The Watcher

You can find this story in Phylum Press Issue 003! The Watcher was inspired by a painting by Caila Warren entitled The Watcher of the Field. This story appears in the Steeltown Dreaming cycle.  

***

It was my turn to change Gregory’s coat.

We trapsed through the sea of winter wheat and it was a bright clear day, hot and muggy like a bowl of tomato soup. Carrying Gregory’s new coat made it all the hotter for me but I was used to it. It took Mom and Nanna all of last week to put it together, get all the feathers just right. Black within black with some shades of blue. Was brand spanking new and I thought it’d look real good on Gregory, better than the last one, certainly. We heard crows cawing overhead and one of them actually had a gardener snake in its talons. We thought that was funny.

            “You gonna ask Gregory?” Hannah said.

            “I suppose I should,” I said.

Up ahead standing seven feet high was Gregory, the family scarecrow. Our great-great grandfather planted him here when he first bought the farm with our great-great grandmother. They named him Gregory and he had been good to the Warrens ever since. Every harvest we changed Gregory’s coat made of feathers because it brought us good luck. Great-great grandfather found that out the year an awful blight hit Romulus’s crops. He had just changed Gregory’s coat—an old farmer’s tweed jacket—because it had become destroyed in the elements. Every wheat and corn field in Romulus fell foul and was no better than rat poison—except for the Warren crops. Our great-great grandparents kept everything. Ever since then the Warren children have taken turns each harvest in changing Gregory’s coat.

            “Okay,” Caleb said. “This is it.”

            He and Hannah stood on either side of Gregory. His old coat was beat up and chewed up and didn’t look right on him at all. Caleb and Hannah carefully removed the coat from the crossbar and folded it together very somberly. They set it aside then looked at me.

It was my turn.

My throat was parched and my head throbbed. Knowing this would be the last time I’d change him made me feel all sorts of ways. He was completely naked except for that wide-brimmed leather hat which hung by the top of the steak. I had never liked seeing Gregory unclothed. It was unnatural and unbecoming of a guardian who had faithfully stood watch over the work of my father’s hands, that same work which I had also toiled. My heart’s persistent tugging turned my face away from the farm and wheat fields and towards those wonderous new world I had read about in so many books and magazines. I had wanted the university. I had wanted to see the city, smell that city air and breathe in that city night life I had seen so often on television.

            “Go on,” Hannah said. “Dress him.”

            I looked at her and smiled. I held Gregory’s coat in my hands as if it were the golden garments of kings. Carefully, so very carefully, I wrapped it about the crossbar so that it was nice and eve, then I made sure the hem dropped all the way down the stake and tied it off. I straightened Gregory’s hat so that it rested more naturally on the stake. Nothing was under that hat and I had always imagined a weather face with weary eyes, and a long grey beard given his age.

            “Aren’t you going to ask him?” Hannah said.

            I took my hat off and looked up at Gregory whose new coat flapped in the warm summer breeze.

            “Gregory,” I said, shy like, as if I were a child addressing my father when I had done something wrong. “If it’s alright with you, I’d like to go on to the university, become a writer. I’d like to be published. Would that be alright with you?”

            His wide-brimmed hat appeared to us to tip downward, as if he had nodded. Caleb and Hannah whooped and hollered and pat me on the back and I stood there silent and happy. I was overcome with emotion at Gregory allowing me to live out my dream. I nodded back, put my hat on and told him thank you.

            “You gonna write about the farm?” Hannah said.

            “Hope to,” I said. “After I graduate I’ll go to New York, find an agent and publish my stories in The New Yorker.”

            “Think they’ll print stories about our farm?”

            “They might,” I said. “And if they don’t there’re plenty other literary magazines that will. I’ll get my start in Steeltown, print some stories in the university paper, maybe send a short novel to a publisher, show them I can really do it. Then I’ll take all my stories to New York. Yes sir, I’ll take them to New York and walk in the footsteps of giants who have gone on before me. I’ll plant my feet in New York sidewalks like our family planted theirs in this soil. In the city they have apartments bigger than barns, richer than Solomon. It’s a wonderful thing to be read and to be loved.”

