The Scarecrow Next Door

Wren

The tax notice rode shotgun the whole way from Boston.

Sutton Hollow Farm. Amount past due: $11,482.16.

Everything else I owned was in the back. Four suitcases, eleven boxes, a garment bag of cocktail dresses I had no reason to wear anymore, and the ring light from the days when Abbott Events had forty thousand Instagram followers and a waiting list. All of it fit in my car.

“Hey, are you there yet?” Birdie asked through the car speakers.

“Not yet.”

“How far are you?”

“Almost there.”

“Wait, you’re breaking up.” Something clattered on her end, a pan, probably, because Birdie was always cooking.

“Promise me that if the house is haunted, you’ll get a hotel.”

“The house isn’t haunted. It’s just old. And there’s no hotel. There’s a bed-and-breakfast that closes after Labor Day and a motel that got one star on Google for, and I quote, ‘vibes.’”

“Bad vibes or good vibes?”

“The review didn’t say.”

She laughed, and for a second I almost felt like everything was going to be okay. Then the road curved, the maples opened up, and there it was on its hill: the white, centuries-old farmhouse, the red barn gone the color of dried blood, and a hand-painted sign at the end of the drive that my grandmother had touched up every spring of my life.

SUTTON HOLLOW FARM. PUMPKINS. CIDER. CORN MAZE.

Someone had tied a black ribbon to the post. It had faded to gray.

“Wren?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“You’ll call me after you settle, still tonight, or I’m calling the police to come check on you.”

“They won’t.”

“Then you better call me,” Birdie said, and hung up.

She’d offered me her couch again before I left that morning, standing in her doorway in her robe. I’d slept on her couch for three weeks, ever since I’d carried my last box out of the apartment Daniel and I had picked out together. But I couldn’t live on her kindness forever. So I’d said thank you, and hugged her too hard, and pointed the car north.

After I arrived, the first thing I noticed was the cold.

Not outside. Outside it was October in Vermont, looking like a postcard: the hills on fire with red and gold, the air sharp and clean and smelling of leaves. Inside was different. Inside, the cold had settled into the house the way it settles when a house is deserted.

I set my bags down and didn’t take my coat off.

The house still smelled like her. Cloves and woodsmoke, and underneath that, the faint green scent of the lavender she hung in bundles from the pantry door. I’d been bracing for grief to hit me like a truck. Instead, it came in slow waves, as if it were not in a hurry.

I tried the thermostat. Nothing. I went down to the basement and stared at the furnace, which stared back at me with the hostility of an appliance older than probably my grandmother. I pressed a red button that said RESET. The furnace considered this and declined.

“Okay,” I told it. “Okay. That’s fair. I wouldn’t want to work for me either.”

Back upstairs, I made a list of things I needed to do.

1. Call furnace guy.

2. Get Firewood??

3. Find out if pumpkins are ready. (How do you know if pumpkins are ready?)

4. Open the patch by the 5th or you’re done.

5. Don’t cry in the kitchen.

I had already blown up number five.

I took the time to read the letter that was in the envelope from the lawyer, underneath the deed, the will, and a heavy key ring. I’d been carrying it around for three weeks without opening it. It had my name on the front in Grandma’s handwriting, which had gone spidery in the last few years, the letters leaning on each other.

Wren.

I made tea in the blue kettle, because she would have, and I sat at the kitchen table where I’d eaten a thousand bowls of oatmeal as a kid, and I opened it.

My darling girl,

If you are reading this, then I’m gone, and I’m sorry to leave you a farm instead of something sensible, like money. I know you’ll want to sell it. You may. I only ask that you give it one October first.

I also have to ask something that will sound foolish. There’s a scarecrow in the east field, down by the stone wall. Your great-grandmother put him there, or so the story goes, and I’ve kept him mended all my life. Please don’t let anyone take him down. Not the buyers, not the county, not anyone.

Be kind to him, Wren. He’s been so patient.

There are things our family owes that I never found the courage to pay. I’m sorry for that, too.

All my love, always, Grandma Ruth

I read it a few times more, trying to understand my grandmother’s cryptic instructions. And then, I started laughing a little. It was a nervous laugh.

Be kind to him.

The last year of her life, Grandma had started saying things like that on the phone. She’d told me the crows were gossiping about her. She’d told me the moon was “coming in crooked.” Once, near the end, she’d called me at two in the morning to ask whether I remembered to say good night to him, and when I asked who, she went quiet. Then she’d said, “Never mind, sweetheart. Go back to sleep.”

I hadn’t gone back to sleep. I’d lain awake and thought, She’s slipping. And I’d thought, I should go up there this weekend. And then the Harringtons’ lawyer had called, and I’d spent the weekend on the phone with my own, finding out exactly how much I couldn’t afford to fight.

I didn’t go up that weekend. Or the next one.

She died while I was running a charity gala in a ballroom with no cell service. I found out in the parking garage at midnight, standing next to my car in heels I’d been standing in all day, listening to a voicemail from a hospice nurse who gave me the news.

I folded the letter and put it in my coat pocket.

Then I did what I always did when I couldn’t fix something. I went looking for something else I could. I went out to the field to see the pumpkins.

There were rows and rows of them, fat and orange under their tired leaves, stretching down the hill toward the corn maze, whose stalks rattled in the wind. Some were the size of basketballs. Some were bigger. One, near the end of the third row, was so enormous that I stopped and stared at it the way you’d stare at a car parked in a swimming pool.

“Who did this,” I asked it. “Who raised you.”

