The crows had appeared at the beginning of the year. In dark, thick swarms, the murders hovered above the cornfields, squawking vociferously and pecking at the crop kernels beneath the husked sheathes with their ravenous black beaks.
Farmer Brown had a problem. If the crop got killed, he could not feed his family, let alone the families of countless others in the tristate area of Des Moines, Iowa. This crow problem had gotten far out of hand. He had to build a scarecrow.
To do so, he enlisted the aid of his stalwart eldest son, Johnny, along with his younger sister, Jenny, aged 10 and 8 respectively. Johnny handled the exteriors of the strawman, finding a hat, a potato sack for a head, and a raggedy old plaid shirt for a torso. He had his mother stitch a smiling face onto the potato stack with black thread on her old sewing machine and found an old pair of his father’s leather work-boots along with suspenders and slacks for legs and feet. Meanwhile, in a task allotted to her tender years, Jenny gathered straw from the stable in the barn for stuffing the figure. Farmer Brown found two cross-wise beams from the lumber yard from last winter’s chopping for firewood, gathered in a bundle behind the carpentry shed. He fastened them together in a cruciform fashion and erected the cross at the perimeter of the cornfield facing the dusty empty highway to enthrone the effigy as an apotropaic against all evil, feathered or otherwise.
Farmer Brown stuffed the clothes and sewed them together, tying the scarecrow to the cross and leaving him there to cast a long shadow in the rays of the setting sun’s saffron glow over the Van Gogh-esque sunflowers billowing in the autumn wind. It was the night of All Hallows’ Eve, it just occurred to him as he led Johnny and Jenny by the light of his lantern lamp into the house past their homemade pumpkin patch in the magic twilight of dusk. The cicadas were making their chorus from the darkening forest beyond the edge of the house with its green gables and white picket fence as they stepped onto the rickety old balcony that had heard the whispers and rumors of generations in their family all down the line. Now, most of the children had grown up and moved away to disparate parts of the world working in high tech. He was the last to stay behind and hold down the fort from the powers that threatened to steal the land from their name. Ghosts seemed to gather in the growing gloom and only the warm Kinkadesque lights emanating from the kitchen warmed the brisk chill in the night air as mist rose from the grass and motley mosaic of fallen leaves from the maple trees framing the eaves.
No sooner had he shut the wicker spring door behind his children running over the wooden floorboards to clamor at the dinner table than did the sound of the crows cawing greet his weathered ears once again. “What’s for dinner, dear?” he asked his wife, Martha.
“Split-pea soup,” she replied with a smile. In his mind, it made him think of The Exorcist. As the pater familias, he led his small brood in saying grace at table, to which the children replied in cheerful unison, “Amen.” They began slipping and slurping, politely dipping buttered biscuits into the warm verdant froth with avidity after a hard day’s labor in the fields assembling the straw man. At that moment, as if summoned from the beyond, a clatter and din rose with the mist from the fields as the sky outside the window on the horizon filled with a cloud of crows like black smoke pluming fume from a flume. They began murdering themselves by committing suicide against the brick and plank sides of the domicile, exploding into blood, guts, and thousands of feathers strewn everywhere. The crows like something out of Alfred Hitchcock smashed through the windows of the kitchen and fell dead to the floor. To make matters worse, in a turn straight out of David Lynch, fat innkeeper worms began sprouting from the dirt in the meadow outside, such that the whole ground seemed to be wriggling to life.
“Daddy, daddy, make it stop!” Jenny cried into her blouse as Johnny put a hand to her shoulder to still her tears. Mother Martha like an Amish matriarch huddled them beneath her capacious polka-dot apron like a hen protecting her chicks from the fatal onslaught.
