The wingtip
I finished the last pass at a quarter to two in the afternoon, the sun high and the wind just starting to stir the wheat. I swung around one more time and lined up on Vern’s sod.
It was a smooth landing. I’ll always be glad of that. I taxied back to the mix trailer and shut her down, and the prop ticked slower and slower until it stopped.
It was the stillest I’d ever heard that place. Just the engine pinging as it cooled, and a meadowlark somewhere out in the wheat.
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I took my helmet off and shook out my hair, short and blond and soaked. My tan flight suit was stuck to my back. I put my dad’s sunglasses on and stepped out onto the wing.
Vern was walking toward the plane, gray beard, seed cap, the binder under one arm and a long white envelope in his other hand. He came through the green grass slow, the way big men do, and stopped at the tip of the left wing.
Behind him, by the shop, the other men had stopped talking.
I climbed down off the wing root onto the grass. I took off the sunglasses again, because I wanted him to see my eyes when he said whatever he was going to say.
“Laurie,” he said. “Is there anything in this binder that isn’t so.”
“No, sir.”
“You flew every field in it.”
“Every one.”
“And Don hasn’t flown my ground since when?”
“The spring before last. He lost his medical.”
Vern looked down at the grass. He nodded a few times, slow. When he looked up his face wasn’t angry. It was something worse than angry. It was ashamed, and not for himself.
“I’ve been bringing that man coffee on this strip for two summers,” he said. “And thanking him. I shook his hand at the elevator in June and told him he was the best stick in the valley.”
“I know,” I said. “He told me.”
He held out the envelope.
“Eleven of us have been through that binder this morning,” he said. “Every one has a tab in there. We figured a pilot’s share on six thousand four hundred acres, thirty cents on the dollar, less what Don already paid you. Twenty two thousand two hundred and sixteen dollars.”