Barn 8

by Deb Olin Unferth

  She went back home and wrote the group an anonymous note. Greetings. I’ve left you a present.

  The news refreshed itself in colorful shapes on the screen.

  A response popped up. Who are you supposed to be, our fairy godmother?

  She wrote back. Check your doorstep, Cinderella.

  Whatever you left better not be something we call the police over.

  She slapped the laptop shut.

  Would they call the police over a chicken?

  She slept an hour maybe, got up before the alarm, her husband still asleep. She drove to work, hid in her office, and worked on data organization. She could hear her coworkers arriving, going in and out of the break room, calling out hellos. Finally she checked, had to. And, yes, she had a new note from the group.

  We see your IP address.

  Could they find out who she was?

  There was a knock and the door opened.

  “Olivia,” she gasped.

  The girl was wearing some sort of hoodie and her hair seemed arranged in knots. “Dead,” said the girl. “It was sudden. A car accident.”

  The daughter.

  HAD OLIVIA MEANT TO LOSE TOUCH? Cleveland had always wondered. Cleveland had admittedly been an odd kid, but she’d been Olivia’s first little charge. She imagined Olivia arriving in New York, looking up at the buildings, hand on her stomach, and thinking of Cleveland, the child she’d cared for, the only evidence that she just might be able to do this.

  On the other hand, Olivia had had a lot to figure out. Alone, in an enormous city, eighteen years old, broke, smart but under-credentialed, and soon she had a baby. She could not have had time to read, much less answer, the many, many emails Cleveland had sent. Cleveland wrote and wrote and wrote, and finally stopped. Why should she have a permanent place in her sitter’s heart? She was Olivia’s job, not her sister or niece or friend.

  One winter day the father of the child called. Olivia had been dead six months. He had the daughter, he said. She could use a little guidance.

  Cleveland, fearful, not wanting to mess it up, put it off, waited for the right time, did nothing.

  She clutched the edge of her desk.

  “Five years ago,” said the girl. “Almost six.”

  Cleveland was so rattled she couldn’t think. “I’m informed about the death, but your appointment is next week.”

  “I changed it.”

  “I haven’t received your course completion verification.”

  The girl frowned fiercely. She looked like a kid from a group home, like a teen let out of juvenile detention. But so much like her mother. “Well, I finished. Last Thursday,” she said. “You haven’t been informed?”

  Cleveland was arguing with her? She needed to gather herself. “We’ll start you tomorrow.”

  “I have the job?”

  “Pick up your employee welcome packet at the front desk.”

  The girl walked out, sneakers squeaking (Olivia playing starship in an old warehouse, Olivia sweeping leaves and twigs from her clothes …). Cleveland’s heart was banging. That wasn’t at all how she’d wanted to begin. She swiveled back to her computer. She had another message from that AR group.

  She knew she shouldn’t read it, but she did.

  She knew she shouldn’t answer, but she did.

  The next day Olivia’s daughter came back and Cleveland shakily took her through orientation: the United Egg Producers’ mission, the history of US layer hen certification, the Five Freedoms afforded to hens. She heard her own heavy voice dole out mechanical explanations, observed her own economical gestures. Olivia had made the table of elements sing, Olivia had spray-painted trig equations on the garage door (to the horror of Cleveland’s parents, who insisted they were gang symbols). Olivia would have made the audit fun.

  She handed the girl a uniform, a clipboard, a mono-use laptop, an armful of binders and forms. “Tomorrow we’ll have a quiz.”

  Meanwhile, it seems absurd to say she got into a fight with these AR activists, but that’s what was happening.

  Where’d you get the bird? You should be charged with neglect.

  As a matter of fact, she’s yours.

  She sure as fuck isn’t ours. The enduring conceptual error of our kind is believing any living creature is the property of another.

  She wrote again three days later, attached twelve photos of chickens in rusty cages that she snapped—illegally, with her phone—while Janey Flores was miscalculating cage space one row over. Here’s for your monthly calendar.

  We do targeted undercover investigations, not pet sitting. If you are in the position to conduct such an investigation, and have the courage and the will, which we doubt, come see us with your face not your phone.

