The Pig Did It
Page 19
Lolly, looking at him with a sly and insolent smile, gave him his cue. “Now that you’re saved and all, can you, do you think, can you love someone might be a murderer?”
Aaron’s mouth ceased its wobble, locked as it was in an open position. He could not move, not even to shiver or to blink or to twitch. It was Sweeney who spoke first, taking into his hand the hand of Kitty. “I can,” he said. “I can love someone might be a murderer.”
Kitty, aghast at first at the touch of a Sweeney hand, soon nodded her head in resignation. “I can,” she said, “murderer as you well may be.” She turned to Aaron. “And Aaron, you? After all, isn’t it a chance everyone has to take if ever we’re going to love at all?”
Aaron turned to Lolly and blurted out the words given to him at last. “I can! I can! I swear I can!”
At the top of the cliff the joined lovers paused to gaze silently out over the sea still booming and plunging beneath them, the gibbous moon making its destined descent into the far side of the horizon. It was Sweeney who spoke. “It’s a great grave you’ve been given, Declan Tovey, greater by far than the mudhole we were arranging ourselves. Lie now in peace. Your mystery may not be solved, but it is accepted in all its unfathomable glory as God prompts us to do, and we will live with it for the rest of all our days. And for pity’s sake, don’t go sending your old bones back up floating onto the shore and raising ructions all over again. You’ve done the deeds you were meant to do. All is fulfilled.”
The wind howled, the sea raged. And the pig came to stand beside them, motionless, snout upraised, meditating perhaps on what had come to pass and contemplating as well what was still to come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author offers unending thanks to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and to the Cill Rialaig Project, in County Kerry, Ireland. He is also grateful to the Irish writer Eamon Sweeney for his help and encouragement and to Tara Claire O’Donoghue, Catherine Clarke, Daniel D’Arezzo, Don Ettlinger, Rebecca Stowe, David Barbour, Bruce Hunter, Martha Witt, Linda Porter—with a special expression of gratitude to Robert Cohan for his help and instructions in Irish darts—how to win, how to lose. To my nephew Jim Smith, my thanks for the accomplished transfer of my sloppy typescript to an acceptable computer printout, and to my brother-in-law Tom Smith, for copyediting said printout—arduous and not particularly thrilling tasks, done with good cheer and uncommon expertise.
A special thanks beyond the power of words to my tenacious agent, Wendy Weil, and her associate, Emily Forland, for their empathic help and unfailing encouragements.
Also to Barbara Lazear Ascher, the editor whose enthusiasm made possible this publication.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapters from this work appeared in slightly different form in the fall issues of The Antioch Review and in Ambit magazine (London).
Copyright © 2008, 2009 by Joseph Caldwell
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