She carefully turned the rusted artifact over in her hands. “A toe grab. I can’t make out if there were any grabs on the back, but possibly. This horse had to do a lot of pulling. Draft horse, of course.”
“Okay, look at this one.” He handed her another.
Harry and Susan exclaimed at this shoe. Lighter, made for a smaller horse, it had a bar across the heel area, joining the two arms of the shoe.
“What do you think, Susan?” Harry placed the shoe in her friend’s hands.
“We need Steve O’Grady.” Susan referred to an equine vet in the county, an expert on hoof development and problems and strategies to overcome those problems. He was a colleague of Fair Haristeen, whose specialty was the equine reproductive system. “But I’d say this belonged to a fancy horse, a riding horse, anyway. It’s a bar shoe . . .”
“Because the horse had a problem. Navicular maybe.” Harry suggested a degenerative condition of the navicular bone, just behind the main bone of the foot, the coffin bone, often requiring special shoeing to alleviate the discomfort.
“Perhaps, but the blacksmith decided to give the animal more striking area in the back. He moved the point of contact behind the normal heel area.” Kimball placed his hand on his desk, using his fingers as the front of the hoof and his palm as the back and showed how this particular shoe could alter the point of impact.
“I didn’t know you rode horses.” Harry admired his detective work on the horseshoe.
“I don’t. They’re too big for me.” Kimball smiled.
“So how’d you know this? I mean, most of the people who do ride don’t care that much about shoeing. They don’t learn anything.” Susan, a devout horsewoman, meaning she believed in knowing all phases of equine care and not just hopping on the animal’s back, was intensely curious.
“I asked an expert.” He held out his palms.
“Who?”
“Dr. O’Grady.” Kimball laughed. “But still, I had to call around, dig in the libraries, and find out if horseshoeing has changed that much over the centuries. See, that’s what I love about this kind of work. Well, it’s not work, it’s a magical kind of living in the past and the present at the same time. I mean, the past is ever informing the present, ever with us, for good or for ill. To work at what you love—a heaping up of joys.”
“It is wonderful,” Harry agreed. “I don’t mean to imply that what I do is anything as exalted as your own profession, but I like my job, I like the people, and most of all, I love Crozet.”
“We’re the lucky ones.” Susan understood only too well the toll unhappiness takes on people. She had watched her father drag himself to a job he hated. She had watched him dry up. He worried so much about providing for his family that he forgot to be with his family. She could have done with fewer things and more dad. “Being a housewife and mother may not seem like much, but it’s what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t trade a minute of those early years when the kids were tiny. Not one second.”
“Then they’re the lucky ones,” Harry said.
Kimball, content in agreement, pulled open a drawer and plucked out a bit of china with a grayish background and a bit of faded blue design. “Found this last week in what I’m calling Cabin Four.” He flipped it over, a light number showing on its reverse side. “I’ve been keeping it here to play with it. What was this bit of good china doing in a slave cabin? Was it already broken? Did the inhabitant of the little cabin break it herself—we know who lived in Cabin Four—and take it out of the Big House to cover up the misdeed? Or did the servants, forgive the euphemism, go straight to the master, confess the breakage, and get awarded the pieces? Then again, what if the slave just plain took it to have something pretty to look at, to own something that a rich white person would own, to feel for a moment part of the ruling class instead of the ruled? So many questions. So many questions.”
“I’ve got one you can answer.” Susan put her hand up.
“Shoot.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
5
Larry Johnson intended to retire on his sixty-fifth birthday. He even took in a partner, Hayden McIntire, M.D., three years before his retirement age so Crozet’s residents might become accustomed to a new doctor. At seventy-one, Larry continued to see patients. He said it was because he couldn’t face the boredom of not working. Like most doctors trained in another era, he was one of the community, not some highly trained outsider come to impose his superior knowledge on the natives. Larry also knew the secrets: who had abortions before they were legal, what upstanding citizens once had syphilis, who drank on the sly, what families carried a disposition to alcoholism, diabetes, insanity, even violence. He’d seen so much over the years that he trusted his instincts. He didn’t much care if it made scientific sense, and one of the lessons Larry learned is that there really is such a thing as bad blood.
“You ever read these magazines before you put them in our slot?” The good doctor perused the New England Journal of Medicine he’d just pulled out of his mailbox.
Harry laughed. “I’m tempted, but I haven’t got the time.”
“We need a thirty-six-hour day.” He removed his porkpie hat and shook off the raindrops. “We’re all trying to do too much in too little time. It’s all about money. It’ll kill us. It’ll kill America.”
“You know, I was up at Monticello yesterday with Susan—”
Larry interrupted her. “She’s due for a checkup.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” He shrugged his shoulders in resignation. “But if I don’t say what’s on my mind when it pops into my head, I forget. Whoosh, it’s gone.” He paused. “I’m getting old.”
“Ha,” Mrs. Murphy declared. “Harry’s not even thirty-five and she forgets stuff all the time. Like the truck keys.”
“She only did that once.” Tucker defended her mother.
“You two are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.” Larry knelt down to pet Tucker while Mrs. Murphy prowled on the counter. “Now, what were you telling me about Monticello?”
“Oh, we drove up to see how the Mulberry Row dig is coming along. Well, you were talking about money and I guess I was thinking how Jefferson died in hideous debt and how an intense concern with money seems to be part of who and what we are as a nation. I mean, look at Light-Horse Harry Lee. Lost his shirt, poor fellow.”
“Yes, yes, and being the hero, mind you, the beau ideal of the Revolutionary War. Left us a wonderful son.”
“Yankees don’t think so.” The corner of Harry’s mouth turned upward.
“I liken Yankees to hemorrhoids . . . they slip down and hang around. Once they see how good life is around here, they don’t go back. Ah, well, different people, different ways. I’ll have to think about what you said—about money—which I am spending at a rapid clip as Hayden and I expand the office. Since Jefferson never stopped building, I can’t decide if he possessed great stamina or great foolishness. I find the whole process nerve-racking.”
Lucinda Payne Coles opened the door, stepped inside, then turned around and shook her umbrella out over the stoop. She closed the door and leaned the dripping object next to it. “Low pressure. All up and down the East Coast. The Weather Channel says we’ve got two more days of this. Well, my tulips will be grateful but my floors will not.”
“Read where you and others”—Larry cocked his head in the direction of Harry—“attended Big Marilyn’s do.”