The Pig Did It

by Joseph Caldwell

  First his aunt, with no difficulty, removed the cabbage from the grave and placed it at the foot of the cairn. Then, with some maneuvering, with a shifting of the corpse, turning the bones toward him, then toward herself, pulling and shoving and tugging the sheet, a sling was spread under the skeleton. With his aunt on one side and himself on the other, the two of them, at the count of three, stood up (without incident) and raised the bones, the skull now resting on the chest, one hand completely detached from an arm, the cap shoved low on the forehead, the left pants leg raised up above the purple sock showing the white bone that his pants had protected from the dirt. They took him inside the house and laid him out on the bed in what was called “the priest’s room,” downstairs, across the hall from the kitchen. This was the room that Aaron, as a child, had never been allowed to enter. He’d had to sneak in, which he did, but not too often. It was called the priest’s room to honor the legend that the house had been built long years ago to hide fugitive priests in flight from the English. There had also been talk of a secret passage, a tunnel really, under the house that led to the beach where a boat would be waiting. Quite naturally, Aaron, as boy-in-residence, had searched and searched again for the passageway, not only in the house itself but at the foot of the cliffs, behind rocks and in the smallest cove. But he had never found it. If the tunnel was sealed, if the earth had reclaimed it and filled it in and the entrances long since stopped up, he would, in a way, have been happy for the reassurance. His reasoning had been that if the tunnel led from the house to the sea, it could also lead from the sea to the house. Creatures of the deep, modeled mostly after not just Grendel but Grendel’s mother as well, had more than once been heard in that boyhood time slowly scraping their way toward him in his bed, the scaly flesh brushing against the tunnel walls, making sounds like the heavy breath of a hungry slug. If, in his boyhood days, he had lost his faith, it was restored in those moments. He prayed, he pleaded, he promised. And, to prove that his beliefs were not contingent upon such emergencies, he often held fast to his faith until well past lunch the next day, whereupon, with a full stomach and a slaked thirst, he would again assert his scorn for superstition, his independence of hierarchical edict, and a brave defiance of deific concern. His apostasy would sustain him rather handsomely until the next time Grendel made his scaly way through the priestly catacombs, having caught the scent of a rebellious and infidel boy

  The room itself was aptly furnished. The bed was narrow, the mattress thin, the covers—mostly a faded patchwork quilt—spare. Only the pillow at the head made concession to some need for a last comfort before the journey might begin—or end.

  There was, instead of a dresser, a small cabinet with a single drawer. The cabinet had once held a mirror, and the supports, curved, with a crossbar, looked now like an unstrung harp, its song long silenced, the strains taken up by the winds that carried it to the chimneys of the towns around. A spindle-backed chair, with one spindle a lighter color than the rest, stood near the cabinet, and, along the wall opposite the bed was a wooden bench, not unlike a pew dedicated to discomfort, almost Protestant in its severity. On its back someone had carved the letter I, and part of what might have become the letter H, if the artisan had not been interrupted in his task and hauled off to the gallows. There was a small table with legs so thin and feeble that it would seem daring, if not foolish, to put so much on it as the rough linen scarf that was there at the moment, both clean and crisp. Aaron had, at the time of the great aunt’s telling, a fear more than a doubt that this very table was, in fact, the altar upon which the desperate priest would celebrate his mass, the rickety legs supporting not only the book and the candles but the goblet of wine and the wafer of bread along with the crucifix still balanced near the table’s edge.

  The window was shuttered, to be opened only on those days the room was given its ritual airing, but closed at all other times since it was never known when a knock at the door might announce the outlaw priest’s arrival, with the sudden closing of the shutters a signal to those in pursuit. Then, too, so the closed shutters might not advertise the presence of a priest, and the open shutters his absence, they were simply closed eternally, and any who saw them in their unchanging state might surmise what they wished.

