Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

“Now there’s a temporary solution,” she said and gave a nod. Did she mean the fleeing investigators, the fire in the barn, the evacuation itself, or perhaps the entire project of animal and environmental activism? Annabelle walked to the cab of the last remaining truck. “Let’s go.” Dill, who was winding himself up to throw the biggest tantrum of his life—these goddamn fucking no good unprofessional investigators—dropped his arms and followed.

  NOW THAT IT WAS NOT GOING BEAUTIFULLY—smoke taking over the sky, investigators streaming through the fields—Jonathan thought again of this concept of missing. He was hurrying around the barns, hoping he hadn’t missed her, that she wasn’t trying to do something ridiculous, get into Barn 8 and save the chickens or who knows what. He spotted her climbing into a truck with Dill and another investigator. He called to her, began jogging over, but she shut the door and faced away. Why? So infuriating. How was he supposed to protect her if she was always running away?

  It occurred to him in that moment a fact that seemed so obvious, he wondered why it had taken him so long to understand: she was protecting Jonathan, not the other way around. Every time she left, every time she refused to let Jonathan follow, that’s what she was doing, and every time it was a hard choice. Now, riding off with Dill, she’d done it again, protected Jonathan, because no doubt the biggest trouble was going to wind up wherever she was, and he’d taken enough steps to walk out in his own tracks, follow the exit path he’d cut for himself, but he couldn’t pull her behind him. Instead she chose Dill. She let him do the protecting. Dill in the getaway car, Dill climbing the fence, Dill destroying the computer. Dill was the sacrifice. She counted on him for that and it had ruined him and his life and they’d both let it.

  Why didn’t she let Jonathan protect her? The very thought enraged him.

  A month later Jonathan would be at Dill’s grand jury hearing for arson (the Greens had to charge someone for the insurance, though Jonathan knew they had the wrong guy). Jonathan would be on the stand as a character witness. He would be thinking, Dill hadn’t done his job. Why hadn’t he protected her after he rode off with her in the last truck? (Of course, Jonathan had it wrong. She’d chosen Dill not to protect her, but to protect the animals. The fact that Jonathan didn’t know this is one of the reasons she left him in the first place.)

  Jonathan considered Dill over at the defense table, in a crappy suit, bruises on his face from who knows what behind bars. Cool despite everything. Fucking sentimental dangerous asshole. Look where it got the lot of them. How Jonathan hated him. Dill belonged in prison. But Jonathan didn’t say this to the grand jury and judge because he knew they had the wrong guy. Dill hadn’t started the fire, not his style, a wormy pacifist in the extreme. He’d never kill a bunch of animals. His fingerprints weren’t on the gasoline cans or the shed. They didn’t have a shred of evidence.

  Besides, if Annabelle were there, she would never forgive Jonathan if he didn’t help Dill. So he’d hired a lawyer for Dill, a damn good one, and he spoke on the stand with conviction. And Dill, a little battered, walked free.

  INSIDE BARN 8, as the smoke choked the hens and the fire raged around them, the spirit of each hen came forward. She shook herself, fluffed her wings, and miraculously all her missing feathers, pecked off in the ravages of radical confinement, grew back. One at a time the hundred and twenty thousand hens (thirty thousand had already died in their cages) stepped to the middle of the barn and curtsied, while the rest of the hens cheered and clapped their wings. She gave a final wave and then looked up into the smoke and ash and flames. It looked like forest up there, like rain, flickering leaves, stretching branches, changing seasons, whirring bugs. When the roof collapsed, the spirits of a hundred and twenty thousand hens shucked off their cages like twiggy nests and soared into the sky.

