The Pig Comes to Dinner

by Joseph Caldwell

  “And drink as well to your protection when the stones fly heavenward and the tower topples as has been destined from the years long since?”

  Now the woman’s smile became a benevolent laugh. And, to Kitty’s surprise, it seemed that handsome Maude McCloskey was transformed, for just that moment, into one of the more beautiful women the County had ever seen. Her skin was luminous with an inner glow, her eyes deepened with a sympathetic sweetness, her proud chin relaxed to a benign serenity. An almost tender sorrow crept into her voice as she said, “You know the story as well as any. Lord Shaftoe—what was intended for him may well come down to you. We’ve taken a chance, all of us, to be here now. Who knows when the moment will come? Before I speak another word? Tonight as you wrestle on the nuptial couch? At daybreak? At dusk? Tomorrow? A year from now? Others search for gold. Search, I tell you, for the gunpowder. It’s here.”

  “Nonsense. That was all cleared up years and years ago. They dug from here to there and there to here and found nothing.”

  “I know. That means it’s still here. But don’t let that interrupt the festivities.” With that, her face reformed itself, and she became a handsome woman again but no longer a Seer transfigured. “But consider yourself warned. Watch you and Kieran both don’t go flying sky-high the way was intended for his Lordship.”

  “Maybe I look forward to the excitement.”

  “You won’t be looking forward. You’ll be looking down- ward—and from a great height and your eyes gone blind and not a limb left to scratch your nose or reach out and hold your husband’s hand. Well, at least you’ll be halfway to heaven. Whether you’ll go the rest of the way is anyone’s guess. And I won’t tell what mine is.”

  “No need for that, is there?”

  “Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty McCloud. Why do you resist being what you are?”

  “And what might that be?”

  “A prophet. Come now, admit to it.”

  “Really, Maude. Such extravagance!”

  “And I a prophet, too. As everyone knows.”

  “I certainly hope not, with your foretelling me gone skyhigh and halfway to heaven and Lord Shaftoe quiet in his grave.”

  “Why do you talk such foolishness? We’re prophets, not fortune-tellers.”

  “And didn’t you just now give the notion you could see this place gone up with gunpowder and me along with it?”

  “A prophet doesn’t tell the future. A prophet tells the truth. A truth no one wants to hear. Or believe. And that’s why you’re a prophet. You’re a truth teller. I’ve read the books you’ve written. And there’s a truth in all of them.”

  “Maude, you’ve gone stark raving. I’m a money monger. And to satisfy my greed I tell more lies than the snake itself.”

  “And it’s a lie you’re telling now. You needn’t admit it to me. But you’ve always admitted it to yourself. You know you’re a prophet. You know you hold the truth, and I’m the one knows it as well as you.”

  “I do it for the money. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “And did you write the truths told in your retelling of Jane Eyre? Anyone with the slightest sense of justice would have done what you did—given the rage and the talent that’s yours. There was Miss Charlotte Brontë trying to tell us it’s a great fulfillment for poor Jane to have her Rochester after all, a bit battered though he may be. And how did Miss Brontë manage that? By having Jane step over the broken bones of a dead madwoman. Is that the path to happiness? Has Jane no conscience? You did it right. Rochester throws himself headfirst from the attic because Jane will have none of his bigamous offer. And it’s his bones broken, and it’s over his dead body Courtney—” Here she became puzzled. “Is it Courtney or is it Tiffany you call the Jane character?”

  “Brianna.”

  “Ah, yes, Brianna. And it’s over his dead body—is it Kyle or Kevin?”

  “Kevin.”

  “And so it’s over Kevin’s dead body Tiffany—”

  “Brianna.”

  “—Brianna steps over, and she and the madwoman, cured by Brianna’s kindness and caring, settle down to a life fulfilled enough, what with the pottery, weaving, and a bit of animal husbandry. Now that’s the work of a truth teller. A tale told by a prophet. You. Kitty McCloud.”

  Kitty tried to stop the squirming that no amount of previous doomsaying had been able to accomplish. The Seer was, indeed, making revelations that Kitty, from the beginning of her career, thought she’d been able to keep to herself.

