The Pig Did It (9 page)

Kitty's face had turned from flesh to stone. She took her left hand from the railing and put it on the wooden knob capping the last spindle of the bed frame. After she'd made herself one inch taller, she said, “The four sons drowned and the two sons with them. Hanrahan rescued Hanrahan's goat, and Kate's cat never made it past the roots of the tree.”

“Those,” said Lolly, “were other times. I spoke only of the days when Declan was there.” She paused, then added, “The days that I was with him. And no one else besides.”

“And you killed him because he couldn't stand the touch of your hand and had better places to go, transporting or no transporting.”

“I?”

“A knock aside the head. One brutal blow.” Kitty yanked the cap away, jerking the skull onto the left shoulder. “Look there, where you struck the blow, a crack that could kill any man, even him.”

Aaron strained his head higher for a better look but couldn't make out if there was a fracture or not. Lolly touched the skull. “It was you did it,” Kitty said. “It was you—and you plowed him into my garden, cracked skull and all.”

“I? Plow?”

“You. If your name is McKeever and your father's name before you.”

“The plow is your answer. It was Kieran Sweeney, then, who did this thing. It was Kieran Sweeney plowed your garden. My tractor. My plow. But Sweeney was the one, not me, and he put Declan Tovey in where the cabbages would grow.”

“Never,” said Kitty. “It was this man stretched here did my plowing. Always. In secret he'd do it to please and surprise me. I'd be away and he'd know it. And when I'd come home, all the plowing done.”

“It was Sweeney did it.”

“Never, I said.”

“Always. Ask him.”

“I've no words for a Sweeney. Yet I won't hear him accused of deeds he didn't do—plowing or killing or whatever. He had no cause.”

“Oh?”

Before his aunt could say anything further, Aaron sneezed. The two women spoke with one voice. “God bless you.”

The blessing dispensed, Kitty glared at Lolly. “Tell me the reason,” Kitty repeated to Lolly.

Aaron sneezed and again was given the blessing. Lolly smoothed down the cloth strips of what remained of the dead man's shirt. “You know the cause as well as I,” she said.

Aaron sneezed once more, the blessing this time taking on the tone of a curse, a warning that his allotment of grace had been exhausted and that further requests for benediction would be either ignored or condemned outright for the selfish and greedy intrusions they were. To distract his body from the need to sneeze, Aaron took up again the shakes and shivers, giving him renewed contact with the wet clothes, coarse with salt and stiffened with their own stench. Bit by bit he was being rubbed raw, and soon there'd be no flesh left. And yet he could hardly leave the room. Lolly McKeever, like his aunt earlier that day, was about to implicate herself further in the murder of Declan Tovey, and she would prove, he was sure, magnificent.

“Jealous. He was jealous.”

Lolly said this, then said no more. Both Aaron and Kitty waited. To prime the pump, Kitty finally said, “Jealous?”

Lolly moved the skull back into position and was now tucking the pillow closer to where Declan Tovey's ear had been. “Hmm,” she said. She let the back of her hand feel the cheekbone as if testing for a fever.

Kitty, her patience more tried, said, “Jealous. And why jealous? Of what? Of whom? And where?”

Lolly brushed the tips of her fingers along her forehead. “I've said all there is to say.”

Kitty took one of her deep breaths, this one into her nose. Aaron was sure it would come back out as smoke and flame. But instead of exhaling, she chose to speak the following: “Kieran Sweeney had no cause and less right to feel jealous about anything that concerns me. And that is the beginning and the end of it all as far as Kieran Sweeney is concerned.”

She spoke as a hard fact, but there was a wistful sorrow on her face, in her eyes, and along the wan line of her lips.

Aaron felt cheated. All Lolly McKeever had done was tuck a pillow and feel a cheekbone. His aunt, in turn, had given some substance for the case against Sweeney—his forbidden courtship of her, her forbidden longing for its success—but she had hardly cleared herself of all suspicion. Something there was between her and Tovey, of that there could be no doubt. And something between Tovey and Lolly. But now no one would speak. He could ask questions. But he was not at all sure he would want what answer might be given. He tried to shiver, to retreat back to a time before these latest complications had asserted themselves, but the best he could do was jerk his head and twitch his arms.

