Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  These are the families. The rear guard, the support troops. They stay away from the farm. They amass on holidays and eat ham, celery, hard-boiled eggs. You can see their faces on phone screens, observe their gadget gifts, read their dispatches.

  The land. Its grand width, long horizon, its coordinates, its unmarked roads that cut through hand-sized towns and run flat and straight. This battle does not take place on the hilly side of Iowa.

  These are the barns. They’re made up of belts and birds and catwalks, ten lux of illumination and the eight-degree slope of a hen’s floor. From airplanes they look like lined-up sticks of gum. Thousands of tons of feed, hundreds of acres of steel bent again and again into a labyrinth of right angles. Guests are asked to step into disinfectant foot baths before coming in, like a liquid welcome mat.

  Here are the manuals, the animal movement logs, the light programs, the beak-trimming protocol. The amount of CO2 gas used for mass extermination.

  These are the farmers. An endangered species, each year a handful fewer than the year before, as the farmlands slowly depopulate (and the number of eggs grows and grows). Men built like blocks atop very clean, very white tennis shoes. They wear plain wedding bands, jeans pulled up to here. Republicans, old-style white men, Christians. An ultrapolite command, they exude a controlled calm. They can be glimpsed leaving the conference room, pausing at reception.

  None of these people went into farming because they hate chickens, for Christ’s sake. What do you think? It’s the eggs, the eggs, so many being made that if they didn’t come to work, who knows what would happen. We used to eat eggs a few times a year, but now they are everywhere, emerging from the nation’s farms at an alarming rate, seventy-five billion per year. Citizens must eat as many as we can. It is our patriotic duty. We must put them into all of our meals, all of our batters and breads and spreads and sauces, our breakfasts, on top of our meat or under it, inside our sandwiches, into all of our snacks one way or another, our power bars and chocolate. But still that won’t be enough. Still more eggs are coming, piling up on the belts, leaving the farms, assembling on the grocery shelves, into refrigerators, more and more and more. We must soldier on, find other ways to consume them. We must put them on our faces, in our hair. We could grind up the shells and make toothpaste. We could build rocket ships and shoot the yolks off into space, small suns, we could explode them and smear them across a daylight sky.

  Here’s a farmer now. He’s coming out of the farthest barn at the end of the day. He’s younger, springier than most. He’s talking into his cell phone, the barns rising around him.

  Farmer Rob (“Robbie Jr.”) Green. He got ready to leave that Saturday of the evacuation, but had no one to wave to as he walked to the lot. Saturday had a skeleton crew. By four the farm was empty. The night security man wouldn’t be arriving until seven. He locked the office, unaware this was anything other than a perfectly normal, utterly irritating day. Rob Jr. (he didn’t like to be called “Robbie” anymore, but he wasn’t ready to be called Farmer Green either), brother of Annabelle Green Jarman, was all grown up (or mostly, he was twenty-eight). He had a wife and a baby to protect—and the farm, of course. He was in charge now, though he hadn’t intended for his life to work out this way. He got into his car, lifted his clean white gym shoes off the gravel, and drove away.

  AT STAKE: the contested objects, nine hundred thousand white leghorn hens, their foremothers brought over from Italy in the mid-nineteenth century and bred in a frenzy ever since. Were they property or individuals? That’s what had to be decided.

  It was from this farm, don’t forget, that Cleveland had taken Bwwaauk some three months before, when she dropped out of her cage and went walking down the road in search of more.

  Bwwaauk had spent her life from the time she was a pullet on this farm.

  You’d think that by now with all the genetic meddling, sensory deprivation, and inbreeding, a hundred and fifty years’ worth, that these animals would barely have brains anymore, that their minds’ dials would be set on static, a low hum, refrigeration vibration. You’d think they’d be blank-brained, a collection of impulses and flesh. Indeed some of the hens on Happy Green Family Farm were moronic slabs, but most were not. They all contained within them the DNA, if not the full expression, of the original bird intelligence. Those hardy genes pressed themselves into existence in all kinds of ways, so that most of these hens still had that feral smart-bird spark in the eye, the instinctual Gallus need to flock, wander, arrange themselves into hierarchies, mate, rear, befriend, follow, fly their awkward short flights, bathe and preen in the dust.

