Part 3 — Drum Number Six
The inspector read the name on the ticket in a level voice. “Patricia Tillman. The card ends in 5518.” Jace did not go white, and that was the first thing the crowd noticed. He turned his whole body toward his mother, and the aviator glasses slid down his nose. Patsy stood at the catfish table with a paper plate in her hand, and the hushpuppies she had dropped were still rolling across the concrete.
What she said next I will not forget. She did not deny it. “It was supposed to quit near the runway,” Patsy said, to no one and to everyone. “Royce has made a hundred deadstick landings. He could set that airplane down in the grass like a feather. The insurance would pay the loss of the aircraft, and the loss would cover the debts, and nobody would ever look at the old books.”
The inspector let her finish. He had done this work for thirty years, and he knew that the worst thing to do to a person who is confessing is to interrupt. When she was done he said quietly, “Mrs. Tillman, an engine that quits does not choose its runway. It chooses the river, the power line or the cotton gin. You were not planning a safe landing. You were planning a gamble with the life of a man who has been good to your family for fifty years.”
Patsy sat down on a folding chair as if the strings had been cut. Jace spoke at last, and what he said was small and true. “Mama, you told me the logbooks were fine. You said you had it handled.” He turned to me, and his face was the face of a boy of ten in my hangar, wanting to touch the propeller. “Uncle Royce, I did not know about the tank. I swear to God I did not. I only knew about the books.”
The books were enough. The deputy took the false logbook, and the inspector took the real one, and a federal agent came from Jackson the next morning to go through the office of JT Air one drawer at a time. The law is not complicated here. Falsifying the maintenance records of an aircraft is a federal crime, and so is knowingly contaminating its tank, whatever the hope behind it. Patsy was arrested at her own kitchen table the next day with her reading glasses on.
Jace pleaded guilty to the logbook fraud and to forging my name. He received probation and a fine, and the FAA took away the operating certificate of his company for good. He did not fight it. The loan I had co-signed, $212,000, was ruled to have been obtained by a false representation, and the bank, which had been rather nervous since the morning at the airport, agreed to release me from it. The two turbine Air Tractors were sold to pay what was owed.
The sentence of Patsy was the hardest of them. The judge in Greenwood, a woman who had known my brother in school, said she did not think malice had been the engine of it. She thought fear of debt had been. But fear of debt does not excuse tampering with an aircraft, and she sentenced Patsy to a term in federal custody, followed by supervision, and an order to repay the insurance company in full. When the judge was done Patsy said, “Thank you, Your Honor.” I have not forgotten how steady her voice was.
The name TILLMAN AG AVIATION went back over the hangar in October. A sign painter from Itta Bena did it for the price of a day of crop dusting. The mechanic Jace had forbidden to touch my 502, a stubborn old man named Bobby Joe, came out of retirement and went over the airplane inch by inch. He found the water, the bad lines and the worn magneto, and he put it right. He charged me for parts only, and when I tried to argue he said, “Royce, you taught me to fly.”
On the last morning of August, I took the 502 up one more time. The inspector from the FAA came to watch, and the deputy came too, with a thermos, and the man from Channel 6 filmed from the ramp. I did the walkaround myself. I opened the drain and drew the sample, and it came out blue and clean as a morning sky, and I held it up to the sun for everybody to see.
The Delta looked the way it does at dawn in the last week of summer. Cotton in white lines to the horizon, rice going gold, the Yazoo lying like a brown ribbon in the haze. I made my pass over the field of my brother, the one that his son had once told me not to spray, and I felt the old airplane settle under my hands like a horse that has finally been told it is home. Never bent a prop. Never hit a power line.
A man who writes down every gallon and every minute is not a fussy old pilot, he is a witness who does not know it yet. The cards in the Prince Albert tin went to the court, but I kept the tin, and it rides in my flight bag again.
Jace wrote to me from the house of his mother in Itta Bena in the winter. He said he was working at a feed store and sweeping floors, and that he had been trying to learn the name of every bolt on the engine of a tractor. I wrote back that a man who learns the bolts will learn the rest. In the spring I invited him to the hangar for a catfish supper. He came in clean overalls and stood by the propeller with his hat in his hands, and I let him touch it.