The Vet Who Stood Up at the Sale Barn

The Knee

Merle had his right knee replaced the second week of August, at the hospital in Woodward. He had put it off for three years. He put off most things that meant sitting still.

I have run his cow herd on shares for six years now. It is a common enough arrangement out here. He owns the cows and the grass, I do the work, and I take a share of the calf check.

Merle still did plenty before the surgery. He checked water, he fixed fence, he rode along when we worked cattle. He was not a man who could watch somebody else do a job.

The surgeon told him plain. No driving for six weeks, because it was the right leg. No climbing in and out of pens. No standing in a muddy lot where a calf could knock him down.

Merle listened to all of it with his arms crossed. Shelby wrote it down on a pad in the waiting room, because she knew her dad would remember only the parts he liked.

Shelby’s mom, Tillie, passed three years ago this spring. Since then Merle has lived alone in the farmhouse a mile up the road from us, with a dog and a radio and a coffee pot that never goes cold.

So after the surgery he came home to that house and sat in his recliner by the kitchen window, and the window looks right out over the weaning pens.

That turned out to matter.

September

We had always sold the calves straight off the cow. Load them up, haul them to the sale barn, take whatever the market gave us that day. It was easy, and it was what Merle’s dad had done.

But for two or three years I had been watching the sale reports. Preconditioned calves were bringing more money. Weaned forty-five days, two rounds of shots, eating from a bunk. Buyers pay extra because those calves do not get sick.

I had asked Merle about it the year before. He said it was a lot of work for a few dollars. He said his dad never did it and his dad did fine.

That August, sitting in the hospital, he finally said, “Do what you want with them, Nolan. I can’t stop you from this chair.”

It was not exactly a blessing. But I took it.

I called Dr. Ingrid Solberg the next morning. She has been the large animal vet in our part of the county for going on twenty years. She sells vaccines out of her clinic and she does not waste words.

“Who’s going to do the work?” she asked me.

“Me,” I said.

“Just you?”

“Merle’s knee,” I said, and she understood. Everybody in the county knew about Merle’s knee.