The Scarecrow: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom) Page 5

  “I’m not much on history books or the Bible.” Odus tore two ears of corn free from their stalks, reveling in the sweet starchy smell. “The first tells you what went wrong and the second tells you why. I’d just as soon stay ignorant, myself.”

  Gordon put his glasses back, which eased Odus’s worry a little. Odus realized what Gordon’s naked eyes had reminded him of: the goats. They had that same heavy-lidded, unfocused stare.

  “The scarecrow wasn’t always an outfit of clothing stuffed with straw,” Gordon said, returning to work. “In the old days, a live man was tied in the garden.”

  Odus glanced at the professor, figuring the man was putting him on. Gordon’s face was as steady as always. Come to think of it, Gordon had never cracked a joke. He seemed unable to laugh and even a smile looked like it hurt him some. “To keep birds away?”

  “Well, that it did. Except other animals came, especially at night. A helpless man in the wilderness drew a lot of predators.”

  “Why did they do that? Punishment?”

  “More than punishment. Sacrifice. A gift to the harvest gods.”

  “Sounds like something a heathen would do.” Odus yanked two ears of corn at once, hoping the squeaking would drown out the professor.

  “It was widely practiced in many cultures. Germanic tribes used to spike a victim’s belly button to a tree, and then wrap the victim around the trunk. In the South Seas, witch priests claimed their island deities called for sacrifices to appease their wrath. African kings killed those magicians who failed to bring the rain. The ancient Greeks had all manner of sacrificial victims, both to Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Ceres, the harvest goddess.”

  “Did they really believe it?”

  “Blood makes the best fertilizer,” Gordon said. “Rich in nitrogen. So the rituals had some scientific validity.”

  They were closer to the scarecrow now, and the coarse fabric of its face suggested a scowl. Odus couldn’t be sure, but it looked to have changed position on the crossbar, its arms hanging down a little lower. Ragged gloves had been attached to the flannel shirt sleeves with baling wire, and Odus thought he saw one of the gloves lift in a beckoning motion.

  “The scarecrow is dry,” Gordon said. “And it thirsts.”

  Odus swallowed hard. He thirsted, too, and hoped the quart of bourbon would be enough to wash down the vision of the scarecrow’s wave. He’d grown up with the legends, but that didn’t mean he had to think about them. Some things were better off left alone.

  “Well, I think we got enough to tide the goats over for a few days,” he said. “Maybe we should leave the rest of it to cure a little more.”

  “The goats shall multiply if the blood is pure,” Gordon said, as if reciting the words of some bizarre sermon. The man had a houseful of books, and being a descendant of Harmon Smith was plenty enough excuse for being a little off.

  “Looks like they’ve done plenty enough multiplying already. You’ll need to cull the herd before winter, or you’ll be spending a hundred bucks a week on grain. The does have been pretty much in rut non-stop. And you know how the bucks are, they start trying to stick it in anything that moves from the time they’re three weeks old.”

  “The herd is a blessing,” Gordon said, ripping down ears of corn with both hands and tossing them toward the basket. One ear missed and bounced against the hilled furrow. Odus bent to pick it up, and when he stood, he saw the scarecrow lift its head.

  The afternoon sun glinted off the ivory eyes. Before, the head had sagged, as if its owner was weary from a season on the spike, and its eyes had been hidden in the shade of the straw hat’s brim.

  “Really, Mr. Smith, I think we got plenty.”

  “What do you think of my new family?” Gordon asked, continuing to harvest ears as if hordes of locusts were swarming.

  “Miss Katy seems right nice,” he said. He glanced over at the farmhouse. She’d walked out on the porch to say hello but Gordon had waved her back inside to get lunch ready. “And your daughter—I mean, your stepdaughter—”

  “She’s my daughter now,” Gordon said. “She’s part of this place.”

  “Well, she seems nice, too. She stands out a little, but she don’t seem a bit of trouble to me. You know how kids are. They just need to find their own way in the world.”

  “They shall be shown the way,” Gordon said, lapsing into that sermon-voice of his, but Odus wasn’t paying attention. He was watching the scarecrow, expecting it to loosen the ropes that held it to the crossbar, wriggle to the ground, and drag itself off to quench its thirst.

