Two weeks before Christmas in 2006, roughly 10 percent of the residents of Cactus disappeared. That sort of calamity would devastate any place, but its impact was especially visible on the tiny, windswept hamlet an hour north of Amarillo on the plains of the Panhandle. That’s because movements in the town were governed by what workers at the largest employer there called the chain. Cactus was then—as it is now—a meat-packing town. Life operated around the conveyor system inside the giant Swift and Co. slaughterhouse on the northwestern edge of the city, which carried thousands of cattle carcasses a day on meat hooks to stations where they were skinned, sawed in half, and then sliced into various cuts. The chain moved almost ceaselessly from 6…
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