…he’s been dead since 2004.
I stood in that field holding a mare’s foot and doing arithmetic that wouldn’t come out. Then I went home and got the old ledgers out of the closet, the ones in his hand, and I sat with them until two in the morning.
There was a name in the back of the ’77 book I’d forgotten. Otis Fenner — apprenticed. And then in ’79, in the same hand, four words: Otis gone. Won’t say.
I asked around for a week before Corriher’s wife, who is eighty-eight, told me the rest of it. Otis Fenner was a Black man from over in Blue Lick who worked at my father’s forge for two years and got run off by three men who thought a farrier’s book was theirs to decide. My daddy never spoke his name in front of me one time.
Otis Fenner died in 1991. But he’d had a grandson, and that grandson is fifty-one years old and lives in a trailer outside Carlisle and has been shoeing horses for the people around here who can’t pay me.
He wasn’t hiding. That’s the part I keep turning over. He’d been doing it for years, quiet, free, on farms where a man will let a lame horse go lame before he’ll admit he’s broke. Corriher never told me because Corriher was ashamed. Half this county was ashamed. And the whole time, the work coming off that man’s bench was better than mine.
His name is Ray. I drove out there with a bottle and no idea what I was going to say, and what I ended up saying was that his granddaddy taught my daddy something my daddy taught me, and I’d been calling it mine for thirty-one years.
We work together now. Two days a week. He still turns a better clinch.
