Starshine and Sunglow by Betty Levin

Author:Betty Levin [Levin, Betty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-203561-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1994-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

The children visited the corn plot almost every day. They had a kind of creepy feeling that something else was going on before their eyes. But it wasn’t until they found the broom scarecrow’s head uncovered again that they noticed he was no longer at the edge of the plot. He was standing between the third and fourth rows. And he was doffing his helmet at the mop scarecrow, who was also just inside the planted corn.

“It’s like a story,” Kate declared. “They’re trying to get together.”

Ben shook his head. “If it’s a story,” he complained, “we’re the ones who are supposed to be making it up.”

Foster just stared. Who are these scarecrows? he asked himself. They needed names.

Over in the big cornfield woodchucks surfaced beside their burrows. Whenever Bramble saw them, she barked wildly. The woodchucks scurried back down their holes. Some of them moved on to dogless gardens away from Flint Farm Road. They couldn’t tell that Bramble’s hunting days were long gone.

Crows came and went, too. The corn had a lot more growing to do before it would seriously interest them.

Meanwhile the scarecrows seemed to have a life of their own. Their wardrobes reflected a new awareness of each other. Kate made a many-colored paper chain to hang around the mop scarecrow’s neck. Ben made ears out of old socks his mother had given up trying to mend. He fastened them onto the bristle-headed broom. One ear was pink and one red.

“He caught a fever,” Ben explained.

Kate thought the broom was blushing. “Some people’s ears get red when they’re embarrassed,” she remarked.

“That would make both ears red. He caught a fever in the tropics,” Ben maintained.

Foster made an earring out of the top of a frozen juice can and hung it from the pink, healthy ear.

Mrs. Flint called from her porch. She wanted them to be careful not to step on the corn while they worked on the scarecrows.

“We know,” Ben answered. “Who moved them?”

“Not me,” was all Mrs. Flint would tell him.

Some days later they made the rounds of all the houses on Flint Farm Road to ask for new donations. Everyone was aware of what was going on in the corn plot except Mr. and Mrs. Josephson. But they let the children search around in the basement where they kept things that used to belong to their children.

Kate couldn’t keep her eyes off the empty puppy pen. But Ben found badminton rackets with a lot of the strings missing and an old stretched-out net.

Back at the farm the children found a broken metal fence post they could shove into the soft earth about midway between the scarecrows, which were now even deeper inside the corn plot. Ben tied one end of the net to the post and the other to a forked branch that they jammed in across from the post. But none of them could figure out how to get the scarecrows to look as though they were swinging their rackets.

“You know what’s missing?” said Foster’s father when he and Adele stopped by on Saturday morning.

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