The Pig Comes to Dinner

by Joseph Caldwell

  The milking done, Kieran threw lime and then straw on the hosed flagstones and, passing the cows one by one, felt that he had put his world back in order. This particular satisfaction was unfailing, and to reap the full benefit, he would always pause to regard the ordered universe his labors had created.

  The pig had found itself a favored cow and had bedded down in the straw, its belly directly in the line of the cow’s breath in order to appropriate the full benefit of the warmth that only a cow can provide. Sly, too, without any further demands to be made upon his inbred border-collie talents, was content to lie quietly on the flagstone floor, waiting without patience or impatience for the summons to follow his master to the scullery—so called here in deference to its inclusion in a castle—where the good man would serve up a fine dinner of his own preparation.

  Just as Kieran was throwing one last armful of straw, Kitty came into the hall with an uncharacteristically tentative step. As soon as she was within speaking distance, she said, “I’ve decided we don’t want the pig.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, leave it alone.”

  “It’s going back where it belongs.”

  “Oh? Look there. It seems it belongs here.” He leaned his head in the direction where the pig was taking its ease.

  “It’s a nuisance. It’ll tear the place down—or dig it up— and cause who knows what. It’s not to be trusted.”

  “One doesn’t trust or not trust a pig.”

  “One does. And I don’t.”

  “What made you change your mind? Again.”

  “I don’t need a reason to change my mind. I just change it. And it stays changed. And besides, the pig peed all over my study in the turret.”

  “What was it doing in your study?”

  “Peeing.”

  “I mean, how did it get there?”

  “It wandered in. The study has no door.”

  “Why didn’t you send it away?”

  “I was working—I—didn’t see it—until it peed.” (What she did not tell her husband is that the offending act had been preceded by Taddy’s passing through her study on his way up the stone stairway.)

  “I like the pig.”

  “And I—I don’t.”

  “Well, then, that settles that.”

  “Good. The pig goes.”

  “No. The pig stays.”

  Kitty cocked her head to the right. “And I have no say?”

  “You’ve had your say. And I’ve had mine. The pig stays. After all, it did bring us together.”

  It was true. The pig had proved a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, it had brought about the resolution of the age-old feud between Kitty’s family’s and her husband’s, the McClouds and the Sweeneys. On the other, it had uprooted Kitty’s cliff-top land and, in the process, exposed the skeleton of the prized seducer Declan Tovey, buried among her cabbages, the man obviously murdered. This, in turn, had initiated an irreverent Irish wake during which the McCloud ancestral home was tumbled by the winds and the waves down into the sea, taking with it the as-yet-un-reburied skeleton of the legendary Mr. Tovey. The pig, for reasons never to be known, had followed her newly arrived nephew from New York to her doorstep after a roadside mishap several kilometers from her home, involving a scattering of animals of a species similar to the one then brought to her doorstep.

  To everyone’s relief, the irresistible Declan was now safely interred at the bottom of the sea, and, to Kitty’s even greater relief, the obdurate pig had been given hospice by Lolly, who, as heaven would have it, was one of the last thriving independent swineherds in all of modern Ireland. And who, by an even more peculiar set of divine devisings, was now married to Kitty’s American cousin, Aaron, also a McCloud.

  So on balance the pig had done more good than harm. Kitty had married Kieran and they now lived in the castle. But that was then, this was now, and the pig had aroused Kitty’s hostility for reasons known only to her.

  It puzzled more than surprised Kieran when Kitty clasped her hands just below her chin. It was as close as he’d ever seen her approach a posture of petition, much less of prayer. Even at their wedding, there at the altar with Father Colavin bestowing more blessings than they could possibly use up in a long, long life, her concession to the sacramental nature of the event was limited to a loose intertwining of her fingers, resting against her stomach. But now the hands were tightly clasped and held perilously near to the heart. “Please,” she said, “it can’t stay. It—it’s bad luck.”

