Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  To make matters worse, a “famous writer” (whom Rob had never heard of) “tweeted” about the article to the reading public—fortunately almost an empty set at this point, but still catching the attention of a “famous spiritual leader” (so famous that Rob had never heard of her or her religion), who then posted a link to the article that her “followers” shared 186,512 times, urging a boycott of any establishment that used Happy Green Farm eggs (which luckily was extremely difficult for anyone outside Green Farm to determine). It was so unfair because Green Family Farm was pretty decent as far as egg farms go—six of the eight barns under a decade old, two of them cage free with more conversions planned—not a superfarm of thirty barns. Green was practically barnyard.

  This had all settled down in a week (people aren’t going to stop eating eggs, after all, or pay attention to where they come from), but Jack still wanted to put together a promotional video. Jack, who’d been in Hollywood six years and not made so much as a commercial, insisted on “saving the company money” and making it himself. To this end he hired an (expensive) cameraman and offered his neighbors—a woman and her daughter—a hundred bucks each to take part.

  So on Saturday morning, mere hours before the farm was invaded by hundreds of insane people, Rob dressed and, instead of spending the morning in bed with his beautiful wife watching their chickadee baby curl and uncurl her tiny fists, he kissed them both and headed out.

  When Rob showed up at Jack’s neighbor’s, Jack was ordering around the “crew” (one man with a video camera). The woman and her daughter were debating who was the star of the “movie.”

  “Promotional video,” Rob corrected. He tried to figure out which—mother or daughter—his cousin was trying to sleep with.

  Jack put on the mics, arranged the mother and daughter in their living room over by the doilies and stuffed chairs, and then Jack said to the mother, “What do you think you’ll see on the farm today?”

  Now, as Rob said to his wife later, if your plan was to be filmed about a visit to a modern egg farm, do you think you might do five minutes of research online about what a modern egg farm is? So as not to sound like a complete idiot?

  Her first take: “Well, I know I’m going to see an awful lot of chickens running around!” A big smile.

  Rob motioned to shut the camera off. “Really?” he said. “Running around? Keep in mind that at capacity we have 1.2 million hens.”

  She and her daughter exchanged frightened looks.

  “Maybe they’ll be inside barns,” he said gently.

  For the record, Rob had said this was not a good idea. Rob had not wanted to use strangers. Rob had said they should have the business manager, Mary, do it. Mary had two daughters and they would have been perfect. Rob had said they should forget humans and have a cartoon of a chicken who puts up her wing and shows where she lives.

  “Let’s roll,” said Jack.

  Had Rob wanted to be a farmer? It had not been first on the list. When he was young he detested the idea. He’d wanted to be a soccer star. Later he thought fireman—ride the truck, run into the flames (he’d been twelve when the Towers fell). After Annabelle left, detective. He’d been an imaginative boy, but not a driven one. In the end he’d majored in business and was working for his father by age twenty-two.

  He thought about this while the women talked on about the farmer strewing grain on the barn floor, about the hens’ chicks making peep peep peep sounds, though there would be no hens raising chicks on an egg farm. He looked over at the cameraman.

  He left and drove to the farm. Jack had had one chore to organize that week. He merely had to oversee the depop of Barns 7 and 8: arrange for the depop crew, a matter of paperwork, a few emails and calls, a single brief appearance on each of the two days it would take, a walk-through when they were finished, a couple of conversations with cleanup.

  Rob arrived at the farm and walked over to Barn 8. He went in and saw them. A hundred and fifty thousand spent birds. How depressing. He called Jack. “What happened to the depop crew?”

  “They came,” said Jack. “They left.”

  “They forgot something.” Rob turned off the call before he could hear his cousin’s irritating voice.

  So Rob understood that he had to spend not only twelve hours a day each weekday but part of Saturday, too, but he didn’t know this included the middle of the night. That Saturday evening, while a crazed battalion led by his sister gathered to march over the land toward his farm, he spent two hours and twenty minutes with his adorable daughter before she went to sleep, instead of the full day as he’d planned. Then he ate the vegetable-tofu dish his wife set down before him (she was making less and less meat these days, since his father’s stroke and his own rising pressure). He went to sleep having no idea that hundreds of raving criminals were at that moment removing every chicken from the premises, until the barn manager arrived at 6:45 the next morning, while he was eating breakfast beside his beautiful baby dropping Cheerios from her mermaid chair. The barn manager walked in, a police officer behind him, and said, “They’ve taken the ladies.” The first thought Rob had was Annabelle.

  BARN 8 WAS THE FIRST THING to truly go wrong. Later everyone would say so. The mistake of Barn 8 would endure. Barn 8 would go down as the colossal error that ensured the defeat of the greatest animal heist in recorded history. Politicians would refer to it, comedians would joke about it. Barn 8, what transpired there, who fucked it up.

  That night, or early the next morning, in the hours before the sun set itself to rise, the fact of Barn 8 spread through the barns. The words “Barn 8’s got hens” were shouted down the aisles, called up into truck cabs, passed along the lines of investigators, from the ones who ran the Friday Feather protests, to the ones who’d grown up in Cuba, to the ones who usually dealt with cows and secretly felt chickens beneath them. The investigators, all with their own reasons for being there, reasons that were honorable (according to them) or exasperating (according to their parents) or criminal (to the farmers) or hilarious (the commuters who heard about it Monday on the radio on their way to work).

