YEARS in animal health, Mary Lou had never seen a mass slaughter. She was not looking forward to it. She had done many inspections that could lead to such an event, but it had never fallen to her to participate. The convicts had erected a fence of plastic panels that completely encircled the inside of the barn. The fence came up to Mary Lou’s chin. Inside there were thousands of distressed turkeys, looking this way and that at the forbidding figures in their hooded white plastic suits who were dragging thick plastic hoses into the barn. The hoses were attached to a pair of tank trucks that had backed up to the doors on either end.
Mary Lou recognized Emily’s eyes behind the goggles as she approached. “Are you ready for this?” Emily asked.
“I guess.”
“Listen, it’s a whole lot better than some other options. Sometimes they use these things like long-handled garden shears to break their necks, one by one. This goes a lot quicker, believe me.”
“Are they using gas?”
“Foam,” said Emily. “Essentially, the same stuff fire departments use. The little bubbles are just the right size to get inhaled and caught in the airways. They suffocate to death.” When Mary Lou shuddered, Emily said, “They’re all gonna die anyway. We’re just giving them a better death.”
A man in a custom Tyvek suit with the company logo—Minnesota Foamers—on his chest approached Emily. She gave him permission to begin.
It took two men to manage each hose. They began on opposite sides of the pen, slowly moving down a parallel course. The pumps made a terrific racket, which had already upset the turkeys before the foam spewed out. It was slightly blue in color, and substantial, like the whipped cream that Mary Lou sprayed on her Thanksgiving pies. It mounded up unevenly. The healthier turkeys ran away from it, but as they were surrounded, some dipped their heads in the rising foam, or bathed in it. Their curiosity had gotten the better of them. Soon all you could see were the long, red, turkey throats sticking out of the rising blue-white foam, and all you could hear over the racket of the pumps was the gobbling, nervous and louder, and then the turkeys in the back where the foam was higher disappeared, and you could tell by the agitation under the foam that their wings were flapping. Finally, the foam curtain closed over the last of the turkeys. It looked to Mary Lou like an ocean wave in a stirring breeze, and then the breeze subsided, and that was that.
When Emily and Mary Lou turned away, they saw the Stevenson children standing in the barn door, Charlie and the girl in the pinafore and two others.
“Go back to your dad, Charlie,” Emily said.
Charlie walked back to the porch where Mr. Stevenson was sitting in the rocker. It occurred to Emily that there was never a Mrs. Stevenson around. He must be alone, with all these kids, and no one to talk to. She wanted to tell him that there would be another year, a better one coming. That he could start over again. That maybe he’d find someone to help him out, console him at times like this. But she couldn’t make any such promise. Instead, she raised her hand in parting, and he nodded.
22
Queen Margaret
Since the big outbreak in Philadelphia, Jill had taken the kids to her sister’s farm. She did it to placate Henry. She was used to him going off to dangerous places, and she prided herself on managing without him. She was handy, she did the books, she kept the house running without disrupting her teaching. No one would fault her competence and independence. But now the dangerous place was everywhere, and Jill was scared. Henry would know how to deal with the anxiety that stalked her thoughts. He wasn’t here to steady her and reassure the children. Both resenting his absence and desperately missing him, she tried to expel him from her thoughts and sink into another existence, her younger sister’s life.
Helen and Teddy loved their aunt Maggie and uncle Tim. They farmed 240 acres in Williamson County, outside Nashville, one of the most beautiful parts of Tennessee. Their picturesque farmhouse had been a stop on a stagecoach line before the Civil War, a detail that put it on the National Register of Historic Places. It was a wreck when Maggie and Tim first drove across the covered bridge onto the graveled drive leading to the house. “The