  “Just because you’re having trouble with your writing doesn’t mean you have to blame it on the pig.”

  “It has nothing to do with my writing.”

  “Oh? And it has nothing to do with your writing when you’re staring off into corners or looking behind you as if you’re being followed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You. And what you do when you’re brooding over those idiotic Tullivers you’re trying to write about.”

  “This has nothing to do with the Tullivers.”

  Kieran pulled his head and shoulders back a good foot farther away from his wife, as if he wanted a new perspective on what he was seeing. He narrowed his eyes. When he said nothing further, Kitty asked, “Do I really go staring off into the shadows?” She seemed curious, even worried.

  Kieran smiled and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Of course you don’t know you’re doing it. You’re that deep into your work. Your book. And then the pig comes along and distracts—”

  Kitty interrupted, but quietly. “It doesn’t distract me.”

  “Well, it somethings you. And I wish you’d tell me what it is.”

  But how could Kitty tell her husband she was seeing ghosts—and that the pig could see them too. It was the pig, with its stare up at the gallery right after it had arrived at the castle, that had led Kitty to see Taddy. And there had been other visions, other visitations. Earlier that afternoon, the pig, with its stare, had let her know that Brid was standing atop the turret looking out toward the sea. It had been transfixed by its sighting of Taddy walking through the sheds that morning. She’d seen it from the window of her study. Even though she’d seen both Taddy and Brid at the wedding, it was only with the pig’s recent intrusion into her life that she’d seen them again and again and again. If the pig was gone, maybe they, too, would go.

  That this logic could be easily contradicted was given not the least consideration. To counter accusations against the prescient animal, she never allowed herself to be reminded that, when she’d first seen the haunting pair at the wedding feast, the pig was nowhere near. Nor had the pig been present during those more than several instances when, coming to the wide landing of the winding stone stairway on her way to the top of the turret, she had found Taddy strumming an unstrung harp and Brid at the loom, her muddied foot working the treadle with neither thread nor cloth to be seen.

  None of this could affect Kitty’s insistence that the pig was somehow an active mediator between her and her sightings. She was determined to avoid the troubling truth of the matter: that the mournful ghosts apparently revealed themselves to Kitty for reasons only to do with herself, with or without the pig present.

  Quite possibly, it disturbed her that the secret was known by anyone other than herself—even if it was known only by a pig. That this knowledge was not limited to herself was untenable. She knew the pig could hardly disclose her secret, but, then again, she couldn’t keep the possibility from her mind. The pig might tell on her. That she was thinking something so impossible that it hinted at madness mattered not at all. The thought was there and not without force. This pig must be returned to Lolly. It knew too much. It saw too much. But all she could bring herself to say was, “Please. It— it can’t stay. I told you. It’s bad luck.”

  “But it brought us together. Is that bad luck?”

  A note of near pleading now came into her voice. “Can’t it just go and that’s the end of it?” It unsettled Kieran that his wife would res
ort to begging. He forced a quick laugh. “If it’s superstitious you’ve come to be, you’re talking about a black pig. They’re the ones bring bad luck. This is a pink pig.”

  “Pink, black, blue, it doesn’t matter. I only know we don’t want it here. Doesn’t the asking of a devoted wife have any meaning for you?”

  Kieran felt a shudder of fear. Something had happened to his wife. Not that she had become superstitious but that she now thought herself as “devoted.” Love he knew she had— and passion and other wifely attributes—but devotion? He looked at her. She was trying to smile and trying even harder to loosen her hands and draw them away from beneath her chin. Now more than ever he knew he must not give in. The issue must remain unresolved. It must be a ready point of dispute. This must be the beginning, not the end, of the disagreement. Their repeated attempts to resolve it would be a form of intimacy. It would keep them joined. If he were to capitulate, if he were to rob them both of this means of continuing involvement, it would mark the beginning of acquiescence, the loosening of the bond forged from their youth by the adversarial, the resolute refusal to compromise or to agree. He wanted no devoted wife. He wanted Kitty McCloud, the girl, the woman he had loved from the day she was branded by his mother and his father as an enemy to be scorned for all his life. Always had he loathed her. Always had he loved her. But the enmity infused into his blood gave his passion a more heated yearning—and the familial proscription added further fuel to his need of her. His marriage had freed him from his family, but he must do nothing that might free him from Kitty herself. She was all he had and all he had ever wanted. But she must remain Kitty McCloud—obstinate and unyielding. Kieran was fighting not for the pig but for the marriage.

