The Inn windmill

The Inn windmill is a damaged structure behind The Inn whose ceaseless motion does no useful work. It first marks the frustration and physical vulnerability of Johnny Gordon, and later remains in view as the town turns the site of his suicide into a public curiosity. Across these appearances, the mill’s rotation persists while the lives around it change, giving the novel a concrete image of futile effort and lingering memory.

Construction and Futile Motion

The windmill stands atop a shed behind The Inn, which is attached to it. The ratchet and chain that should pull the fin and turn the mill’s face out of the wind-stream had broken long before Johnny Gordon and Rose Gordon Burbank moved to Beech. In both summer and winter, the wind drives the blades anyway: the shaft moves an eccentric mechanism slowly up and down, though it is attached to nothing and does no work.

The mill’s failure is audible as well as visible. It squeaks so painfully that the infrequent transients staying in town have difficulty sleeping. Its motion is therefore not simply useless; it imposes itself on the place, an ongoing disturbance that residents cannot readily ignore or repair.

Johnny Gordon’s Attempt to Stop It

After a sharp complaint about the noise, Johnny Gordon tries to stop the mill. He props an unsteady ladder against the shed and climbs up to work out how it operates. A sudden, mean shift in the wind turns the flying blades against him, tearing his coat and cutting his shoulder. He leaves the windmill alone after the injury.

That failed attempt gives the structure a personal history: Johnny cannot master the machine that troubles the people at The Inn, and its motion continues after he retreats. The narration later makes the parallel explicit, recalling that Johnny had not conquered the mill and that it had turned on him and cut him long before his brilliant son, Peter Gordon, was born. The image connects the mill’s pointless labor to a wound that precedes the family’s later grief without suggesting that Johnny’s injury itself causes what follows.

The Shed and Peter’s Private World

The shed beneath the whirling mill becomes a markedly different kind of space for Peter Gordon. A small wood stove makes it comfortable, though it smells of smoke and kerosene. Peter builds shelves there for Johnny’s medical books, alongside stuffed gophers and rabbits, beakers, retorts, and other chemical equipment. Away from the taunts and jibes he faces at school, he withdraws into this room and its work.

The juxtaposition is telling: above Peter’s concentrated private world, the windmill continues its purposeless turning. The shed holds the books and materials through which Peter pursues knowledge, while the mill embodies motion detached from productive purpose. The contrast gives the structure a recurring place in the family setting, rather than leaving it as a mere background detail.

After Johnny’s Death

After Johnny’s suicide, neighbors and tourists identify The Inn as the place where it happened. Customers in the saloon look across at the turning windmill and watch Rose Gordon Burbank as she goes out to take clothes from the line or water flowers, hoping to see whether she and Peter bear visible traces of the tragedy. The mill’s familiar movement thus accompanies a new and invasive public attention to the household.

The Inn later becomes an eating house and is painted red and renamed The Inn / Red Mill. The old stigma gradually loses force as the town’s circumstances change: businesses close or fail, new bartenders arrive, and passing salesmen may know nothing of the earlier story. The windmill nevertheless remains a visible feature of the place. Its broken mechanism outlasts Johnny’s attempt to stop it and the immediate notoriety of his death, joining mechanical futility to the town’s imperfect, changing memory.