Scarecrow

Chapter 1

The familiar gray ceiling of Jim Donnelly's bedroom is the first thing to greet him when he opens his eyes at 5 am sharp on Monday morning, a ceiling flecked with chipped paint and discolored from a burst pipe a few years back. Donnelly licks his lips, coaxing moisture back into his mouth and lungs as he begins to stir. He has woken up at this time every day for as long as he can remember, woken with the first strangled cry of the rooster at dawn until it became a natural reflex. Traces of night still lick at the window as he swings his legs out of bed, and the sun is still but a fiery sliver behind his fields.

Donnelly stretches, hearing the joints in his neck and arms crack soundly. The cool trickle of tap water echoes peacefully as he brushes his teeth in relative darkness, the outline of his stubble and heavy-set face a black shape in the bathroom's gloom. His blue overalls hang on their lonesome over the back of his desk chair, and he dresses quietly. Penny snorts softly in her sleep as he fastens the second button, her hair a black halo pooling about her head. When he snatches his Chiefs hat from the nightstand, she mumbles and turns back over. Donnelly bends and plants a soft kiss on his wife's forehead before tiptoeing out of the bedroom, shutting the door softly behind him.

—

He tends to the cows first. The largest one, a real prize winner named Bess, is a tame and gentle beast whom he has raised from her birth. He pats her massive side, whispering with soothing words as he collects the milk in a pail, then moves on to the next one. The cows hum all around him, a low-throated, bovine drone in the air. Despite the general manure-stink of the whole pen, he enjoys the company of the cows much more than he does the pecking chickens, with their sharp beaks and insistant clucking. He would never admit it to anyone, perhaps not even to himself, but Donnelly feels a suppressed twinge of satisfaction whenever the time comes to bring one of the little feathered bastards under the ax-blade.

The chicken coop is just next to the cows, containing three fat females and a single pompous rooster who emits a horrific death-cry whenever Donnelly enters. He assumes the little cock is just being territorial, but as he fills a wicker basket up with eggs, he has to stop himself from aiming a kick at the rooster's skull when it struts over and takes a defiant crap on his right boot. His hired help doesn't have to deal with this, oh no. The chicken coop is well-behaved when the hired help collects the eggs, and Donnelly is counting the days 'til the farmhand's summer break begins. He's decided by this point that it's a simple power play. The rooster just doesn't respect him.

By the time he is done in the chicken coop, the sun has gotten a move on with rising. Its light shines down upon the entirety of Donnelly's property, a small myriad of brown fields dotted with the occasional black smudge of a silo or barn, and the family farmhouse rearing up at its back like a white phantom. The house is old, built while the farmland itself was still being tilled for its fertility, and the newest thing about it is the front porch and deck, set in by Donnelly's grandfather. This too, however, has begun to peel in recent years. On good, cloudless days, one can sit on that porch and look out over the whole property from a simple rocking chair.

Blinking in the change of light, Donnelly deposits his load and nabs a sickle from a tool chest at the back of his storage shed. The tool has been faithful to him through past harvests, an ideal instrument for any farmer to wield. Six solid inches of curved steel fashioned into a shiny crescent, Donnelly uses the sickle mainly for sampling small sections of his crops, employing its larger and more dangerous cousin, the scythe, for when the corn is fully risen. Today is not for harvesting, it's still too early for that, but simply to test the health and growth of a few select sheaves of corn before the summer heat takes hold. The task tends to take the better part of his morning, and it's one he detests. He starts at the corn, taking an ear roughly in his calloused hands and inspecting it for insects, mold, and rot. Satisfied, he lets the ear go and watches it spring back lazily to the rest of the stalks like a slinky. He moves down the rows, sampling one from each line and giving the diseased plants a quick and easy death with a slash of his sickle. On bad harvest years, when the rain comes down too hard or sometimes does not come at all, the amount of rotting vegetation can stack up enough to make a second floor of the field.