The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

Kade spent the afternoon telling people about the gin pole, and the leathers, and the boom truck, until his mother told him people had heard enough about leathers.

Mom sat in her lawn chair by the tank with her cake and her coffee, in her blue jacket, and watched the heifers drink.

She didn’t say much. She didn’t have to. Every so often she’d look up at the tail vane and smile.

Glen stayed. That surprised me too. He stayed until the very last car left, and then he helped me stack the lawn chairs and carry them to the shed.

When we were done, we stood by the tower, the two of us. The wind had died down some in the late afternoon, and the wheel was turning slow. The water was still coming, just slower.

“I didn’t think you could do it,” Glen said.

“I know you didn’t,” I said.

“I’m glad you did.”

I didn’t answer that right away. Then I told him about the tail. About Dad’s letters. About sixty years.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he asked if he could see them.

“They’re on the back side,” I said. “You’d have to climb.”

He looked up at the tower. He’s fifty years old, my brother, and he hasn’t climbed anything taller than a stepladder since high school. But he looked at it for a long while.

“Next week,” he said. “When it’s calm. You’ll take me up?”

“I’ll take you up,” I said.

And I did. The next Saturday, a calm still morning with no wind at all, I furled the wheel and harnessed my brother up in the spare harness from the co-op. I checked every buckle twice, the way I had with Kade.

Mom came out with her coffee and sat in her lawn chair by the tank. Kade came too. He said he wanted to see it.

I think he wanted to see his Uncle Glen scared, but he was kind enough not to say it.

Glen was scared. He went up slow, slower than Kade had, and he hugged the tower twice on the way. But he went up.

And when he got to the top, he looked at the tail vane a long time, and then he put his hand on it.

When he came back down, his eyes were red. He didn’t say anything about it, and nobody asked.

The windmill has been pumping two years now. The heifers drink out of that tank every day, and Mom doesn’t haul water anymore.

She walks out to the tank with her cane in the mornings and drinks a cup of water from the pipe.

Glen built his shop on his own ground. It’s a nice shop, forty by sixty, and he’s proud of it. Mom helped with the slab like she said she would.

And every spring, the first calm Saturday in May, we go out to Mom’s and service the windmill. We change the oil in the gear case. We check the bolts. We look at the leathers if we need to.

I climb. Kade climbs. And Glen, who never climbed anything, stands at the bottom with both hands on Mom’s old aluminum extension ladder, holding it steady while his nephew goes up.

He’s always the one holding the ladder now.