“Today’s the day,” Kitty had said as Aaron was eating his second hot dog. She rubbed her hands together to work up the heat appropriate for the deed she was about to do. “By the time you get back, he’ll have had it, and bad cess to him.” She quivered in anticipation, causing her shoulders to hunch and her elbows to draw themselves closer to her ribs. By the time the screen door slammed behind him, Aaron could hear the muted click of the computer keys hurrying Tiffany toward the revenge not only on the husband but on Thomas Hardy and a fair portion of nineteenth-century English literature as well. “Bad cess” was one of his aunt’s favorite phrases.
To protect his feet from the stones and shells that paved the beach, Aaron had worn his sandals, but with a pair of white socks, because he felt self-conscious about the way his big toe was trying to crawl on top of the toe next to it. That he would meet anyone on the beach seemed unlikely; that he would meet anyone interested in his toes was even less likely; but, with the exception of matters of the heart, Aaron preferred not to take chances.
In the distance the waves boomed and cracked. Aaron advanced at what he considered a pace suitable to thought and to vacant-eyed meditation. Small stones poked sharply at the soles of his sandals, and occasionally a larger rock sent him lurching to the side, but he held to a mourner’s slow stride.
About a hundred yards from the rock face of the intruding cliff, he saw a figure round the point, a man of some size, moving toward him with a determined step. As if performing an exercise intended to strengthen the calves, firm the buttocks, and give free swing to the arms, back and forth, the man seemed to be marching in response to an invisible military band. Now the arms were raised above his head as he scissored them back and forth across each other. Whether to attract Aaron’s attention or to ward him off seemed only two of several possibilities. This could be part of the exercise. Or the man might be pursued by real or imagined furies invisible at the distance. He seemed to have picked up his pace, big arms waving more frantically until one arm flopped across his forehead and sent a hand dangling over his face. It was, of course, Kieran Sweeney
Now his hands were cupped to each side of his mouth, and he seemed to be shouting something that Aaron’s sea-deafened ears couldn’t catch. Aaron, too, moved more quickly, Sweeney, giving up his attempt to communicate, stopped and stayed where he was. It would be up to Aaron to approach. He, Sweeney, had done all he’d intended to do and would do no more.
Aaron came up to him, limping slightly, “Didn’t you see me waving?” Sweeney asked.
“Waving?” Aaron leaned his head closer. Sweeney was breathing hard and seemed somewhat impatient, his eyes wide, his teeth quite possibly clenched.
“Yes. Waving. I was waving.”
“Yes. I saw you. Waving.” Aaron nodded.
“And I was shouting.”
“Yes. Shouting. I could tell you were shouting.”
“And you kept right on anyway.”
“Yes. Right on.”
“But I was telling you to turn around. To go back.”
“Oh. Go back. I was wondering what it was.” Aaron nodded again.
“Then why didn’t you? Turn back?”
“I’d come down for a walk.”
“But can’t you see the sea?”
“Yes. I can see it.”
“Can’t you see what it’s doing?” he asked.
“See the water rising? The waves?”
“Those aren’t waves. Look again. They’re jaws or maws or whatever you like. See how they open wide, and then wider still? They’re the mouths of monsters and they’re after you.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“The waves may be high, yes, but they don’t seem to come to shore.”
“Of course they don’t. They’re taunting us. They’re telling us what they have planned and what they’re going to do.”
“Oh?”
“And it won’t be just a drowning. Look at the white along the crests. That’s not froth. Those are teeth. Look now how the jaws clamp down. You’re not drowned. You’re devoured.”
“Oh. I see.”
“And you don’t remember? It’s you they’ve marked. Didn’t I tell you? They made you their own yesterday. They’re not just teasing. They’ll be coming for you any minute now.”
“When the tide comes in? But that’s not for another hour.”
“Do they look like they wait for tides? We could be standing right here where we are and before we could get from here to there we’d be swallowed whole.”
“Then you’re saying I should go back?”
“Do you want me to say it again?”
“Well. All right. But I did want to go for a walk.”
“Then you must do it. And I’ll say my farewells to you now since there’ll be no other chance.”
“Well. Good-bye, then.” Aaron held out his hand.
Sweeney shook his head. “You’re worse than your aunt. The curse of your race. They do what they want no matter. Well, it’s an honorable way you’ve chosen to go. Good men have gone this way before. I can’t say you’re worthy of their company, but that’s for the sea to decide.”
“I’ll turn back when the tide begins to come in, don’t worry.”
“No, I won’t worry. It’s all past worry. And you’re not worse than your aunt. No one is worse than your aunt.”
“Oh?”
“It’s said in sorrow, not accusation. An observation, certifiable by all who know her. And it’s said in anger and with more provocation than a man is meant to bear.”
Sweeney had turned away, sending his gaze out over the sea. The booming thunders seemed to make him solitary. He spoke, the words hurled into the gaping maws. “It’s a terrible thing to murder a man,” he said. “Or so I suppose. A haunting thing to have done what can’t be undone. The man’s dead and she’s done it and she’ll never get free. And now she has him there in the house with her. It’d make a lesser woman mad, but not your aunt. Not she.”
