Unnamed Crop Duster

This is "the pilot who dusts the rest of the cotton with weevil poison" - the 'rest' because Lucas refuses to let him "even fly his laden aeroplane thought the air" above the fields he works as a tenant farmer on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation (112-13). The "weevil" is the boll weevil, a beetle that is the natural enemy of cotton plants. Crop dusting - applying insecticide or fertilizer or seeds from an airplane - became a common agricultural practice in the 1920s.