Snowball's Chance Page 2

  In another first (or at least the first that anyone could remember), this pronouncement by the pigs was openly derided. At the posthumous awards presentation (Animal Hero, First Class), there were even a few stealthy hecklers—hooters and honkers. Squealer wasn’t so terrible, after all—but surely, a pig who in his last days was pushed around in a wheelbarrow, as he could not even sustain his girth on four legs, was no pig who had, as it was claimed, died of “a lifetime of exertion.” It would have taken old Squealer himself to explain that a pig buried in a piano case wasn’t funny.

  The last of the old pigs to take control was Minimus. He, like the others before him, was considered one of the original heroes of the rebellion. (And yet, his ascent was cause for much surprise, as aside from compose a few poems, nobody could accurately pinpoint what he had done.) Though robust, Minimus was quite advanced in years—and to address concerns that the next succession might be turbulent, Pinkeye, the most powerful, and incidentally, well-liked pig of the younger generation, was selected to fill the newly created position, Next Leader.

  So Pinkeye kissed ducklings and lambs, as Minimus went about managing the farm. A silent Leader, Minimus was a mystery to be feared and respected. The dogs were loyal to his service, as were the other pigs, just as it had always been. And yet there was a new calm—unprecedented—a calm bespeaking, perhaps, a better future, or perhaps, the darkness of days to come.

  It was one night—an average sort of normal May night—that there was an extra-extraordinary disturbance in the stalls. The moon low on the horizon, a figure had appeared at the gates. It was a strange figure—unfamiliar in his dark suit with pleated pants and a wide-lapel. The animal (was it an animal?) walked on two feet, wore shoes and a brimmed hat, and carried a briefcase. A few steps behind him, a goat was similarly accoutered. (Was it a goat? Yes, it was a goat. Surely, a most sophisticated goat.)

  The dog in attendance at the outer gate barked ferociously at the pair—though not many of the barn animals paid him much mind, as the dogs at the outer gate were particularly high-strung beasts, known to be incited to woof by causes so innocuous as moon shadows and silverfish. One of the cows, no doubt bolstered by the anonymity of night, belted out her exasperation at having been, once again, so rudely awoken—

  “Shaaat-up!”

  In actuality, however, the scene that took place at the outer gate was not nearly so common as the cow imagined—for although the cause of the shepherd’s excitement was a stranger, and not a silverfish, after what seemed scarcely more than a few well-chosen words, the guard dog, having dropped to his forelegs, was backing away on his belly. Mouth closed, eyes wide, he lowered his head and tucked his tail under his haunches—as the briefcased pair, cutting elegant if foreboding silhouettes against the indigo sky, breached the outer gate with no more discussion.

  From her perch in the hayloft, Norma the cat, who had been watching the moon through the chinks in the barn, was the single animal to witness the brief exchange. Norma, like most cats, was more interested in being a cat than a member of the Manor Farm. Yet she was an extremely personable creature—always playful. And, excepting those times she was lazing around in the shade while the other animals were huffing in the sun, she was widely appreciated.

  “Sssssssss!” she hissed at the broken windowpane—her back arched, her claws extended, her hair on end.

  This, as would be expected, immediately woke the rats, who endeavored to keep themselves well attuned to the cat. Seeing that Norma was nowhere near their nest (for there were nights when the feline, overly affable, chose from among them some unfortunate favorite to frolic to death), the rats scurried along the high beams to see for themselves what had caused such unease.

  What the rats saw were the two figures—a goat, and now it could be discerned, a pig—crossing the hayfield to the barn.

  The sheep too, arising, looked to the nearing comers. Nervously, they paced their stalls. “Ohhhh,” they fretted anxiously—

  “Shall we worry? Shall we worry?”

  With that, the old donkey Benjamin woke. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm (as old as yesterday itself, said some of the geese) and lowering his fourth leg, as donkeys sleep on three legs, he turned to a slat missing from the side of his stall—his eyes cynical and bitter as ever.

