by Janice Law
They could have called it quits, of course, but each had acquired a taste for romance. Diane didn’t want to go back to Liverpool leaving behind her “American developer.” And Martin, solid Rotarian that he was, did not like to admit that his fling abroad had ended in failure. They soldiered on, each hoping the other would disappear one morning like dirty dishes under a fairy godmother’s wand, and each, quite unconsciously, made certain plans for how things might be without the other.
Like other unhappy couples, the Forbishes might have lived this way for years if it had not been for two incidents trivial enough in themselves. The first occurred in connection with Martin’s work: a farmer out beyond Pomfret wanted to sell off some land, and Martin went to have a look at the property. It was a narrow strip of scrubby woodlot and low meadow fronting the state road, which was good, and backing up a pig farm, which was not. Martin leaned on the wire fence, surveyed the churned-up earth where several dozen muddy-legged red pigs were rooting and snorting, and shook his head.
“Can’t have bacon without hogs,” the old farmer observed sagely. “Ain’t no smell to good hogs.”
“City people,” Martin murmured apologetically.
“These hogs,” said the farmer, “they’re raised the way hogs are meant to be raised. Outdoors, see. Your pig’s an intelligent animal. She gets bored indoors, gets bored, too, if you ask me, with all this processed feed. Slop’s good for pigs, old bread, too. They like that. Cook it up myself for them a couple times a week.” He nodded to a small dark shack which Martin had failed to notice. Before it stood a line of troughs.
“Bread, you mean?”
The old farmer shook his head in irritation. “Bread they eat plain,” he said scornfully. “Naw I mean old turnips and cabbage, waste from the butcher. Cook it all up for them. I tell you I’ve eaten a lot worse than those hogs many a day.” He spoke with a relish that Martin found disturbing.
“They eat meat? Pigs aren’t carnivorous.”
The old farmer laughed. “Eat you, young fellow, right down to the gristle, and crunch your bones.” He gave Martin a keen, unpleasant look, as if he could fancy a cutlet or a chop himself. See that gilt,” he pointed to a hugh animal with a bristling of white around her snout. “That’s Peg o’My Heart; she weighed over seven hundred and fifty pound last time we had her on the scale. You can bet she enjoys a meal.”
“They’re not dangerous, are they?” Martin asked in alarm. His suburban clients were alarmed by large livestock.
“Naw, not if they’re well fed and not molested. And clean. Now they’re muddy at the moment, but this is a sweet-smelling animal. You can tell that to any client. If they build a house along here, why they’ll hardly even know there’s pigs around.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” Martin said, “but it won’t be top dollar. You understand that. What with the low ground and the brush to be cleared and your agricultural endeavors—
But the old farmer repeated everything he had said about the merits of his land, the cleanliness of his hogs, and the general level of profit that he considered reasonable before Martin got away, and the visit did not leave the junior partner of Raymer and Forbish in a happy mood. He’d be lucky if he sold that tract within a year, and the thought of the pigs and of their hearty yet somehow insinuating guardian made him shudder. Their round bulk balanced on dainty hooved feet, their small, cold, intelligent eyes, and their disgusting habits, so vigorously depicted by the farmer, touched the pit of his stomach. Perhaps that’s why the argument he had that night with Diane turned ugly. They started to shout at each other, disregarding the neighbors. She called him drunken pig and he called her a tramp before disappearing into the den, slamming the door, and turning on the television set. After that, all seemed as usual, but twice in the next week, Martin found himself checking details he had forgotten about the farmer’s parcel of land and standing, nervous yet fascinated, watching the pigs. The second time, he brought three hamburgers from a roadside eatery. Though he could not have borne to examine his reasons, he was set to make an experiment.
One of the animals came over to the fence with the peculiar ambling trot of a fat pig, raised its long, sensitive snout, and sampled the air. Martin felt his stomach contract. The hog made a snuggling sound like the clearing of large, nasal passages and fixed its small round eyes on Martin hopefully.
