Moo (39 page)

And then he didn’t wake up again until that guy was back, with another slam of the door. Earl stared at him through slit eyes, but maintained his deep breathing, as if asleep. The guy said, “Off your feed, eh, Sooie? No shit, either. You sick? Well, it’s Christmas, and I’m not hanging around to figure this out. I suppose you can hold it till tomorrow, can’t you?” And then he left. Good riddance, thought Earl.

The trouble with sleeping all day, though, was that then you were up all night. Earl, a hog of preternaturally regular habits, had never been up all night before, and he would have been the first to agree that it was not an experience he was likely to repeat.

First of all, it was completely dark, because that guy hadn’t left even a single light on. Second of all, it was unusually quiet. Though it was always more or less quiet in Earl’s pen, the total darkness seemed somehow to amplify the silence. If Earl simply lay there, hardly breathing, hardly rustling his straw, the silence flowed around him, seemed to pour into his eyes and mouth and nose as well as his ears. Seemed to wash over his hide like the warm baths Bob gave
him every so often. But it didn’t put him to sleep. The thing was, eyes open or eyes closed, he saw the same black screen no matter where he turned his head, and on it, after a bit, little flashes of color began to appear. At first they were mere dots, then larger dots, then streaks. As a hog, Earl didn’t wonder much about the future, but in his experience, most odd things that happened were followed by pain, so the dots and streaks made him uneasy, until it was clear that they were just dots and streaks. He lay there and enjoyed them, not really analyzing them too deeply. What a mood he was in! Lost somewhere, it seemed, but neither anxious nor frightened, hardly aware of his bulky body and the discomfort, pain, and effort that were its daily lot.

Then, inside and contained by the darkness, he saw light and he sensed activity around him. He made himself very still, and the activity grew more intense. What it felt like was being about to open his eyes and stand up, stand up and run around, as if standing up and running around were the most automatic thing in the world. It felt as though, if he were to be just a little quieter, he could hear something, but he didn’t know what it was. And no matter how quiet he made himself be, he could not be quiet enough to hear what it was, but whatever it was was reassuring and familiar. Earl gave out a deep sigh.

Then the feeling changed again, as if he had moved past the earlier feeling into something new. The something new was a sense of anticipation, rather like the feeling he got every morning when he heard Bob outside the door, but this was a hotter and more eager anticipation, the passion of a younger hog, and then Earl could place what was happening to him. He was remembering.

Of course it was all there—he had a brain the size of a grapefruit after all—and while it was somewhat lacking in the cerebral cortex division, Earl, like every other brain-owning individual, usually only bothered to use a small percentage of its intellectual capacity.

Earl did not surmise why he hadn’t ever remembered more than the most daily concerns—mired in routine? or possibly denial? Now, however, sunk in darkness, he sensed the mundane fall away, and he distinctly remembered what it was that made his youthful self so excited. It was the out-of-doors.

As a well-bred hog, Earl had been gestated and born in an ultramodern confinement complex. Not for him the hurly-burly of the traditional muddy hogpen, or, God forbid, a half-wild youth among pin oaks, nosing all the time for acorns. He was born to be air-conditioned
and heated, to lie on a smooth grate and drink from an automatic waterer, to eat milled food laced with antibiotics, wormers, and growth enhancers. Nevertheless, it had happened that around the time of Earl’s birth the farmer who bred him found his complex rather lightly booked—only three or four of the sows had litters, and it was a late Indian summer—and so he had amused himself by letting the animals out in the yard every day, they were so lively and cute.

The brown crackling leaves lay on the sunlit, moist grass, and the black branches of trees laced against a sky that day after day poured forth a light that Earl had never seen before or since. All the piglets gambolled and frolicked in the yard, and the farmer sat nearby, his yearly work of planting and harvesting done, remarking to his wife that the grandkids should see this. The sows enjoyed the air and the late-season warmth, and rooted around here and there for some sharp-tasting morsel or other, the farm dogs wandered over and barked in their official capacities, the farm cats looked on from a distance, and the days, five or six of them, passed in a rare dream of mammalian amity. Crows cawed in the trees, the wind blew, and Earl stored up a treasure of memories that only now, having set his work aside, he found the time to sift through.

