The North End of Tackett's

by John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Loretta Pruitt kept her fields in a green clothbound ledger, one field to a page, in pencil. North at the top. Levees in dotted line. Trees drawn as little scalloped clouds, the way her father had drawn them on the backs of feed invoices. A wire was a hard ruled line with its height written beside it and a box drawn round the number. A pole was a dot she pressed into the paper until the lead broke. There were two hundred and eleven pages. Some of the fields had changed hands three or four times since she drew them, and the pages still had the old names at the top.

At a quarter past six on the first Tuesday in August she had the ledger open on the hood of the truck, and the new pilot stood on the other side of it with a gas-station coffee, reading upside down.

"Hollis is loading you for Bergman's south. Three loads, maybe a little over." She put her finger on a box. "East side, the drop to the well. Twenty-two feet. You come in from the west and you're under it before you see it. So you don't come in from the west."

"Yes ma'am."

"What's your screen say?"

Wesley Gentry turned his phone round. He had the field from the job file, a green polygon with the swath lines laid across it like the teeth of a comb. "Says the well's there."

"It doesn't say the wire."

"No ma'am."

"Nobody ever put the wire in it. That's my point."

He was twenty-six. He had towed banners for four summers up and down the beach at Gulf Shores and loaded chemical for an outfit near Crowley for one more before anybody let him spray. He had a little over six hundred hours, and forty-one of them were in her old Air Tractor 401, the one with the round engine, which she had bought out of an estate in Hazen in 2009 and kept flying because it still flew. He was polite. He was careful. He looked at the phone first. She'd had other boys who looked at the phone first. Two of them sold crop insurance now.

"Then I'll do Tackett's," she said, and turned pages.

Tackett's was a hundred and sixty acres of rice along the bayou with a tree line at each end, pecans on the south and cottonwoods on the north, the cottonwoods tall enough that you came up out of the field like a cork. She had sprayed it every summer since Arlen Tackett's father first flooded it. The page was soft at the corners and grey with thumbs.

Wesley tipped his head to read it. "There's a bin out there now."

"There's no bin on Tackett's."

"North end. By the cottonwoods, across the road. I came in on the gravel this morning, the one past the little church, the—" He made a shape with his free hand that could have been a steeple or a bin. "There's a new bin, a big one, with a leg on it. Guyed out. The co-op's set a pole for it."

"Arlen doesn't store. He hauls to Stuttgart."

"I don't know whose it is."

"Was it Tackett's?"

He stopped. She watched him go back down the road in his head. "It had cottonwoods on the north end."

"Half the Grand Prairie has cottonwoods on the north end." She flipped forward to D. Dunavant's: three bins and a leg, drawn in 2019, the guy anchors marked with x's and the leg boxed at ninety-five. "Church road runs right past Dunavant's. There. That's your bin."

He looked at it a while. "Maybe," he said.

"Maybe's a fine word on the ground." She shut the book. "Go fly Bergman's. From the east."

---

Hollis had the nurse truck backed up to the loading pad with the hose already out, and the 401 sat at the end of it ticking as it cooled from the warm-up. Hollis was her late husband's brother. He was seventy-three and had loaded for her for nineteen years, and in nineteen years he had said maybe four hundred words, most of them numbers.

"Four hundred even," he told Wesley, and that was the whole briefing.

Loretta watched the boy climb up. He walked round the airplane twice first, which was right, and he put his hand on the boom and shook it, which was right. Then he sat in the cockpit with the canopy open and looked at the screen of the guidance unit for a full minute before he started the engine. The big radial coughed, threw smoke, caught. The airplane shook itself awake the way the old ones did, the whole tail going. He taxied out with his head moving side to side, he turned onto the strip, and the 401 went down the grass heavy and patient and came off at the very end, the way loaded airplanes do in August.

It was eighty-one degrees at six-fifty, and the air was so wet you could have wrung it out. Wind out of the south at four or five. Good spraying.