Grandma had, obviously. At eighty-nine, with a cane and a bad hip, she’d planted forty rows of pumpkins because she always had. Because October was the farm’s whole year, and if the patch didn’t open, the farm didn’t make it to spring.

I kept walking, past the corn maze and past the orchard where the apple trees stood gnarled and heavy, down the long slope toward the east field. Night was falling fast, and I had to get out my phone for light.

And there he was.

I’d forgotten how big he was. Or I’d been small the last time I really looked at him. He stood on his post at the edge of the field, where the old stone wall divided our land from the Marsh place next door. His arms were stretched along the crossbeam, wrapped in a flannel shirt so faded it had gone from red to the soft pink of old bricks. His trousers were patched at the knees. His hands were burlap gloves stuffed with straw, the fingers long and carefully sewn, and something about the care in those stitches caught my attention.

His face was the strangest part.

Most scarecrows have funny faces, a button nose, a lopsided grin, something to make the kids laugh on hayrides. He wasn’t like that. His face was burlap, stitched with dark thread to make a straight nose, the hint of a jaw, and a mouth sewn in a line that wasn’t smiling and wasn’t sad. Just waiting. His eyes were two dark knots of thread, and they were looking down, toward the farmhouse.

Toward me.

When I was six, I was so afraid of him that I wouldn’t go past the orchard alone. Grandma used to walk me down here by the hand. He’s not scary, she’d say. He keeps watch. That’s all. On Halloween nights, she’d leave a mug of hot cider at the foot of his post, and in the morning it would be gone, and she’d wink at me and say the raccoons were very polite in Vermont.

I stepped closer.

There were patches all over him, dozens of them, in fabrics from every decade. Gingham and corduroy and denim. A square of green velvet that I was almost sure had come from Grandma’s Christmas dress. And there, sewn over his heart, a patch of yellow flannel with tiny blue ducks on it.

My pajamas. From when I was seven.

“She put me on you,” I said out loud. “Oh, Grandma.”

The wind moved through the grass, and I had the strangest feeling, standing there in the last of the light, that I knew him somehow. The way you know a face across a crowded room before you even realize who it is. It was like a word on the tip of my tongue.

There you are. I thought.

Which was insane. I was clearly more tired than I’d thought.

“Okay,” I began. “Hi. I’m Wren. You probably don’t remember me. I was the kid who cried when you looked at her.”

Of course, the scarecrow said nothing.

“Grandma says I’m supposed to be kind to you. So I guess this is me being kind.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Honestly, you’re the first person, well, not a person, but you know what I mean, I’ve talked to since I got here, so that’s a nice change. This farm feels weird without her here.”

Then, I decided to tell him everything.

I told him about the Harrington wedding and the four hundred calla lilies, and how the bride’s mother had called me the help in front of eighty guests, then sued me anyway. The lawsuit was just big enough and just public enough that my two biggest corporate clients quietly took their business elsewhere.

I told him I’d spent eight years building Abbott Events out of nothing, and it had taken four months to come apart. That in August I’d sat across from the only two employees I’d ever had, and told them I couldn’t make payroll, and they hugged me and cried with me, which made me feel worse.

I told him about Daniel. That we’d been engaged for fourteen months, and the venue was booked, and I’d planned our wedding the way I planned everybody’s, down to the minute. That was when the business started going under, and he’d sat me down at our kitchen table and told me, very gently, that he couldn’t marry someone who was always in crisis mode. That I was a lot to manage for one person.

That he’d kept the apartment, because his name was on the lease, and the good coffee maker, because it was his. I’d kept the ring for exactly one more day before I mailed it back.

I told him I’d missed my grandmother’s last phone call because I was working the only job I had left, a charity gala I’d taken at half my rate, apologizing to the client about a chocolate fountain. I told him about the eleven thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars and sixteen cents, and that I had until the end of the month, and that I didn’t know how to tell if a pumpkin was ready.

“And I’m going to sell this place,” I continued, my voice cracking. “I have to. I can’t run a farm. I kill houseplants. I killed a cactus, for crying out loud. But first I have to get the patch open, and pay the taxes, and make it look like something somebody would want to buy, because whatever I get for it is all I’ve got. There’s no apartment. There’s no business. There’s no Daniel. There’s nothing in Boston to go back to.”

I laughed again, almost crying. “So I’m going to make this work, and then I’m going to take the money and start over. From zero. At thirty-one. And I’m going to be fine.”

Even to a scarecrow, it didn’t sound possible.

I noticed the wind had died completely.

I wiped my face with my sleeve. “Sorry. That was a lot to manage for one scarecrow, I’m sure.”

For one second, and I would tell myself later that I imagined it, I thought he moved, and I thought his face looked sadder.

It was dark now, and the only light I had was from my phone.

I shivered and pulled my coat tighter.

“Good night,” I said to the scarecrow, and felt silly, and said it anyway. “I’ll come back tomorrow. I promise I’m not always this much.”

I turned and started back up the hill toward the house. The kitchen light glowed yellow at the top, the only light for a mile. My breath fogged in front of me. Somewhere in the orchard, an owl asked its question into the dark.

I was halfway to the corn maze when I heard it.

A rustle behind me.

I stopped.

Everything around me was perfectly still. There wasn’t a breath of wind anywhere on that whole hill.

I didn’t turn around.

I told myself it was a deer. A raccoon. One of the polite Vermont raccoons, coming for cider twenty-nine days early. I tried very hard to convince myself of that, and then I remembered my grandmother’s words.

Be kind to him.

He’s been so patient.

I locked the kitchen door behind me. Then I stood at the window over the sink for a long time, looking down the dark hill toward the east field, which was now pitch black.