And I recognized the name of the agent who wrote it, because that agent was my own brother. Raymond Hale. Special Agent Raymond Hale, Drug Enforcement Administration, in a steady blue ballpoint, in the margin of an old photocopy under the name of my husband. Next to it, in that familiar impatient scrawl, were three words that made me put my hand on the cold glass of the museum case. Flying home. Protect him. I had to sit down on the base of the display.
My brother had told our family, for thirty years, that he worked for the government doing accounting. He wore a gray suit and drove a gray Ford and never told a single story at Thanksgiving. He died in a car wreck on Highway 61 in 1992, and I had cried at his funeral, and I had thought I knew him. Now a retired man from the DEA stood beside me with a folder and said, “Mrs. Blalock, your brother was the finest agent I ever worked with. And your husband was his best informant.”
Kendall Strayhorn told it slowly, with his hat in his hands, and Trey stood next to me and listened with his mouth open. In the spring of 1979, Buster had flown for a crop dusting outfit in Leland, and one day he had noticed that two men were paying cash for flights over the Gulf, with no cotton to dust. He had gone to his brother in law. Raymond had taken him straight to the agency. Buster, who never raised his voice in his life, had said yes.
A quiet man may spend forty years in a barn with his coffee, carrying a secret that once required more courage than most men will use in a lifetime.
In July of 1979, Buster had flown one of the two planes out of Belize, loaded with marijuana, on instructions from the agency, with another man in the second plane who was working for the smugglers. The plan was for both planes to land in Louisiana, and for the agents to arrest everyone. But the second pilot suspected a trap. Over the Gulf, he fired on Buster, who radioed a mayday and went down low, below the radar, in a rainstorm. Buster flew the plane home with a hole in the tail.
He landed on a dirt strip in the Delta at three in the morning with two quarts of oil left and his hands cramped on the stick. Raymond and a dozen agents were waiting in the dark. The cargo was seized. The man in Louisiana was arrested and went to prison for fifteen years. And the agency, to keep my husband alive, announced that his plane had been lost at sea. He was told to say nothing, ever. They repainted the tail yellow, filed the numbers off, and sent the plane to a barn.
Strayhorn paused and cleared his throat. He said that in 1980 the Delta had been a dangerous place for an informant. The men who ran the smuggling network were angry and had long memories. Raymond had told Buster to buy a new biplane, a yellow one, and to fly crops under the sun in front of everyone, in plain sight, as though he had nothing to hide. Hiding, Raymond said, was the one thing a dead man could not do.
“Why did he keep the plane?” Trey asked, in a small voice. The DEA man looked at the leather helmet on the cockpit seat. “Because it was the only evidence that he had ever done it,” he said. “He told your uncle that someday his boy might need to know who his father was. Mr. Blalock never wanted a medal. He wanted his son to be able to look at the plane and see what a man can do.” Trey made a sound I had never heard from him.
I put my arm through his and held on. I had been angry for months, and now I was not. Trey wept openly, standing in a museum in Jackson, Mississippi, with a hundred strangers pretending to look at the exhibits. “Mama, I am sorry,” he said. “I called it a death trap. I called the plane of Daddy a death trap.”
I said it had been one, in 1979. It had also brought a man home. Then Strayhorn pulled a small velvet box out of his jacket.
Inside was a medal, the Award for Exceptional Service, issued by the DEA in 2025, forty six years late, and awarded posthumously to Wilbur Buster Blalock. Strayhorn pinned it to the leather helmet. The museum director read a statement. The little sign that stood in front of the plane was replaced that afternoon with a larger one, in brass. It tells the story of a crop duster who flew a stolen airplane home. Trey and I stood beside it with our arms around each other, and we did not leave until closing.