  “The pig goes nowhere,” he said, trying with some success to sound neither insistent nor adamant but merely decisive.

  Kitty, putting an end to this strange interlude during which she had experimented with the more usual persuasions of a good and amiable wife, put her hand on a cow’s hind quarter and pressed the other hand against her right thigh. “Then whatever happens will be all your fault?”

  “I’ll scrub where it peed.”

  “So it stays here, in the hall? With the cows?”

  A small smile crossed Kieran’s face. He gestured to where the pig lay. The cow’s nose had moved closer to the pig’s belly, the belly itself rising and falling in a rhythm that can be achieved only by the most pacified. “Does it look like it wants to be anywhere else?”

  “Don’t let me even look at it.” She started out, but stopped. Without turning around, she said, “And don’t let it look at me.”

  As she crossed the hall toward the door, her stride more purposeful than when she’d come in, Kieran watched, but now in sorrow. How could he refuse this magnificent woman anything!

  Suddenly the pig moved away from the cow, and the cow stood up and stared at the wall not two feet in front of it.

  A cow on the far left side began to stomp, another to moo. The pig moved on a few paces and started to root in the straw. Now two more cows were stomping, then a third. Most were whisking their tails back and forth, brushing the air, as if trying to keep something away from them. The pig snorted, trying even harder to find something buried in the straw. More than half the cows had raised their heads, stretching their necks so that their discordant moos could be directed toward the ceiling and the skies beyond. The snorting of the pig grew louder, then stopped, abruptly. As did the stomping. Heads were lowered, the bellowing tapering off to something closer to a sniffle. The pig’s cow lay down again. The pig returned and it, too, lay down, its head snuggled against the cow’s neck.

  Kieran surveyed the room. Peace, it seemed, had been restored. He waited a few seconds to make sure, turned, and started to leave. It was then that he saw the cause of the disturbance. A neighbor woman, a girl really of not more than seventeen, had come into the hall. She had prepared herself for a cooler night with a heavy brown cloak, the hood pulled away from her head. A homespun dress reached almost to her ankles. She was barefoot, the mud of the day caking her toes, the dirt of the road dusting her ankles. Her brown hair fell freely into the hood of her cloak and onto her shoulders. At first she seemed somewhat plain, but when Kieran strained for a closer look he decided she was more than handsome, her skin fair if pale. Her eyes were blue and her lips plump, the upper more than the lower. Her neck had been chaffed by the coarse weave of her dress.

  She was staring at Kieran, quietly expectant, if he interpreted correctly the slight parting of her lips and the merest widening of her eyes. He thought he recognized her as one of the wedding guests. She had worn the same clothing. Now she would tell him why she had come. But she said nothing. She simply continued to look at him, her expression unchanging, her slim body upright, her head tilted slightly to the side, her right foot forward of her left.

  He waited another moment, then said, “You’re probably looking for my wife.” The girl took a strand of her hair that had fallen across the left side of her face, put it behind her ear, then resumed her near-stately stance, her mildly expectant look. “Or is there something I can do for you?”

  He looked more closely at the girl. Around her neck was what had seemed a rough woven collar, but when he looked harder, he saw that it was not cloth, but flesh. Obviously she’d worn something of so coarse a weave that it had rubbed raw the skin. It could also have been a burn. Perhaps that was why the girl was unable to speak. Kieran would ask her. But before he could decide on which words might be appropriate, the girl moved her right foot backward, even with her left, paused a moment, then disappeared. She didn’t dissolve; she didn’t fade away; she simply ceased to be where she had been.