  Her motive wasn’t really the money. It was her insistence on truth, on justice. Then, too, she had her wrath, a bottomless cauldron from whose roiled depths would surface some of the most deeply honest fiction of her generation.

  But none of this must ever be known. If her worldwide readership—yet another by-product of so-called globalization—ever saw in her not the shameless, exploitative hack of unscrupulous ambition and insatiable greed but a prophet inspired by nothing less than principles of the highest order, she would be abandoned by her votaries. Supermarket book racks, airline newsstands, drugstore check-out counters would no longer offer her output. Best-seller lists, hardcover and paperback, would deny her the accustomed listings, their notations of the number of weeks, the months, the years of her prominence. Critics would ignore her, their vilifications no longer applicable. No more miniseries, no more amused condescension from the academics. Her fame, her fortune would dissolve. She would be forgotten, impoverished, bereft. Maude McCloskey’s voice must be silenced, her powers nullified.

  To achieve this, Kitty simply reached for the most effective weapon she could summon: not denial but agreement swaddled in ridicule. “Oh, yes, Kitty McCloud, the great crusader! The Maude Gonne of the literary world. Writes with a flaming sword handed down by St. Michael himself. An unquenchable thirst for truth, repository of a wrath not seen since Queen Maeve herself. Take a good look, Maude McCloskey. When will you see the like again?”

  “Mock me if you will. I’m used to it. But it changes nothing.”

  “Oh? Until you uttered this last nonsense I was almost ready to consider that the gunpowder might still be lurking somewhere and I could go heavenward at any moment. But now my mind is eased for good and forever. What you speak, my dear, is one absurdity after another—and I thank you for the assurance it gives me that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Without your gracious idiocies I might have completed my entrance into the married state without this chance to dismiss from my mind all rumors of a curse yet to be fulfilled. This is your gift to me, and I thank you again, and again.”

  “You lie, Kitty McCloud.”

  “Oh? And wasn’t I just a few moments past the noble truth teller?”

  “You are. Except when you lie.”

  “Now there’s logic for you!”

  “You’re a prophet. Your books are the proof.”

  “I’m a coarse and pushy money monger who sells longdead writers for coin. And you know it as well as everyone else, including myself.”

  “Look me in the left eye and say that again.”

  Before Kitty could oblige, she realized she’d been watching a young man at the far end of the hall. Sweetly handsome he was, but sad and sorrowful as well. He seemed to be searching for someone he might never find and was already mourning the loss. The more Kitty watched him, the more annoyed she became, almost as annoyed with him as she was with Maude. His skin was tan, a more pallid shade than his clothing, but not so much a tan bestowed by the sun but rather a pallor no sun had seen. He was obviously one of the squatters come to mock her at her wedding feast. He’d costumed himself like a peasant—even his feet were bare—a servant of such low estate that by an old custom he could allow himself but one color for his clothing. If she, Kitty, were to presume to be Lady of the Manor, he would come as corrective to her pretensions, posing as a menial familiar with the tyrannies of the Lords Shaftoe themselves.

  Yet the more Kitty observed him, with his gaze moving slowly from one side of the hall to the other,
all sorrowful, the more her annoyance gave way first to mild interest, then to increased absorption.

  Maude, aware that Kitty had experienced another shift in concentration, followed Kitty’s gaze. Kitty herself had dismissed the smile she’d chosen for her interview with the Hag and, without so much as a nod in Maude’s direction, said, “That young man all done up in brown, who is he?”

  “Where?”

  “There, the wall straight across and a little to the right. Dressed himself up like a peasant.”

  “I don’t see him.”

  “Wearing all brown. Jacket, tunic, pants to just below the knee. Bare feet even.”

  “I still can’t find him.”

  “Never mind. Just curious. One of the squatters come to make fun of me.”

  “Knowing you, it’s something I’d not advise. But I still can’t find him.”

  “What he needs most is a full plate of food, and a bit of color in his cheeks. And a pair of shoes for his muddy feet. And a pretty girl to cheer him, all sad the way he is. And next time he puts on his costume he should give up the homespun, the way his jacket has rubbed his neck all raw. Serves him right, making a spectacle and a joke the way he is.”