“You can keep silent for as long as you like, but it won't change the truth of what I've said.” Kitty's tone managed to be both airy and severe at the same time.

Lolly kept her eyes on the hand that was holding the sheet. “Don't you have some better cloth than this for the poor man? He
is
dead, you know.” She let go of the sheet, and Declan Tovey's hand slipped onto his groin.

“I know he's dead,” said Kitty. “And now it's known who killed him.”

Lolly moved the hand farther up onto his stomach, nearer the man's waist, then reached over and brought the other arm up to restore the symmetry unfailingly imposed upon the dead. It gave him the gesture of a man satisfied by a good meal. “Kieran Sweeney,” Lolly said, “was driven mad. Let that be said in his defense.” The time had come for another of the woman's Irish monologues, and she proceeded with all the eloquence at her considerable command. “The very idea that Declan Tovey would set his eyes on me sent him to a frenzy. And when he saw that the man was allowed into my house to perform intimate acts like scraping my drains and patching my walls where the rot came through, sense left him and his jaw was set. The very notion that the words of this man should slip their way into my ears, that the sight of him should sink in through my eyes, sent him daft. And when Tovey confessed the truth about how he was feeling, about his striving for me alone, about his plans for glory, Sweeney went mad all over himself. Free liquor he gave him, and poor man, Declan that is, that was, his head on the table far past all protest, and what does he do but do him in? When Declan's head is bending low and he's slurring my name with his liquefied tongue, in goes the poison and the drink is drunk. To whose health Declan drank only Kieran can tell us, but down again goes Declan's head on the table, the glass toppled and the dregs running out, and the arms gone limp for good. He's done in. He's dead. And that is when he, when Kieran Sweeney, up and plowed your garden, Kitty McCloud. Digs up your ground. And in goes Declan Tovey for all time until today. Now let the deed be known, and Sweeney can stop going to church and doing other sanctified acts not fit for a saint.” Three times Lolly had changed the position of Declan's arms, first crossing them on the chest, then moving them back down so the fingers were approaching the crotch, then back to the stomach where they'd started. “Dear Declan,” she said, touching the peak of his cap, “I could have saved you, I suppose. I could have denied to Sweeney all the things you said, and only I was supposed to hear. I could have let someone else patch my walls and mend my roof. I could have given to others what was rightly yours, but forgive me if I couldn't, as much as they wanted it and as much as they kept pleading for it. Even to save you from this I couldn't do it, and you've got to forgive me now because I'm asking for it, for to be forgiven.” She took her fingers from the top of the cap and put them to her lips, then to her cheek, then let them slide down her chest, something of a secular sign of the cross. When the fingers got to her waist, she hooked them inside her belt buckle and let them stay. Kitty had tilted her head as she gazed, blank eyed, at Lolly, as if only from an odd angle could she properly view the woman as she spoke. Slowly Kitty straightened her head. No emotion showed on her face. It seemed to have shed all muscular responses, to have found a repose so absolutely natural that Aaron barely recognized it as the face of his aunt. The intelligence was gone from the eyes, the amusement from the lips, and the stubbornness from the chin. The nose seemed uninterested in whatever smells the world might offer; the cheeks had completely forgotten

whatever laughter they might have known. She was staring at the space above the headboard where an oval picture must once have hung, an egg-shaped pattern of pale yellow put into relief by the surrounding brown. Aaron tried to remember what painting had been there before, but nothing suggested itself. What he could see now might be a work of art itself, the perfect oval, the evocation of an
egg
unencumbered by the actual picture of an egg
,
a presentation of “eggness” that had taken genius to devise and years to achieve. Because it lacked detail, because it offered no specific of the actual, it could be studied endlessly, an action to which his aunt seemed to have dedicated herself for the length and breadth of Lolly's speech. Without disrupting her enthrallment, she said, somewhat tonelessly, a voice made level by the depth of her artistic involvement, “So it was with poison you did it. A coward's way, if you ask me. A sneaky way and I'm surprised at you because you're my best and closest friend I ever had. Because what you've done is confess to the crime if ever a confession was made. To think I gave you credit for a hit on the head, a good bold blow, out in the open, so he could see it coming and gasp a prayer or two. You disappoint me, Lolly, after all these years.”