  But in fact few of the investigators’ motives were that simple. It is difficult to be honorable for more than a flash of time. Darker or more complex motives are always banging around under the surface. Investigators are exasperating, but only to each other and to whoever is trying to herd them. Exasperating people tend to be loud and dumb, while, in public, investigators are intelligent and watchful, trained. You could be looking into their faces, talking to them every day, and have no idea (and maybe you are). Almost none of them were insane, as Robbie had said (though they had their moments) or criminal (they prided themselves on following the law with the exception of the ag-gag laws, which they considered unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment). And they certainly didn’t find any of this funny.

  However, one group was sifting among them that night that indeed was criminal, and a few of its members were possibly insane. This group was not made up of investigators proper. Their training had been in methods not sanctioned by any of the major AR investigative units (they had split off during the Investigator Wars of 2013). This group felt a bit shunted to the side that night, their expertise unappreciated (they almost always felt that way). As dawn approached but had not quite arrived, and as hundreds of investigators stomped and fumed over Barn 8, this little group stayed silent.

  The investigators, still loading chickens, still emptying the final rows, shifting the last trucks into gear, were muttering. It was impossible to get another hundred thousand or whatever out. They didn’t have any more trucks, they were out of time, and anyway whose fuckup was this? Who was in charge? Annabelle and Dill? And anyway, of course it was fucked, the whole thing. Why had the investigators been so naive as to believe Annabelle and Dill could organize one simple rescue? A big one, granted, but elementary in design. Those two had basically abandoned the movement months, years, before, to say nothing of that suit, Jarman, while the rest of them
had carried on. The investigators would just have to leave one barn full. Maybe they could come pick up the rest next week, when Happy Green Family Farm least expected it.

  Ha! other investigators were saying. They’d all be eating off metal trays next week!

  While this was going on, the other group, the silent one, the only true criminals among them—even the anarchists would have nothing to do with them—made a decision on their own initiative: no one gets left behind. This small fringe group should not have been invited to begin with, which hits at the deeper, fuller, longer flaws in the plan, a plan that had appeared (somewhat) doable under Jonathan Jarman’s direction, but was a damaged cart rolling along, shaky, a broken wheel, riddled with bullets, dropping pieces of metal on the grates, hens falling out, bound to collapse.

  These stubborn radicals at least had the decency to wait until all six barns were basically empty and investigators were assembling in clumps, cursing and demanding, Now what? Should they leave or wait or what? Then these fringe rebels pulled on their face masks, trotted single file across the farm in the dawn that was just beginning to light their silhouettes, and, skilled arsonists all, set Barn 8 on fire.

  FROM THERE it was only a matter of watching it all self-destruct.

  Barn 8 went fast.

  At one time Barn 8 had been Meadow Barn, its cages shiny and able to hold more hens than ever before. In 1990 Leo Green had led a local reporter over to it, raised his arms, and prophesied, “This is the future.” But decades had passed. Barns went up and came down around it, more barns were added, technology advanced. Twenty-six years later it was Barn 8, set at the end of the farm, filthy and fetid, a disgrace, scheduled for demolition after one more cycle of hens. It was so old it had wooden rafters, it had plywood walkways, not to mention the hens themselves, fluffs of ratty feather and skin. Setting it on fire essentially involved setting the belts on fire, setting the pit on fire, setting the walkways on fire. It essentially involved very little, because once the feathers caught, the hens were packed in so close, the fire leapt through the barn and soon was raging, smoke billowing out the ventilators and seeping through the roof. Smoke led into the sky like a train.

  Thanks a lot, Bwwaauk.

  By this time the little band of rebels—a semicharismatic leader, her childhood friend, and the five young people who loved them—were gone.

  Of the sixty trucks, fifty-nine had left or were leaving by the time the flames hit the hens, but hundreds of investigators still were on the scene.

  Some of the fire alarms were out of service, but not all. When the working ones sounded, the investigators, still cursing, heard a sound different from the fans, the trucks, the hens, and their own voices. They heard bells. The investigators tilted up their heads, mouths open, and saw smoke in the sky. For one collective-investigator moment they paused, watched the poof of white grow. Then they dropped what they were doing and went streaming into the fields in all directions. The final truck heaved off, leaving a few loaded batteries on the pavement.

  Sixteen minutes later, four minutes longer than in drill practice, the town’s single fire truck came whining up the road. The firemen looked out in astonishment at all those people running away under the tall white flume rising before the red sun.

  Meanwhile, the hens in Barn 8 were burning alive—cooking, some would say, well-done, charred. But the firemen, leaping from their truck, were more concerned with preventing a spread to the other (empty) barns than in saving a bunch of the dumbest sort of bird (who were supposed to be saved already by Annabelle, or at least depopped and dead).

  Because the fire alarm was set to trigger a call to the elderly sick Farmer Robert Green Sr., not Robbie Jr., Robbie wouldn’t know for another hour.