  If this strikes you as similar to the vision Janey had in the barn—perhaps even the fulfillment of that vision?—you would be correct. For this is what chickens believe happens when you die, it is their unified spiritual prophecy: The flock gathers, bids goodbye, the departing hen does a final little two-step dance and a curtsy, while the ancient forest trees of their origins rise around them. Then she calls out her own name and flaps into the sky, her soul on its final journey. As humans see a tunnel with a light at the end, as turtles see a misty underwater tow gently tug them away from all the fauna and faces familiar to them, so hens see this. The vision Janey saw in that barn six weeks back, while night-auditing various farms around Iowa, and which inspired her to pursue all that came after, was the collective death wish of the seven million hens on that particular farm. Those hens wanted nothing more than to die. They were wishing it so strongly (praying, some might call it) that somehow Janey stepped into it, caught a glimpse, saw what they saw, and mistook it for something else (this).

  Did all those hens’ spirits really rise? I don’t know. Either the hens were right and the graceful flight that evolution denied them in life was granted in death, or they were wrong. I might be all-knowing about these people and animals, but even I do not know what comes after death for chickens.

  CLEVELAND AND JANEY? Meanwhile, where were they? They had run. They were out on the road, slowing to a jog. The last truck rolled by and Janey waved.

  “Why is this funny?” Cleveland kept saying. “Stop it. It’s not funny.”

  They walked along side roads, Janey sobering. They watched the sun coming on, lighting the sheds, the fences, the posts, the distant houses.

  A police car drove up alongside them and slowed. “Good morning, ladies. Would you please stop right there and put your hands up?”

  Janey again started laughing.

  JANEY WAITED FIVE YEARS—until Cleveland got out of prison—to go back. Janey had gotten less time (some said it was because of her looks). Then one afternoon they went. They drove over, left the car, and walked into the fields alongside the old barns. Cleveland had been out of prison only a few weeks—divorced now, with a job at a grocery (in three years she would be an assistant manager, her skill at organization overriding her record). They stood in the wild grasses, untended for so long, and surveyed the barns, including the eighth, which had never been demolished or repaired. It was blackened, roof caved in. A cool breeze rippled the grasses. The sky seemed as remote as ever.

  “I’m going to marry him,” she told Cleveland. “I want you there.” She’d waited until Cleveland was out to say yes.

  They kept walking.

  Even now she felt traces of the vision returning. She could see it hovering at the edges of her sight. Was it the past or the future? she wondered. Memory or promise?

  They turned back toward the barns, which were empty and desolate. Cleveland took a few pictures. “We did it,” Cleveland murmured, though obviously they had not. Had any of those hens made it? Where would they have made it to? Were any of them “free”? Janey now knew what it was to be imprisoned. Janey thought she saw a movement, a figure, and turned quickly but saw nothing. Maybe just the vision. They walked back to the car and got in.

  4

  Price Securities

  Assignment: Happy Green Family Egg Farm

  Security Officer: 063507

  Log: 6/26/2028, final entry

  She was here my second night on the job. I saw her.

  This is not part of the public record because I told no one. I did not record it in this log, did not call the emergency number taped to the desk, or mention it in the morning to the gruff barn manager, because I did not think it necessary to report a glimpse of what was clearly a family member in a family business. Later I did not report it to any of the assortment of authorities because, for one, my English wasn’t and isn’t that good, and for another, how was I supposed to know the woman was a terrorist? Perhaps it is beyond this security officer’s station to suggest that if the company suspected violent, criminal relations might be coming by to do reconnaissance, invade, pillage, and then burn the place down, the company executives might have put up a picture with the word wanted undern
eath, in lieu of a framed group photo with the perpetrator as a teenager smiling into the camera, the owner’s arm protectively around her, the words Our Happy Hen Green Family in fancy script below.

  My first night on the job I had studied this photo while sitting at the desk, noted the unsurprising blinding whiteness of the family in contrast to myself and the workers I’d met. Hard not to study it since the photo was posted three meters from my head.

