They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 8
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One flock, bigger than any of the others, lifted off Ashford Plains and didn't settle. It swung east over the road, turned, and leveled out. Darius watched it line up, coming straight for his field.Darius didn't run. He stood beside the truck with one hand on the door and watched the front edge of the flock.Just like the notebook said, a smaller group broke off first and came in ahead, maybe 200 birds dropping low. They went for the north side, where the birds had been heaviest all week. Yesterday there had been three figures there; now there was one, and less than half an hour earlier, Darius had walked the length of that tree line where every bird on the wire could see him. The scouts dipped toward it, rose, and swung away.They tried the east. Yesterday the ditch had been nearly bare; now it held the red shirt and two figures that hadn't been there the night before. Walter's truck had rolled along that ditch at sunup, and Walter had gotten out and walked. A gust caught a sleeve of the red shirt and lifted it, then let it drop. The scouts didn't land.Above them, the main flock wheeled in a slow circle and waited.The scouts found the south corner—low ground by the fence, the third gate, the one he'd left empty because it had been quiet for a week, the one he'd written about on the fifth night. The scouts slid down over the fence and dropped into the rows, and this time they stayed down. Darius saw the sorghum heads bend under their weight. Overhead, the big flock tightened its circle. If those birds stayed down a few more minutes, the rest would follow, and the south end would be stripped by noon.Everything in him wanted to run at them yelling. He knew how that would go: they'd lift and drop 20 rows over, and the flock would read it as a field worth fighting for.He got in the truck instead. Because he'd parked on the south lane, he was at the fence in under a minute. He climbed out, pulled one of the figures from the bed, and walked straight down the row toward the birds—steady, not hurrying.Stake number 11 stood bare in the middle of the corner. He jammed the figure onto it, right in front of them, and stood beside it without moving.The scouts burst out of the corner all at once, hundreds of wings snapping like a sheet being shaken out. They went up hard and fast. Above them, the main flock saw birds tearing out of Holloway farm in a panic. The circle broke. The flock split in two: one half swung toward Walter's land, the other turned back toward Ashford Plains.Not every bird left. A few dozen crossed his rows and kept going. A handful dipped low over the east side, hung there, and moved on. But no wave came down—not on his field.