The Pig Did It (7 page)

Aaron felt the need to stall. “I'm looking for the second one.” He went back and sat down on the armchair, hugging the pillows to his chest. His aunt had murdered her lover. So vivid had been her descriptions of the other woman's needs, so emphatic her feelings of betrayal, so heated her speech, Aaron had little doubt that it could be only of herself that she had been speaking. It was she who'd struck the deadly blow and sent the man sprawled out onto the floor. It was she who'd buried him in the garden. Aaron wasn't sure if she intended to keep the remains in the priest's room—available for visitations—or return him to the ground at a more respectable depth. What was he to do? After Aaron had pondered the question for a full two minutes and come up with no answers, he called out, “I found it,” and took the cushions into the priest's room.

Aunt Kitty had lowered her forehead onto the tips of Declan Tovey's shoes, the shoes themselves still clamped between her hands. Aaron waited, but she didn't move. “I found it. The other cushion. Here.” He spoke quietly.

“Put them then where they belong, one alongside each foot so he's not disgraced by a foolish posture.”

Aaron did as he was told, slightly rolling each cushion so it would hold more firmly the helpless feet. His aunt had not yet raised her head.

“Is there more I can do?”

“Call Lolly McKeever and tell her to come and pick up her pig.” Still she didn't move, her hands still holding the feet clasped between her hands, her forehead still resting on the tips of the shoes.

“Call her now?” Aaron asked.

“Now.” Kitty's voice was low.

A single gull was careening high over Aaron's head, the wings flicking almost imperceptibly to accommodate the shifting winds coming in from the sea. Now the wings were flapping, desperately it seemed, as if all support had suddenly vanished and only this frantic effort would keep the bird from dropping down into the water below. It disappeared over the top of the cliff, but now Aaron could hear its screech and scream, scolding the elements for their sudden treachery. The water had risen to above the roll of his pants leg. The tide was not going out. It was coming in. Aaron, with a sigh, turned and started walking back toward the switchback path that zigzagged up the cliff. The water was cold, cold enough to numb his feet if he didn't move faster than he was moving now. He moved faster.

The sea itself was quiet, the waves no more than a series of slight swellings, too low to crest and fall and froth. They simply flattened themselves out and made their small contribution to the tide that now reached above Aaron's knees. There were no waves battering the cliffs to Aaron's left, no thrown spume to lash his face and sting his eyes. There was merely the sly and teasing rise of the water, imperceptible in its inchings, taking its measure from those body parts newly soaked: below the knee, the knee, above the knee, the lower thigh. Aaron looked to see if some watermark on the cliff would let him know how high the tide might come. The line was clear enough. The water had stained the stones to the height of Aaron's nose.

By now he was slogging. The water was mid-thigh and it took considerable effort to force one leg ahead of the other and keep him moving along what had been the beach. He had no memory of the tide coming this far, of claiming all the available land at the foot of the cliffs. To his left was a small cave he hadn't seen before, with a stone the size of a football about to loosen itself from the rounded roof and fall with a merry splash into the rising tide. A fossilized artifact? The lost toy of a Druid child, unearthed at last? Aaron had no time for speculation. And his energies should be rationed out to his legs, not given to the synapses chattering foolishly in his brain.

And yet
it
seemed right that his mind should search for distractions. The effort it took to move one leg, then another, was replicate of a dream, the slow, effortful push, the impeded movement, the inability of the limbs to make progress no matter how desperate the urgings. He raised his arms from his sides, partly to keep his designer watch from getting wet but also to promote some mutation of his arms into wings, as he had tried to do as a child. If only nature would consider it a possibility, if only the evolutionary process could be speeded up on his behalf, he would be mightily grateful. Often enough in dreams he had flown. It required no more than a mild expenditure of the will, a spiritual lifting, the easy employment of a competence he kept forgetting he had.

He slogged on, the freezing water threatening the warm blood of his dick, his balls, the water forcing a retreat of the waiting sperm, leaving behind a shrunken flap of flesh and a shriveled nut, the two appendages threatening in their deprivation and their shame to disappear completely.

