I climbed up the windmill to fix the pump. It had quit pushing water into the stock tank, and out here past Cortez, no water means no cattle, so it is not a chore you put off. It is a long way up one of those old windmills, higher than you would think, and I do not love heights, but there is nobody else to do it. So I am up top wrestling with the pump rod, and I happen to look down. And from up there, at a height I do not guess a single soul had ever climbed to on my place, I could see the flat part of the roof of my own old barn below me. And on it, something I had never once seen from the ground. Could not have. You would have to be up on that windmill, looking down at just that angle, to ever spot it.
There was something laid out on that barn roof. Too regular to be nothing, too deliberate, too arranged. Somebody had put that there, up on a roof nobody ever climbs, in a spot you could only see from a height nobody ever reaches. I hung on that windmill and could not make it make sense, and I could not leave it either.
That evening I leaned a ladder against the barn and climbed up to have a look for myself. And when I got up on that roof and saw what it was, up close, I had to grab hold of the chimney to keep my footing.
It was letters. Big ones, laid out in flat river stones, painted white once, gone gray now, faded near into the shingles. Three words. HI DAD FLY.
The family before us had a boy, and that boy daddy was a crop duster, flew the fields all over this valley in a little yellow plane. And that boy had hauled a whole creek worth of stones up onto the barn roof, one bucket at a time, and laid them out and painted them, so that every single morning when his father took off and banked over the home place, he would look down and see his boy telling him hello, and telling him to fly.
I found the family, tracked them down two states over. The boy is a grown man now, near sixty. And when I told him what was still up on that barn roof, he went quiet on the phone for a long time. Then he told me his father crashed in that little plane the summer the boy was twelve, dusting a field one county over, and that he had laid those stones the spring before, and never had the heart to climb up and take them down before they moved away.
He saw it every morning. He told me so. He said the best part of flying was banking over the barn and reading what his boy left him. I did not know it was still up there. I did not know anybody would ever see it again.
I did not take those stones down. I painted them white again instead, fresh, and I keep them that way. Nobody flies over anymore to read them. But they are still there, an old boy love for his father, spelled out on a roof for the sky.