The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (2 page)

“Then don't.”

“I won't.”

“Fine with me.”

“Fine with me, too.”

“All right then.”

With as much indifference as he could summon, Aaron glanced out the side window. They were on a narrow road that would intersect with the one that ran closer to the edge of the cliffs, the old boundary of the McCloud property that had boasted a house of stone, two stories high, with well-appointed rooms, some of their windows looking out over a stretch of meadow that ended at the precipice that dropped to the sea below. Nothing was left now, the meadow having been eroded bit by bit over the years, and the house itself ultimately delivered in one great gulp into the sea—after which Lolly McKeever and Aaron McCloud, Kieran Sweeney and Kitty McCloud, had all admitted to their love. It was as if, now free of the house and all its complicated history, they were able to see into their hearts and find there a surprising and inevitable ardor that would sustain their lives for all time to come. Or so they hoped. Or so they expected.

It should be mentioned that it wasn't just the remnants of the meadow and the fine stone house that had been claimed by the waves. Nor was it only the chattel accumulated by more than several generations of McClouds. In the house at the time of the havoc wreaked by the roiling waters and the insistent winds was a laid-out skeleton, handsomely clothed, resting in a coffin of fine boards and embroidered cushions. The bones of Declan Tovey, master thatcher and celebrated seducer, who was murdered and then buried with the tools of his trade in the garden of Aaron's aunt, had been unearthed by the rootings of a pig.

The murder had never been solved, the identity of the murderer complicated by the last-minute confessions of no fewer than three of those attending the irreverent Irish wake of the unfortunate Mr. Tovey: Lolly McKeever, Aaron's Aunt Kitty, and Kitty's new husband, Kieran Sweeney. One by one each had claimed credit for the thatcher's despatch, complete with motive and method. Aaron himself, the fourth participant in the burial rites, suspected but couldn't verify that each in turn might be protecting one of the others, making it impossible to identify the one true malefactor among them.

(The authorities, of course, were not allowed to get involved. The crime concerned Lolly, Kitty, and Kieran, and no one else. Also, who would go to the gardaí and implicate one of their own? Although years had passed since the days of Irish oppression, the word
informer
still retained a stench sufficient to gag even the most vengeful proponent of that most elusive ideal of all: justice.)

It should be remembered as well that part of the attraction that fulfilled itself in the marriage of Lolly and Aaron, then of Kitty and Kieran, was the possibility that one might be marrying a murderer, bringing to the conjugal couch an implicit forgiveness along with a hint of courage that one would place oneself in so perilous a situation for the rest of one's life. To sleep night after night next to a possible killer is hardly conducive to deepest repose, but since all marriage commitments are founded on risk, on the unknowable, on the brave surrender to uncertainty, why would something so touchingly rash as a killer's confession be considered an impediment? Did love not conquer all? Did it not consist, in part, of an attraction to mystery and its corollary, danger? And so each had found in the other an increase of interest in that very element that might have discouraged someone less willing—or less able—to accept a wider range of possibility, a deeper complexity, in one's choice of an everlasting mate. Declan Tovey, dead, had achieved the impossible: the joining of two of the least likely couples imaginable, Leda and the swan and Titania and the ass included.

As the truck lumbered along, Aaron could see, off to his left, evidence of the changes that were altering the countryside in recent years. Prosperity had shocked all Ireland into rejuvenation. Whole villages were springing up, with “holiday houses” meant to lure not only intruders from abroad, but also Irish urban dwellers denied, until now, the means to mingle among the agreeable company that the truer Irish County Kerry could so readily provide.

Bereft of their poverty, the Irish now had to adjust to changes just as challenging as the coming of freedom, if not more so. That they deserved both freedom and prosperity and had dearly earned them was beyond question; still, it was change. Aaron could hardly mourn his people's loss of hardship. He couldn't wait to see them adjust. He reveled in the awakening. Lolly, of course, might worry that it could make even more archaic her pig farming. Would the avalanche burying the past doom her show of independence, which had planted its standard in the muck and mire of her beloved farm, the stubborn flag uprooted as if it were a mere sapling, highly qualified for extinction? Aaron devoutly hoped it would not.

