The Pig Did It (21 page)

As he'd handed the shirt to his aunt upstairs in his room, she had, in tones of sturdy practicality, said, “Don't get yourself too interested in Lolly McKeever. I've consented to all this because it's the best way to get her to admit what she's done. Before the poor body is laid to rest, she'll confess.” Again Aaron had said nothing, simply handing over the shirt, the socks and the undershorts.

When he'd handed Lolly the volume from the inherited
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
number 25 from the 1911 edition, so she would have something to refer to when arranging the bones—the article on skeletons—she'd accepted the book, reached over and lightly touched his arm. “I'm so happy you're here,” she whispered. “You'll be a valuable witness when he confesses. And don't worry. He will. Before the bones are out of the house, he'll admit to what he's done. So pay attention.” She then patted his cheek. Aaron had said nothing. He had simply reached up and touched the skin where her fingers had been, however briefly.

One last issue had yet to be resolved. It was customary for the women to wash the corpse before dressing it. There was no actual corpse to wash, but some gesture in that direction was deemed necessary. Kitty thought a simple once over with a feather duster might be enough; Lolly wanted total immersion. It was finally settled: Kitty would wash each bone with a wet cloth. Lolly would dry it with a fresh towel and place it inside the clothes. When Lolly insisted on soap, Kitty, after a moment's pause, conceded, promising as well to use the expensive and scented soap that was one of the few indulgences she allowed herself.

Aaron went outside before any more contentions could be introduced. As he headed toward the shed to get the spade, he found himself looking around for the pig. It was nowhere to be seen. Not in the garden or in the high grass leading to the cliff or across the road or even in the wallow it had so rudely made of Declan Tovey's grave. He considered looking down from the cliff to see if the animal had finally gone over the edge. But if that were so, he didn't want to see it, the pig impaled on a crag or stuck, still struggling in a crevice, or even the fat pink body plumped on the narrow beach like some sea slug washed ashore by the maddened waves.

Now that these images had passed before his inner eye, he had no choice but to go and look. He owed it to the pig. Its fate could not fulfill itself unnoted. The obsequy of a glance, a wince, a shudder, a revulsion seemed the least he could offer. He strode into the resisting grass, the pull of it at his feet as he slowly tore, more than trampled, his way toward the cliff, giving him a sense that he was being given one last chance not to proceed.

The great waves, rising high as if aghast at what they were seeing on the shore, plunged down in pity and in grief at what they were witnessing, sending heavenward the spread spray fanning out over the waters, a last gesture of despair in the face of so much that was calamitous and doomed. Surely this could not be just for the pig—if it was the pig the waves could see. Some other vision—either prophetic or present now—brought these waves to this violence, this need to destroy themselves, this determination to be spared any further sight of what lay along or beyond the shore.

Aaron stopped before he got to the cliff's edge. It was his aunt's house the waves could see, the stones gone gray with age, the slate roof blue in the bright air, the windows reflecting back the flaming flares of the lowering sun. It was Declan Tovey's grave the waves could see, the rock cairn at its head, the wind-bent trees bowing to the east, and the cluster of trucks—Sweeney's and Lolly's, along with his aunt's Acura. And they saw as well the rock wall alongside the road, the bristle and blossom of the blackberries springing out from the rocks themselves. It was Sweeney fashioning the coffin they could see, and his aunt and Lolly washing down the broken muddied bones. And it was Aaron too they saw, dragging himself through the grass toward the top of the cliff, Aaron McCloud, accessory to murder, complicitous in his every act to the death of a fellow human being, guilty in what he was doing, guilty in what he wasn't doing—he should have, either directly or by some seeming accident, revealed the bones to the
gardaí.
He should have allowed Jim to rejoin the found bone to its rightful hand and not gone off giving praise and glory. He should, with what exhausted moral and civic sense he might have left, persuaded at least one, if not all three, of his coconspirators to surrender, if not themselves, at least the hapless skeleton to the authorities, who would honor it by tracking down the perpetrator that had laid him low and given his flesh to feed the cabbages of his aunt. The wheels of justice should have been allowed to turn even if they ground to pulp his own aunt, whom he loved, or Lolly, whom he craved, or Sweeney, whom he honored. At worst he was craven; at best he was confused.

