The Pig Did It: Book 1
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About this ebook
Joseph Caldwell
A playwright and novelist whose previous books include In Such Dark Places, The Deer at the River, Under the Dog Star, The Uncle from Rome and Bread for the Baker’s Child, Joseph Caldwell has been awarded the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.
Read more from Joseph Caldwell
The Pig Trilogy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBread for the Baker's Child: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Such Dark Places: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Pig Comes to Dinner A Novel: Book 2 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In the Shadow of the Bridge: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Deer at the River: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnder the Dog Star: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pig Goes To Hog Heaven: Book 3 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Uncle from Rome: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLazarus Rising: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for The Pig Did It
123 ratings19 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Garbage. Pretentious. Neither funny nor charming. I only made a few chapters. Sad because I have been looking forward to reading this for ages.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I wanted a light, cozy mystery, preferably with a pig playing a fun role in it. I got a pretentious and boring story. The pig has very little to do with the story, but he (she? I don't remember) does dig up some bones. Some very unlikable people all accuse one another, all try to pass off the murder. The plot is ridiculous, the phrasing is pretentious. Passive voice is frequently used, and that can be very effective in some cases, but not in this one. This is the first book of a trilogy, but for me, it's the first and last book of that trilogy.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Professor Aaron McCloud, recently jilted in love, travels to the family home in Western Ireland to visit his aunt Kitty. He ends up stranded outside town with a pig following him down the road. This was a strange novel, not much about anything particularly. The writing was very good, but the narrative seemed endless at times. There were many flashes of humor but overall this book came off to me as a very literary farcical novel. The romantic resolutions at the end didn't seem realistic.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I did not enjoy this book very much. The protagonist was unlikable and some of the content was very adult and seemed out of place. I was listening to it with my little kids in the car, and I was glad they were too young to understand what was going on. This plot was quite silly and humorous at times, but it crossed over into the ridiculous the rest of the time. It took me a few years to finish this book. The narrator was a good one, but I think this book would have been much more pleasant if read quickly in paperback form. The style felt too verbose and slow moving for audio, painfully dwelling too long on all the awkward parts.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Those who think the Irish are quaint, charming, and endlessly entertaining will like this book. Everyone else should avoid it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Absurd is the only word for this one. When Aaron McCloud returns to childhood haunts in Ireland to "grieve" over a lost love that never was, he finds himself adopted by a stray pig, which wreaks havoc on his Aunt's back garden and cabbage patch, digging up the bones of a poor murthered tinker in the process. Who did it? And what's to be done about it? And will Aaron ever actually find the time to walk alone along the beach and feel sorry for himself? Full of hilarious moments that beg to be filmed (I kept thinking of "Waking Ned Devine"), and purplish Irish prose...a delightful farce.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I requested this book through the LT Early Reviewers thinking from the description that I would enjoy it. While there is a murder in the book - it is not a murder mystery in the normal sense. There is no detection happening, just the main characters all blaming each other for the murder. While I normally enjoy audio books, I think I would have enjoyed the actual written book because at times it was hard to follow the story, and I kept wondering if I really heard what I thought I had just heard. I found the book just "OK" - I didn't hate it, but I certainly cannot rave about it either. I agree with many that most of the characters were very self-absorbed and thus difficult to like. I did enjoy the pig, but I kept wondering about it - was it supposed to symbolize something else, or was it really just a pig. Was this story about something metaphysical, or just a bit of humor that I didn't quite understand...