A few weeks later I opened a brand new bag of birdseed, I began to dump it into the feeder when something shiny caught my eye, and there amongst the little seeds, was a ring. Not my ring, but a crappy, ironic version. Somewhere in Mexico, or Tiwan, a factory worker who found it amusing to sort birdseed with their feet, is missing a toe ring.
And somewhere else in the world, someone is holding up a pair of hoof nippers, turning them over in their hand and saying, "What the heck is this?"
Last Friday, the last barn of the day, I carried my tools out to the field. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and the temperature was perfect. The first horse was a bit of a mess, and we ended up circleing the pasture about 20 times before she relented and let me trim her feet. The last horse, the owner informed me causally, hated wind.God thought it would be funny if he'd send some. He'd not just send wind, but a storm of biblical proportions. The sky opened and began to dump icy droplets. The poor horse I was attempting to work on was spinning in place, stomping his big foot into the mud and splashing me, my tools and his owner.
I finally convinced him to stand, and we were just about done when my 5 year old, Beeps shows up. "Mommy it's raining!" she says, wearing my coat on her head, and flailing the sleeves hanging off her like tubes. I laughed, gathered my things, and we walked out of the pasture. I tossed my tools in the back and we started for home, glad it was Friday, and glad to have heated seats.
Monday came, and I was readying myself for the first barn. When I opened the truck I had a feeling I was forgetting something before I even had a chance to remember. It was a void, like the car had somehow developed trunk guilt. At the first barn, my feelings proved to be correct, they were gone.
I have lost nippers before- my first 'real' nippers were given to me by an old farrier, who I'm sure felt extremely sorry for the starry eyed girl who lived in the woods, trying to trim her own horses. He would stop by when doing the neighbors horses and give me tips on doing my own. I stared in amazement, gape mouthed at his 'real' nippers, a pair of mid grade Diamond brand. He laughed and shook his head. "I'd give 'em to 'ya, but these things are 'lible to be older 'en you guurll." He shook his big head, his old cowboy hat flopping with the movement.
My nippers were the red handed kind that all cheap tools made in some foreign country where the workers live in huts provided by the factory and make seven cents a day. The nippers would not cut a piece of cheese, much less a hoof, but as a beginning farrier, I probably had no business cutting cheese or hooves with nippers.
A few weeks later, the old farrier stopped by for a visit. He pushed the door of the truck, and it barked loudly, the hing crying out for oil like a dying man in the desert might call out for water. He slid out of the seat with great effort, limped around the side of the truck and dropped the tailgate sat with a sigh. "I found somethin' at the dump." he said, as if the words were some huge effort. I sat beside him, curious. "Thougth 'cha might like it." He reached behind him, and handed me a long slender box. A 15 inch long box. My heart pounded. No, it wasn't jewelry, but it did say Diamond. "Found 'em just layin' there, right on the ground." he said of them.
I was twenty, and totally fell for the ruse that someone would drop a brand new pair of $100 nippers on the ground in a rural South Carolina landfill that is so picked over that the rats don't bother stopping by anymore. I screamed and hugged first the nippers, and then him. He just smiled, his wise eyes crinkling in the corners. "I best be gettin' on now." He said, and lumbered back to his feet, shut the tailgate and left me with the box in my hand, staring at his truck disappearing down the road in a cloud, not unlike one an angel might appear to you in, except this cloud was made of dirt- and angels tend to fly and not drive twenty-year-old Fords.
The nippers proved to be magical, as if some of the old farrier's luck had rubbed off on them, because shortly after, I got my first customer, and then another, and another. I lived in a tiny town called Rum Gully. It was a hole of a place, it's claim to fame was 'the Christmas Lights'. "That's the place with the Christmas Lights?" people would ask when I told them where I lived. I learned to just say "yes" though I never saw the lights the four years I lived there, I heard that they were 'something to see' the person would explain and then sadly say, 'they don't do 'em anymore', shaking their head at the loss.
Rum Gully seemed to be a cut off point, an invisible line that farriers simply did not cross, past that line the market was wide open. After a few years, I saw why. . .
I was young, young enough to believe that there was no horse I could not ride, no animal I could not tame. I would drive for an hour to stand up to my ankles in mud with a stallion's teeth snapping the bill of my hat, his leadrope tucked in my back pocket, and his elderly owner saying "Isn't that cute, he's nibbling you."
"Yes ma'am." I'd say, cutting an inch and a half of overgrown hoof.
I was a sucker for the line: "I just can't get a farrier"
I was so desperate to help horses, even at my own detriment, even if the drive proved to cost more than what I charged for the trim. I wanted to help horses, and I wanted to help them all.
I charged $20 , it didn't matter if I got kicked in the face, or had to chase them around a barbed wire pasture dodging junk cars. I once trimmed a wild mustang, with a freeze brand so fresh, the hair hadn't grown back.
"I think she's gentle deep down." The owner said over the fence, because she was too afraid to go in the pasture with this sweet mare. I nodded, panting and bleeding, holding the end of the lead rope while she galloped wildly around me. "Maybe so." I said, waiting for the mare to slow. In the end, I learned that mustangs can kick you in the face with a hind foot, while I was holding up a front.
My Diamonds and I had more adventures than most couples on "The Amazing Race" show. Our final journey was with a farm deep in the heart of nowhere.
I laughed the day South Carolina issued our brand new license plate boasting the new state motto stamped in pale blue hard to read letters "Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places".
South Carolina had some places that could have been construed as beautiful. The sun setting over a forest of Cyprus, their nubby knees reaching out of the water like hands reaching out from graves, begging for help could have been construed as 'beautiful', to a zombie. The smiling faces were also an exaggeration. I often joked that the tooth brush was invented in South Carolina, because if it was invented anywhere else, it would be called the "Teeth Brush". The deeper you went into the belly of the state, the more rotten the core. Looking at many of the residents made you feel guilty for having so much calcium in your mouth.