Aaron looked down at his socks and wiggled his toes. A great wave, closer to shore, slammed down into the tortured waters. He looked up at Sweeney. Sweeney, still staring out over the sea, as if searching for some sail he knew would never appear, lifted his head higher. A look of solemn mourning came into his face.
Aaron concentrated again on his feet. “My aunt says Lolly McKeever did it, Lolly says you did it, and you say—my aunt. You know what I think?”
“You think I did it.” Aaron made no move. Sweeney continued. “Think that, if you like. It makes no matter.” He turned, looked at Aaron, reached out, and took him by the arm. “Come,” he said. “I can’t let you stand here so close to your eternity. I’ll walk you back.”
“Thanks, but I’m going the other way.”
“No. I can’t let you do it.”
“But it’s what I came to do. To walk. Here. Along the beach. Alone.”
“Yes,” Sweeney said. “We walk the beach and look at the stones and let the sea think we don’t know it’s there. We walk and let the sorrows come. We let the sea do all the raging for us so we can be gentle to ourselves in our suffering. We let the sea do our yearning.” He lowered his head. “All right, then. Go on. It’s a great grave you’ll have and the company, if not of saints then at least the nibbled dead, to welcome you. The mouth of the fish is better than the mouth of the worm and not so noisy, I’m told.”
He went past Aaron but stopped after two steps. Without turning around, he said, “Is it a wife you’ve lost or what?”
“A woman.”
“Beautiful?”
“Not particularly.”
“And you thought she’d be grateful to get a man so splendid.”
“Yes.”
“But she wasn’t grateful.”
“No.”
Sweeney nodded. “Ingrates, all of them. No idea of the bounty being offered.”
“You’re here for the same reason?”
“Ingrates. Maybe not all of them. But one o
f them I will never name.”
“Is it a name I know?”
“No man knows the names I have for her.”
“But does she know, this woman, does she know the way you feel?”
“No one knows how I feel.”
“Does she have any idea?”
“Idea? How could she? It’s beyond all imagining.”
“Maybe you could give her some hint.”
“And what good would that do?”
“She might think it rather a fine thing.”
“No, not she. Never.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s not a fine thing. It’s a madness.”
“But why?”
“She’s my enemy from birth. And I am hers. We were brought into this world to take on the enmity left behind from years long gone. Our baptismal vows are nothing compared to the oath we take with the first light we see and the first cry we make. An oath not in water but in blood. Forgotten blood of long ago. All that survives is the enmity. And don’t say it isn’t there. It is. I have it. She has it. We exchange it back and forth. We can’t let it go, because that would be surrendering who we are. We’d be no one without it. It’s what gives us life. And we wouldn’t trade it for all the love the world has to give. This world and the next.”
“But can’t you—”
“No. I can’t. And she can’t.”
“Then that settles it, doesn’t it?”
“It’s settled. Yes.”
Aaron’s feet were getting cold. He looked down to see why this should be and saw the water receding from the beach, flowing over his toes, wetting his socks. He stared a moment, then looked straight ahead. The rock face, the wall cleaving the sea, still rose up in the distance, shadowed by a passing cloud. The clouds hadn’t moved before but were moving now, not swiftly but with a confidence suggesting that a command had been given and they were on the march. Another wave came in, small, gentle, no more than a light laugh. It ran up and surrounded Aaron’s ankles, then, delighted with its mischief, retreated back into the sea.
“If I’m going to continue my walk, I’d better start,” Aaron said.
He took a few steps and stopped. Sweeney was saying something, but the waves had increased their fury and seemed to be making a more determined advance to the shore, and Aaron could barely hear. He considered going back within hearing distance but knew if he was going to have any time with Phila, it would have to be now. He didn’t think it admissible to postpone it another day. The poor woman had been neglected enough as it was. He’d had almost no thought of her since he’d come to Kerry, and this was hardly fair. Kerry was meant to feed his grief, to bring his self-pity to the highest possible pitch and allow him to send his wailings upward, at one with the shrieks of the gulls and the curlew’s cry. But all his fine intentions kept being thwarted. If he were so inclined and if he could convince himself no one could see, he’d stamp his foot, wet sock and all. Instead he resolved to resume his walk, and Sweeney could stay there blathering on about love and death to his heart’s distress. Aaron, for his part, had his own suffering to consider, and he would be faithful.
Down the beach he went, determined not to notice the rising billows. He thought he heard Sweeney behind him, shouting, “Her name is—” And the last word was lost to the sound of the sea, where, about fifty feet from shore, was the sight of what looked like a canoe with a man paddling almost lazily, as if making his way down a smooth flowing river. Now he was rising, taken to the top of an angry swell, now he disappeared only to be raised high again, in full view, as the waves lifted and dropped him.
Then the canoe was on the crest of a wave, and as the paddler leaned down toward the water, his arm shot out, reaching for something. The canoe and the man were dropped down behind the advancing wave. Aaron saw, held high on the crest just before it crashed, the man’s paddle.
