The Pig Did It (23 page)

Louder still sang Sweeney:

And the old woman, wheezing and groaning,

A-bed for a year in despair,

When she sups her half pint, stops her moaning,

And kicks the bedclothes in the air.

Faster danced Lolly and Kitty. The pig raced around the couch, knocking over an end table, around an easy chair, trampled on some books, around the coffee table, screaming, threatening the Tullamore Dew. On the dancing went and the song too. More kicks were given the coffin, and the laughter came close to a cry of pain, the song a protest shouted into the demented noise. The pig was headed for the coffin.

Aaron jumped up. “It's going to tip him over!” He called out the words, but even they were taken as a goad to further excitement. The pig lowered its head and aimed itself directly at the coffin. Aaron sprang into its path and spread wide his arms. The pig continued its charge, butting its way through the pandemonium. When it was within two feet of the coffin, Aaron, as if joining the festivities at last, flung out his leg and gave the pig a swift shove on its left ham. The pig, stunned, stopped and looked with disbelief at Aaron. Aaron gave it another shove, harder. The pig spent one full moment in stupefied amazement, then let out a scream never heard this side of the slaughterhouse.

“You can't do this to the poor man. He's dead,” Aaron cried out to the pig, a plea for acknowledgment if not understanding. He gave the pig another shove.

Lolly stopped first, then Sweeney—and the song stopped too. Kitty slowed down, then she too was still. They all—the pig included—stared at Aaron.

Lolly reared back a little. “You kicked the pig,” she said, her voice astonished and threatening in equal measure.

“It was going to tip over—to spill out—”

Kitty took a step forward. “You kicked the pig?”

Sweeney looked from Aaron to Lolly to Kitty. “He kicked the

pig?”

“He kicked it,” Lolly said.

Sweeney looked again at Aaron. “Did you kick the pig?” he asked.

Aaron gave the pig another push. “Yes,” he said. “I kicked the pig.”

Again the pig protested.

“But why?”

“It was going to tip over the coffin. To spill out all the bones.”

In unison all three looked at the coffin. They then looked at Aaron himself, their heads moving at the same pace, each expression equally bewildered by the strangeness of his concern and the enormity of his deed.

Kitty moved to the coffin, reached inside, and touched the tips of her fingers to the side of the skull. Without taking her hand away, she said, “Let the sweet bones rest. I was the one killed him with the hand that's touching him now.”

No one moved except the pig. It was trying to root into the rug near the couch, scratching its snout, snorting into the weave. “The things he said to me should never have been said,” Kitty continued. “The only time—or so he told me—the only time he'd ever laughed in all his life was when he read one of my books. It was the one amusement he'd ever found in the whole sorrowing world. My correction of
Jane Eyre
sent him, he claimed, howling to the skies. And he dared to open a book lying there on the kitchen table, where, in my correction of
Jude the Obscure,
all the children grow up and go to Cambridge. He read from it. And he laughed. He read some more. And laughed again. Mid-sentence I gave him the clout with the implement you see in his hands now, dispatching him to the devil that had created him in his very own image. And I buried him where he would feed my cabbages.”

“No!” said Aaron. “That's not true. I know it isn't. Sweeney, sing your song. I shouldn't have kicked the pig. Please. Sing!”

Without taking her hand from Declan's cheekbone, Kitty said, “It's the truth I've told, and there's no one stopping me now.”

“Kieran Sweeney,” Aaron pleaded, “for the love of God, sing!

Don't let her—” Sweeney reached out his hand and placed it on the crown of the baseball cap. “No need for me to sing, nor need for you to worry. There's no word of truth in what's been said. Never did this woman kill this man, and I'm the only one can know for sure. It was by the hand that touches him now that he died, and justly so, whatever the law might say. Standing straight before me in the mist of a misty day, he said words no man may dare to say. The woman in question, the one he referred to, has not, as he claimed, the face of a cow. In her all beauty of the world lives in shining splendor, cowface or no cowface. And when he threw in for bad measure that the woman in question—the one I love and will love for all my days and all my nights and well into eternity until God commands me to look his beatific way instead—he said that this lump of a woman had twice farted in his presence and had the hair of a hag. It was then that justice was done, not with a sword but with the iron he grips in his fist right now. ‘Cowface,' said I. ‘Tart!' said I. ‘Hag!' said I, giving a blow each time. And he was done for. And I buried him in the garden then of the woman herself and let him try as he might to see her cowface now.”