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5(This is a review for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)I’m still digesting my thoughts from this book. It’s not quite a traditional mystery, although there is a dead body involved.Aaron McCloud, an American of Irish descent, returns to Ireland to mourn the loss of a love that never was. On his way to his aunt’s house his bus is delayed by a herd of unruly pigs. Determined to help, Aaron tries to rescue one of the pigs. By the time he gets the pig under control, the bus has left him and he and the pig make their way to Aunt Kitty’s house. Not finished causing trouble, the pig unearths a skeleton in the garden. While there is some attempt to discover the killer, I wouldn’t say it’s the main focus of the story. It’s more a study of the characters, the Irish countryside, and Aaron’s failed attempts at mournful solitude. There’s a bit of the ridiculous throughout, with quirky characters and wordy rhapsodies. I had a hard time warming up to Aaron’s character; he’s rather a dope (which I’m hoping was intentional). I liked the Irish folk better.I felt the narrator did well with the story and the accents; I enjoyed listening to him.I didn’t realize this was the first in a trilogy. I haven’t decided yet if I want to continue with the next two books; I think I need to be in the right mood for them.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was an absolutely great story. I not only loved the CD for the story but also the person that read the story did an absolutely wonderful job!! The story doesn't just involve a mystery put also it has a lot of humor! The author gave such depth to the characters. Wonderful to hear on audio CD. The pigs antics will have you laughing out loud many a time! Enjoy!!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Funny, if sometimes a bit heavy handed, farce written using Jane Austen's approach to complicated social situations. So just what does one do when the pig digs up a corpse in an Irish garden? The audio version is very easy to listen to.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Unfortunately, I would have to say that the photo on the case was my favorite thing about this book on CD. I love mysteries of all kinds, but this book just did not appeal to me. It almost felt as if the author was trying too hard to convince the reader of the authenticity of the Irish setting. At times, the plot moved very slowly (really, is an entire disc about a game of darts necessary?) and at other times, something major happened so quickly that I had to backtrack to catch it. It's possible that I would enjoy this work better reading it instead of listening to it, but I doubt I'll give it another chance.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Irish Blarney? Perhaps, but that's okay. Irish brogues for Irish characters? That's okay, too, except it would have bee nice had he been able to change his voice for the main charactes (and I probably wouldn't even have mentioned it had I enjoyed the book). Even the ending was okay...and even unexpected, actually, which was nice.But the main character was so thoughoughly unlikable, how could I like the vehicle that brought him to me? If you are interested in narsissism, here's your book! This may be a book better read in print.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In The Pig Did It, we follow an American, Aaron, as recovers from heartbreak in County Kerry, Ireland. Staying with his Aunt (who "corrects" the classics to be more to her liking), he soon finds himself in the company of a pig (an actual pig, by the way) who won't let him alone. When the pig finds a skeleton out back in the garden, the skeleton of a missing neighbor, Aaron's Aunt Kitty, neighbor Lolly (on whom Aaron has a growing attraction), and he play a round-about game of finding out who really killed the young man and why. I'm a big fan of audiobooks, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone who reads this thread. They're good for putzing around the house and they've saved me from getting any grey hairs while commuting. For this one however, I wasn't really a big fan. The first book in a trilogy, the events that would normally seem charming and entertaining to me instead seemed forced and made me antsy. I didn't much care for any of the people in the book, and what other reviewers mentioned as lilting language and hilarious farce seemed like a whole lot of nothing about nothing. There were times (many times, if I'm honest) when I felt like I could feel the author trying really really hard to use as many rubbish "Blarney" sayings as possible. It's a short book, and for that I was thankful. The narrator, Chris Patton, does a fine job - and by fine I mean "alright" not "outstanding-gee-golly-whiz" - covering both a few different Irish accents and an American one, but I just couldn't keep th him and what he was saying. He reminded me of Campbell Scott - nothing wrong with his voice, he's a popular narrator, but he's just not for me. All in all, I wasn't a fan of this book. I'm giving it a generous 3 stars, why I don't know, it should probably be closer to two. I think this is a book that you either love or loathe indifferently (if such a thing is possible). I received this book through the ER program.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a bizarre little book. Aaron has gone to Ireland to rid himself of a perceived failed love by visiting his aunt Kitty. On the way there, he attempts to rescue a pig that the owner, Lolly, evidently doesn't want. The pig creates many issues, the biggest being the digging up of a body in Kitty's garden. The rest of the book involves the way the 2 women and a local man, Sweeney, handle the situation. Perhaps this is supposed to be a commentary on the lives of those who live in western Ireland. There are lots of long speeches, but no one will take the blame for the murder until the end, when all three claim to have done it. There's a rather strange ending too. I think there are more books following this one, but I won't read them, nor will I recommend this one to anyone. It's just too strange for my tastes. I finished it and thought, "Why?"