  Slowly Maude turned back to Kitty and straightened her spine, a sure sign that she was about to deliver some further pronouncement. But before the Seer could have her say, Kitty let out a quick laugh. “No. Wait. It’s all right. He’s found the girl he was looking for. And she dressed the same as he. No, not the same. But all done up in something quaint, including a great brown cloak and the hood pulled away and her long hair flowing down on her shoulders. A match for him all right. But look: she’s just as sad as he. Now there’s a pair! And the cloak has had its revenge, all rough wool scratching her neck, too, right down to the blood practically. Small pleasure are they having by the looks of them. She could take in a bit of beef the same as he and show herself more to the sun. Look at them. She taking his hand, he touching her cheek, as wan as any I’ve ever seen. Now the two of them looking this way, right at me. To see if I appreciate the joke.”

  Kitty smiled and gave her head an exaggerated nod up and down. “Yes, I see you, the both of you. And a fine pair you are, come to make fun of me and my marriage and my castle.” She didn’t call out the words; she simply spoke them, more to Maude than to the squatters. “But enjoy yourselves. Welcome you are to the feast. And I thank you for reminding me of what I am. Hardly Lord Shaftoe—may he howl in hell—but keeper of the castle am I, as rightful an heir as anyone with Kerry blood coursing in her veins. You’re standing now on Kerry soil and all the Shaftoe days are done. Eat. Dance. Drink. This feast is yours as much as—”

  She stopped, gave a quick move of her head, and began searching among the thronged guests. “Well,” she said, “I’ve lost them now. Funny.” Still smiling, she looked at Maude expecting her to share her amusement. But the Seer took two steps back and, mouth half open, was staring at Kitty.

  “Oh, Maude, sorry. I was supposed to look you in your left eye and swear some kind of oath and now I’ve forgot. But you needn’t look at me quite like that, as if you’ve dreamed up some even worse prophecy than the last.”

  When Maude said nothing, Kitty decided she’d best keep talking until the Hag had found her tongue and could again begin wagging it for all to hear. “All right then. I’m looking straight into your left eye. Now tell me what I’m supposed to say so I can say it and be done.”

  Maude’s jaw moved up and down a few times, until she was able to speak, but in a voice low and unsteady. “His name is Taddy,” she said. “Her name is Brid.”

  Kitty gave the snort she often substituted for the laugh she couldn’t quite manage. “Taddy and Brid, you say? The names of those hanged for the plot of the gunpowder? Now you’ve gone completely off with your head, you mocking me as much as they.”

  Maude swallowed twice and, without saying anything more, turned and headed straight for where the drinking was and knocked back in quick succession two generous draughts of whiskey, of Tullamore Dew.

  Before Kitty could scan the crowd to see where the presumed Brid and Taddy had gone off to, Kieran came up and held out a pint. “You ready for this?”

  “I’m ready for anything. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  As if on cue, the fiddler Annie Fitzgerald, the whistle player Jamie Kerwin, along with Cathy Clarke on the bodhran (the Irish drum) and Charlie Dillon with his guitar jumped headfirst into “Johnny Will You Marry Me” and before Kitty could take a first sip, she was dancing the hoppy, all the steps coming back from her girlhood as if her memory were in her feet. Changing partners, weaving in and out, back and forth, slapping her feet on the wooden platform she’d provided for the dancing, unable to show the impassive face the dance demanded, Kitty found herself distracted by the thought that the squatters, whatever their real names, might come on the dance floor and that, sooner or later, she would loop her arm in Taddy’s, if only for a few steps, before being returned by the intricacies of the dance to her newly won husband. When it turned out otherwise, she felt no disappointment, too determined was she not to miss a step and thereby reintroduce into the proceedings the unsettling foolishness Maude McCloskey had tried to put into her mind.

  The Seer was helping herself to more Tullamore Dew.

