The Pig Did It (6 page)

Aaron wanted to keep his aunt from saying more, but there was no stopping her. Now she was cleaning the dirt from the cheekbones and the forehead, forcing the skull to move from side to side. “No farther than the door would she let him go, and she bashed him on the head. And he's dead on the floor. So what can she do but bring him here and put him where the cabbages were going to grow. And look at him now, without even a sheet to cover him over, the stingy slut, she was that pissed off at him.”

Kitty had taken up the left hand and was picking the dirt from the joints, blowing on the bones with quick breaths to make sure the job was properly done. “Well, we can't let him here like this, not in the state he's in. It's hardly a decent grave if every pig that comes along is going to snout its way into his crotch. Come on. I'm going to need your help.” She let the hand fall onto the thighbone and stood up. When Aaron got up from where he'd been kneeling, his foot knocked against a cabbage and sent it rolling down into the grave, onto the crotch recently mentioned by his aunt.

“Bring the cabbage,” she said somewhat mournfully. “It'll do for lunch.” She headed toward the house. The screen door slammed.

Aaron knelt down again and leaned into the grave to retrieve the cabbage. The earth beneath his knees began to give way. He braced himself against the mound of dirt but couldn't figure out how to stand up without sliding down on top of the bones. As he pondered, the earth itself decided to continue its shift. He went facedown onto the cabbage, his knees touching the dead man's shoes. A worm was feasting on a cabbage leaf. Aaron slid his left arm out and put the hand next to Declan Tovey's elbow. The right hand he put next to the man's other elbow and, in effect, he began doing pushups, which at least took his nose out of the cabbage and away from the worm.

He heard the screen door slam again. Now his aunt was at the side of the grave. “What are you doing now? Whatever is it?
You are
the peculiar one, aren't you? Well, stop it and get up and come help.”

Aaron rested his forehead on the cabbage, slackened his arms, and thought he'd rest a minute before making another try. His knees were on Tovey's shinbones, the skeletal fingers touching his thighs. The worm had left its leaf and was crawling along the side of Aaron's nose. He brushed it away, but it clung to his fingertip. He wiped the finger against the dead man's coat, just below the shoulder. The cloth parted at his touch, a readymade hole into which the worm might crawl.

“Get up from there. This is nothing for anyone to see, whatever it is.”

“I slipped.”

“I can't hear you. Stop muttering, and get up and get out of there.”

Aaron did as he was told, with his aunt's help. He'd had to shove aside the one leg, and if it hadn't been for the strong hold of his aunt's hand, he would have slipped back down and probably broken the shinbone where his knee had been resting. “I slipped,” he repeated.

“Please. Spare me.”

“Well, I did.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Kitty had in her other hand what looked like a folded tablecloth with strewn daffodils for its design. But when she flung it open, billowing it out in front of her, he saw that it was a bedsheet generous in size and brilliant in its yellows and greens, a field of flowers one would like very much to lie down on. Aaron assumed his aunt would cover the body with the sheet so it wouldn't be exposed while they waited for the
gardaí,
for the police. But such was not the case.

