The grease gun was still cold in my hand when I walked back from the machinery shed and saw Clara standing out there in the middle of the south forty. Her knuckles were red from the autumn wind, and she had a strip of yellow gingham pinned between her teeth while she knotted it around the rusty wire shoulder of that dummy I had welded together out of scrap rebar and old drainpipe. I didn’t want to yell at her because the sun was already dropping behind the timberline and my knees were acting up bad from the damp, but I had put three solid hours into building a proper nuisance to keep the grackles out of our winter wheat, and she was turning the whole thing into a church social.<\/p>\n
“Clara,” I said, wiping my palm down my thigh where the denim was already stiff with grease. “The crows don’t care if a fence post wears polka dots.”<\/p>\n
She didn’t take the cloth out from between her lips. She just pulled the knot tight, gave the scrap a little tug to make sure the wind wouldn’t take it, and then turned around with her chin stuck out the way it always did when she figured she was smarter than me. Which, to be fair, was about ninety percent of the time since her mother passed.<\/p>\n
“You built a skeleton, Daddy,” she said, her voice small and dry against the rustle of the dry corn husks. “You wanted something dead to scare the live things. That’s not how any of this works.”<\/p>\n
“It’s iron and barbed wire,” I told her, stepping out past the tractor tire. “It’s supposed to look mean.”<\/p>\n
“It just looks sad,” she said, and walked right past me toward the house with her empty basket swinging against her knee.<\/p>\n
I stood there by the edge of the furrow for a long time. The wind off the river was carrying that sharp, metallic smell of frost that usually means you can kiss your late tomatoes goodbye. The scarecrow looked ridiculous. I had welded a jagged piece of old harrow disk for the head, with two rusted carriage bolts for eyes that stared out across the dirt like a pair of dead headlights. I had crammed an old wool coat of my uncle’s over the wire frame, stuffed it full of wet marsh hay that was already starting to sour in the damp air. It was ugly. It was the kind of ugly that makes you want to look away because it reminds you too much of how thin things are getting around the county.<\/p>\n
And the birds knew it. That was the humiliating part.<\/p>\n
By Thursday morning, three dozen black crows were sitting right on the harrow-disk shoulders of my masterpiece, tearing tufts of sour hay out of the ribs and dropping them into the dirt like they were remodeling the place. I stood on the back porch with my coffee mug, watching them through the screen door, and I could feel my jaw tightening up until my back teeth ached. I had spent sixteen dollars on welding rods and a whole afternoon dragging that iron frame out into the mud, and the local wildlife was using it for a bus stop.<\/p>\n
Clara came down the stairs with her coat already buttoned up to her chin, carrying a cardboard shoe box stuffed with scraps she had salvaged from the sewing basket behind the pantry. She didn’t say a word about the crows. She just walked right past me, poured herself half a cup of lukewarm chicory, and looked out the kitchen window.<\/p>\n
“You’re going to let them eat the whole middle out of that coat,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The metal’s too heavy to move by myself,” I said. “Leave it be.”<\/p>\n
“I’m not moving it,” she said, setting her cup down on the oilcloth. “I’m fixing it.”<\/p>\n
She didn’t wait for me to agree. By noon she was back out in the field with a roll of baling twine, an old pair of tin snips, and a length of faded blue curtain material that your Aunt Mae had left behind in the trunk after the flood back in ninety-four. I watched from the cab of the combine while I was greasing the grease fittings. I told myself I wasn’t watching, but you can’t help seeing a girl work when she’s moving like she’s got a fire under her petticoat.<\/p>\n
She didn’t take my ugly coat off. She just wrapped that blue curtain material around the ribs right over the wool, twisting the fabric until it puffed out like a skirt or an apron, something wide and loose that caught every stray gust of air coming off the bottoms. Then she took a strip of white feed sack and tied it around the harrow-disk head, right across the eyes, so it looked like a blindfold or a bandage. And then she hung three empty tin cans from the left sleeve, old tomato tins with the bottoms punched out so they clattered together when the wire shivered.<\/p>\n
When she finished, she stood back with her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets and stared at it for a minute. The sun broke through the gray cloud cover just then, hitting that faded blue cloth until it looked almost silver against the dark timber.<\/p>\n
“There,” she said when she climbed back up the porch steps. “Now it looks like something you aren’t supposed to mess with.”<\/p>\n
I laughed, but it was a dry, ugly sound. “A ghost in an apron. That’ll terrify the crows.”<\/p>\n
“Just wait,” she said.<\/p>\n
The next morning, I didn’t even make it to the tractor before I saw them.<\/p>\n
The crows weren’t on the fence. They weren’t on the wire shoulders. There were about fifty of them sitting down in the stubble thirty yards away, all facing the middle of the field like a congregation waiting for a sermon that never starts. Not one of them was landing. The wind caught that blue curtain material, and it didn’t just flap, it billowed out wide, slow and heavy, and those empty tin cans gave a dull, hollow *clink-clink* that sounded just enough like a walking man to make them nervous.<\/p>\n
