They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 7
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
That same afternoon, Vivian slowed beside the field again. She looked at the figures, then at Walter's truck pulling away from the ditch."42 acres," she said through the window, like that settled it. "Whatever you're doing out here, it doesn't scale." Then she drove on.On the 18th day, the weather turned. A front pushed through from the northwest overnight, and by afternoon the wind had swung hard. With it came birds—not hundreds now, thousands. They covered the power line from pole to pole until the wire sagged, and they packed the cane along the ditch so thick the stalks bent under them. The noise never stopped; it sounded like a crowd that wouldn't go home.Hannah called him at dusk. "Every flock from three counties is pushing in here. Whatever you've been dealing with, this is bigger. A lot bigger."He set his alarm for 4:00.In the dark, wearing a headlamp, he went to work. He carried his father's red shirt, the one Marcus had worn more than any other, from the north side to the east ditch. He stood two more figures on ditch stakes that had been bare for days. He left just one figure on the north side. The south corner had been quiet for a week. He had six shirts and three gates, and he chose to spend four of them on the north and the east. He knew it was a risk.Then he did one more thing: instead of parking by the shop, he parked the truck on the lane in the middle of the south side and laid the last two figures flat in the bed.At first light, while the birds were still lined up on the wire, Darius walked the north tree line from end to end in plain sight and walked back to the truck.Then the birds came down.They didn't come as one flock; they broke into a dozen. The first big one dropped onto a sorghum field half a mile south of Holloway farm. One minute the field was green and gold, the next it was moving, black from one end to the other. A second wave hit Walter's east block, then Ashford Plains.The cannons went off and kept going off. Every blast threw up a cloud of birds so big it shadowed the road, and every time, most of that cloud came back down. Darius could see Ashford's pickups tearing down the turnrows, men jumping out and waving their arms and yelling. Travis was in one of them. Vivian stood in the bed of another, one hand shading her eyes, looking at a field her machines couldn't hold anymore.Darius glanced at the cap on the dashboard. $9,400. His mother asleep after a 12-hour shift. A lease offer still on the table. Running into his rows now, waving his arms, would only push birds from one end of his field to the other. He stayed by the truck and kept his hands still.