But Zee and Janey. He thought they could make it.
“Look, you want your wife back, broken or not?”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“Here’s what you do.” Dill leaned forward and the chair squeaked. “Call the power company. Tell them to turn off the power.”
“Drive her out? Her father’d kill me.”
“Not his apartment, you idiot. Your house.”
“It’s going to be awfully dark in here.”
“Cancel the newspaper.”
“We don’t get no fucking paper newspaper. Kill a thousand trees.”
“Forward the mail to her father’s.”
“He won’t like that.”
“Pack a suitcase. Two suitcases. Pack enough to last a long time. Go knock on her father’s door. Bring the suitcases.”
“I don’t know if he’ll let me in.”
“Go into her bedroom. Don’t leave. You stay in that bedroom. All day. Sleep there.”
“My job won’t give me time off.”
“Quit the job. It’s a stupid job. You can get another job just as stupid or stupider later. Go in that room where Janey is and wait until she’s ready to leave.”
“Both of us in there?”
“Yeah. You stay no matter what. Weeks if you have to. Months. You tell her, say, This is not Barn 8, okay? There is no Barn 8 when it comes to you. You tell her that. Nothing is burning this shit down.”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Now go pack.”
“No Barn 8.”
“Right. Good luck, man.”
Dill hung up and swiveled back to his desk.
But Dill was wrong. It wasn’t true that they could have done it without Barn 8. Even without Barn 8 it was impossible. There was no place they could have taken all those hens.
THEY WERE AWASH WITH HENS. No other way for Dill to put it. It was as if a sea of hens had swept in and not drained away and now they were drowning in them, hens rising far overhead, a tide of them, an undertow.
It had been going smoother than expected until about 3:00 a.m. Then they began to fall behind. Dill was outside Barn 1 passing around bags of nuts but there could be no doubt that the team was losing steam. Collectively wearying. Hens had gotten out and were running underfoot. Some of the batteries weren’t fitting onto one of the trucks (was it truck 1-5? 1-6? fucking Jarman and his convoluted number system) and slowing everything down while the investigators unpacked half the truck to try to understand their error. Stacks of batteries were piled along the ground. Another truck (3-9? 4-6?) was idling in the driveway, waiting to get in. It was blocking the path of yet another truck (?) on its way out. Two investigators were waving this truck in opposite directions, the beep beep beep of backing so loud and long over the roar of the fans that Dill feared it could attract attention. Off to the left three investigators were pushing a cart of batteries in circles, destined for truck 2-8, which hadn’t arrived, though it should have by now and might be lost.
Annabelle came over to Dill. Her face was streaked with sweat and dirt, her hair full of static, but she was calm.
“Dill, do me a favor. Put those down.”
He dropped his sack of snacks.
“We need to check all the barns. See where we’re at.”
“Right.”
“I’ll take these three. You take the rest.”
Dill took off across the field toward Barns 4, 5, and 6. His shoes pressed down into the dirt and shit.
Chicken shit. In this business it was once a valuable commodity. Sold as fertilizer in a competitive market, an extra dime for the farmhands—phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, everybody’s happy. But the nation’s number of hens squared and squared and squared, and their shit squared with them. Supply left demand behind decades ago. A hundred and fifty thousand hens make two thousand tons of manure a year. On a farm such as this, the farmer has to contend with sixteen thousand tons of shit before Christmas. Meanwhile, chemical fertilizer has become cheap and is a hell of a lot easier than hauling around thousands of tons of shit. Farmers pay for their shit to be carried away and put into landfills. Some of it winds up in our waterways. Some is spread out in the fields around the chicken farms as a sort of superfertilization. That shit sinks into the earth over a period of years and more is spread over it, tamping down the shit beneath it to form a thick crust of chicken shit to stay for all time.
