by James Coplin

Created on: September 30, 2009   Last Updated: October 09, 2009

Protector of the Corn

The late summer air of western Mississippi is sodden as a blanket. It can feel possible to drown in it. Within the breathless rows of the corn stalks it presses down on you like a boot heel, squeezing the air from your lungs and leaving you to gasp like a catfish in a bucket.

That's how Elmer Travis felt as he crashed through the corn. Blood hounds were baying not far behind him and there was no disguising the black and white prison stripes within the packed rows. His leg irons kept tripping him and there was going to be no escape.When they caught him they were going to kill him - unless he first reached the sharecropper's cabin he had seen at the edge of the field.

Suddenly he broke through the corn and into the clearing. Just a few yards off stood a fodder barn, a rickety slat structure with some stalls and a loft. It wasn't much but at least there he could keep the dogs off him. The Warden's men - well they better look out! He'd split their skulls as wide as he had the Chain Gang Boss, with just a ticker of luck and a handy sling blade.

They killed Elmer Travis in that shed. They shot-gunned him into a mess of pulled pork and did a fair job on the barn besides. Elmer had been a real bad man, they explained to the poor owner. He'd killed five, maybe six people not including the Chain Boss. A few holes in his barn was a small price to pay and a service to the County he should accept without a fuss.

So the Prison Wagon rolled off bearing Elmer's earthly remains , leaving a shed in bad need of carpentering and a mess to clean up. As the farmer, a poor Mississippi sharecropper named Joe Bottoms, sourly surveyed the damage his son, Bobby Joe, fetched the honey bucket and began to fork up the straw.

"Boy!" Leave that straw be!"Bobby Joe looked up puzzled like."It's got blood all over it, Papa."

"Never you mind. I ain't tossing it out at a quarter a bale. It's good enough to bed down the pigs. Save a pile for your Ma too. I want to put a new scarecrow up field and she might as well use that then clean."

So what once ran through the veins of the murderer Elmer Travis ended stuffed in the cast offs of a Mississippi dirt farmer.

Maybe that trace inspired an uncommon frightening scarecrow. It was built round crossed sticks like any other; padded arms straddled wide with canvass gloves at the tips.Yet seeing it from the road, through the haze of kicked up dust, it seemed to be fixing to grab and crush the life out of a body.The head was a meal sack

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