They seemed to play themselves out on the screen of darkness that enveloped him whether his eyes were open or shut. That green, that blue, that brightness. The impact of one of his siblings barrelling into him, rolling him against the cool earth. His own trotters sinking into softness as he jumped about. Most important, all the scents and odors that mingled everywhere, all of them distinct, but none of them strong—much unlike the confinement building, where the odor of himself and his companions was overpowering.

He gave himself up to his memories, and lay in a half-stupor on his bed of straw, unsleeping but remote from his trough and his ventilation system and his toys and his duties, and also from the pains in his legs and his back.

When the guy came in with his usual slam the next morning (well, it was almost afternoon, but how would Bob ever find that out?), his conscience smote him at the sight of the still hog, and he panicked—dead, for sure, and this was some kind of unique experiment—and he ran out and called Bob, who was having Christmas breakfast with his family after opening presents. Bob thought first of Dr. Bo and second of Earl and jumped in his car without finishing his waffle, just putting a peanut butter sandwich and two pieces of sausage in his
pocket, and by the time Bob got back, Earl was on his feet at the trough going at it as if nothing had ever happened and that guy was talking fast about how often he had come over and when he had last checked him the night before and first checked him that morning, and Earl pretended not to notice the quarrel. Bob felt him all over while the guy was standing there, and said, “Well, he seems okay. You’re lucky. I’ll pay you for two visits, is all.” And after the guy left, Bob picked up the scratching stick and sat on the bars of the pen and scratched Earl on the back WHILE he was eating, a highly unusual and indulgent procedure to which Earl didn’t object at all.

C
HAIRMAN
X
COULD NOT
help getting Cecelia mixed up with the last remaining virgin cloud forest, which that pompous, bombastic, cretinous imbecile from the economics department was doing his best to destroy, and so every thought of Cecelia, which would normally be at least a little soothing, a little refreshing to his spirit, was now infused with anxiety and rage. It ran both ways. Because he had not as yet happened to mention to the Lady X that he had been having an affair with Cecelia, he could not quite bring himself to mention the cloud forest and seek her advice about what to do about it. If he brought up the cloud forest, then that would lead straight to Cecelia, and that would lead straight to confession of the affair, which would lead straight to discussion of their sex life, which would lead straight to self-doubt and self-blame on the part of the Lady X, which would lead to a discussion of their relationship, which would bring on a crisis, which would force them to make a decision about the future, which, as he was in no condition to be making decisions, would fall to her, and God knew where that would lead, but Chairman X did not want to risk it, so he sat through all the Christmas festivities in an agony of silence, because, as the Lady X had always said, he didn’t know the first thing about discretion.

Every year, to open the season of celebration, they went through their belongings and chose the best of what they had ceased to play with or wear and boxed it up for Toys for Tots. This year, he didn’t bother to cajole them. If they wanted to hang on to outgrown items for no good reason except habit, he let them. They began giving him funny looks and making their arguments anyway. He shrugged. When they went to the grocery store to buy food for the can drive, the eldest tentatively chose two cans of roast beef hash. He didn’t say a word, didn’t steer her toward bags of dried beans and masa harina and un-sulphured dried apricots. She grew uneasy and on her own chose a box of raisins. He himself was too glum to be selective. He chose four jars of Skippy peanut butter. At the Christmas tree farm (on
marginal land, rows of live Christmas trees planted in turf did an excellent job of holding the soil) he settled on the first Scotch pine he saw, instead of whipping and goading them all the way to the back of the acreage in search of the fullest, most symmetrical and fragrant balsam. He showed no interest in making cookies or molding the bean loaf into Christmassy shapes. When they asked for what they wanted, he didn’t harangue them with his usual good cheer about the Siamese twinship of Christianity and capitalism as perfectly represented by the so-called Christmas spirit, which was really just a sensation of culturally permitted greed. In fact, Chairman X didn’t interfere at all in the Christmas joy of his family, and while they were all obscurely grateful, it did make everyone secretly uneasy, but nobody said anything because to bring it up was to risk reminding him, and then he might start in again.

