Those Kind Eyes
The car sped through the night. Behind the wheel, Go Gi-jin heaved one heavy sigh after another.
"Dad, honestly—why'd you have to go and hit somebody? Aigoo, I can't live like this. I just can't!"
His face, locked on the road ahead, was dark and stormy. He snorted several times—pff, pff, pff—then started muttering all over again.
"How bad must that fella be hurtin', though. What if he got a pneumothorax out of it? If it'd just been his arm or somethin' that got cracked, that'd've been a whole lot better."
The other man had been hurt badly enough to land in the hospital, so Go Gi-jin could only hope the damage had stopped at a hairline fracture in the arm. The thought brought back the memory of being struck by his own father.
It had hurt like hell.
It had been the year he filled out his university applications. Go Gi-jin had gone to his father bursting with pride. He was going to veterinary school, he said. He was going to become a fine veterinarian, just like him, and carry on the family work.
He had even added this: now that the son was going to be a veterinarian too, they ought to change the hospital sign to Father-and-Son AnimalAnimal Hospital—a name that held both their hearts in it. He had said it with his shoulders thrown wide, certain his father would praise him for walking the same road.
"But all I got was a beatin'."
That day, Go Gi-jin learned firsthand what it meant to get beaten so badly the dust flew off him—rain and all. The Go Gi-jin who took that thrashing from Veterinarian Go Panseok collapsed into bed. For three whole days.
For a young man who had never even caught a common cold in his life, it was an unprecedented thing. And for those three days, he cried and cried. Not because it hurt. Because he had been told not to go to veterinary school.
To Go Gi-jin, cattle were friends. His very best friends. From the day he had first toddled on unsteady feet, the cattle had always been there beside him. They were irreplaceable.
And when those friends fell ill, his father was the one who made them get right back up on their feet. To Go Gi-jin, that father was a hero. A real one. He had wanted to become just like him. He had wanted to make his cattle friends get back up, over and over, the way his father did.
So he had studied with everything he had, determined to become a veterinarian—and all he got for it was a beating. He couldn't accept it. For the first time in his life, he defied his father.
He applied to veterinary school. Ready to be hit for it.
But when he actually said he had applied, his father had nothing more to say. And after Go Gi-jin passed, his father clapped him on the shoulder.
"You worked hard."
That was when Go Gi-jin said it.
"If you were gonna praise me like that, you should've just praised me from the start."
Veterinarian Go Panseok had answered with a smile instead of words. A bitter smile. The same kind of smile Go Gi-jin wore now, driving through the night.
Go Gi-jin muttered on, his face sour.
"He oughta do somethin' about that temper of his. I wonder if the fella he hit is even all right. Don't tell me a tooth got knocked out."
If it had been serious enough to get him hauled into the police station, the other man's condition might be worse than he hoped. Hongseong Police Station was full of people who were on friendly terms with Veterinarian Go Panseok. That he had been taken in anyway meant this was no small matter.
The night roads had been running clear and fast until a red light caught him. Go Gi-jin scratched at his head while he waited for it to change. Heat was rising off his scalp.
"Ah, Dad, honestly! What's he doin' over there on a cold day like this!"
Until that moment he had been worrying only about the man who had been hit. Now, all at once, the words that came out of him were for Veterinarian Go Panseok.
"He'll be fine, right? He'll be just fine. If he was cold, Uncle Gyeongsin would've given him a blanket at least."
All the way there, Go Gi-jin worried over both of them—his father, and the man his father had struck.
Meanwhile, the father on the receiving end of all that worry was fuming inside a holding cell.
"That bastard—I should've beaten him harder. Should've knocked his damn jaw clean off."
If Go Gi-jin had heard that, he would have jumped out of his skin. Far from reflecting on what he had done, Veterinarian Go Panseok was sitting there resenting that he hadn't hit the man enough.
"That rotten son of a—! Who the hell does he think he is, walkin' in there! Walkin' in like that!"
He stared a hole through the wall a little way off, his face so fierce it was as if the other man were standing right where his glare landed. He held that look for a long while. Then his head dropped, and his gaze fell to the floor with it. The glare sharp enough to fire laser beams drained away.
Go Panseok covered his head with his hands and let out a breath.
"Hahh..."
He sighed again, long and low, and the face that emerged was so grief-stricken it looked ready to spill over into tears. It was hard to believe this was the same man who had been wearing that savage expression only a moment before. With his face buried between his knees, he muttered,
"I'm sorry."
Words of regret. Anyone sitting beside him would have thought that Veterinarian Go Panseok, sobered up, was sorry for the assault. It would have been a reasonable conclusion.
But Go Panseok had never been drunk to begin with.
Then who was he apologizing to? The wife waiting at home, sick with worry? Or the son who might find out—Go Gi-jin?
He muttered once more.
With that, he lifted the face he had buried in his knees and leaned it back against the wall. His gaze fell, as gazes do. What it found were his own two hands.
Time had passed, but Go Panseok still remembered the warmth at his fingertips—no, in his whole hands. The warmth that had come through coats of downy fur and sleek fur.
He forced his eyes away. Another sigh left him the way breathing does, as natural as air.
"Hahh..."