  Those hundreds of thousands of brains of Happy Green Farm were ticking away in those grim warehouses, crushed into tiny boxes (or crowded into larger boxes in the two so-called cage-free barns), half-smothered and rotting alive in the oppressive air, barely able to spread their wings, unable to look up and see anything but steel and conveyor belts and low-wattage bulbs, pressed up against strangers, beaks half-severed, feet deformed by the wire they stood on day and night.

  Bwwaauk had grown up in Barn 8, an old-style A-frame structure, where the cages are piled in tiers on a slant so that when the crap drops through the wire, it misses (mostly) the hens in the lower tiers. Bwwaauk had lived in a bottom-row cage, the worst spot on an A-frame because crap drops on you from above (the system isn’t perfect). The whole jalopy is placed on the second floor of the barn with a large opening underneath. The excrement falls through the wire to a huge open room below called the pit.

  Barn 8 was the oldest barn on the farm, built in 1990. Its cages were rusty. In places the wire had corroded and had holes in it, holes the size of a chicken. In most rows if a hole broke through the rust and a hen fell through, she simply landed in the cage below her. The hens in that cage would peck her to death as an invader, then stand on her dead or dying body to give their feet a rest from the wire. But in Bwwaauk’s case, when the ammonia ate through the rust, the hole that broke open was in a cage on the bottom row. So when Bwwaauk fell, she flopped down onto a six-foot pile of excrement.

  She landed with a thump. She looked up at the cage she’d just left. The hens in the cage peered down through the hole at her below. They all assessed the situation.

  In the wild, chickens have complicated cliques and distinct voices. They talk among themselves, even before they hatch. A hen twitters and sings to her eggs and the chicks inside answer, peeping and burbling and clicking through the shells. Adult chickens have over thirty categories of conversation, each with its own web of coos and calls and clucks and struts. Chickens gossip, summon, play, flirt, teach, warn, mourn, fight, praise, and promise.

  It is this last, promise, that concerns us here.

  In a cage situation a hen has little use for most of these categories of conversation. Her vocabulary atrophies or never fully develops—but it’s there, contained within the brain (which stores and processes information differently from the human brain—the bird’s brain is more like a microchip folded inside the cortex, not like the human’s bulky car motor) and will surface when necessary.

  So it was that in the moment Bwwaauk turned her face up to the hens in the cage she’d just fallen from, she struggled to communicate, her mind turned on. Winked to life.

  There is a particular cheep isolated by bird researchers who specialize in the Gallus gallus. This sound, when tagged onto the end of a vocalization, translates to something like, “It’s coming.” So a mother might cheep to her chicks, “Follow me up here! Danger—it’s coming!” Or if a male is strutting in front of a female and he tacks the cheep to the end of a crow, he might mean, “Passion, food, babies, protection—it’s coming, girl!” In other words, this cheep works as a rudimentary form of the future tense. This hen that Cleveland took, whose brain was lighting up, turning over, working, while she looked up at her hen friends in the cage (hens have long-lasting friendships and can recognize over a hundred other chicken faces, even after months of separation, and they recognize huma
n faces too), her brain was in the toil of trying to convey the complex thought, I’ll be back for you, I promise, not a sentence hens would generally have a lot of use for in or out of cages, since they like to stay close to one another, even in the wild. This particular cheep came to her.

  She made the sound of her own name—Bwwaauk—and the cheep, “It’s coming.” Then she slid down the pile of excrement and marched on.

  She never did go back, but she sent someone to fetch them.

  JONATHAN HADN’T BELIEVED they would come. Or anyway not so many of them. But now as he shook himself awake and reluctantly followed Annabelle out with his clicker, he conceded he had known they would come (though he hadn’t believed it, those two could coexist: an admission of fact alongside an expression of incredulity) because she had asked them to.

