Scarecrow Man
Nolan Parker was a scarecrow man. He had a stern, serious look that let people know he meant to do things his way, and they left him alone to do it. People sometimes wondered about Nolan––if he was put together right, what his head was filled with––those sort of things. Nolan lived with his folks on 60 acres of farmland. In summers he worked the farm with his father, and in winters he holed himself up in the hayloft and made scarecrows.
There is more to a good scarecrow than old clothes and straw. The shape of the head, the paint on the face, the posture of the back and arms––these are all important considerations. A bad scarecrow makes a mock of a farmer. The farmer hears the birds cawing and laughing as he goes to work, sees them eating the crops he has planted. They circle around the scarecrow and sit on its arms, or pluck straw from its head until it sags and falls.
A good scarecrow is a piece of witchcraft; a voodoo god in the garden. A good scarecrow puts a fear in the birds that will keep them miles away––and that's just what Nolan’s did. For small-scale farmers like the Parkers and their neighbors, a good scarecrow might be the difference between a profit and a loss.
Year after year, Nolan sold his scarecrows to the small-time farmers in the valley. Year after year, his business grew, until every farmer around was buying three or four of his scarecrows every spring. By the time the harvest was over and the first snow fell, the farm wives would be over to visit Mrs. Parker and drop off a few old shirts for her son. “For the scarecrows,” they would say politely. As if she didn’t know.
“Nolan, you’re 23 years old now,” Mr. Parker said at dinner one night. “You started this work ten years ago so you could pay for college. I’d have to hire help for a couple of years while you’re gone, but maybe it's time you start thinking about going.” Nolan didn't look up. “Not this year,” he said, and the subject was closed.
Nolan worked tirelessly that winter. Dark rings developed around his sunken eyes and he seemed gaunt no matter how Mrs. Parker fed him. One winter morning, Mr. Parker found a baited cage set in a tree near the barn. That evening the cage was gone, but as Mr. Parker entered the barn to check on the cows, he heard an unearthly squawking coming from the hayloft. He mounted the stairs quickly, and was horrified by what he saw.
Nolan was standing with his back to Mr. Parker, holding a crow in the air in his right hand, grasping it by the feet. It was not upside down, the way a farmer will sometimes carry a chicken, but upright, and its wings were flapping furiously as it attempted to escape. Nolan was holding the crow directly in front of a tall and looming scarecrow, making it stare it in the face. The crow squawked in terror and beat its wings ever more furiously for several seconds. Then suddenly, it went limp in Nolan’s hand. After all its panic and terror and flapping, the bird’s heart had burst. As Mr. Parker silently descended the stairs, he heard a faint muttering that sounded like incantation. As he crossed the yard to the farmhouse, Mr. Parker realized something he had long suspected: he was afraid of his son.
In spring, Nolan sold and set out his scarecrows, and the harvest that year was better than ever. When the farm wives came with their scarecrow shirts, a few of them remarked to Mrs. Parker that they hoped Nolan wasn’t off to college any time soon. “We all need him here,” they said. “We so depend on him.”
As fiercely independent as Nolan seemed, that independence was really only from the people closest to him. He was the puppet of every farmer in the valley and he knew it. He knew that only he could do what he was doing for them, and because of that he could never stop.
So Nolan stayed and made his scarecrows, and the years passed slowly in the Parker home. They passed even more slowly when Mrs. Parker died and the family plunged into social obscurity. It was quiet then, and both of the Parkers were lonely.
Mrs. Parker was the first, but soon enough, many of the old-timers were dying or getting too old to farm. Some of their children didn’t want to run the farms, and sold out to large farming corporations. When the corporations began to aggressively pursue more land from those who weren’t selling, it was Nolan and his scarecrows that came through for the valley.
The men from the farm corporations came into the valley wearing dark suits, carrying checkbooks in their pockets and clipboards under their arms. They parked their black automobiles in dusty driveways and knocked on doors to see if Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so were home. But most of the So-and-sos dug in their heels. Someone even put up a scarecrow in front of their house to show they weren’t going to budge. Soon everyone who planned to stay had done the same thing, and Nolan sold more scarecrows that year than ever before.
As the corporation men began their intrusion, talk about Nolan increased. People began to ask whether Mr. Parker was still alive, and no one seemed to know conclusively. Stories began to travel about Nolan having a sort of supernatural power, like he personally determined the success of the valley's crops. Those were good years for the valley, and there was nothing else to explain it. Because Nolan Parker kept to himself, there was nothing to temper his legend. Nolan’s scarecrows were a part of life in the valley. Without Nolan really knowing it, they became a symbol of the people’s pride, a talisman of their resolve. Someone even scratched out a few lines of verse that were put to a simple tune and spread like a prairie fire. People wrote out the words and tacked them to their front doors when the corporation men were in town.
Nolan Parker is a scarecrow man, a farmer’s hand, a son of the land.