  That’s when she stole two chickens. Drove to the Anderson Family Egg Farm, grabbed them, left them in a box with a note. There are two million more where these came from. I’m doing your job for you. Whose side are you on anyway?

  They wrote again. Oh excuse us that we aren’t jumping up and down when strangers leave animals at our door for us to care for. Rescuing individual chickens is just stupid. If you refuse to work on our terms by whatever is crouching in your contradictory heart, if you feel exculpated by taking two hens and leaving the rest to suffer and die, let alone ten billion every year, bring them to this address, not ours.

  The address was far, sixty miles out of town, one of those ludicrous sanctuaries miles off the highway. She looked at overhead images of it online while Janey Flores sat across from her in the Anderson Farm conference room and paged through the feed log—too quickly to determine whether the guidelines had been followed.

  Cleveland drove to the Spillman Egg Family Farm two nights later, a farm she’d audited every year for the past five. She walked onto the property with a sack like at the grocery and pulled six hens off the cage-free floor.

  Now you are getting on our nerves, they wrote. Since you refuse to introduce yourself, we are taking the liberty of the introduction. We have installed a security camera, for which we used scant, valuable funds. It is up and running, so whatever you do when you come to our door, whether dressed in a farmhand smock or the dark garb of an animal revolutionary, we will see it, please know.

  That was the last time she took any hens for a while.

  Until she couldn’t stand it anymore and took three more.

  “Look around you, Janey.”

  They stood among angles scarce in nature. Eighteen barns. A gathering of smaller supporting buildings. The girl didn’t lift her head from her ground gaze. A dull sun.

  “You see, Janey, this is the story of American ingenuity. The modern egg barn is a perfectly calibrated instrument.”

  Cleveland delivered this speech a dozen times a year—at training sessions and 4-H clubs, impromptu at neighborhood association meetings. “Hens left to their own devices lay as few as thirty eggs a year. Eggs used to be a luxury.” She pointed to a barn. “These hens lay two hundred and seventy eggs a year each. Do you know how? With one scientific discovery.”

  She stopped and squinted at the girl. “Stand up straight, Janey. We do not make scientific progress by slouching.”

  The girl straightened almost imperceptibly.

  Janey Flores. Silent (sullen?), inexpressive (unimaginative?), she had an exasperating habit of tugging the zipper of her hoodie up and down, up and down, a hoodie she insisted on wearing over her uniform so she looked like (was?) a runt with an attitude problem. Still, each time the girl turned and Cleveland caught a different angle of her face, a monstrous affection and protectiveness came over her.

  “Light. The discovery was light.” Cleveland resumed walking. “American scientists in the 1930s figured out that light is how the hen’s body knows when to lay. Long light means spring and laying. Less light means winter and rest. More light, more laying.”

  The girl merely needed discipline, guidance, care.

  “So the scientists shined more light on the hens, and lo and behold the
hens kept laying.” She lifted an arm to the barns. “Enough light and these hens will just lay and lay and lay and lay. Now what do you say to that?”

  “Another win for mankind,” Janey said, glumly.

  “For Americans,” Cleveland corrected.

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to meeting the woman her mother had sat for, Janey worried. She wondered whether the woman would like her. She tried to recall if her mother had ever mentioned her—Cleveland was her name, Janey loved it!—and it came to her that she remembered less and less about her mother. She had so little of her mother left—a suitcase full of old clothing, two paintings, a handful of jewelry, three voice mails, which she carefully copied along with every photo onto any new technology. So much was gone.

  She tried to communicate with the old Janey. Ask her, Janey thought at her. Ask Mom about Cleveland.

