Every day on the bus ride to school through the country, I would see  it: the Mommet. That’s what we all called it, but no one seemed to know  who had called it that first.

The Mommet was an old scarecrow, sitting atop the shallow valley  my bus route cut through. The field it was intended to guard had long  ago been abandoned, surrendered to grass and weeds and wild-growing  Indian corn. Backdropped against it was an old woodlot filled with too  many dead trees to count, long overdue for felling. Perpetually perched  in those naked branches was a murder of crows, inexplicably indifferent  to the insidiously imposing scarecrow beneath them.

The first thing that most people would probably notice about the  Mommet was that it had been deliberately and irreverently placed on a  life-sized cross. Its outstretched arms had been bound at the wrists to  the horizontal beam, its body sagging under its own weight in an  undeniable mockery of Christ’s crucifixion.

Even more bizarre was the fact that the Mommet’s head had been  made from a leather plague doctor’s mask topped with a wide-brimmed  black hat. Combined with dark gloves and a tattered black cloak on its  outstretched arms, the Mommet had apparently been made in the image of  the crows it was meant to fend off.