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The magnolias were blooming at Beaumont Plantation, which was to say they were blooming with the particular desperation of flowers that know they are growing in soil that has been fed by too many things that should not have been composted. Scarlett Beaumont stood on the porch of the main house and watched the white petals fall like snow that had forgotten what winter was, and she thought about how the South had always been like those flowers: beautiful and desperate and growing in ground that would have been better left untouched.

She was twenty-seven, lean and stubborn and possessed of a skill that her father had never understood and her mother had warned her about: she could look at an airplane and see it the way a sculptor looks at a block of marble, as something waiting to be revealed. Aircraft photography had not been a respectable pursuit for a plantation heiress in 1939 Mississippi, but Scarlett had never been particularly interested in respectability. She was interested in truth, and the truth was that the machines that had been built for war were the most honest things she had ever seen, which was not high praise coming from a woman who had spent her life surrounded by lies dressed up as tradition.

Her father had died in the winter of 1942, and with him had gone the man who kept the plantation running on borrowed money and inherited pride and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the world had moved on from plantations the way it had moved on from horse-drawn carriages and candlelit dinner parties. And with him had gone the man who had kept William Harlan away.

Will Harlan had been the closest thing Scarlett had to a brother, though they were not related, which was the kind of complication that the Beaumont and Harlan families had treated with a mixture of amusement and outrage for three generations. Will was a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps, all Southern grace and American precision, the kind of man who could fly a P-40 Warhawk and recite Longfellow at the same dinner table without skipping a beat. He had come home to Natchez in the fall of 1942 after his father died, the patriarch of a family that was more titled than wealthy, and he had not been able to leave. The estate was in disrepair, the debts were mounting, and the family needed him, which was the kind of chain that had held Southern families in place long before the war had given the rest of the country the excuse to slip the leash.

Scarlett had visited him once, in the spring of 1943, driving her Ford down the back roads of Mississippi in the humid heat that arrives in May like a promise the weather keeps making and then breaking. She had found him sitting on the porch of the Harlan estate, looking at the sky the way other men look at women they want, with a particular concentration that suggested he was reading something written in a language only he could see.

They sat on the porch together and drank sweet tea that had been sweetened by the particular bitterness of knowing that the person you are sitting with will not be there tomorrow, and Will told her about the mission he was being asked to join, a suicide run against a supply line that no one in the high command had the courage to name as a suicide run because there were politicians who needed to believe that no American mission was suicidal and Scarlett had wanted to tell them that every mission that sends young men into the sky to be shot at is a suicide run dressed up in flag-draped language and the word suicide is just the honest word for what the flag is trying to disguise.

She left him on that porch and did not come back. The war was happening too fast, the world was changing too fast, and Mississippi was changing even faster, becoming something neither the old South nor the new America but something in between, something uncomfortable and hot and full of the scent of magnolias that were blooming over graves that no one had the energy to maintain anymore.

In 1944, Will Harlan disappeared. The official record said he had been transferred to a training facility in Alabama. The unofficial record, which Scarlett heard from a woman at the Natchez post office who heard it from a woman at the general store who heard it from a man who had served with Will in basic training, said that Will had volunteered for a mission that no one else would fly, a deep-penetration strike against enemy territory that was understood to be a one-way trip, and that he had flown it because he had nothing left at home that was worth staying for.

Scarlett did not believe the unofficial record. She believed something worse, which was that Will had not volunteered for a mission at all, that he had simply left, that the estate had become a prison he could not escape because he was a Harlan and Harlans did not abandon their families, so he had chosen to be abandoned by the sky instead.

Five years passed. The plantation grew more dilapidated. The magnolias kept blooming. Scarlett kept photographing airplanes because photographs were the only things that did not ask her to be a Beaumont and carry the weight of a name that was becoming a burden rather than a legacy. She made a name for herself in aviation circles, which was a strange thing for a Mississippi woman to do, but she had a gift for seeing what mattered and a refusal to apologize for seeing it at all.

She was at a military airbase in southern Mississippi in the autumn of 1949, filming a documentary about the base's history, when she saw him.

He was sitting on a bench outside the enlisted men's barracks, wearing a suit that might have been expensive once and was now the kind of expensive that looks poor because no one has maintained it, and his right leg was extended in front of him in a way that suggested it was not fully his anymore. The amputation was below the knee, and he was wearing a prosthetic that was new enough to be uncomfortable but old enough to have been tried on too many times to be new. His face had changed in the ways that faces change when a body has been broken and reassembled by surgeons who were doing their best and doctors who were doing what they could and time, which is the most indifferent force in the universe, doing the rest.

Scarlett approached him slowly, the way one approaches a wild animal that might recognize you or might not, and she stopped in front of him and waited for him to look up.

He did look up. His eyes were the same. They had always been the same, and this was the thing that made her heart stop, because eyes are the one part of a person that do not age or change or hide, and Will Harlan's eyes were exactly what she remembered: bright and knowing and full of a particular kind of Southern grief that is not loud or dramatic but is constant, like the heat of a Mississippi summer that arrives every year like clockwork and stays until it is time to leave.

Scarlett, he said, and her name in his mouth was a welcome and a question and an apology all at once.

Will, she said, and his name was the same.