  My second night I was on an 0400 hours walk-through (not required by Happy Green Farm, but recommended by Price Securities). I strolled the perimeter, then walked between each long, loud barn in the howling dark, an unsettling experience, no matter how well trained the security officer. I turned a corner and my flashlight’s beam caught a figure, a woman in a brown dress about twenty meters away from me. It was only an instant. I saw her face turn toward me. I was so surprised to see a woman out here in the night that for a moment I did nothing. Then she was gone. I ran after her. I went down the length of the barn, thought I saw her, swept my powerful flashlight. A spring fog had descended and lit up under my beam in a spooky haze. Nothing. I turned and went around the other side. Didn’t see her. I double-backed the other way. In my mind I could still see her shape and that pale face turning, the shine of her dress off my flashlight. I ran around the next barn, swinging my light. I kept going.

  It was only much later, after I’d returned wet with sweat from running, that I realized it was the girl in the photo. Had I even seen her out there in the dark or was it a mirage? Perhaps a ghost or a spirit? Or had I invented her, having stared absently so long at the framed group?

  I considered whether I should put it in the log. Either she had been there or she hadn’t. If she had, then surely she was allowed on company property, right? A little strange at that hour, but still. If she hadn’t, well, I didn’t want to go around writing in the log about ghosts, which I do not believe in, my second night on the job.

  I decided to leave it out of the log.

  Two nights later, Saturday, half an hour after my shift started, she walked right in and stood before me. I almost ducked. I knew immediately she was the woman who’d slipped through my flashlight beam. I didn’t greet her, because, being Nicaraguan, I understand hierarchy and family aristocracy, and how even on a chicken farm the boss’s daughter may or may not wish to acknowledge the existence of the workers. But she paused beside the photo, said pleasantly, “Is Ricardo here?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’m from Price Securities.”

  I now see what she was doing—she stood there by the photo long enough that I could be damn sure the girl in the photo and this woman were one and the same. “That’s right,” she mused. “He’s on vacation.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m the temp.”

  She shook her head. “What a waste of money. Actual night guards, you know? While the alarm system is always off.” I stiffened. It wasn’t very nice to call me a waste, and we are called “officers,” not guards. She leaned an elbow on my desk in a languid, flirty pose, which I now know was a guise to have a look at the board of green lights that I sat by. “See? Off.” The green lights twinkled. I’d been told not to touch them.

  “Anyone else around?”

  “I am alone, ma’am.”

  “Except for the birds.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A million birds. Alone except for them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I allowed, “alone except for a million birds.”

  She straightened. “In that case, could you help me with something?”

  Not having much choice, I stood and followed the wayward daughter, perpetrator, enemy-terrorist—though I did not know she was any of these things—a few steps around the corner. I can still see myself behind her. I sensed there was something off but there I went. No, don’t go! I call to my younger self, who never listens.

  “I keep telling them we need a stepladder in here.” She opened a door, pointed. It all happened very fast. “Could you reach that box for me? That one there?” not saying what it was or why she could possibly need it on a Saturday evening. I stepped in and reached up toward the boxes on the shelf. I was shoved hard from behind and I stumbled. She or one of her cohorts slammed the door shut and the light went off. “Hey,” I called out and pushed on the door just as I heard the clack of a padlock. “Hey,” I yelled and shouldered the door, once, twice, a few more times in terror. It was absolutely dark. I heard a male voice. “Sit tight, amigo. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  Man, I hate being called amigo. What kind of amigo do you lock in a storeroom? Anytime someone calls you amigo in this country, watch out. I shouted and kicked the door. Damn thing was sturdy. I fumbled around in the dark determining the coordinates of my confinement. I had been a fool, yes, but she was benefiting from a very lucky coincidence. Since I was so new to the job I had left my phone in my car as I’d been directed. “No phones on campus,” the barn manager had said. She was banking on me following the rules. I can tell you I never did that again.

  I looked for something that could help me escape. I did this for a long time, taking apart what turned out to be rolls of toilet paper, reams of paper. I kicked the door a few more times. I sat down on the floor. I could hear nothing beyond. I thought I heard trucks but I couldn’t be sure. I waited.

