What the Scarecrow Remembers
2 min read · Original fiction — a story, not a true account
Deshawn took the farmhand job at the old Whitlock place mostly for the free room above the barn, and he figured the scarecrow standing crooked in the cornfield was just another piece of inherited clutter, same as the rusted plow and the collapsed silo.
He noticed the first shift on a Tuesday: the scarecrow, which he was certain had been staked at the field's far corner, was now standing roughly ten feet closer to the fence line. He blamed the wind, or his own bad memory, and went back to work.
By the following week it had moved again, always in the same direction, always toward the farmhouse, and always exactly the distance a person might walk in a single unhurried night.
He mentioned it to old Mrs. Whitlock, who had sold him the job but kept living in the cottage down the lane, and she went quiet in a way that told him this was not new information to her. "That scarecrow's stood in this field since my husband passed," she said. "He liked things a certain way. He's still particular about who he lets get close to the house."
Deshawn laughed it off until the night he woke to the sound of straw dragging across the porch boards, slow and rhythmic, like something walking with great effort and great patience both at once. He did not look out the window. He has never regretted that decision.
By the end of the season the scarecrow stood at the very edge of the farmhouse garden, close enough now that its shadow at dusk fell across the kitchen window, and Mrs. Whitlock seemed, if anything, comforted by its proximity rather than troubled.
"He's just keeping watch," she told Deshawn, setting his coffee down without ever quite looking at the window herself. "He always did like knowing who was in the house with me. You'll get used to it. He minds his own business, so long as you mind yours."
Deshawn stayed on through the winter. The scarecrow has not moved since first frost, standing sentinel a few feet from the porch steps, and Deshawn makes a point, every evening on his way to the barn, of nodding to it politely, the way you'd nod to any neighbor who took his responsibilities seriously.
"It wasn't scaring off the crows anymore. It had decided something else needed watching."
