The Windmill Mom Was Told to Scrap

He’d come up behind the crowd. I hadn’t seen him move. He stood there with his hands still in his pockets, looking at that cup like it might bite him.

“Come here, honey,” Mom said.

He came. Everybody watched him come. Nobody said a word. Tobias looked at the ground. Velda looked at her cake. Glen walked across that grass in front of the whole yard and took the cup from his mother’s hand.

“Drink it,” she said.

He drank it.

“Now,” she said. Her voice was soft, but everybody heard. “That windmill pumps. So it stays. And the barn stays, because your daddy built it, and I’m not done looking at it either.”

Glen nodded. He was holding the cup in both hands.

“You want a shop, you build it on your own ground,” she said. “You’ve got eighty acres, and it’s good flat ground. Put it there. I’ll help you pay for the slab if you need it. But not here. Not while I’m living.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Glen said. He hadn’t called her ma’am since he was a boy.

“And call that man with the torch and tell him not to come,” she said.

“I already did,” Glen said. He looked at me then, for the first time all day. “I called him last night. When I drove by and saw the boom truck.”

That was the first I knew of it. I hadn’t seen him drive by. I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did.

He handed the cup back to Mom. She hung it on the nail.

Then she put her arms around him, right there by the tank, and held him the way she used to hold us when we were small, with one hand on the back of his head.

“I know you were worried,” she said into his shoulder. “I know you love me. But you don’t get to decide when I’m done, Glen. The Lord decides that. And I’m not.”

He didn’t say anything. He just held on.

Then somebody, I think it was the feed store man, started clapping, and then everybody was. Not loud. Just a warm kind of clapping, the kind you’d give at a graduation.

Velda cut the cake on the hood of her car. It said Happy 80th Ilene in blue frosting, and there was a little windmill on it that she’d drawn herself with a toothpick, and it was not a very good windmill, and it was the best cake I ever ate.

People stood around in the yard all afternoon. Nobody wanted to leave. They kept walking over to the tank to watch the water come, the way you’d walk back to look at a new baby again.

Tobias stood by the tower for a long time with his hand on the leg, just feeling it run. When he finally came over to me, he shook my hand and didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

The old men told stories about every windmill in the county. Who had one. Who took theirs down. Who wished they hadn’t.

One of them said there used to be a windmill on every quarter section between here and the river.