The canoe reappeared, the man sitting calmly upright, looking neither to the shore nor to the advancing sea. He seemed to have placed his hands, folded, in front of him on his knees. He could be praying or simply waiting, patiently, for what was soon to happen. Aaron recognized him. He was none other, of course, than his opponent of the night before, the imagined Declan Tovey, the suitor, real or imagined, of Lolly McKeever, the man whose nose Aaron had punched.
Twice the man appeared, and twice disappeared. All movement was the sea’s, he himself moved not at all. Aaron turned his face to the north and took five paces. The wind had filled his shirt; now it swelled behind him like a great white hump, a disfiguring burden instead of a blown sail. He took another five steps, then another three. The canoe was tilted to a forty-five-degree angle, no longer riding from crest to trough to crest again, but caught at last in the rising maw, the froth-toothed mouth ready to close down and swallow its prey. Down the crashing water came, sending its wild spume toward shore. The canoe reappeared, the man still inside. Just as he had refolded his hands, another mouth closed down.
Aaron ripped open the cuffs and front of his shirt, sending garment and buttons flying in a single backward fling. He rid himself of his khaki shorts. Now clad only in his cotton briefs, he rushed into the water and dived into the first wave that came for him. Immediately he dropped down to a depth where his feet failed to touch bottom. To resist the cold more than to survive the water, he stroked out ahead with his arms and, with legs and feet, performed an unending series of entrechats that would have been the envy of the greatest danseur noble now performing on the planet. Propelled by the unceasing beat of his feet, pulled forward by the unthinking stroke and lunge of his arms, he made his way through wave after wave, rising, falling, straining forward, insistent that he do nothing but advance until he reached the doomed canoe.
Walls of water rose ahead, great swellings passed under him; twice he was tumbled and twice he recovered. The salt taste in his mouth told him he’d taken on water. Still he continued what he hoped was forward, closer, closer to the man he was determined to save.
At the rise of a medium swell he saw about fifteen feet to his left, the canoe, now nosed toward the shore, the man not looking in his direction or even taking note of the change in the canoe’s course. His hands were no longer folded, but gliding through the water at the canoe’s sides. Before Aaron could call out, another wave tumbled down on top of him and it seemed, as he struggled to reach the air above, that the sea had finally made its claim and he should cease and desist in his futile defiance.
He swallowed water and struggled harder, his arms heavy from the weight of his hands, his legs weary from the drag of his feet. He must throw off this heaviness. He must fling from him his hands and shake his ankles free of his feet. Flinging, shaking, he reached the air. He pulled it in, but it gagged him. And another wave tumbled down, dunking his head, holding it under, not even offering to free him after the count of ten. Again he took up his struggles, cursing the hugeness of his weighted hands, begging to be free of his size twelve feet. Again his mouth was flooded with the salty taste stinging the inside of his nose, threatening to burst open his ears so the water could make a more thorough invasion. But the air was near, then nearer. His hands became as light as down; his feet buoyant, lifting him toward the blessed air he was to be given at last.
First he felt the water rush from his mouth. There was a taste of sand on his tongue, a sea taste of weed and kelp. Next he felt the waves press down on his chest and water spurt out of his mouth. Again a wave pressed down. He twitched his hands. He shifted his feet. There was no water under him. This then, was the ocean’s bed, and he had come to rest on it and wait for the murmuring currents and the whispering nibbles that would relieve him of his flesh and heart and lungs, his liver and his spleen, that would unman his proud and lovely crotch, that would transform him to Declan Tovey’s twin, bare bones clothed not even in tatters, scalped, without even a Brewers baseball cap to cover his head. Unmourned he would lie, and unmournful too. Phila would cease to matter. Lost. All lost. Due to the imagined look-alike of the dead De
clan Tovey, out in his canoe.
Again a great wave pressed down on him, but this time it forced him to take in what seemed to be air, not water. The wave pressed down again and again. He felt his opened mouth sucking in some drying substance not unlike the breath he had known and been accustomed to during his life on earth. He opened his eyes. A wet tangle of weeds, brownish yellow turning to green, was less than six inches from his nose. It had the smell of fish no longer fresh. The leaves looked like the emptied seed pods from a maple tree, interspersed at intervals with what seemed oblong beads growing a slimy fur, a sea rosary sent to tempt him to prayer.
The pressure was repeated. Aaron grunted. In quick succession three more shoves were made downward on his sides, along his ribs. “Hah! Now you’ve done it!” a voice said. “You’ve gone and saved him.” It was a man’s voice, a voice that managed to be both amused and unbelieving at the same time. “And are you all right? You took on a bit of water yourself, you know.”
“Ill be all right by the end of the day,” another voice said, this one low and solemn, the breath coming in quick gasps between the words. Aaron lifted his head with the intention of twisting it around so he could see who was there and ask what was happening and what had happened that had brought him here, lying on the sand with a tangle of kelp inches from his nose. That he had failed to save the man in the canoe and that he himself had been rescued was apparent to him now, but a few particulars might be welcome. He felt a hand on his shoulder encouraging him to put his head back down on the sand. “Rest yourself another minute,” the quiet, solemn voice said.
The Pig Did It Page 11
