The Woman He Dared To Fly

By that Sunday, half of Piney Fork had seen the video, because one of the bankers had posted it before he even got back to Springfield, and a place like ours does not let something that big sit quiet for long. I walked into the fellowship hall for the potluck after church with a green bean casserole in my hands, same as every other week, and the whole room went so still I thought for a second I’d left the oven on at home. Then an old man who had served with my husband’s uncle stood up from the folding table by the coffee pot, a man I had known my whole life as somebody who complimented my pie crust and nothing more, and he saluted me, right there between the sheet cake and the paper plates. I did not know what to do with that. I still don’t, some days. I just nodded back and set the casserole down and let the room start talking again, because a woman raised the way I was raised does not know how to stand still and be looked at for very long.

What happened after that happened faster than I expected. The investors did not walk away from Bell Ridge, but they walked away from Alford. Within the week, the company’s board, the quiet money that had funded Alford’s ambitions from an office in Kansas City, brought in new leadership for the flight test program, and they offered that leadership to me. Not out of guilt, though I suspect some of it was guilt, but because eleven years of combat aviation experience is not something a company trying to sell autonomous aircraft to nervous farmers can afford to keep mopping floors.

Alford is still at Bell Ridge, technically. He answers to a flight test director now, a woman he once offered to marry as a joke meant to humiliate her in front of a room full of strangers. He has never apologized to my face, though Berdine tells me he has stopped making jokes about anyone’s uniform, past or present, since the day the video of that flight passed two hundred thousand views on a Facebook page somebody in Piney Fork started calling Small Town Justice.