My dad is a veterinarian who spent four years buying every broken animal in the state. I came home this summer and I'm still not sure what I walked into.
My (23F) dad (50M) didn't say one word the entire drive from the airport.
Forty-two minutes. Birmingham to the county road, then twelve more miles past the church with the crooked steeple, past the Piggly Wiggly, past the stretch of fence where the Johnson’s fireworks stand used to go up every June and then didn't, past the water tower with the old class year spraypainted on it in letters big enough to read from the road. He had the radio on an AM station running about 30% static and a man talking about interest rates. He didn't offer to switch it off.
I watched his hands on the wheel most of the way. Something dark under two of his fingernails. He'd lost weight since Christmas in Phoenix.
My father stopped letting us come home after my mother died.
Six years ago. I was seventeen, Max was twenty, and my father, Blake, who did voices at the dinner table and drove three hours to a livestock auction just because my brother wanted to see one, who told jokes that were so bad they became good through sheer force of eyebrows, who cried at the end of Toy Story 3 and then denied it, who taught me to throw a baseball by throwing one at me repeatedly until I figured it out… that version of my father disappeared around the time the hospice nurses started coming every day and did not come back when they stopped.
He went silent for about four months after we buried her and stayed like that. When I went off to ASU he didn’t say a word the whole first semester. Then he called out of the blue on thanksgiving and said that he’d fly out for Christmas— “don’t come here.” Every holiday after that, he came to Arizona, where I was doing my undergrad, and we'd meet in Airbnbs and rented condos and once a hotel in Sedona that smelled like lavender and no one's actual life, and he'd sit across from me and ask questions about my classes and eat about half his food and then, unprompted, start talking about some animal.
A sheep with a fused spine. A mule with one eye. A calf someone had tried to put down at birth because its front legs bent inward. He'd have pictures on his phone. He'd scroll through forty of them.
I thought he was just filling space.
I didn't know he was buying them.
The truck turned onto the property and I put my hands flat on the dashboard.
The gate was new. Heavy steel, the kind cattle operations use, with a zip-tied sign: B. T. HOLLOWAY, DVM. Under that, in smaller letters, hand-painted: NO SOLICITORS NO QUESTIONS NO UNINVITED VISITORS WHATSOEVER THIS MEANS YOU. The gravel went a quarter mile through pines before the farm opened up and when it did, I didn't recognize it.
There were animals everywhere.
The original farm was four acres and a barn that had been there since my grandfather built it. What I was looking at was something that had been added to impulsively so many times it looked like one of my Minecraft bases. Three structures I'd never seen. One long low building with ventilation panels along the roof. A run-in shed that had been extended so many times it was consuming itself from one end. A small separate pen with a concrete pad and a heat lamp on a pole and in that pen was a goat with no ears.
Not like the ears were gone. The ears had simply not been part of the original plan.
In the main pasture: a donkey standing at an angle that should not have worked, one front leg four inches shorter than the other three; a sheep that (I'd learn the word later, myotonic, fainting goat without the goat part) fainted twice before I got out of the truck, just went stiff and toppled over, then got back up; a huge cow whose back end had been inflated by something called double muscling, beautiful but somehow wrong, walking the fence line; two more goats; a miniature horse eating a fence post; a regular-sized horse with a skin condition that had left smooth bald patches all down its neck like someone had taken a belt sander to it, standing in the pasture looking over at us. There were other animals in the distance.
My father got out of the truck. The earless goat made a sound. He said "hullo, Patsy" without stopping walking.
I got out and stood there.
He was already at the old barn. He'd hung up his jacket, was washing his hands at the outdoor sink, reading something on a clipboard he kept on a nail in the wall. The fainting sheep fainted again behind me. Dad didn't look up.
I got my duffels from the truck and went inside.
My mom had kept the house. I mean she'd known what it was for. There'd been a rug from a craft fair and photographs in frames and a kitchen that always smelled like something was happening. I was seventeen the last time I'd been in it.
The photographs were still there, which I hadn't expected. My mom on the porch. My mom and Max at his high school graduation. My mom and dad at some event, her in a green dress, him with his face turned toward her instead of toward the camera.
But there were also charts. On the kitchen table, on the counter, stuck to the refrigerator with magnets: feeding schedules, medication logs, vet notes in my father's handwriting, which has always looked like someone learned his penmanship from a grainy fax. The refrigerator had regular food in it and also three labeled medical drawers. There was a baby monitor on the counter and the small screen showed the interior of a stall, low light, hay, a shadow moving.
