The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

The last job

The last job of the season was Vern’s late wheat, three hundred and twenty acres planted after the wet spring, the last field in the valley still flowering. The wheat along his strip had already turned gold.

I ferried out at six. Nick followed on the gravel with the mix trailer. It was the first bright clear morning in a week, that pale washed blue you only get on the prairie after rain.

I landed on Vern’s sod and taxied up to his farmstead, which sits inside a shelterbelt of cottonwoods and green ash his grandfather planted in the thirties, like a house in a room.

Vern was waiting by the strip with a thermos. He always was. He’d bring the pilot coffee and talk about the weather while Nick loaded. He thought he’d been bringing that coffee to Don for two summers.

I shut down and climbed out. Nick handed me the binder out of his pickup without a word, and I walked over and gave it to Vern.

“What’s this,” he said.

“Those are the as applied maps off the plane, Vern. For your sunflower question. And everything else the plane did this summer. The ones with the tabs are yours.”

He opened it standing right there to the first tab, his north quarter, June twenty sixth. I watched his eyes go to the header. Then he turned to the next tab, and the next.

He didn’t say anything. He just kept turning pages.

“Your coffee’s going cold,” I said.

“Go fly,” he said, without looking up. “I’m going to sit a while.”

So I went and flew.

My father wore a pair of gold rimmed aviator sunglasses every day I can remember. When he died four winters ago, my mother gave them to me in a cardboard box with a rubber band around it. One earpiece had a kink from being bent and straightened so many times.

I didn’t wear them to spray, because of the helmet visor. But I kept them on the glare shield every flight, folded, lenses toward the field. My dad liked to see where he was going.

On the first load I pulled up over Vern’s shelterbelt and the sun came across the panel and hit those lenses, and the whole cockpit filled with gold light.

I don’t know why it got to me then. I was tired, and a man on the ground was reading the truth about me for the first time. I said out loud, to nobody, “Well, Dad. Here we go.”

I could almost feel his hand loose over mine on the stick.

I sprayed it the way he’d have wanted. Straight lines, square turns, the boom off exactly on the end rows. Three loads, the lightbar dead center almost the whole way.

Each time I came back for a load, Vern was somewhere new. First on his tailgate with the binder on his knees. Then on the phone, walking slow circles in the grass.

The third time there were three more pickups in his yard, and men I knew standing around his tailgate reading pages.

Nick looked up at me while the hopper filled. “Laurie,” he said. “What was in that binder.”

“Just the maps, Nick.”

He nodded slowly. He was eighteen, but he wasn’t dumb. He’d been loading me all summer. He knew whose name was on the job sheets he clipped to the panel.

“Don called me twice,” he said. “Asked if you were out here. I told him yeah.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Tell him the truth if he asks you anything.”