Beneath his feet the pebbles became more pointed, and even the growing numbness of his soles provided no protection against the pokes and jabs of the sharpened stones. The common assumption that the water would smooth them, that the washing sea would lubricate the surfaces for easier passage, proved false. The stones were no longer the beach; they belonged now to the sea. They were resentful; they were annoyed and they wanted this land-born, mud-dwelling intruder to feel the full force of their petulance. Aaron was certain that the soles of his feet were bleeding from a thousand cuts, that he was making a sizable contribution to the crimson tide.

Possible rescue appeared ahead—the huge table of stone that had fallen from the cliff and had blocked his path. It seemed both a taunt and a challenge. The water was rising to his waist. Soon his circulation would stop. Strength he still had, and energy, but the rock was at least a hundred yards away. He wondered if he should strip, if the lightened load would provide the difference between making it to the rock and not making it. He decided, by some circuitous reasoning unavailable to his conscious mind, to give up his belt. The rest of his clothes he'd continue to wear—for the time being at least. If they got too heavy, he'd shed them along the way.

He slid into the water. His boots, still slung by the shoestrings over his shoulder, floated away toward the sea. His watch's claim to be waterproof was now being tested—severely. With each stroke of his arm, with each plunge of his hand, he seemed to douse
it
again and again, angry now that he had made it a cause for concern, that he had been so prissy in his protection. His purpose, as he swam closer and closer to the rock, was to punish his watch. He had no other intent. Take that! And that! And that! Given so strong a goad, he quickly gained the rock.

He climbed on top. Had he given up his clothes, his skin might have been too slippery, but the coarse cotton of his denim shirt and the strong weave of his khakis clung nicely to the sandstone surface. With a minimum of clawing and scratching he got himself up out of the water and sprawled and spread-eagled himself on the cold surface. He'd stay still for a few moments, surrender to the rock, too exhausted for any act beyond relief—and, of course, a quick look at his watch. The second hand was still sweeping its way around the face. The big hand was between the seven and the eight, the small hand was close to the three. It was, he deduced, about twenty to three Irish time. He closed his eyes. He kept them closed to the count of three, then opened them. He took two more breaths, deep, taking in the salt smell of the rock that made him think of summers past. He must stop indulging himself. He had not washed ashore, saved from a sunken ship. He'd had a simple swim. That and nothing more. He had no right to his exhaustion. He was an excellent swimmer, or at least had been. He'd even been awarded a plaque more than several years before, attesting to his successful swim off the Long Island shore.

What he had done now was negligible. He'd got wet; he'd got cold. Now he would
get
dry; now he would get warm. And the swim, if he'd only pause to take note, had excited his energies instead of depleting them. He paused, took note, and sat up.

Some distance off, two men in a fishing boat waved at him then returned their attention to the other side of the boat. No gulls flew overhead, but a lone crow circled high above, laughing its raucous laugh at Aaron's plight. The water no longer seemed to be rising, but the sea swells were beginning to crest, to fall, to send their froth rising toward the rock, disappointed that they could not reach the tips of his toes.

The time had come to meditate on Phila Rambeaux, to sit solitary on this rock, fasten his gaze seaward, and brood on loss and the impossibilities of love. He would recall her face, her gesture when, in his class, she would rub her thigh with the heel of her left hand as if trying to erase something she had written on her green plaid skirt. Or the way she would, with her index finger, place her hair back behind her ear, forgetting that the hair was too short to stay there for more than the second it took her to take her finger away. Or maybe he would opt for the abstract, for a general melancholy that would give his sorrows a more universal cast, his woe identified with the woe of the world. Until now he had been unfaithful to Phila. Almost a full day gone and he'd given her almost no thought at all. No pangs had pierced, no yearnings had struggled to find release, to wander, to search, never to find. The grieving that he owed her had been left unexercised. It was time to make amends.

He looked at his watch. It would now be a quarter to three. He could mourn at least until the water had receded to knee height. How long that might be he did not know, but he didn't require that he should. His grief could easily outlast the ebbing tide. It was eternal. He might even wait for the tide to return, then ebb again before leaving off his meditations. Phila, his beloved, deserved no less.