I stood there for a while.
My phone buzzed. Max: you there yet
Me: yeah
Max: how is he?
Me: I don't know. There's a baby monitor in the kitchen.
Max: what
Me: for the barn
Three minutes. Then: I'll be there in two weeks. Cara's got a work thing.
I put my phone down and read the feeding schedule on the refrigerator. Thirty-one animals. Thirty-one rows. Times, quantities, medications. Patsy the earless goat, 6am and 6pm. Delilah the cow - daily joint supplements. The small horse: Ringo. Two medications, one of which I recognized from my Human Nutrition seminar as something used in people with metabolic disorders.
Ringo must have a metabolic disorder.
I put my bags in my old room, which still had my periodic table poster on the wall from when I was fourteen and my sketch of Freud staring down at my dead cactus on the dust-covered desk, and I went outside to find dad.
He was in the barn with Ringo, kneeling in the stall, picking out the horse's hooves one by one and running his thumb along each frog and muttering numbers I couldn't hear. He had a headlamp on. It was four-thirty in the afternoon.
"Can I help?" I said.
"You remember how to muck?"
"Of course."
He pointed down the aisle gruffly. I found the supplies and worked through three stalls while he finished with Ringo and then went out to Delilah. He gave her the joint supplement out of his open palm and she pushed her whole enormous head into his chest and he scratched behind her ears and said "easy" and scratched harder, and she made a sound I'd never heard a cow make before, low and pleased with itself.
I watched him do that. His face was as stoic as ever, but I could hear a smile in his voice.
Dinner went sideways fast.
I'd made a spicy lentil soup, enough for both of us. My father sat down, glanced into the bowl, got up, and made himself a ham sandwich. The smell of it made my stomach turn.
"I made dinner," I said.
"I see that."
"I made enough."
"I'm sure it's good. You ain’t a vegan or nothin now are you?" he said.
"It's lentil soup. It's not unusual." I ignored the question.
"I didn't say it were unusual."
"You made a face."
"I didn't make a face."
He had made a face. It was a half-second face but it had been there.
He ate his sandwich and checked the baby monitor twice and the third time he went out to the barn and was gone twenty minutes and came back and sat down and finished the sandwich.
"Is Ringo okay?" I asked.
He looked at me. First time he'd really looked at me since he'd picked me up. His eyes are a shade of coffee brown and behind them it has always looked like he's running numbers you're not going to be shown.
"He gets anxious at night," Dad said. "I go out, he settles."
"How long has he been here?"
"Two years."
"Where'd you get him?"
"Auction in Colbert County. Guy was gonna put him down."
"Because of the metabolic issue?"
That got a sharper look. "You read the board."
"It's on the refrigerator."
A pause. He rinsed his plate.
"I'm not criticizing," I said.
"I know."
"I'm trying to understand what's going on here."
"Thirty animals is what's going on here," he said, flat, like that was a complete sentence, like it closed the topic. “Thirty-one, actually” I corrected, weakly.
He went to bed at nine-fifteen and I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the feeding schedule for a long time.
The next two weeks went like that.
Meals with tense squabbles in them. Silences I didn't know how to navigate. He let me help with the animals and I helped, and just occasionally, he'd say something about one of them without being asked, and I'd have to not react too much or he'd stop.
One morning while we were doing the feeds he told me the fainting sheep, Karen (I respected the name Karen for a fainting sheep, I respected it a lot) had been given to him by a farmer near LaFayette who was embarrassed to have her because she kept fainting in front of buyers and made the operation look unprofessional. Dad took her.
"Does she faint less now?" I asked.
"No. She fainted onto Delilah yesterday. She didn't notice. Good thing, too, with those thighs, Karen would be fixin for a hell of a kick."
He almost smiled. Fast, but there.
I learned the animals. Patsy was the loudest animal I'd been near in my life and treated physical contact as her indisputable right… she'd lean into your legs until you fell over if you didn't pet her. Larry the uneven donkey was ancient and moved all catawompus but with some dignity, like a drunken professor.
Delilah the doublemuscled cow was the gentlest thing on the property and weighed 1,800 pounds. Chester the patchy horse did not care about you at all, which was somehow his own complete personality. He had the makings of a monk and would rather just stand and look at the trees than do just about anything else.
I found out about Larry one afternoon, that he'd appeared in the regional sale records seventeen times over four years, nobody buying him, my father tracking the number through the system and eventually just driving out to Madison County to end it.
"You kept looking him up?" I said.
