Ever by My Side

by Nick Trout

  The top-lip licking stopped, Vaughn removed the stylet, and stood back as we watched a bead of clear, colorless liquid roll out of the hub of the needle and onto the floor. I swooped in to catch our sample inside a purple-topped sterile tube. Neither of us spoke. We let our eyes share the satisfaction of the moment.

  Shadow woke up none the worse for wear and went home to await the results of the fluid analysis. Sadly I had to be going myself—my two-week externship coming to an end, a new term at college about to begin—but Vaughn promised to give me an update regarding my first patient.

  It was several weeks later when a card arrived, along with a note on which was scrawled a single sentence:

  See, it’s not about the winning. Vaughn.

  It was a thank-you card from Mr. and Mrs. Stoddart and directed primarily at Mr. Vaughn. It turned out the fluid analysis had come back as normal, or rather, no underlying cause of Shadow’s disease was detected. A course of steroids had been tried, with modest success for a few weeks, but when Shadow began to have seizures, the Stoddarts could not stand by and see him suffer any longer and they had him put to sleep. There was a paragraph dedicated to “Nick, the veterinary student,” for trying his hardest to get to the bottom of the problem, for going “above and beyond.” It was just a sentence or two but it hit me hard, gratitude and recognition in spite of failure. It was the first veterinary thank-you I ever received, and with it came the understanding and wisdom of a veteran—what matters most is how hard you try.

  Invariably, while I gallivanted around the country, my father would continue to suggest I make use of our cottage in the Yorkshire Dales and avail myself of some real veterinary practice.

  “It’s all well and good you broadening your horizons, son, but there’s only one place on God’s green earth where you can experience the real thrill of becoming a veterinarian, isn’t that right, Whiskey?”

  My father would crank up the northern edge to his fake Yorkshire accent and offer his golden the appropriate visual cue (normally, mouthing a bark), and Whiskey dutifully bestowed his verbal agreement.

  “There you have it. Straight from the dog’s mouth.”

  There was an element of ritual to this, our playful banter, but at the same time, I sensed a genuine undercurrent of concern. I was approaching the end of my fifth year of vet school and naturally my father was beginning to brood over the future, Wasn’t it prudent to plan ahead, to be putting some feelers out for a potential job when all this training was over? But as yet, his son had failed to visit a practice anywhere near the Yorkshire Dales. Time was running out for me, and perhaps for him too. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to work in the Yorkshire Dales, it was, after all, intoxicating, beautiful country, but at the same time, it wasn’t an obsession in the same way it seemed to be for my father. I was getting to the crux of my education—all those seemingly pointless hours in a lecture theater finally starting to have practical meaning. You could feel it falling into place. That “stuff” the teachers had thrown at me from so many different angles had percolated into something meaningful. Suddenly I was no longer that wallflower student playing his guessing game, and I didn’t want to discount any facet of veterinary life or be pinned down or committed to becoming a country vet in one specific part of the country. I wanted to keep my options open, and one day Dad caught me in the wrong mood for our passive-aggressive game.

  “You really want me to?” I asked him.

  My tone was all wrong, the question coming out like an ultimatum or a concession—if I do this now, you’ll stop bugging me and we can move on. It was as though I put it out there like I might be surprised by the answer, even though my falling in love with the Dales was something Dad had clearly been craving for years, a desire akin to his old nicotine habit, a yearning that could still stop him in his tracks and cozy up when he least expected it.

  “It’s entirely up to you, son,” he said, and I knew he had sensed the change in me, his phony accent abandoned.

  I dropped my head, ashamed, realized I was merely pushing against his pull. I had resisted for as long as possible, like a shrewd politician dodging sanctions by evading talks, but eventually, as I had known all along, I would have to give his plan a chance. Maybe it would feel just right and if not, he could never say I didn’t try. Now seemed as good a time as ever for my obligatory James Herriot rehearsal.

  I chose the first couple of weeks in the New Year, trying to give myself an unfair advantage, knowing a Yorkshire winter would make it hard to win me over.