  The skeleton of Declan Tovey was placed on the bed. Some of the bones were, by now, disconnected and mixed up, but once the sheet had been spread open on the bed, his aunt, as if reorganizing the place settings on a dinner table, managed to put him back together in a reasonable likeness of what the man had been when they’d first dug him up. The baseball cap—the word “Brewers” now visible—was placed farther back so that the visor wouldn’t shade his forehead. Then the hands were placed on the chest in typical laying-out fashion, then put at his sides. Finally one hand—the right—was put on the chest and the other allowed to rest casually on the hipbone. The last remaining button on the jacket had come loose and had slipped down onto the sheet transforming one of the daffodils into a black-eyed Susan. His aunt made no effort to put it back in place, as though allowing nature to take its course.

  The main difficulty was with the feet. They kept flopping, each one to the side in imitation of a ballet dancer in first position. When the tips of the shoes were leaned one against the other, it made the man look pigeon-toed.

  “Go get some pillows from the couch,” Kitty said. “We’ll prop the feet. We can’t have him looking silly.”

  “Aren’t the police going to say something because we moved the body?”

  “What police?” She tried crossing the ankles, but the feet still flopped sideways.

  “The gardaí. When you call them. When they come to—”

  “Who’s calling the gardaí?” First position was tried again, but it was not to her satisfaction. “Go get the pillows. And let them be matching. The blue ones, I think, with the green stripes. A bit somber, but then why not?”

  “You aren’t going to call the gardaí?”

  “Why would I do a thing like that?”

  “The man was murdered.”

  “The slut.” She held the shoes clamped together in her hands so they wouldn’t repeat their stubborn insistence on lying on their sides.

  Aaron smoothed the sheet up near the pillow. “The police are going to have to be told.”

  “Told what?”

  “That, well, that there’s this body—”

  “They’ll be told nothing of the kind.”

  “But—”

  She let the feet flop. “And have them come and go carting him off?”

  “But this is evidence, for starters.”

  “This is Declan Tovey. And I won’t hear him reduced to ‘evidence.’ ”

  “A crime bas been committed.”

  “The slut.”

  “You—we—we’re culpable if we—”

  “Nothing wrong with a little culpable here and there. And do I go get the pillows or do you?”

  “I’ll go.”

  “The blue ones.”

  Aaron moved around the bed, past his aunt, and squeezed between the cabinet and the footboard. At the door he stopped but didn’t turn around. “Then this woman—Lolly—she gets away with murder?”

  “Oh, no. I’ll see to her.”

  He turned toward her. “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it says.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She was alternately holding the feet, then letting them go, watching them flop, testing to see if they’d land in the same position each time. After Aaron had seen this repeated three times, he went for the pillows.

  The living room was large but with a low ceiling so the heat wouldn’t rise too far above one’s head. On the north wall was the stone fireplace, the varying colors, rusts, blacks, and browns, suggesting the design of a calico cat. Black soot coated the insides, with wisps of gray rising up the chimney, the old soot burned again to an even more refined ash. Andirons shaped like the bis
hops from a serious outsize chess set held stretched between them a single log, the birch bark still evident at the ends, the middle burned almost through, a bridge destined to collapse at any moment. The windows, two of them, looked out on a stretch of weed. Beyond that was the road, then the pasture that began the rise to the hill that helped block what winds might come down from the east.

  The couch, covered in gray corduroy, looked like a large mud pie, its filling made up of splayed books, a coffee mug, a plate with the remains of a fried egg—the fork stuck up between two of the hefty cushions—a Vogue magazine and a New York Review of Books, the Vogue more dog-eared than the New York Review. The coffee table was a sturdy construction of pine planks stained the color of walnut, and anchored by four fat legs that seemed the remains of four fat rolling pins. On top of the table was a clutter of CDs, one with a picture of Bach wearing what looked like a dyed-red wig. A heavy brown knit sweater was wadded underneath a single shoe with no shoelaces. There was a stack of books about to topple, the Irish Times (disheveled and with a column on the front page torn away), a white porcelain bowl with what looked like a single peach pit placed perfectly in the center, the TV remote, and a brass candlestick holding not a candle but a bulb of garlic.

