Lord of the Barnyard

Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt, Tristan Egolf, 1998, Grove Press, New York

Characters

John Kaltenbrunner, the tragic protagonist.

Narrator, an unnamed member of the garbage crew, the "hill scrubs."

Ford Kaltenbrunner, the father John never knew, idealized by his mother and by the town, but secretly despised by most. Ford died before John was born.

Wilbur, a member of the garbage crew who befriended John, perhaps the only friend John had in his life.

Location

Baker, Greene County, state unknown.

Synopsis

Ford Kaltenbrunner owned a farm and worked for a mining company. The company was beset by archeological problems - Indian relics or wooly mammoth bones would be found and the whole operation would be shut down for weeks, months on end while archaeologists sifted through the remains. Ford decided to handle these matters himself. Whenever such discoveries were made, he was called in and took care of the situation. The evidence went away and mining continued unimpeded. In this way, he advanced in the company until he was number two man under the owner. And this was not his only such endeavor. He had a notebook listing genealogies and proclivities of most of the families in Baker. When he died in the mine "accident," he was in the process of organizing the mine workers against the owner, in hopes of taking over management of the mine himself. He was much respected, much feared and much hated.

John grew up in the shadow of the great man. His mother worked at the factory to feed them. The farm became run down. By about age eight, John began to be interested in reviving the farm. He started out with homing pigeons, then added chickens and sheep. He fixed up the barn and restored the tractor to pristine condition. At school he was withdrawn and merely waited for release so he could continue some project at home. In building and repairing, he found a padlocked room in the barn that had been hidden by the broken implements stacked in front of its door. After breaking down the door, he discovered the place his father had stored all of the archeological finds. He also found the notebook his father kept listing the townspeople and their failings, in essence, a blackmail catalogue.

By the time he was 15, the farm was a going enterprise and John was counting the months until he could quit school and really build it up. But that time would never come. A tornado ripped through the farm, damaging much of the structures, killing, freeing or maiming most of the animals. His mother came home from work sick. He called in two doctors but both said she was just tired and submitted their bills. Finally he decided to drive her to the hospital. On the way he was hit by a migrant worker who blamed him. The police took him to jail and finally took his mother to the hospital where she was diagnosed as terminal. The Methodist cronies descended - the Methodist cronies befriended the dying, giving them comfort and convincing them the best would be for them to sign over their estates to the Methodist Church. He understood what was happening from having read his father's journals but couldn't convince his mother. She signed away the farm.

Everything took its toll and finally he blew. Under cover of darkness, he buried his father's finds. Then, the next day, he expelled the cronies, drove his prized tractor into the house, and took his shotgun and blew a hole into every wall. Then he waited for the police. They came. He rolled his mother's wheel chair out on the porch for her to be taken away and began the standoff. Luck was again against him. Before he could load the last shell and turn the barrel on himself, a teargas canister dropped beside him and he was sent away to prison.

In only about four years he returned but no one recognized him. He tried several menial jobs but was fired from them all, not for lack of work ethic - call it a difference of opinion. His upstairs neighbor, Wilbur, befriended him and they sat on the balcony porch and talked about farming. Wilbur was a garbage man, the lowest form of labor available in Baker, suited only for men of a certain lowness of self-esteem. Wilbur decided to get his new friend a job and soon John had totally changed the working habits of the crew. John did the work of three men, not for any other reason than that is how he was built, that was the way he operated.

The boss was a man named Kunstler, a truly detestable man. But, then, why shouldn't he be detestable, since, after all, the garbage crew, the "hill scrubs," were detested by the community. They were not personally detested because no one knew them. They were detested because of what they did - they took away the leavings, the dregs, the waste and refuse, they removed those items of shame, of humiliation. The hill scrubs cleaned up the community's mess, they, in effect, showed the mess to the people, showed them their own failings, had disposed of it in a public way. And for so doing, to take away the spotlight from themselves and their abomination, they despised the hill scrubs and treated them with contempt. They spat on them, called them any name they could think of, demeaned them in any way possible.

John always stayed aloof from his fellow workers. Wilbur was the only friend he had ever had in his life and that friendship could be tenuous at times. The crew began to resent John. They could see he meant no harm in his overly zealous work manner but that combined with his aloofness gave them no feeling of where they stood with him. Wilbur tried to talk to him, tried to get him to be more social with the crew and, it took a while, he finally came to see that maybe he should make a move. He designed a new route plan. It combined parts of current routes and broke out other parts into their own routes. No one told Kunstler. They just took off every day on the new routes, finished earlier and the work was more evenly distributed. Still there was the matter of the customers' indignation, that the low pay, and Kunstler. The next step: strike.

The garbage began to pile up. No one went to work. Though the job was menial, because of bureaucracy, licensing, an the reprehensible nature of the job, they knew they couldn't be replaced quickly. No one went to work. Neither did they venture out in public. After several weeks, inspectors began shutting down the meat packing plants. The local Greene County newspaper and the Pottville television station from the rival town began to cover the situation, the former in a more compassionate manner, the latter brutally maligning Baker. The town council was impotent (none were reelected). The local police tried to contain the situation but did not have the manpower to keep the rats, coyotes, buzzards, pigeons and other scavengers at bay and keep porch-sitting, shotgun-packing neighbors on friendly terms, while at the same time scooping trash out of the river where from passing cars it somehow arrived.

It all came to a head with the big game: the Baker versus Pottville basketball game. These communities hated each other under normal conditions. But with Baker under tons of rotting garbage, and the game scheduled to be played in Baker this year, only bad consequences could result. John and several of the crew were together to watch the game on television. The weeks had been hard on them, too. Garbage men were paid poorly and there wasn't much left between them for food, let alone beer. John announced he was going to the game. Wilbur and some other tried to convince him it was a bad idea but in the end decided to join him and try to keep him out of trouble. They painted their faces Baker green (Pottville fans came in red) and went to the stadium.

The game lasted only through the first quarter. Then a referee made a call that neither side agreed with and the green and red fans rushed each other. The hill scrubs tried to make an exit but the heat caused the face paint to run and someone recognized John. He got away with his life but little else. Neither Wilbur or the others knew where he went. The next day, Wilbur went to the police station to ask about him. He was in the hospital. He had run but he hadn't gotten away after all. He was beaten mercilessly. Wilbur tried to see him in the hospital but the guard wouldn't allow anyone in. When John regained consciousness, he acted instinctively. As soon as the door opened, he rushed out, punched the guard and ran into the open elevator shaft. Two floors below, he fell through the elevator roof. He got up, shook himself off and ran out the door.

The next day, Wilbur got a call from the police. Would he identify a body? It was John. He was found lying in the mud, dead. His life had been a tragedy from start to finish. All the things that his father's proponents had said his father was: gregarious, well liked, he wasn't. But he had succeeded in doing one thing where his father failed: in organizing a strike. The strike was over in less than a week after that. The crew's demands were met. Wilbur replaced Kunstler, their pay was increased and they were accorded more respect, almost fear by their customers.

1-Jun-2005