The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

I do not want to make my brother sound like a villain in a picture show. He was not. He lived a mile down the road. He checked on her. He fixed her furnace twice the winter before.

He wanted her safe, and he wanted the place simpler. He was scared of the day he would drive by and find her down by that tank with a broken hip and nobody around for miles.

I understood that. But what he did at that table was still wrong, and I knew it while I sat there.

He had already called the scrap man. He had already set the day. He was telling her, not asking her.

“Mom,” I said. “What do you want?”

She turned from the window. Her hands were folded on the oilcloth, and I saw her thumb rubbing the place where her wedding ring had worn a groove in her finger.

“It’s my place,” she said. “And it’s my windmill. If you can fix it, Merle, fix it. If you can’t, then Glen can have his man come.”

Glen let out a breath. “Mom.”

“That’s my say,” she said. “I’m not dead yet. I still get a say.”

And that was that. People ask me sometimes why I didn’t just tell Glen no and leave it, or call somebody to come fix it.

The answer is plain. It was Mom’s place and Mom’s say, and she said fix it if you can. So I had to be able to.

Glen pushed his chair back. He rinsed his cup at the sink, which is a thing our father taught both of us, and he set it in the drainer upside down.

“Her birthday’s five weeks out,” he said, not looking at me. “The man’s coming the Saturday after. If it’s not pumping by then, it comes down. That’s fair.”

“That’s fair,” I said.

He went out, and I heard his truck start and pull away down the lane, and Mom and I sat there a while without saying anything. The clock over the stove ticked. A heifer bawled out in the pasture.

“You don’t have to,” Mom said finally.

“I know it,” I said.

“Your daddy would have,” she said. “But you don’t have to.”

The next morning at breakfast I told my son. Kade was seventeen that spring, a junior, all elbows and appetite, and he had been after me for two years to let him climb something.

I told him what Glen said and what Mom said. He was eating his third piece of toast standing at the counter in the morning sun. He set it down.

“We can do that,” he said. “Can’t we?”

“It’s a lot of work,” I said. “We have to pull the pump. We have to take the old head off and put a new one up. That head is going to weigh near a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“So we’ll use a gin pole,” he said, which surprised me. Then he grinned. “I watch videos, Dad. I’m not stupid.”

His mother looked at me over his head and shook hers, but she was smiling. “You’ll harness him,” she said. “Every inch of that tower.”

“Every inch,” I said.

I called the dealer the next morning on my lunch break, sitting in the cab of the bucket truck.