  I found a practice only a short drive down the dale from our cottage, and on a perfect cloudless morning that brought the bitterest cold I had ever known, I set out down a narrow winding road cut through a valley of frosty white fields. The veterinarian I would be working with was Brian Hastings, a man who hailed from the south of England and spent many years doing volunteer work in South America before finding his niche in Herriot country.

  “How are the farmers and the pet owners to work with?” I asked at the earliest opportunity. “I mean, is it still like it was during Herriot’s day?”

  Brian hoped I would be able to answer my own question at the end of my two-week stint and promised to remind me of it before I headed back to college. I liked this laid-back approach, his wanting me to find out for myself, not wanting to influence my opinion, but I particularly liked the fact that Brian didn’t fit the All Creatures caricature I had expected, what with his hippy hair and unruly beard. He had more than a hint of Grizzly Adams about him and I couldn’t wait to get out and about and see how he fit in with the locals.

  At least 80 percent of his practice involved farm animals and I quickly discovered three features particular to this line of work—endless driving, professional frustration, and physical exhaustion. It seemed as though we spent more time on the road getting from practice to practice than we did actually working on the creatures in need of our services. Farms were spread far and wide, and if we ever got stuck behind a milk tanker or a tractor, we were virtually guaranteed our Land Rover would obtain a geological sample from an adjacent drystone wall when we had an opportunity to pass. Thank goodness Brian knew the unmarked shortcuts, the high roads above the snow line that took us over the top rather than through the valleys. I couldn’t imagine how long it would have taken a stranger like me to navigate my way from farm to farm. By the time I arrived, the farmer would have given up all hope, the sick livestock shipped off to the slaughterhouse. And this proved to be another troubling discovery—the ruthless economics of farming. This was the era of Chernobyl, when British farmers feared a radioactive mushroom cloud might kill their livestock. And there was this little-known disease of cows that appeared to be making them “mad.” The diagnosis and treatment of diseases in sheep and cows and pigs was no less fascinating than caring for cats and dogs, the only problem being that all the doctoring in these cases—the workup, the medicines and the thrill of the cure—was, for the most part, theoretical. If a case of mastitis in a ewe did not respond to the first course of treatment, the animal found itself in the wrong column on a balance sheet—a financial loss, destined to be culled, denied a second chance. I knew this was how it had to be, with the emphasis on herd health, prevention over cure, but it was so frustrating, the feeling that I could have turned an animal around, but I was denied the opportunity because it didn’t make good business sense. Standing in the back of a dark, wind-whipped barn watching Brian shake his head after examining the blackened udders of an accommodating sheep, I understood this harsh reality of rural practice would always be a major stumbling point.

  The final realization came one afternoon after helping Brian remove the budding horns of eighty steers. No matter which way you cut it, farm practice can be grueling and potentially dangerous work. On the plus side, I got a taste for the camaraderie and playful banter that exists between vet and farmer, the way these kinds of physical endeavors and the sense of accomplishment that comes with them bring you together. It had an irresistible appeal and
moreover, you never had to worry about getting to sleep at night.

  When it came to my initial question, about whether much had changed in this part of the world since Herriot’s day, one particular farm visit provided the perfect answer.

  Brian and I pulled into a farmyard of frozen mud, like brown concrete set in front of an isolated stone farmhouse with a sagging slate roof, and when we stepped out of the Land Rover we were greeted by a snapping border collie with a piercing, unrelenting bark.

  “Easy, Shep,” said a hefty bald-headed man whose crown and cheeks were seared red and raw by the cold. He walked toward us and offered me an explanation for the dog’s hysteria. “Every time veterinary turns out our Shep thinks he’s gonna lose his knackers I reckon.”

  The bald man laughed to himself as we shook hands and Shep went quiet.

  “What you got for me, Trevor?” asked Brian as I trailed the two of them toward a distant barn.