Her own airplane was the 502, the turbine, five hundred gallons in the hopper and a PT6 up front that whined instead of roared. Hollis put four-fifty in it. Azoxystrobin at the rate the consultant had written, mixed out in water, for sheath blight. A hundred acres a load, and the chemical alone in that hopper came to about fifteen hundred dollars. She did the walk-round. She did not look at a screen. She had the screen, it was bolted to the glare shield, it would lay her swath lines down as straight as a ruler and paint in the field as she sprayed it, and she used it for that. She didn't use it to tell her where anything was.

She was off at seven-ten. Tackett's was six minutes northeast.

---

The thing she told every boy, the thing she had made them repeat back to her on the hood of the truck: you look the field over first. You come in high, three hundred feet, and you go round it, and you find every wire and every pole and every tower, and then you go round it again the other way because the light is different from the other side. Then you fly it. She'd told it to Wesley in May. He'd said it back to her word for word.

She came up on Tackett's from the south at three hundred and went round it once, clockwise. The pecans. The bayou on the west side, brown and still, with a heron in it. The levees curving across the rice in their soft contours, the rice itself heading out and gone that deep blue-green it went in August. The cottonwoods on the north end, a wall of them. The gravel road beyond, the church a quarter mile east, white, with its little steeple. The sun was low in the east-northeast and dead in her eyes when she came round the northeast corner. She squinted, she saw the road and the trees and a shine past them that was the sun on something. She was round the corner and heading south before she thought about it, and then she didn't think about it. The page was in her head. There was nothing on that side of the road. There had never been anything on that side of the road.

She did not go round the other way.

She started on the west side, by the bayou, and ran north. Eight feet over the heads of the rice, a hundred and thirty-five on the airspeed, the boom open and the spray laying down behind her white for an instant and then gone into the crop. The levees came at her one after another and she rode them, eased up and eased down without thinking about it, the way you take stairs in your own house in the dark. At the north end the cottonwoods came up like a wall. She pulled, the airplane stood up, the trees went under her, and at the top of the pull she went into the turn she had made at Tackett's for thirty-one years: left forty-five, hold it, then the long climbing reversal right, round the back and down into the field again on the next swath over. The reversal took her out over the road and the open ground past it, and back. Then down the field to the pecans, pull up, turn, and north again.

It was good flying. She knew it was. There is a kind of pleasure in it that she had never tried to describe to anybody, the field coming at you and the airplane doing exactly what you meant before you had finished meaning it.

West to east, swath by swath, each reversal at the north end carrying her a little farther east. Six passes. Seven. The hopper gauge going down. She was flying the field on the page in her head and the field under her was agreeing with it.

On the ninth pass she came up off the cottonwoods with the sun just to the right of the nose, went left forty-five, rolled right into the reversal, and there was a tower in her windscreen.

It was not a big thing. That was what she would remember. A grain leg is a skinny thing, a steel lattice the width of a closet, and this one was standing beside a bin so new the corrugations threw the sun back at her in stripes. She was banked forty degrees to the right at a hundred and forty feet, heavy, the airplane still carrying three hundred and some gallons, and the leg was right of the nose and above her, and running down from it at a long slant, down and away to the ground on her side, was a cable she could not see but knew was there, because there is always a cable. There are always three.

There was no thought in what happened next. There was not time for one. Her left hand went to the dump handle and pulled it all the way.

The hopper gate opened under her and the load went out of the bottom of the airplane in a rush she felt through the seat, and better than a ton of water and azoxystrobin left the 502 in about the time it takes to say so. The airplane leapt. That's not a figure of speech; it rose under her the way a boat rises when a heavy man steps off it. She had the power all the way up already, she was pulling, and the airplane that a second ago had been heavy and slow in the turn was suddenly light and had something left over. She tightened the turn and it went. The nose came up and round. The leg slid to the left across the windscreen and the bin went under her wing, and she looked down out of the canopy, she could not help it, and saw the cable after all, a hard grey line slanting down to a concrete anchor in the grass, passing under her wingtip with what she would afterwards, pacing it on the ground, call forty feet. It might have been thirty.

Then she was at four hundred feet over Arlen Tackett's road with an empty hopper, the turbine whining evenly, and nothing in front of her but sky and the white church.