  How did she get people to do things? Jonathan had never sold a cage. Those enriched cages? She’d been the one to convince the farmers. And when she decreed that all hens be cage free, the whole industry veered in that direction. When she decided cage free wasn’t good enough, that husbandry itself was the issue, her minions filed out behind her.

  Still more investigators were arriving. And more, though they could not all have been investigators. Not that many in the history of the world. They were coming up the road, filling the yard with clunkers, some roaring in on motorcycles (typical), a few came on foot, walking past the trees. He recognized some from the old days (so that’s where they wound up—nowhere), and over there he saw her latest additions, the auditors, standing together, apart from the others, the pretty one laughing, the blond one with her usual face of stone.

  His phone buzzed. Joy. He didn’t answer.

  He could see Annabelle out there, talking to a man whose face was covered in tattoos. Yes, she had a way about her. The sort of thing that gets people to join cults, start wars. Charisma, they called it. And Dill—who was coming up the porch steps—he had it too, Jonathan grudgingly admitted. Allure.

  “How many more do we need, Jarman?” Dill was saying.

  Annabelle. Her face turned for a moment from the cartoon she was talking to, rose, shining, searching out his.

  “Jarman, what do we got?”

  “Move,” he told Dill. “With those three, 421.”

  His phone vibrated to let him know he had a message.

  In the end the final head count was 507, fucking show-off investigators, and Jonathan already had a massive headache.

  “Amazing,” the pretty auditor kept saying, “far out.”

  “This is not far out,” Jonathan said. “This is 204 too many, 204 people whose only possible function in this plan is to fuck it up.”

  Yes, now they had the hands, but also higher risk. This could disintegrate into chaos more easily. There could be last-moment dissenters or wafflers or weaklings. There could be unknown elements among them who could be their undoing (in fact, there were), but too late now. Everyone had to be enfolded.

  Their only hope was time: they were setting out tonight. Nearly no time for the many fiascos this number of eager assholes could put together.

  “I just don’t see how extras can be a problem,” the auditor was saying.

  Dill was nodding. “Extras can only help.”

  “Uh huh,” said Jonathan. “You watch.”

  When the final hour arrived, Annabelle and Dill peeled away first.

  “Wait, where are you going?”

  “To take care of the security guard,” Annabelle called, walking backward away from him.

  “What security guard?” said Jonathan. “You said Ricardo’s on vacation.”

  “This is the temp.”

  “Temp?”

  3

  NIGHT, WOMAN, MAN. A road from farm to farm.

  But there was a third farm in all this.

  First farm: the one they were headed to. Eight barns, 1.2 million birds at capacity, a rumble of machinery, a stench.

  Second farm: the one they were coming from. Willed to the banker on a deathbed. Seventy acres, mostly grassland at this point. A barn, a shed, a house. A farm that no longer functioned as more than a holding tank for the itinerant bird, dog, or human.

  Third farm: the original. Founded by Grandfather Green just after World War II. Sprung up in the second wave of the modern American henhouse.

  Grandfather Green was just Leo Green then. Back from the war with decorations, drive, and a GI Bill mortgage. He bought a piece of farmland three miles outside his home village, beside a quiet forest where a river twisted through, not much good for hunting except squirrels and birds, but peaceful. He didn’t build a house on that land, that’s not how it was being done anymore. He built a giant barn instead. A decade earlier a barn of over ten thousand hens was unheard of. But this was the dawn of the highway, TV, suburbs, and radical confinement. The United States—and soon the world—would never be the same (though what does that mean, really? every moment nothing is the same).

  Leo Green’s first barn held thirty thousand hens.

  Over the decades he refitted his barn, once before the Vietnam War and once after, with all new equipment. It could hold fifty thousand birds, then seventy thousand. Then he tore the whole thing down and replaced it with the latest the ’80s had to offer: a battery barn for a hundred and ten thousand hens. The country had arrived at the era of shopping malls, gutted cities, emptying farmlands, and mass incarceration. Farmer Green had the blueprints to construct two more barns in the next three years.

