The Pig Did It (20 page)

“The ones I've never seen. Like a bluebird or a nightingale or an eagle.”

“You've never seen an eagle?”

“No. Never.”

“How strange. You really must.”

“Yes.” Aaron gave a quick smile, then looked again out the window. “My favorite, I think, is the cormorant. Except I saw one, here, yesterday, a cormorant near the cliffs.”

“Your favorite?” She was more puzzled than surprised. “A greedy thing like that?”

“The sound. ‘Cormorant.' I loved the sound even as a boy, the way it works the mouth just to say it. ‘Cormorant.' ”

“There's one now,” Lolly said, nodding toward the window.

There, as if summoned, winging its way out over the cliffs, riding the air, wings spread wide as if in ecstasy, was the scorned scavenger, indifferent to the world's contempt. “Yes. A cormorant. I'd forgotten it was my favorite.” The bird plunged down below the cliff, then suddenly rose up again as if it had landed on a tarp and been sent bouncing back into view. Off it soared to the south, satisfied that it had completed the demonstration the mention of its name had required.

“Cormorant,” Lolly said.

“Yes. Fine word. No matter what.”

“Yes. A fine word. I'll remember that.” Again she was smiling her inward smile, anticipating a future time when the word would come to her mind and she would say it half out loud and remember the moment when this new appreciation had come to her. Aaron watched as the smile slowly relaxed and Lolly returned to contemplating the hands folded on her lap.

He listened for any sounds that might come from the panel opening. Was the tunnel really a labyrinth and were they lost?
Had
someone been hidden there? He listened more closely, heard nothing except the twittering of yet another bird he could not name. The calm was welcome, and the ease of Lolly's quiet company was too natural for him to be surprised. He watched her hands as she recrossed her thumb, lengthened an index finger, then curled it in again, closer to the thumb. He took note of her breasts. Relaxed and ample, they seemed comfortable, neither demanding nor defiant. His gaze must have lingered longer than he'd thought. When he lifted his eyes, he saw that Lolly was smiling at him. Aaron, too, smiled, warmed by the thought that she in turn had noted his attention and was now acknowledging it as an acceptable act, expected even, requiring no further comment or gesture from either of them.

To reciprocate she seemed now to be considering either his nose or his ears, he couldn't be sure. In reflex he blinked his eyes, preferring that these be the focus of her regard. Having duly become aware that it was his face that interested her—it seemed, finally, his ears—she leaned forward toward the opened wainscoting, not impatient, merely checking—as Aaron had done. Still nothing could be heard. She leaned back again and seemed about to rest her head against the wall but obviously decided instead to simply gaze not toward Aaron but out the window she had so effortlessly opened.

In response another breeze wafted into the room, this time smelling more of manure than of apples—even though there were no cattle near, any more than apples were stored out under the eaves. Aaron looked down at his khaki shorts, at his shirt, at his squished feet. Had the breeze, in passing him, brought his own scent into his nostrils? He had forgotten that the deposit from his swim and the seeped stench of the tunnel had become the very fabric of his clothes, permeating at the same time his pores even unto the hair follicles of his head, chest, arms, legs and elsewhere too. That it was merely manure that could be smelled might be to his advantage.

“My pigs must miss me,” Lolly said, her voice seemed sad for the sorrows of her swine. Aaron, without effort, could guess at what had put the thought into her head. He nodded but didn't look up. “Mine are the only pigs that smell like bran,” she said. “And I don't feed them bran. But that's what they smell like. Bran.” Again Aaron nodded. “They must be missing me.” Again her voice was sad, but amused at its own sadness.

Aaron decided not to nod. She might be bored by the repetition. Instead he said, “I never liked cabbage until I was fourteen. Then I liked it.”

Now it was Lolly who nodded. She waited a moment, then said, “Come sometime, see the pigs. Then you'll know. Like bran they smell.”

