This brief, lyrical chapter shifts to the first-person perspective of the Scarecrow standing in Harp Oletsky's fallow field. The Scarecrow opens each day questioning its own existence, hoping it has a purpose: to scare the dust away and keep the sky clear. Yet it confesses paralysis and impotence, unable even to frighten the crows, who roost on its shoulders through the night and preen in the strange tall light that grows in the fallowland.

At noon, the Scarecrow witnesses a black-tailed jackrabbit bounding across the field, its name surfacing unbidden in the Scarecrow's mind. A red-tailed hawk plunges from the east and seizes the rabbit, the two animals merging into a single soaring creature. Watching the rabbit's hind legs kick at the sky, the Scarecrow prays for something similar to seize and tear it free from its hay bale.

The Scarecrow then recalls watching Harp eat a cheese and tomato sandwich on his tractor the day before. The act floods the Scarecrow with sensory memories of taste, bread, pickles, and seasons, along with a fragmentary recollection of a yellow lunch pail and a scratchy voice calling tomatoes "love apples, dear." The chapter closes with the Scarecrow's quiet realization that it once meant something to someone, hinting at a buried human past.