Miss Callaway set the horseshoe on the Derby party table beside the bowl of mint, and it caught the light from the television like a small gold moon. It was an ordinary steel shoe, painted in craft store gold, with a hairline crack running through the heel and a date lettered underneath in silver ink. She is fifty one, barely five feet, in a satin jacket the color of a school bus with her silks stitched on the back, and she held her chin high. “Mr. Pierce,” she said, “I rode your colt, Sweet Alibi, at Tampa Bay Downs last March. I have waited a year to tell you what really won that race.”
Pierce had his julep halfway to his mouth, a lean, pink faced man of fifty in a pink suit and a nine hundred dollar hat, and the toast he had made about my granddaughter was still hanging in the air over the television and the bourbon balls. He had said that his groom made more than Hannah and did not get kicked. Everybody had laughed. Hannah had sipped her sweet tea. “That is a charming story, Miss Callaway,” said Pierce. “The trainer invited you, I believe.” “He did,” said Miss Callaway. “He is a coward, and I am not.”
“At five in the morning on the day of the race,” she said, “the farrier your trainer always used did not show. He was asleep in a ditch in Dunedin. The groom panicked. And a girl in a rusty pickup pulled up to the barn. She had come to drop off a set of shoes for a friend. The groom begged her. She picked up the front left foot of the colt, looked at it for ten seconds, and said, this one is cracked. If you run him on this, it will let go at the quarter pole.”
A gold painted horseshoe sat among the mint and bourbon balls at a Derby party and gave one grandfather the length of a race to bring a son in law back to his granddaughter.
“She worked on him for forty minutes with a hoof stand and a borrowed hammer,” said Miss Callaway. “She pulled the shoe and showed me the crack with her thumbnail. It ran through the heel and into the nail hole. She said, a shoe like this will twist at the turn, and it will turn a leg. I have ridden since I was sixteen. I have seen what a thrown shoe does to a horse at forty miles an hour. I have seen what it does to a rider.” She touched the small of her back. “It broke mine in 2009. Three vertebrae.”
“She reset the foot. She asked for nothing. Your trainer paid her fifty dollars in cash and told her to keep quiet, because he did not want you to know the regular man had failed. I won by two lengths. The purse was seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars. In April you sold half of your colt to a group from Dubai for one point two million dollars, on the strength of that win.” She picked up the shoe. “I kept the one she pulled. I painted it gold. It is the most valuable object in this room, Mr. Pierce, and the girl who earned it is the one you made a joke about.”
Hannah looked at her boots. She is twenty eight, strong shouldered, with hands the size of a man and a face that reddens like a girl. “Miss Callaway, I only did the work,” she said. Pierce set down his julep. His face was the color of his suit. “Hannah,” he said, “I told this whole party that you nail shoes on the horses of other people. It was my horse.” His voice cracked. “I did not know my own money had a farrier.” “Most owners do not,” said Miss Callaway, and she was not unkind. “That is what the ones like her are for.”
I am her grandpa, and my blood pressure be hanged, I stood up. I said that Hannah would be the official farrier of all three of his horses, on a real contract, at ninety five thousand dollars a year. And that the therapy riding barn in Reddick would never again pay for a shoe, a vet bill, or a bale of hay out of its own pocket, because the winnings of that colt would cover it. And that on a Saturday morning, in a plain shirt and without the hat, he would go to the barn and hold horses for the riders. Pierce nodded. “I would like to see it,” he said.
He was kicked within the first hour, the first kick of his life, and he sat down in the dirt and looked up at the sky with an expression of deep astonishment. By ten, he was walking beside a gray mare named Biscuit, leading a woman in a wheelchair across the arena, step by step, with one hand on the bridle and one on the knee of the woman. A retired Marine rode after her. Pierce walked for three hours. He came out into the dust with a sunburned nose and said to me, over lemonade, “I have spent forty years watching horses run in circles.”
“I never watched one carry a person who could not walk,” he finished. His eyes were red. He wrote the check for the barn that afternoon, standing at the fence. Hannah quit her other jobs by the fall and drove her rusty pickup to the track with a rig of her own. In May, Sweet Alibi ran at Churchill Downs and finished fifth, with every shoe on him set by my granddaughter, and she stood in the paddock in the rain with her hammer in her belt while the whole world looked at her horse.
At the Derby party this year, Pierce stood in front of the television with his julep, in a gray suit, and my heart went tight. “To Hannah,” he said. “Who keeps the horses on their feet.” The room cheered. Above the television, on a nail that Pierce had hammered in himself, crooked, hung a steel horseshoe painted gold, with a crack through the heel and a date in silver. Underneath it was a little card in the hand of Miss Callaway. It said, Sweet Alibi. Won by two lengths. Thanks to Hannah.
