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I nodded, thinking it unjust that a man’s life be so much affected by what to all the rest of the world was only a scrap of paper. If I were Carl, I’d burn all the paper in the fireplace and go out and fly my airplane.
“Here’s something you’ll love to see,” Carl said, returning.
He unrolled a long photograph on the table and we looked down at a row of ten biplanes parked in front of a hangar. White-ink letters at the lower right corner said June 9, 1929.
“These are the boys I used to fly with. Look at those guys. What do you think of that?”
He named each one of the pilots, and they looked out at us proud and unfaded, arms folded, standing by their airplanes. There at one side stood a young Carl Lind, in white collar and tie and knickers, not yet president of Lind Plastic Products, not yet concerned about a medical certificate. He wouldn’t be thinking about that for another thirty-five years.
“Look here, huh? Long-Wing Eaglerock, Waco Ten, Canuck, Pheasant … now there’s some real airplanes, don’t you think? We used to go out to the Firemen’s Picnic …”
It was a good evening, and I was glad that my years had overlapped Carl’s. He had been flying and smiling up out of that photograph seven years before I was born.
“Be glad for your friends,” Carl said. “We know people, don’t we, Thelma, with millions of dollars, but without one friend in the world. Boys, be glad for your friends.” He was deadly sincere, and to break the gravity of the moment he smiled at Stu. “You having fun out here in the cow-pastures, flying around?”
“I’m having more continuous fun than I’ve ever had in my life,” the kid said, and just about startled me off my chair. He hadn’t said such a revealing thing all summer long.
It was midnight when we zipped ourselves into our hot sleeping bags and settled down under the wing of the biplane.
“It’s a tough life, isn’t it, Stu?”
“Yep. Mansions, chocolate cake, swimming in Lake Geneva … this barnstorming is rough!”
A farmer was out by the huge Gothic cow-barn across the way at six a.m. He was a tiny dot by the base of the barn, dwarfed by the tremendous double-sloped roof with its four giant ventilators lined along the rooftrees seventy feet in the air. He was a quarter-mile away, but his voice came clear across the calm morning hay.
“BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE BIDE! HURRY IT UP, BOSSY! C’MON C’MON C’MON!”
I woke and lay under the wing in the early light, trying to figure out what “Bide” meant. And “Bossy.” Do farmers still call their cows “Bossy”? But there was the call again, coming across the fragrance of the hay, making me feel guilty to be lying abed when there were cows to be gotten out.
A dog barked, and day began in America.
I reached for pen and paper, to remind me to ask about BIDE, and as I wrote, a tiny six-legged creature, smaller than my pen-point, came hiking across the blue-lined page. I added, “A very small pointy-nosed bug just walked across this page—purposefully, definitely going somewhere . He stopped here.”
Were we, also, hiking along some cosmic journal-page? Were the events about us all part of a message we could understand, if only we found the right perspective from which to read them? Somehow, with our long series of miracles, of which this field at Walworth was the latest, I thought so.
Our morning check of the biplane showed that we had come up against our first problem of maintenance. The tail-skid was wearing thin. At one time it had a steel roller and metal plate to guard it, but the constant takeoffs and landings had worn those away. If we had to, we could whittle another skid from a tree-branch, but this was the time for preventive work. We talked about it on the way in for breakfast, and decided to look around the hardware store.
Close as it was to the resortlands of Lake Geneva, Walworth was becoming a very modern small town, and we found Hardware in the shopping center.
“May I help you?” the clerk said.
“Well, yes,” I said, slowly and carefully. “We are looking for a tail skid shoe. Would you have anything in that line?”
How strange it was. If one doesn’t stay well within the bounds of what one is expected to say, his words might as well be Swahili.
“Beg pardon?”
“A tail… skid … shoe. Our tail skid is wearing out.”
“I don’t think … a what?”
“We’ll browse around, thanks.”
We walked the rows of hardware, looking for a long narrow strip of metal, with holes for screws to mount it on the wooden skid. There were some big hinges that might work, a mason’s trowel, a big heavy end wrench.
“Here we go,” Stu said, from across the room. He held a tail skid shoe. The label on it said Vaughn Spring Steel Super Bar. It was a small flat crowbar that had clearly been made by a tail-skid-shoe company.
“Oh, you mean a pry-bar!” the clerk said. “I wasn’t sure what you were looking for.”