A settlement of the aforementioned “holiday houses” was behind them after a turn in the road. Up ahead, however, an equally unnerving spectacle confronted them. On the far side of a field to the left, an aggregate of equipment was arrayed along the road that bordered what had been part of the McCloud property. Tarred gravel was being spewed onto a widened roadbed, and an elephantine steamroller advanced slowly, almost solemnly, behind, the newly paved portion reaching almost into the ditch that ran between the meadow and the road. Aaron's first thought was that, surely if God still loved Ireland, the equipment would be tipped into the ditch before more desecrations could complete themselves. But then a native sympathy intervened, and he quickly wished no evil upon those earning their daily bread (and beef and stout and fish and vegetables and fruit and tarts and french fries) by the sweat of their swarthy brows. These men had jobs. If anyone were to complain, it wouldn't be Aaron McCloud.

This did not prevent him from saying to his wife, “We have to go back,” his relief at the necessity badly disguised. “We can't turn onto the road where they're working.”

“Nonsense. We'll just get out and walk across the field, then up to the edge of the cliffs.”

“There's a ditch just to our left.”

“Why would a ditch stop us?”

“It's a very wide ditch. And there's water at the bottom.”

“If we get wet,” Lolly said, “we'll get dry”—an age-old assurance central to Irish survival. She stopped the truck, opened the door, swung her legs around, and let herself out onto the road. To give emphasis to what she'd said, she slammed the door shut, went around to the front of the truck, and started down into the ditch. “Uuh. Nice and mucky. You're going to love it.”

Aaron was out of the truck. “I won't love it.”

“That's all right. It'll love you, and that should be enough.” She slogged through the muddy bottom and climbed the opposite bank. The swineherd boots she had never relinquished during her novel-writing days were coated with a thick black ooze, suggesting that oil might be lurking not far beneath the sacred soil of Kerry. After stepping into the field, she called out, “Look at the lovely gorse. Come smell it.” She snapped off the prickly sprig and held it up to her nose. “Come,” she said, holding out the flowering shrub. “Rewards await.”

Determined not to soil, much less wet his loafers, Aaron decided to jump the ditch. It was a successful leap, but the earth on the far side was unappreciative of his athleticism, and no sooner had he landed than the sodden incline sent first his right foot, then his left, down into the muck he had so foolishly tried to avoid. To further punish his refusal to accept the ditch on its own terms, his entire torso was sent down the embankment, the dirt adhering to his shirt, his pants, his hands, and the tip of his nose. When he raised his head, his wife, ignoring his predicament, simply reached down, placed the gorse under his muddied nose, and said, “Smell. Lovely.”

“Aren't you going to help me up?”

“Oh, do you need help?
I
didn't need help.” She smiled the smile of the preeminently pleased. “But of course if you need me …” Aaron reached out his hand. “Oh. Filthy. Filthy. Brush it against your pants. You certainly don't expect me to muddy myself. Hardly a fitting reward for the help I'm about to give. That's right. Take hold, but don't pull me down with you. One disgraced member of the family is more than enough.”

Firmly she took his hand and yanked him, not without agreeable aggression, into the thicket of gorse lining the ditch. “There you are, you stupid lump. Do I get to clean you when we get home? Umm. Delicious.”

“We should have turned back.”

“Too late now. We don't want your mishap to be in vain.”

“How do we cross that road when we get to it? It's wet tar.”

“In your condition, what's a bit of tar?”

“They won't let us.”

“Who needs to be let?”

“Everyone does. By the men working there.”

“Everyone does not include us. Come along.”

