Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  She reached the bottom of hundreds of job ads. Her father passed her a box of fries. He tossed a piece of paper onto her keyboard, folded in three, a brochure. “I grabbed this,” he said. “There was a pile in the break room.”

  She picked it up. A photo of smiling ugly midwestern white people in uniforms on the front. “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing. I grabbed it for you.”

  “Well, don’t grab things for me.” She tucked it between the sofa cushions.

  “Your mother would have wanted to see you make something of yourself.”

  “She would have wanted me to be,” Janey tugged the brochure back out, read off the front, “a layer hen consumer auditor? What the fuck is that even?”

  Sometimes, as she did now, Janey imagined the dead Janey, the one who had died “tragically” with her mother in the crash. She imagined the dead Janey hovering above, looking down on both Janeys: Janey not dead in New York, Janey not dead in Iowa. The dead Janey was high overhead, an over-Janey as it were, so that now, while the new Janey in Iowa was saying “consumer auditor,” words the old Janey would have little occasion to say, the over-Janey could see into the new Janey’s mind, could see that her thoughts had tugged to a stop five seconds before, when her father said the word mother. The over-Janey could see the word mother pressed across Janey’s mind as if ironed down there. And perhaps the over-Janey could see the old Janey back in New York and, just maybe, she also had the word mother in her mind at this moment because, say, her (their) mother had just arrived home breathless and was shaking off her raincoat, launching into a tale, and the old Janey was looking up, grinning. The new Janey wondered fleetingly about the overlap of thoughts and whether that counted, whether the over-Janey could observe a link between them as tenuous as this, at once as strong and frail as a spider-web, the most elemental thought, surely the infant’s first thought before she could even put a word to it: mother.

  “It’s steady work,” her father was saying. “They do college reimbursement. You get an education.”

  “No way am I going to do what you do.”

  “It’s not what I do. You improve yourself.”

  “I’m improved enough and fuck you.”

  But who knew if thoughts counted? Thoughts, which hurry through at the speed of light—are thoughts like light?—and are accompanied by so much else. Thoughts are like nets on an ocean floor, dragging along with them sand and sadness and shells and shit. She looked at the brochure. “I don’t have any of these qualifications.”

  “You can get around the qualifications. I know the lady.”

  “You know what lady? You don’t know any ladies.”

  “She said she’d give you a job.”

  “A lady. This your new girlfriend?”

  “Don’t be cute.” He cleared his throat. “She knew your mother.”

  The afternoon not making it through the blinds, the TV dinging a win or mock-win, smiling faces on the screen, hands raised in joy or in imitation of it, the air around Janey full of oxygen and ions, ozone, dust.

  “Your mother babysat her when they were kids.”

  On this day Janey could feel the significance of each of her words twinkle through her. She could feel the over-Janey watching.

  “You have to do the training course. It’s just four days.”

  She was certain it was happening, that a word was about to unite the two Janeys, old and new. Both were opening their mouths to answer a question. But what was the old Janey being asked, her mother adjusting her raincoat on the chair, drops of water falling to the tile? Should they step out for rainy sundaes? Should they go this weekend to the zoo?

  “Do you want me to call her?” her father said.

  Even if they said the same word, Janey knew, it would have a different meaning—the context was different, the two Janeys were different—but the fact of a crossover could not be denied, the connection.

  Well, the over-Janey wasn’t going to give either of the Janeys the satisfaction. She wasn’t going to let the new Janey say the word, wasn’t going to allow the link to fasten. She was going to keep it from them both, hold it back in her tight little fist (a.k.a. heart). But the old Janey—the original, the best, the one who might have lived and gone on to greatness, or at least happiness, or at least somethingness, had she not made the one terrible error—was stronger than any of them. The rest of the Janeys were mere shadows fading in light. If anyone could do it, pull the Janeys together, it was she. The old Janey would say it and if the new Janey could hear her, she’d say it with her. The old Janey was opening her mouth. Flight, consciousness, time: so much was possible that should have been impossible. Janey strained to hear. Would she say no? Would she say yes?