Automatically, his hand opened one of the greasy paper sacks and produced a burger. A second pig came over and leaned against the fence so that the wire vibrated, making Martin nervous. “Here,” he said and threw a piece of the burger on the ground. It was gone in an instant. He threw out another piece and then another, separating the meat from the bun, but it didn’t matter, they wolfed it down like children on an outing and pressed their big bristly bodies against the wire and snorted and snuggled and demanded more.
“Get away you filthy things,” Martin cried, and he kicked at the wire and slammed his fist against the fence post before he ran back to his car. Sitting sweating in the front seat, he had some inkling of the way events were going, and in a passion of fear, knew his danger, knew he had to escape. That night, when he was pounding some veal for dinner, Diane came in. She was in a good mood, and ordinarily, Martin would have postponed unpleasantness, but now he dared not.
“I want a divorce,” he said. “I’ll pay for your flight back to England.”
“You want?” she said.
“We have to get a divorce.”
“Well, you picked a fine time. Think you can just say come and then go, do you. What would you say if I told you I was pregnant?”
Martin didn’t say anything. Instead he swung the sold steel meat tenderizer straight at her head. It caught her on the temple and she fell to the floor without a word.
For an instant, Martin stood in the middle of his kitchen. Then he dropped the implement with a clatter and bent over his wife. “This is why,” he said stupidly. “It can’t go on. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Surely, you see now it was all a mistake.” There were tears running down his face and he talked on for several minutes, explaining, cajoling, apologizing, before he realized she was dead.
He sat back on his heels in shock. He jumped up to call the doctor, an ambulance, the police, lifted the receiver, then let it drop. He ran into the bedroom, ripped a sheet from their bed and covered her up, then sat down at the kitchen table, lit one of his rare cigarettes and tried to stop shaking. He sat there for quite a while, incapable of thought, incapable, almost, of feeling, before he noticed the meat tenderizer and the veal— for two, obviously— waiting on the counter. The thought, stern and overmastering, came to him that everything must seem normal, that everything must be as always. With a feeling of intense relief, he jumped up, put the tenderizer in the dishwasher, threw the veal into a frying pan and prepared dinner. When he had set the table for two as usual and fixed the vegetables and fried the veal, he could have wept with joy; everything was the same. And it would be. Everything would be all right, if he did not think, if he did not remember.
It was dark after dinner, and since the house had been build with an attached garage, there was no problem about putting Diane in the car. Martin loaded in the rest of what he figured he’d need, threw in, at the last moment, a change of clothes, and headed for the farm. A half-hour later, lights off, his car lurched onto the dirt track that ran between the property for sale and the field where the pigs were kept. Martin pulled well into the trees, turned off the motor, and reconnoitered. Then, satisfied, he laid his trouble light down on the floor of the swill shed and went back to the car.
He was in the shed all night, working hard with a kind of blank concentration. He was assisted in this oblivion by the physical difficulties of the operation: the swill kettles were large, cast-iron tubs, heavy and awkward. The fire burned coal or wood indifferently and required constant watching if it were not either to smoke and go out, or flare up with a vehemence that threatened the entire shed. By dawn he was ready, and using a scoop he found in t
he shed, Martin Forbish began to transfer Diane’s mortal remains to the troughs outside. When he was done, he changed, fed his soiled clothes and hers into the fire, and then waited out in the gray, dew-soaked pasture for the pigs.
The sun rose and he had a moment of sheer horror: they weren’t coming; the old farmer had gone to modern methods, confined them to the barns, fed them in the yard. But then, when he was soaked through with sweat and shivering uncontrollably, the first dark shape appeared on the brow of the hill. The heavy brood pig raised her snout, then trotted down toward the troughs. Martin made for the safety of the fence and stood there, his hands white on the post. He was sick in the trees after, but the old farmer had been absolutely correct: the herd of pigs cleaned the troughs till there were only a few large bones left. Sick with fear, Martin crossed the wire and retrieved these, the hogs watching with interest, accepting him as one of their providers. Martin put the last incriminating evidence down a chuck hole at the edge of the wood, got in his car, and drove away.