Aaron reached the end of the field. Evening had almost come. A few clouds had paused near the horizon to give the sun some chance to make a display of itself before disappearing for the night. Rays of glory were already shooting heavenward, the orange and gold streaking the western sky suggesting in their splendor that heaven, not hell, should be a place of everlasting fire. The grass was turning damp, the air cold. The sea was ominous with warnings of the rampage it had planned once the dark had come, its vengeance on the land and on the living for the distress the daylight had visited upon it, allowing it all the sights it had seen.

The pig came snorting out of the tool shed and ambled toward the ruined garden, favoring this time what had been the beets. Aaron could now, in good if troubled conscience, get the spade and go about his criminal task.

There was water in the grave to a depth of six inches. Aaron could dig down deeper, then decide how to bail out the pig's wallow and provide Declan with a dry and suitable resting place. As he dug, thoughts of his abandonment of Phila began to surface and recede, then surface again in his consciousness. The pig, interested now in this enlargement of its handiwork, came to watch the digging. Aaron continued his labors, bringing up thick chunks of mud and placing them carefully away from the side of the grave. After a few moments he paused and looked directly at the pig.

“I've been unfaithful to Phila,” he said, his voice mournful and resigned. “I try to think of her but something always happens. I want to think of her, but …” He stopped, sighed, and slowly shook his head. The pig blinked. “I never loved her,” Aaron at last confessed. “All I wanted was for
her
to love
me.
And when she didn't, I decided to feel sorry for myself, grieving, tearing my hair, rending my garments, but it wasn't love.” The pig flicked its ears but didn't move away.

“It looked like love. It felt like love. Jealousy, yearning, aching, all of it. But it wasn't love. It was obsession. I was obsessed with her. Not love. Obsession.” The pig both blinked
and
flicked its ears. “There's a difference between love and obsession, even if I'm the only one knows it. She had to love me so I wouldn't have to love her. And when she didn't, I became a man obsessed. And that's the truth of it all.”

The patient pig did nothing. Aaron paused a moment, considered resuming his digging, but decided instead to say just a few words more.

“Even Proust didn't know it. The difference between love and obsession. Proust thought Marcel loved Albertine. He didn't. Marcel just wanted Albertine to love him—and when she didn't, he, like me, was a man obsessed. And then, when he was convinced she
did
love him and even came to live with him, he hadn't the least idea of what to do with her now that he'd had his way. His obsession had been fulfilled, and there was nowhere to go from there. Obsession, not love.” He stopped, considered this a moment, then, amazed by the realization, he looked past the tool shed, past the pasture, and out toward the sea. In tones both awed and disbelieving, he said, “I know more than Proust. Imagine. Me. More than Proust.”

The pig, as at their first meeting, sent out an arc of urine from behind, as sows will do. Then, when the arc had collapsed, went back to make sure no beets had survived its repeated incursions.

Aaron returned his attention to the matter of the grave and to the water now reaching up to the top of his socks. He peeled them off, wrung them out, and tossed them toward the cairn, where one caught itself on a jagged stone near the top, hanging down like the muddied flag of a defeated leprechaun.

Aaron dug away, bringing up shovelful after shovelful of sludge that he placed far enough from the sides of the grave to prevent their return to the bottom of the hole. Not an easy job, but it gave him some sense of solidarity with the old existentialists to know that his labors were futile but that the imperatives of action demanded that he struggle with them as best he could. When a small mudslide slipped back into the grave, far from being discouraged, he accepted it as a further bonding with those masters, long superseded, with their self-dramatized resignation that excused and even glorified their ineptitude. Aaron McCloud was one with them at last—as more mud slipped and slid back into the hole.

Tom and Jim returned when Aaron was ankle deep in mud and shin deep in water. In their journey back to the station, they slowed the car to a stop to observe Aaron's labors. In the backseat was the presumed malefactor, a youth in his twenties with a high mound of black hair combed back on his head and a goatee suggesting his alliance with the devil.