  PERHAPS IT WAS BETTER that the hens died, rather than live another moment in those cages. Later the AR community mourned those Barn 8 hens with candles and songs and a website. For a five-dollar donation, you could give a deceased hen a name—beyond the individuated clucks by which they were known to one another—and six hundred grand was raised for animal sanctuaries across America.

  The company, Happy Green Family Egg Farm, for their part, posted a report on their website, saying that there were no deaths or injuries in the fire, meaning humans, of course.

  In fact nearly all the farm’s hens died, about a million. The police chased the trucks and ran a few off the road, the investigators hopping out and making a run for it, keys swinging in the ignition. Some pulled over of their own accord, hands up in surrender. A few trucks, those that had left earlier in the night, made it to their destinations—the sanctuaries scattered around the neighboring states. The hens were being unloaded by nonplussed volunteers when the police caught up with them. It all took a little time because there were simply not enough police to chase down all those hens. They needed dozens of cars in a town that had four police officers and two police cars and one police bicycle. The sanctuaries had police at their doors and in their driveways. Volunteers were hiding in the bathroom, peeking out the window, calling the investigator-truckers and saying, “Don’t come! Don’t come!” so those trucks rode on with no destination but the sunrise, until the police stopped them too. The trucks were rounded up and impounded, chickens and all, a few towns off, in a vast megachurch parking lot, which was coincidentally empty on this Sunday, the entire congregation, twelve thousand congregants, having gone off on a field trip to Washington, DC, in protest against government spending on health care for the poor, and the church had its own caravan of buses winding through the hills. The trucks full of hens were driven to the church parking lot, a few more arriving each hour, and left there, forming irregular triangle-family shapes on the tarmac. The plan was to empty the trucks just as soon as the police could find enough people to unload all those hens and figure out where to put them—surely not back on a criminal investigation site still smoldering with fire? But where else? The chickens would be all right for a handful of hours while they unraveled this.

  But, as Rob Jr. knew, they would not be all right. He kept screaming this into the phone from the farm, which was streaming with officers and journalists and photographers and townspeople, and then in person at the police station. Hens cannot sit in those batteries with no ventilation, Rob Jr. said. The trucks need to be moving, sifting the air through, or the hens will die. And on that sunny Sunday in God’s parking lot, all of them did, in accordance with God’s plan presumably, suffocate and die.

  BUT TWO TRUCKS RODE ON. Trucks 2-5 and 1-4: shiny, silver, gleaming, flames painted on the passenger doors, palm tree silhouettes on the wheel flaps, How’s MY DRIVING? stickers slapped on the back like a taunt. Trucks 2-5 and 1-4 had pulled away from the farm wreckage hours before it was wreckage. They left at midnight, while the evacuation was still going the way it was supposed to, when the trucks that left contained heroes in their cabs and the rescued on their backs. They drove away to cheers. With those cheers echoing in their minds, mingling with the clucks and the coos of the hens, the heroes forged ahead into the dark, following a less obvious route than the others. They turned off the highway and onto a small side road not meant for trucks of that size, trusting the directions Annabelle had given them. Signs flashed in the headlights—DANGER. NO TRESPASSING. SUPERFUND CLEANUP SITE. They passed the barbed wire, passed the second set of signs, passed the single totem that had been erected as a sample, though they couldn’t see it in the dark. The road split in two, one dirt and one gravel, and into two again, and then again. The heroes were soon lost in the night, forbidden to use their GPS. They wound around and around, the tall trucks teetering on the bumpy mud roads. Now and then they pulled to a stop and an investigator jumped down from one truck and ran to the other, pointing and swearing. Finally, after much too long of this, they dragged up a long hill and found in their headlights where they were supposed to be: Grandfather Green’s original barn, empty thirty years.

  The investigators tried to send Dill the code that confirmed their arrival, but service was weak
that far out and their message didn’t go through. So not only were they unable to report their success—that they’d finally found the goddamn place—but they learned nothing of what was happening back at Happy Green Family Farm. They arrived in the dead of night, four investigators, interrupting the silence with their cargo of thirty-eight thousand hens.

  Sore, hungry, exhausted, grumbling, these investigators, professionals all, knew better than the police that the hens couldn’t stay in those batteries. Wearily they began to unload.

  AS SOON AS DILL SAW THE POOF of smoke rise over Barn 8 and heard the bells that he knew would bring fire trucks roaring up the road, he thought of gasoline. Where had the assholes gotten the gasoline? Had they brought it along, had it been their plan, or did they just drive around with a trunk full of gasoline? (Neither, as it happens. They found it when they banged the lock off an equipment shed.)

  The bells sounded, a dinging in the barely dark, and the investigators froze across the farm. They were outside now since the barns were empty (at least the assholes had had the decency to wait). They looked up, pricked their ears, sniffed the air like dogs. In the next instant every investigator on the premises fled.

  They went leaping and tripping over equipment, escaped into the field of shit, set off at a dead run down the road. Dill, for his part, headed for Annabelle. She and Zee had been securing a battery onto the final truck on the premises, but when Dill reached them, she had her hands on her hips and was watching the cloud of smoke in the sky, investigators bumping by her.