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I'm surprised to see that LT's recommendation feature thinks I will love this book, albeit with low certainy, because I certainly did not! While I'm sure the author found the protagonist's pretensions and incessant musing comic, I thought it was simply pathetic.And the ending was so convoluted I had to go back and read it twice -- did that REALLY just happen? Wait, did I really just read THAT? Well, I did but I shouldn't have. I won't be seeking out the sequel.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aaron McCloud has been disappointed in love. Well, not exactly. But he thinks he should mourn the loss of a girl he never won anyway and he sets off to his aunt's house in Ireland, the place he spent his childhood summers, in order to best mope and sigh and grieve this quasi-love spurned. But before he can properly sink into the requisite melancholy, a farce breaks out with him and the pig who follows him to his aunt's house squarely at its center. Vowing to return the pig in the morning, he is greeted by the sight of total destruction, the pig having torn up his aunt's garden and shed. More troubling, the pig has uncovered a skeleton in the cabbages. Aunt Kitty knows who the murdered man is and she has a very convincing tale of who might be the murderer, naming Lolly, the woman to whom it is assumed the pig belongs. The plot thickens when Lolly disavows any knowledge of the pig and furthermore, points a convincing finger at Sweeney as murderer. When Sweeney is apprised of the conjecture, he, in turn, spins a tale that indicts Kitty. In the meantime, Declan Tovey's skeleton has been unearthed, brought into the house, and starts to cause all sorts of antics to ensue. And through none of this can Aaron muster up the oomph needed to properly suffer over the demise of a love affair that was only all in his head.While a short novel, there is a hog-load of Irish blarney here. In the grand story-telling tradition, each character has the opportunity to make his or her case for what really happened to Declan Tovey while poor Aaron and the reader are only certain of one thing: that the pig unearthed the skeleton. Aaron, as an American, despite his familial ties to Kitty, doesn't understand the resolve of the three suspects to not involve the police nor can he quite figure out who among them has done in Declan. Regardless of his confusion, he is thoroughly involved by the time possessing the skeleton of a murdered man becomes a comedy of errors. The monologues by the main characters are a bit long but when they lead to such hilarity as they do here, they are well worth the effort to read through. I think I spent as much time as Aaron did, completely baffled by the trio of other characters and I wondered how they were going to come to terms with each other and their unstated (or perhaps mentioned in a roundabout, sideways sort of way) desires. Watching Aaron try, unsuccessfully, to wallow in self-pity was highly entertaining. And the other characters were equally quirky and enchanting. Eccentric and offbeat, this comedy about love and life and a skeleton unearthed by a pig will probably have you scratching your head but ultimately wondering what the pig could possibly be up to in the second book.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Well, I didn't think it was very funny, in fact I started to get bored about half way through. I found myself skimming through to the end to see what happened, and was as disappointed with the end as with the rest of the book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell is awesome! It is well crafted, compelling, and funny. It is simply yummy and I recommend it highly. I hope part two will be published soon!!
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5EnghOK, not greatInteresting tale told by Aaron McCloud - American relation of the Kerry McClouds who want time to pine over a (non) relationship goes to Ireland to visit his Aunt who is 2 yrs old than him. While there, a pig follows him home, and results ensure. Bring in the a few old wives tales, false love, a death of a local, etc etc.A little forced to be trite.
Book preview
The Pig Did It - Joseph Caldwell
The Pig Did It
ALSO BY JOSEPH CALDWELL
FICTION
The Pig Comes to Dinner
Bread for the Baker’s Child
The Uncle From Rome
Under the Dog Star
The Deer at the River
In Such Dark Places
THEATER
The King and the Queen of Glory
The Downtown Holy Lady
Cockeyed Kite
Clay for the Statues of Saints
The Bridge
The Pig Did It
JOSEPH CALDWELL
tahDELPHINIUM BOOKS
HARRISON, NEW YORK • ENCINO, CALIFORNIA
To
Robert Diffenderfer
… and about time, too!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The reader should assume that the characters in this tale, when speaking among themselves, are speaking Irish, the first language of those living in the western reaches of Ireland where the action takes place. What is offered here are American equivalents. When someone ignorant of the language is present, the characters resort to English.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Andrew Marvell,
To His Coy Mistress
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Preview: The Pig Comes to Dinner
Acknowledgments
1
Aaron McCloud had come to Ireland, to County Kerry, to the shores of the Western Sea, so he could, in solitary majesty, feel sorry for himself. The domesticated hills would be his comfort, the implacable sea his witness. Soon he would arrive at the house of his aunt, high on a headland fronting the west, and his anguish could begin in earnest.