  “Three of me best ewes started coughing. Reckon we’d best nip it in t’ bud.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Trevor made to reply but was cut off by another round of incessant barking behind us in the yard. I turned, half expecting to see another vehicle pulling up but looked back to see Shep standing on the roof of the Land Rover, legs akimbo, savoring a moment of copious urination.

  Brian ran back, cursing and waving his arms, as Trevor and I laughed from the doorway of the barn. Shep ignored all of Brian’s protestations until his bladder was completely empty and the front and sides of the vehicle were stained by a series of irregular yellow stripes.

  Brian headed back our way, his face betraying his irritation.

  “What’s wrong with that bloody dog of yours, Trevor?”

  Trevor stifled a smile.

  “Nah then, Veterinary. There’s nowt wrong with our Shep. He just wants to make sure you’ll be knockin’ summat off t’ bill. After all, he just gave you a free car wash.”

  The reckoning with my dad came on my last day, as I was shutting down the electricity, draining the water from the pipes, and otherwise readying the cottage for a few weeks of wintry isolation before my parents’ next visit. Dad phoned, clearly prompted by my mother, to offer an unnecessary reminder to make sure everything was switched off. Somehow or another he caught me completely off guard when he managed to slip in the question “So, is this the kind of vetting you see yourself doing when you qualify?”

  “No,” I said, and I was shocked by how quickly I had answered, how the silence on the other end of the line stretched between us. It was more than the negativity and the way I managed to sound lackadaisical and heartless, so capable of crushing a dream years in the making, it was the fact that I never hesitated, didn’t need to deliberate, as though I had never even entertained the option in the first place. This was my father, the man who had kept me on task for all the right reasons, to whom I owed so much for having this chance, and here I was, cutting him down, consigning his hopes to the garbage with one word.

  “I mean, I don’t know. It’s still too early to decide,” I said, but I’m sure he saw my offering for what it was, an attempt to backpedal, like someone who windmills his arms after he has lost his balance and moved beyond the point of no return, the long fall inevitable.

  What made it all the worse was the way he managed to carry on, changing topic, as though my answer had never really mattered. By the time I said goodbye and hung up he seemed perfectly fine, but I was pretty sure he was about to mull over the same scenarios starting to run through my mind. We were both thinking about his role as Arthur Stone, practice manager, the man with the connections, the liaison between the pet-owning and farming public and his son. He was leaning into a fence, wearing his beloved flat cap and Wellington boots, sharing a joke with a farmer at my expense as they looked on, enjoying my attempts to extricate a calf from its mother. He was sticking his head around an examination room door asking if I could just have a quick look at the cat of an elderly widow, pro bono. It was the life I knew he had imagined the two of us would savor and share. I wished it were different, but before I closed the cottage door behind me, he and I both knew this dream of a veterinary life had vanished, the stuff of fantasy and nothing more. As much as my honesty hurt him, fooling myself, trying to be someone I wasn’t, was destined to fail. I had to trust my subconscious, the way it had spoken faster than my brain could think. The bigger question, the one my father had dared not ask, still remained.

  “If you’re not interested in the Yorkshire Dales, son, then where?”

  7.

  In Defense of Happiness

  It was to be our last walk together across those familiar fields, though, of course, I didn’t realize it at the time. Autumn was just getting started; gray, thumb-smudged sky, swirling wind, the satisfaction of a golden crunch under every footfall. I had joined the trio—Dad, Whiskey, and Bess—striding out along the same public footpath, passing through the same farmland across which Bess had strayed all those years before when she had been eager to meet some cows and nearly met her maker instead.

  “Even though I rarely see ‘the girls’ out and about this time of day I always keep Whiskey and Bess on a leash for the next three fields,” said Dad. “Then they can run loose a bit until the way back.”

  “Is it okay, I mean, for Whiskey, what with his tendency to go after a … what did you call her … a ‘lady friend’?”

  Dad frowned, as if it were an effort to answer such a ridiculous question.

  “He’s fine. He can’t go too far out this way. There are no other houses for miles.”

