Kelle Groom

In Perpetuity

1782

1.         Thomas must be sweating from helping to move the windmill. Even with the 40 oxen, yoked in pairs. A wooden block the length of two oxen set on each pair’s backs, just below their necks. Held in place with wooden bolts and middle screws. The oxen don’t seem to mind. Noses the mild pink of smushed roses, the oxen chew slowly as cows, both the same species: Bos taurus. But oxen are males castrated at 4 years old, trained for strength. Today, docile in their blocks, twenty pairs are lined up as in a parade.

2.         I ate a windmill cookie: cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg. Shingled with an open door.

3.         This windmill originally built in 1635 between Sandwich and Barnstable. Bought a century later and moved to Bass River in South Yarmouth. Now, after 32 years, Capt. Samuel Farris has bought it. The oxen and the men, including Thomas, will move it to Farris’ land up the street to a large, empty field.

4.         The oxen are getting restless, veering into the grass to eat it. Each weighs 3 tons. The two millstones weigh three and a half tons. Like a millstone around your neck. The saying makes no sense. The stone around your neck would break you in two, like a cookie.

5.         Thomas doesn’t mill the grain. He is Wampanoag, recorded in the census as a laborer, a fisherman. His family calls him a teacher. His obituary will say he was a self-educated lawyer who read much and thought more.

6.         Thomas is 35 years old, married to Jane for 14 years. Three of his six children already born: Susannah, Phebe, Thomas. John, my fourth great-grandfather will be born in two years. Then Jinne/Jane in 1787, and Salle/Sally in 1789.

7.         I look for him in the windmill to see what he saw. His initials painted in black with the date, high on a beam near the stairwell. Before or after the move. Ornate “T” with bird wings; “G” familiar as my own last name. This is my hand. A letter sent 243 years ago. 

8.         A damsel drives the runner stone, a shoe is a chute. The bedstone does not move. A broad box with a basin on top. Frame resting below the open window, bright blurred white light. The world outside a heaven or outer space.

9.         On the wall around the corner from his letters and the year, an iron circle engraved with ornament or rust hangs on the wall. Nails empty of the things they held. Beside his initials, a sharply square-cut charcoal beam with two nails has cut through a larger plank. As if pushed up through the earth, breaking the softer wood in two.

10.       The windmill octagonal with a door that in daylight opens into darkness. Gray shingled with a cornered cap. A smock with eight sides. Three-story tower with 54-foot sails. In the future, it will be almost completely covered in moss. Verdant as the green knight, tendrils curling.

11.       Windmill wings so wide and low, one has to be aware. Boys would climb a wing and ride it upside down, the full circle, clinging to it like vines on a trellis. When the windmill was given to Henry Ford on his 80th birthday by the Cape Cod Automotive Dealers in November 1915, dismantled and reassembled in Dearborn, Michigan, it was placed on a stone base, raising the wings above everyone’s head.

12.       A northern sky calms. Evenly cloudy with mist or fog that can come in off the ocean so fast you’ve disappeared before you know it. You are fog. Hair drenched, face streaming. But today it hasn’t enveloped everything, today one wing is a ladder.

13.       In 1782, there were 15,546 people living on Cape Cod, including approximately 250 Wampanoags, and Thomas Greenough was one.

14.       A wartime economy. On Cape Cod, people learned of the Declaration of Independence two weeks later, from the newspapers delivered by ship from Boston.

15.       Before you can begin, you have to grease the bearings: climb the ladder, use lard. Make sure the wings are turned into the wind. If not, you have to change the direction with the wheel. In the turning of the wheel which turns the sails, the wind sounds like children playing and calling. But the field is empty. It’s just one man spinning a wheel.

16.       In 1778, this town of Yarmouth authorized the selectmen to sell or lease the Indian Reservation Lands, previously given in perpetuity, to reimburse the town treasury for expenses of smallpox care for the Wampanoags. Most of whom died.

17.       When the wings are facing into the wind, it’s time to unfurl the sailcloth. Untie the ropes. A woman’s voice is almost a song, another language. Tie the sails on.

18.       Then you can release the break. It moves inside the mill like a tectonic plate. And the cog begins to move in a circle, turn the sails. Beeswax keeps the wooden cogs smooth.

19.       The town selectmen voted that all their [Wampanoag] effects be sold to pay their charge of having the small pox and the land formerly belonging to the Indians to live upon to be sold also or leased.

20.       A sack of grain is lifted by a system of ropes and twirls slowly in the air like a person being airlifted by a helicopter.

21.       Voted that the Selectmen bring a Writ of Ejectment against Thomas Greenough for making improvements on the land that was laid down for the Indian inhabitants to live upon contrary to the direction of the Selectmen, March 30, 1779.

22.       Feed the grain into the eye of the stone. With the milling now engaged, the round and colonnaded top of the shaft circles like a Top of the World restaurant from which you can see everything.