  CLEVELAND HAD KNOWN HER as Olivia. She’d been seven when Olivia Flores first turned up on a bright Saturday night while Cleveland was filling and unfilling a universe of buttons—galaxy M82, Andromeda, Halley’s Comet in glitter—on the floor. Her mother had bent over the arrangement, “Well, what have we here?” but teenage Olivia, in a paisley dress and red lipstick, barely glanced down. “Jupiter has sixty-seven moons, not the dozen or so you have there. And did you know that outer space is completely silent? There’s no atmosphere for sound to travel through.” Cleveland already disliked most people, so when she dropped a bottle-cap black hole and sat up, her mother sighed with relief.

  Olivia came that Saturday and then on a string of Saturdays and other days in an ill-advised attempt to save Cleveland’s parents’ marriage (the plan worked, but some people shouldn’t stay together). Cleveland liked collecting alarm clock parts and jumping on her minitrampoline, but Olivia got her to go trick-or-treating, which she had refused to do since she was four. Olivia insisted they form their own tambourine and xylophone band, despite Cleveland’s flat lack of talent. Olivia taught her Spanish verbs, the table of elements, the waltz (there still exists a video of Cleveland bravely careening around the sunroom), the sad spotted history of labor rights in this country, and the proper way to assemble a taco. Olivia was sophisticated, brilliant, beautiful, ambitious. Beside Cleveland’s parents, who looked like dumplings, she was everything Cleveland thought a person should be. She sat for five years, a year longer than Cleveland’s mother felt necessary (but what was the harm in paying someone to be her daughter’s friend?), then she vanished and that was that.

  Cleveland received a postcard of buildings, another of a statue, nothing else. She missed her sitter for years and years, heard rumors of her life far away (daughter, bright city), summoned her in her mind in times of need, mourned when she heard of her death. In sum, never saw her again.

  On the day Cleveland took the hen, a numb Iowa afternoon in February, she had not seen Olivia in twenty-one years, which isn’t as long as you’d think. She still contemplated universes filling and unfilling, but the universes were smaller now, empty of comets and planets, full of animals and excrement and equipment, in other words, barns. Not the barns of once upon a time, retro or relic, that red-planked national emblem—hayloft, chicken coop, horse stall, pitchfork—but the barns of now, the powerful machines, the massive robot supercomputers, the human-made megafauna. And on the day she took the hen, she stood before one of them: 480 feet long, nearly a football field and a half, the size of the four largest dinosaurs ever to walk the planet lined up end to end (she loved that image), this single structure filling and unfilling with forty million eggs a year—unremarkable for this type of barn, but the highest number of eggs per hen in the history of the earth.

  The wind yammering over the fields. The cold sun battling it out behind the gray. Cleveland had been recently promoted to the head of Iowa layer hen farm audits. The audit: certifying best practices for consumer safety and hen welfare, navigating a star map of guidelines. Even at seven Cleveland had been good at games involving rules and organizational expertise—jigsaws over drawing, times tables over pretend. The job was a good fit.

  In five minutes she would take a hen from Happy Green Fami
ly Farm and change the course of her life forever (though she did not yet know she would do it).

  “If you have a moment, sir?” This was three weeks earlier in her first meeting with the regional director. She lifted her tablet. “I’d like to present a few ideas.”

  His eyes blinked to his screen and blinked back. “All right.”

  She had ideas about farmhand training. She had thoughts about feed logs. It was now in her job description to “revise for betterment all audit tools and templates.”

  “The sanitary procedures are undependable,” she said. She tapped her tablet.

  “If I may,” she said, “the entire transportation section of the audit is little more than an honor code.” She tapped madly, scrolled. “Now, about cage space allowance.” There was the lighting section, the manure section, beak trimming.

  But the director was rubbing his face. “I’m going to stop you right there, Cleveland.” He dropped his hands. “See, this was my hesitation in the first place. We’ve gone over this. You assured us.”