Family was very important to your placement in society. "Who's your daddy?" was not a sassy come-on but a genuine question. My daddy was a picture in a scrapbook, gone since I was a kid. To make things worse, he was Native American, which lent to more suspicion, and my mother? She was from France. It would have been better if I had whipped out a Yankee accent and said "I'm from New Hampsha" (I did live there for a few years as a kid and learned enough accent to make fun of them). I was a stranger, a strange stranger- a girl doing a man's job. A girl with a floppy cowboy hat and a truck two years older than I was. I'd pull up in my chugging old ford, hop out in my faded jeans and the customers would look past me and ask "Where's your husband?"- wondering where the farrier they called was.
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Me and my Diamonds had reached our final destination, a farm an hour and a half from Rum Gully in some municipality that nobody even bothered to name much less put it on a map. I got out of the truck to a crowd. It seemed that the woman who wanted a farrier called everyone in her family, and most of their friends, to watch me trim.
"She's right thare" she said with a voice that should have been used in an add to terrify small children about the dangers of smoking.
The horse she pointed to was a pretty gray- she was tied to a hitching post made of telephone poles. This should have been a warning. "She ain't been done since I got her." she said in her 'I smoke twenty cigarettes before breakfast' voice.
I smiled, confident I could trim this sweet girl.
Twelve years later, I biq jbiq a new language. It's called Farrier Speak. When an owner says "The farrier just quit showing up!" it translates to: "I quit paying the bill- or my horse killed him and now his wife won't return my calls"
The line: "She never kicks!" translates to "You will loose your front teeth and look like me!"
"I don't know how she'll do" translates to "I know what she does, but I'm afraid if I tell you, you won't even try." The owner knew exactly what this horse, standing in the hot summer sun, with four shoes grown into her hooves, would do.
I walked to the horse and picked out her first hoof. She stood quietly, and I pet her and said a few words. I began to pull the nails out of her overgrown hoof where the shoe had embedded itself and she slammed her hoof down. I picked it up, started again, and she slammed it again. I heard a man chuckle. I looked up, Red-neck-family-Robinson crept forward. Someone even pushed Grandma a little closer, her wheelchair wheel crunched a twig and the mare pulled back against her telephone pole post and snorted.
A dirty, shirtless little boy spit tobacco and asked, "When's she gonna git kicked?"
"Dunno." A fat man with boobs bigger than mine shrugged.
The mare wasn't mad, she was simply proud. She refused to behave for any two legged creature, even one that was trying to help, and looking at these people, I couldn't blame her.
I finally figured out to use her anger to help us both. I hooked the teeth of the nippers over the shoe and let the ol 'gal pull. She yanked, and I held, yank and hold. Eventually she pulled all four shoes for me. Most of the family had given up by now. The few remaining stragglers stood with sour faces, their arms crossed resting on their ample bellies.
An hour and a half later, the mare was standing on four trimmed feet. I was slimy with sweat, but was free of bruises and blood. The entire family had given up and gone back inside the single-wide. The woman with the 'rocks in a blender' voice pulled a wet twenty from the front of her shirt and handed it to me. I took the boob cash and carried it to my truck and started the hour drive home.
I walked in the door to be greeted by a flashing light on my answering machine. The Marlboro woman had left a message. "You left yur hoof cuttin things here."
My heart sank. In my exhaustion, I left my Diamonds behind. I got back in the truck, using the $20 I just made, in gas, to retrieve my precious tool.
The mare was still there, tied to the telephone poles, wet with sweat, the noon sun beating down on her. I turned away and walked to the trailer. It looked like a bloated tin can of creamed corn, affected with botulism, bloated from the inside out. I knocked on the botulism door, I saw a movement behind the dark brown, warped plexiglass window. A strange, glutteral sound answered my knock "Wha?"
"It's Shannon- the farrier."
More animal sounds came through the tin door, and finally it swung open. The family was crammed into the tiny doorway- Marlboro woman stood in the opening, her arms crossed.
"Hi, I'm here to get my nippers."
"Yur what?" She narrowed her eyes.
"I got your call," I smiled. "You found my nippers." I said, hoping to jog her Budweiser soaked memory.
"They got lost." She said.
"but you called." I said, my voice cracking. Behind me the mare snorted telephone pole post. There was a deep rut where she'd been pawing.
"They got lost." Fat brother/husband came forward, his breasts swinging. He crossed his arms across his chest, and rested his forearms on his stomach.
"What?" I asked, crushed. The family started to squeeze forward, filling the doorway like I would dare enter the fortress of tobacco stink and sweat.
"I said they're lost." She said again.
"Yup," brother/husband said, reaching for the door. "They're lost." The door slammed.
I stared at the dented door for a long while, the duct tape cross patching some mysterious hole- made from the inside. I felt a loss, a deep inexplicable feeling like a part of my body had fallen out on their dirty floor, like a appendix or spleen had been surgically removed. I walked back to the gray mare tied in the sun. I looked around the dirt beside her, maybe my nippers were there, but I knew better. "Hey girl." I said, running my hands over her sleek coat. "You deserve better." I said, wishing I could fold her up and put her in my front seat and take her home. Instead, I reached up and un-clipped her halter, sliding it over her beautiful ears. "Run." I whispered. "Run."
Somewhere in South Carolina, is a silver Arabian mare, wild, and living on the green grass of the lowcountry. Somewhere is a fat family has a rusty pair of Diamond nippers on their coffee table being used to pull teeth or clip toenails.
Somewhere, here in Virginia, a portal exists sucking in GE nippers in through the trunk of my car. But wherever they are, I hope they're happy.
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