Kitty turned a stony gaze in Sweeney's direction, but before she could say anything, Lolly stood upright, came closer to the coffin and chose, for the placement of her hand, the leggett itself. “Be that as it may, Kieran Sweeney, no one here has said what's true in all this time, and so I'll say it now. The blow was struck by me, and it didn't take more than one, as it took some others I'll never name. True, a man should be careful what he says about another's loved one, and my deed is the proof of that. Scorn my pigs, he did, and lie his lies. Stupid, he called them. Filthy, he said. Ate swill and shit and slurry, he said. Not my pigs, I said, a warning already in my eye. But would he stop? No. Not Declan Tovey. He must point to a pig just four feet off and call out within the pig's hearing, ‘Stupid! Filthy! Eat swill and shit and slurry. You,' he cried, ‘You're the one I'm talking about.' And then he did it, sealing his doom. Over he strode, the four feet of it and—and I don't want to say it. But he did it and it has to be told. He kicked the

pig.”

Aaron stood up straighter, then slumped as low as he could and still remain standing. The pig raised its snout from the rug.

“One sharp blow and the devil was down, and the leg that had desecrated the pig stretched out straight as a candle. And because I'd seen the cabbages planted that day, I knew the fitting place to put him, and it's God's own justice that a pig brought him to the light so we can put him back into the cabbages where he belongs.”

She kicked the coffin.

“No!” said Aaron. “You're all lying. You're—you're—you're
competing.
You're all claiming credit—or—or protecting each other or—or you're
competing.
You each want to be the most important person in his life! I don't want to hear any of this. I didn't hear any of this. Sweeney, sing again. Sing and we'll dance, all of us. I'll dance. I promise. Sing. Please.”

When no voice was raised, Aaron himself began to sing, weakly but with some brave determination.

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs …

His voice grew in strength and conviction.

… in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the parlor,

And they are Irish, too.

The wind gave the house another shake, shuddering the frame, causing even the stones to groan. Lolly was looking at Aaron now, not with scorn or threat but with a mournful disappointment, questioning why he had done what he had done.

He continued to sing, his voice a reedy tenor that made up in volume and vigor what
it
lacked in timbre, its pitch uncertain, its passion beyond doubt. He looked directly at Lolly.

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the parlor,

We let the pigs in the—

A cry of heartrending anguish was heard above the singing, followed by a series of shrieks obviously prompted by a pain beyond what could be endured. The pig, to escape from the song, ran clattering from the room, across the hall, through the kitchen, and out the hole it had torn in the screen door. The shrieks, instead of receding, became louder until, finally, a great splash was heard and the sounds were reduced to snorts, an expression of revulsion and disgust.

“It's in the grave—again!” Sweeney bolted out of the room, fast in the path of the pig. The screen door slammed. “It's in the grave!” he shouted from the yard. Kitty followed, and again the screen door slammed. Lolly apparently had hoped to make it through the door before it closed but failed by a hair. Aaron, still singing, heard an
“Ahgh”
followed by the opening, then slamming, of the door.

The song trailed off. He sat down on the ladder-back chair, the only mourner left. The fire in the fireplace was dying down, sending out onto the chimney stones only a muted glow that wouldn't last much longer. Outside the wind had found the note it had been searching for, high and shrill, neither rising nor falling, but insistent and alarmed. It rattled the windows, it harassed the chimney, and, it seemed to Aaron, nudged the whole house to remind it that the elements were taking its measure. Now the note lowered itself an entire octave. Aaron listened to its call, a summons to whatever furies might be passing through, an invitation to join it in the terror it was determined to bestow.

