Cody went to the side of the great black anvil with a rag in his hand, and for a moment I thought he would never kneel. Then he went down on one knee in the sawdust, rubbed away a century of soot from the steel, and read what was stamped there in deep square letters. “A. Burke. Master Smith. Gallatin County Fair, nineteen sixty eight.” His voice shook on the last word. The thirty people in the tent had stopped moving, and a child with a cup of lemonade let it tip slowly in her hand. I am Ansel Burke, eighty one years old, and I stood at the rail with my granddaughter Lacey gripping my elbow.
In 1968, I was twenty three years old, and I stood in a borrowed shop outside Belgrade for nine days and forged that anvil from a single block of railroad steel, for the county fair, to prove I deserved the guild. The master smiths of three states watched me do it. They gave me the iron ring that I wear on my right hand, hand forged and stamped inside with my number. I made horseshoes for twelve years, shod the horses of half of Gallatin County, and then my back gave out, and I drove a milk truck for twenty four years. I never told a soul at the dairy.
The old rancher by the hay bales, Dell Harmon, eighty years old, walked across the sawdust, took off his sunglasses, and put out his big cracked hand. “Ansel,” he said. “I held the tongs for you the day you struck that stamp. I have shod horses on that anvil for fifty years, and I never knew you were still alive.” The woman in the Carhartt jacket lowered her phone. The kids with lemonade stared. Someone near the back began to clap, in the slow way of country people, and the sound spread through the tent like wind in wheat.
An iron ring on a farm hand gave one retired milk driver the length of a county fair afternoon to bring a young smith back to the anvil in Bozeman.
I gave my terms with a hand on the rail. “Cody, you are not in trouble with me. You have good hands, and you were trying to keep a tent full of strangers safe from a fire. I only ask three things. Turn that horseshoe down, because your fire is too hot and you are burning the steel. Let me show you how to set the heel, here, at this anvil, before the next show. And read the name on this anvil to every audience you ever have, because a man ought to know whose iron he is hammering on.”
Cody got to his feet slowly, wiping his hands on his leather apron. His beard trembled. “Mr. Burke, my father taught me to forge,” he said. “He passed two years ago. I never had a master after him. I learned the rest from videos.” He took a ragged breath. “I called you Pops in front of thirty people, and I told you that you bought a ring at the gift barn. I did not know there was a man alive who could have made this anvil. I am ashamed, sir. I was trying to be big, and I was being small.”
But shame makes a young man hasty. Cody reached out suddenly and seized my hand from the rail, worked the iron ring from my finger, and bolted for the open flap of the tent, saying that he had to check the stamp against the guild book in his truck. He took six strides. Dell Harmon stepped into the opening and planted his boots. Lacey ran around the back of the forge and stood in front of the other flap with her arms out. The woman in the Carhartt jacket moved a hay bale across the path with her hip.
Cody halted in the sawdust, with the ring held tight in his fist and nine or ten people in a ring around him. Nobody spoke. Dell Harmon cleared his throat. “Son,” he said gently, “that ring has not left that man hand in fifty seven years. Put it back where it belongs.” Cody stared at the ring, at the number stamped inside it. Then he walked back to the rail and took my hand, and slid the iron over my knuckle, turning it twice to settle it, and he bowed his head, and the tent was so quiet we heard the fire settle.
The consequences were quietly wonderful. I stood at the forge for the rest of that afternoon with Cody beside me, and the two of us made a horseshoe together while the crowd watched, my old hands guiding his young ones. The fair board cleaned the anvil and set it on an oak stand with a brass plate. Cody asked if I would teach his Saturday class, and I said I would. We met every week through the fall in a cold shop in Belgrade, the two of us and a handful of high school boys, and the sparks flew.
In the name of my wife June, who passed in 2019, I started the June Burke Fund. It pays for blacksmith and farrier apprenticeships and for tools for young people who want to learn the trade, in Gallatin, Park and Madison counties. In the first year we placed eighteen apprentices with master smiths and bought forty anvils, hammers and tongs sets. One was a sixteen year old girl from Manhattan, Montana, who forged her first horseshoe and held it up to the light with both hands, shaking, and said she had never made something that would last.
On the last day of the following fair, I stood at the back of the tent in my good hat. Cody was at the forge with a crowd of tourists, his apron blackened, his hammer ringing. He heated a horseshoe to a dull cherry, set it on the anvil, and read the stamp aloud before he struck. “A. Burke, Master Smith, nineteen sixty eight,” he said. “And that man is standing right there.” Thirty heads turned. I lifted one finger off the rail, and he grinned at me, and swung the hammer down, and the whole tent rang with the sound of good iron.