The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

He kissed me on the forehead, right on the red line the helmet leaves. Then he climbed down and stood back with Vern at the edge of the grass.

That was July. It’s November now, and the wheat is long in the bins, and I’ll tell you how the rest of it has gone so far.

I ferried Don’s plane home that afternoon, washed her down, and left the keys on his desk on top of the invoice book, with the memory stick beside them. The office was empty and the stove was cold.

The man from Crookston didn’t buy. Don called him in August and told him the truth, which Pete says was the hardest call his father ever made. In October Don sold the plane to an outfit in Montana.

Vern’s men paid their invoices in August, less what they had paid me. Don did not argue a single one.

I’ve spent this fall at the kitchen table studying for my own operating certificate, and Pete has cooked supper every night for six weeks.

I found a single seat sprayer in Oklahoma with a fresh engine. I put Vern’s twenty two thousand down on her and borrowed the rest against Pete’s land. Pete signed the note without blinking. “That’s what it’s for,” he said.

She comes north on a trailer in April. She’s yellow too. I didn’t plan that. It’s just how she came.

Fourteen farmers have already put their wheat on my board for next summer. Nick is going to load for me. He came by in October to look at pictures of her and grinned the whole time.

Two Sundays ago, Don stopped by the house after dinner. He didn’t come in. He stood at the back door with a cardboard box in his arms and his cap in his hand.

In the box were the spare nozzle bodies from the hangar, a coffee can of check valves, and the old windsock that had hung over his strip for forty years, faded nearly white.

“Thought you could use these,” he said.

“I can,” I said. “Thank you, Don.”

He stood there a while. “Your lines were always straighter than mine,” he said. “Even back when I was flying. I used to drive by the fields after and think it.”

“You could have told me,” I said.

“I know it,” he said. “I’m telling you now.”

I asked him to stay for pie, and he did. He sat where Pete’s mother used to sit and told me about a field he flew in 1991 with hail coming in behind him, and I let him tell it all the way through.

We don’t talk about the summer. I don’t need to. It was said out loud on Vern’s strip, in front of the men who matter, and that was enough for me.

But when I can’t sleep, it isn’t that conversation I go back to. It’s what came right after.

Pete and Vern stood back at the edge of the grass. Nick waved from the trailer. I put my dad’s sunglasses on the glare shield, lenses toward the field. I started her up, taxied to the far end of the sod, and turned into the wind.

I took off from Vern’s strip and tipped my wings over the wheat.