            There was a long silence before Caleb said, “You won’t forget about us will you?”

            I smiled and put my arm around him. “Never. Why, you two could come visit anytime you’d like. Mom and Dad, too. Now don’t you both cry. I’ll be back to visit over Christmases and Easters. Things may be changing, but this won’t be the last you’ll see of me.”

            We talked well into the afternoon and walked through the winter wheat back to the barn. The sky had gotten shadowed blue with some grey and the crows multiplied over our heads.

            “You two go on to the house,” I said. “I’ll close up the barn. Leave the camera.”

            Off they went and there I was standing all alone in the middle of that great barn where over many summer I’d fed the mules before storing our wheat in the big silo which as a boy I imagined was a rocket ship or a watchtower where I’d look out for imaginary invading Martian hordes. I could smell Mom’s cooking come off the stove and almost taste that cool glass of strawberry lemonade that would assuredly be set at the table. As is tradition in the Warren home Hannah played her violin and Caleb sat at the piano. That evening they played the Doxology which of course was my favorite hymn. I thought it tremendously sweet of them to consider me on this my last week before university. A week of last suppers. I went over to the fleece blanket that covered up the chicken coop which was old and rusted. As I pulled down the blanket I saw immediately the misshapen form of our elder brother, Eric. His crow’s beak was fractured in three places and caked with his own blood and the entirety of his body was covered with sores, most of which had become infected. His featherless arms were crow and much of his face and neck were crow. His torso and legs were human. He looked at me with his very human eyes and I cried. I cried until my cheeks were so wet you could wash clothes on them. I thought back to happier days when Eric used to carry me on his shoulder or teach me to fish by the river.

            “Eric,” I leaned against the cage, said, “I’m going away to the university very soon. I’m going to do what you always wanted to do, and I hope I make you proud. It’s not fair that this had to happen to you. It’s not fair what Mom and Dad did to you. It’s just not. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried in my room hearing Dad pull out your feathers for Gregory’s coat, and you cawing and screaming like that. I certainly won’t miss pulling them and I’m awfully sorry I hurt you. I can’t imagine your pain, Eric. It’s a strange magic our great-great grandfather came across and it’s a strange thing he found in Gregory, who watches over our wheat fields when all other wheat fails. But Eric, I’m going to do you proud. I’m going to get published and make money and I’m going to remember you for how you once were. Like us. For as long as there’ll be firstborn Warrens crossed with crows for Gregory’s coat, I’ll remember them all and I’ll immortalize them in poems and novels. People will read about them a hundred years after we’re all gone, when a new set of Warrens will drape new coats over Gregory’s shoulders.”

            My brother twitched and cawed and clapped his mutilated featherless wings together and squirmed around in that small cage as if worms had gotten underneath his skin and itched him. Never had I seen such sadness, such pain, as when I saw Eric. I snapped a photo of my brother as he crouched there and looked at me, his dark blue eyes like spears through my heart, yet it was his pierced side from which the water flowed. I told him I’d always be grateful.

    “Well, I’ve said about as much as I can say. Goodbye, Eric. I’ll miss you.”

            That evening I had said goodnight to Mom and Dad and Hannah and Caleb. I stayed up in my room writing on my grandmother’s typewriter, the one she used to type a letter to my grandfather congratulating him for receiving a job offer at Piss, where she worked as a secretary at the time.

            The sun had nearly set and still I could see an unusually large murder of crows hovering over Gregory. Their harvest was very near, and it seemed bittersweet to me that this was my last time watching them gather. Gregory sent out his legions of crows to the surrounding farms to subjugate their fields, devour their wheat, bring back eyeballs and kidneys, tongues and livers, lips, teeth, shinbones and shards of skull from farmers who had yet to learn the plain and simple fact that the Warrens grow the only wheat Romulus will ever need.

            I slept like a baby that night and I dreamed of my bus ticket and I dreamed of boarding the bus and dreams of stories on my grandmother’s typewriter, fields of stories like winter wheat.