The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

The Sexton's Scarecrow

Previously: "The Path Through the Protective Maze" 

It's not an old book, and it is written in English, but it has the feeling of a scrapbook. The pages are all of different sizes and weights; typeface varies; some pages are handwritten. It is quite thick. You open almost at random and start to read a handwritten scrawl:

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I should start by saying that everything here happened a long time ago and didn't happen around here. I don't know why you're asking about it, and I'd forgotten all about it myself until I got your letter. It surprises me that your dad remembers my telling him this story, which I got from my own granddad. I don't know how seriously to take it and I hope you don't take it seriously. I don't want to be responsible for nightmares, though I also reckon you are big enough now not to be scared that easily.

So like I say, all this happened back over in England, and as it was told to me it happened a long time ago in one of those little villages up in the north, the kind that sit next to and nearly atop some moors and some little ways off from the sea. It was one of those places where there's nothing to stop the wind from blowing in from across the great northern oceans, rattling the grass and creaking in the boughs of the forest that grew up right near where folk lived. It was one of those places with a little stone church that had been built back even before King John sat on the throne, back even before there was a village that needed it. It had been built back when someone reckoned it was a good idea to plant a church in an empty place that had, we may say, things that wouldn't like to have a church nearby and so wouldn't linger near where there was one.

So you should picture it as a cold and gray and windy kind of place, where everyone and everything seemed to have a kind of a hunch in their shoulders. The surprising thing, I'm told, was that it wasn't that poor or unpleasant. If the sky was often cloudy, it rained when it was seasonable but never got all floody. If the sun was weak it was still strong enough to tempt little green shoots out of the earth. Most people there walked around with a kind of permanent sniffle, but you shouldn't expect people to be too healthy in those old times. And if people who were too young or too old got carried off by something in the wind, or if even a strong man sometimes laid down at night and didn't get up in the morning, and if the cows sometimes stopped giving milk--it wasn't something out of the ordinary. The wonder wasn't that people or animals got to feeling poorly, it was that they got to feeling so a lot less often than you'd think, given the color of the sky and the scrape of the air. In fact, if anything they seemed a little fatter than they oughter have been.

So, like I say I was told, there was a sexton at this church, which means he was the handyman. He made sure the gutters were cleaned and the grass mown, that the windows were washed and fires kept when they needed to be kept, and that the pews never broke. He was also the fellow that had to dig the graves, whether it was seasonable or not, though there was another fellow in this village that supplied the gravestones. Grave-digging's not a fun thing, though I guess it's hardly worse than ditch digging. Just goes deeper and you don't have as much room to swing your arms. Still, I get the impression the ground all about was pretty stony, which can't have made things any easier.

This sexton had been a sexton for as long as anyone could remember. He was described to me as a runty little man, all hard and a little squashed, with legs and arms that bowed out a little and a face all squashed down into a frown and a big, pointed chin that jutted out to one side. Sextoncy (if that's a word) ran in his family, for his dad had been the sexton before him, and his granddad too. That much I know, and if the story isn't a load of what shouldn't be sniffed too closely then probably the line went back way before them. It doesn't get mentioned whether this fellow had a son all lined up to take over for him. Maybe he didn't, and that's how come it all came down around his ears.

For instance, if he'd had a son, maybe that kid could have kept his fellows out of the corn field. That was one of the perks of the sexton's job, you see; he had a plot of good land next to the church where he could grow his own food to sell in town and supplement his church salary. I guess it must have been a pretty decently sized field, for from the road you couldn't make out too well the scarecrow he had in the middle of it, and you couldn't make it out at all once the stalks got high enough. I wish I could visualize exactly how it all were laid out, because it's one of the things that makes me wonder about the story. Folks should have been able to see that it was a wrong thing, if they'd been paying attention. But maybe they did pay attention, and just preferred not to notice, or maybe there was something that kept them from seeing. I don't know. Maybe it was just a very big field.

So, some of the young fellows in this village used to get in the sexton's field. It would put him in a bother when they did, for of course they ought to have known better. The sexton wasn't a well-liked man, and maybe they liked to persecute him in small ways. He caught one boy once and shook him hard, and told him that if he wasn't careful he'd get a much closer view of the field much sooner than he'd expect, which the boy took to be the joshing threat that he'd get himself "planted" in the field if he didn't watch out.

But one of these young fellows did get in the sexton's field one day and somehow contrived himself into the center of it, where the scarecrow was. He said afterwards that he didn't mean to go anywhere near it, had no notion of it or even of getting himself deep into the field. He was just trying to skirt the edge of it as a short cut home. But he'd gotten confused, and the sun was in the wrong direction, and the corn rows would insist on turning at weird angles, until he found himself in a little circular patch under a very strong sun, in a place where the wind did not seem to want to blow. There was a very tall pole there with a cross beam, and tied to it was a scarecrow in some old black trousers and an old black coat, and a burlap bag painted up like a human face. The boy's own face got a little queer when he mentioned this last point, and those that questioned him afterward about thought it looked like he was trying to remember something, but whatever it was never came. He told them it was tied to the main pole at the ankles and to the cross beam at the wrists, but—and this was where his listeners really sat up—he said it was tied to the pole upside down, with its feet toward the sky and its head toward the earth.

Now, our Lord and Savior, when He got Himself crucified, at least had the decency to have it done to Him right-side up, so for the sexton at one of His own churches to crucify a scarecrow upside down was not something folks could just dismiss. So they went and talked to the parish priest about it. The priest listened to them very seriously, though I doubt he took them very seriously. He went and asked the sexton about it, and the sexton told him that the birds, being God's own creatures, needed a little something extra to put the fear of the devil in them—an answer the priest called "pert." I think I would have liked this priest, because he went back to the men that had talked to him and said it was the sexton's own business what he did with his scarecrow, and that only trespassers would be in a position to argue about it. So they went away grumbling, and nothing more got said, though I suppose it was a black mark against the sexton's reputation in the village.

I'm guessing the business with the scarecrow happened after the business with the crypt. That was the idea of one of the wealthier men in town. Everyone else, when they died, got planted under the ground, but this fellow had himself a tomb built above ground for himself and his wife. The sexton didn't like it, though to be fair a lot of folks apparently didn't like it, as it just seemed like another way of putting himself above everyone else. But it was the sexton complained the loudest, which everyone at the time put down to resentment at having another building to maintain. But it got built, and then fellow that ordered it up and died and was put inside. A few years later his wife died, and to everyone's surprise when it was opened again there was no sign of her husband or his remains. The sexton said they must have moldered away quicker for being above ground; others said they'd never heard of such a thing, but when the sexton asked what they had heard about crypts and how they worked, these folks had to shut up. Anyway, the wife went in, and she disappeared in her own turn when her son, some years later, asked to have the crypt opened again on some business or other.

Next: "The House at the Center of the World" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"