  The bushel basket was full again, and Gordon stooped and picked it up by its wire handles. “Know them by the fruit of their works, not by their words,” he said.

  “Sure, Mr. Smith. Whatever you say.”

  “I think we’ve picked enough for today.”

  Odus hoped his sigh of relief passed for a tired gasp. Gordon would slip him a tax-free twenty and Odus would be doing some slipping of his own, first down the snaking road to his caretaker apartment, then down the soft and hazy river of eighty-proof Old Mill Stream.

  “But we still need to take down the scarecrow,” Gordon said.

  The scarecrow’s form had slackened again, as if it were made of cloth and silage after all. Odus wasn’t in the mood to touch it. This had been Harmon Smith’s land, after all, and although the Horseback Preacher hadn’t been seen in a decade or so, sometimes bad air lingered long after a dark cloud had drifted away.

  “I’ve got to be off to Titusville,” he lied. “Sarah Jeffers needs some help down at the general store. Got a truck coming in, and she got no kin to help out.”

  “Then your services are more valuable there.” Gordon dumped the bushel basket into the wheelbarrow, which was overflowing with green-wrapped ears of corn, the tassels and tips of the shucks burned brown with frost. “Come back tomorrow and we’ll take care of the scarecrow.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Smith. Can you pay cash today instead of saving up my time until Friday?”

  “Of course.” Gordon removed his gloves and laid them across the staves of the wheelbarrow. He thumbed a twenty from his wallet and handed it to Odus. As Odus’s fingers closed on the money, Gordon grabbed his wrist and pulled him off-balance. Though Odus weighed two hundred pounds, Gordon had leverage and an advantage in both height and weight. Odus found himself looking through the distorted left lens of Gordon’s eyeglasses. Again Odus was reminded of the goats, and the professor’s pupils seemed to take on that same narrowed and flattened aspect.

  “Know them by their fruits,” he said, his breath rank with pipe tobacco and garlic.

  Odus nodded as Gordon released him, then tucked the money in his pocket and headed toward the gate. He took one last look to make sure the scarecrow still hung on its stake. It did, although the ragged brim of its hat was angled even lower, as if the stuffed head had dipped in a prayer of resignation or in summoning of the Horseback Preacher.

  He climbed in his Blazer and drove away as the goats came down from the pasture to see what Gordon was serving for lunch.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Total suck city.

  Mrs. McNeeley was outlining on the dry-erase board, lecturing like she usually did with her back to the class. To the ninth-grade English teacher, instruction meant breathing chalk dust and turning her pupils’ brains to sawdust. Who the hell cared what a direct object was, or a plural nominative? Like anybody was ever going to need to know that stuff in real life. Jett sure wasn’t.

  But teachers like Mrs. McNeeley were great for those kids who were logging their time and sopping up free lunches while waiting until they could legally drop out. Like Grady Eggers and Tommy Wilson on the back row. If McNeely had the sense to seat the kids in alphabetical order, the problem would cut itself in half. As it was, the two goons kept up a spitball barrage and a constant taunting of everyone around them. Like all successful goons—and most of that subspecies had been gifted by God with a generous amount of cunning—G
rady and Tommy knew when it was time to play the angel, to let their faces go soft and wounded whenever another student made an accusation or complaint.

  Like this morning when Tommy had made a grab for Jett’s ass in the hall.

  That kind of thing was flattering in the fifth grade, when you didn’t have any ass worth grabbing, but now she was becoming a woman, and as freaky as that prospect was, she thought her body had some value. She had whirled and tried to kick him in that mysterious region between his legs, where all manner of lumpy, disgusting things dangled, but at the last second he had twisted away and her foot bounced harmlessly off his thigh.

  Worse, he caught her leg while she was off-balance, tilted her over like DiCaprio going for Winslet in “Titanic,” or maybe Gable doing Leigh if you were lame enough to have watched “Gone With The Wind,” as she had. Tommy put his mouth close to hers, braces and all, and whispered, “Not a bad move for a headless chicken.”

