it with their hind toes, and sometimes when they run a hind leg between both fronts they step on the inside heel of a front shoe. A horse whose foot is fit full, or a klutz, or a tired animal does this a whole lot more often than a close fit horse whose feet are cared for more regular. Horses with enough experience to have some sense about where they step and horses that aren’t ridden past the point of hard work keep their shoes better, too.
Casual-like, I showed Mac the shoe I’d picked up on the hogback at the back of the Buckeye ranch.
He pursed his lips and looked up at the clouds like he was considering smooching the sky. The recollection came to him soon enough for shoer time, and he gave it a nod. “I got some clients with a couple of Pasos use these,” he said, taking the shoe from me and considering it. He cockeyed the shoe and cast me a sideways look. “Oh, yeah. Has to be.”
My grin let him know I’d noticed the slightly squirrelly shape. It was like the horse it was made for had a slightly deformed foot.
“Got a little low ringbone,” he muttered.
I nodded. Nothing like a Paso for getting low ringbone. That trappy gait—nice from the saddle I hear, though I’ve never ridden a Paso—sure can’t be the easiest way for a horse’s joints to land. The ringbone explained wanti
ng a lighter shoe, thus the aluminum. For show purposes, Pasos have to have a light shoe anyways but a horse with ossifications would be more comfy in a light shoe.
Pasos move in a pretty inspired manner. They don’t need weight to make their feet fly. Trail riders would like a light shoe too and aluminum could fit the bill except it doesn’t wear well on rocks, so the average backcountry rider doesn’t use aluminum.
“Shoe’s seen some wear,” I said. The breakover was well worn at the toe.
“Loretta gets the miles in,” Mac said. “Not sure how much Vince gets around.”
It jostled me, but I tried to act like a real unjostled kind of person. “Yeah? Loretta from the saddle shop? Um, Pritchley, or something like that?”
He nodded. “That’s the one. Goes out on those rides with that group that plays mountain man, you know, the Outfitters group?”
“Um . . .” I was stuck on Mac’s mention of how much Vince gets around, but my mind was getting none too far.
“Them people that have those gatherings a couple of times a year. Play cowboy and Indian. Have those big trail rides.”
“Right.” I nodded.
Mac shrugged. “I think there’s more people on this side of the county into it. Darby over at that service station in Cowdry’s the only one I can think of on your end that does the Outfitters.”
“You’re pretty sure this shoe’s off that Paso?”
“Yeah, looks like.”
“She covers a bit of ground, does she?”
Chuckled, he did. “She rides like she stole the horse.”
Using an old rasp, he put a little bevel on the shoe he was working, then popped the shoe out of his vise and checked its width against a mark he’d made on his anvil. This left him back under the horse for nailing, finished with his anvil and vise. Nailing’s a time for peace and quiet, so I stood still and studied on his kit while he worked.