Before Aaron could take yet another turn nodding, a definite murmur came through the opened wall. As the sound came closer, it grew to a mutter, a collective mutter, then to the almost distinguishable voices of several people—three to be exact—caught in, of course, a quarrel. No particular word was able to rise above the rest, but not for want of trying. Finally, as the sound came closer, “finger” could be made out, possibly in Jim's voice, then “believe” in Tom's, then “breathe” in Kitty's. The garbling came nearer. “Shine the light,” followed by, “Keep walking,” followed by, “Is it what I think it is?” followed by, “I can't breathe, and you want to start collecting souvenirs.” Then, at the last, “But it's a piece of bone. I can feel it's a bone!”

“Part of Declan's finger,” Aaron murmured. “They've found it.” The beam of the flashlight hit the ceiling, crossed to the far side, and, as the ascent was made up the tunnel steps, the light began its descent along the far wall. Lolly got up and quickly smoothed the blanket on the bed, running her hand along the edge of the mattress to make sure Declan was safely stowed beneath. She shook out her hair as if not quite sure of what might have happened or what might have been said since she had been left alone with Aaron in the room.

Kitty's head poked through the opening, preceded by the beam of the flashlight made pale by the light from the opened window. Before she could make it through the panel, she was shoved aside by Jim, who stumbled into the room and rushed to the window. He held up what seemed like a trinket, turning it over and over to see what refractions might be caught in the light. “It
is
a bone! Like a knucklebone,” he said. Kitty made it into the room, followed by Tom. Kitty brushed the hair from her forehead and rubbed the flashlight along her cheek. “What's that awful smell?” she asked.

Tom joined Jim at the window, the two of them regarding with awe what was obviously the found knucklebone of Declan Tovey. Tom tried to take it from Jim's hand, but Jim pulled it out of reach, waited for Tom to lower his arm, then held the bone up to the light once more. “A relic,” Jim whispered. “A holy relic. Some martyred priest. The blessings I'll get.”

“It's a fish bone,” Tom said.

“Because you didn't find it.”

“It's still a fish bone.”

“You have no faith.”

“I have no faith in fish bones, if that's what you mean.”

The screen door slammed. Sweeney burst into the room, the flung door slamming Kitty against the wall. “The pig,” he gasped. “The pig is in the grave!”

For want of a more original response, both Lolly and Aaron stiffened, and possibly Kitty too, still stuck as she was between the door and the wall. Sweeney seemed to have immediately realized the error of his announcement and, scratching his chest, wetting his lips, managed to say, “I mean—” But before be could complete his revision, Jim, gaining heat from Tom's heresies, dangled the bone in front of his colleague's face. “We'll see what Father Colavin has to say. I'm showing it to him and telling him the whole story and then we'll see …” He stopped and turned slowly to look at Sweeney. Tom, too, turned his head, but even more slowly.

“What pig?” asked Jim.

“And a grave?” asked Tom.

“No, no, nothing. No pig. No grave,” Sweeney answered.

“Didn't you just say, ‘The pig is in the grave'?”

“Oh. That. Yes. Yes, I did say that.”

Jim closed his fist over the bone as if to protect it from whatever disrespect might come from talk about a pig. “Then I'm asking again, what pig?”

“Yes,” Tom said, unwilling to yield his proprietary rights to the question that had been of his own devising. “What grave?”

Kitty slid out from behind the door, rubbing a shoulder. “His name is Sweeney, You know that. So why do you listen to one word he says? They never know what they're talking about. A bunch of blatherers if ever there was one, almost always muttering about pigs and graves and sheep and shrouds. And you're paying him the least attention? You must be as idiot as he.”

“Idiot, am I?” Sweeney drew himself up at least another quarter of an inch.

“If you're a Sweeney, the word applies. And enough of pigs and graves and whatever madness has come over you.”

Sweeney managed to find, somewhere in either his spine or his neck, enough slack to raise his height yet one more quarter inch. “These men know better than to listen to slander. In their profession they know that only the truth is of interest. The facts, no more. And they also know, as does the entire civilized population, that to be a Sweeney is also to be a poet. And if you can't recognize poetry when you hear it, you don't belong to the land where you were born. It was a poem I was reciting. ‘The pig is in the grave.' Have you never heard of symbolism? Is metaphor an area of ignorance? Listen then, will you? ‘The pig is in the grave.' Can you hear it now? Have you or have you not an ear for cadence?” He shifted his proud gaze from Kitty to Jim and Tom.
“You
can hear it, can't you?
You
know poetry when it's visited upon you. ‘The pig is in the grave.' Ponder, gentlemen. Ponder. And then admit to me and to all gathered here that you are in the presence of a poet.”