  Then he spun her in spastic imitation of a Spanish dance, the other kids laughing as she fell to her knees, and a nuclear orange anger had erupted behind her eyelids. She must have screamed, because when the dust cleared, the beefy assistant principal Richard Bell, known to the kids as Dicky Dumbbell, had sequestered Tommy away for a private counsel.

  Apparently sexual harassment wasn’t a serious offense at Cross Valley High, because Tommy had been right on time for first period Geography, and since Cross Valley was a small school, Jett was in the same class. Tommy had winked at her and flashed a twisted smile that held the promise of future humiliation.

  The worst thing of all was that she had blushed, and tingling blood had flushed to that secret and forbidden woman region that craved attention but didn’t know quite what to do with it yet.

  And so the day had gone. Now, with McNeeley’s sentence diagrams covering the chalkboard and the hands of the clock reaching wearily toward two, Jett was calculating how fast she could reach the door when the final bell rang. She closed her eyes and must have dozed, because she saw a faceless man in the straw hat and plaid shirt at McNeely’s desk, lean and tall in denim jeans. Now she could see his face—it was a sack made of coarse tan cloth, two uneven holes burned for eyes and holding nothing but blackness.

  She closed her eyes when the sack made a ripple of a mouth, and it began to speak.

  “The possessive of a name ending in ‘s’ is followed by apostrophe ‘s’, except, strangely enough, in the case of Jesus,” the scarecrow man intoned, with a voice as dark and loud as Revelation’s thunder. “In that case, it’s just an apostrophe by itself. That’s according to the Chicago Manual of Style, brothers and sisters. Special rule for Jesus. Amen.”

  Jett’s eyes snapped open and she found her head had almost banged against the top of her desk, the one with the greasy pencil slot and “Suck Big Donky Dix” carved into the surface.

  McNeely was finishing some monotone declaration or other, and the class had long since given in to fidgeting. Tommy made a bleating, goatish sound from the back of the class, causing McNeely to turn. She stood with the marker in her hand as if it were a laser gun, her eyes like milky marbles.

  “Did someone have a question?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Grady Eggers said, raising his hand and lifting himself out of his seat. He was already five-ten and had the first signs of stubble, the kind of kid who was headed for either gridiron glory or the oily pits of auto shop.

  McNeely tugged at her cardigan and pushed her cat’s-eye glasses up her long nose. “Mr. Eggers?”

  “Does Jesus really get no ‘s’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, why does He get treated any different? You said every rule applies to everybody the same.”

  Jett was wide awake now, no matter how drowsy she had been before.

  “I don’t understand,” Mrs. McNeely said, putting on her teacher’s smile, the automatic response to anything that cast doubt on the textbook.

  “You said Jesus was the exception to the rule.”

  The class grew silent. Even Tommy Wilson looked pensive, a rare expression for him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Eggers. I didn’t say a thing about Jesus.”

  “You said He don’t get no apostrophe ‘s,’ just an apostrophe.” Grady sounded uneasy, on the edge of rage. “I heard it plain as day. Why come is that?”

  “We were discussing when to use ‘who’ or ‘whom’ in the objective case,” McNeely said. “I don’t see how our dear Lord and Savior could enter into it. And I can’t teach anything religious, anyway, or we’d all be in big trouble.”

  The bell gave its brittle cry of release, and the tension in the class dropped like a wet rope.

  Jett gathered her books, hoping to make it to the next class before Tommy caught up with her. She felt faint, partly due to the vision she’d had of the scarecrow man.

  But Grady heard it, too. Although he thought McNeeley said it.

  Did it really count as a vision if two people experienced it, or did you chalk it up to the beginnings of mass hysteria?

  In seventh-grade health class in Charlotte, Jett had been subjected to the ever-popular drug scare videos. While most of the kids had snickered as somber narrators expounded on the dangers of evil weed, Jett had actually paid attention. Unlike the others, who wouldn’t know a yellow jacket from a roach, Jett saw it as an opportunity to educate herself. She’d paid attention when the talking head launched into a tirade on acid flashbacks, in which a bad trip could come on weeks, months, or even years after the initial “exposure.” Come right out of the blue, the narrator had said. Totally unexpected and without warning. Flashback sufferers often went to the hospital because they thought they were having a nervous breakdown.

