Often, on house calls, the clients meet my Dad with lemonade or tea, occasionally fresh milk. As we pull off the highway and into Uncle Harry’s drive this afternoon, I watch the long, empty porch and its lonely swing pass by. Summers, we played with my cousin, Brett, here on the farm, my brother and me. We’d fish the pond. I tried fishing last summer with Dad, but he only made it an hour until the heat made him dizzy. Spells of “vertigo,” he called it, but not an inner ear thing, something with his heart. That Kareem Abdul-Jabbar disease. I can never remember the name.
When Dad leaves the house, it’s for a favor, like this. I was over watching the Vols humiliate Vandy when Uncle Harry called. I could hear him on the phone, desperate. After hanging up, Dad told me, “Get in the truck,” like when I was a kid and we’d make these large animal calls. He stopped large animal practice when I was at Vanderbilt myself, in favor of permanent small animal practice, he’d decided. His clients could bring their patients to him. Plus, Golden Retrievers don’t kick your front teeth in.
Large or small, he never warned me what to expect when he’d bring me along to help. Once, a dog began spewing puppies on the exam table, this shivering toy poodle I held while waiting for Dad to inject the usual antibiotics. While assisting, you clamp your hand down on the back of the dog’s neck–hard–it’s awkward and worries you for your fingers at first, and while you’re pressing down, you lift the lower jaw. So they can’t bite the vet. The poodle wasn’t ripped up or gasping, just seemed like a regular little dog, only nervous. By the time I put my hands on it, the dog began shaking so hard it nearly wriggled out of my fingers, despite weighing eight pounds. Suddenly, puppies began plopping out and the dog seemed as shocked as I was. The smell was the worst part—blood, and adrenaline. The tiny red puppies, capsule shaped and sticky in their little pools of pink amniotic mucus could have been any breed, their dark hair not yet poofy.
We drove silently home. Somewhere along the way, I realized Dad headed out so quietly on calls because he strategized his treatments like a battle plan. Around twelve or thirteen, I stopped asking what to expect, let him work in his head.
“Harry’s probably waiting by the barn,” I say. The empty porch–no Harry, Brett, or farm dogs–makes me anxious. For a moment, I hope we’ll find Harry gone so we can go back and finish watching the football game. But, when we roll to the house’s back corner, Harry’s beat-up truck sits at the cattle gate.
Uncle Harry is waiting by the barn, down the gravel drive a short way, standing in overalls and a flannel shirt at the barbed wire that cuts off the grazing field.
I step out of the cab, cross the front bumper, but Harry stays quiet, forlorn beneath huge, tangled eyebrows. When I step alongside him, he mutters, “Heard your brother’s having a baby.”
“Thanks,” I say, thrown by his trance, add, “Yes, sir. He is.”
Harry’s plucking at a button, not listening, doesn’t respond.
We stand quiet as Dad creeps around the cab. He touches fingers to the truck cab to keep his balance. Harry, lost, snaps to and calls over to Dad, “She’s down by the trees. All swollen up.”
He’s not seen Dad since Mom’s funeral, hasn’t learned how slow Dad walks now, like he’s losing momentum daily. When he meets the gravel, he shuffles in tiny steps like someone treading ice. I circle around and walk behind, at a distance, ready to help.
Greeting Harry with a nod, Dad crouches under the barbed wire while Harry lifts. Despite his uneasy feet, Dad ducks the wire with the ease most men roll out of bed—years and years of fences, almost half a lifetime. In the time it takes me to creep underneath, lowering to my hands and knees and crawling under, the two older men are deep in the field. Barbed wire unnerves me. I picked up a fear of tetanus somewhere, something I read. Even wood splinters give me stomach knots.
The trees run across the far end of the field, and, in places, the grass and briars rise to our knees. Harry’s taken my place by Dad. Dad moves easier here, the rough grass catching his sneakers like the moving walkways at an airport.
Harry wrings his hands, brushes at the tip of his nose with long, crooked fingers. “Me and Brett didn’t notice her missing. I didn’t catch it. I’m sorry–” he’s trailing off “–she’s all swollen up, Jesse. I’m sorry.” His knuckles are huge at the center. Like Mom’s were.