Through the bus window now, Aaron could see that the pasture land of Ireland had been long since parceled out, the stones put into service as defining walls, creating what looked like a three-dimensional map, each border drawn in heaviest black, each territory a rectangle or rhomboid with an occasional square or triangle thrown in to vary the cartography.
On the upper slope of an unshaded hill a flock of sheep was slowly nibbling its way to the west as if clearing a path to the sea. Bunched together, a cloud of their own making, they concentrated on their appointed task, uncaring for whom the path was meant as long as the job put food in their stomachs. Above the flock, about ten feet from the nearest sheep, there was a shepherd, a man—or maybe a boy—wearing a sweater of wide horizontal stripes: reds, green, blue, gold, and closest to the waist, black. He was holding a crook, a shepherd’s crook. Antiquity lived. Customs survived. A whole history of the ancient land was being offered for his amazement. But Aaron was allowed no more than a few seconds to marvel at the gift he’d been given. It was not a shepherd’s crook. It was a furled umbrella, which the man propped against a rock, pulling a camera from the pouch at his side to take a picture of a sheep. He was no more a shepherd than Aaron was. He was a tourist at best, a government bureaucrat at worst.
The bus, more comfortable and modern than the Greyhounds and Trailways at home, sped along at what Aaron judged to be about fifty miles an hour, down the narrow road that curved and wound its way through and around the Kerry countryside. It would bring him by late afternoon to the village—a cluster of a few houses and a pub, Dockery’s—where his aunt Kitty would meet him and drive him the rest of the way to the old fieldstone house where he’d spent summers as a boy, equally unwanted by his newly divorced mother and father.
He loved the house, set as it was in a field not far from the edge of a cliff that dropped to the sea. Below was a beach that stretched along the ocean’s shore before ending at a rock face that rose from the sea itself and walled off the cove that lay on the farther side. When he’d stayed with his aunt and her family, he’d resented the wall, a barrier between him and the sandy shoreline of the cove. It separated him from the other children who could come to swim and wade in the quieter waters, to bury one another in the sand, and to build forts and castles that, had they been real, would surely have saved the land from the plundering foe that had swept down from the north and driven his ancestors all but into the sea.
But now the memory of the wall pleased him. His stretch of beach would be deserted. His solitude would be inviolate, his loneliness unobserved and unremarked except by the sea itself. There would, of course, be gulls, there would be curlews. He would hear their shrieks and watch the curve of their spread wings riding a current of air so rarefied that only a feather could find it. Perhaps there would be cormorants and, if he was lucky, a lone ship set against the horizon. There would be squalls and storms, crashing water, and thundering clouds. Lightning would crack the sky. Winds would lash the cliffs and—again, if he was lucky—rocks would be riven and great stones thrown into the sea. Then he, Aaron McCloud, would walk the shore unperturbed, his solitude, his loneliness, a proud and grieving dismissal of all that might intrude on his newly won sorrows.
Aaron had been unlucky in love. And now his body and his soul, trapped in perpetual tantrum, had come to parade their grievances within sight of the sea. Surely the rising waves would rear back in astonishment at his plight, cresting, then falling, bowing down at the sight of such suffering. Solemn would be his step, stricken his gaze. Only the vast unfathomable sea could be a worthy spectator to his sorrows. The culminating act of Aaron McCloud’s love for Phila Rambeaux would soon come to pass at this edge, this end of the ancient world.