First his aunt, with no difficulty, removed the cabbage from the grave and placed it at the foot of the cairn. Then, with some maneuvering, with a shifting of the corpse, turning the bones toward him, then toward herself, pulling and shoving and tugging the sheet, a sling was spread under the skeleton. With his aunt on one side and himself on the other, the two of them, at the count of three, stood up (without incident) and raised the bones, the skull now resting on the chest, one hand completely detached from an arm, the cap shoved low on the forehead, the left pants leg raised up above the purple sock showing the white bone that his pants had protected from the dirt. They took him inside the house and laid him out on the bed in what was called “the priest's room,” downstairs, across the hall from the kitchen. This was the room that Aaron, as a child, had never been allowed to enter. He'd had to sneak in, which he did, but not too often. It was called the priest's room to honor the legend that the house had been built long years ago to hide fugitive priests in flight from the English. There had also been talk of a secret passage, a tunnel really, under the house that led to the beach where a boat would be waiting. Quite naturally, Aaron, as boy-in-residence, had searched and searched again for the passageway, not only in the house itself but at the foot of the cliffs, behind rocks and in the smallest cove. But he had never found it. If the tunnel was sealed, if the earth had reclaimed it and filled it in and the entrances long since stopped up, he would, in a way, have been happy for the reassurance. His reasoning had been that if the tunnel led from the house to the sea, it could also lead from the sea to the house. Creatures of the deep, modeled mostly after not just Grendel but Grendel's mother as well, had more than once been heard in that boyhood time slowly scraping their way toward him in his bed, the scaly flesh brushing against the tunnel walls, making sounds like the heavy breath of a hungry slug. If, in his boyhood days, he had lost his faith, it was restored in those moments. He prayed, he pleaded, he promised. And, to prove that his beliefs were not contingent upon such emergencies, he often held fast to his faith until well past lunch the next day, whereupon, with a full stomach and a slaked thirst, he would again assert his scorn for superstition, his independence of hierarchical edict, and a brave defiance of deific concern. His apostasy would sustain him rather handsomely until the next time Grendel made his scaly way through the priestly catacombs, having caught the scent of a rebellious and infidel boy

The room itself was aptly furnished. The bed was narrow, the mattress thin, the covers—mostly a faded patchwork quilt—spare. Only the pillow at the head made concession to some need for a last comfort before the journey might begin—or end.

There was, instead of a dresser, a small cabinet with a single drawer. The cabinet had once held a mirror, and the supports, curved, with a crossbar, looked now like an unstrung harp, its song long silenced, the strains taken up by the winds that carried it to the chimneys of the towns around. A spindle-backed chair, with one spindle a lighter color than the rest, stood near the cabinet, and, along the wall opposite the bed was a wooden bench, not unlike a pew dedicated to discomfort, almost Protestant in its severity. On its back someone had carved the letter
I
, and part of what might have become the letter
H,
if the artisan had not been interrupted in his task and hauled off to the gallows. There was a small table with legs so thin and feeble that it would seem daring, if not foolish, to put so much on it as the rough linen scarf that was there at the moment, both clean and crisp. Aaron had, at the time of the great aunt's telling, a fear more than a doubt that this very table was, in fact, the altar upon which the desperate priest would celebrate his mass, the rickety legs supporting not only the book and the candles but the goblet of wine and the wafer of bread along with the crucifix still balanced near the table's edge.

The window was shuttered, to be opened only on those days the room was given its ritual airing, but closed at all other times since it was never known when a knock at the door might announce the outlaw priest's arrival, with the sudden closing of the shutters a signal to those in pursuit. Then, too, so the closed shutters might not advertise the presence of a priest, and the open shutters his absence, they were simply closed eternally, and any who saw them in their unchanging state might surmise what they wished.

The skeleton of Declan Tovey was placed on the bed. Some of the bones were, by now, disconnected and mixed up, but once the sheet had been spread open on the bed, his aunt, as if reorganizing the place settings on a dinner table, managed to put him back together in a reasonable likeness of what the man had been when they'd first dug him up. The baseball cap—the word “Brewers” now visible—was placed farther back so that the visor wouldn't shade his forehead. Then the hands were placed on the chest in typical laying-out fashion, then put at his sides. Finally one hand—the right—was put on the chest and the other allowed to rest casually on the hipbone. The last remaining button on the jacket had come loose and had slipped down onto the sheet transforming one of the daffodils into a black-eyed Susan. His aunt made no effort to put it back in place, as though allowing nature to take its course.

The main difficulty was with the feet. They kept flopping, each one to the side in imitation of a ballet dancer in first position. When the tips of the shoes were leaned one against the other, it made the man look pigeon-toed.

“Go
get
some pillows from the couch,” Kitty said. “We'll prop the feet. We can't have him looking silly.”

