They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 10
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Vivian closed the notebook and held it a moment before she gave it back. "I tried to buy an answer. You were out here figuring out the question.""Yes, ma'am."She glanced toward her own fields, then back at him. "Would you show the others how you lay it out?""I'll show them, but there's no map to copy. If there were, the birds would learn that, too."Two days later, he stood in the scale house at Walter's elevator, in the same room where nobody had spoken up for him, and walked a dozen farmers through it. They put the cannons on random timers and moved them every couple of days. They sent people out to drive and walk the rows during the hours the birds came down. Nobody pretended one tool would do it all. The damage didn't disappear.Harvest came at the end of September, and Walter's combine worked around the stakes along the edges of Darius's field. Hannah went farm to farm with her clipboard: Holloway farm lost about 7%; Walter lost about 18%; a few Ashford blocks near the cane strip lost more than 30% before the changes took hold.Hannah was careful about it: a small field, one man able to cover it, the way it sat on the map—all of that helped. "But most of that gap is how he ran it," she said at the elevator, loud enough for everyone waiting in line to hear.Darius's sorghum crossed Walter's scale clean and dry. He paid the $9,400 in the second week of October, and there was enough left for seed. He wasn't rich. He had kept the right to farm his grandfather's land for another year.Vivian told him she wouldn't be needing the lease papers, and Holloway farm went on to next season's equipment list.Walter clapped him on the shoulder at the scale house. "How's your crew holding up?" Nobody in the scale house laughed.On his last load, Vivian was at the elevator. She looked into the bed of his truck where the red shirt lay folded over the tailgate. "I still think it looks ridiculous.""So did the birds," Darius said, "until they weren't sure."Vivian laughed. This time, she wasn't laughing at him.In the evening, Darius walked the cut field and took the shirts down one at a time. Straw spilled onto the stubble. He shook each one clean and folded it, and he folded the one with Marcus on the pocket last.In the shop, he laid them back in the wooden trunk and set the notebook on top. Then he went out to the truck, took his father's cap off the dashboard for the first time since February, and put it in the trunk with them.In the field, 14 bare stakes stood in the low evening light.Sometimes the people with the least to work with are the ones paying the closest attention.