Dad nods, his face set in a scowl, a gargoyle of concentration. He’s frowned for years; it deepens when he thinks. The sun is on our backs and washes warm across my neck, though the late afternoon breeze is cool. Flies menace my ears. When we reach the trees, the land descends gently, and Harry takes Dad’s arm, coasting him down.
“She’s down here, all swollen up.” Harry’s voice has raised, he’s shouting now, really, but assumed the client-to-doctor manner. We all began shouting at Dad years ago when we need to impart. Dad won’t wear his hearing aids and remains lost in his head.
I smell the cow before I see her.
Uncle Harry leaves Dad in a flat place and trots down into the woods, yelling over his shoulder, “Do you think she’ll make it.”
Dad waves his hand horizontally, as in “50/50.”
The cow lies on its side, horribly bloated around the ribs. It stinks like trash down here, like the dump. I’d assume the cow was dead, except its tail gives a sudden small jerk, attacking ghost flies. It’s clear from a distance that it shit on itself in a thin pool bogging the orange and yellow leaves around its back half. It’s dark brown and green on the hind legs. But, moving closer, I see and know that that isn’t feces. Something worse.
***
David, my little brother, walks slump-shouldered from the delivery room. His hair is mussed from running his fingers up, back, and through. His eyes pop wide into a cartoon mask, announcing, “Holy shit!” for me and our cousin, Brett. We’ve been waiting in the lobby. Dad fell asleep in his chair. His new heart meds conk him out.
Brett laughs at my brother’s pulled face. He’s got two daughters and has been through this himself. I’ve got no idea and intend to keep it that way. I make sure I’m up front with my inevitable exes. The notion of sacrificing time to someone who doesn’t exist yet is beyond me.
I love–or, strongly like–my sister-in-law. She and David married five years ago, have struggled toward this day since the first months. In order to conceive, my brother needed–and I know no better way to phrase this–a procedure to surgical scrape his testicles clean, or the tubes that run down there, rather. I could barely make it through his description of the operation.
Through the delivery, I sat here in this freezing waiting room and tried to read my phone, worried woozy for her. I was worried for all of us, truthfully, after what happened with Mom.
“How’d it go?” Brett asks, one to vocalize communal thoughts.
“Okay,” David says, but with a simultaneous grin and grimace.
“Is she okay,” I say, meaning my sister-in-law, Emily, and the baby, named Julie, after our mother. My big mark for Emily is her agreeing to the name without protest. The original plan was “Scout,” but they called an audible. A name’s a forever thing, one of life’s actual decisions.
One out and one in.
“Yeah,” David says.
Brett laughs again and claps a hand around David’s shoulders. “Pretty rough, right?”
David nods and blinks several times. We lead him toward the lobby.
***
Harry is down with the cow, kneeling. He strokes its side. It reeks. The black liquid spills from its rotting womb where the dead calf decays. Even I know that odds are gangrene already set in, will rot, shock, and kill this animal.
Harry calls out, “What should I do?”
Dad edges down the hill, inch by inch, like he’s approaching a precipice. I take his arm and lead him to the cow. His arms are all veins now and his skin is slowly bruising purple, the dark hair on his forearms seems longer in the absence of flesh, simian. When I’ve led him to a good, flat spot I let go. He scowls down and observes the bloated cow and my kneeling uncle. Here within feet of the cow, the smell is like a hot, overloaded garbage can overdo for pick up. I’m certain this cow will die soon, is mostly there, and I wish Dad would call it. There’s still time to quit and turn back before things proceed where I fear they’re headed.
Dad rolls up his sleeves.
Harry winces, rolls up his sleeves, and moves to the back of the cow. Dad waves him off. “I need to see if it’s still together, Harry.”
“Goodness, Jesse,” Harry says, “I can do it. I’m sorry I didn’t notice she’d gone off. She’s all swollen up.” He says this to the cow. His eyebrows are slick with sweat and he blinks fat drops that bead and fall from his lashes. Without hesitation, Harry plunges an arm inside, up to the elbow. She moans.
