They Mocked a Black Boy for Stuffing Old Shirts With Straw — Then Blackbirds Hit Every Field but His
Chapter 9
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Darius didn't celebrate. He stayed beside stake 11 for another 20 minutes, standing in the open where every bird on every wire could see him, until his legs started to shake. He knew it could turn in the time it took to walk back to the truck.He finally walked back.Walter's truck was stopped on the county road. Walter stood beside it with his arms folded, looking from Darius's field to his own, where a black patch the size of a house was settling into the sorghum. Farther off, Ashford's fields were dark with birds in long moving stripes, and the cannons kept booming over them.Darius's field was green and gold, with a few birds crossing it and none of them staying.That night, the farmers' group chat filled up with photos of damaged fields. Nobody posted anything about Holloway's crew.The next three days, Darius drove past Ashford Plains every morning on his way to the elevator, and he watched it change. Vivian's crew had gathered up every old shirt they could find. By the 20th day, 60 figures stood in her sorghum, ten times what Darius had. They stood in straight rows, evenly spaced, all facing the same direction. From the road, they looked almost professional.The first day, the birds kept their distance. Darius saw Vivian at the edge of the field with her hands on her hips, looking satisfied. Nobody moved the figures. The crew was back on the combines. Nobody walked the rows.On the second day, the birds came closer.On the third morning, Darius slowed on the road and watched a flock settle into the gap between two straw men in the middle of a block. One bird sat right on top of a stake. Travis stood at the field edge with his phone to his ear, and Darius didn't need to hear the call to know who was on the other end.Vivian had copied the shirts and nothing else. The shirts had never been the advantage; the advantage was that they were cheap and light and could be somewhere new every morning. Hers stood exactly where they'd been put.That afternoon, Vivian's truck pulled into the Holloway yard, right where it had stopped almost three weeks earlier. She got out. She wasn't laughing."What are you doing that we aren't?"Darius could have said a lot of things. He'd thought about a few of them at 3:00 in the morning. Instead, he took the notebook off the dashboard and handed it to her.She read it standing up: the times, the three gates, the diagram of 14 numbered stakes, the two blank days and the note beside them (Bird on Dad's shirt), then a page near the back where he'd written down her cannons (12 minutes, then seven, same spots).She looked up from the page. "You started this before the meeting.""A week before." Darius leaned against the truck. "If they see the same straw man in the same place long enough, it's just a post wearing a shirt." He nodded toward her fields. "Your cannons aren't useless. They just do the same thing every time. Move them. Don't let them fire on a clock. It doesn't matter what you use if they get time to figure it out."