Now the heel of Dill’s shoe pressed down onto one piece of shit in particular. That shit, a bit denser than most shit due to the mysteries of biology, pushed past the shit around it, and sank. It continued to sink, bit by bit, through the other shit, over days and months and years, until it arrived at pre–Green Farm dirt. From there its slight heft began a slow historic—then posthistoric—descent. As the earth made its rotation, as the planets moved on their skytracks, as humans raised and lowered their civilizations, the shit traveled a hundredth of a millimeter at a time farther below the surface of the world, sucked by gravity, until it broke free into the cavern of the water table. It drifted down through the soft mud, landed on the bottom, and kept going, grinding through tertiary layers, chalk, carbon. Finally one day this extraordinary piece of shit stuck fast in the Paleozoic era, its cellular makeup joining its ancestors and imprinting a fossil into the rock.
Far above the shit, in the shifting sky, the stars were the only objects humans could see and not destroy. They could destroy only the sight of them, which they were doing, dot by dot, the stars blinking out over the planet, dimmed by human light. But from where the investigators were that night, they could still look up and see some, and Dill did, before entering Barn 4.
BARN 4 HAD ENRICHED CAGES. Dill walked through. The aisles were like funhouse mirrors, cages until you couldn’t see, columns of infinite regress, multiplying overhead onto a second floor identical to the first. The first rows were empty and filthy, cage doors hanging open, grime floating through the air like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, the belts still churning and squeaking and rolling. It was like wandering the wreckage of an abandoned city or like climbing out of a smoking volcano, the air ready to kill you with whatever was gathering in your lungs. At the far end the investigators were packing up the final quarter of the birds. They were covered in excrement and dander, coughing, shirts torn, bleeding at their necks and arms. The survivors of a catastrophe.
“Is it over?” one said, hollow-eyed.
“Almost,” said Dill. He patted his shoulder and dropped a bag of peanuts into his hand. He ran through the corridor to Barn 5.
And Bwwaauk? Where was she during all this? She’d walked off. The investigators, a few hours before, back at the banker’s, had left open the gate to the run. But only Bwwaauk had been brave or oblivious or quixotic enough to ramble out before dark, while the others huddled in awe. Bwwaauk hopped onto, then over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, and trotted away. By the time the sun set she was fast asleep in a tree.
Dill went into Barn 5, a cage-free barn. It was in chaos. A tower of batteries had knocked over, surely birds injured, investigators shouting, a fight on the verge of breaking out. The middle of the tremendous barn had somehow flooded with water and investigators were walking around on the tops of the aviaries. They were singing, dropping down, and sloshing from island to island like in a musical. At the other end of the barn, Dill spotted an investigator with an eye patch, rolling down an aisle on a cart, waving a black shirt like a flag. “I run this town,” he was shouting.
Dill stepped out in front of him, held up his hands. “Where are we at with the birds?”
The investigator raised his arms and flapped. “Flew away last year.” He rolled by.
“Get down from there!” Dill yelled after him.
The last barn, 6, was another cage-free barn. Birds had gotten out and were running around on the grates. The investigators had gotten the worst of the hens’ attacks, their arms and necks spotted with wounds. They looked like they’d joined an ancient culture, war paint on
their faces, rags tied around their heads and arms like giant wings. Birds were flapping all around them, the dim lights tossing shadows.
“Who’s in charge here?” Dill demanded.
An investigator, bent like an old man, pointed up, nodding slowly.
Dill looked up, puzzled. “Ceiling?”
The investigator shook his head.
“God?” he guessed.
The investigator recoiled.
“Who then?”
The investigator choked hoarsely. “Sky.”
But the next day Bwwaauk was lonely. Hens are social creatures. She traveled along the streets and came upon some hens, a little group of so-called backyard chickens (named, as usual, for their relation to humans). She stood outside the fence and looked in but she couldn’t get into their enclosure. The owner (though you can’t really own another being) came out and said, “Well, what have we here?” and invited Bwwaauk in with some lettuce and corn. Bwwaauk, strutting, bobbing—nobody’s fool, but reaching for the leafy romaine—followed her in.