  Aaron picked up the blue cushion crammed against the arm of the couch and looked for its mate. It was under the armchair, along with another plate, this one completely clean except for a hardened swirl of something green. He picked up the cushion. On one side was a stain the same shade of green as on the plate. Aaron guessed it was, in both instances, pesto.

  Before going through the door, back to the hall, back to the priest’s room, he noticed, to his left, the bookshelves lining the entire wall from floor to ceiling, the spines of the books fading, the lettering dim. Here were the complete works of Jane Austen and George Eliot, the writings of the Brontë sisters, all three, and Thomas Hardy to keep them company. These were the sources and inspirations for the highly successful novels his aunt “relieved herself of”—as one critic noted—“with a regularity most people reserve for another function.”

  The voice of his aunt intruded. “I’m waiting for the cushions. Have you fallen down the well, then?”

  Aaron felt the need to stall. “I’m looking for the second one.” He went back and sat down on the armchair, hugging the pillows to his chest. His aunt had murdered her lover. So vivid had been her descriptions of the other woman’s needs, so emphatic her feelings of betrayal, so heated her speech, Aaron had little doubt that it could be only of herself that she had been speaking. It was she who’d struck the deadly blow and sent the man sprawled out onto the floor. It was she who’d buried him in the garden. Aaron wasn’t sure if she intended to keep the remains in the priest’s room—available for visitations—or return him to the ground at a more respectable depth. What was he to do? After Aaron had pondered the question for a full two minutes and come up with no answers, he called out, “I found it,” and took the cushions into the priest’s room.

  Aunt Kitty had lowered her forehead onto the tips of Declan Tovey’s shoes, the shoes themselves still clamped between her hands. Aaron waited, but she didn’t move. “I found it. The other cushion. Here.” He spoke quietly.

  “Put them then where they belong, one alongside each foot so he’s not disgraced by a foolish posture.”

  Aaron did as he was told, slightly rolling each cushion so it would hold more firmly the helpless feet. His aunt had not yet raised her head.

  “Is there more I can do?”

  “Call Lolly McKeever and tell her to come and pick up her pig.” Still she didn’t move, her hands still holding the feet clasped between her hands, her forehead still resting on the tips of the shoes.

  “Call her now?” Aaron asked.

  “Now.” Kitty’s voice was low.

  A single gull was careening high over Aaron’s head, the wings flicking almost imperceptibly to accommodate the shifting winds coming in from the sea. Now the wings were flapping, desperately it seemed, as if all support had suddenly vanished and only this frantic effort would keep the bird from dropping down into the water below. It disappeared over the top of the cliff, but now Aaron could hear its screech and scream, scolding the elements for their sudden treachery. The water had risen to above the roll of his pants leg. The tide was not going out. It was coming in. Aaron, with a sigh, turned and started walking back toward the switchback path that zigzagged up the cliff. The water was cold, cold enough to numb his feet if he didn’t move faster than he was moving now. He moved faster.

  The sea itself was quiet, the waves no more than a series of slight swellings, too low to crest and fall and froth. They simply flattened themselves out and made their small contribution to the tide that now reached above Aaron’s knees. There were no waves battering the cliffs to Aaron’s left, no thrown spume to lash his face and sting his eyes. There was merely the sly and teasing rise of the water, imperceptible in its inchings, taking its measure from those body parts newly soaked: below the knee, the knee, above the knee, the lower thigh. Aaron looked to see if some watermark on the cliff would let him know how high the tide might come. The line was clear enough. The water had stained the stones to the height of Aaron’s nose.