***
David tells us that the baby is healthy, though small.
The birth came with the expected unpleasantness. On David’s end, anyway. The sights and sounds he’d been warned of. For my sister-in-law, who happily took the epidural, it was, in David’s words: “not so bad, she really soldiered through.” We don’t ask questions.
The delivery, all told, took about seven hours, so, to my understanding, it was fast. Very fast.
Emily is young, twenty-six, and healthy. She works as a dance instructor. I sat in the lobby terrified the entire time. Dad slept with his head lolled over onto his shoulder, and it was him I watched.
Two years ago, I would have prayed. I prayed in this same hospital for Mom. Now, it feels like bad luck.
Brett jokes, flirts with the nurses, teases David. We wake up my father and tell him the good news. The nurses call my brother back, saying he can see his child and wife now. The rest of us will be allowed in soon.
I don’t know what to expect. Will I see my sister’s blood and shit? Will I smell the birth, the scent of her womb?
***
Now, elbow deep in the cow, Harry fishes around. He squeezes his eyes shut and bares his large, tobacco-stained teeth. I can’t tell if those are sweat droplets or tears. “I don’t feel anything. Oh–”
For several minutes he’s been sunk in the cow. Whenever he shifts his elbow, dark sludge oozes out and splatters the carpet of fall leaves. She groans continuously. He halts. His brow furrows. Clearly, he’s bought a grip on something. “I think I got it,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Dad. “Should I yank on it?”
Dad grunts, which means “yes.”
Harry pulls. Nothing. Then, with a twist of his shoulder, his arm slides out fast. His feet slip, and he dirties the knees of his jeans in the black stinking mess. Pulled about a foot out of the cow, gripped in Harry’s large-knuckled hand like a sword from a lake is something greenish-brown and covered in slime. It’s the ankle of the rotten leg of a calf. Strands of hair stand spiked by mossy colored mucus. Harry curses, pulls it free, lets it tumble to the leaves, and continues fishing. He pauses and looks at Dad, dismayed. “It’s all broken up in there.”
“Get all of it,” my father says, not demanding but clinical.
“Will she die,” Harry says, “if I don’t?” His dark eyes grow baleful. They look bovine that way, like an old, unruined, cud chewing cow in his expansive green fields. I must step away from the growing pile of gunk on the leaves. The smell is a monster in the woods.
Harry continues rooting for what must be five minutes. I pull my t-shirt up over my nose, return to the cow, crouch, and stroke its neck. The fur is coarse and cold. From the look in its eyes, I believe she’s either lost consciousness open-eyed, or gone insane from agony. For the first time since the little rotten leg, I speak. “How long has it… she been here?”
“Three or four days,” Dad says and wipes sweat from his eyes.
“Is she going to die?” Harry whispers to himself. I don’t think he realizes he’s saying it.
Slowly, my Dad kneels next to Harry; takes a closer look. Harry is obviously struggling with the smell, wincing and turning his head up at a skyward angle, but Dad poles his face within an inch of the cow. “I’ve got Tetracycline,” he says, but his flat tone suggests treatment won’t be needed, an afterthought.
Harry stands and wipes long smears of black ooze on his jeans up his overalls, streaking like a mechanic’s grease stains. He shakes his head. “I see two legs and the skull down there. That’s not all of it. What do you think, Jesse?”
Dad leans back, looks at the pile of parts, arranged like an exhibit, like a recreation, like a paleontologist’s dig. He’s knelt for so long examining the cow that when he stands his knees pop simultaneously. Dad looks from Harry and then back to the display of bones and cartilage. “Little pieces. Another leg.”
Both men look worn and blunted, like one of the tools back up in the barn. .
The shirt I wear is my favorite, a blue Arcade Fire T that I wore without thinking. I check my hands, shed the shirt, tuck it into my back pocket, and lean down. “Let me try.”
***
The baby, Julie, is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’m cautious and afraid to hold it. Bearing my mother’s name, she’s all we have left of her.
Emily looks tired but proud, and she and my brother seem anxious when we hold her. Dad is sitting when he takes his turn, and David hovers beside him, poised to catch a spill.
