The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

People were already in the yard. Tobias and his wife, in their good clothes. Velda with her cake on the hood of her car. The man from the feed store. A couple of families from church.

And Glen, standing by his truck with his hands in his pockets.

I didn’t go to him. I went to the tower in the gray T-shirt I’d changed into after church. I clipped my harness on at the base and climbed up the extension ladder to the first rung, then up to the platform, slow, because I wanted to be careful that day of all days.

Kade climbed up behind me and stopped partway, where he’d been the day before. I looked down at him, and he gave me a thumbs up.

At the top, I took the chain off the brake. I eased the furl lever.

The wind caught the tail first, Dad’s tail, and swung the head around into the south wind like a dog turning its nose to a smell.

Then the wheel began to turn.

Slow at first. Then faster. The new gears hummed. I could feel it through the tower, through my boots and my hands, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

Down below, the pump rod started going up and down. Up and down. I held my breath and watched the pipe at the stock tank.

Nothing for a minute. Then a cough. Then a gurgle. Then water.

It came out of that pipe in a stream as thick as my wrist and splashed into the steel stock tank, bright and cold, and caught the sun. I heard Velda say “Oh,” like she’d been pinched.

Mom’s red heifers had been standing around the empty end of the tank all morning.

Now they came over all at once, pushing at each other, and put their noses in and drank like they’d been waiting three years for it.

I stayed up top a minute to watch it run. Then I clipped down, and Kade clipped down behind me, and we came down off the extension ladder into the grass.

Mom hadn’t moved. She was standing at the end of the tank in her blue jacket, smiling a little, watching the water come.

Everybody else had stayed back up in the yard, and they had all gone quiet. The only sounds were the wind, and the wheel turning, and the water, and the heifers slurping.

Then Mom walked to the stock tank. She stood there a long minute with the heifers. Then she reached into the water.

She had Dad’s old tin cup in her hand, taken from the nail on the tower leg. It had hung there sixty years. Dad drank from it every time he checked the cattle, and nobody had touched it since he died.

She held it under the pipe until it was full and running over. Then she drank. She drank the whole cup slowly, with her eyes closed, the way you’d drink the last cup of something you’d never get again.

“That’s Daddy’s water,” she said. “That’s the water I was raised on. I’d know it anywhere.”

Then she filled the cup again. She turned around, and she held it out.

Not to me. To Glen.