It was a couple of days before the store called about Diane, and a couple more before Martin felt obliged to call the police. The town was small, Diane’s reputation was not entirely unknown, and by and large the police were sympathetic. “She’ll turn up,” said the officer. “Most missing persons do.”
Martin agreed. It was not until almost six months later, when her family back in England began making noises, that the investigation started in earnest. Then there were questions, a polite but persistent young officer asked to look through Diane’s belongings, and gradually, every so gradually, Martin felt the scales tip as sympathy slid into suspicion.
With that transition, the fantasy of normalcy that had sustained him through the ghastly scenes in the swill shed began to come apart. He was impelled tho think over what he had done, not from any guilty conscience— necessity, for Martin, as for so many others, excused all— but for fear he had made some mistake, left some clue, neglected some essential. He wondered now if he should have discarded some of her clothes along with the cosmetics which he had prudently thrown into the trash, and whether he should not have packed a case and taken it to Boston, perhaps, or checked it in New York, or bought an air ticket, or done any one of a thousand things to throw the quiet, but by now omnipresent, young detective off his train, Worst of all, he began to wonder if there was not perhaps something left in the shed or in one of the troughs.
This thought haunted him. The young detective was forever “checking on his movements” as he called it, and it seemed very likely that he would one day visit the old pig farmer, hear about the wholesome old-fashioned diet of these particular hogs and— But Martin could never go further than that. The very thought was unbearable, suggesting, as it did, that he really had done what he had. So, one afternoon late in the year, Martin did his last foolish thing: he got into his car, taking with him his clipboard and notebook as if he were going to work, and drove to the farm. He had to have a look round. He had to know.
It was colder out in the country; the ruts in the fields were filled up with ice, and the only color in the brown and white landscape was the thin band of rose and gold were the sun, lethargic all day, was dying in splendor, its blood staining the trunks of the trees and the plain unpainted boards of the shed. Martin’s mouth went dry, and he delayed, leaning against the wire, sick at heart and unwilling to go on. Then the blue shadows of the dusk appeared, and, sure the pigs would have been driven back to the barnyard, he climbed the wire and crossed the frozen clods of earth to the troughs. They were dry, empty. A fragment of a cabbage leaf stuck fast in one, another had a little long-frozen slip. He went into the shed, lit matches to see into the depths of the kettles, poked in the ashes of the fire: nothing.
Rather than reassuring him, this absence filled Martin with panic. Not so much as a button: they’d been there before him. Even now that smooth and quiet detective would be laying out his evidence, putting buttons and zippers and bones in little plastic envelopes. With a shudder, Martin went back outside. He walked around the troughs, peering underneath, nothing. Chilled with sweat, he got down on his hands and knees and felt beneath each trough, then all along the ground between them. He clawed at the frozen clods of earth until his fingers ached, and then crept back again, patting the cold, ice-slicked sides of the trough: it had to be there somewhere, it had to be.
Deep in his search, he did not hear them until they were pressed close around him, long snouts twitching, small, cold, intelligent eyes watching him with hopeful curiosity. Martin raised his head and saw that they were close enough to touch, their large warm, bristly bodies a solid wall, their evil little hooved feet pawing the ground in hungry eagerness, their eyes filled now with a passionate interest, their narrow jaws open to show the stubby, yellowed teeth.
“No,” said Martin with a gasp, “get away.” He flung his arm out at them, but the pigs were unconcerned, they pressed closer, eager to be fed. “No,” cried Martin, as his chest turned to ice. He clutched the side of the trough and tried to pull himself upright, but his breath failed him. “Please, no,” he said, but impatient now, one of the hogs poked him with its moist snout, Martin swung his arm, mad with horror at them, at their eyes, at what they could do, at what he had done, and in this last effort, his heart, long-burdened by its secret, burst.
