“But somebody did take my prize watermelon!” I protested. “Ida couldn’t just get up and walk away. Somebody had to carry or drag her.” And a second later, Poetry was juggling a little jingle we’d heard him use quite a few times, and was:
“I proposed to Ida,
Ida refused;
I’da won my Ida if I’da used ...”
“STOP!” I ordered Poetry and started to start to say something else but got stopped by Big Jim shushing me, making me swallow my words and my temper. But I still knew I was right. The whole thing was as plain as a dog-day day to anybody with half a mind, which it looked like maybe I was the only one of us that did have.
That was as far as any of us got to talk or think right then, on account of from the direction of the tent I heard a car door slam and I knew it was the truck, and my mind was busy trying to imagine who had probably just climbed out of it.
“Do you suppose it’s anybody we know?” Dragonfly asked, and sneezed and grabbed his nose with his right hand to stop another sneeze that was already getting ready to explode.
For a few anxious seconds we all lay there in the nice clean dust of the cornfield, listening and thinking and trying to decide what to do, if anything. For a few minutes, even though I was worrying on account of the mystery, I was hearing and actually enjoying the sound of the husky rusty rustle of the corn blades in the very light breeze that was blowing. Overhead I could see the big white cumulus clouds hanging in the lazy afternoon sky, also the shimmering green leaves in the top of the cottonwood tree farther down the shore. I even noticed a lazy crow loafing along in the sky like he didn’t have a worry in the world. It wouldn’t be long before fall would be here, I thought, and that lonely old crow would join about five hundred of his black-feathered friends and spend half the day everyday, for a while, cawing and cawing in his hoarse voice, keeping it up and keeping it up, hour after hour in the bare trees. One of the dreariest things a farm boy ever sees in the autumn, is a forlorn-looking crow flapping his sad wings above the frosty cornfields.
Nearly every summer there is a crow’s nest in the top of the old pine tree on the other side of the creek near the mouth of the branch. About all a pair of crow parents ever do to make a nest for their crow children to be hatched in, is to build a rough platform of sticks—some large and some small—and line it with strips of bark from the cedar trees. Then the mother crow, who is just as black as her husband only her feathers don’t shine as brightly, lays from four to seven eggs that are the color of green dust with little brown spots on them. Crows are always scattering themselves over the new cornfields in the spring, digging down into the rows where the grains have been planted, and gobbling up the grains before they have a chance to grow.
Of course, any farm boy knows a crow eats May beetles and grasshoppers and cutworms and caterpillers and even mice, and he is also a thief—but he doesn’t use a plastic clothesline to help him get what he wants.