The Amish Blacksmith (12 page)

“Hey, you're the one who said you were listening to him.”

“I wasn't implying actual speech!” She stared at me for a long moment, her eyes narrowing before she added, “And here I always thought you were different.”

She started to come toward me and would have passed me and gone out of the barn had I not stepped in front of her.

“Wait! Come on. I thought you could take a joke.”

She blinked at me. “Is that what we're doing here, Jake? Joking? Well, then in that case. Yes, Patch leaned in and whispered it in my ear. Ha-ha.”

Again, she started to move past me. Before I could think it through, I reached out and stopped her. She looked down at my hand on her elbow, and I quickly dropped my arm.

“Priscilla, please. We used to be friends. Why are you acting like this?”

At least she had the decency to blush.

“Fine,” she said. “It was clear to me just by interacting with Patch that he had been abused by someone. Then, when Uncle Amos came into the stable this morning to tell me about the auction, Patch reared up and became very upset. When you came in a little while later, Patch didn't react at all.”

“So?”

“So the big difference between you and Uncle Amos was that he had his hat on when Patch saw him and you didn't. Patch was afraid of the person in the hat. Men wear hats. Thus, I concluded that he was abused by a man. Simple, see?”

She left me in the stable to think on this, which I did as I finished up with Big Sam and put the buggy away. While I appreciated Priscilla's interesting deductions, I doubted she was right. It couldn't be that easy.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to test out her theory. When I was done with Big Sam and finally free to work with Patch, I intentionally kept my hat on as I walked into his stall. My presence hadn't been all that disturbing to him before, but this time, to my surprise, the moment he saw me, he pawed the ground at his feet and whinnied as though he'd been poked with a hot iron.

I took off my hat.

S
EVEN

E
ven hatless, the only way I could get Patch to calm down was to walk off and leave him alone for a while. My stomach was growling, so I decided to go back to the cottage, where I made myself a giant glass of iced tea and two ham sandwiches. As I sat at the table and ate every last crumb, I wrote out a fee schedule for my services and went over my notes from farrier school. Then I cleaned up my dishes, shoved four apples into a paper bag, and headed off. I still had nearly an hour before Natasha's driver would pick me up, which gave me enough time to work with Patch a little more, assuming he'd calmed down by now.

At the main barn, I hung my hat on a peg by the door, placed the bag of apples on the floor, and grabbed a handful of carrots from the bin. Then I moved on into the smaller stable, holding my breath as I stepped through the doorway. Just as I'd hoped, Patch's reaction to my appearance was completely different from before. I was the same guy, but with no hat on my head this time, the horse had no reason to fear. In fact, he barely gave me a glance as I walked toward him, only growing skittish once I got close, but for him that was normal. At least he let me feed him a carrot and pat him gently on the neck.

Incredible.

Now that I was pretty sure Priscilla had been right about the primary cause of Patch's problem, I could get down to the business of fixing things. Seemed to me, a phobia of hats had to be about one of the worst phobias a horse in Lancaster County could have, especially a horse owned by an Amish family. There would always be hats in Patch's life, which meant I would have to desensitize him to that particular fear while also training him to trust his handler whether he was frightened or not.

I took Patch, who seemed willing but wary, out to the smaller outdoor pen behind the welding shop, speaking in soft, comforting tones along the way. I set the carrots on the ground beside the fence and led the skittish horse to the center of the pen, pausing to latch the gate behind me. I waited until he was calm, and then I dropped the lead rope and took a step back. As soon as Patch realized he was free, he began to trot around inside the limited space, huffing and puffing and nervously trying to discern the limits of his boundaries. I left him alone for a few minutes, until he settled down again. When he finally came to a stop, I reached for a carrot and slowly began to approach the horse's flank.

I was about ten feet away when he spotted me and darted off, running frantically around the circle again in an attempt to escape. Classic flight or fight response. There wasn't really anywhere for him to go, however, so once he'd calmed down and come to another stop, I tried once more, moving with quiet determination toward his flank. It took several more tries, but finally I was able to get close enough to offer him the carrot. He took it from me, munching away greedily as I went to retrieve another and start over again.

The next time, though, I wouldn't let him have the carrot until he had calmed down a little more first. This became the routine, and after about fifteen more minutes of me approaching his flank and rewarding him with a carrot every time he stopped flinching, he began to visibly relax.

“See there, boy?” I told him, patting his neck as he chewed away. “I'm not going to hurt you. Nobody's ever going to hurt you again.”

When our time was up, I led a far more compliant Patch back to his stall. We were done for now, but before I left, I retrieved the bag of apples, returned to the stall, and rewarded Patch's efforts by giving him one. He took the ripe fruit from my hand, emitting a grunt of pleasure as he did.

“Good session,” I told him with a final pat. Then I headed back outside, snagging my hat and returning it to my head as I passed through the door.

By then it was nearly two o'clock, so I took a seat on a stump near the
driveway and ate one of the apples myself as I waited for my ride. A sleek black pickup appeared just as I was finishing, and as it turned into the driveway and eased in my direction, I stood and slid the remaining two apples into my pockets for later.