Eyes that had lost their light stared blankly at the wall opposite. Stains mottled the plaster here and there. Among them was a black one. Looking at it, something rose in his mind.
Large, dark, kind eyes. A cow's eyes. The eyes of the one he had put the needle into twice.
Just as Lee Jun had feared, Veterinarian Go Panseok was still suffering the aftereffects of being deployed to a livestock culling site not long ago. He had euthanized as many as a hundred and ten head of cattle.
It had been because of foot-and-mouth disease.
Only fifteen of them had actually contracted FMD. Every last one had been marked for culling all the same. Watching them slowly stop breathing after the injection—that work had fallen to him.
Had it only been that recent time? No. Before that, too. And before that.
Go Panseok thought back a few years.
"Was it five hundred head, back then?"
That time, he had had to send that many lives away. He had become a veterinarian because he wanted to save cattle, because he wanted to treat the ones that were sick—and with those same hands, he had had to kill them.
"I killed too many of 'em... way too many..."
The first time he had been called out for a culling, Veterinarian Go Panseok had been unable to practice for a long while. How was he supposed to save cattle with these hands that had killed them?
For a time he could not even leave the house. He could not sleep. He could not eat. He stared at the wall and did nothing but apologize.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."
He had muttered those words like a mantra, like a prayer. A month went by that way, then two. Then one night, well past midnight, the front gate of Veterinarian Go Panseok's house rattled on its hinges.
A cry for help went up loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood. A cow was dying. Please, save the cow and the calf. At the sound that the calf, that the cow, were both dying, Go Panseok came bursting out of the house and ran for the farm. It was two months and ten days since he had shut himself in that room.
And there he saw them: a cow's great eyes, welling and shining with tears. She was in agony from a difficult birth. The farmer said she had been like that for two full hours, and a guilt Go Panseok could not hold back came crashing over him.
There was no time to feel it. His hands were already moving.
The cause was a malpresentation—the calf's position in the womb was wrong. All that needed doing was to turn it to a normal lie. It was a treatment Veterinarian Go Panseok was very, very good at. He corrected the presentation in an instant, and before long the calf was born.
The farmer poured out his thanks, but none of it reached Go Panseok's ears. Every nerve he had was on the cow looking at him. She was watching him with those great eyes, and every bit of the gratitude in her was held there.
That was when he snapped wide awake. If he had come even a little sooner, the one in front of him would not have had to suffer like that. No—if he had not shut himself in that room, if he had been making his rounds the way he should have, he would have known in advance and done something about it.
From that day, Veterinarian Go Panseok went back to practicing. And he worked harder than before. Truly, desperately hard. Not that he believed what he was doing would earn him forgiveness. He simply felt that he had to.
"Just when I thought I could start to forget..."
Given enough time, it dulls a little. The memories do not vanish, and neither does the guilt, but you work, and you eat, and you go on living. You start to think you can live like that. And then foot-and-mouth disease breaks out, and it all happens again.
He wanted to grit his teeth and get past it. The truth was, he did not even know what getting past it was supposed to mean.
Go Panseok looked at the stain on the wall and sighed.
"Looks just like that one's eyes."
It was identical to the eyes of the cow he had euthanized at the culling site only a short while ago.
When cattle take a culling injection, the strength goes out of their legs within a minute. They call it recumbency—going down and being unable to rise. A few minutes after that, they stop breathing. But just as there are people who do not take anesthesia well, there are cattle like that too. It might be a constitution that resists the drug, or the animal might simply be too heavy for the dose that was given.
This one must have been like that.
He had been standing there, a groan caught in his throat, looking out over the sight of every cow down—when one of them got up. It staggered to its feet, and then it started walking toward where Veterinarian Go Panseok was standing.
Pleading eyes. Eyes full of fear. And eyes that begged to be saved.
He still could not forget that look. No—he could not forget it. How could he?
What had that cow been thinking, taking the needle a second time? Had it been glad, hoping its body would get better? If it had any memory of feeling well again after an injection, it might have thought that. Or had it resented him, guessing it would go down like its friends?
Either way, those eyes were vivid to him. He did not think he would ever forget them. Not until he stopped breathing himself.
Veterinarian Go Panseok knocked his head against the wall and muttered,
"When the hell is this gonna end?!"
At last, a single tear ran down Go Panseok's face.
This was the reason. This was why he had hoped his only son would never walk the veterinarian's road—so the boy would never have to suffer this kind of pain. He knew too well how much Go Gi-jin, his tender-hearted son, loved those cattle, how dearly he cherished them.
But he had not been able to say any of that to a boy in his last year of high school. All he had been able to do was tell him not to go to veterinary school. He had even resorted to force, thanks to that stubborn son of his. Even so, Veterinarian Go Panseok had hoped the boy would not walk the same path he had.
That was why he had told Go Gi-jin to go to Lee Jun and learn small-animal medicine. He had wanted him to see that the world was full of other animals, full of creatures that needed treating. He had wanted him never to go through the same pain.
"Hngh... I just wish that boy'd settle down over there and stay put."
He was still muttering when a thick, sturdy voice reached him.
"Eotta, Dad, what in the world happened? What're you doin' in there?"