If, at that moment, Aaron had been told to make the judgment as to who had committed the crime, he would have been lost completely. Each had stated her case—and one for Sweeney as well—and each had named the means by which the deed was done: a blow to the head (his aunt) or poison (Lolly McKeever). Kieran Sweeney remained a candidate for either method. Forensics would tell. With this thought Aaron arrived at what he considered a Solomonic moment. He would become insistent that the skeleton be put in custody of the
gardaí.
Whichever of the women objected would be the guilty party. Opposition would be an open admission of murder.

“The police, the
gardaí,”
Aaron said, “they're the ones can tell how it was done and who did it.”

“The gardaí!”

Kitty and Lolly had screeched in unison, each equally aghast at the proposal. And it was in chorus that they said, “Have you taken leave of yourself?” Because Kitty seemed the more choked of the two—but only slightly—it was Lolly who made the first solo effort. “Why would anyone go to the
gardaí?”

Kitty, recovered somewhat, added, “What has this to do with them, of all people?”

“The man was killed,” said Aaron.

“And don't we—”

“Know it. And don't—”

“You know it too?”

“What can they tell—”

“Us we don't—”

“Already know?”

The women looked at each other, nodded in unison, then looked at Aaron, more with bewilderment than accusation. Without taking her eyes from Aaron's face, Lolly said to Kitty, “He's your nephew. You be the one talk to him.”

Kitty cleared her throat, preparing no doubt for a lengthy speech that would trace the history of Irish jurisprudence and, bringing to bear the Jesuit instincts congenital to the Irish, offer irrefutable proof that in crimes of this kind the usual procedures must be dispensed with and the course of justice channeled not through the corridors of power but allowed a more domestic passage. It was at the hearth rather than at the bench that the truth would be revealed, just as proofs were to be found not in the fluorescent glare of the laboratory but in the flickering light of the fire, the shadows dancing on the faces of the just and the unjust alike. Truth would be more valued than vengeance, the truth in itself the highest form of punishment. What greater penalty could be inflicted than that one be known in truth and all one's deeds cast before the accuser's eye? Unprotected by prison walls, forever susceptible to the all-knowing gaze of this piercing knowledge, what contortions of mind and spirit must the guilty devise, whether in the direction of a cringe or the assumption of an arrogant indifference? Were Lolly the murderer, what worse punishment than to have it known by his aunt? Were his aunt the killer, what higher vengeance could be exacted than Lolly's knowing stare and sly smile? Pleas for imprisonment would rend the air, surrender and public confession would be considered a mercy at its most necessary. Self-exile would become an option; the secluded life, a comforting consideration. Sackcloth would be a benevolent cover, and ashes a welcome benediction.

Kitty by now had cleared her throat—twice. The moment had come and she would speak. “Keep your nose out of this,” is what she said. And that was all she said. Lolly nodded in agreement, her lips pursed with approval. Aaron considered saying, “But”—but of what might follow he had no notion, so he said nothing. He simply looked from Kitty to Lolly and back to Kitty again, then down at Declan, silenced, disarmed by their stares, casual on the surface, defiant at their depths. He must comply. To persist would bring not their opposition but their dismissal. To save himself from relegation to the irrelevant, he kept his peace and continued to look, as if for some show of support, at the man on the bed. Declan could offer nothing more than a slightly amused grin made more self-satisfied by the absence of a limiting mouth that would have circumscribed the bared teeth seen now in one unmitigated leer.

Aaron's ploy about summoning the
gardaí
had accomplished nothing beyond further befuddlement. The two women were equal in their disdain. He believed both, in turn, to be guilty. Since this was an impossibility, be began to have stirrings in the back of his brain that a third person (Sweeney) might be the culprit.