The Pig Did It (2 page)

The driver had slowed the bus and by the time they had rounded a curve, Aaron understood the bikers' cry. There, crowding the road, were the pigs, a mob more than a herd, each squealing and screaming as if the destined slaughter were already under way.

A few pigs were now clambering up the rock walls that lined the roadway, others trotting up the hills, with about four of them sniffing the wheel of a truck stuck in a ditch. One of the front wheels was still spinning, as if the truck's fortune, for better or worse, would be made manifest at any moment.

The bus stopped; the door opened. The spike-haired man was the first off, then the driver. With some pushing and shoving of their own—as if taking their example from the pigs—the passengers, Aaron included, emptied the bus. A frail elderly woman elbowed her way to the front with all the courtesy and consideration of a fullback.

The round-up of an escaped pig is not a spectator sport. Almost without exception the passengers were wading in among the pigs or running along the road, clapping their hands, calling out,
“Suuee! Suuee! Suuee!”
A young woman with a switch pulled from the nearby thicket was trying to herd the pigs together in the road and move them in the direction the bus and the truck had been going. She was, Aaron noted, a bit too self-consciously costumed as a swineherd in her baggy black woolen pants and thick woolen sweater, dark gray, spattered with the rust colors of earth, the green stains of crushed grass, and a few purple streaks of unknown origin.

And yet, to Aaron, she seemed more a dancer than a keeper of pigs. Her sneakered feet managed to escape being dainty, but only just. And their quick pivots and graceful turns allowed him to guess with fair accuracy the easy movements of a most feminine form that not even the outsize clothing could begin to conceal. Then, too, her auburn hair would be flung across her face, first one side, then the other, suggesting a happy abandon hardly consistent with her present predicament, revealing in intermittent flashes the eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, chin, and neck of a woman of vital beauty and immediate allure.

She was laughing, clearly enjoying herself to the full, as if a ditched truck and a mob of confused pigs were one of life's more surprising delights. With each flick of the switch she would let out a small cry of triumph, a point scored in a game that provided unending amusement. The pigs, in return, raised their snouts and screamed their indignation.

One of the passengers, an elderly woman, had made her way into the middle of the clamoring beasts and was slapping their snouts and spanking their hams, more intent on punishing their behavior than restoring order. The man in the tweed suit ran along the side of the herd, yelling, clapping his hands over the pigs' heads, sending even more of the frightened animals off into the pastures that lined the road. The zinc-haired youth had placed himself a few yards down the slope of a hill and had made it his job to see that no pigs passed into the valley below. Stamping a foot, shouting, hunching forward in warning, he did his best to encourage a return to the road; but, to complicate his task, more than a few of the pigs seemed attracted to his performance, and the youth, to escape their charge, was forced to move farther and farther down the slope, the pigs in pursuit, eager for yet more sport.

The man in tweed was running alongside a pig as it raced up a hill, a contest to see who would make it first to the top. Two passengers—ample matrons of great dignity whom Aaron had heard conversing only in French—were standing to the side, nodding their disdain, speaking to each other like sportscasters commenting on the game in progress.

Some pigs stood next to the truck, content to wait for things to calm down. Others rooted in the grass with their snouts, searching out whatever tasty grubs might be found beneath the turf. One pig, pinker than the rest, began prodding its fellows with its snout, bumping, shoving, grunting, and snorting even louder than the piercing shrieks of those whose dignity was being offended. Only when, with a few discreet sideswipes, it tried to force the two Frenchwomen into the herd did the swineherd, the beauty with the switch, put an end to its presumptions by driving it deep into the middle of the pack.

Merrily she flicked her switch, claiming with a quick nip one pig, then another, reminding each in turn that it belonged to her and might as well accept the happy fact. The woman's eyes, like the switch, seemed to flick and dart, rejoicing in the calamity, more interested in the chaos than in the rescue of her stock.