I'd been in plenty of cars and trucks before, but never in one as classy and up-to-date as the vehicle Natasha Fremont had sent for me. The interior was all inlaid wood and leather, the dash looked like a small computer, and there was even a tiny fridge in the console. The driver, a twentysomething stable hand who introduced himself as Ryan Warner, offered me a beverage as soon as I'd climbed in and shut the door—at least I thought that's what he said, though he had the music cranked up so loud I wasn't sure.

“You like country?” he yelled over the din as he turned us around in the driveway.

“It's fine,” I replied, because I didn't exactly hate it.

“What's that?” he asked, turning the volume down just a bit.

“I said it's fine.” The twang of the tune that was playing was a different sound for me, and not exactly my favorite. I'd been a rock and roll kind of guy when I was younger and in my
rumspringa
. But I could deal with this for now.

“Go ahead,” he urged, sensing my hesitation about his offer of a drink. “Help yourself.”

As we headed off down the narrow road, I did just that, opening the console and viewing my options. Nothing looked familiar among the various bottles and cans. I chose something called Perrier, which sounded vaguely familiar. It turned out to be water with a fancy name.

“So you just graduated from farrier school?” he asked as he turned the music down a little more, much to my relief.

“Not exactly. I mean, yes and no. I graduated a year ago.”

“Gotcha. How do you like it so far? Are you allowed to use modern conveniences back at your shop there?”

I had to think for a moment what he meant. Blacksmithing was an ancient art, so there weren't really any modern conveniences to speak of, except maybe the fact that we ordered our shoes from a catalog now, premade, as opposed to forging them ourselves. But those shoes were put on a horse the same way they were a century ago. An electric machine couldn't shoe a horse and probably never would.

“Well, our forge is propane powered, if that's what you mean,” I said, taking a light tone.

“Oh, yeah. I guess there isn't much about shoeing that involves a computer, eh?” He laughed. I smiled with him.

“Have you been with the Fremonts long?”

“The last four summers. I'll be going back to Penn State in the fall.”

He went on to tell me he was one of three students Natasha employed each summer. Apparently, they did a lot of the grunt work, such as cleaning out stalls, watering, grooming, repairing fences, and exercising a small contingent of horses she stabled for other owners, in addition to caring for their breeding mares and the foals.

“About the only horse over there we don't fool with is Duchess. She has her own stable, closer to the house, and Natasha prefers to handle that one herself.”

“Duchess?” I asked, wondering if that was the horse I was being brought out to see.

“Long story,” Ryan replied with a wave of his hand, as if to say he wasn't in the mood to tell it.

We were silent for a moment, and I tried to think of some other topic of conversation, lest my driver grow bored and decide to turn the music back up. “Natasha seems pretty nice,” I finally managed to offer.

“Yeah, she's nice enough. Rich, but nice.”

“Do you enjoy working with the horses?”

A new song came on, and Ryan began tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Sure, though warmbloods aren't my favorite. I like hotbloods. Arabians, actually. If I had my own horse, that's what I'd get. An Arabian.”

“I hear you,” I said, and I really did know what he meant. As Amos and I had explained to Priscilla earlier, hotbloods were fast and feisty, which made them much more exciting than the well-trained warmbloods of the horse show world. Definitely more interesting—at least to a guy like Ryan.

“You people probably don't have any show horses, though, right?” he asked. “I mean, what would an Amish man do with a warmblood?” He laughed again, clearly enjoying his own sense of humor.

“Yeah, that would make about as much sense as your taking a buggy with you back to college,” I replied, and he howled with laughter.

We managed to converse easily enough the rest of the way to East Fallowfield, talking about horses and riding and all things equestrian. As we got closer, the subject came back around to Natasha, and from the way Ryan talked, it sounded as if she was more than just the money behind a successful
horse breeding and boarding business. Apparently, she was also a top-level competitor in the sport of dressage.

“She made Grand Prix champion by the age of thirty,” he said, as if I would know what that meant. “Can you believe it? The horse she won with is retired now, but she's working really hard to get there again, with Duchess this time.”

I could act as though I knew what he was talking about, or I could just ask. I opted for the latter. “Grand Prix champion?”

“Sorry. Guess I forgot you're not part of the horse show world.” He went on to explain that dressage had levels of achievement, with each horse-and-rider pair having to earn their way up the various levels at competitions until they reached the highest level, which was “Grand Prix.”

“Right now, Natasha and Duchess are still three levels down from there, at the ‘Prix St. George' level. But I have no doubt they'll make it eventually. The next qualifying event is in Devon this fall, and Natasha is determined to compete and earn up to the next level from there. If she can do that, they'll probably be able to make Grand Prix in another year or two.”

“She must really be something,” I said, my eyes on the gorgeous scenery that surrounded us. “But isn't she a little… ” I stopped short, realizing such a question would be rude.

“A little what?” Ryan replied, crowing with laughter. “High strung? Intense?”

I shook my head, mad at myself and my big mouth. I wanted to drop it, but he wouldn't let it go.

“Fine,” I said. “Old, okay? I'm guessing she's in her late thirties. I was going to say, isn't she a little old to still be competing in horse shows?”