The Value of the Corn

*Murder / Suicide / Mild Gore*

It was the coldest day of the year. The crow swooped down from the white sky and landed in the middle of the field in front of the scarecrow.

The crow said nothing yet, but paced back and forth on the frozen soil like a drill sergeant. A few minutes of this passed, then the crow stopped and announced to the scarecrow:

'Bad news, friend. Spring isn't coming. Neither the warmer summer. This winter is, it pains me to apprise, all you'll see from now until your splints give, or the farmer dismembers you for kindling. That means you and I - we have no more quarrell. There will be no seedlings for me to thieve, and so there will be none for you to shoo me from.'

'That can't be,' said the scarecrow. '... Even if it were so, how does a crow know it?'

The crow chuckled. 'My dear boy. I fly! Here, there, I speak, I listen. It's a fact, I'm afraid, that the wheel of the seasons has snapped its felly and stopped, and at a most inconvenient juncture - for the both of us.'

'This... can't be...'

'Yes, well, I thought it bad form not to tell you, despite our adversarial bearings... no hard feelings, by the way.'

'Likewise,' said the scarecrow meekly.

The crow made a short bow of acknowledgement, then looked to the sky and spread his wings.

'Wait!' cried the scarecrow.

'What is it?' said the crow, resheathing his feathers.

'It's just that... what will I do now? Will I be stuck by my post indefinitely in this afflicted earth?'

'Not my business,' said the crow.

'At least admit our condemnations are uneven; you, after all, can still busy yourself with scavenging - for a while, at least - and then you'll die and that is usual. What if the farmer doesn't come for me? Won't this weather preserve me, a sack, cloth and straw and never again the protector of a valuable thing?'

The crow looked upon him with pity. 'I concur our fates are not the same.'

'Even now,' sobbed the scarecrow, 'I feel the awful hope for some anomalous mercy burning inside me with the urgency of a fool.'

'My friend, that valuable thing you speak of - I can see that I have injured you already, but I would truly be remiss if I didn't offer you this on the matter: the farmer and I have in common that we value the corn for practical sustenance. The farmer and I do not have that in common with you. There, I submit, is your comfort.'

'I don't know what you're saying,' said the scarecrow.

'Goodness. It's simple,' said the crow. 'You have never needed the corn, not in the sense that its nutrients are crucial to you. Your loss is merely one of purpose - an affecting loss, to be sure, but, in light of the news I have delivered to you, surely a trivial one. It can be only ego and privilege that afford you the pain you are feeling.'

The scarecrow butted the air in anger. 'So now you mock me, crow!'

'On the contrary, my dear boy, I mock myself by caring to impart the obvious!'

'You dirty, heartless crow! Is that all you have to say?'

The crow sighed, then flew up and perched on the scarecrow's shoulder. 'No. My intention was not to disparage your fears, but to clarify them - ahead of my solution.'

'Your solution?'

'Yes. My solution. You see, since your woe comes not from the expiration of the thing, but from the severing of - might we say - your soul's relationship to it, does it not follow that forging a relationship with something new - something resilient to, or even dependent on, this winter - would be the most candid thing to do?'

'Go on,' said the scarecrow.

'The farmer has a daughter that is his purpose. What if you had that in common with him? - a companion. Moreover, the winter would not perish you both like it surely will us.'

'What nonsense are you telling me!' scoffed the scarecrow. 'I am not flesh! I cannot walk or fly! With what mythical thing am I to replicate him?'

The crow hopped off the scarecrow's shoulder on to the ground. 'You see that snowy copse at the edge of this field?'

'Yes.'

'That is where the farmer's daughter plays. Last winter she built a snowman there. She built a snowman there the winter before that, and the winter before that... it stands to reason this year she will do the same. Tonight, in fact. But, as we know, this winter is unique, isn't it?'

The scarecrow was dumbstruck, flabbergasted at the crow's genius.

'Now you see my solution,' said the crow.

'I see! I see! Crow, I don't know how to thank you! But... the copse is all the way over there... and I'm all the way over here. How am I to know my companion with that space between us?'

The crow chuckled. 'Rest your mind. It's a simple matter of convincing the farmer's daughter to roll the snow over here.'

'And you can do that?'

'Of course! She and I are well acquainted. '

The crow poised himself to fly away, but then turned his head and said to the scarecrow:

'She always dresses her snowman with a scarf. Last year it was her father's black scarf, the year before that it was her mother's blue scarf. I don't think, given the circumstances, it would be bad form to request a colour of your preference.'

The scarecrow thought for a moment, then said, 'You know, even in winter the sky can be blue, and at nighttime I'll have my fill of black. It's the green in the trees and of the fields I fear I'll miss the most. Green is my preference.'

'Green? Green is what I would have chosen!' exclaimed the crow, and grinned and flew off toward the farmhouse.

                                   ***

That night the crow returned, sprightly and excited.

'Good news, friend! Look! Not just have I brokered the making of your companion, but there, see! The farmer in his goodness has come with his daughter to provide for you!'