But then he wouldn't be at his aunt's when Lolly McKeever would come for her pig. He had phoned her. She was due at three. She hadn't sounded particularly eager to make the retrieval nor had she given him thanks for his efforts. His tale of tenacity was cut short before he'd even told her about the top of the hill. The cheerfulness with which she'd responded to the dispersed pigs was apparently reserved for catastrophe and not for rescue. “At three then. And don't feed it until I'm there.” With that she had hung up, as if Aaron had been some rash intruder calling to solicit funds for some obscure cause. He had hoped to hear her laugh, but she hadn't laughed at all.

It then occurred to Aaron that this woman might indeed be, as Kitty had claimed, the jealous killer of the man in the garden. It also occurred to him that Kitty might take the opportunity of Lolly's visit to confront her with the remains and force a confession. There would be a spirited exchange of words, of accusations, denials, and, possibly, counteraccusations. Kitty was, to Aaron's mind, as much a candidate for the crime as the woman she'd named. How the scene between the two of them might end Aaron had no notion. But he should be there. He was, after all, a writer. This display of human conflict, of murder and of love, should not pass unseen by the artist's eye. He owed it to himself and to his readers, to those dependent on him for uncommon insights, to say nothing of high drama and the amusement that only a killing can provide.

Sleek as a seal, Aaron slithered from the rock into the water. He'd swim the distance to the switchback path, then walk the road back to the house. He was wet anyway and accustomed by now to the cold. Maybe Lolly McKeever would still be there when he'd arrive, and she would see him soaked and dripping, having just risen, like Cuchulain of old, up out of the sea.

4

T
hat's not my pig.”

Lolly McKeever stood near the shed looking more at the damaged door than at the pig snuffling its way through the pasture grass between the house and the cliff. She swung the dangling hinge open, then shut, loosening the last screw so that the hinge fell clattering onto the hardened ground that surrounded the shed. “Sorry,” she said, then put the tips of her fingers on the door itself as if to complete the damage done by the pig and release the door, letting it, like the hinge, fall at her feet. But the lock held fast and the door swayed only slightly, still secure with one corner dug into the earth, an almost balletic toehold that held it balanced free of all other support except for the sturdy hasp of the padlock that refused to let go.

“What do you mean, it's not your pig?” Kitty picked up the hinge, dusted it off, blew the dirt from its surface, then dropped it again, cleansed, onto the ground.

“It's not my pig.”

Kitty gave the hinge a kick. It moved no more than an inch. “Tell her, Aaron,” she said.

Aaron, shivering in his wet clothes, had been trying not to let his teeth chatter or his body twitch. The sea, to complete the trouble it had caused him, had sent a stiff breeze from off its vasty deeps, making sure that the brine soaking his shirt and pants sustained the near-arctic temperatures they had enjoyed before they had been sponged up out of their native element and been brought so thoughtlessly to this arrogant headland. The sea had not finished with him
yet.
Now the drying salt began to sting his flesh and shrink his skin and there was as well the stench of dried seaweed and rotting fish. Only a pelting rain could help him now, cleanse and warm him, but the sky was a pitiless and uncharacteristic blue, and the sun seemed more mockingly benign than it had ever been on these primal shores from the beginning of time. He looked at Lolly McKeever and opened his mouth. Lolly, for the first time, looked at him. Her eyes brightened, her mouth opened, and she let out a laugh of pleasure and delight, similar to the laughter excited by the unmanageable pigs the day before. The sight of Aaron was apparently equal in calamity with the ditched truck and the chaos that followed. Aaron, hurt, confused, moved his jaw up and down, his mouth not quite closing, “I—I—I—

I—” He clamped his lips together, swallowed, then tried again.

“I—I—I—”

“There, you see?” Kitty said. “The pig was in your herd. As he said, he chased it up the hill and down, and you'd already gone off and left him. And the pig too. But now it's here and you can take it home.” Lolly's laughter stopped. She turned her attention from Aaron to the pig. “It's not mine.”