Inside a ring about twelve paces across, the grasshoppers stop. The flax field at Bruinsloot ticks with them from May until the first cold, a dry sound that carries to the dike road. At the edge of the ring it ends as if cut, and the scarecrow stands in the pocket of quiet that is left. It is an ash pole with a crosspiece, a faded indigo smock, sacking trousers and a flat-brimmed felt hat with a tuft of straw through the crown. Three people have told me what it does. They disagree, and I set their accounts down as given.
Odilia Haverkamp, who rents the field, says it does nothing but keep its hours. At dusk the arms slide down from the crosspiece until the sleeves hang straight, and in the morning they rise again. She has watched this from the gate, milk pails at her feet, for nineteen years without remarking on it. She hangs her wash on the fence outside the ring and has never once hung it inside. The ground within is packed bare and grows only a gray moss, so the flax is sown to the line and no farther.
A drover from Aldenhoek, bringing six heifers along the dike in August, says it turns to face the road at noon. His cattle would not enter the ring. Field hands cross it with their hats in their hands, since a hat worn inside may be found on the scarecrow's head by morning, and the drover, who would not cross at all, went around. He looked hard at the face, because it seemed to be looking at him. The left eye is the green base of a wine bottle. The right is a knothole in a wooden plug. The mouth is a seam of black waxed thread that runs a thumb's length past each corner.
The third account comes from a clerk of the dike board, who walked the ring in October with a measuring rod and found the pole standing in a different hole from the one it held in June. The old hole was filled and tamped. The new one lay seven paces east, dug clean, with no spade marks in the stubble. Every March the straw in the smock is fresh and the seams are mended, the left elbow patched in sailcloth, and the people of Aldenhoek say the same of their own. Nobody will say who does the work, and nobody has answered the question that would settle the other two accounts: whose hands are they, when every farmer in both parishes swears they were not theirs?
- Classification
- Animated straw-and-timber construct
- Habitat
- Flax and grain fields, dike country
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 7 ft on its pole
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Lowland fields behind the dikes
- Binomial
- Stipula vigilax
- Diet
- None observed
- Temperament
- Watchful, still, territorial