They sat on the bench together beneath a live oak whose branches hung low and heavy with Spanish moss that looked like gray lace draped over a dead man's shoulders. Scarlett could smell the magnolias from the plantation, carried on a wind that had traveled thirty miles of flat southern land without losing any of its scent, and she thought about how the South preserves things that the rest of the world has moved on from, how the magnolias still bloom and the Spanish moss still hangs and the grief is still there, unchanged and unchangedable.

I have been back, she said. Twice. The estate is falling apart. The roof leaks in the west wing. The magnolias are still blooming, which seems like a joke told by a God who has forgotten that he is supposed to be funny.

I know, Will said. I walked through the house before I left for Alabama. It smells like my father's study, which is to say it smells like cedar and cigar smoke and the particular kind of failure that comes from inheriting a house that is bigger than your means and smaller than your pride.

She looked at him sharply. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, his face turned toward the sky, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something that would change everything.

What happened to you, Will? she asked, and the question was not accusatory but was not gentle either. It was the kind of question that comes from a woman who has spent five years wondering about a man who had disappeared into the sky and come back without his leg and with something else missing that no amputation could explain.

Will turned to look at her, and in his eyes she saw the particular transparency of a man who has stopped pretending he has anything left to hide.

I flew a mission, he said, and the words were flat and simple, which made them heavier than any description could have been. It was 1944, and we were sent to hit a rail yard in southern France, and we were told it would be light flak and maybe some fighters, and we all knew that no mission sent alone is a light mission, that when the high command sends one plane instead of a formation, they are not sending a mission. They are sending a sacrifice.

Scarlett said nothing. The magnolias were falling around them, white petals landing on the bench beside them like small prayers that had been answered and then forgotten.

I got shot over the target, Will continued. The plane went down in a field outside Lyon. I bailed out. I was caught by French resistance fighters who patched me up and hid me and then turned me over to the Americans when the front moved close enough that they could do it without getting themselves killed. I was in a hospital in Paris for three months. They took my leg in Marseilles. I was in a hospital in Marseilles for three months. I was sent home. I was sent here. And I have been sitting on this bench every day since I got here, watching the planes take off and land and trying to understand why I am still here when the men I flew with are not.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bundle of letters, wrapped in a cloth that was worn thin from handling, and placed it on the bench between them.

I wrote you, he said. Every week for two years. I wrote you from the hospital in Paris, from the hospital in Marseilles, from the hospital in Alabama, from the train home, from the house in Natchez. I wrote you about the mission and the flight and the falling and the hospital and the leg and the pain and the silence and the way that silence grows inside you like a second body that you carry around and call yourself but is not yourself at all. I wrote you sixty-two letters. I kept every one of them because I did not know whether to send them, and then I did not know whether I still wanted to, and then the letters became a record of a man who existed in a space between being alive and being dead, and I kept them because they were the only proof I had that I had existed at all.

Scarlett unwrapped the bundle carefully, the way one unwraps something sacred, and held the stack of letters in her hands. They were thick, the paper yellowed at the edges from humidity and handling, and she could feel the weight of sixty-two weeks of a man's life compressed into paper and ink.

Why did you never send them? she asked.

Because I did not want you to carry them, Will said. I did not want you to carry my grief as well as your own. I did not want to be another thing that Beaumont Plantation demanded from you, another weight on top of the house and the land and the name and the magnolias and the ghosts. I wanted you to be free of me, Scarlett, because you were already carrying the South, and the South does not let go, and I could not ask you to carry me too.

Scarlett held the letters against her chest and felt the weight of them through her dress, and she thought about how the South preserves things by refusing to let them go, how it holds onto grief and tradition and magnolias and plantations and the names of men who are dead and the names of men who are gone and the names of men who are sitting on benches with missing legs and full hearts.

I have been photographing airplanes for five years, she said quietly. Every one of them. I photograph them because they are the only things I know that can fly, and flying is the only thing I know that can get away from a place that wants to hold you forever. But I have never gotten away. I have never left Mississippi. I have never stopped smelling magnolias and feeling the heat and carrying the name Beaumont like a stone in my pocket. And I have never stopped thinking about a fighter pilot who sat on a porch in 1943 and looked at the sky the way other men look at women they want, and I have never known whether to be angry about that or grateful.

Will reached out and took her hand, and his fingers were thin and warm and exactly what she had expected them to be, which was the most surprising thing of all.

I think it was both, he said.

She looked at him then, really looked at him, past the prosthetic and the thinning hair and the suit that was trying to be expensive and the face that was trying to be what it had been, and she saw the man who had sat on her porch in 1943 and looked at the sky and saw something written in a language only he could read.

Come to the plantation with me, she said. Not as a request. As an acknowledgment. The roof leaks. The magnolias are blooming. The house is too big for one person and too small for two. But I would rather have it too small for two than too big for one.

Will looked at the letters in his hands, the sixty-two letters that were a record of a man's existence in the space between being alive and being dead, and then he looked at Scarlett and then he looked at the sky.

I will need to send a telegram, he said.

That is all, she said, and they sat on the bench beneath the live oak until the magnolias had finished falling and the evening had begun to cool the particular southern heat that arrives every day like a promise and keeps it for as long as you will let it.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: