“Jeff, I will tell it myself,” I said, “and I will tell it to the one person who has a right to hear it.” I took out my flip phone and dialed my daughter Laurie in front of Kendra, the notary, and my son. Jeff lunged for the phone. I stepped back, and the notary, a heavy man in a short sleeved shirt, put his hand flat against Jeff chest and said, in a tired voice, that he had not been paid enough for this. Laurie answered on the third ring. “Daddy? What is it?” I said, “Honey, I need you and Mike to come to the farm. Now. Bring Mike.”
They arrived forty minutes later in their old Chevy, Laurie driving, Mike beside her with his cane. He had never walked right since 1998. Kendra had retreated to her Hyundai with her folder against her chest and had the decency to look ashamed. Jeff stood in my yard like a boy sent to the principal. I made everyone sit on the porch, and I told it plain. In March of 1998, my son Jeff, thirty years old and drunk on his own birthday, had climbed into my yellow Air Tractor at dawn without my knowledge and taken it up over the Spring River bottoms for a joyride.
He lost the engine over a bean field. Mike, who had gone out to the strip early to fuel the plane, was in the second seat of the trainer cockpit, because Jeff had dragged him along. Both walked away. But Jeff had no pilot license, and an unlicensed flight would void the policy. Marlene made the call, in the next hour, that has haunted my family for twenty seven years. She told Mike to say that he had been at the controls. Mike held a license. The insurer paid. Jeff took the money and opened his car lot, and no one ever said a word.
A son held an old secret over his father head, the old pilot told it first, and a Piper Cub went up with two men aboard.
I did not learn the full truth until that afternoon. Mike told me himself, sitting on my porch with his hands on his cane. “Roland, Marlene asked me,” he said. “She said Jeff was going to lose everything, that he would not survive a federal charge. I was twenty nine and I loved your daughter. I said yes.” Laurie was crying without any sound. “You carried that for twenty seven years,” she said to him. “I carried it for her,” Mike said, and took her hand. I looked at my son, who stood silent with his shoulders caved, and understood exactly what Marlene had done and why she could never tell me.
Jeff spoke at last. “Pops, I never asked Mom to do it. I was thirty and drunk and scared. When she said Mike would claim he was flying, I let her. I let him limp for twenty seven years while I sold cars. And when you started to seem slow, I thought if I could get the farm into my hands, nobody would ever look back.” I said I had not been slow a day in my life. I had only been quiet. He nodded and looked at his boots. Laurie stood and walked down the porch steps, and for a long minute I could not tell which way she would go.
The insurance investigator, a courteous man named Mr. Kessler, was waiting at the Carthage airport hangar when I drove in. He showed me the photo of Jeff standing next to the wrecked Air Tractor. He told me that he had been asked by the company to close out old claims, and that the statute of limitations on fraud had expired in 2008. “Mr. Ashby, I cannot touch this,” he said. “But I thought you ought to know someone was shopping that photograph. Your son sent it to us himself, last month, trying to make you look foolish.” I thanked him and went home.
That night I did not sleep. I sat in the kitchen with Marlene reading glasses in front of me, and around four in the morning I made up my mind. I called the bank and canceled the reverse mortgage inquiry. I called my lawyer in Carthage and placed the farm into a trust that named Laurie and Mike and their three children as sole heirs. Jeff would receive a check for what remained after the trust expenses, and a letter from me. I wrote it in longhand, and it said only this: “Son, what you do next is yours.”
He did something I never expected. Ten days later he drove to the insurance company in Kansas City, sat down with a claims manager, and wrote a check for the full amount, with interest, out of the sale of his car lot. Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. No one forced him. No one even asked. The company thanked him in writing and said it had no further interest. When he told me about it, standing at my door in a wrinkled shirt, he looked fifteen years older and about forty pounds lighter. “Pops, I could not breathe,” he said. “I had to put it down.”
On a Sunday in May I rolled the Piper Cub out of the hangar at the Carthage airport, wiped the dew off the wings, and told Jeff to climb into the right seat. He stared at me. “Pops, I have not flown since that day,” he said. I said, “Then it is time.” I took off, climbed to a thousand feet over the Spring River, leveled out, and nodded at the second stick. His hands shook the first minute. Then they steadied. He banked, gently, to the left, and the sun came across the wing, and the whole green country of Jasper County opened below us like a map.
We landed smooth. He taxied back to the hangar and cut the engine, and for a moment we sat in the quiet cockpit with the propeller ticking down. “Pops,” he said, “do you think Mom would have been proud?” I thought about it carefully, the way I think about weather. “She would have been scared,” I said, “and then proud. She was always both, at once.” Jeff laughed, a short wet laugh, and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. I clapped him on the shoulder, hard, and we climbed down. That Thursday, at the burger stand, Dewayne called me Captain again.