“Let’s go upstairs, kids,” she murmured in hush tones, as if the crows could hear her. With no further adieu, they ran up the narrow stairs to their bedrooms on the second floor, leaving the father to fend for the family all alone, like Mel Gibson in Signs, or some such paranormal drama. Yet he felt no fear, as he dabbed his fingers in the holy water font at the side of the threshold to their humble abode and kissed the crucifix on the wall as it shook under the thuds of the tumbling crows. However, as if suspended by a preternatural power, when he went outside to see them in mid-flight, it looked as if time stood still, as they hung in mid-air in various states of self-destruction. He rubbed his eyes bleary from milking the cows at four in the morning. What could this mean? They were hanging there as if in a trance, and Farmer Brown thought that he was losing his grip on reality. To make matters more eerie still, he looked to the scarecrow, but it was no longer there! Lightning struck the cross that stood in his stead and lit it on fire, like the KKK.
“Daddy, it’s raining from the roof!” Jenny whimpered from her room. Farmer Brown in a spurt of collegiate athleticism from his track star heyday in agricultural school sprinted up the wooden stairs, almost slipping on the rug on each step. The shingle must have sprung a leak. He looked out the Windsor hatched window on the second floor landing, but no sign of precipitation had yet manifested from the tumultuous skies above. Perhaps a pipe had burst with the temperature change. No sooner did that deduction cross his mind than did a hideous sound emerge from the upstairs bathroom.
“Honey, the bathtub is overflowing, but the water isn’t running!” Martha hollered from downstairs. Sure as rain was falling on his weathered head, Farmer Brown could not make heads or tails of the situation at hand. He had tilled these soils many a season and seen many a comedy and tragedy befall the farm, but never something so preternaturally perturbed as this scenario. It was as if a poltergeist had been unleashed by the murder of the crows, corvids of covid. A storm cloud had made its roost in the upstairs quarters, as a deluge poured from the ceiling, like something out of a Tarkovsky film. He licked the moisture from the stubble on his upper lip only to find it was bitter to the taste. A rank and fetid stench emanated from the plumbing of the whole home, as gurgling noises bubbled forth from every orifice, as if the house had been struck with cholera. Runny horse manure disgorged itself from the toilets of the homestead, flooding the rooms with six inches of brown liquid.
“Dad, make it stop, what’s happening?” Johnny cried, losing all of his Boy Scout aplomb at the sight and the smell of the river of shite threatening to drown his family whole.
“Relax, son, we’ll solve the problem,” Farmer Brown said calmly, reminded of the many times he had fought off fire and flood on this very family farm. Suddenly, he heard Martha shriek below. He ran down the stairs again to find his wife swooning on the floor… and the scarecrow peering through the window. Farmer Brown nearly became incontinent for the first time in 40 years. Had a farmhand on a neighbor’s lot pulled a sick prank and donned the Halloween costume in an attempt to freak the family out? It could not be, for the machine man had no eyes with which to see. He unbolted the latch on the swinging split-door and walked right in with his straw feet moved by the slack legs Johnny had filled just this afternoon. Farmer Brown had half a mind to destroy that which he had conceived by pulling out his gardening shears and practicing harakiri on the thing, but it did not seem right somehow, so he stepped aside and watched, mesmerized as the scarecrow walked up the stairs… towards his children!
“Stop, what are you doing in my house? Has someone cursed us?” the scarecrow turned around at the railing and nodded “no” in his heroic mutism. Somehow, Farmer Brown trusted the scarecrow at his word, despite his lack of words. It reminded him of the Wizard of Oz and all the comfort and coziness that entailed, in spite of the creepiness of the witch who melted into a puddle. With that, the scarecrow reached the top of the stair and burst into flame, spontaneously combusting into a cruciform ball of fire that might as well have read IN HOC SIGNO VINCES. The rain ceased, the feces disappeared, the crows awoke from the dead and flew away from the house, and with the blink of an eye, the scarecrow had become a pile of ash and dust.
The family never spoke of that autumn Walpurgisnacht ever again, as they cleaned up the remnants of a potential catastrophe, brushing the ash into the dustpan and mending the shattered windows in the kitchen. But as they prayed the Rosary every night around the fireplace as the days grew shorter and the nights grew longer into the deepening winter, the words “deliver us from evil” held a new dimension for them all.
Papist Press 