Freezing rain was coming Saturday, the Christmas parade horses had no ice shoes, and the only person in Calder County who could fix it was a seventy-year-old newcomer buying birdseed at the feed store.
Bernadette Kolb had told only her daughter what she used to do for a living, and she did not mean for it to come out. It came out at Calder Feed and Seed on Tuesday morning, because Jace Doran was standing at the counter with his phone, about to cry.
"The guy from Columbus canceled," Jace told the clerk. "His truck broke down. And the other two are booked through New Year's. If I can't get Juniper and the team shod for ice, the Delaneys can't pull the wagon."
Bernie was buying a bag of birdseed. She set it down on the counter.
"What kind of shoes are they wearing now?" she asked.
Jace looked at her. He was seventeen, a bronc rider with a bruised cheek and a hat too big for his head. He saw a small, square, white-haired woman in a quilted vest and did not know what to make of her.
"Plain steel," he said. "Why?"
"Because plain steel on wet ice is like a hockey skate," Bernie said. "Where are the horses?"
The Delaney place was on Lutz Hollow Road. Kaylee and Mark Delaney kept two big Belgian draft horses, Duke and Dolly, and an old bay mare named Juniper who was blind in her left eye. Every year since 2015, the Belgians had pulled the Grace Methodist hay wagon down Main Street at the front of the Christmas parade, with Juniper walking out ahead, ridden by a teenager carrying the flag.
This year the teenager was Jace. It was the first time anybody had asked him to do something in town that did not involve getting thrown off an animal.
Bernie walked around the three horses in the Delaneys' barn without saying a word. She picked up each foot and looked at the shoes. She ran her hand down Dolly's legs. She stood behind Juniper and watched the old mare shift her weight.
Then she looked at Jace.
"Borium," she said. "On all of them. Small spots, toe and heels. And Juniper gets a rim pad on the front so the snow doesn't ball up in her feet."
Jace stared at her. "How do you know about borium?"
"I shod police and parade horses in Chicago for thirty-one years," Bernie said.
That was the secret that came out at the feed store. Bernadette Kolb had shod police and carriage horses in Chicago from 1984 to 2015, one of the few women in the trade back then. She had shod horses for parades on Michigan Avenue in February and riot lines in the rain and a funeral for a fallen officer where forty horses walked a mile on wet granite without a slip.
She had moved to Pine Hollow in October to be near her daughter, who taught at the high school. She had brought her anvil and her forge in a U-Haul and told her daughter she would sell them. She had not sold them.
"Borium is old-fashioned," Mark Delaney said doubtfully. "The guy from Columbus does those drive-in studs. Screws them right into the shoe."
"Drive-in studs work fine," Bernie said. "If you've got them. Do you?"
Mark shook his head.
"Then you've got me," Bernie said. "And a forge."
She set up the forge in the Delaneys' barn on Wednesday morning. It was an old coal forge, black with use, and when she lit it, the barn filled up with a sharp, sweet smell like fireworks and bacon. Jace stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
"You want to learn," Bernie said, "or you want to watch?"
"I want to learn," Jace said. "I want to shoe horses. For a living. Maybe."
"Then come here and pump the bellows."
She showed him how to heat the shoe to a cherry red. How to hold it in the tongs. How to lay the little borium rods on the toe and heels and melt them into the steel with a brazing flux, so the hard tungsten grains stood up out of the shoe like grit on sandpaper.
"That grit bites the ice," she said. "Every grain is a tiny claw. A horse with good borium can walk on an ice rink. I've seen them do it."
Jace burned his hand twice. He did not complain. By noon, he could hold the shoe steady. By three, he had laid his first borium spot by himself, and Bernie had looked at it for a long time and nodded once.
"Again," she said.
The trouble was time.
Twelve shoes. Four per horse. Each one had to be pulled, fitted, heated, brazed, cooled, and nailed back on. Bernie was seventy, with a shoulder that had been broken twice by police horses and a back that complained every time she bent over a hoof. By Thursday night, she had done the Belgians' front feet and half of Dolly's hind.
"We're going to make it," Jace said.
"Maybe," Bernie said.
She did not tell him about her hands. They had started to shake around four o'clock Thursday. They always did, these days, after six hours at the anvil.
Friday was worse.
The freezing rain came early, at two in the afternoon. By four, Lutz Hollow Road was glazed like a doughnut. Bernie still had Duke's hind feet and all of Juniper to do.
At five, Kaylee Delaney came into the barn with her phone.
"Bernie, the parade committee called," she said. "They want to know if we're in or out. If we're out, they need to tell the church tonight. They'll put the wagon on a flatbed truck instead."
Bernie straightened up from Duke's hind foot. Her back made a sound like a dry branch.
"We're in," she said.
"Are you sure? You've been at it ten hours."
"We're in."
Kaylee went out. Bernie bent back down over the hoof and picked up the hot shoe in the tongs.
Her hand shook. The shoe slipped out of the tongs, hit the edge of the anvil, and fell into the straw.
Jace grabbed for it before she could stop him.
He yelled. He dropped the shoe and stood holding his right hand, white in the face, and at his feet, in the dry straw, the cherry-red shoe began to smoke.