The scarecrow wasn’t mean anymore. It was… well, it was something else. It had an outline that kept changing every time the air shifted. It looked like a woman standing out in the rain waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming. It looked human enough to make you second-guess yourself if you caught it out of the corner of your eye while you were walking the fence line after dark.<\/p>\n
“Well,” I muttered, standing by the pump with my coffee cup getting cold in my hand. “I’ll be.”<\/p>\n
By Saturday, the rumor had reached the feed store down in town.<\/p>\n
Ray Henderson pulled his pickup right up to our mailbox, killed the engine, and leaned his elbow out the window with his hat pushed back on his forehead. He didn’t even get out, just sat there squinting across our winter wheat like he was trying to read a brand on a stray calf three fields over.<\/p>\n
“Vernon,” he called out as I came around the side of the barn with a milk bucket. “What in the tarnation do you got standing out in your bottom?”<\/p>\n
“It’s just a scarecrow,” I said, walking over to the fence and leaning my forearms on the cedar rail.<\/p>\n
“That ain’t no scarecrow,” Ray said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds. “That looks like some kind of modern art piece they put up in Peoria when the state grants come through. My Martha seen it from the back road yesterday and made me turn the truck around just to look at it twice.”<\/p>\n
“Clara dressed it up,” I admitted, feeling a little foolish. “The crows were treating the old one like a club-house.”<\/p>\n
Ray squinted harder, his eyes narrowed up against the glare off the tin cans. “Well, it’s working. I ain’t seen a single crow on your acreage all week, and mine are eating me out of house and home over by the creek. You selling tickets?”<\/p>\n
I thought he was joking. I laughed and told him he could come out and take pictures for free if he had nothing better to do on a Saturday. But Ray wasn’t joking. By Monday afternoon, there were two cars parked by the gravel turnout near our south gate. People I didn’t even know, folks from up toward Taylorville and down past the river, were standing by the fence with little pocket cameras, pointing at that old drainpipe frame like it was something holy.<\/p>\n
I found Clara sitting at the kitchen table that evening with a pair of scissors and three more feed sacks spread out around her like fallen leaves. She had a pencil behind her ear and a look on her face like she had just figured out how to fix a broken plow with a piece of wire and some spit.<\/p>\n
“They’re taking pictures,” I said, dropping my cap on the washstand.<\/p>\n
“I know,” she said without looking up. “A lady from the *Register* asked if she could sketch it for the county section.”<\/p>\n
“Clara, it’s just old rags on a pipe.”<\/p>\n
“It’s not rags anymore, Daddy,” she said, looking up at me with those sharp gray eyes she got from her grandmother. “People are tired of looking at things that want to hurt them. They see enough of that on the news and down at the grain elevator. They want to look at something that doesn’t make sense, but still looks like it cared enough to get dressed up.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t know what to say to that. I just sat down across from her and watched the way her fingers moved over the denim, steady and sure, cutting little strips that didn’t look like much until you saw how they hung together in the light.<\/p>\n
By the end of the month, the whole thing had gotten entirely out of hand.<\/p>\n
We didn’t sell tickets, exactly, but Clara started making little ones, three-foot tall versions built out of willow switches and scrap ribbon that she set up on wooden blocks by the mailbox. At first, she just wanted to see if she could do it. Then a woman from a gift shop over in Springfield drove out in a Buick the color of an old turnip and bought twelve of them for forty-eight dollars apiece.<\/p>\n
Forty-eight dollars. For bundles of dried grass and old flour sacks.<\/p>\n
I stood there on the porch holding a roll of damp bills while the Buick backed down our gravel drive, kicking up dust that settled right on the unwashed windshield of my truck. I looked out across the south forty where the big one was standing, its blue skirt snapping in the evening breeze, throwing a long shadow across the rows of wheat that were finally coming up clean and green without a single black feather anywhere near them.<\/p>\n
“She’s right,” I whispered to the empty porch rail, feeling that old, stubborn tightness in my chest finally give way. “They don’t know what to make of it.”<\/p>\n
Clara came out the screen door with a cup of water for the geraniums, stopping beside me to watch the dust settle down by the road. She didn’t look proud, exactly. Just tired, the way you get when you’ve done a hard day’s work and the sun’s gone down before you finished cleaning your tools.<\/p>\n
“We need more wire,” she said quietly, handing me the empty pitcher. “And tell Ray Henderson if he wants another small one for his sister’s birthday, he has to wait until Friday. I’m out of blue ribbon.”<\/p>\n
I took the pitcher from her hand, my fingers brushing hers, both of us smelling faintly of woodsmoke and damp earth. I didn’t ask her why it worked, and she didn’t try to explain it either. Sometimes you spend half your life building hard things to keep the world out, only to find out that the world was just waiting for someone to make something beautiful enough to make it stop and look.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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