Above and through it all came the cries from the garden, pleas and threats to the pig, blandishments and calls of
“Suueee! Suueee!”
a splash, a screech, a shriek, Lolly's voice the loudest of all. Aaron looked through the screen door and saw, by the light of a gibbous moon, the three figures dancing around the grave, bending down to it, raising their arms to heaven, circling the pig as if it were an object of worship, continuing the rites and revels that had earlier consecrated the coffin.

Aaron couldn't move except for an occasional blink and the rise and fall of his breath. Lolly McKeever had broken his heart. The mournful gaze she'd turned on him, the bewildered hurt he'd seen in her face, in her eyes, and in the helpless lowering of her chin, had not only loosened his heart but had, as well, wounded it and made it susceptible to invasion.

Phila Rambeaux had played out the part the Fates had, from the start, devised. She had sent Aaron to these shores, dispatched him toward his truer destiny, and could now fade from the scene with less than a smattering of applause. It was to Lolly he had been sent. All events, all persons, had no purpose but to bring him to this moment.

The wind in its ravings shouldered the house, as if trying to uproot it and send it off to Cork, shoving rather then blasting it, nudging, pushing. Aaron wished it would take the roof and be satisfied. In the yard the pleas and calls had taken the form of laughter, high and howling; there was another splash, a yell, and Aaron could see Kitty and Lolly lifting Sweeney by his arms, up out of the grave.

The room shuddered, the glasses rattling on the tabletop, a chattering comment on what was taking place. Aaron headed for the glass he'd left half empty on the coffee table but stumbled against the edge of the coffin. He drew himself up and looked at the unfleshed face of the murdered Declan, the murder weapon held fast in his hands.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none I think do there embrace.

Aaron lurched toward the table, took up his glass, and gulped down all that was left. The house shuddered again, more deeply than before. He put the glass down and picked up what Kitty had left. That, too, he took in one good swig. Again the house shuddered, which he took as an incitement to help himself to Sweeney's glass. That too he drank. When he'd lifted Lolly's glass, fuller than the others, he turned toward Declan and raised the glass in sad salute, but before he could bring it to his lips, the floor trembled beneath him, rattling the coffin and toppling the ladder-back chair. He steadied himself with one hand on the coffin's edge, then made another attempt to drain the drink. But again there was the shudder, a lamp crashing. The foot end of the coffin bounced from its chair; the windows rattled frantically. A rumble came next, then a low roar, growing, beneath the house. The light went out. Only the silver glow of the moon lit the room. The coals of the fire were hurled across the floor, a pile of embers lodged beneath the tipped end of the coffin.

Still clinging to Lolly's glass, Aaron started toward the door, the hall, the kitchen, the yard outside. But before he could make it out of the room, only halfway to the door, he felt the floor lowering slowly, like an unhurried elevator. He made another effort toward the door, but a slight tilt made it an uphill struggle. The roar was even louder now, the war cry of a beast about to set upon its prey.

The house began to wobble. Flames were lapping at the tumbled end of the coffin, wisps of smoke were rising from the rug. Aaron called out for help using the one word he could still speak: “Lolly!”

Such was the tilt of the floor that he could no longer see into the yard itself, but only the trees on the far side of the garden. “Lolly!” he called again, the cry devoured by the animal roar coming from underneath the house. He got the glass to his lips, gulped the Dew, and swallowed fast. The glass fell from his hand, the floor pitched sideways, and he was thrown against the coffin flaming at its foot.

Aaron dropped to all fours and began his angled climb to where he knew the door to be. He was in the hall. He was in the kitchen, the hole in the screen just ahead.

Water touched his foot, then slowly rose to cover his leg to the knee. The sea was coming in, rising behind him in the tilted house. The house was being pulled down into the sea itself, giving the adamant waves the prize they'd been seeking for uncounted years. The wind, with its pushes and shoves, had done its best to send the house to safer ground, but the sea had proved more powerful.

Aaron had been warned. The sea had asked for him by name, had staked its claim, and now had come to take the chosen trophy, which had twice escaped its unfathomable embrace.