On they walked through the gorse and the heather, the smell of the tar almost overwhelming the scent of the sea. Nor could the growls and grinds of the road-building equipment completely drown, so to speak, the sound of the waves bashing themselves against the cliffs. Wife and husband came to a fence and climbed over. They passed some sheep that
baa
ed at them, expressing their disdain for anyone passing through who failed to offer them a sack or two of feed. They continued on. There was a narrow wooden gate at the next fence, adorned with a sign that warned
BEWARE OF THE BULL
, meant to intimidate trespassers unfamiliar with a commonly known absurdity. Aaron passed through without hesitation, rubbing the tip of his nose, expecting to wipe away the residue deposited by the ditch. He succeeded in transferring the remaining mud onto his upper lip. He spit. Then spit again.

When they got to where the McCloud house had been, a convenient bend in the road shielded them from the sight of the workmen. They crossed the road. The tar glued some of the gravel onto the soles of Aaron's pampered loafers and Lolly's experienced boots. As they were clambering over a final fieldstone wall, Aaron gallantly offered his stained hand to Lolly, helped her up, then stopped to survey the fields, the stones, the widened road, and the horizon to the west, where the sea became indistinguishable from the sky. To honor her husband's pause, Lolly, too, paused and took in the world around them.

Facing the sea, Aaron said quietly, “Is it because you want to see the grave where Declan Tovey was buried and where we were going to bury him back again before the sea came and took him?”

This was not an idle question. With Lolly, Kitty and Kieran out in the yard, Aaron was, except for the skeleton, alone in the house when the winds had had their way with it, tilting, sliding, sinking the house into the welcoming waves. That Aaron was saved by divine intervention had never been doubted. He had managed to escape the house through a hole a pig had forced in the mesh door that led from the kitchen to the garden, where that very same pig had unearthed the skeleton. Then, as if that weren't miracle enough, a wayward canoe, first thought to be a shark, had nudged his panicked body, and he was given just enough strength and skill to raise himself over the side, when the waves promptly heaved him toward the shore and onto the beach.

Lolly, Kitty, and Kieran had watched from the top of the cliff, at first despairing, then disbelieving, then hopeful, then astonished—an astonishment that ultimately advanced to jubilation. With Aaron's nearly drowned body safely ashore, the heavenly presence lingered long enough to exact from Kitty and Kieran, then from Aaron and Lolly, confessions of true love, all in the presence of the pig, which, on some level of submerged consciousness, seemed to confer on the episode a legitimacy that could never be revoked.

Now, studying the mountains, the high rounded hills off to her right, searching for some means to avoid answering Aaron's earlier question, Lolly found herself at a loss. Apparently her quick-wittedness had abandoned her. She could say nothing but an undirected “What?”

“Never mind,” Aaron answered. “You wouldn't tell me anyway.”

“How do you know if you don't ask?”

“I did ask. And you gave me the only answer I'm going to get. Which was no answer.”

A mist had begun to creep over the top of the nearby hill. Lolly, relieved to have a subject other than the one Aaron had introduced, took note of the obvious and said, “Oh, look. A mist is coming down, and we're going to disappear.”

“How convenient.”

“You're sulking. Why are you sulking?”

“Because you want to go—for reasons of your own—to look at where Declan Tovey was buried.”

“Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

“Simple. Because he was your lover.”

“He was Kitty's lover.”

“And Kitty said you were.”

“Kitty McCloud, your aunt though she may be, is not a reliable source of information, especially in matters pertaining to her early adventures. What need had I for Declan Tovey? I had my pigs. I had a calling and I gave it all I had—and more. The way I always do with anything important. You should know. You've been the beneficiary this past year gone.”

After a moment's consideration, Aaron turned to look at his wife. “Is that true? I thought your novel was the most important.”

“How can writing a novel be important?”

“It was to me. When I was doing it.”

“Because you're a writer. I'm not a writer. Just because I wrote a novel doesn't make me a writer. Who can't write a novel if she's got half a head?”

“Fewer people than you think.”

“Nonsense. I was too busy being your wife to do anything else, besides, of course, tending my pigs. But you, more than anyone, should know that. I wrote the novel to try to relax a little, to give myself some time off, to get ready for more of what we do better than anyone in history.”

“Is that true?”