The eldest went so far as to mention it to her best friend over the phone. “My dad is so weird,” she said with her habitual disloyalty, but then she did not feel the usual relief, and she let it drop. As weird as he was, it occurred to her, she did not actually want him to change!

Meanwhile, Beth was distracted enough with Christmas preparations to merely be grateful. When she did think about it, she thought that it was the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe that was affecting him, and even that he had arrived on his own at an interpretation of that event much like hers (communism was a nice idea but it didn’t work and you couldn’t actually live in such an extreme way. Even Christmas wasn’t so bad if you exercised moderation and care for others). As for his unwonted silence, well, however you INTERPRETED an event, there were still feelings to deal with, and let him deal with them on his own for once. She herself was going to bake lots of cookies and buy a few manufactured ornaments for the tree and maybe have a party, which they had never done before. When she told him that, he just said, “Oh. If you want to, okay by me.”

Beth, who had grown up in a normal American family (which Chairman X had characterized frequently over the years as a purely commercial enterprise fatally corrupted by the capitalist need for a cheap workforce and an ever-expanding market), had envisioned some kind of consumerist profligacy on the part of the children, but they couldn’t do it. Great conservatives, they opted for the homemade ornaments, the whole-grain cookies, the traditional donation of food and time to the homeless shelter, the stringing of the tree in the front yard with popcorn and cranberries for the birds. When Beth pulled
out the MasterCard to charge a present for Amy, the eldest stopped her with reminders of mailing lists she would then get on, business and probably government files their names would subsequently appear in. The usual Christmas. And they didn’t have the party, either. Too much work.

It was not until the afternoon of Christmas Day, the first ebb of the season, that Beth realized that something else was going on. The older children were out sledding and Amy was taking a nap. X was sitting on the couch, admiring the Christmas tree, or so Beth thought. She flopped down beside him with a happy sigh, and said, nestling under his (unresponsive, but she wasn’t going to notice that) arm, “Well! This is nice. The tree looks good this year.”

He said, “Does it?”

“Well, look at it!”

“Mmm.”

She sat up and turned to look at him. He looked glum and his skin, usually flushed as an effect of pumping adrenaline, looked gray and chill. She said, “Are you all right?” She felt his forehead with the back of her hand.

“Oh, sure.”

“You look blue.” Actually, he did. Blue. She kissed him lightly, affectionately, on the nose, the way a wife does who’s wary of attributing neediness before the husband has indicated that such an attribution is allowable. She said, “The kids were great this year. I think your policy of leaving a lot of decisions up to them was just right. They’re old enough now—”

He put his face in his hands.

She pretended not to notice. “—to make up their own minds about the consequences of their actions. Did I tell you that when I pulled out that old MasterCard—”

He said, “Oh, God,” but it was muffled by his hands. She pretended that he said, “Oh, good.” She said, “Did you like the vest? I think those Seventh Generation sweaters and vests are terrif—”

He seemed to sniffle.

“—ic. And not expensive, considering. You can wear it with anything. If you add up all the times you wear something like that, it turns out to be a bargain—”

She tried another tack. “I did like the flower-embroidered blouse. I was just surprised because it’s not the sort of thing I usually wear, but I’m sure it’ll look better when I’ve lost a few pounds, you know
I’m amazed at how much longer it takes to lose it all after the baby’s born when you’re in your forties compared to before—”

“Shh,” he said. “Shhhh.” Well, that’s what she should have done, she thought afterward. She should have shrugged her shoulders and stood up and gone into the kitchen and done the dishes, and then gotten Amy up from her nap and served Christmas pasta (broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes) for dinner and kept her mouth shut and her mind closed. But her mind opened up at the sight of his unusual distress, became first a great vacuum that sucked the story right out of him, and later—well, that was later.