The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

The well was about seventy feet deep. In the Sandhills the water is not far down, which is why there were windmills on every section once.

Pulling seventy feet of pipe and rod by hand is not a job for two men, though.

So I called Tobias. Tobias was Mom’s nearest neighbor to the east, eighty-one years old, and he had pulled more wells than anybody in the county. He still had his pipe pulling rig on an old flatbed.

He came out that same morning. He did not say much. He looked at the tower, looked at Mom in her lawn chair, and nodded once like he had already been told the whole story, which he probably had.

“Glen said it was scrap,” he said to me.

“Glen said a lot of things,” I said.

He snorted, and that was all either of us said about Glen that day.

We set up Tobias’s rig over the well and pulled the pump rod first, length by length, unscrewing each one and laying them out on sawhorses in the grass. Kade worked the wrenches. Tobias ran the rig.

Then the drop pipe, all seventy feet of it, and at the bottom of it the brass cylinder that holds the leathers. When it came up out of the casing, Tobias held it up to the sun.

“There’s your trouble,” he said.

The leathers were shot. They were dried out and curled and cracked like an old boot left in a barn. Without leathers, the plunger just slides up and down in the cylinder and doesn’t lift any water at all.

“Soak the new ones overnight,” Tobias told Kade. “In a bucket of water. Don’t put them in dry or they’ll tear the first day. Your grandpa knew that. Everybody used to know that.”

Kade wrote it on his hand with a pen, which made Tobias laugh, the first time I ever heard him laugh.

We left the pipe laid out on the sawhorses and the leathers soaking in a bucket on Mom’s back step. She checked on that bucket three times before supper like it was a pan of bread rising.

The next Saturday was the head. That was the part I had been dreading, not because of the climbing, but because of the weight, and because my son would be up there with me.

I went up first with a rope and a block. At the top of the tower, just under the head, there’s a little wooden platform.

Her daddy’s boards had long since rotted, and Dad had put new ones in before he died.

I clipped off to the tower and looked around. You could see clear across the hills from up there, gold and rolling and empty, with the road a thin line and a few cattle like specks.

I took the wheel off first. It comes off in sections on a 702, and each section is bolted to the arms.

I unbolted them one at a time and lowered them down on the rope to Kade on the ground.

Then I lashed the gin pole to the tower leg, a length of heavy pipe that stuck up above the head with the block hung at the top.