  I will not disparage myself for falling asleep. Did you know that hostages often must be woken when they’re found? It’s true. In prisons it’s part of the training. I worked in a prison before I came to Price Securities and the handbook instructs: If you are taken hostage, remain calm. Stay positive. Focus on a soothing image—a seashore, a quiet forest, a loved one. Try to sleep.

  I curled on the floor and dreamed of my girlfriend. Followed protocol even while unconscious.

  I woke face down on the linoleum tile, three feet into the storeroom, to the shouts of a man I recognized in the doorway—the barn manager. “Where the fuck are the chickens, Smirnoff?”

  At that hour there were no live chickens on the premises.

  They called me Smirnoff because on my first day I’d had a bottle of water. “No drinking on the job,” the barn manager had said and let out a laugh. The next night he called me Vodka, and the next night Smirnoff. No one ever said my actual name, which is Muñoz. First name: Alejandro.

  The police, the FBI, the firemen, the reporters, they were all there when I came out blinking into the light. Someone had set up a TV and I could see the aerial shots and hear the perpetrator’s brother making a statement. They all lined up and asked me one by one, How could I have slept through it? How tired did a man need to be to sleep while criminals burn the place down? How did it feel, they marveled, to be responsible for the misplacement of a million units of company property? And though my English is not good, I said in answer to every question, “But I was locked in a closet.”

  No one told me to leave. I came back the next night.

  I figured the next batch of chicks would arrive by the end of the week but they were calling it a criminal investigation site. No chickens allowed. The workers were sent home to wait for the trial. I waited for orders from Price Security. I heard nothing. Weeks passed. I kept coming—I was on night shift, which is probably why no one noticed me. My paychecks arrived in my account every other Monday. I wrote to Price Securities and received no answer. I wrote again, said I’d taken the initiative to move to the day shift, since technically there was little need to protect the hens at night, seeing as there were none.

  In the second month I asked my girlfriend to marry me—there’s something about being locked in a closet that puts things in perspective. When she said yes, I’d never been happier, more sure of the future.

  The brother was in charge. He showed up now and then, paced the barns, muttering and shaking his head. Once he turned around and said, “You’re still here?” I opened my mouth to reply but he walked away down the grate, as if he’d forgotten me even while I was still before
his eyes.

  Why didn’t he bring in more chickens? He had people in to discuss it. They walked up and down the rows, outside around the barns, sat in the office, feet up on the desk. I kept close by, a room away or a few meters behind, wanting to show them that I was wide awake and on the job, not asleep this time! When the birds arrived, I’d be ready. They seemed to have no idea who I was, despite my uniform. When one got into his car, he tipped me. Then a handful of workers came and carried out the equipment that might be useful elsewhere, though they left a great deal behind. Some of it is still here. They shut the door and were gone.

  We had a small but jubilant wedding. I carried her up the stairs to our apartment. Our friends had filled the cupboards with chocolate kisses, champagne glasses, confetti.

  In the years since the last hen left the premises, my job has grown dull. I try not to let on. I tossed away the last book I was reading for fun a year ago, pages from the finish line. I send emails, requests for reassignment, but it seems to go to an automated system, no one on the other side.

  I think about the daughter: Did I really see her my second night here or was she a ghost? If I had reported it, none of this might have happened.

  But it did happen. She came, took the birds, and left, and everything else seemed to cave in behind her, like tugging the end of the tablecloth and it all came tumbling to the floor. The farm’s ruin, the decay in the fields, the ash, the echoing barns. The sinking of this beautiful country. Even the mass extinction over the earth seemed to choose that moment to kick in in earnest. The slide downward—we all knew it was coming, and now it was here and staying. As if the woman were a black hole, and everything fell into her and was destroyed. All that was left was the wind blowing over the flat fields and these cavernous barns, the crevices sealed up so tight according to FDA regulations that not even rodents can get in after all these years.