The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

That way you can lift the head straight up off the mast pipe and swing it clear.

Mom’s old tractor was on the other end of the rope down below, with Kade driving it. I had him take up slack an inch at a time, and I called down every move.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. Stop.”

The old head came off the mast pipe with a groan. It was heavier than I thought, and it swung.

My heart went up into my throat for a second. Then it settled, and I guided it out past the platform.

“Down slow,” I called, and Kade backed the tractor up a foot at a time, and the old head came down out of the sky and landed in the grass as gentle as a hen settling on eggs.

Mom clapped from her lawn chair. Just once, two hands. That was all.

The tail vane had come off with the head. I hadn’t thought about it, but it was attached to the old head, and now it lay flat in the grass, a long sheet of painted steel with the paint mostly gone.

Kade was the one who found it. He was coiling rope when he stopped and squatted down and looked at the tail.

“Dad,” he said. “Come look at this.”

I came down. It took me a few minutes, unclipping and clipping, the way I’d told him. When I got to the bottom he was still squatting there, and he pointed.

On the back side of the tail vane, the side that faces away from the house, there were letters.

Somebody had scratched them into the steel with a nail or a screwdriver, and then painted over them, and the paint had worn away and left them clear.

R.G. plus I.H. 1966.

R.G. was my father. I.H. was my mother, before she was a Gade. The year they were married.

I hadn’t known. In all those years, I’d never been up there close enough, or looked at the right side.

Dad must have climbed that tower right after the wedding and scratched it in where nobody but God and the hawks would see it.

I stood there with my hands on my hips, and I couldn’t say anything. Kade looked up at me, and he didn’t say anything either. He’s a good boy that way.

Then I walked over to Mom’s lawn chair.

“Mom,” I said. “You need to come see something.”

She got up slow. She has a bad hip, the left one, and she walks with a cane on the uneven ground. I took her arm, and we went across the grass together to where the tail lay.

Kade stood back. Mom looked down at it for a long time.

Then she put her cane in my hand and got down on her knees in the grass, which I had not seen her do outside of church in years.

She put her fingers on the letters. She traced them one by one, the R and the G and the little cross he’d made for the word plus.

“He told me he put something up there,” she said. “The week after the wedding. He said it was a surprise, and I’d find it someday. I asked and asked, and he never would tell me. I thought he was teasing.”