  3

  Kieran had to be careful not to take out his annoyance at Kitty on the cows. They had done him no wrong. They had not paced from room to room, seeming to listen for a sound that only they could hear, searching shadows, darting a glance into one corner, then another. They had not, when questioned about this strange activity, said, as Kitty had, “Oh, was I doing that? Sorry, I guess I get distracted. You can understand that.”

  The cows suffered no inexplicable distractions. They had come clomping up from the stream at the first encouragement, followed his directions into the great hall, found the flagstones no challenge to their contentment, and had even chosen, one after the other, a place facing the walls.

  They were all a man might ask of a cow—and he must never bring into his relationship with them an emotion or a need generated elsewhere. If Kitty McCloud chose to try his patience, if Ms. McCloud—she’d kept her birth name despite the marriage—if Ms. McCloud decided to indulge in erratic behavior, if his darling and dearest found it necessary to shut him out completely, he must not blame these innocent animals.

  Kieran knew the source of her agitation. But to understand and accept it was something else. Still, he had knowingly married a writer, a self-absorbed species set apart from all others, beings who exiled themselves from this world and made forced entry into another.

  And, he had been given to believe, she had more than reason enough in this current instance for her exasperating conduct. Contrary to the first rule imposed on any writer, his wife had, on their honeymoon to Ballinskelligs and Skellig Michael, divulged some of her secrets. She had had no choice. The distance between her and her computer—an appendage the honeymoon had severed so they could get themselves away—was too great a loss for her to forgo some sharing of her bereavement.

  He had reciprocated by confessing his need for his cows. But, he had had to acknowledge, he would be returning home to a world well known and finely ordered. She would return to disorder edging toward chaos. She had, she admitted, taken on a challenge that placed her near the abyss. Not without trepidation, she had decided to correct George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (which he had never gotten through though he had tried). Outbursts like “Stupid Maggie! Dumb stupid Maggie, silly dumb bitch!” would intrude on their moments of bliss. “Bloody Tom Tulliver! Prissy prig, I’ll get him yet!” once interrupted the serenity of their drive to Ballinskelligs for an evening of dancing at the local pub, Tig Rosie. Defiant curses, fair warnings, moments of near diabolical laughter promising the imposition of her will by whatever means, words like “Justice!” and “Just desserts” were muttered at meal time. “She’s going to be happy. I’m going to make her happy!”

 
Now, home at last, here she was, determined to wrestle George Eliot—aka Mary Ann Evans—into submission.

  Kieran, not appeased by his reflections, was milking the seventh cow—there were twenty-three in the herd—when he felt a newly familiar ache gathering just beneath his breastbone. It would, in the next few moments, spread outward, upward, downward, and sideways, an easy flow that would fill his entire chest cavity and part of his stomach besides. It suggested a reach and an urge beyond himself that could only be mollified when he would take his wife into his arms and hold her fast, protected from all hurt. He would then be granted, in return, the completion of himself, a fulfillment that held within it the true definition of all he had been, all he was, and all he was meant to be. Only within this context could he be revealed to himself. Robbed of this, he would remain undefined.

  Watching the squirts of warm, sweet milk spurting into the bucket, he was given, as an infusion of grace, the persistence of his exasperation. It had not vanished; it had simply evolved. It had provided the seed out of which his love would grow. For all his life he had felt nothing but wrath at the sight of this woman—and, as he had now come to know, his wrath had made possible his love. Within his rage lay the knowledge of her vulnerability. At the height of his fury there would awaken deep within himself a need to shield her from every harm. He pitied her because she was undefended; he saw her courage in the face of his ferocity, the presence of her defiance. Only he could save her, his hand alone could stay the advance of his malevolence. And so she had cracked open his hate-protected heart and had entered in. But, to Kieran’s consternation, she had brought with her all that had made possible his love. She was now, as then, enraging. And now it had been revealed to him that this was a necessity. This was a nutrient of his love, and without it his aches and urges would be endangered, possibly to the point of extinction. She must always annoy him. She must always try his patience. And, Kieran was also given to know, she always would. Her sustaining characteristics were ever at the ready, as potent as Cupid’s darts. A well-aimed glance, a shrug, a grunt, the lift of the head: each arrow would reach its mark— and in these gestures his love would be renewed.