  The whole thing was starting to freak her out. It was possible that Grady, too, had dropped LSD. But that still didn’t mean they would have the same flashback. And how could you “flash back” to something that had never happened before?

  Gordon would probably know, but she’d rather eat a hot popsicle in hell than talk with him about anything in her personal life.

  Yeah, go babbling about a scarecrow man and it will confirm everything he wants to believe. He’d park your ass in a treatment center so fast you wouldn’t have time to change your earring. And Mom would just sit there and put up with it. For “the good of the family.”

  She negotiated the halls, weaving through kids in denim jackets with rolled-up sleeves, low-hanging pants, the girls wearing wide belts. Even here in the sticks, it seemed everybody knew about Old Navy and Gap. A bunch of brainless trendoids. Some of the redneck boys wore flannel, but they stuck to their own kind, stomping their boots as if to knock the cow crap out of the treads, sneaking pinches of Skoal between their cheeks and gums.

  “What’s the hurry?” came a girl’s voice behind her.

  Jett wheeled to face Bethany Miller, who was as cool as Mentos in her short skirt and blue halter top with bra straps showing, totally in defiance of the school dress code. “No hurry, I just have to do my homework before math class.”

  “But class starts in four minutes.”

  “That’s what I mean. I don’t want to disappoint Mrs. Stansberry. She’s the only cool teacher I have.”

  “Did you sleep okay? You look like you’re late for your own funeral. Or maybe your eye shadow’s a little thick today.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “No, you’re good. This Goth thing looks bitching. I wish my parents would let me get away with it.”

  “See, that’s just it. You don’t ask your parents, you tell them. Have to show them who’s boss right from diapers.”

  “I’ll bet your diapers were black.”

  “Well, not while they were clean.”

  “Ooh, yuck.” Bethany crinkled her overly pert nose.

  “What are you doing after school?”

  “Feeding the goats.”

  “I hate those cloven-hoofed little monsters. They scare me.”

  Bethany laughed. �
�They’re okay. The males, the billy goats, stink unless you cut their balls off. My dad has a metal band that you put around the sac, then leave it for a few weeks. The balls swell up, turn black and gross, and then they fall off. Problem solved.”

  Jett shuddered. She wasn’t an expert in male anatomy, but she was under the impression that the testicles were the most vulnerable spot on their bodies. Which is why you tried to kick there in an emergency. But causing their balls to rot seemed like the sort of punishment that should be reserved for the very worst creatures. Ones like Tommy Wilson.

  Jett decided she wouldn’t complain about her own chores for a while. Sweeping the living room didn’t seem so bad when compared to forking hay to a goat. “Well, I’ve got to get to that homework. Say hi to Chuck for me.”

  Bethany’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you mean?”

  “Your boyfriend. The Chuckster.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “You told me all about him. Chuck steak, 100 percent lean.”

  “And don’t forget he’s mine.” Bethany frowned and turned, then was swept away in the tide of students. Jett looked at the clock on the wall. Two minutes to solve six math problems.

  And the rest of her life to solve all the rest of her problems.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Katy ruled the kitchen, but the living room was all Smith.

  The centerpiece of the fireplace mantle was a small hickory-and-glass case that contained a single book. Not just any book, though; this was an antique heirloom, the family bible owned by Harmon Smith, Gordon’s great-grandfather and a Circuit Rider from the days when small mountain communities had to share a single preacher. It was opened to Psalms, its pages yellowed and brittle, the black leather cover cracked. She wasn’t even allowed to dust the case.

  The rest of the room was more like a postcard than a place where a family “lived.” The rustic furniture was complemented by a modern sofa and Gordon’s favorite chair, but instead of a television, the dominant feature of the room was a stereo on which Gordon often listened to old mountain hymns and recorded sermons. The room’s walls were covered with drawings, photographs, lithographs, and sheet music, as well as sacred relics that Gordon had collected during his research.