It’s early. The morning is creeping above the pines and blackjack oaks. The heater blows hard, cold air on the floorboard, marking time with the exhaust pouring from the tail pipe of the Chevy. It’s the first new vehicle my parents ever owned. Three years old now, we still ride straight and proud on the brown bench seat. The new owner’s handbook branded the exterior sunset gold. Raised in the Sandhills, I’ve never seen a sunset with that much yellow. The paint looks more egg yolk or lemon custard to me, but as the youngest, I keep my thoughts stored in the vault of my mind, safe.

Daddy is driving along the fence line and we are counting the cows. His mood seems happy and he switches on the radio, commanding the static filled station to, “Come in, Cairo.” The broadcaster’s voice surges and fades delivering fragments of the farm report in aggressive staccato making the price of soybeans and hogs sound hurried and angry.

Daddy says for me to count the ears and divide by two or count the legs and divide by four. No division needed if you count the tails. He smiles at his own joke. I smile too although I am serious about the numbers.

I report my total of thirty-seven tails and despite the coming of winter, my sister’s drugging, the dwindling woodpile, and the Sear’s and Roebuck Wish Book, a glue-bound reminder of what we won’t get for Christmas, the number is right, and we are content in the cab of that truck, the heater now warm and Cairo coming in clear over the airwaves.

Daddy and I are both fifth kids. Grandpa was too. Five is my lucky number, although I don’t tell anyone why. I played it once at the county fair, my dime promising and shiny as the Carney tossed a hexagon shaped ball. I watched it tumble and land on five, making me the winner. I chose the red, stuffed bull, counted the horns and divided by two.

We get back to the barn, hook up the cattle hauler, and begin the process of loading two steers into the trailer. It’s my job to get the steers into the stable and then give confident signals as daddy reverses flush with the stable door opening. I have to yell, enunciating because whoa and go can sound similar. I wonder if different words such as forward and stop might be better, but I know to keep inquisitiveness slack as a rope.

Doors shift to the side and the yearlings, red with white faces, bound onto the metal floor. In a few hours, they will be unloaded, numbered, and run through a horse-shoe shaped corral. People will give quick waves, making strong commas in the air, as the auctioneer looks for twenty, now five, thirty, now five.

The truck hums as Daddy works the clutch and moves through the gears, three on the tree. I warm my feet at the air blast and pour Daddy coffee from the silver thermos. He smokes as he drives, his cigarette a fixed appendage in his left hand.

We roll through the stop signs in second, as the sun grows bigger in the sky. We pass Uncle Dan’s house and Daddy hits the center of the steering wheel twice, the horn a double-barrel hello. He surveys the corn stalks that haven’t been plowed under and wonders aloud if Dan’s new chicken house is turning a profit. I know this question isn’t for me, but I nod, affirming.

We cross the line into Chatham county and the hills roll, cursive Ms freckled with creeks and rocks. It’s Friday and Daddy is on vacation. This is what my father does, works on vacation.

The cattle sale bustles with trucks and trailers. We unload and walk the metal pier above bulls, heifers, steers, and calves. A small trip of goats stands to the side, looking worried. I learned that a group of goats is called a trip in the World Book and I like this knowledge, but I don’t flash it around, I keep it the vault alongside forward and stop. I don’t like heights, so I trail close behind, careful not to fall into the pens below, forever lost in a sea of hooves and manure.

We take seats in the arena and Daddy tells me to be still and keep my hands down. I fold forward at the waist to sip my sweet tea from the straw, fearful of accidentally buying a herd of Holstein or a brawling Brahma.

The men who sell and buy seem powerful. Teenage boys, sporting buckles and boots move the animals through the ring. I believe that they are real cowboys with their short whips and climbing skills, scaling the metal rails and separating the fights. Each cow’s destiny is determined by breed, weight, and appearance. A man named Red buys in bulk and files slick calves onto eighteen wheelers, their grand finale on a fancy menu as something called veal. A calf that size wouldn’t fill our freezer, so we wait for ours to age and fatten to beef, volume, a high priority.

