Mr. Calloway reached into his vest and pulled out a bent, rusty horseshoe, and held it up in his old hands.
Son, he said to Tyler, you said somebody has to nail the shoes on. You do not know what you are looking at.
In May, Mr. Calloway said, a thoroughbred went down in a trailer wreck on I-64, thrashing, terrified, in danger of killing himself and anybody near him. A farrier crawled into that trailer and lay down with the horse and calmed him with his voice and his hands for two hours, until the vets could work. That horse lived. That horse was mine. He is the last colt out of a mare I trained forty years ago, the best horse I ever had. This rusty shoe came off that mare, and I have carried it for forty years, and I want the man who saved her grandcolt to have it.
Wade had stopped cold with the ice bucket in his hands.
Tyler said the only man in the family who gets kicked for a living, and that man lay down in a trailer with a thousand pounds of panic to save an old trainers last great horse.
Mr. Calloway was in a wheelchair now, and he had asked Tylers own mother to bring him to the party, just so he could put that horseshoe in Wades hand in front of the family.
I am Wades daddy. He refilled the ice bucket and said enjoy the race, Tyler, and took the joke, because a man who has calmed a dying horse with his own body does not flinch at a fellow in a seersucker suit. Wade keeps that rusty horseshoe on a nail over his forge now, and he will tell you whose mare it came from, if you ask.