They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 5
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Darius ran. The birds went up, but not far. They settled into the tree line and sat there waiting for him to leave. He stood in the row breathing hard and looked at the heads around him. The tips were pecked bare. He walked the first ten rows and counted. Maybe one head in 20 was hit. That wasn't ruin, but at that rate for three more weeks, it would be.For a minute, standing there with grease on his hands, he felt like the group chat had been right all along: old shirts and straw, a kid playing farmer.That night, he spread the notebook open on the kitchen table and went back through every page. It didn't take long to see it: the good days, the days when birds came in and turned away, were all days when something had changed that morning. The days when they came closer, when they circled twice instead of once, came after he had left things the way they were.He had nothing written for the last two days. He didn't need it. He had seen with his own eyes what the birds did when nothing moved for long enough: they stopped circling and simply landed. It was never the shirts. The birds had never believed the shirts were men. What kept them out was that they never had enough time to be sure the shirts weren't. Two days of the same field had given them all the time they needed.He sat back in the chair. Walter had offered a pump; if he'd taken it, he would have lost an afternoon instead of two days. Darius wrote down what he'd seen beside the two blank days. Then he closed the notebook and wrote one more line inside the cover:Don't let it sit.For the next three days, he watched Ashford's fields almost as closely as his own. He sat on his tailgate at the edge of the county road with his watch: 12 minutes between blasts, every time. And the birds had figured that out. They still went up when the cannon fired, but they didn't go far anymore. They dropped back into the same field before the next blast—sometimes into a different corner of the same block, sometimes right back where they'd been.At the elevator, he heard Travis complaining to another hand that the whole crew was tied up getting combines ready for harvest; nobody had time to babysit cannons. They sat in the same spots they'd been set on the first day.On the 13th day, the timing changed: seven minutes between blasts. Vivian had turned up the frequency. For a day it worked, and the birds scattered harder. By the next afternoon, they were landing between blasts again.On the 14th morning, Walter pulled up beside Darius's truck and frowned across the road. "They're losing ground over there. Vivian says there's just more birds this year."It was partly true. The flocks were bigger, but more birds didn't explain why they had stopped being scared of the noise.