The Committee Opened Its Files And Found His Signed Promise

I did not answer Finch's demand that night.

I pinned a new seat cover to a classroom stool and pulled the cloth smooth. The blue chalk line ran straight across the back.

My student Ben watched me cut.

"You're mad," he said.

"Yes."

"You don't look mad."

"This cloth costs $24 a yard. It didn't do anything to me."

After class, I made two copies of the letter. One went into my tin. The other went to Elise.

She called from the committee office.

I wrote the time of her call on the envelope. Years of loading aircraft had left me with that habit. A memory could tell you something happened before lunch. A written time could tell you whether the order came before the check. Finch had spent years living in the space between those two things.

"Russell has no right to collect your papers for us," she said. "Our chair asked him to withdraw that demand."

"Did he?"

"He said you misunderstood it."

"It's one page. Hard to get lost."

The reunion group was a small nonprofit run by former crew members and their families. Finch chaired its history work. He didn't command anything except the microphone.

Still, people had been treating his rank like a standing order.

Elise gave me the board chair's name, Howard Beck. He had spent his service repairing radios. He apologized without explaining Finch to me.

That helped.

"We have a duty to check what we publish," Howard said. "Will you give us time?"

"If you stop passing his claim around while you check it."

"Agreed."

They put that promise in writing.

Della made a source list. My sheets had the same mission number as Mireya's log. The revisions followed in order. The release notes supported how we had received our copies.

None of that, she told us, meant she could simply stamp every word true.

"I can document the papers," she said. "People with the right training need to check the loading figures."

Mireya worked through them with a retired transport instructor named Walt Hsu. He had never served with Finch. He brought his old reference tables and spent an afternoon at my kitchen table.

"The first plan goes past the aft line," Walt said. "The final one stays inside it. Santana signed the final check."

He wrote his method down. Mireya signed a separate statement about what she had seen.

I requested the records I could obtain from my own service file and the old mission review. Della helped me identify the right record office. We sent copies of the release note and asked for the retained review, if it still existed.

Then we waited.

Finch didn't wait.

He called people. Several called me afterward, sounding as though they had stepped into the wrong house.

"Russell says this is about a medal," one man said.

"Ask him which medal I requested."

"Did you?"

"I requested that he stop calling me a coward."

The next Sunday, Finch came to my porch while I was carrying out a chair frame.

"You could have phoned me," he said.

"You had a microphone."

He glanced past me toward the kitchen.

"That old paperwork isn't worth what this will cost you."

"What will it cost?"

"Friends. Invitations. People don't enjoy a grievance."

I shifted the chair frame onto my hip.

"Then they shouldn't have put one in the booklet."

He offered to change the caption to Crew Overcame Early Loading Delays.

"No names," he said. "We both walk away."

"Who ordered the unsafe plan?"

"That's your opinion."

"Then let the records be checked."

He left without touching the chair.

Six weeks passed. Cottonwoods along the Boise River went bare. I taught a class on fixing loose springs. Mireya drove over from Nampa every Thursday with another meal I hadn't asked her to bring.

"Witness support," she called it.

During that time, the committee opened its project accounts. Howard gave both Finch and me copies of the material each had submitted about the disputed flight. Private addresses were covered. Nothing was voted on behind our backs.

The history contract called for $6,000. Finch had received $4,200 for his draft. The last $1,800 depended on a checked and approved final version.

"He was paid?" I asked Elise.

"The board hired him to research and write. I thought you knew."

I hadn't. He had called the display his gift to the squadron.

Payment alone proved nothing. Writing took work. But the contract required accurate source statements and return of the draft payment if a material source statement was knowingly false.

I read that sentence twice.

Clipped behind it was Finch's signed source certificate.

He had checked a box beside Reviewed Original Aircraft Crew Log.

Beneath it, he had written the number of Mireya's book.