What the Mill Kept

They closed the mill the year I turned nineteen.For eighty years it had told the town the time —the seven whistle, noon, the half-five out —so that we set our clocks not by the sunbut by the men who set their lives by it.When it went quiet, something in the airthat we had never noticed being therewas suddenly, enormously, not there.The birds came back. That was the strange part. Birdsyou couldn't hear before, all down the row,as though the town had been too loud to sing inand no one told the birds until the end.My father stood in the yard the first whole morningand listened to a blackbird like a manreceiving news he wasn't sure was good.He'd given it his hands, his back, his hearing.It gave him, at the end, a bird. He wept.I never told a soul. I'm telling you.