  “In the interest of accuracy …” she began.

  “This is not your job. You describe what is or is not in compliance. You do not participate in the problem-solving process.”

  She lowered the tablet, knew what was coming.

  “What are we doing here, Cleveland?”

  “Feeding the country, sir.”

  He sat back with satisfaction. “The egg is the perfect unit of nutrition.” He spun a little in his chair. “Protein, B-12, D. Vitamins of the bones and the mind.” He pointed to his temple. “Strength and intellect. A dozen eggs and the poor man eats like the rich. The American dream, Cleveland. The democratic solution.” His eyebrows went up. “Raise the price of eggs and the poor man’s family doesn’t eat.”

  She didn’t know how happy the poor man was going to be when it turned out the certification he put his trust in …

  “It’s science, Cleveland. This is philanthropic work. The ethics of survival. Sustaining civilization.”

  “Understood,” she said.

  “All right then. For the last time.” His eyes shifted to his screen. “Is that absolutely everything? Are we done?”

  She walked back down the hallway, the gap between the director and herself filling with carpet and drywall. She traveled across the divide, widened it. Her phone beeped.

  Janey registered for the training.

  Olivia, galaxy creature. She’d had an exuberance and freedom that had entirely escaped Cleveland, though she tried hard to learn it, through memorization, imitation, repetition. Olivia would have known what to say. (Olivia, lifting her chin, tossing her hair, straightening to her full height, opening her mouth …) Cleveland was, well, afraid was too strong a word, but unsettled about finally meeting the daughter. Cleveland wanted to measure up.

  Three weeks later Cleveland was walking along a line of barns that could be seen from airplanes and rocket ships. The land piled up, stacked in the distance. The feed silos twirled into the sky like turrets. She’d just finished the Green Farm annual audit. Her briefcase was heavy with the outdated electronic equipment of a dubious, maybe meaningless task. Over by the farm office, Farmer Green waved goodbye as he shut the door. Cleveland, cheerless, waved back. (Everyone knew his sister had run off and become an animal rights activist.) She got into her car, drove out of the small lot. But there was a white blur in front of her. She slowed. A shade lighter than the gray ground, and so small.

  A hen, strolling down the road, as if it was time to just walk away.

  Loose hen on property. That would fall under Structural Access.

  She eyed the hen from behind the steering wheel. The universe—the one full of darkness and silence and mud—thrived on coincidence and free will, error. But in the barn, error meant collapse. If hens could get out, other animals could get in, spread disease, kill off half the North American egg eaters, and so on. Cleveland would have to go back, tell the farmer he had a biosecurity violation out there. She’d have to redo the audit form, subtract two points under House Security and Access, sign again, issue a Corrective Action, fill out a Biosecurity Plan form, refile the …

  Or she could just drive around the hen and keep going.

  She looked at the hen, stared into its center.

  Olivia dropped into her thoughts like a stone. (Olivia raises one blue-painted nail to point out the windshield, turns her indignant face to the director, says …)

  It may have made the difference, it may not have. The human mind is a mystery.

  Hens are in constant motion. They do not freeze like rabbits. They do not “lock eyes.” Their eyes work separately, have multiple objects of focus. When they cock their heads they’re getting a series of snapshots from different perspectives. But this hen stopped. Her eyes “met” Cleveland’s.

  Cleveland pulled over and got out of the car.

  HEN, ALONE, strolling away from the eight looming apparatuses of Happy Green Family Farm. Her first steps on dirt, not wire. Where was her mother? Only a little over a year old, orphan from egg crack. Who knew where she thought she was going (why did the chicken cross the road?) or whether chickens “think” about such things as destination (of course they do—not quite the way we do, but close enough). You had to root for her. Most industry hens out of a cage for the first time would never walk off into a chilly day after a life spent in a cage. Most would be crowded up against a wall under an overhang or hiding in a bush, trying to get back inside so as not to be prey to whatever the hell was up there: sky and all its certain evils. Bred to cower, you might say. But here was this enterprising (imprudent?) hen, Bwwaauk, as she was known to herself. All chickens, hell, all birds, are known to themselves and each other by individuated chirps—in other words, names.