Martin fell with a cough and a sigh onto the frozen ground. The pigs were puzzled, disappointed. They snuffled at their empty troughs, and, spoiled as they were, it was a full day before they decided that Martin as he was would just have to do.
The Archeologist’s Revenge
Nothing would have been managed without the road, but fortune favors the prepared, as well as the brave, and I’d been preparing for years. Ever since the afternoon Eva “disappeared,” I’ve lived for two things, work and revenge.
I’m an archeologist, not a famous one, but I think I can say I’m well respected. Solid and tenured, with the requisite two books under my belt, I’ve reached a pleasant academic plateau. My specialty is the burial customs in the Late Riverine Archaic, and while the eastern woodlands tribes are not really a glamour area in Native American studies, I have found my researches deeply satisfying— and useful, too, as you will see.
“Useful” is perhaps the proper word for me. I’ve been a useful teacher, a useful researcher; Jane, my wife, might say I was a useful husband, but a life of pure utility robs the soul. That was where Eva came in; Eva was social danger, emotional extravagance, pure poetry. I adored her from our first meeting, when I walked into the Feingolds’ living room, prepared for the usual round of academic gossip and one up-man-ship, and saw her sitting by the fireplace. She was fair and plump, a woman bewitching in that peachy mode the old Flemish painters loved so much. When she saw us approaching, she smiled a big, open mouthed smile and devoured my heart.
“Come meet Eva, Eva and Andrew Donaldson,” said Chloe Feingold, who knows everyone’s rank, tenure status, dissertation subject, and grant prospects. “Andrew’s just gotten the Renaissance appointment in the English Department.” She beamed with unfeigned delight at a thin, focused looking chap with lank brown hair and wind burned skin, a poor specimen next to his blooming wife. “And,” Chloe added, as if announcing a special treat for us, “he’s a Renaissance Man, himself, running a marathon next week.”
Fool, I thought, as I shook his hand, what are marathons, what is the Renaissance, that you should neglect this treasure? But he did neglect Eva, though they were moving in, though the old Burdine farmhouse was a wreck, though the lawn was too long for their little suburban mower. Fortune, as I said, favors the prepared. I brought over our riding mower— my wife, Jane, insisted— and while I circled the yard, leaving swaths of hay on the lawn, Eva raked up the cuttings and smiled as I went past. I was as happy that afternoon as if I had been orbiting the outskirts of paradise.
Five years. If you know the nosey, gossipy ways of academe, you won’t believe me, but Eva and I had five good years. I even came to love the marathon, particu
larly the requisite training runs which provided us with hours of happiness. I remember those afternoons in the pasture back of the old farm: summer heat, wild berries, the Glassian repetition of locusts and cicadas, my darling’s faintly downey cheeks, the dimples on her knees, a certain blessed avidity. Then fall, the smell of wild grapes and leaf mulch, and spring, spring! after the logistical difficulties of the winter, spring with woodcocks mating, thrushes singing, skunk cabbage and marsh marigolds bursting from the swamp. Each spring, I understood why captives of the old Iroquois and Algonquins were reluctant to return to the stiff Colonial world of floors and chairs, of stays and ruffs and high leather boots.
I would push off in my canoe, paddle along the rim of the large pond, thread my way through the marsh on the little streamlets I came to know so well, and land at the foot of the old Burdine, now the Donaldson’s, pasture. Simplicity, itself, when you think about it. I always had excuses: prospecting for fish weirs, looking for campsites, immersing myself in the habitat of the archaic woodsmen. Believe me, I understood them much better after I went hunting for joy in my own canoe, stealing along the pale of settlement to pounce on my own fair darling, Eva.
If my wife, Jane, knew, she was indifferent; wisely so, I think. We had two children, both in college at the time, and our marriage, if no longer inspiring, has its own fidelities and foundations. We understand each other; that’s an important point, and Jane has her own interests, the writing of romance novels chief among them. I’m told that her last three are quite the best she’s ever done. I wonder if suspicions of my affair inspired her, but Jane keeps her own council.
