Around ten o’clock Pastor Lyndon gave a long and rousing sermon using the story of Isaac and Abraham as a centerpiece, repeating the refrain, “If the Lord God desires it, it shall be done!” until he got even some of those from the other side riled up. Old Man Gordeau actually raised his hand before speaking out of turn this time, and said, “Forgive me Pastor, but I read the Good Book cover to cover and I don’t remember no mention of leading pigs into the nettles with flowers around their neck.”
Pastor Lyndon said, “And neither did you read about the town of Whitbrow. Yet you did read about sacrifice. Do you believe, Brother Gordeau, that sacrifice was meant only for the children of Israel? The Lord has made manifest His desire for the Chase of Pigs through tradition. We were not present when the Lord made creation, nor were we of an age to question when our grandfathers saw fit to lead the first pigs away. Will we call them fools that nursed us and nursed our mothers? Will we now walk over their graves to put meat on our plate? We should thank the Lord for letting the choice between Him and Mammon stand so clearly before us.”
Anna Muncie, the teacher of the younger grades, had the unpleasant task of following Pastor Lyndon. She said, “I am just as right with Jesus as anyone here. Yet I think we are doing our children a disservice to raise them in the shadow of such an ignorant tradition as this. My late husband had been to Spain before we married, and he told me all about bullfights. That is also an ignorant tradition, although he allowed that he quite enjoyed them. Now, we have no control over what the Spanish do in Spain, but we have control over our own actions. I try to tell the kids about the marvels of the modern world and flight and medicine and all that, but then we stand around and let little girls decorate pigs we should be eating and shoo those pigs away for no good reason. Help me to help our kids not be savages. Thank you.”
Old Man Gordeau called Eudora Nichols as the final speaker of the evening, noting that the meeting would reconvene the next night for others who wished to have their say before the aldermen voted.
She captivated them.
I watched her do it.
If the men wanted to hate her for being a woman or a Yankee, her beauty soothed them and her reason made them listen. If the women resented her beauty, then the kindness in her voice made them forgive her for it. The kindness told them that she would never try to turn their husbands, that she would never look down her nose at them if they were plain, nor envy them if they, too, were cleverly made.
She did not use any new arguments; the idea that the money saved from the Chase would help to ease at least a few of Whitbrow’s troubles had been addressed before. She did offer one new proposal, though.
“Why not fashion pigs out of straw or branches and decorate them? Perhaps the labor would be sacrifice enough. Ursula and the others could still weave flowers through them. And they could be carried out to the same place. I don’t know. I’m not as religious as I perhaps should be. And I’m not from here, as you all know. But I care about what happens here, and I hope you’ll agree with me that the money from the collections might do better buying clothes or paying bank notes for those who are struggling instead of reimbursing farmers for wasted animals.”
She got considerable applause.
Gordeau called out, “I’m sorry I called you a carpetbagger!”
“Mr. Gordeau, when did you call me that?” she said.
“Not to your face, ma’am.”
When she was done and she walked away from the podium, some looked back at me where I was beaming at her from my spot against the wall. Some looked at Pastor Lyndon to see if he was looking unfavorably upon her, but he was not.
When Paul called the end of the meeting and those of us who were inside went out and mingled with those who were outside, we all got treated to one more spectacle.
Martin Cranmer was on his bicycle. He rode around the town square fast like a little boy, and he howled. He did not howl loud enough for anyone to fuss at him about the noise, but he howled low so that when he circled near the town hall everyone heard plainly what he was doing. The ones nearest the road watched him as if he were a stuntman or an acrobat doing a trick, so he did a trick. He put one foot on the seat and stood with the other foot held up high behind him, steering shakily and grinning at them through his beard.
“That man’s three sheets to the wind,” a woman said, and, as if he had been prompted, Martin hit a stone and fell, slowly and luxuriously, the way hard drinkers fall even in accidents involving machines.
Lester Gordeau’s younger brother Saul ran to help the taxidermist up and the sheriff came over, too, and talked quietly to him so that he nodded his head and pedaled off gently.
“He’s alright,” Sheriff Blake said. “Nothing hurt but his liver. Let’s all go home now.”
And that was what they did, each to his own home.
And I believe none slept well that night, and none remembered any good dream.
THE ALDERMEN HELD their vote the next night, deciding six against three that no more pigs should be herded into the woods. This was the same margin by which the advocates of the Chase had won two years before when the same issue had come up following the slaughter of piglets for the Hog Reduction Program. The decision was read and entered into the minutes at 8:15. Lawton Butler, whose pigs were next on the registry and due for surrender in the coming weeks, reportedly got up out of his seat and raised his hands to the ceiling as if he were about to be baptized.
Eudora went to this meeting without me.
I had begged off so I could work, but what really happened was that I sat in front of the typewriter and nursed three glasses of Drambuie.
Dora said not many came at all.
ALL THE DRAMA and the most compelling speakers had gone the night before; besides which, it had been widely believed that the ceremony would not survive a second vote, so few were surprised when the decision was entered.
What did surprise the community was the death of Paul Miller, alderman and owner of the general store.
It surprised Paul, too.
The pain hit him while he was standing on a stepladder to stack flour on a high shelf. It shocked him so that he stepped off the ladder wrong and cracked his head, dropping a sack of flour, which burst all over him and the floor. This happened early in the morning two days after the vote.
Dr. McElroy, an old-time black-bag doctor who kept his office in the back of his house, was the only one who was not surprised.
He filled us in at the general store.
Why was I hanging around there? Why wasn’t I at the typewriter? Because I had to go into those woods next, that’s why.
Where are your pants, my friend?
“I told him his heart was not bad insofar as I heard no murmurs or irregular beats, but that his restin heart rate was high, and he didn’t need an MD to tell him he was carryin too much. I told him he had a clean bill of health so long as he’d promise to lay off the fat meat, cut his portions and start takin walks. He only heard what he wanted to hear. Like most of us, I reckon. Maggie Whaley found him all white with flour on his floor, an she came runnin for me. I told her he was dead when he hit the floor and she couldn’t of done a thing; truth is, he was probably still tickin, but that’s the kind a thing you say. Either way, he was all done when I listened to that big chest of his. No more prime rib for you, old man. It’s a sorry damn shame is what it is.”
Paul Miller was buried in a very large box. His funeral was well attended despite the rains that came on the tail end of a hurricane that had given hell to the Florida Keys. People strained to hear the pastor’s words in the wind.