I Was Minutes From Euthanizing the Cat Who Saved Me After My Wife Died—Then He Heard Me Scream From the ICU

By March, the ground down by Sugar Creek had thawed into a rich, dark loam that smelled of decaying leaves and fresh river water.

The wreck of the F-250 was long gone—towed away to the scrap yard in Crawfordsville three days after the accident. In its place in the machine shed sat a 2012 Chevrolet Silverado I had bought off old man Miller for four thousand dollars. It had four new hydraulic brake lines, a brand-new master cylinder, and a heavy rubber mat in the passenger seat that Buster had claimed before the title was even signed.

My leg had healed into a thick, permanent knot above the ankle that made me walk with a slow, rocking hitch, like an old sailor stepping off a gangplank. My ribs didn't hurt except when the barometer dropped before a thunderhead came over the county line.

Buster was doing better than I was.

His hair had grown back over the surgical scars on his head, though the ridge of bone above his left eye gave him a permanently fierce, questioning expression—as if he were perpetually deciding whether you were worth the time it took to bite you.

His head tilt remained. When he watched the red-tailed hawks circling over the corn stubble, he had to cock his chin up at a sharp angle to bring them into focus with his right eye, but it didn't slow him down.

Every afternoon at 3:00, when the sun hit the southern face of the barn, Buster would climb up the three wooden steps to the grain platform, sit on an overturned oak bushel basket, and watch me work.

I was rebuilding the south fence line—setting forty new cedar posts deep into the clay, stretching three-strand barbed wire with a hand winch, and stapling it tight with heavy steel staples.

It was hard, back-breaking work for a seventy-two-year-old man with a bad hip and a steel plate in his shin. Fifty years ago, I would have finished forty rods of fence in two days. Now, it took me four hours just to dig three post holes with the hand auger.

I stopped at 4:00, leaning my back against a freshly set cedar post, wiping the cold sweat from my neck with a red bandana.

Buster hopped off his bushel basket, limped slowly across the green grass, and sat down right on my boot.

"You're in the way," I told him.

He didn't move. He reached up with his left front paw and gave the cuff of my trousers two short, impatient tugs.

I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out a strip of dried liver I had bought at the butcher shop in town, and dropped it into his mouth. He chewed it slowly, his tilted head cocked toward the sound of a tractor working three miles away on the county road.

"Jim at the NAPA store asked about you yesterday," I said, leaning my head back against the rough wood of the fence post. "He said you were famous over at Purdue. Said some professor wanted to come down here with a camera crew to take pictures of your head."

Buster stopped chewing for two seconds, gave a low, dry grunt through his nose, and went back to his meat.

"That's what I told him," I chuckled softly. "I told him we don't take kindly to people looking at us like we're circus freaks."

I looked across the south pasture—the green winter wheat was just starting to poke its blades up through the dark soil, turning the forty-acre flat into a brilliant green carpet that stretched all the way to the treeline at Sugar Creek.

For fifty years, I had thought that farming was about control.

It was about tilling the soil until it was smooth as sugar, planting the seed in straight, perfect rows, spraying the weeds before they could breathe, and harvesting the crop before the autumn rain could rot the ears in the husk.

It was about fixing what broke, holding onto what you owned, and refusing to give an inch to the weather, the bank, or the years.

I had been wrong.

Farming wasn't about control at all. It was about endurance.

It was about standing in the middle of a muddy field after a hail storm had torn thirty acres of young corn into green ribbons, looking at the broken stalks, and knowing that the soil was still there under your feet—waiting for you to clean off the field and drop another seed into the dirt.

Ellen was gone. My youth was gone. My truck was scrap iron at the bottom of a ravine.