The Pig Did It (3 page)

He looked to the north and saw only two cars and another truck. He looked to the south and could see nothing beyond the bend in the road. He ran down the hill; he leaped the wall; he stood in the road. There were pig droppings squashed into the asphalt. An apple core and a banana peel lay on the white stripe that served as a median; there were the skid marks of the truck, there was the truck itself. The woman's kerchief fluttered in the bramble, struggling to evolve into a bird or a butterfly. Everyone had gone, even the pigs. He had been left behind. The town was not near. His aunt's house was even farther. She would not wait once he had failed to be on the bus. He would have to hitchhike.

Aaron's worry subsided. These were hospitable people, and he was, after all, reasonably respectable in his jacket and gray slacks, even if he wasn't wearing a tie.

He started down the road, too pleased with the countryside, the crisp cool air, the deepening shadows just to stand still. After two bends in the road a car came. He held out his thumb. The car slowed, then picked up speed and passed him by. Another car soon followed, but this one not only didn't slow down, it also honked its horn as it sped by. The next car ignored him completely. He should have waited near the overturned truck. A man in distress would not be left alone in his misfortune. Another car passed. Two teenagers in the front seat and a young girl in the backseat had actually laughed at his plight. He would go back to the truck and make his plea from there.

He turned and saw the pig. It was less than ten feet behind him. It looked at him, then lowered its head and began snouting the pavement. A lone man would have been given a ride, but not a man with a pig.

Aaron stamped his foot. The pig continued its sniffings. Aaron repeated the cry he'd made earlier, but, as before, the pig was unimpressed. A car went by, then another right behind it. Aaron rushed at the pig but had to stop so he wouldn't crash into its lowered head. “Get away! Go! Go away!
Suuee! Suuee! Suuee!
Go home!”

The pig lifted its head slightly and stared at Aaron's shoes, then lowered the snout and rubbed it against a rock in the wall. Aaron stamped his foot again, but got no response. He turned and began again his walk along the side of the road. A car was coming around the bend. He started to raise his arm. He would no longer use his thumb. He would wave his arms, a signal of distress. The car would have to stop. It didn't. The pig, of course, was still following.

There was a repetition of the stamping, stomping, and shouting, but to no effect. “Go on up the hill. You wanted to go up the hill, then go up the hill. Go on. No one's stopping you.” Then, again, the stamping, the stomping, the shouting. He was ignored.

Aaron continued toward the town. Cars went by, a truck, a pickup, more cars. He made no attempt to ask for help. He never turned around. He knew he was being followed. There was nothing he could do. And so, as the sun descended and the lengthened shadows spread themselves over the land and the sea, over the islands and the pastures high and low, Aaron walked the darkening road, finally entering the town, arriving at the place chosen for the enactment of his sorrow and his grief, in, it would seem, the custody of a pig.

2

A
aron looked out the bedroom window. There, in the morning light, was the wide pasture that stretched from the house to the headland, smaller than he remembered—which was to be expected since he himself had, in the intervening years, grown to such a formidable height. It had been mowed for hay, the grass short now but too soft to be considered stubble. To him it still seemed forbidden territory and filled, therefore, with unending allure. For fear that he'd go running right off the cliff, or, while playing, chase a ball over the edge, he'd been warned of its dangers and threatened with punishments too fearful to name if he ventured unaccompanied into its precincts. Aware, in her wisdom, that common sense or a concern for his safety and well-being were insufficient proscriptions, Great-Aunt Molly had invented gaping maws hidden in the ground that could open at the touch of his toe and deliver him to an underworld where there were devices designed solely for the enlightenment of disobedient boys. That they involved saucer-eyed creatures of insatiable appetite was hinted at. There, beneath the field, was the haven to which the driven snakes had retreated at Patrick's command, and no appeal to the heavenly saint would be heard above the howls of the regretful children now being introduced to the rites and rituals their defiance had earned for them. (When Aunt Molly had presented this information, it had the form and sound of a plea more than a prohibition. He must, for her sake if not for his own, preserve himself from such a fate. It would torment his aunt to know that, at this moment, he was being, as she put it, “processed.” What “processed” meant, she would not say. And, in pity for her, he must never find out.)

