Hanging Dead Crows

To fool a crow, Goody, I must fashion a crittur that will first deceive a man. — Dickon, in Percy MacKaye's The Scarecrow (1908)A Sentence in a Schoolgirl's DiaryOn Wednesday, June 5, 1940, my mother was fourteen years old and living in Alexandria, Ontario. She wrote in her diary, in French, as she nearly always would for the rest of her life. That morning a Mr. Smith helped her with her agriculture lessons before school. Then she and a school friend went to look at the school garden.And then, without preamble and without comment, this:Il a des corneilles mortes pour le blé d’Inde.There are dead crows for the corn.That’s all. The very next line tells me the afternoon was very hot. There was a music test, then laundry to put away, the oil stove to light, a little piano practice, eggs for supper, homework, the radio, bed.I should be honest about what the sentence does not say. It doesn’t say the crows were hung. In her grammar, il a almost certainly stands for il y a, “there are,” but…