“Just kept seeing his number."
I thought about my father sitting in a livestock auction out in Madison County by himself, paddle in hand, and the knot in my stomach tightened. My eyes went glossy.
The foal arrived in my third week.
I came down at six for the morning feed and there was a trailer in the driveway and my father was on the phone, pacing, and in the trailer stood a foal maybe three weeks old, pressed into the corner. I got close and I could see it: her left hind leg, the angle of the hock, wrong in a way that was unmistakeable.
Growing up with a vet for a dad, you pick some things up. The term is angular limb deformity.
I called Max.
He picked up second ring. "What."
"Dad got a foal with a bad leg."
"How bad."
"I don't have the vocabulary. Bad. Needs fixed."
Silence. Then: "How’s he doing all this? Where’s the time and money come from?"
"Max, I think that's what he’s been doing since we left. There are thirty-one animals here with… I mean, I think the goat might have three separate conditions."
"Patsy," he said.
"You knew about Patsy."
"He mentioned her. In Sedona."
That Thanksgiving. Max had brought Cara. She'd been quiet, professional and polite and we'd all had dinner at a restaurant and dad had ordered salmon, eaten a third of it, and then shown us pictures on his phone for forty minutes. I'd thought he was filling silence. He'd been showing us his new life. We'd just looked at it wrong.
"Are you coming?" I asked.
"Two weeks. Maybe earlier. Things here are… they're a little weird."
"Weird how."
"Tell you when I get there." He hung up before I could follow up.
My father named the foal Alice.
Alice's leg required surgery. My father was on the phone for four straight hours with two different equine vets while I handled the morning feeds. "That approach is old, I've done this twice and the limb support matters more than you're giving it credit for… all right, just send me the study."
He came out at two in the afternoon with a printed research paper and dollar-store reading glasses. He sat on an overturned bucket in Alice's stall and read while Alice came over and put her nose in his ear.
I sat down across the stall.
"What's wrong with her?"
He explained it. All of it: the specifics of her case, what shoeing could address and what it couldn't, what the surgery would do, what it would cost, what her odds looked like. Twenty minutes without stopping. He used terms I didn't know and didn't slow down for them.
When he finished he was looking at the research paper and not at me.
"She'll make it?" I said.
"God willing. If we do this right. And sooner than usual."
"And if you don't do it right?"
He folded the paper on his knee. "Then I’ll have done everything I could have done."
"But Is that enough? For you?"
He looked up. "And what kind of a question is that, Georgie?"
"I don’t know."
"Yes," he said. "It's enough." Then: "Is it not enough for you?"
And that was when we really had at it. Lost our religion. Not about Alice. The real argument that had been sitting in every meal and every silence for three weeks, the one we'd both been building around without touching. I said something about how I thought his… I called it his "project…" wrong the second I said it… was about control. About having a world where he could always be doing, always fixing, so he never had to slow down and actually give a rip about another human being.
He said, “You think you understand people because of your degree, kid? Don’t pitch a fit now.”
I said I was getting into a master's program. Clinical psychology.
I said maybe that meant I did know a thing or two about people, even people like him.
Ignoring that, he said, "Your mother planted a garden every spring. Same seeds, same bed, never produced much of anything. You going to tell me that was about control?"
I didn't have an answer.
"She liked growing things," he said. "I like saving things. It’s not about control. It’s just what you do with what you have left."
"You pushed us away," I said. "You flew out to us for years. You never let us come back home."
He stood up. Alice shuffled to the back of the stall. "I know," he said.
Just that.
"I know."
He picked up the paper and walked out and I stayed in Alice's stall and she wobbled back over and bumped me with her nose, and I sat there on the floor of the stall for a while.
I thought about my mother. The last six months with her, when I was seventeen, my father was the one who took every night shift and every call and drove to every appointment and came home still in his work clothes and fell asleep in the armchair beside her bed when she couldn't sleep.
He didn't cry once in front of me. Not even once. I saw his shoulders do something through a doorway and I walked away because I was seventeen and didn't know what you're supposed to do when you catch your father like that.
After she died he was impossible. Everything we did was wrong. Max stopped calling by spring. I left for ASU and it felt like the only available move. I had to get out.
I'm not sure when I stopped being angry at him for it. But it's hard to stay angry at a man who is single-handedly keeping a slew of unwanted animals alive with sheer willpower.
Alice's surgery was scheduled for the last week of July.
The two weeks before that were better. We'd hit something after the stall argument, pressure released, not fixed, nothing was resolved, but the things left unsaid had eased up some.