Lolly and Aaron allowed themselves to slump slightly. Jim looked for another moment at Sweeney, thinking, then turned back to the light coming in through the window. Again he held up the relic. Tom continued to regard Sweeney, thought requiring for him a bit more time. Then he, too, returned his attentions to the bone. “Superstitious nonsense.”

“Faith,” said Jim. “I'll take it to Father Colavin.”

“Take it to forensics,” Tom said. “They'll test it. They'll tell you the foolishness you're worshipping.”

Aaron looked at Kitty, Kitty at Sweeney, Sweeney at Lolly and Lolly at Aaron. No one spoke. No one moved.

“Forensics!” Jim spit out the word. “They'll never touch it with their gloved hands, their carbon dating, and DNA and all. It's faith tells all we need to know.”

“All we need to know about fish bones. Fish bones and faith.” Kitty relaxed first, then Lolly, then Sweeney, then Aaron. Lolly, at her most casual, said, “Aren't you supposed to be looking for an escaped prisoner?”

“We are looking, thank you very much,” Jim said. “And we'll continue looking, if you'll excuse us. Come, Tom. We'll go to Father Colavin. And you'll be begging indulgences from what I hold in my hand before the day is out. And you'll be given nothing back but your own scorn.”

Their shoes weighted with the full authority of their calling, Jim and Tom stomped out the door, across the hall, through the kitchen, and out into the yard. Aaron could see them pause for only the briefest moment when they saw the pig wallowing down in the hole, allowing, no doubt, some fleeting thought to pass through their minds. As they continued toward the car, Tom alone looked back, his head turning slowly. He faced front abruptly when he bumped into the back fender of their car.

Aaron, Lolly, Kitty and Sweeney watched silently as the car drove away, Declan's knucklebone no doubt laid out on the dashboard, guarding against all evil in this world and the next.

After the car had driven out of sight, Aaron, Lolly, Kitty and Sweeney turned as one and looked toward the bed where the rest of Declan Tovey lay smothered and crunched beneath the flimsy mattress known heretofore only to priests.

“I think,” said Kitty, “that before we do anything more or say anything more, we all have a bit of a drink.”

9

F
inally everything was settled. Aaron felt that the combatants, himself included, succumbed at the last to exhaustion and to the fellow feeling of having shared and survived a somewhat energetic day. Then, too, the Tullamore Dew they were drinking may well have made its contribution to the newly generated amity. Assignments were made. Assignments were accepted. Aaron would enlarge and deepen the grave, Sweeney would make the coffin, and Kitty and Lolly would do the women's work of preparing the corpse.

Sweeney's brother would milk his cows, Lolly's sister would tend her pigs, Kitty's novel would be given a time of rest, and Aaron's suffering would be—yet one more time—postponed. And so they set themselves to work.

When Aaron started out to dig a more commodious grave, Sweeney was already, with a crowbar, taking down some of Kitty's bookshelves, the books themselves candidates for corrections—from Elizabeth Bowen to Virginia Woolf, with, ominously, a new section devoted to Joyce Carol Oates. The oak would make a worthy coffin. To purchase boards in town would inevitably lead to unwanted questions, and Sweeney was a man loath to lie, especially to his friend Diarmid Dunne, from whom he'd have to buy the lumber. Aaron himself had been obliged to hand over a pair of socks, some undershorts, and a clean shirt, so the women could properly prepare the skeleton. (Aaron had feared that his one good suit was about to be appropriated and his last pair of shoes as well, but the fits were wrong—Aaron's fault, they implied—and the rest of his wardrobe survived intact.)

It was during the fulfillment of these various tasks that Aaron was given some insight as to why the decision regarding immediate burial had been agreed to by each participant from the start. When he helped Sweeney remove the books from the confiscated shelves, the man leaned close to his ear and said, “Before all this is over, she'll confess. Prepare yourself. I know she's your aunt, but I know shell let it all come out before the coffin hits the ground.” Aaron had said nothing, simply continuing to remove the complete works of Aphra Behn from the shelf.