West Wind, VII.

We see Bill only occasionally, when we stop by the antique shop that’s on the
main hot highway to Charlottesville. Usually he’s alone—his wife is dead—but
sometimes his son will be with him, or idling just outside in the yard. Once M.
bought a small glass ship from the boy, it had chips of colored glass for sails and
cost two dollars, the boy was greatly pleased.

Today Bill tells us—for a mockingbird has begun to sing— how a friend came
during the summer and filled a bowl with fruit from the cherry tree. Then,
leaving the bowl on the stoop, he went inside to sit with Bill at the kitchen table.
Together Bill and his friend watched the mockingbird come to the bowl, take the
cherries one by one, fly back across the yard and drop them under the branches
of the tree. When the bowl was empty the bird settled again in the leaves and
began to sing vigorously.

At the back of the shop and here and there on the dusty shelves are piled the
useless broken things one couldn’t ever sell—bits of rusty metal, and odd pieces
of china, a cup or a plate with a fraction of its design still clear: a garden, or a
span of country bridge leading from one happiness or another, or part of a house.
Once Bill told us, almost shyly, how much the boy is coming to resemble his
mother. Through the open window we can hear the mockingbird, still young, still
lucky, wild beak kissing and chuckling as it flutters and struts along the avenue
of song.