Dill came out and turned to head back to Annabelle. He stopped. Beyond the road that cut through the farm stood Barn 7, free-standing and older. Barns 7 and 8 had been depopped last week and were empty—Cleveland had it in her records and Annabelle had confirmed it—but … he hesitated. He was a professional, after all. He ran across the shaved grass and dark road to Barn 7, swung the door open. He could already tell by the silence that it held no birds. He walked through to the hen area, an old-fashioned battery barn. The machines were quiet, belts still, fans switched off, cages open and cleaned but rusty. The emptiness felt guillotine-final. He went back out.
Behind Barn 7 was Barn 8—it looked older than 7, an antique really. He shouldn’t be wasting time. But …
He ran across the field and opened the door. He could swear he heard machinery. Then, no, please, no. The sound of birds. He staggered in with the awe of a condemned man. A full barn. Buzzing flies, grime as thick as it ever got piling up in statues, spent hens crouched in their cages, their feathers half gone, combs poking through the bars.
Somebody’s fuckup. Whose, it didn’t matter, because here they were, Dill and a hundred and something thousand birds, their sisters in the other barns shuttled out while they were left behind.
HERE’S A QUESTION: Who cares? It’s just a bunch of stupid chickens.
But chickens did not always have the reputation of being dirty, ugly, and dumb, a practical version of the pigeon. That’s a uniquely twentieth-century construction. Until recently chickens commanded respect. Roosters, of course, were warriors and leaders since the earliest images of them on the pharaohs’ walls in Egypt. Hens were devoted mothers, teachers, and nurturers—in India, China, the Mediterranean.
The hen in ancient myth, scratching through water and sand to bring the world into being.
The hen, protector of creation. Her egg, a symbol of life, resurrection. Inevitable yet fragile.
All through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was always the hen—her loyalty, her vigilance, her love. She came out the other side of the Reformation as the Protestant hen—thrifty, tidy, industrious, pious. Observe the way she used every stick and morsel in the barnyard and woods for nesting and caring for her babies! Admire the compact egg with its perfect chick nutrition!
In nineteenth-century England, people went mad for hens and the vogue spread to the United States. The era was known as the “hen craze.” Her beauty, her plumage, her proud vanity. At the first Boston Poultry Exposition in 1849, ten thousand people paid four pennies each to stroll the Public Garden, study a thousand chickens of all breeds and sizes assembled in tents a hundred feet long. These shows were wildly popular for decades across the country and abroad, straight through the First World War.
Only then, at the business end of history, did the hen’s standing begin to fall, correlating to when we began putting them into cages and out of sight.
ZEE WOULD REMEMBER the moment Dill came tearing across the farm. Zee was loading hens into truck 2-9 (really it was a very simple number system) when he spotted Dill running toward him.
Zee would think of it in the coming years, while he tried to find some other kind of employment (the absurdity that his only skills were in an industry he despised so much that he’d stopped his life to stop it). There was the trucker job. The hotel job. Landscaping. Dill appearing in the distance.
Zee would think of it while he waited for Janey to get out of prison. He wooed her from the other side of the bars because once he met her no other woman would do (sharing Oreos with her from the visitation vending machine and laughing). He remembered it on his long drive to the prison each Saturday, and when she didn’t make parole and they had to wait another four months, there it was: Dill sprinting, growing larger. In moments of adversity, when he faced an unreasonable challenge, that’s what he thought of. Dill running.
So, seven years later, following Dill’s command (he was still a professional), he showed up at Janey’s father’s apartment, where she’d retreated into her teen bedroom. He knocked on the front door and called, “I’ve come to get my wife.”
Dill cutting across the gravel, veering Zee’s direction, getting closer, and finally upon him. Dill stopped, gasping. He dropped a heavy hand on Zee’s shoulder. “Barn 8’s got hens,” he said before running on.
Now that was a situation, Zee thought seven years later, rolling his suitcase past Janey’s father (he’d had to buy one to bring over—no, he’d never owned a fucking dumb-ass suitcase). That was a catastrophe. That was basically crazy and was probably why he’d laughed. This was nothing—his wife encased within a room, her father frowning, waiting to see Zee’s next move and it better be a good one since Zee had agreed to take this on, had sworn before God and plenty of investigator-witnesses not to give up on her no matter what (although they hadn’t used words like “give up” in the ceremony because that would have been inappropriate). This beside that, he thought, another full barn! This beside evacuating nine hundred thousand hens in the first place (what kind of shitty idea?)!
