10.
Martha shakes out the table cloth, sprinkling a few crumbs into the yard. It is a still day. The sun sizzles on the sheds but the air is cool. It is late winter, and Jack is plowing under the winter tillage readying the fields for corn.

She spreads it back on the table--it is almost clean, and no one else is coming until Tuesday. On the stove, the kettle is spluttering a little, clearing its throat to whistle. She puts a teaspoon of instant coffee in a John Deere mug, adds two of sugar and a slap of milk, then makes herself a cup of comfort.

The phone rings. She picks it up after the third ring. "I'll look," she says. "Blue? You think you left it by the couch?" She walks the phone into the parlor, finds the sweater that Jane has left behind. "Yeah, it was a good session today. I didn't know what the new girl would be like but she was fine. People just get it, don't they?"

When they signed up for the Terris they had figured it was a straight-forward job. They had the equipment, the franchise gave them the special gear, and set them up with a skeleton crew, personnel manuals, even some contacts where they could hire nurses and medical people whose papers weren't enough to work in hospitals. The first woman they interviewed had been a doctor in Peru and had been doing housekeeping. She almost wept with joy when they showed her the shed.

Then word got out. At first they got a lot of flack about it. But they were keeping the farm. Other ones were going up for sale. The Friday auctions just made you want to cry when you saw who was selling off their equipment. Every family had at least one job in town, And the kids couldn't get out fast enough. SO, she wasn't proud but she sure didn't see any need to apologize.

Then Pastor Venge asked if he could come to pray for them. He told her they were special souls. They were being held in a place of special purity. They were like children before they were born, and if you hurt them or let them die it would be like an abortion. He said Martha and Jack were very special for doing this. And then he asked if he could bring just a few of the faithful to pray with him.

Somehow it had turned into a regular event. Twice a week Pastor Venge and a group of brisk young men and women would come through, walking up and down the aisles of the Terri shed and calling on the Spirit of the Lord to bless these innocents and bless them too. And after a while some of the women in the church who were closer to Martha's age started to come too, and then to stay after the Pastor's group left. It was Nancy, who asked her first what she knew about one of them--a yellow-haired Terri who had probably been pretty and vibrant and now was mostly very pale, with puddling fluids making her face look vaguely swollen and bruised.

They didn't have any information about them. The whole system was set up to be anonymous. No family visits. If there were families still in the picture they didn't end up on Terri farms. But most families hit their lifetime max pretty quickly and then the Lifers took over. Nancy suggested they bring the girl up to the house and pray over her, special. Even though they wouldn't know who she was, they should pray for her, just her, and make her the focus of their intention as if they did know her.

Somehow it just seemed right. Maria prepared a dolly and brought the girl up, they set up a bed for her in the living room, they way they would have had a casket if someone had died, and then they all sat around her and looked at her. Finally Nancy started. "I think you must have been in love. You had yellow hair and he probably did too. I want to tell you that there are still butterflies flying around and they miss you." And then Nancy began to cry, very quietly.

Martha spoke too. She told the yellow-haired girl about how her own daughter had left when she was about the same age. She came back a couple of times for Christmas and now she called every month or two. One time she came with a young man who smelled bad, and she fought with Jack. She hadn't been back since, but Martha knew she'd come soon. As she talked to the girl Martha thought that the bruises in the skin moved slowly, like clouds, and she could feel the pure presence like a quiet place in her own mind.

Phyllis took her turn. Her husband Daniel was paralyzed and she did her work and some of his and let the rest drift bit by bit. Their oldest son was at the land grant college and said he was coming back and she was just trying to hold on till he did. But he wasn't there at the harvest and he wasn't there at the planting and she talked about him less and less. Now she took the still hand in her own and stroked it, the way she would have stroked Daniel's if his eyes hadn't told her that pity would kill him faster than anything else.

Finally when enough had been spoken and the women sat quietly with their hands at their sides, Nancy stood up and went to the Bible on its stand, and opened it at random and read for a while. Then they all understood that the whole last hour had been a prayer.

They had been coming once a week now for five months. They brought up different Terris, and sometimes that seemed to make a difference. Each time before they started she thought that they would have all said what they had to say and would just sit and someone would start talking about the news or the weather and then that would be that. But each time they found themselves refreshed by the hour, like butterflies sipping renewal from the drying lips of the dead.

4. Terri Farm

9. "They give me the creeps," Maria says, rubbing Palo’s feet, trying to break the knots that are cramping his toes. He grunts, trying to listen to the radio and listen to her at the same time. If tomorrow is raining the chickens will crowd towards the middle of the chicken house and there will be more dead than usual. On the other hand it will cool things down so maybe there will be fewer dead.