  I noticed he was setting quite the pace, or maybe it was the dogs eager to get to freedom beyond the third field. With one leash in each hand, he looked like Ben-Hur sans chariot. He had blown off my offer to take one of them as if it might upset the natural order of things, the routine all three of them savored, and so I focused on keeping up. The wind was really gusting at times, though it still held some leftover summer warmth and I found myself working to keep the hair out of my face and eyes, noticing that my bald father had the advantage of unimpeded vision. Over the years his receding hairline had fused with a monk’s tonsure, leaving a neat corona of gray hair over the back of his head and ears. Enjoy the windblown sensation, I thought, seeing into my future.

  The footpath was well worn, the bare earth tacky but not slippery, so no problems with traction for canine footpads or a sturdy pair of Wellington boots. I was sporting a “hunter green” pair (and matching Barbour jacket), the classic attire of a British equine veterinarian and the closest I would come to fooling the world into thinking I knew what I was doing around horses. Dad was in an industrial charcoal pair, and though he had forsaken the flat cap (since it would have been a challenge to keep it in place given the windy conditions), he was striding out in the same raincoat, and armed with the same infamous walking stick of my childhood.

  For a while the four of us were content to keep our rhythm, juggling our thoughts, letting the brisk air and the countryside in.

  I was about to go back to college for my final year at veterinary school and I had just returned home after a three-month visit to the Unites States. There was a great deal for my father and I to discuss, not least my plans for what I might do after graduation, a subject he and I had purposely avoided after my apparent dismissal of a future in the Yorkshire Dales.

  “It’s funny,” I said as we crossed over a wooden stile, “it’s always been Whiskey and Bess, not Bess and Whiskey, even though, technically, thanks to Mum, Bess got there first.”

  Dad considered me and kept walking.

  “Nobody ever says, ‘The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy’ now do they?”

  I smiled, kept the pace, and said nothing. These three really were a trio.

  I had come to accept that they were happy for me to join them but, as with Patch, I felt like an outsider, never really felt part of a quartet. If ever I was asked, “Do you have dogs of your own?” I wouldn’t hesitate to talk
about Whiskey and Bess, to proudly recount their virtues, their foibles, and their individuality. But how much could I really claim to know about them, having not been around them for the greater part of their lives? In this context, my sentiments about Whiskey and Bess seemed so broad and sweeping, lacking the nuance and fine detail I remembered from my life with Patch. I watched them, these two dogs, constantly monitoring my father, connected, visually checking in, trotting forward and dropping back, another glance, eye contact, connection made, trot forward and drop back. They were all around him, moving in and out of formation, canine wingmen, covering him from all sides. I found myself thinking that they had come to feel more like cousins, still family, but, to me, slightly more distant relatives.

  “So how was the trip?” said Dad, now that both dogs were loose, as though he could finally relax, all bovine danger behind him. Whiskey was off, last seen disappearing into a copse whereas Bess stayed within a fifty-yard radius, checking in every fifteen seconds or so.

  “It was good,” I said, choosing my words carefully. In truth, I wanted to gush, I wanted to share my excitement, but I sensed the need for diplomacy.

  “I hope you can do better than that,” he said.

  I paused, deliberated, found the mental notes I had previously prepared when I suggested joining him for this walk, and started in.

  “You know this was all very spontaneous. I was lucky to get a place, it was so last-minute.” Solid opening gambit, I thought, pointing out the fact that none of this was premeditated or part of a cunning plan I had been working on for years. What I didn’t tell him was how I had been eavesdropping on a conversation in the school cafeteria between two of my classmates regarding their upcoming summer visit to the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They were part of a small number of English students who were about to blend in with our colonial cousins across the pond for specialized final-year rotations. Most veterinary schools have a lecture-free, purely clinical final year and theirs had already started, whereas ours did not begin until after the summer break. Here was an opportunity to get a sneak preview, to discover a fresh, American perspective on veterinary medicine and visit a country I had always wanted to visit, all at the same time. Even though it had felt as though they were discussing a party to which I had not been invited, in that instant, I became Cinderella, determined to get to the ball at all costs.