“Brenda?” Dwayne said, and the voice I had loved for four years came across the concrete floor like warm syrup. “What are you doing in the hangar of Billy, baby?” I stood, with the mason jar in one hand and the fuel log pressed against my chest. My legs had turned to water. In the doorway behind him, in a sheriff khaki uniform with a hat tipped low over his eyes, stood Sheriff Calvin Rudd, a man I had known since the second grade. “Evening, Brenda,” he said quietly. “Jake called me from your kitchen. He told me everything. I followed the truck of Dwayne out here from the highway.”
Dwayne turned. I watched him see the sheriff, and I watched the smile slide off his face like paint off a wet wall. For a moment he stood absolutely still, a big sunburned man in a pressed shirt, his hands open at his sides. “Calvin,” he said, “this is a family matter.” “It sure is,” said the sheriff. “Brenda, hand me that jar, please. Carefully, by the lid. And the log. I would like to read the entry for August fourteenth out loud.” I put them into his hands. My fingers were shaking so hard the glass chattered against his glove.
He read it aloud in the empty hangar, in the flat voice of a man reading a sentence. “August fourteenth. Fueled by D.P.” He looked up. “Dwayne, Billy wrote in this log every day for twenty eight years, in the same pen, in the same hand. On the fourteenth, somebody else filled in a line.” “That was me,” said Dwayne, quickly. “Billy asked me to fuel his plane. I do it all the time.” “Not that morning,” I said. My voice came out from somewhere I did not know I owned. “Billy fueled his own plane every morning. He told me so at supper the night before. He said the plane does not care how good a pilot you are.”
A mason jar of tainted fuel in a locked hangar drawer revealed what really took a crop duster out of the sky.
Sheriff Rudd put the jar on the workbench and wrote something on a pad. “Water and sugar,” he said. “Billy labeled it. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has a laboratory in Jackson that can test it by Thursday. I imagine it will say what Billy said.” Dwayne sagged against the wing of the Air Tractor. All the air went out of him. “I owed two hundred forty thousand dollars,” he said, to the concrete. “To some men in Memphis. They said they would hurt my children. Billy would not sell. I only meant to ground the plane. I never meant for him to take it up. He was supposed to find the sugar on Monday.”
“It was Saturday,” I said. “He took it up on Saturday because the farmer needed the cotton sprayed before a rain.” The sheriff put the handcuffs on Dwayne at the back of the hangar, under the long fluorescent tube, and I will remember the sound for the rest of my life, two small clicks. Dwayne did not fight. He cried like a child. He kept saying the name of Billy and then mine, until the deputy led him out into the dusk, and the red and blue lights moved across the white sides of the planes like a slow, silent alarm.
Jake was waiting by my car in the parking lot, with his arms around himself. He had come after all, though I had told him to stay. We did not speak. I held my boy against my chest in the middle of a field of cotton stubble, with the sheriff car idling nearby, and for a long while we just breathed. He smelled like Billy, the same sweat and soap and sunscreen. “I read it, Mama,” he said into my hair. “I read the note, and then I just could not sit in the house.” I told him he had done everything exactly right.
The laboratory report came on the Thursday and said what the sheriff expected. The district attorney in Greenville charged Dwayne with murder, and the men in Memphis were charged as well, on conspiracy, after Dwayne gave a statement in exchange for a lighter sentence. The trial took nine months. I testified for forty minutes, with the jar on the evidence table in front of me. When it was over, the jury took less than three hours. Dwayne received life, with the possibility of parole in thirty years. The marriage was annulled the same week, by a judge who patted my hand.
I sold the planes. It was hard, but they had become ghosts. I kept the hangar, and I kept the log of Billy. I gave the business contracts to a young pilot from Indianola named Tammy Reyes, a woman who checks her fuel with her own two hands every morning and would, I think, make Billy proud. She flies his old route. On summer mornings I step out on the porch with my coffee and hear the engine climbing above the cotton rows, and I raise my cup. It is the most beautiful sound in the world.
Jake took down the bug zapper years ago, but he put it back up last spring. He repaired the wiring and replaced the bulb. At dusk it hums and snaps, and the moths dance around it. I sit in the old chair of Billy and watch, with a glass of sweet tea, and the zapper makes its little blue light on the porch rail, and I let the evening settle over me. I think the note in it was the last thing he did on the earth. He was not afraid. He put the truth in a bug zapper because he knew his wife would one day look.
Some nights I read the log, front to back, all twenty eight years of it, in his small square capitals. Pre flight complete. Fuel checked. Home by supper. On the last page, in pencil, in the margin, I found a line I had missed. Brenda, if I do not come home, plant tomatoes. I did. They came up red and fat the next July, along the fence, and I carry the first one to his grave and set it on the stone.