  How had Bwwaauk gotten herself into this predicament?

  Or rather how had she gotten herself out of it? (The predicament being the situation of the hundred and fifty thousand layer hens she’d left behind in the barn. How had the hens gotten themselves into that?)

  She went trotting down the road into the cold afternoon.

  ANY OTHER HEAD AUDITOR might have left the hen and gone home. But Cleveland Smith had been on track, worn out treadmills. She’d won first place three years in a row in the Auditors’ Hustle Up the Hancock race, where auditors from all over the country gather in Chicago on the last day of the conference and run up ninety-four flights of stairs. Woman could run.

  The hen was fast. She dodged, weaved, but Cleveland cornered her by the wheel-cleaning station and snatched her up. She held the hen according to United Egg Producer guidelines—under the breast with one hand and holding both feet with the other, close to the body for security. She walked back toward the farm office to deliver the hen and a lecture on farm sterility.

  She hesitated. A chicken couldn’t go back into the barn after being exposed to the outside. A farmhand would euthanize her. A perfectly good hen, spritely. Quarantine was what was needed. Vet facilities on every farm, a half-time veterinarian, not unreasonable considering there were millions of animals per farm.

  The regional director, holding up his hand. “I’m going to stop you right there, Cleveland.”

  (Olivia, in a flower dress and gym shoes, scrambles for a fly ball, holds it up in triumph, takes off whooping down the bleacher steps.)

  She put the bird on the backseat and drove away.

  Haha! There she went, tearing toward town (at the speed limit, of course), hen cooing in the backseat. Silly thing had dropped onto the floor. Outside, the land was the color of sand and the sky the shade of rocks, but Cleveland inside was in cartoon colors, zipping away. See her disappear into the distance.

  She sat in her driveway. House, lawn, neighborhood were a wash of midwinter life-support tint. It had occurred to her: What was she going to tell him about having brought home a spent hen? (Yes, she had a husband, nice man, an admissions administrator at the nearby community college, specializing in sliding the young into slots as they came throu
gh on the conveyor and sending them back out, packaged and certified.) He’d be home in an hour, and he’d think she’d gone mad. She turned around to the backseat. The hen looked skeletal, primitive, feathers half missing, filthy, cage-ravaged the way they got. This could be considered stealing.

  She brought the hen into the garage, cleared a little space, put down a tin of water and a plate of lettuce. By the time her husband got home, Cleveland was settled behind her laptop on the sofa. A fluttery panic in her chest was making her breath come out in little gasps. This was a clear violation of the Ag Facility Fraud law. She could lose her job. Well, the Green Farm was in violation, she would say. She had every right to confiscate the hen. But of course no one else would see it that way. So what was she going to do? She couldn’t bring the hen back to the farm and put it in a cage in the middle of the night, let it be pecked to pieces and spread disease across America.

  Her husband put down his gym bag. “Is that clucking I hear?”

  Cleveland was terrified. “The Clayborns got some chickens, maybe.”

  “Zoning violation,” he said. “I’ll write the neighborhood association.”

  Cleveland turned on the TV.

  She lay in bed, listening, eyes open, her husband breathing beside her. The only thing to do was to bring the hen to the local animal rights office. Farmer Green’s sister worked there, after all. It was almost like returning her, really. She got up and went to the garage. The hen had spilled the water on the floor and was crouching under the bicycles. Cleveland got down on her hands and knees, fished her out, put her into a cardboard box, and drove to the office in the quiet downtown. The only communication Cleveland ever had with the AR people was on annual Visit the Farm Day when a few teenagers showed up in torn jeans and slogan T-shirts, passed out hysterical leaflets. So nondescript, it could have been anything, a storefront church, a dying pharmacy, a failing political candidate’s headquarters. She took the box and slid it to their door.