At thirty-two Aaron had given himself permission to fall in love—or so he thought—with a woman inordinately plain, a student of his in a writing workshop at the New School in New York. She had undecided hair, mostly straight, but more frizzled than curled at the ends, halfway between brown and blond, the actual coloring left to whatever light might get caught in the unmanageable mass. Under the fluorescent glare of the classroom, she was blonde; in the muted light of the lobby, she was brunette. Her eyes were hazel, flecked with green, and for cheeks she had been given flat planes that slanted down from her eye sockets to her jaw. Her mouth consisted of a squat isosceles triangle, her nose a straight and common ridge, her chin uninflected, undimpled, a serviceable meeting place for the bony angles of her jaw.
But she had notable, beautiful hands, the hands of a harpist. Aaron had the feeling that if he were to press one of those hands to his face, the scent would be not of soap or expensive lotions but of some subtle balm secreted from within the hand itself, enthralling and mysterious. Yet for reasons unknown Aaron was inflamed not by the hands but by the face, the flat cheeks, the flecked eyes, the serviceable chin. His amorous urges were sustained as well by her habit of playing with her right ear whenever she was talking.
Her writing was wispy. She had an inborn antipathy for the specific, mistaking the obscure for the ambiguous. She lacked vulgarity, that gift most needed to transform intelligence into art. She’d been given no artistic equivalent to her notable hands.
And so, two years after his wife’s elopement to Akron, Ohio, with a baritone from the choir of Saint Joseph’s Church, Aaron decided to let his favor fall on Phila Rambeaux. How grateful the woman would be. She would be given the attentions of a man not without assets, a man noted for his easy charm, his easy wit, his easy allure. He was a published novelist and the recipient of several awards obscure enough to be considered prestigious. For his classes he had more applicants than he could accept. For his socializing he had more friends than he could accommodate. He owned a floor-through apartment in a brownstone on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. And, more important, he had a trim and taut physique, not the product of a grueling vanity that required a personal trainer, but maintained by a native restlessness—bordering, some said, on the manic. Also, he could cook.
Phila would be a pushover. Aaron’s lovemaking would drive her to the edge of dementia, making rescue necessary, a rescue he would effect with reassuring kisses, a consoling embrace characterized by withheld strength, followed by the reviving ministrations of whispered invitations for yet another journey to the boundaries of madness. He would even, when the right moment came, confess that for her, and for her alone, he had decided to free his sexuality from the confines to which he’d committed it when the baritone had made off with Lucille, the soprano. For Phila, and for Phila alone, he had encouraged the resurgence of his heretofore disciplined carnality. Restored to the fullness of his manhood, ardent with awakened lust, aching with a resuscitated tenderness, he made his move.
But Phila Rambeaux was not about to be pushed over. When invited for coffee, then for a drink, then for dinner, she didn’t so much refuse as convey her perplexity. She seemed not to have the least idea what he was talking about, as if he had introduced a subject so alien as to preclude intelligent comprehension. If he had asked her would she like to harvest cocoa beans in the Congo, she could not have given a more bewildered No, thank you.
The offer of a movie, then a play, then an opera, was met by the same confused response, neither annoyed by his persistence nor curious about his intent. The very idea of his existence outside the classroom was so far beyond her powers of perception that her incomprehension was absolute. He was not so much dismissed as dissolved.
Aaron did, however, get her to come to a reading of his new novel by making it a class assignment. She attended but was gone before he could wade through the crush and distinguish her by his attentions. As a last resort he gave a party in his apartment, inviting all the students. Phila came, wearing a dress of black silk with orange and blue geometrics that looked like intergalactic debris left behind by a failed space probe. When he asked if she’d stay to help clean up, Aaron was given a perplexed shake of the head as if cleaning up were an idea foreign to her understanding. It was, however, when Ms. Rambeaux left, laughing, in the company of the single student in Aaron’s class who could claim any talent, one Igor something-or-other, that Aaron was seized by the Furies and taken into torments never before visited upon the human psyche. And so the party ended.