Looking out now at the forbidden field, Aaron wondered if he might be allowed at last to walk its length and look down from the headland height onto the beach and the water below. Or, rather, he wondered if he could allow himself to push through the grass unaccompanied by his great aunt, long dead. With his hand in hers, no harm could come. That is what he had been told and that is what he believed. Nor was his belief without foundation. Many times, wide eyed but thrilled, he'd been escorted through the pasture grass, alert to any rumblings beneath his feet, then allowed to sit on the edge of the cliff, his bare feet dangling down, Aunt Molly at his side, sitting too, her shoes and stockings off, both of them wiggling their toes, an insolent offering to the sea, a gesture of scorn directed at the dark forces frustrated by the presence of his aunt and the hold of her hand.

Once, after an excursion made eventful only by their sharing an apple while sitting on the cliff—his great aunt not hesitating to take bites far larger than his—he informed himself that the dangers were nonexistent, that he was being denied pleasures that were his for the taking, that his aunt was unduly frightened on his behalf and he must, casually and perhaps humming a small tune, stroll through the high grass, up to his chest, look out to sea for at least the count of three, then swagger back unharmed and uncaptured, to the vegetable patch he was supposed to be weeding. His aunt would be grateful and relieved by the assurances that he would later give her, allowing her to share in the triumph of his survival.

Not more than four strides had he taken into the forbidden acres when there had been a distinct shudder in the earth beneath his feet. His hummed tune pitched itself into a quick cry of penitence. He twisted his body around and flung himself into the grass that had closed behind him, covering the path he had taken. With another cry he sprang up and, arms held out from his sides as if pleading for the gift of flight, he plunged his way out of the high grass and, stumbling, arms flailing, made his way back to the turnips and parsnips that had been committed to his care. No more would he brave the secret pasture; never again would he experiment in wickedness, nor would he question received truth or doubt imparted mysteries. (That the trembling had come from his own limbs and the low sound from his own bowels failed to occur to him then and did not occur to him now.)

As Aaron looked out the window, a land-borne breeze caught the turf and began an orderly march—small wave upon small wave of bending grass—to the edge of the cliff, flattening one stretch of green, then another, the pale underside exposed to the morning sun before the grass was returned to an upright stand. Then came another breeze, another wave, one after the other, as if the pasture in its pride were mimicking the sea, intimating that it too had depths and stirrings of its own.

Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide. He had intended to awaken earlier and make his initial appearance before the sun had fully risen, but his exhausted state combined with the five-hour time difference between home and here had kept him in bed long past the determined hour. And besides, the evening before had not been an easy time for him.

He'd arrived at his aunt's house well after dark. A ruggedly handsome no-nonsense young man with a tawny well-trimmed beard—his name was Sweeney—who had come into town in a small truck, the equivalent of an American pickup, had agreed to take him and the pig the few miles out of town that Aaron had still to go. Some thought had been given to abandoning the pig in the town, but Aaron figured that by now he had labored too hard and endured too much not to be rewarded—no money, of course, just a simple heartfelt thank-you—from the woman with the surprised laugh and the darting eyes. There would be a quiet warmth to her gratitude, a small smile in recognition of the trouble Aaron had taken to deliver the pig safely to its rightful owner. “The least she can do is give us a ham and a few chops, maybe a bit of bacon when the slaughter's done,” his aunt had said after he'd explained the pig's presence at his side. But Aaron wanted nothing but a brief rite of abject thanks from a woman overwhelmed to the point of inarticulation by the selflessness of this man who waved away all promise of reward both in this world and the next. And so the pig, with a minimum of encouragement—the threat of a slap from Sweeney—had clattered up the ramp improvised from a door conveniently discovered in the bed of the truck and was carted off to the house of Kitty McCloud after a brief pause at the bus stop outside Dockery's, the pub where Aaron's bags, relieved only of his Walkman and his tapes of Mozart, Bach, and Chopin's Funeral Sonata, were waiting for him.