  By now he was slogging. The water was mid-thigh and it took considerable effort to force one leg ahead of the other and keep him moving along what had been the beach. He had no memory of the tide coming this far, of claiming all the available land at the foot of the cliffs. To his left was a small cave he hadn’t seen before, with a stone the size of a football about to loosen itself from the rounded roof and fall with a merry splash into the rising tide. A fossilized artifact? The lost toy of a Druid child, unearthed at last? Aaron had no time for speculation. And his energies should be rationed out to his legs, not given to the synapses chattering foolishly in his brain.

  And yet it seemed right that his mind should search for distractions. The effort it took to move one leg, then another, was replicate of a dream, the slow, effortful push, the impeded movement, the inability of the limbs to make progress no matter how desperate the urgings. He raised his arms from his sides, partly to keep his designer watch from getting wet but also to promote some mutation of his arms into wings, as he had tried to do as a child. If only nature would consider it a possibility, if only the evolutionary process could be speeded up on his behalf, he would be mightily grateful. Often enough in dreams he had flown. It required no more than a mild expenditure of the will, a spiritual lifting, the easy employment of a competence he kept forgetting he had.

  He slogged on, the freezing water threatening the warm blood of his dick, his balls, the water forcing a retreat of the waiting sperm, leaving behind a shrunken flap of flesh and a shriveled nut, the two appendages threatening in their deprivation and their shame to disappear completely.

  Beneath his feet the pebbles became more pointed, and even the growing numbness of his soles provided no protection against the pokes and jabs of the sharpened stones. The common assumption that the water would smooth them, that the washing sea would lubricate the surfaces for easier passage, proved false. The stones were no longer the beach; they belonged now to the sea. They were resentful; they were annoyed and they wanted this land-born, mud-dwelling intruder to feel the full force of their petulance. Aaron was certain that the soles of his feet were bleeding from a thousand cuts, that he was making a sizable contribution to the crimson tide.

  Possible rescue appeared ahead—the huge table of stone that had fallen from the cliff and had blocked his path. It seemed both a taunt and a challenge. The water was rising to his waist. Soon his circulation would stop. Strength he still had, and energy, but the rock was at least a hundred yards away. He wondered if he should strip, if the lightened load would provide the difference between making it to the rock and not making it. He decided, by some circuitous reasoning unavailable to his conscious mind, to give up his belt. The rest of his clothes he’d continue to wear—for the time being at least. If they got t
oo heavy, he’d shed them along the way.

  He slid into the water. His boots, still slung by the shoestrings over his shoulder, floated away toward the sea. His watch’s claim to be waterproof was now being tested—severely. With each stroke of his arm, with each plunge of his hand, he seemed to douse it again and again, angry now that he had made it a cause for concern, that he had been so prissy in his protection. His purpose, as he swam closer and closer to the rock, was to punish his watch. He had no other intent. Take that! And that! And that! Given so strong a goad, he quickly gained the rock.

  He climbed on top. Had he given up his clothes, his skin might have been too slippery, but the coarse cotton of his denim shirt and the strong weave of his khakis clung nicely to the sandstone surface. With a minimum of clawing and scratching he got himself up out of the water and sprawled and spread-eagled himself on the cold surface. He’d stay still for a few moments, surrender to the rock, too exhausted for any act beyond relief—and, of course, a quick look at his watch. The second hand was still sweeping its way around the face. The big hand was between the seven and the eight, the small hand was close to the three. It was, he deduced, about twenty to three Irish time. He closed his eyes. He kept them closed to the count of three, then opened them. He took two more breaths, deep, taking in the salt smell of the rock that made him think of summers past. He must stop indulging himself. He had not washed ashore, saved from a sunken ship. He’d had a simple swim. That and nothing more. He had no right to his exhaustion. He was an excellent swimmer, or at least had been. He’d even been awarded a plaque more than several years before, attesting to his successful swim off the Long Island shore.

  What he had done now was negligible. He’d got wet; he’d got cold. Now he would get dry; now he would get warm. And the swim, if he’d only pause to take note, had excited his energies instead of depleting them. He paused, took note, and sat up.