  Instead he was pulled up short in 1986 by a Cold War surprise. A nearby weapons company, which at the time employed a third of the village, accidentally (though that word implies inadvertence and ignorance) had been leaking, dumping, and floating downstream powerful chemical agents. Everyone had to get off that land. Now. Dermal contact, inhalation of fugitive vapors, soil and groundwater ingestion: all held risks. So the entire town and for miles around, including Grandfather Green’s farm, took their settlements and cleared out (additional payments promised for the next ten years, but were discontinued after four, the courts grown weary), leaving Grandfather Green’s new battery barn empty. Green set up a new farm ninety miles away and had three barns up in three years, right on schedule.

  But the original barn, long since vacant of its machinery, its cages removed, still stood. A husk, a shell, it had not detained a hen in thirty years.

  Daylight was leaving, the sun shifting lower. The insects are disappearing from our planet, but on this night they held strong. All around the empty barn, insects were rubbing their instruments, tuning up, playing the preludes to the millions of songs that sound to the human ear like the authorless plainchants, a chorus of Dark Age petitioners, though in fact each cricket song contains variations that make it unique.

  A hundred swallows on their way elsewhere alit on thin feet on the roof of Leo Green’s barn. They checked their internal universal map, then were on their way.

  A woman and a man, traveling from farm to farm, exited the highway and passed a small road. If they had gone down that road, through a twenty-six-mile stretch onto contaminated land and over a contaminated river, to the remains of an abandoned contaminated village and nearby abandoned factory, and then another three miles, almost to the edge of a forest, they would have arrived at this farm. The woman turned her head and looked down the small road as they drove by.

  A: It had always been Dill and me. From the time we met, we had an understanding. We’d started something cunning and secret together and it had gotten away from us. We’ve been living in the aftermath ever since.

  The day I resigned from the organization I told no one but him where I was going. I packed a few things and drove past the warning signs and barriers. NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT. SUPERFUND SITE. PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL HAZARDS PRESENT. NO OFF-ROAD TRAVEL. And so on. The barbed wire was rusted, fallen over in places, twisted and running along the ground. I remember there had been talk of designing totems to warn humans off for thousands of years but the money had not materialized. The
future will have to fend for itself, I suppose. This is hardly the worst of the little surprises we’ll be leaving.

  I went into the original village, which had been abandoned when I was a year old. I picked through the wreckage, the houses, the factory. Nature had ravaged the place in revenge. The evacuation signs lay facedown in the weeds like fallen soldiers. I walked down to the riverbank. The whole tributary was poisoned, but a few miles up, near the old farm, in the forest preserve, it was supposed to be all right. I could bring water down. I decided to set up my home right there in the heart of civilized civilization-destruction.

  Dill and I used to say what was needed were areas of human withdrawal, land and water that people would voluntarily remove themselves from and vow not to enter, allow nature to go on without us. Wilderness, we called it. But now I understand that will never happen. Humans won’t volunteer to do anything but destroy. They will have to be forced out. And no one can make them do it—not any other animal, not even nature. But no one will have to. They’ll do it themselves.

  And that moment when they go? It will be an opportunity.

  THE NIGHT THEY WENT to get the chickens was new spring and the smell of shit stood in the fields. A procession of seventy vehicles began to leave the banker’s farm, a few at a time. They drove north down the highway, exited, a series of blinkers like Morse code in the twilight. They rode through the church-dotted towns, past pale sidewalks, long yards, little houses, streetlights winking on. They drove by pastures, thickets of trees, a Walmart on the dimming horizon. At last they arrived, hundreds of investigators (though it wasn’t only investigators now—they had shelter workers, tattoo artists, vegan dishwashers, younger brothers). Across the field, silver silos jutted into the sky over a collection of windowless warehouses, like a fallout shelter for an entire city, an industrial vision of Oz.