The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

“It’s scrap metal, Mom,” my brother Glen said, and he set his coffee cup down on her kitchen table like that settled it. “It comes down with the barn. The man’s coming with his torch the Saturday after your birthday.”

Mom did not answer him right away. She looked out the window over the sink, past the yard light pole, to where the old windmill stood with its wheel locked and quiet.

It had been quiet for three years. The wheel had not turned since the spring the gears started grinding, and Mom had furled it herself one windy morning before it could shake itself apart.

I was sitting at the end of the table with my boots still on. I had come by after my shift with the co-op to check on the heifers, and I had walked into the middle of this.

“He’s offering three hundred dollars for the tower and the head,” Glen went on. “That’s more than it’s worth. Then I can pour the slab for the shop by June, and you won’t have to look at a dead windmill anymore.”

“I like looking at it,” Mom said.

“You like looking at a lot of things that don’t work,” Glen said. He said it kindly, the way you would say it to a child, and that was somehow worse than if he had said it mean.

My name is Merle Gade. I am forty-five years old, and I have climbed power poles for the rural electric co-op in western Nebraska for twenty-two years.

Glen is five years older than me, and he has always been the one with the plan.

Mom is Ilene Gade. She was seventy-nine that spring, a widow for eleven years, and she still ran six red heifers on the home place out in the Sandhills, because she said a farm without cattle on it was just a yard.

The windmill was hers in a way nothing else on the place was. Her daddy put it up in 1946, the year she was born. She grew up hearing it creak at night outside her bedroom window.

“Glen,” I said. “Has anybody looked at it? Really looked?”

“I looked at it,” he said. “The gears are stripped. The pump’s dry. It’s been dead three years, Merle. Nobody makes parts for something that old.”

“Aermotor still makes parts,” I said. “They still make the whole head. That’s a 702. You can order one.”

Glen laughed. It was not a mean laugh, but it was the laugh he used when he thought I was being soft about something. “And who’s going to put it up there? You? On your days off?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“For what?” he said. “So she can keep hauling water to a tank she doesn’t need for heifers she ought to sell?”

That was the part that stung, because that was the part that was true. For three years, Mom had been hauling water to those heifers in a three hundred gallon poly tank on the back of her pickup.

She filled it at the hydrant by the house and drove it out to the stock tank every other day. At seventy-nine. Glen had seen her doing it. So had I.