Then the semester was over, and Phila Rambeaux was accepted at a writers’ conference in Utah. The recommendation he had written for her specified that she had no talent—whatsoever—obviously the conference’s most compelling prerequisite. And so she was off—gone for good. Aaron would not wait for her return. He would pack up his anguish and haul it off to Ireland. He would carry as well his resurgent unappeased sexuality; he would gently lay, alongside his comb, his toothbrush, and his deodorant, a determination never to repeat this folly. Women had had their chance. There were limits to his munificence, and from now on those limits would be strictly observed. All this he brought to Ireland, to County Kerry, to the shores of the Western Sea.
Pigs! Pigs!
Aaron heard the taunt through the heavy glass windows of the bus. Two teenagers coming toward them on their bikes repeated the cry as they wheeled past the windows. Pigs! Pigs!
Aaron didn’t doubt that this was some social commentary aimed at those who sat passively and were carted comfortably from one place to another in adjustable, upholstered seats. Pigs!
The shout faded in the distance. Aaron twisted in his seat to catch some final glimpse of the insolent bikers, but they were gone. The only other movement among the passengers was a general straining not in the direction of the hostile youths but toward the front of the bus. A man in a heavy tweed suit snorted, the sound not unlike that of the animal just mentioned. A young woman closed her book and studied her fingernails. Those in the aisle seats leaned sideways for a clearer view ahead. A tall skinny man got up and went to the front of the bus. His hair, whitened with what seemed to be zinc oxide, rose in stiff spikes from his scalp. He was wearing a leather vest over a red silk shirt, his pants a pair of baggy blue sweats, and his shoes the obligatory untied Reeboks. The youth peered through the windshield, blocking the view of anyone else who might want to take a look up ahead.
The driver had slowed the bus and by the time they had rounded a curve, Aaron understood the bikers’ cry. There, crowding the road, were the pigs, a mob more than a herd, each squealing and screaming as if the destined slaughter were already under way.
A few pigs were now clambering up the rock walls that lined the roadway, others trotting up the hills, with about four of them sniffing the wheel of a truck stuck in a ditch. One of the front wheels was still spinning, as if the truck’s fortune, for better or worse, would be made manifest at any moment.
The bus stopped; the door opened. The spike-haired man was the first off, then the driver. With some pushing and shoving of their own—as if taking their example from the pigs—the passengers, Aaron included, emptied the bus. A frail elderly woman elbowed her way to the front with all the courtesy and consideration of a fullback.
The round-up of an escaped pig is not a spectator sport. Almost without exception the passengers were wading in among the pigs or running along the road, clapping their hands, calling out, Suuee! Suuee! Suuee!
A young woman with a switch pulled from the nearby thicket was trying to herd the pigs together in the road and move them in the direction the bus and the truck had been going. She was, Aaron noted, a bit too self-consciously costumed as a swineherd in her baggy black woolen pants and thick woolen sweater, dark gray, spattered with the rust colors of earth, the green stains of crushed grass, and a few purple streaks of unknown origin.
And yet, to Aaron, she seemed more a dancer than a keeper of pigs. Her sneakered feet managed to escape being dainty, but only just. And their quick pivots and graceful turns allowed him to guess with fair accuracy the easy movements of a most feminine form that not even the outsize clothing could begin to conceal. Then, too, her auburn hair would be flung across her face, first one side, then the other, suggesting a happy abandon hardly consistent with her present predicament, revealing in intermittent flashes the eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, chin, and neck of a woman of vital beauty and immediate allure.
She was laughing, clearly enjoying herself to the full, as if a ditched truck and a mob of confused pigs were one of life’s more surprising delights. With each flick of the switch she would let out a small cry of triumph, a point scored in a game that provided unending amusement. The pigs, in return, raised their snouts and screamed their indignation.
One of the passengers, an elderly woman, had made her way into the middle of the clamoring beasts and was slapping their snouts and spanking their hams, more intent on punishing their behavior than restoring order. The man in the tweed suit ran along the side of the herd, yelling, clapping his hands over the pigs’ heads, sending even more of the frightened animals off into the pastures that lined the road. The zinc-haired youth had placed himself a few yards down the slope of a hill and had made it his job to see that no pigs passed into the valley below. Stamping a foot, shouting, hunching forward in warning, he did his best to encourage a return to the road; but, to complicate his task, more than a few of the pigs seemed attracted to his performance, and the youth, to escape their charge, was forced to move farther and farther down the slope, the pigs in pursuit, eager for yet more sport.