Both Tom and Jim came and stood by the side of the grave. They simply stood and watched.

“And what would you be digging up?” asked Tom.

“I'm not digging up. I'm digging down.”

“Oh? So the McCloud insolence lives on, does it?”

“Let's hope so.”

“And what are you digging down to find if I might ask?”

“I'm digging a grave.”

“Oh? A grave is it? And for anybody in particular?”

“For a man who was murdered.”

“A mudhole for a man murdered?”

“That's what I said.”

“Ah, the McClouds, the McClouds. And who might have murdered the murdered man?”

“No one knows. If they did, wouldn't they have come to you?”

“Who knows what anyone would do? The world, young man, you'll find, is the strangest place in which we're ever going to live. And strangest of all is the people in it. That man there, in the car.

We found him down the road. Imagine biting a gerbil. I don't even want to think about it. Putting it in your mouth—a gerbil—squirming and squealing—how can anyone even think about it—and you bite it! Never would I want to see a thing like that. A gerbil, right there in your mouth. How can anyone even think about it? Imagine!”

“Yes,” said Aaron. “I just have. Thank you.”

“Squirming—”

“Yes, thank you. And now you must excuse me. I have a murdered man needs burying.”

“The insolence of the McClouds thrives and flourishes.”

“Thank you. Yes.”

Jim finally spoke up. “Pigs need a wallow. You're giving it a good one. I hope it appreciates all you're doing.” He turned away then, Tom, too, but only in time to see the prisoner again make his escape. “Now look what you've done!” Jim said. And then, after a series of colorful oaths and a series of grinding turns of the car, they were gone, back in the direction whence they'd come. Aaron, strengthened rather than weakened by the work he'd done, hoisted himself from the grave without difficulty. The elation rightfully known to those who labor was honestly his and, as he went toward the kitchen door, muddied and smelling now of the pig as much as of fish and seaweed and fetid vapors, he couldn't help marveling at the knowledge of this newfound competence as a ditchdigger. Maybe he didn't have to be a writer after all.

When he entered the house, he heard the clink of glasses coming from the living room. He crossed the hall and went inside. There, laid out between two high-backed dining-room chairs was Declan in his coffin, a fine oak box cushioned with a blue quilt with little yellow buttercups and a pillow under his skull, the pillowcase a lighter blue than the quilt, with larger flowers but still buttercups. His Brewers baseball cap had been fitted onto the skull, the peak slanting at an angle over what should have been his face, shading what should have been his eyes and nose. To keep the mouth closed, his thatcher's leggett—an iron tool like a grooved paddle, or an oblong skillet for frying sausages—had been placed in his hands, as if in reverence to his trade, with the paddle part shoved firmly up against his lower jaw. A further act of reverence was a rosary of brown beads entwined in the fingers, binding the two hands together in holy bondage to keep him from committing mischief until hands more blessed than his own might free them into acts of bliss without end.

To complete the shrine Kitty had stuffed a crock with yellow flag and dog violet, with a burst of heather stuck in between to keep the bouquet from seeming too dainty.

Lolly and Kitty were seated on the couch, each holding a glass, Lolly sipping, Kitty staring down, licking her lips, and taking in a deep breath. Sweeney, with a poker, was jabbing among the coals burning in the fireplace.

Aaron had expected a less formal rite: The bones would be placed in the coffin, the coffin would be put in the grave, the mud and earth shoveled on top, and the day's work done. But apparently it was felt that since Sweeney had, with effort and expertise, made the coffin, and Kitty and Lolly had, with quarrel and compromise, placed the bones inside the well-brushed suit, the clean undershorts, the socks, and the clean shirt, their handiwork should not be disposed of too readily.

“We're going to have to use some buckets to
get
the water out of the hole,” Aaron said. “The grave, I mean. Anyone want to help?”

“Sit a minute,” said Kitty. “We've all been working away, and it's time for a short rest. Help yourself.”