They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 4
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On the seventh morning, he walked the east ditch at 7:00 and skipped the north side entirely. At 7:30, a group came in over the ditch and turned away without circling. Over the north side, the same kind of group circled twice before it left.By the ninth day, a pattern was showing: the figures worked best in the spots where the birds had just seen Darius himself, alive and moving, a short time before. A shirt by the ditch did very little on its own. A shirt by the ditch 20 minutes after he'd been standing there did a lot more. He underlined it, then wrote next to it:Too early to say.Across the road, Ashford's cannons were winning. Every 12 minutes, a blast rolled across the flat ground, and a few hundred birds burst up out of Vivian's sorghum at once. At the elevator, men talked about it like it was settled. Somebody asked Darius how his crew was holding up and got a laugh out of the room. Darius didn't argue. From where he stood, the cannons were doing exactly what Vivian said they would.On the eighth afternoon, Vivian's truck slowed beside his field while he was carrying a figure across the rows on his shoulder. She rolled the window down."You're spending hours a day on something a machine does on its own."Darius set the stake down. "Your machine does the same thing every time.""Yeah, that's what makes it reliable." She shook her head. "Call it a method if you want. It looks like a man who couldn't afford the real thing."She drove off. Darius watched her truck until it turned at the ditch. She was betting on size; he was betting on change. Right now, only one of them had results to point to.On the tenth day, the pump on the soybean field quit. The sorghum was past needing water, but the beans were still filling pods, and in late August heat, they couldn't go long without it.Darius had the pump housing open on a tarp when Walter pulled up."Got a spare sitting in my shed," Walter said. "I could send my guy over this afternoon.""I've got it, Mr. Briggs.""All right." Walter looked at the parts spread across the tarp. "You sure?""Sure."He wasn't. But he'd spent five months hearing what a shame it was about his dad and how somebody ought to help that boy out, and he couldn't take one more favor that came with that tone.Walter left. Darius worked until dark, drove to two parts stores the next morning, and worked until dark again.For two days, not one shirt moved. He walked the same path to the pump and back over and over.Late on the second afternoon, the pump finally caught. Darius walked out of the bean field wiping his hands and stopped.A flock of blackbirds was clinging to the sorghum on the north side, a few feet from one of his figures. One bird sat on the crossbar itself, right on the shoulder of the shirt with Marcus on the pocket.