  As the story went, long ago, Benjamin had suffered some disappointment, and maybe lost a friend, or two. And that was why he hardly spoke, except to utter an occasional—

  “None of you have seen a donkey die, and none of you will.”

  This was said with an enormous remorse. And as he spoke, Benjamin would look at an animal as if he knew exactly where that animal was in his or her life. And the farm animals shuddered to look back at Benjamin, as each of them had personally experienced this cruel wisdom—Benjamin looking at you, and remembering the day you were born, and knowing what day you were in, and foreseeing the day you would die. And then, Benjamin turning coolly away, and rather than weeping, saying—

  “Hard life goes on,” which was the other thing he said.

  But tonight, as Benjamin lifted his head to look out at the figures crossing the hayfield, an animation, however briefly, flitted across his face. In his expression, there was fear, and glee—and even hope. All the animals were riveted on Benjamin—what would he make of the figures? Even the three steeds—who were argued by the sheep to be the dumbest animals on the farm—knew enough to gauge Benjamin for some answer.

  The cows lowed—

  “What is it? What do you remember, Benjamin?”

  Benjamin, having known many of the cows for a long time, would, on rare occasion, help them to remember. But tonight, as rare an occasion as it might be, he just backed away from the missing slat—unresponsive.

  Startlingly—so much closer than the barking at the gate, the animals heard the blood-curdling growl of dogs. Just outside the barn doors, two of the German shepherds had borne down upon the strangers. The canine rumble was as horrifying as an opened vein, and the animals cowered, as if to hide their own blood.

  And yet, the pig answered the menace in a voice confident and knowing—

  “I have seen larger dogs than you. I have smelled them. They are pungent with bear and cougar. They would take you in their jaws and carry you to their burrows, where they would feed you to their young. I have made these dogs my dogs. And now you will be my dogs—or you will be meat and bone.”

  The pair of dogs, so fierce only a moment before, tested their voices to bark, and heard emanate from their own throats no more than pathetic yelps.

  “Sit,” said the pig. And the two dogs sat.

  The cows, who didn’t much like the dogs, as they were an aggressive lot who were always getting underhoof, recognized an eminence in this pig, and they directed the cat—

  “Unlatch the barn door.”

  Norma, scuttling down the rail to the hayloft, pawed, pawed, at the wooden lever, until the door swung wide—and the finely tailored pig crossed the threshold into the dim kerosene glow of the barn.

  Upon sight of the animal, there was the hoarse craw of the raven, Moses, who, high above in the rafters, none of the animals had known was in attendance—

  “Snowball!”

  The two guard dogs, at the sound of the name, managed to overcome their fear—and growled again as they rose from their haunches. But with merely a twist of the head, the pig turned them back. They shrank and whimpered—

  “I’m a small dog. Small.”

  The raven crawed again—

  “It’s Snowball!”

  The name, to many of the animals, did not have the resonance that one might expect, as their memories were too short. But after a minute or so of murmuring, most of those present had an inkling of who Snowball was—and his wicked lot in history.

  The cows definitely remembered that, however many years ago, Snowball had snuck in during the days to upset the pails, and in the nights, to milk them in their sleep. The chickens also retained some idea of Snowball�
�breaking eggs and stealing corn. And even a few of the sheep thought they remembered that Snowball had destroyed the windmill.

  Snowball held out his hooves—

  “You have been told that I trampled the spring shoots. That I gnawed the bark off fruit trees. That I broke windows and blocked drains. That I stole the key to the store-shed and threw it down the well. That I planted weeds, and mixed their seed with the seed of the vegetables. That I conspired with the enemy farms of Foxwood and Pinchfield!”

  The animals broke into a wild tumult. They clacked and snorted to each other in anger—yes, they had heard of the traitor Snowball! The villain, Snowball!

  Raising his voice above the din, Snowball continued—

  “You have heard that I am a spreader of lies and rumors. That I was an agent of evil from the very start. But I ask you now to remember, not what you have heard, but what you have seen!”

