Everyone Laughed When Widow’s Daughter Collected Their Rusted Horseshoes—Until They Entered Her Barn

Chapter 2

The Saturday trips to Sageford became the only lie Nell ever told her mother. She told Ruth she meant to stretch her legs by the smithy while the eggs were traded and the flour weighed out, and Ruth, too tired for questions, let her go.

The smithy sat at the edge of town where the street gave up being street and turned back into dust. Its owner, Otis Kray, was a wall of a man with two fingers missing off his left hand and a laugh that could shake glass off a shelf. He spent his days shoeing horses and fixing axles, and he had no time on earth for scrap. Behind his shop he kept a growing graveyard of it: bent shoes, snapped brackets, cracked rims, nails like broken teeth.

“They call you the little pack rat,” Otis said the third time she showed up, eyeing her over the anvil’s fire. “You hear ’em? Every one of ’em’s got a joke about you.”

“Yes, sir. I hear them.”

“And you still come haul my garbage?”

“I’d like it if it was my garbage, sir. If you’ve no use for it.”

Otis studied her. Sun had burned half the hide off his arms, but he was kind under all the noise. “For practice, is it? Iron work’s for men with shoulders like barn doors, girl. It’ll bust your hands and humble your spirit. But I ain’t the type to light a kid on fire.” He waved a sooty hand at the pile. “Help yourself. Haul it all, for all I care. Saves me the fee of a hauling man.”