And I sank right down onto her sewing stool, because what was tucked under that false bottom, wrapped in cotton batting soft as a cloud, was a pair of silver wings.
Not jewelry. Aviator wings, the military kind, and pinned to a strip of felt beside them was a patch I did not know, a little cartoon character with goggles and wings of its own. Under that was a black-and-white photograph, and I had to hold it up to the window and study it a good while before I understood I was looking at my grandmother. Twenty years old maybe, in coveralls and a flight cap, one hand up on the wing of a big silver airplane, grinning like she owned the whole sky.
There was a little logbook, her name inside the cover, Wilma, in her own young hand. Page after page of flights, aircraft types I had to look up later. And a bundle of letters, and a set of orders on Army paper, and slowly, sitting on her stool with her spools of thread all around me, I put it together. My grandmother, the gentlest quietest Sunday-school woman in all of Ponca City, had flown military airplanes in the Second World War.
She was a WASP. Women Airforce Service Pilots, I learned, a couple thousand young women who flew every kind of aircraft the Army had, ferrying bombers across the country, towing targets so the gunners could practice with live rounds fired at them, testing machines the men would not go up in. They were not allowed into combat, and they were not allowed, for a long while after, to so much as call themselves veterans. Thirty-eight of them died, and the Army would not even pay to ship the bodies home. And when the war was won they were told thank you, go home, do not talk about it. So that is exactly what she did. She came home to Oklahoma, married my grandfather, taught Sunday school, quilted, prayed over her tomatoes for sixty years, and never told one living soul she had once flown a fighter alone across a continent at twenty-one.
The last thing in the box was a note she must have written not long ago, in her old shaky hand, laid on top like she half hoped somebody would find it.
I was not always the quiet one. Once, I flew. I did not want to be remembered as only gentle. Wilma.
I about came apart. All those years I sat quilting at the knee of that soft, patient woman, sure I knew her top to bottom, and I never once knew she had been a pilot, a real one, brave as anybody who ever drew breath. She did not want us to know while she lived, I think, because that generation of women just folded the big things away. But she left the box unlocked, in the end, for whoever loved her enough to look.
We buried her wings with her. But the photograph of that grinning girl on the wing of her airplane is framed on my wall now, and when my own daughter points and asks who that is, I get to tell her the truth. That is your great-grandmother. Before she was gentle, she was a pilot. She was both at once. So can you be.