He is protector of the natural way, the dying day, the settler’s say.
Crow-men, black suits, fly away, fly away. Crow-men, black suits, fly away;
Nolan guards this land.
Everywhere they went, the city men were met with silence, scarecrows, and the name of Nolan Parker. As strange and eerie as this was, they ascribed it all to the obtuseness of the rural people's minds. They reasoned that the only way to deal with this annoyance was to do battle with the people on their level. They resolved to get Nolan Parker out of the way, and to make such an example of him that everyone else would feel defeated.
So the city men went out to Parker's farm early one morning to see what they were up against. From a distance, his house looked more ordinary than they had imagined it. But as they got closer, they saw what they looked like a scarecrow sitting on the porch in a rocker, moving back and forth slowly. Hesitantly, they parked their automobile and approached the figure. "You Parker?" one of them asked. Old Mr. Parker slowly raised his head to look blankly at them, then gave a slight nod. The men laughed. "Well you sure ain't much to look at, Nolan Parker!"
They tied the old man to a flagpole in front of the general store on Main Street. They kept his feet on the ground, being careful not to make him look like Christ on the cross, but draped his arms over a horizontal pole so that his elbows were above his shoulders and his hands hung down unnaturally. Then they painted his face crudely with pointed eyebrows, a dark nose, and a long irregular mouth.
Mr. Parker stood dazed, not sure exactly where he was or why he was there. In his old age, his memory was faded and dim. He remembered only the most simple things about himself, and only the most vivid moments of his life. Most often he remembered the night in the hayloft he had seen his son holding the crow in the air, and the terrified, unearthly sounds it had made. As Mr. Parker stood there, tied to the flagpole, the events of that night replayed in his head once again. Mr. Parker had never spoken about that night to anyone, especially not to Nolan, but he had taken to wearing a straw hat around the house. He wore it to unsettle Nolan, to shake him if he had any bit of a conscience in him. But Nolan Parker kept a painted face. Mr. Parker began wearing more flannel shirts, even looking for opportunities to stand with his arms askew, resting them on a fence or hay bale behind him. But Nolan, if he noticed, seemed inhumanly cool––as if there were straw where his heart should have been. The truth was that Nolan did notice his father's antics, but could never give any sign that he did. He knew his parents could never accept what he was doing. If they had learned of his secret, he had to ignore them, push them away. It was better to be distant than to lose them. As Mr. Parker had grown older, his manners of dress and posture had become habitual, unconscious. When cataracts clouded his vision and Alzheimer's clouded his mind, Mr. Parker seemed as much a scarecrow as a human. Sometimes he even had the odd sensation that his head was stuffed with cotton.
But Mr. Parker was aware of a different sensation now, a pain in his chest and a shortness of breath. His frail body, unaccustomed to remaining upright for so long, was working harder than ever to keep blood flowing regularly. The ropes, tied tightly around his chest, were making it difficult for him to get the oxygen he needed. Mr. Parker's body went into panic mode. He tried desperately to move, making convulsing motions with his head and neck, and kicking his legs violently into the ground. This lasted for several seconds and then stopped. After all the panic and strain, Mr. Parker's heart had burst.
The general store owner soon arrived to open up for the day. He saw the old man lashed to the pole and painted up like a scarecrow. Unsure whether the man was dead or alive, he hurried in to his store and called the county sheriff, who lived a few miles away. Then, not wanting to be the only witness, he called up a few of his neighbors and friends. Word spread quickly. By the time the sheriff arrived, there was a crowd of people gathered around the general store. The sheriff went right up to the scarecrow man, checked for a pulse, and undid the lashings. “Somebody get me some water,” he said to the gathered crowd. Someone brought a bucket of water, and the owner of the store brought out a cloth and a bar of soap. They washed Mr. Parker's face, and everyone gathered around to see if they could identify him. “I think that's old Mr. Parker,” someone said. It took a bit of convincing, since half the people there thought Mr. Parker was long dead, but soon they agreed that their man was none other than Nolan's father. “The poor man,” said someone. “The poor, poor man.”
If it had been Nolan tied to the pole, the people might have lost their battle that day. They would have seen him humiliated, seen him human, and seen that the corporation men could do whatever they liked in the valley. They might have gone home and looked at their own scarecrows differently––noticed that the eyes were painted with what looked like dried blood, or that the heads were stuffed with black feathers, mixed with cotton and straw. But having Mr. Parker there tied to the pole only aroused their sympathy and hatred.
The sheriff took the body back to Nolan's place and explained to him what had happened that morning. When he left, Nolan went out on the porch and studied the automobile tracks left in the dirt.
No one knew what happened next with the corporation men––whether they learned of their mistake, or what happened because of it, or whether they were still in the dark the day they drove back out to Nolan Parker's farm. But everyone in the valley knew that they went up into the hayloft to find Nolan, and that he pulled them into a pile with all of his scarecrows and burnt the whole barn to the ground.