  And with that, Snowball stripped himself of his blazer, his tie, his cufflinks, and his shirt. This was not the chest of any pig that any of the animals had seen in a long, long time. Few remembered having ever seen an old pig so muscular and lean. Where the pigs of the farm were fat and decrepit, Snowball had a body that every animal in the barn recognized as his own body—hard with years of hard sorrow and hard work.

  The Yorkshire boar turned, and showed the scars on his pink back—buckshot. Wicked burns striped his flesh. And the animals, now gathering together into the center of the barn, began to talk amongst themselves. Someone remembered that Snowball had attempted to have them all killed at the Battle of Windmill. No, someone else remembered, it was the Battle of Cowshed—and he was only censured for cowardice. One of the brighter cows seemed to recollect that it was Napoleon who had inflicted the wound upon Snowball—but that was with his teeth, not buckshot.

  Their eyes questioning, the animals turned to Benjamin, as he was the sole creature who remembered things exactly the way they happened. But Benjamin wasn’t revealing anything.

  “Life’s always hard,” he said, in his usual cryptic manner.

  “I swear to you,” Snowball interjected, in a tremulous voice hard to disbelieve, “that I received these wounds ready to give my life—to die—for Animal Farm.”

  Here, all gasped. Nobody uttered those banned words in public. Sometimes the words were heard in private conversations, or in silent prayers to some distant, glimmering future—but never in public. The shepherds would surely devour him.

  But, they didn’t.

  Snowball was alive.

  “It’s, it’s called the Manor Farm,” squeaked a nervous rat.

  “No,” said Snowball with total resolve—

  “It is called Animal Farm!”

  There was another gasp, then silence. Then the raven Moses croaked from the rafters—

  “Where have you come from, Snowball? Have you returned from Sugarcandy Mountain?”

  Few could fathom why the cawing of this common raven was tolerated by the pigs. Moses was always sitting around on some perch somewhere, decrying the virtues of the age-old myth of Sugarcandy Mountain—a place, he said, just above the clouds, where it was Sunday everyday, and clover was always in season, and lump sugar and linseed cake flowered from bushes. More often than not, he would be drinking from the gill of beer that he was officially allotted each day by the pigs. (For only a quarter-pint, he seemed to drink quite often, and quite heartily.) But Moses, despite his porcine sponsorship, wasn’t much listened to by the animals. His audience was generally filled out by the few Sugarcandy zealots—mostly troubled, troubling souls, who were themselves better left ignored. Perhaps, it had now and again been suggested, Moses was kept on tap for the simple reason that he diverted those maniacs from making real trouble.

  At any rate, to the vast majority of the farm animals, Moses had been telling his tales of Sugarcandy Mountain for far too long, with, aside from his beer quota, far too little result.

  “Really,” Moses breathlessly repeated—

  “Aren’t you back from Sugarcandy Mountain?”

  Moses made his suggestion with a kind of hypnotic sway. But far from inspiring awe, the bird elicited no more than a single snort (one of the steers), which was followed by a collective caterwaul and boo. What an annoyance that Moses should insist on voicing this absurdity! Even Snowball hardly grunted a dismissal. The question, apparently, was too far beneath his dignity to address at all.

  Still bare-chested, the lean pig lifted his hooves as high as they would go.

  “It is true that I have been far away.”

  “But Snowball,” asked a sad-eyed lamb with ears and a muzzle of deep brown, “where have you been?”

  And Snowball replied—

  “I have been on a dangerous mission—in the village.”

  Animals gulped with fear. Animals oohh-ed, animals aahh-ed.

  Snowball continued triumphantly.

  “But now—still alive!—I return to you, old Matilda the cow, and you, old Frido the sheep,” and here, Snowball paused to look deeply into the eyes of the two elderly animals, who didn’t seem to have the faintest memory of ever having seen him before, “For so long have I missed you, my dear old friends. And so too, as absence makes the heart grow fonder, am I swelling with a love for each and every one of you!”

  The well-dressed goat pawed Snowball a handkerchief. Snowball dabbed at his eye.

  “And with this pride in my chest, I do bring to you—a better way!”

