"Water," Bernie said. "The bucket. Now."
Jace plunged his hand into the water bucket by the forge. Bernie kicked the hot shoe off the straw with the side of her boot and stamped on the little curl of smoke until it was gone. Then she knelt beside him and took his wrist.
"Let me see."
It was a bad burn across the pads of his fingers, white in the middle, already blistering. She had seen a hundred like it. She had had a dozen herself.
"Stupid," Jace said through his teeth. "That was stupid."
"It was," Bernie agreed. "Never grab hot steel. I told you that Wednesday." She held his hand in the cold water. "It was also the bravest stupid thing I've seen in a while. You were trying to save my shoe."
Kaylee came running in. She took one look and went for the first-aid kit and her car keys.
"Urgent care in Marietta," she said. "Come on, Jace."
He did not move.
"What about Juniper?" he said.
Bernie looked at the old mare standing in her stall. Juniper's blind left eye was turned toward the wall. Her good eye watched them.
Then Bernie looked at her own hands. They were still shaking.
"Go get your hand looked at," she told Jace. "I'll do Juniper."
"You can't. You can barely hold the tongs."
"I know it." Bernie took a breath. "So I'm going to do it the way I did it in Chicago, when I was sixty and my shoulder was bad and we had forty horses to get ready for a funeral by dawn. I'm going to do it slow. And I'm going to do it sitting down."
She pulled up an old milk crate and sat on it beside Juniper's front foot.
She did not hurry. She had learned that from the old mounted sergeants, a long time ago. A horse knows when you are rushing. A horse knows when you are scared. So she talked to the mare the whole time, low and steady, about nothing. About Chicago. About her daughter. About the birdseed she had been buying when this all started.
She heated the shoe and held it in the tongs with both hands, braced against her knee. She laid the borium one grain at a time. She let each shoe cool longer than she needed to, so her hands could rest.
Kaylee drove Jace to Marietta and back. His fingers were wrapped in white gauze, and he had a prescription for burn cream, and the doctor had told him he was lucky. He did not go home. He sat on a hay bale in the corner of the barn and held the flashlight for her when the barn lights flickered in the storm.
At one in the morning, Bernie drove the last nail into Juniper's left hind shoe and clinched it over.
She set the foot down gently. Then she sat on the milk crate with her hands in her lap and could not get up for a while.
Jace came over and sat on the barn floor beside her. Neither of them said anything. Juniper put her head over the stall door and blew warm air into Bernie's white hair, the way a horse does to a friend.
"Is that it?" Jace asked quietly.
"That's it," Bernie said. "Twelve shoes."
The parade went off at ten on Saturday, right on time, on a Main Street still glazed with ice.
The sheriff's car went first, creeping, with its lights going. Then Juniper, old and half blind, with Jace Doran on her back carrying the American flag in his one good hand. She walked out onto the ice like she was walking down a gravel lane. Her borium bit with every step, a soft crunching sound you could hear from the sidewalk.
Behind her came Duke and Dolly, two tons of Belgian draft horse, pulling the Grace Methodist hay wagon full of children singing Jingle Bells off-key. Their big feet came down on the ice and stayed there.
At the corner of Main and Elm, a pickup truck in the line behind them slid sideways into a snowbank. The horses never slipped once.
People cheered from the sidewalk. Dot Kessler cheered from the door of the diner with a coffeepot in her hand.
Bernie Kolb stood at the corner by the feed store in her quilted vest, with her hands jammed deep in her pockets so the crowd could not see them shake. Her daughter stood beside her and put an arm around her.
"Mom," she said. "I thought you were going to sell the anvil."
"I was," Bernie said.
Jace came by the Delaneys' barn the next Saturday with his hand still bandaged and a coffee can full of the ruined horseshoes from the week. He had cleaned every one.
"I want to learn the rest," he said. "All of it. Whatever you'll teach me."
Bernie looked at him for a long time.
"It's five years before you're any good," she said. "Ten before you're great. You'll burn yourself again. You'll get kicked. Your back will hurt every day for the rest of your life."
"Yes, ma'am."
She took a pair of old leather gloves out of her vest pocket. They were cracked and black with forge soot, and they had a faded star stitched on the cuff by a mounted sergeant who had given them to her in 1985.
She handed them to him.
"Then go pump the bellows," she said. "The fire's getting cold."