  Had he blinked? Had he been talking to the shadows in the far corner of the hall? Had she left when he’d been— unknown to himself—looking elsewhere? He went out into the courtyard. No one. Nothing. He peered back into the hall. No one. He stepped back inside. Most of the cows were lying down, their heads angled away from the wall in front of them. The pig had moved, and the cow was resting its chin on the pig’s belly.

  Kieran peered along the walls, into the corners. He walked the row between the cows. He made a quick turn, trying to surprise anyone who might be behind him. Only a few shadows. He stood at the end of the hall, facing the animals, shifting his eyes from one side to the other. In a voice of practiced command he said, “I don’t appreciate foolish games. So let this be the last time you try this. Understand?”

  Before any answer could be given, he had gone back out into the courtyard. Determined not to look behind him, he went toward the scullery, where he knew he could be alone. It was while crossing the yard that he added to the list of possibilities of what might have caused the girl’s disfigurement, the wound around her neck. It could have been made by a thick rope of coarse fiber. He was unable to prevent himself from continuing on to the next surmise: she could have been hanged.

  He knew now who she was. Her name was one he’d heard since he was a boy. Her name was Brid.

  But it couldn’t have been Brid. Brid was dead—dead for more than two centuries. This girl seemed very much alive.

  4

  Kitty was at her computer, in her study on the first landing of the winding stair that led to the turret battlements two flights up. Frustrated by her work, stifled by her imagination’s refusal to respond to her proddings, desperate to expand her skull so it could accommodate a brain enlarged enough to comprehend what she needed to know, what she needed to see and to hear, she had decided to go— as she often had before—to the top of the tower and present her pleas to the open air.

  When she made the turn leading to the landing above, she stopped. She knew she’d see the loom, unthreaded, bare, the worm-eaten wood worn and gone gray, the treadle smoothed by the touch of uncounted feet. She knew she’d see the small unstrung harp, the kind you held against yourself with one hand and plucked the strings with the other. The pegs for the strings were still there, twisted each in a di
fferent direction like snaggled teeth. She had often wondered if some alignment could be achieved if ever the harp could be strung again. The instrument rested on a crudely fashioned stool, its wood never having known the touch of paint or sealing of any kind. Worm holes, like those on the frame of the loom, suggested a passage of years beyond knowing.

  When first she’d seen the harp and the loom, Kitty’s impulse had been to pick up the harp, to try the loom, to see if the treadle would move at the touch of her foot. Her next impulse was to touch nothing. These had not been left behind by the squatters; ancient they were and sacred to this room. And since that time, passing through to the ramparts above, she respected their dust and continued on, as did Kieran when he climbed to the turret.

  On this day of particular frustration with her writing, Kitty made the final turning of the stair and stepped onto the landing. Unresponsive to her presence, Brid was working the loom, her muddied bare feet on the treadle, moving it up and down, the rhythm measured and easy, the cloth beam and the warp beam turning, the treadle allowing the girl to move the boat-shaped shuttle between the warp threads—except there were no threads.

  No cloth was being woven, but this didn’t seem to bother the girl. While over and through the unseen threads the shuttle went, Brid remained calm and unperturbed. Taddy held the harp against his left side, braced under his chin, the bottom frame resting on his thigh. Slowly he brought his right hand toward his body, the fingers twitching ever so lightly, the entire movement all the more graceful since no strings were being plucked, only the unstirring air brushed by the touch of his fingertips.

  Kitty saw him in profile, his face immobile, his eyes downcast. He was listening. As was Brid. Whether the song was sad or happy she would never know, but she could tell from the distant look on Taddy’s face and Brid’s that memories had been awakened.