  One of the younger lambs repeated, “a better way, a better way,” and Snowball only just silenced him before the other sheep joined in and the meeting was overwhelmed by their chanting.

  “I have searched from the hill-crest to the vale,” Snowball nodded his head gravely, “And tonight, I present an animalage of such erudition that all the wisdom of the village is now ours.” Snowball turned to the genteel goat behind him. The goat, his fine silver hair elegantly coifed, bowed with his hoof at the trim waist of his pinstriped suit—a blend of silk and tropical wool.

  And it was then that any forward momentum was lost—as with the scratch of three-toed feet, and a flutter of down, the last of the avian population, having finally gathered in such mass as to push open the door, flocked into the barn. There were the geese and ducks from the pond, the hens from the henhouse, the roosters from the rooster coop, and the pigeons from the pigeon coop. And thus assembled, the winged audience grew bold—voiced its confusion. Not known to be particularly intelligent, the ruffled latecomers proved exceedingly difficult to unruffle. The meeting sputtered to a standstill, as Snowball was forced to repeat, and reiterate previous minutes. When Snowball came to the part about a better way, the sheep could not contain themselves, and broke out into a mantra of “a better way,” which lasted for five minutes.

  It was not until the black cockerel was heard a-cock-a-doodle-dooing that the Shropshires finally hushed. The doodle-doo of that cockerel was a harbinging to heed with terror, as it could mean only one thing—

  “Minimus is coming,” whispered Norma the cat.

  Minimus, like the leaders who’d preceded him, was always led by a heraldic black cockerel, who served as a kind of trumpeter. Upon entering the barn, the cockerel, still doodle-dooing, was immediately followed by a pack of dogs—the most vicious on the farm. These were Minimus’s personal guard. Directly into the barnhouse marched the procession—and behind them, marched Minimus himself.

  In spite of the similarities, Minimus, unlike his predecessors, left a distinct impression that he wasn’t too happy with it all. Yes, like the others, he did wear a whip. But unlike Squealer or Napoleon, he never used it, and had been overheard saying he didn’t much like the damnable thing and only carried it because all the other pigs carried them—and he didn’t feel like going around, amongst a lot like that, the only one without a whip.

  Minimus was an old fat pig with a scholarly disposition. Always in his smoking jacket, he gave off an exceedingly literary, if conservative air. The fact of the matter was that Minimus
didn’t really enjoy running the show—he’d rather be reading Shakespeare.

  Minimus’s dogs, however, were not so indifferent. Nor were they so easily frightened as had been those dogs at the barn door. All the animals were aware, these dogs would attack if Minimus gave the order. Their commander, Minimus’s Top Dog, was an all-gray brute named, aptly, Brutus. It was known around that Brutus would not back down—that he was not scared of anything. Once, he had taken on a den of snakes. Nevertheless, Brutus, being a dog who believed profoundly in the chain of command, prided himself on an absolute loyalty. So, when Minimus raised his thick snout and uttered, “Stay,” Brutus, with his soldiers, stayed.

  The dogs under Brutus’s command had an instinctual hatred of Snowball. To them, he was simply an outsider—at the time of Snowball’s departure, few of these shepherds had even been born, and not a one remembered him, or his hog’s smell. Grimly, they grrrr-ed. Dogs didn’t like change.

  Brutus snarled at the upstart—

  “So you tell them you’re Snowball—and they believe you. That doesn’t make it so.”

  This, agreed the animals, was a point that warranted some serious consideration. After all, even if they presently believed it was Snowball, why should they continue to believe it was Snowball? Why, without any evidence to the contrary, they could easily change their minds, and decide it wasn’t Snowball.

  Minimus, his jowls shaking as he vigorously nodded his head in agreement, redoubled the argument of his Top Dog—

  “And even if you are Snowball, just because you say Snowball wasn’t bad, that doesn’t make that so, either.”

  And this, again, was a point well taken. Logically—and it made two of the sheep pass out to have it all in their heads—whether or not this pig was Snowball, Snowball might have been no good.

  “You,” Minimus contemptuously deduced, “might be an imposter and a liar.”