She flew straight and level for a while. She checked the gauges and they were fine. She looked down at the place where the load had gone, and it lay across the bare ground past the road and down into the ditch, a long dark wet stain in the dust and the Johnson grass, and none of it, as far as she could tell, on the bin.

Then she went round Tackett's once more, at three hundred feet, counterclockwise, with the sun behind her now. From that side the leg was as plain as a flagpole. So was the bin. So were the guy cables, all three, silver in the low light, and a new power line running from a new pole on the road to the bin, slung at maybe thirty feet, right across the open ground she had been using for her reversal since 1995. The cottonwoods on the northeast corner were gone. Somebody had cut them down to the stumps to make room for the pad, and from the south, with the sun in her eyes, the line of the trees had looked unbroken because the line of trees was in her head.

She called Hollis on the radio. "Coming in empty."

"You're early," Hollis said, which for him was a speech.

---

She landed and taxied in and shut down, and sat in the cockpit while the turbine wound down through its long falling whine to nothing. Her hands were all right. Her knees were not entirely all right, and she gave them a minute before she climbed out.

Hollis looked at the hopper, and then at her, and didn't ask.

"Tackett's has a bin," she said.

She got the ledger off the hood of the truck and stood with it closed in her hands. Then she went and sat in the cab with the door open and her boots on the running board, and she made two telephone calls. One was to Arlen Tackett, who was very sorry, he'd meant to say, the bin was his cousin's from Ethel and they'd only poured the pad in June, and was she all right. The other was to the Plant Board in Little Rock, because a dumped load beside a public road is a thing you report before somebody else reports it for you. The woman at the Plant Board had a pleasant voice and a form, and she went down the form with Loretta line by line, product, rate, gallons, location, time, and she asked whether there had been any injury and Loretta said no.

She was still on the phone when the 401 came over the trees from the east, settled onto the grass with its tail up, and ran out long and slow. Wesley taxied it to the pad and shut it down. He climbed out and started toward the nurse truck, saw the 502 sitting there, looked at the hopper, and came over.

She finished with the Plant Board. She put the phone down on the seat.

"How was Bergman's?"

"Fine. Took the east side from the east."

"Good."

He waited. He was not a boy who filled a silence, and she had held that against him for three months. He looked at the 502 again, and she saw him look at the wet streaks down the belly behind the hopper gate, and she saw him understand them.

"It was Tackett's," she said.

He had the decency not to say anything to that at all.

She opened the ledger on her knee. Tackett's, soft at the corners, the cottonwoods scalloped all the way across the top of the page, unbroken. She looked at it a while. Then she took the pencil out of the spine and held it out to him.

"I didn't see it close," he said.

"You saw it from the road. You saw more than I did."

He took the pencil. He stood on the running board beside her knee and bent over the page, and she watched him do it, slowly, the way she had been taught by her father and had taught everyone since, and had never once let anyone but herself put a mark in the book. He rubbed out the northeast corner of the cottonwoods with the eraser on the end of the pencil, carefully, a few scallops, until there was a gap. He drew the road through the gap. He drew the bin as a circle and the leg as a square beside it. He drew the three cables out from the leg to three x's, and the new line from the road to the bin, ruled against the edge of his phone.

"How high's the leg?"

"Hundred and ten, I'd say. Maybe a hundred and fifteen."

"Write a hundred and twenty," she said. "And box it."

He wrote it and boxed it. He looked at the line to the bin. "Thirty?"

"Thirty. Box it."

He boxed it. Then he put the dot for the new pole on the road, and he pressed it in, she saw him decide to, until the lead broke.

She took the pencil back from him and looked at the broken end. She got her pocketknife out and began to sharpen it, shaving toward herself over the open book so the curls fell into the gutter of the pages.

"Hollis," she called, without looking up. "Hold the loads."

Hollis lifted a hand from the nurse truck.

She closed the knife and put the pencil back in the spine. She held the truck keys out to Wesley, and when he took them she swung her boots into the cab and pulled the door shut and sat there on the passenger side with the ledger on her knee and two hundred and ten pages to go.

"Church road first," she said.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ā Iōanne Boydiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Boyd, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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