“Aren't the police going to say something because we moved the body?”

“What police?” She tried crossing the ankles, but the feet still flopped sideways.

“The
gardaí.
When you call them. When they come to—”

“Who's calling the
gardaí?”
First position was tried again, but it was not to her satisfaction. “Go get the pillows. And let them be matching. The blue ones, I think, with the green stripes. A bit somber, but then why not?”

“You aren't going to call the
gardaí?”

“Why would I do a thing like that?”

“The man was murdered.”

“The slut.” She held the shoes clamped together in her hands so they wouldn't repeat their stubborn insistence on lying on their sides.

Aaron smoothed the sheet up near the pillow. “The police are going to have to be told.”

“Told what?”

“That, well, that there's this body—”

“They'll be told nothing of the kind.”

“But—”

She let the feet flop. “And have them come and go carting him off?”

“But this is evidence, for starters.”

“This is Declan Tovey. And I won't hear him reduced to ‘evidence.' ”

“A crime bas been committed.”

“The slut.”

“You—we—we're culpable if we—”

“Nothing wrong with a little culpable here and there. And do I go get the pillows or do you?”

“I'll go.”

“The blue ones.”

Aaron moved around the bed, past his aunt, and squeezed between the cabinet and the footboard. At the door he stopped but didn't turn around. “Then this woman—Lolly—she gets away with murder?”

“Oh, no. I'll see to her.”

He turned toward her. “What does that mean?”

“It means what it says.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“That's for me to know and you to find out.” She was alternately holding the feet, then letting them go, watching them flop, testing to see if they'd land in the same position each time. After Aaron had seen this repeated three times, he went for the pillows.

The living room was large but with a low ceiling so the heat wouldn't rise too far above one's head. On the north wall was the stone fireplace, the varying colors, rusts, blacks, and browns, suggesting the design of a calico cat. Black soot coated the insides, with wisps of gray rising up the chimney, the old soot burned again to an even more refined ash. Andirons shaped like the bishops from a serious outsize chess set held stretched between them a single log, the birch bark still evident at the ends, the middle burned almost through, a bridge destined to collapse at any moment. The windows, two of them, looked out on a stretch of weed. Beyond that was the road, then the pasture that began the rise to the hill that helped block what winds might come down from the east.

The couch, covered in gray corduroy, looked like a large mud pie, its filling made up of splayed books, a coffee mug, a plate with the remains of a fried
egg
—the fork stuck up between two of the hefty cushions—a
Vogue
magazine and a
New York Review of Books,
the
Vogue
more dog-eared than the
New York Review.
The coffee table was a sturdy construction of pine planks stained the color of walnut, and anchored by four fat legs that seemed the remains of four fat rolling pins. On top of the table was a clutter of CDs, one with a picture of Bach wearing what looked like a dyed-red wig. A heavy brown knit sweater was wadded underneath a single shoe with no shoelaces. There was a stack of books about to topple, the
Irish Times
(disheveled and with a column on the front page torn away), a white porcelain bowl with what looked like a single peach pit placed perfectly in the center, the TV remote, and a brass candlestick holding not a candle but a bulb of garlic.

Aaron picked up the blue cushion crammed against the arm of the couch and looked for its mate. It was under the armchair, along with another plate, this one completely clean except for a hardened swirl of something green. He picked up the cushion. On one side was a stain the same shade of green as on the plate. Aaron guessed it was, in both instances, pesto.

Before going through the door, back to the hall, back to the priest's room, he noticed, to his left, the bookshelves lining the entire wall from floor to ceiling, the spines of the books fading, the lettering dim. Here were the complete works of Jane Austen and George Eliot, the writings of the Brontë sisters, all three, and Thomas Hardy to keep them company. These were the sources and inspirations for the highly successful novels his aunt “relieved herself of”—as one critic noted—“with a regularity most people reserve for another function.”

The voice of his aunt intruded. “I'm waiting for the cushions. Have you fallen down the well, then?”