The scarecrow watched the farmer and his daughter go hand in hand into the copse, and he felt a divine gratitude welling in his heart.

'Crow. Night and day I have denied to you the saplings all, the corn, and right through every harvest - you must tell me, why have you done all this?'

The crow fluttered up on to the scarecrow's shoulder. 'Listen....' he said. 'Listen, my dear boy.'

Then a gunshot rang out around the white horizons; so powerful was it in the still, cold air that it shook the snow from the boughs of the trees at the edge of the copse.

Then rang another.

'What was that!' cried the scarecrow.

The crow didn't reply, but sprung off the scarecrow's shoulder and flew hastily into the copse.

                                ***

Later the crow returned carrying two eyeballs in his talons. He landed and situated the eyeballs forward and tilted on the hard soil so that they stared up at the scarecrow. 'These belonged to the farmer's daughter,' he said. 'They are green, like her mother's were.'

The scarecrow wept. 'Why has this happened?'

'Why?' replied the crow. 'That isn't the question. That is never the question because it is a stupid question. Ask yourself why - why is this, an eternal winter, descended so cruelly upon us, and without warning?' The crow stamped his feet. 'Why?- Why?- Why? ...And yet it is, that much is in need of no investigation. I intend to sustain myself for as long as my peck can penetrate ice - ice, oh! As we here grouse on such idle platitudes, ice seizes that fast-cooling flesh over there. Scarecrow, I have brought to you the daughter's eyes so that you may be reminded of the green in the trees and of the fields: that is my mercy and farewell. I am sorry.'

With that, the crow rose and blended into the darkness like a secret taken to the grave.

The scarecrow wept and wept in terrible solitude. The daughter's eyes that stared up at him did not so with any the motherly numinousness of blooming trees, but instead seemed to relish with plain and infinite stamina the scarecrow's ceaseless anguish.

                                   ***

Days had gone by, weeks, months. It occurred to the scarecrow that this morning would have been the first day of spring. By now, the scarecrow had died of despair many, many times, and was quietly hanging by his nails and twine above the unchanged field. He moved not so much as the corner of his eye when the crow swooped down and landed in front of him.

The crow was thin and solemn. 'Bad news, friend,' he said. 'These eyes that I gave you, they're all that's left of the bodies in the copse. I'm sorry you'll never see green again, but I must take them from you now. For practical sustenance... no hard feelings, I hope?'

'Take them,' said the scarecrow.

The crow hesitated, cocked his head on his wing and studied the scarecrow, unsure what to make of his deference. He said:

'They're for my survival. You understand me, don't you?'

'Yes.'

'Do you understand that when I've eaten these, there is nothing left; I'll succumb to this winter and that will be that.'

'Nothing?' exclaimed the scarecrow. 'How supple were your wings? How far did your eye see, with what precision? Yet for all of that, all your life you have navigated yourself in circles within squares. You are a stupid animal!'

The crow slowly drew back his skinny neck under his withered quills. 'What is this? I'll prolong myself now but a fraction of the future... and nothing of yours! Why assault me now with your ungrateful scorn?'

'Ungrateful?' scoffed the scarecrow. 'May be a snowman's chance in hell I'm that... No, my intention was not to deprecate your demise, but to clarify it - ahead of my story.'

'Your story?'

'Yes,' said the scarecrow. 'Are you ready?'

'I'll listen,' said the crow.

A shrill wind slithered over the bitter land as if to proclaim itself witness. The scarecrow fixed his gaze on the crow and started:

'At first I despised those eyes. They did naught but shone back to me my angst, my futility. Unwavering were they in their wretched quest; they killed me, again and again, and only after a hundred deaths, then struck an anomaly that hushed my squirming soul. No less dolorous but somehow... righteous then, I felt the truth and purity of indifference pour through me like cold milk. And then death was to me mere earth beads on the abacus of unknowing.

'It was the last real death, but there I still was, looking into those green eyes, eyes that suddenly no longer mocked or injured me, but transmitted to me nothing any more. And I do mean nothing. Real nothing was the nexus that flew me far away from you, crow, and your placative artifices.'

The crow dug his talons into the ice. 'Go on,' he said.

'She was at her mother's funeral, the brave girl. You and I will agree, though neither of us saw it, that she put her arm around her father and fought through that day for him.'

'We do agree.'

'When they came hand in hand out of the copse they went back to the farmhouse and the farmer told her what a beautiful snowman she'd built, didn't he?'

'It was beautiful,' said the crow.

'What did her father make her for supper that day?'

'Broth. Beef and onion... They ran out of matches to light the stove, the farmer had to use his jeep's cigarette plug on a rolled up newspaper and rush back inside like a Viking pillager. She couldn't stop laughing.'

'She will start high school after the summer... Her first kiss. Her first broken heart. Her first failure - won't that be a day! But she'll live...'

Your fraction of the future, what does it look like now?

'Bigger,' said the crow, somewhere from the heart, and later he ate his last meal slowly and with his mouth closed, awaiting a regrettably usual death.