To show he wasn't a tourist, Aaron snapped a reed-thin switch from the bramble. With brutish disregard he stripped it of its leaves, swished it twice in the air like a fencing master testing his rapier, and looked around for a task worthy of his style and dash. He would pick one of the more wayward pigs and bring it safely back into the fold. Two were sniffing their way along the rock wall, another was already halfway down the hill toward the valley, three were trotting back to the road, their playtime at an end. One, on the upward slope, had raised its snout and was squealing, begging for rescue, another coming down the hill slowly, almost daintily, as if it had relieved itself in the gorse and didn't want anyone to know what it had been up to.

Aaron saw his pig. Or, more accurately, his pig saw him.

There, about twenty feet up the hill, it stood, its front legs brazenly spread to declare its defiance. Its huge head was thrust forward on a neck and shoulders that a bull might envy, its snout twitching, daring Aaron to come closer. The eyes, pink-rimmed slits, blinked, peered, then blinked again. The ears stiffened, the tail lifted, and from out behind came a big arc of piss, a sturdy yellow stream that, for some reason, made him think of Coors beer. Aaron, aloud, counted to three. The arc collapsed and disappeared. Aaron started up the hill, stick in hand. He would go around the pig, approach it from above, apply the switch, and drive the animal down to the road. As he went up the hillside, the pig turned, keeping an eye on him. Aaron kept moving, higher. The pig itself turned some more, still watching. By the time Aaron had arrived at the place from which he'd expected to make his attack, the pig had turned around completely. The two of them faced each other once again.

Aaron would tolerate no more. He stomped down the slope toward the pig, uttering a high and fearful yell that could have been mistaken for the cry of someone who'd seen a mouse. The pig, unimpressed, stood its ground. Aaron stopped. With the switch he made two quick slashes in the air. The pig blinked but didn't move. Aaron went to his left. He would charge from the side. But just before he could complete the maneuver, the pig, with a gruff snort, turned and made a dash up the hill. Aaron hesitated only a moment, not for decision but for adjustment to the shock. The pig was not cooperating. Then he sped up the hill, the held switch bending again and again like a divining rod bewildered that its divinations were being repeatedly ignored.

The pig continued up the hill, gaining speed as it broke into a full gallop. Aaron followed, determined now that the pig would not escape. Just below the summit, the pig veered to the left and started toward the eastern slope that curved around to the other side of the hill. Aaron gained slightly, but he began to worry about how long his breath would hold out. He wasn't exactly panting, but he could tell that the breaths were becoming shorter and shallower and there was a slight stitch in his right side. Heart attack or appendicitis, either could fell him at any moment, but he no longer cared. He would get the pig.

For its part the pig was covering ground at a fair clip. To Aaron it seemed that it was deliberately leading him, luring him farther and farther away from the bus, from the road, from his fellow passengers, like Moby-Dick, tempting him into uncharted territory, to a hidden valley beyond the hill. If that were its aim, Aaron would become the pig's Ahab, his will more steeled than ever in spite of the panting breaths and the ache in his side.

The pig disappeared around the eastern slope, bounding over the heather, avoiding the rocks. Aaron followed, putting the switch into his left hand so he could hold his side with his right. He rounded the curve. There, higher up toward the summit, stood the pig. It was rooting up the turf with short grunts of repellent satisfaction. Aaron stopped. He stood there panting. The ache in his side had grown to an actual pain. He let the switch fall from his hand. He turned and headed back the way he'd come. He would have no more interest in the pig. He cared not at all that it was being abandoned on the hillside, that it must forage for itself as best it could, denied the amenities of a safe clean pen, the swill-filled trough, the privilege of being counted among the chattel of a woman with a surprised laugh and darting eyes.

Aaron completed the turn around the side of the hill and began the descent. From this height—he hadn't realized how high he'd climbed—he could see to the west the parceled pastures that sloped upward, unheeding of the edge of the cliff that dropped off to the sea. The town to the north was gray even in the slanting light of the lowering sun, the houses, stucco and stone, obviously on friendlier terms with the hills than with the cliffs and the sea. On the horizon, a single ship seemed about to drop sideways off the end of the earth. No fishing boats, no curraghs could be seen. The coastal waters had been fished out long before. The hulking rock of Great Blasket Island, more than a mile offshore, rose into a cloud as if hoping to find in its mists the meaning of its hard existence.