The man in tweed was running alongside a pig as it raced up a hill, a contest to see who would make it first to the top. Two passengers—ample matrons of great dignity whom Aaron had heard conversing only in French—were standing to the side, nodding their disdain, speaking to each other like sportscasters commenting on the game in progress.
Some pigs stood next to the truck, content to wait for things to calm down. Others rooted in the grass with their snouts, searching out whatever tasty grubs might be found beneath the turf. One pig, pinker than the rest, began prodding its fellows with its snout, bumping, shoving, grunting, and snorting even louder than the piercing shrieks of those whose dignity was being offended. Only when, with a few discreet sideswipes, it tried to force the two Frenchwomen into the herd did the swineherd, the beauty with the switch, put an end to its presumptions by driving it deep into the middle of the pack.
Merrily she flicked her switch, claiming with a quick nip one pig, then another, reminding each in turn that it belonged to her and might as well accept the happy fact. The woman’s eyes, like the switch, seemed to flick and dart, rejoicing in the calamity, more interested in the chaos than in the rescue of her stock.
To show he wasn’t a tourist, Aaron snapped a reed-thin switch from the bramble. With brutish disregard he stripped it of its leaves, swished it twice in the air like a fencing master testing his rapier, and looked around for a task worthy of his style and dash. He would pick one of the more wayward pigs and bring it safely back into the fold. Two were sniffing their way along the rock wall, another was already halfway down the hill toward the valley, three were trotting back to the road, their playtime at an end. One, on the upward slope, had raised its snout and was squealing, begging for rescue, another coming down the hill slowly, almost daintily, as if it had relieved itself in the gorse and didn’t want anyone to know what it had been up to.
Aaron saw his pig. Or, more accurately, his pig saw him.
There, about twenty feet up the hill, it stood, its front legs brazenly spread to declare its defiance. Its huge head was thrust forward on a neck and shoulders that a bull might envy, its snout twitching, daring Aaron to come closer. The eyes, pink-rimmed slits, blinked, peered, then blinked again. The ears stiffened, the tail lifted, and from out behind came a big arc of piss, a sturdy yellow stream that, for some reason, made him think of Coors beer. Aaron, aloud, counted to three. The arc collapsed and disappeared. Aaron started up the hill, stick in hand. He would go around the pig, approach it from above, apply the switch, and drive the animal down to the road. As he went up the hillside, the pig turned, keeping an eye on him. Aaron kept moving, higher. The pig itself turned some more, still watching. By the time Aaron had arrived at the place from which he’d expected to make his attack, the pig had turned around completely. The two of them faced each other once again.
Aaron would tolerate no more. He stomped down the slope toward the pig, uttering a high and fearful yell that could have been mistaken for the cry of someone who’d seen a mouse. The pig, unimpressed, stood its ground. Aaron stopped. With the switch he made two quick slashes in the air. The pig blinked but didn’t move. Aaron went to his left. He would charge from the side. But just before he could complete the maneuver, the pig, with a gruff snort, turned and made a dash up the hill. Aaron hesitated only a moment, not for decision but for adjustment to the shock. The pig was not cooperating. Then he sped up the hill, the held switch bending again and again like a divining rod bewildered that its divinations were being repeatedly ignored.
The pig continued up the hill, gaining speed as it broke into a full gallop. Aaron followed, determined now that the pig would not escape. Just below the summit, the pig veered to the left and started toward the eastern slope that curved around to the other side of the hill. Aaron gained slightly, but he began to worry about how long his breath would hold out. He wasn’t exactly panting, but he could tell that the breaths were becoming shorter and shallower and there was a slight stitch in his right side. Heart attack or appendicitis, either could fell him at any moment, but he no longer cared. He would get the pig.
For its part the pig was covering ground at a fair clip. To Aaron it seemed that it was deliberately leading him, luring him farther and farther away from the bus, from the road, from his fellow passengers, like Moby-Dick, tempting him into uncharted territory, to a hidden valley beyond the hill. If that were its aim, Aaron would become the pig’s Ahab, his