Seven years after the discovery of Barn 8—a prison sentence, a string of dispiriting jobs, a marriage, a birth, a death, and so much more behind them (and so much more ahead)—Zee held the handle of his suitcase, tilted his head to Janey’s bedroom door, placed a hand lightly against it, only his fingertips touching the wood, as if touching the side of her face. (Where the fuck was Cleveland when they needed her, by the way?)
“I’m here, Janey,” he said.
He stayed quiet when she cried, “Go away! I hate you!” and her father shuffled angrily behind him.
But they’d gotten the other hens out, hadn’t they? They’d gotten them all. Almost.
Well, almost isn’t enough.
But almost is damn close. Sometimes almost is all you need to go forward. To throw yourself out there, ask for more, say it one more time, More, demand it. His hand encircled the doorknob (he prayed for more). “I’m coming in, Janey,” he said, and walked in, pulling the suitcase behind him.
MEANWHILE, FARMER ROB (“Robbie Jr.”) Green knew nothing about it until the next morning. Yes, he slept through the whole fiasco—in his bed, with his wife, baby in the next room, because there was a trained security guard on the premises and an expensive, perplexing alarm system, and Rob didn’t realize he needed to be there literally twenty-four hours a day. He thought twelve were plenty enough, which were how many he put in and put up with most days, since his father had gone into so-called semiretirement after the stroke, and his cousin was the most incompetent man Rob had ever known.
Rob’s cousin Jack, back from Los Angeles, recalled from the west like a defective appliance, there to “help,” since Robert Sr.’s illness. Jack had done nothing right since he’d arrived. The chore list Rob drew up for him grew shorter each week in inverse proportion to the list of his cousin’s deficiencies Rob discovered.
As an example. On the Saturday morning of the invasion (though Rob did not kn
ow there would be an invasion, God forgive him for thinking he might be able to stay away for a few hours without an army of lunatics coming along and taking the whole place down), Rob woke with a heavy heart because although he’d planned to take off all of Saturday and Sunday, he knew he ought to check in with his cousin, since Rob had been at an egg conference in Des Moines on Wednesday and Thursday, and had barely seen his cousin Friday, what with Jack’s interpretation of casual Friday: long lunch and early departure. He reached for his phone and called.
“Jack, what’s this I hear about Barns 7 and 8?”
“How should I know?”
“Why did I have a message from cleanup last night saying they were done with 7 and to let them know about 8?”
“Am I God, Robbie? Do I solve the mysteries of the universe? I’m busy here.”
“They were both depopped, correct? The computer says they were. Did you not sign the paperwork? I saw depop Tuesday inside 7. Were they here Wednesday doing 8? Did you see them do it? Did you check?”
“Yeah, I checked.”
Rob could tell by his voice that he hadn’t.
“Look,” Jack said, “I’m doing the opening shots of that documentary for you guys today.”
Documentary.
“You mean the promotional video?”
“I’m doing it now.”
Rob sighed. “Where are you?”
His Hollywood cousin was making a promotional video to go on the company website, a public relations effort to counter the bad effects of one of his cousin’s major screwups: Jack had let a journalist onto the farm last month, had not run it first by Rob, who had already told him to never let a journalist onto the farm. Chase them off with a stick if you have to. With a gun. Call the police. Did he really did not know that? Did he not know that animal ag was under siege by the liberal media? But there you have it: while Rob was gone for a few hours at a pullet farm, Jack had let the journalist come. Mr. Hollywood, unable to resist a reporter, especially a female one. The result was the article spread open on Rob’s desk, a nasty “exposé of the egg industry,” specifically of Happy Green Family Farm. Jack had read the article open-mouthed and stunned, and said finally, referring to the journalist, “But she was so nice.”
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