On a Sunday in mid-June I discovered pinkeye was doing a number in 60 head of calves in the commercial cow herd. It was mid-morning of what was to be a hot day, and the window to work them had closed. I set my sights, then, on the next one.

My sisters, between work and baseball camps, couldn’t make the next day work. I couldn’t ask my friends in good conscience. They had work, and the short notice couldn’t be excused by the fact that I am family.

“I could do it,” said my father.

In the morning I was certain I could get them a quarter mile to the corral fine on my own. Beyond that some help would be nice with the sorting and the catching.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I replied.

My father has idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a gradual hardening of the lung. This spring he went on oxygen. We’d all complain, but he was diagnosed in 2012. They wanted to put him on oxygen, then. He was stubborn.

He got into a drug trial in an effort to help others. Prior to the trial, the only treatment was an antacid, a multivitamin, and trading for someone else’s lungs. That is if someone wasn’t using them at the point you got poor enough to need them, and had stabilized enough for a surgeon and a transplant specialist to say, “What the hell.”

In the trial, Dad would later find out he got the drug. It was meant to slow the progression of the disease. It was approved after it had done so for most participants. For Dad it did something for him it did for no one else. He got better.

Eight years later I was with him at a doctor’s appointment. She asked him if he remembered when he first came in. He told her he did. “I was just trying to buy you another year,” she told him. “We passed that a long time ago.”

Last year she congratulated him on being her longest lived patient. My father wondered if that congratulation came with an improved hospital parking spot. This was the same guy wanting to work calves now.

“He always wants to help. Sometimes I’d like him to have plans other than that.”

“Like what?“

“I don’t know. To go places and do things. All the things I’ve got to do because of him.”

“Have you told him that?”

“I have.”

“What did he say?”

“I tell him I want him to spend time doing what he enjoys. He says he is doing what he enjoys.”

“Do you think you can accept that, then?”

“It’s hard.”

“Why?“

“Because I know I’m not worth all of that.”

Back at the ranch, we started getting the cows in at 6:30 the next morning. It was cool and they moved easy without wanting to bunch in the heat. Into the corral and then the sort pen with my father after them like his faithful border collie, Rusty.

My father was on the gate as always, and a portable tank of oxygen was in his truck. They sorted well, and Dad took a break. I moved the calves up closer to the catch chute and began sorting the haves from the have nots.

At some point I notice a collapsible Coleman camping chair being positioned between the pickup and the chute. The portable oxygen was deployed as well. One by one we made our way through the calves.

Occasionally we took a few extra minutes.

Ten days later, trying to bat cleanup on any infections still lingering, my father piloted a Kawasaki Mule bringing them up, while I flanked them in a Chevy truck. This time we were trying to fit it in at the end of the day, thinking the heat Ihad abided enough.

The air was in the low 80’s, but the cows were still too hot. The front ones wanted to stop and bunch, while the bulls covering them wanted to stop and fight. It was all too much for my six year old nephew, Easton, tagging along with Grandpa in the mule with his Mom.

“I’m scared, Mom.”

“About what, Easton?”

The bulls were fighting right outside the Mule, and he and the rest of its occupants were not protected by the doors and windows of a full cab.

“I love Grandpa, and I don’t want anything to happen to him.”

Meanwhile, Grandpa let out a war whoop that would have made old Rusty proud.