We all share smiles at this precious thing Emily and David created, though, eventually, I must step into the hall to cry for the third time since my mother died. The actual passing, of course, and then at Emily’s baby shower, where I learned the intended name. Each time, I cut it off after several seconds. It’s too big. It might pour through all at once and tear.
Brett, who cannot help himself, is ribbing Emily when I return, asking how it felt to have someone’s hands in her after so long. Emily smiles and tells him to shut up, and David echoes. My Dad asks that this be repeated–he couldn’t hear–and I say I’ll tell him later. He’ll forget, but in the inevitable quiet riding home I’ll need it. I hope it makes him smile.
Feeling he’s on a roll, Brett suggests they start on another kid today and asks if we should leave the room.
There’s a weak smile from Emily and another “shut up” from David.
Brett leans over David and plucks the child from my father to take a second turn holding. Emily and David flinch. Brett, oblivious, coos at the baby and proclaims happily that she looks just like my mother.
The room falls still.
Dad asks me what he said. “I say ‘she’s got a lot of hair.’”
***
I hold my breath as I grope around inside the cow. The texture’s like warm pudding but with sharp bits of bone. I sling them into the leaves. When I can’t hold my breath, I breathe through my mouth. It helps.
On my last scoop of muck, I sink to my bicep. I grip a tiny, partially formed hoof, which has been slipping my grasp. I’m sweating. Hunkered in weeds and leaves; I’ll itch for days.
“I think that’s it,” I say. The men are ready to give up, and wordless, they begin walking up the hill, Harry taking Dad’s arm once more. I do my best to wipe the filth off in the leaves and carry my shirt in my less disgusting hand.
Back at the fence, Harry is shaking his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t notice her gone.”
Dad ducks under the fence. “You’ve got syringes?”
Harry considers. “Yeah–somewhere. In the barn.”
Dad opens the cab and comes out with a rolled paper bag. “There’s a 12cc and Tetracycline. Use it tonight and the morning. Go by the clinic tomorrow.”
The two men work out the details. My father’s retired. He sold his practice to a younger vet and some of the staff stayed on. If it lives, Harry will pick up more syringes to continue treating the cow.
My father still insists on driving, and with how he fusses, it’s easier to let him. We drive silently for a time. The truck’s got a cassette player but no radio. Dad lost all his old cassettes, buried in the seat when he sold his last truck
As we turn onto the highway, I say, “Will she die?”
Dad grunts. This time it’s: “not sure.”
“You don’t think we got it all?”
He grunts again. Same grunt.
“We could have just shot it, “I say, “so it wouldn’t suffer?”
He shakes his head, gives me a blank glance as we coast down I-11.
I’m twelve again, like when I asked why that dog was shivering before it had puppies.
***
Politely, David asks us all to leave. I was ready to go, anyway. Brett rides with us in the elevator. I ask how Harry, his grandfather, is doing?
“Taking care of the cows,” he says and frowns. “She lived, you know–that cow?”
I didn’t. We’re quiet.
After the hospital, the parking lot hits like a hair dryer. Beads of sweat shine on Dad’s brow before we’re off the sidewalk. His doctor says to drink a liter of water every day; he only drinks Diet Sprite.
Dad’s not driving anymore, not with his new medication. On the way home from the hospital, it’s me and him. He’s staring out the window at nothing.
“She’s really gorgeous,” I offer.
Dad grunts.
I’ve avoided talking about it with him, but sooner or later, I’ll have to at least chip away before it crushes us. “I’m glad about the name.”
Dad grunts. He tells me to turn the radio on. He likes the Blue Collar comedy station, which I turn up full blast. A woman I don’t recognize starts a routine about fishing, and I suggest we visit Harry when it cools off again, try fishing. I don’t say I’d like to see him out of bed more often. Dad grunts.
I imagine us greeted by this flattened, hollowed out cow about this thin between my hands. Unanchored against the wind, a blanket flapping, a kite, I imagine her slipping back into the herd like a scalpel, burrowing between bodies for warmth and tethered to the earth by the solid mass of her fruitful sisters.
*****
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in JMWW, Bridge Eight, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, Maudlin House, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