His job mostly involves pulling the dead ones out and throwing them in the bins. They're trucked off. He thinks maybe they get ground up and fed to dogs. They kill each other a lot of ways. On purpose and by accident and sometimes they start by accident and finish on purpose. They peck at one another all day long, nothing else to do all jammed together like that except figure out who is in charge. The ones that get pecked and pushed away from the food, which comes down the sluice in the middle, are likelier to get hurt when something scares them and they all rush to the same place, thinking it will be safe. They get pulled under foot, and stepped on and they end up with broken feet and eyes scratched out. Then after that the other ones come at them harder and after a while Palo will notice there's sort of an eddy, a hill where things should be flat. So he takes his stick with a claw, and hooks out the body.

They could just keep them in cages and that wouldn't happen. Other things happen but not that. In cages they'd be held so tight they wouldn't be able to turn around. The ones that got scared easily would scrape their necks on the mesh. They'd pluck out their own feathers--of course they do that now too, and each others' feathers. He thinks that they probably lose a few more birds this way but they get bigger and they sell them for a little more because they aren't in the cages. And it gives him a job, watching with his claw, like the bird so high up it doesn't even have to bang feathers with the next one down to prove where it belongs.

Actually that isn't true. There is a belligerent rooster that would like to take him down a notch and he always has to keep an eye out when he comes into the long shed where the birds range back and forth. The rooster is watching for him. It's almost a kind of romance, the way he comes running up to him, then leaps up, claws up to strike and spin. He might like to pick that one out, for his spirit, breed him down into one of the bright tough birds they used to fight back home, back in the camps. But that isn't going to happen, the cocks are all capons anyway. He just has something going on that remembers the way things ought to be.

Palo is maybe thinking too much about that now, thinking about how much he is turning into one of these chickens. He and Maria and the other workers have their own rooms now, sheds a little smaller than the chicken yards but built on the same lines with sheet metal sweeping down, crackling in the sun. Balloon frame walls. He was here when they put them up. Water at the tap now piped into each kitchen, but still coming from the same flat tinny tasting source, through black pipe that takes up the taste of hose in the sun.

Behind the chicken sheds are the new sheds. These have cinder-block walls, and a lot of piping and electricity, a lot of stuff going on inside. They have generators too so that even if a thunderstorm knocks out the power, lightening cracking on a transformer as happens pretty regularly, the lines will continue. Not open all the way like the chicken houses, or quartered like the laborers' units--two rooms, a stove, a sink and a toilet apiece; a shower to share between every four. The Terri sheds are two tiers high, four long rows with eight in each row, air-conditioned and full of humming and ringing machines. Maria works there now. The job is not all that different from Palo's. She takes care of them and when they die she reaches up and turns the things off and they go away. Only probably not to pet food. And so far, she hasn't actually seen one die.

The Terris--most of them are women and most of them are old but she knows they all really aren't called Terri-- come to them from all over. After a certain point there isn't much to do with an old person or a hurt person except to let them die. Nothing is left to try to fix. Things wear out, people aren't made of pieces that you can replace or upgrade. If you think of them that way, anyway, these are like manual typewriters or old electric ones. They aren't anything you'd bother repairing. Just dump and upgrade. But that isn't going to happen.

Terri Shaivo is the first Terri. She's the one they fought to keep alive. The law churned around her like the chickens stepping on one another and then she went down. But later, here and there they changed that law. So depending on where you are and who cares and what's the matter, you get to a certain point and then there's nothing to do but die, except you're not going to. There’s so many ways to keep you alive. Not exactly a 'you'. But the blood pumps around and the eyes open and close. And after a while, the beds in the hospitals and nursing homes are full, with people who aren't going to get better, and there's no room to take people who might get better if only there was room.

That's when the Terri Farms started. They bring them out and take care of them. It's a little like nursing but its more like taking care of the chickens or, actually, most like taking care of the pigs and veal calves in their pens. They don't move around. In fact, it's easier with the Terris because they mostly don't want to move. You do the same kind of thing, keeping them washed down, keeping the pens clean and putting a lot of antibiotics into the feed so they don't get sick. The air gets filtered to keep it clean inside. A lot of the equipment that the farm used when it still raised hogs just got reengineered for the Terris. It's the first one in this section of the state and it's almost full now. Taking care of the Terris is a lot more profitable than raising beef.