Belted Galloway are rare in Siler City, but there’s one this day. Its black and white pattern makes me giggle. I want to ask if this is where Oreo milkshakes come from, but it’s unpredictable if Daddy will take a shine to my funny.

Our steers enter the loop and Daddy seems pleased with their price. I silently send them a solid see you later. I don’t know how much money my daddy got for the steers, because dollars are not for discussion with children. I make mental record that there are now thirty-five tails in our pasture, seventy ears, one hundred and forty legs.

The sun is starting to sit down and I doze on the ride home, satiated by a belly full of Carolina Stockyard bar-be-que sandwich and the rickety rattle of an empty trailer. The afternoon sun is warm on the window that I am using as a pillow. I wake when Daddy honks another howdy at Uncle Dan’s homeplace.

My daddy stands at five feet ten, the shortest of his siblings. The leatherbound photo album that lives in the sliding storage at the head of my parents’ bed, shows a dark-haired couple, standing side by side. I have seen other wedding photos and my parents don’t look overdone or glowing. They are dressed sensibly in navy. They are not beautiful, more like handsome. They stare straight ahead looking at the photographer. To me there is doubt in their eyes, like when I make a promise that might one day be hard to keep. I never knew my daddy’s hair to be any color but gray. He says life and a bushel of young’uns will do that to you.

Their wedding night was spent in a motel two towns over. They rode there in a borrowed truck. My daddy was so excited to get inside the room that he left the truck lights on and they had to get a battery jump the next day, which happened to be Christmas Eve. Daddy loves to tell this story and the grown-ups always laugh. It makes my mama smile even though she looks like she doesn’t want to.

At the intersection of highway 24/27, Daddy turns on the Chevy’s radio again. He doesn’t summon Cairo as the reception is strong on the paved road. Waylon sings about a place called Luckenbach and Kenny broods about a woman named Lucille.

Of all the days that weren’t so good with my daddy, this one was. At nine, one good day can make up for a crop of rotten ones.

Thirty years later, a few weeks before my daddy died, trees fell onto that same fence line creating an exit ramp for his cows. Three escaped into the night. The others, a different, smaller herd than the thirty-seven of days gone by, stood onlooking. They were witness to the breakout, but silent in the ways of bovine brotherhood.

To lose cows, to have three unaccounted for, worried the hell out of my father. His breaths were labored, the final scene of a movie brought to you by Pall Mall, non-filtered.  His conversation was clipped and when I leaned in to hear him, his final plea was for someone to please find his damn cows.

Psychology might call this displacement, but I wouldn’t. He had a mathematical, engineering mind and he needed things to add up. He slipped into a coma, waking intermittently to make piercing eye contact, his walnut-colored eyes the same as my own. I was standing beside his bed during one of these stare downs. I would like to say that I told him he was a good dad and that I loved him, but I didn’t speak those emotions aloud. That wasn’t our relationship.

His cows were found, caught in underbrush, a few days after Daddy was laid to rest. I figured that was when his spirit ascended, able to lift off with the final reconciliation of life and livestock.

I own that fence line now. I worry over it. The pastures are rented, home to what I call Hollywood cows. They don’t go on to be veal or even flank steak. They make their living being bred for shows, competing on the basis of bone structure and beauty. They are indeed pretty, a rich auburn in color. Four donkeys stand their guard as coyote bouncers. This is not a familiar side of farming for me, so I stay back and admire the cows, detached and judgmental about their lack of usefulness.

Last I counted there were twenty-two tails, forty-four ears, and eighty-eight legs.

My friend, Lisa, who grew up a few roads over, on Whippoorwill Hill, asked me once if I ever felt homesick. “Nah,” I replied. When I left for college, I was glad to escape Moore county. I went on to replace cattle auctions with sales quotas and rows of pole butterbeans with shopping at organic grocery stores.

It all comes full circle now that I view it from a distance. That’s the gift of aging eyes, seeing things I want to see and blurring the rest, a historical bi-focal of sorts.

The twisted truth is that I wouldn’t go back and do it all over again. But if I had a stack of days that I could repeat, I’d like an encore of the one when we were hauling steers in that golden pick-up, honking a salute to Uncle Dan, Cairo on the radio.