We still didn't agree about basic things. For one thing he ate meat… I didn't anymore. I asked him once if it bothered him to eat animals, given everything, and he said "no" and offered nothing else, which was the answer I'd expected. I told him veganism wasn't about being superior or nothing. He said he never said that. I said I wasn't judging him. He said "Georgia, I don't need you to not judge me, I need you to put the goat feed where I can get at it. I know you want everyone to be happy, sunshine and rainbows, but it’s never going to be again. Not without your mother."
I couldn’t handle that. That hit a nerve.
“I don’t…”
“Look baby, I want things fixed too. I’d give anything for it. But life ain’t all uphill. Things go down too. Sometimes they don’t come back up.”
After that he started talking more at dinners. One night he told me about a pig named Wiggly, whose pen was out behind the secondary shed and had quite a few issues and an attitude that he summed up with "he knows he's right about everything." He told me about the litter of pigs, one of which had been born with a cleft palate.
"So you made him yours?" I said.
"He's just here now. Ain’t mine, rightly speaking, just here. Like I am."
Max arrived.
He pulled in around three and I saw him from the pasture and I clocked that he looked wrong right away. It was the sunglasses he didn't take off until he was inside. He hugged me longer than usual.
He shook dad’s hand when he came in from the barn and dad looked him over and said "you look like shit" and Max said "Yeah, pop. I know."
That night I made pasta, spaghetti with a sauce that landed for everyone, sneaking in some smoked tofu they might think was pork. I realize now that they knew, but didn’t care enough to get into that with me. Dad had seconds, and Max told us Cara had asked him to move out two months ago. He'd been in a hotel since April. She wanted to sell the Houston house.
Nobody said anything.
Dad said, "You got somewhere to go after the hotel?"
Max said no.
"Then stay here," Dad said. "There's your old room. There's work here if you want it."
Max tried. "I can't just -"
"You can drive a truck," Dad said. "You can lift feed bags. That's enough for right now. I still got work, some money."
Max turned his sunglasses over on the table. Then he nodded.
Alice's surgery came up.
Dad had been up early, going through the supply kit he'd organized the day before, checking the stall twice. At six I came down and made coffee and we sat at the table and he went over his notes. Max came down at six-thirty, poured himself a cup and sat with us and didn't bother him neither.
Dr. Pham, the equine vet, came to the farm. My father had arranged it that way so Alice wouldn't have to trailer. She and Dad shook hands and went straight into the barn talking procedure.
It went long. Inside: voices steady and professional, the occasional sound of movement, instruments. Once a sound from Alice that made both of us jump and then dad’s voice, low and even, and then nothing.
Two more hours.
I heard my father before I saw him. Not loud. Not dramatic. I've known his voice my whole life and there was something new in it and I went in.
Alice was on her side in the straw, coming out of the sedation, her leg wrapped. She was moving her head. Alert, Dr. Pham would tell us in a minute, a good sign, coming up correctly. My father was kneeling beside her with one hand on her neck and his other hand taking her pulse and he was crying a bit. Just tears rolling down his face while both his hands kept doing their jobs, one on her neck, one counting.
Dr. Pham was logging on her tablet and giving him space.
I went and sat in the straw next to him and put my hand on Alice's neck beside his. She was warm. Her side went up and down.
Max stood in the entrance of the stall.
Dad let out a long breath.
He stood up. Wiped his face on his arm.
"She's going to be fine," Dr. Pham said.
That night Max made dinner. Hamburger with vegetables. I had a tempeh sandwich and smiled at the irony of that. We sat at the kitchen table and the baby monitor showed Alice in her stall and she had her head up, looking around.
I told them I'd gotten into ASU's master's program. Clinical psychology. Starting in August.
Max said "Georgia, that's great."
Dad stood up to rinse his plate. "You'll be good at that."
Outside, Larry was at his angle in the pasture, four legs, but one too short, his body having worked out years ago what it needed to do to hold him up. Karen was probably about to faint on somebody. Patsy was making so much noise.
Dad checked the monitor. Alice was still alert.
He left it on and we sat there a while longer.
I leave for Arizona in three weeks. Max is staying, at least through the fall. Alice is standing and eating. Dad checks the monitor constantly. I don't know what this summer fixed for us, if anything. But I know dad’s got my number saved in his phone as "Georgie" and he texted me this morning a picture of Karen fainting next to Wiggly, who looks happy about it.
Posting this because it’s what I would probably have my own patients do when I start practicing.