Aaron picked up his pace but still had to brake each step so he wouldn't slip and slide down the steep incline of the hill. His aunt Kitty would be waiting, and she was not a woman famous for her patience. Fortunately she and Aaron were—through the generational peculiarities of the McClouds—near contemporaries, with Kitty, two years older. As children they had allied themselves to each other more as cousins than as aunt and nephew. Only in a clinch would Kitty bring into play the precedence decreed by her having been sired, in his old age, by Aaron's grandfather. She was the final fructification crowning more than thirty fertile years that had produced seven children, two clusters of three each, with nine years intervening, and then, at the last, this ultimate flowering who would, to the family's chagrin, inherit the house, chattel, and pasturage of a doting, dotaged father, a deliberate perversion of primogeniture leaving all not to his eldest son but to his youngest daughter. Encouraged by this perversity, Kitty soon fell into a habit of exasperation, an inability to understand or accept inconvenience. Spoiled, she considered herself to be without blemish and had no patience with anyone who took a different view, not because they were wrong but because they lacked discernment.

Aaron liked her and always had. It was she who had taught him to be, like herself, a little snot. She had schooled him in the ways of intractability; she had inspired in him a scorn of negotiation or compromise. They got along fine. Still, she would not want to be kept waiting—even for him. Aaron's apprehensions were not without cause.

He continued down the hill but stopped when the entire scene, himself included, was put into shadow, but gently, like a whisper. The town darkened, and the sea become still. Only the tops of the clouds, those out over the island, held the light, bright streaks of blazing silver. Eager for the day to end, a cloud had come up from the sea, from beyond the western horizon, claiming the sun for itself, leaving the land and even the sea to do as best they could under its shadow. The world seemed abandoned, forgotten, as if in the moment ages had passed and he was being given a glimpse of the future, the land drained and empty, the sea sullen and indifferent.

Aaron felt the stirrings of an ancient fear, but before it could take its unshakeable hold, there welled up in him not so much a memory as a repeated experience, a distant moment, alive again not in his mind but in his senses. He was with his great-aunt Molly, Kitty's mother, an ample and hearty woman with a harsh laugh and a tender touch. They were climbing, through the heather, through the gorse, to a hill high above the town when, without warning, a mist rose up, obliterating the whole earth, separating them from everything known and familiar. He must have whimpered because, after letting out a short quick laugh, the good woman took his face between her two rough hands and said, “Poor child, you're not Irish at all, are you, not anymore. What has happened is the everyday miracle from which comes all our wisdom. We've been taken into a mystery. See? It's all around us and we know nothing but itself. Everything is mystery—and we accept it to God's glory. So give up being afraid. And be Irish again, for the moment at least. And wise as well. Learn—and fast—to live with mystery. And to die with it, too. Now let me kiss your foolish forehead”—which she did—“and you'll be afraid no more. And let me take your hand in mine and we'll go up the hill, not even expecting to see our way. It is ever so. And then well eat a bit of cake I've tucked into my pocket.”

Aaron felt the kiss again on his forehead. He drew his hand across the place where her lips had touched, then looked down at his feet. The stirring of the childhood fear faded to nothing. And, better still, the pain in his side had receded, his breathing had been restored, the heavings of his shoulders no longer needed to keep him going. The cloud, having had its way, resumed its advance to the east, hoping perhaps to frustrate the moon somewhere over northern France. Light once more shone, the world restored to its vital near-somnolent self. Aaron raised his head. The stones of the town sparked with the minerals and ores that were their secret element. Whitecaps roused the sea, and the grass was given again not only its multiple shades of green but the scents as well of heather, gorse and, if he was not mistaken, nicotine.

But before Aaron could revel completely in the world's restoration, he saw that he had come down the wrong side of the hill. There were no pigs, there was no bus, there were no ineffectual herders scampering in the road. The woman with the darting eyes and the surprised laugh was nowhere to be seen. He would have to reverse direction and make his way back to the opposite slope. Just as he was about to make the turn, he found himself staring more intently at the road below. True, he could see no pigs, no bus, no passengers, nor the swineherd with the switch. But the truck was there, still in the ditch, as if taking a snooze before continuing on its journey.