  She lay in her room in her father’s apartment and tried to imagine what sort of person Cleveland would be. Playful, spirited, smart. She’d grown up on the prairie, so Janey could see her as a wholesome health nut—braids, sandals, strumming something acoustic. Janey knew it wasn’t good for her to think like this but she imagined the two of them going camping, forging rivers, hiking through woods, sitting around a fire, Cleveland telling her stories about her mother as a teenager, acting out parts. How Janey would laugh! Then Cleveland would reach over and tuck a lock of Janey’s hair behind her ear, and say, “Your mother would be so proud of who you are,” and Janey would cry. Cleveland would put a big-sister arm around her and say, “Now let’s figure out a plan for you. Obviously you can’t keep doing this,” and gesture in the general direction of the office where they worked (the job itself played no part in this scenario). But here Janey’s fantasy would pause because that’s what Cleveland had done, after all. Stayed in Iowa, taken this job, was even the boss! Janey rushed to her defense. It was understandable in Cleveland’s case because … because … because … Janey faltered, then got it: Cleveland was a single mom! Raising a child alone and doing a great job (like Janey’s mother!). A little girl holding a marshmallow stick popped up at the campsite in Janey’s mind. Together the three of them explored the wilderness in a five-state contiguous region, floated over lakes in canoes, scrambled through caves. And just like that Janey was integrated into this little family (Aunt Janey!) and a new new Janey emerged: cutoff shorts, hair up in a bandanna, majoring in environmental science at the state university (Janey had never been one for nature, but with Cleveland by her side, she fell in love with the planet), coming home on weekends to Cleveland and her daughter (Olive!).

  It had been so long since she’d thought about being healthy. Could she do it for this woman, if she had to? She would try, really try.

  The auditor certification course was horrific, four long days of PowerPoints with cartoons of grinning chickens at the end of each one, quizzes with golf pencils like this was 1999, the most boring set of hours ever to unfold before her, while also truly disturbing. The vocabulary alone: “depopulation” (i.e., killing hens off by the hundred thousand), “forced molting” (i.e., reducing their food to the point where they don’t quite die), “beak trimming” (i.e., cutting off their faces), “certification” (sanctioning, no, requiring a whole allotment of atrocities), “the United Egg Producers” (the middle-aged white men in charge of all this).

  She was like a quester having to pass through trials of tedium in hopes of one day reaching enlightenment, and at last arriving at the end … Janey was so impatient, she moved her interview up five days. She drove to the address. A cube building in a landscape of cube buildings, an office “park,” acres of pavement. In place of trees, mounted signs directed you to distant lots. A receptionist pointed her into Cleveland’s office. Janey knocked and walked in. The pale woman behind the desk paled further. “Olivia?”

  Janey startled. “Dead.”

  From there it only got worse. On her first day Cleveland made Janey sit while she paced in front of a whiteboard and delivered a monologue on the topic of “duty.” She spent ten minutes on the rules for the employee lunchroom. Janey was too surprised to speak. Cleveland gave her “homework.”

  Over the next few days they went out to do the audits. Janey donned grimly the uniform, sat in the fluorescent farm offices and paged through the documentation, tramped behind Cleveland to the barns in the rain, followed her down the rows of hens. Nearly all the farmhands were Latino. A few times one joked with her in Spanish and she didn’t understand a word. She felt utterly foreign and unmoored. The barns were massive, sci-fi—level crazy, a powerful stench of chemicals and ammonia.

  And Cleveland was strange. Expressionless face. A rigid way of turning her head. Why had Janey been so ignorant as to imagine the woman could be anything but what she was? This “Cleveland,” a true believer in a middling cause, a ridiculous woman in a uniform, uptight, an autism-spectrum interest in regulations, named for a US president who hadn’t even done anything, twice. A woman who seemed to sincerely believe these disgusting warehouses were perfectly appropriate places for birds, as if they were lawn mowers or TV sets. If Cleveland hadn’t said her mother’s name at the interview, Janey wouldn’t have believed she had the correct person.

  Something was not right about her. She was twitchy, secretive. She lived in the ugliest house Janey had ever seen, plastic sun shades over the windows, fake siding coming off in places. No kids, a pasty husband who was already balding. Janey ducked below the windshield when Cleveland came out to the curb with the recycling bin.

