| | Now, some thirty Octobers from adolescence, from the invincibility and ignorance of youth, I spend the better part of my day thinking of my father and wishing I could have, would have, done more to help him through the tough times. I wish I had not done so many things that had made the tough times tougher.
But I didn’t. I didn’t.
It has been said that memories travel best with the wind, and I believe they do. There is a particularly fond memory of mine that comes with the cool winds that move through the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains, pass swiftly along its rivers and through the red, yellow, and brown leaves of its forests. It’s this mountain wind that picks up and carries with it the familiar aged scent of elm and hickory and the sweetness of
sassafras.
But for me, the most stimulating aroma this wind carries is that of horse manure. It is this scent, carried on the wind, that always finds me—when I’m seated on an outcrop of rocks at the edge of a gorge, when I’m hiking the towering ridges of the canyons or the shady foothills, when my feet are submerged in the swiftness of a stream that cuts through it all—and takes me back, back to a farm, back to a barn, back to a hay-covered floor where I wait for my father.
From the recesses of memory, through a damp early morning fog, I see again, coming through the barn door, the man whom I’ve forever since been trying to become.
He wore old cowboy boots, jeans that were faded and ripped, an old tee shirt with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes protruding from the breast pocket. He held a rope in one hand, and an old coffee can filled with molasses grain in the other. Obediently following behind him, attached to the rope but not pulled by it, walked a shiny black horse.
Now, with the help of the wind, I remember that he often told me the key to catching a horse was not to chase him (since he with the most legs would surely always win) but rather to convince him. Convince him to come with you. Convince him you’d take care of him; protect him; that you’d let nothing happen to him while he was with you.
He had told me this as if he somehow knew I’d be a teacher one day. Sometimes, as I struggle to chase the at-risk students seated in my class, I feel the wind, and hear his words, and I remember, and I become just a little more like him.
Nailing metal shoes to the bottom of horse hoofs was sort of a family affair. The work was hard and the pay was little, but now as I look back, I realize that while riding around in that old pickup with my father, going from farm to farm, I was introduced to the West Virginia of my dreams, vast, tall, and green, and that I met many of her most precious people. Only now do I understand how many priceless hours I got to spend with the best man I have ever known.
There in the barn, while my father went to get tools from the old pick-up truck, I held the leather reins in my hands. The horse curveted and capered, and its heavy hooves thumped the barn floor. When my father returned, he ran his hand across the restless animal’s smooth, solid neck, up into its coarse mane, and the horse immediately calmed. That same hand, that scarred, callused hand, could also calm me, could make me feel safe. And in the horse’s large black eyes, I see again the reflection of my father’s face.
My father learned his craft from an old horse trader named Burt Brown, after the West Virginia coal mines gave my grandpa a black lung, a pine box, and a pension that was not enough to feed his six children. With my grandfather buried in an unmarked grave behind their company-owned house, my father was left to take care of his mother and sisters.
So at the age of fifteen, my father became a blacksmith. At the age of seventeen, he became a soldier. At the age of twenty, he became a cripple.
In spite of his disabilities, I was astonished by my father’s strength as he gripped the tuft of hair on the back of the horse’s hoof and by the way he lifted it, with the beast’s cooperation, to his thigh on which it was supported. The prosthetic replacement of the leg amputated in a field
hospital in South Vietnam shook a little, but never—as he never—gave way. And while the war made him technically disabled, his years of blacksmithing gave him a crushing grip and the muscular build of a floor safe.
Yet, his manner remained open and gentle.
Since I was small and could not help with the manual labor of
horse-shoeing, my father assigned me the responsibility of watching for horseflies. It may not sound like much, but I assure you, it was quite an important job. If it were not for me, horseflies could come and go as they pleased, free to bite the horse my father was working on. And if the insects
managed to land and bite the horse, the thousand pound beast might buck, and my father could be seriously injured, or even killed.
I took my duty seriously.
My father had told me all good soldiers know their enemy. And like a good soldier, I knew mine. I had studied their ways. Yet, I somehow knew that, for the same reason I couldn’t hold the heavy horse hoofs, pound nails into them, or bend the metal shoes, I could also not help my father with the bill collectors who sent notice after notice, the foreman who fired him because he couldn’t move as fast as the other workers, the wife who left him to deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder on his own, and the government who gave him a Purple Heart medal and thirty percent
disability—money that did little to help him raise me by himself.
But I could watch for, and take care of, the horseflies.
There at my post I stood watch, searching diligently for the elusive insect as my father worked. I searched everywhere, watching along the horse’s back, under its large round belly, over its flanks—anywhere the horse’s whisking tail could not
reach, I watched.
My father always began his work with a friendly pat on the horse’s rump and a, "Hello, old friend."
Then, one at a time, like a surgeon, he chose each tool he would use to fix the horse’s feet. While holding the hoof with the bottom facing up, he removed the old shoe with a device resembling a pair of pliers. Then, using a knife with a narrow-blade and a severely curved end, he cleaned the bottom
of the hoof.
"If the hoof gets too dry and hard, it cracks; but if it's too pliable, it bruises easily, leading to abscesses or infections," my father taught me.
Then, after cutting away the callus-like growth from the underside of the hoof, he used nippers to trim a quarter-inch-thick semicircle from the bottom of the hoof. Next came the rasping of the hoof bottom, making it into a flat surface. It was here that my father had to consider the horse’s biomechanics and individual hoof shape. Although he possessed only a ninth grade education, he drew on his learned skills, his experience, just as a scientist or engineer, would. He did it perfectly, every time.
Next, he chose a long rasp and filed down the hoof until it was smooth, clean, and evenly rounded. Between his teeth he held eight flat one-and-a-half-inch nails, one for each of the holes in the horseshoe. He held them there for easy access because both of his hands were full—a hammer in one and a horseshoe in the other. Then, he put shoe to hoof, attaching it with a nail on each side, careful to ensure that the nails came through the hoof. Once the shoe was in place, he hammered in the others and cut and filed each of them. Finally, he filed the leading edge of the hoof so it was flush with the horseshoe.
"Does the horse feel anything?" I asked my father every time I watched him remove a nail from his mouth and hammer it into the horse’s hoof.
"No. The hoof's like your fingernail," he said, and smiled.
And I can remember, even without the urging of the wind, a saying my father recited as he worked. "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. And for want of a horse, the rider was lost."
He had taught me, "If a horse is shod improperly, he can break a leg, cause a spill, make riders go down. People can break necks and die."
And when the wind is right, I can again here my young, anxious voice: "Dad! I see one!"
And I hear my father's calm voice. "All right." He releases the horse’s hoof he is working on, letting it clomp back down on the barn floor, and steps back. "Go ahead, boy."
Finally, it is my turn, my turn to help him. I would take care of him as he had taken care of me for eight years.
He watches me, proudly, as I sneak quietly up beside the horse, my reflection captured in the animal’s large black eyes that searched for the cause of the sudden silence.
With my small hand flattened, I carefully bring it up behind the horsefly, cautious not to startle it.
And I count to myself…one… two— the horse snickers and bucks—three!
When I open my hand, I watch as the fly falls to the ground and buzzes in the sawdust and hay.
And I crunch it under my foot.
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The Horsefly Watcher