When he'd knocked on the door of his aunt's house—he'd forgotten that doorbells had long since come to Ireland—a voice had called, “Come in, then! I'm in the kitchen, can't you see?”

Aaron lifted the latch and pushed on the door. It wouldn't open. “It's locked!” he yelled.

“Of course, it's locked. So come around the side, I—no, never mind. I'm on my way.”

His aunt opened the door. The room inside was dark and she, too, was standing in the dark. “Aunt Kitty? It's Aaron. I was delayed.”

“Delayed? I thought you were coming tomorrow. I'm papering the kitchen so you won't have to see the same old roses from when you were here before.”

“Oh. I thought I was coming today.”

Sweeney was standing stiff and erect two paces behind Aaron. “Where shall I put the pig?”

“You brought me a pig?” His aunt's voice, surprised, was bright with anticipation and delight. “Now that was a kind thing. And expensive, too. Is it dead or alive? There's my freezer in the basement, so it doesn't really matter. Come in. Come in. Aren't you ever the Greek, bearing gifts.” She stepped aside, deeper into the dark. Aaron could see a pale yellow light coming from the kitchen into the hallway that led to the back of the house, but the light was too far away to make of his aunt more than a shadow even darker than the room behind her.

For one swift moment, Aaron thought that the problem of the pig had been resolved—in his favor. He and his aunt would have ham and bacon and chops forever. But he had told Sweeney everything, even before the ride, about the escaped pigs, the run up the hill, the woman with the kerchief. And Sweeney had acknowledged that he had heard the whole story already. Everyone had. And he had written down for him—with a ballpoint pen on a supermarket receipt—the woman's name, known to the whole town for her independent life, wanting to raise pigs when all of Ireland had long since given over their pigs to Intensive, the Irish equivalent of American feed-lot farming, with few actual pig people left. Getting her phone number would be no problem. She'd come and collect the pig, but small thanks must he expect. The woman was not noted for her sense of obligation. Aaron had opened his mouth, ready to defend the woman against such defamation. The woman had been so cheerful. She knew how to enjoy calamity, an excellent thing in woman. But he'd said nothing. He was a stranger, a foreigner, and a show of superior knowledge would hardly be welcomed his first night in the town. He would, no doubt, meet Sweeney again and could put the record straight after a week or so had passed and his authority as a sage established. Until then he'd withhold his corrections. And besides, it was the man's pickup and Aaron was tired. Still, if he gave his aunt the pig, Sweeney could talk. The town would know him for a thief. The woman would make her claim, and his aunt would be annoyed.

“It's not my pig,” Aaron said. “It belongs to Lolly”—he turned to Sweeney. “What's her name?”

“McKeever. Lolly McKeever.”

The shadow of his aunt seemed to stiffen, if a shadow can be said to stiffen, raising itself to an even greater height, the women being taller than he'd expected. (Now that he, Aaron, was grown and had passed six feet, it was presumed that his aunt would have diminished. But she hadn't. She, too, had grown. But no matter. There was the pig to take care of.) “Lolly McKeever's pig, then,” his aunt said. “Well, that's interesting, isn't it? Lolly McKeever. And you've brought into the household her very own pig.”

Aaron told her the story: the bus, the pigs, the passengers, the run up the hill and down, the walk to town, the kindness of Mr. Sweeney. At the sound of the name, his aunt's shadow lengthened another half a foot. She leaned forward and seemed to be looking over Aaron's shoulder. “So it's you, is it?” she said.

“It is I,” Sweeney said. “And it wasn't here I knew I'd be coming until I'd already taken on the pig. And here I am to deliver it. And be gone.”

“Put it in the shed, and mind it doesn't eat any of the implements.”

And so the pig was locked into the shed. Aaron offered Sweeney a drink for his trouble, but before the man could make his own protest—a half-raised hand, the shake of his head—his aunt, speaking rather abruptly, claimed that there was nothing to drink in the house. Sweeney, saying no more, got quickly into his truck and drove off, backfiring twice. The pig was protesting in the shed. The smell of exhaust fumes filled Aaron's nostrils. “Oh, Sweeney, shut up,” his aunt had muttered.