  Janey was in despair. She wished she hadn’t built Cleveland up in her mind only to be toppled, wished she hadn’t allowed a feeling that resembled hope to enter her peripheral vision. She lost her uniform at the Laundromat, lost the audit binders on a vast farm (set them down somewhere and forgot about them until Cleveland looked at her askance an hour later), lost all curiosity about Cleveland, lost her ability to fake it through this, and was well on her way to losing the job too.

  In other words, Janey didn’t even ask her about her mother.

  “Thanks a lot,” she said to her father. “Now I’m stuck measuring ammonia levels and scraping excrement off my shoes. I stink even in my dreams.”

  She said, “My mother only sat for her once or twice, right? They barely knew each other.”

  He gave the most infuriating shrug. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters.”

  “Then why don’t you ask her?”

  THEN SHE CAUGHT CLEVELAND using her phone in a barn. Once, twice. Forbidden, but who cares. She caught her again. Must be checking her texts.

  But, no, holy crap …

  Janey was so disappointed in Cleveland and so sunk in her disappointment, she might have easily missed the whole thing.

  Cleveland was taking video of the animals—against the law, in violation of the Iowa ag-gag law, which Janey had learned about half-asleep in auditor training and which she knew carried a possible penalty of something or other imprisonment and fines. And here was Cleveland taking photos, not of fluffed-up chicks, but of fucked-up hens. Hens crowded behind the wire, hens with raw wounds, hens with prolapsed uteruses, hens dead in a bin in a bloody heap. Janey watched this for a week. Cleveland was an undercover investigator. Who would have imagined. What an operation. Genius. Janey was impressed. Janey was almost a little frightened—Cleveland had to be a psychopath to pull this off. She had to be mad.

  And the shit. She was taking pictures of it.

  One midnight Janey was at Cleveland’s house, sitting in her car, half-hidden by a minivan, the entire street turned down to dim, not one room lit, not a stray teen sliding out a window. Janey was dozing against the headrest, eyes lifted a slit. She jolted awake when she saw the front door open and Cleveland herself step out onto the lawn—a dewy luminescence and a shaded figure creeping swiftly over it. She got into her car and drove off. Janey waited, then followed a block behind on a slow ride through town. When she turned left onto Route 54, Janey knew where she had to be going. Janey s
tayed ten minutes in the Jack in the Box parking lot, then drove to the farm they’d audited that day. There it was, Cleveland’s car, parked on the side of the road across from the farthest barn. Janey pulled over a way off, put on her hat and gloves, and walked down the road in the dark. She waited, her breath forming and rising in the cold.

  Ammonia, darkness, fans like a plane in takeoff. Cleveland emerged from the barn with a sack.

  The excruciatingly beautiful night! The tininess of Cleveland against the gigantic barn! The light inside illuminated her from behind and glowed around her. The fans sounded like om. Who was this woman? What had her mother passed on long ago? The same defiant spirit that had led her away from this town, that had brought Janey back? The fire of her mother, her grandfather, was a trace of it here? Janey had thought this was a dead end but now …

  Cleveland shut the door and disappeared. Janey waited. Saw the line of shadow cross the dark.

  Janey came up behind her. Cleveland was bent over the backseat, a couple of chickens climbing out of the sack.

  Cleveland could be fired. She could face criminal charges. She could go to prison. She could be charged with bioterrorism. She could …

  “Hey,” said Janey.

  Cleveland startled, straightened. Dropped the empty sack. She slammed the back door with menace. “What do you want?”

  She was wearing her fucking uniform.

  “Why’d you do that?” said Janey.

  “Do what?” said Cleveland.

  INSIDE: BARN UNIVERSE. Completely enclosed in steel and concrete, seven tremendous aisles of cages soaring twenty-five feet high, eight tiers in two stories. A system of chains bringing in the feed, a series of belts carrying out the excrement. Powerful fans pulling through and out the carbon monoxide, the hydrogen sulfide, the ammonia, the dust. Twenty thousand one-foot-candle bulbs at regular intervals, like a monstrous Christmas decoration, the sun rising and falling on a timer. The entire barn rumbling with machinery. A hundred and fifty thousand chickens stood there, waiting—for what? for whom? On a wide conveyor, eggs slowly floated by.