The Scarecrow in the Sugarcane

• 3 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

There was a scarecrow at the near edge of the sugarcane field behind my grandfather's house.

It was an ordinary one. A cross of bamboo, an old shirt, a jute sack for a head with nothing drawn on it, and a broken straw hat.

It stood about forty metres from the back wall of the house, and I could see it from the window of the room I slept in.

Where it stood

I was there for the whole of one winter and I looked at that field every morning.

And in the third week I noticed that the scarecrow was closer.

Not much. Perhaps five metres. It was between two different rows than it had been.

I told my grandfather and he said the men move them, that scarecrows are moved around a field so the birds do not get used to them, and that this was completely normal.

I accepted that, because it made sense and because he had farmed that land for fifty years.

Closer

Over the next month it came another fifteen metres.

Each time it moved a little, and each time there was a perfectly good reason: they had cut that section, they were irrigating, the wind had been strong.

By the middle of January it was standing about twenty metres from the wall, and I could see the shirt properly, and the way the straw came out of the ends of the sleeves.

I stopped opening the curtain in the morning until I had woken up properly.

The question

At the end of January I asked my grandfather, in the evening, who moved it.

"The men."

"Which men?"

He named two, and I said I would ask them, and he said fine.

And then, an hour later, without me raising it again, he said something else across the room.

"Do not ask them."

I looked up.

"They will say they have not touched it," he said. "And then you will know, and you are here for another three weeks."

The last three weeks

It did not come any closer after that conversation. It stayed where it was, twenty metres out, for the whole of February.

I went home at the start of March.

My grandfather died four years later and the house was sold and the field went with it, and I have never been back and I do not intend to.

But I asked my mother once whether she had slept in that room as a child.

She said she had, and that she had asked her father about the scarecrow, and that he had told her the men moved it.

And she asked me, quite casually, how close it had got by the time I left.

Which is not a question you ask unless you already know it is a thing that gets closer.