The Pig Comes to Dinner

by Joseph Caldwell

  6

  As was his custom when expecting a parishioner of some affluence, Father Colavin had managed, when Kitty arrived, to be poring over the parish ledger. As was also his habit, he invited her to sit down while he finished one little matter in which he had been deeply involved. He then traced a pen down the columns of the ledger, emitting little gasps and a few groans, but no words. Kitty was treated to this familiar rubric until the good priest sighed, pushed his chair away from the dining room table where they were both seated—he on one side, she on the other, in keeping with procedural etiquette prescribed back in his days in the seminary: when alone with a woman always keep some barrier between the two of you. The reasons were obvious: no vow could survive the lures emanating from the female of the species, or, worse, the woman herself was, by nature, a temptress not to be trusted.

  Father Colavin’s dining room table was covered with what looked like a large shawl—his mother’s?—a relic from his boyhood or even beyond, when his ancestors had come down from Ulster five generations ago. They had since become more the people of Kerry than the people of Kerry themselves. The shawl, with broad strips of brown and maroon and a fringe of gray yarn like thick but exhausted hair, provided some sense of decoration. At the table’s center an empty glass bowl intended for fruit completed the attempt at bourgeois display.

  What had fascinated Kitty from childhood were the table legs. Thick to begin with, they swelled halfway down to the floor, then diminished to their original circumference, suggesting to Kitty that each had swallowed a melon and been unable to complete the transaction. The chairs had cushioned seats, the embroidered fabric worn down on only one at the head of the table: Father Colavin’s. The rest had simply faded, the red of the roses a pale tan and the green of the leaves close enough to this same tan color, hinting that both foliage and blossom were among time’s indifferent achievements. The chairs also testified to the priest’s solitary life, his loss of that most civilized human ritual, a shared meal. Perhaps the Eucharist—the ultimate meal shared with the Savior himself—was sufficient, even superior, and he felt no deprivation.

  There was a sideboard, a repository for the place settings seldom used and the bottle of Jameson whiskey called into service for visiting dignitaries and applicants for weddings, funerals, and baptisms. (Kitty and Kieran had been given generous sips during their nuptial arrangements, a foretaste of what lay ahead when the baptisms and the funerals would be required.) The Cross of Saint Patrick, the Celtic cross with a shortened horizontal beam, was centered above the sideboard, the rest of the wall bare out of deference to this symbol more Irish than the shamrock itself.

  Near the door leading to the pantry were the expected pictures of the Sacred Heart aflame with love and the Blessed Mother, her exposed heart pierced with the daggers of her seven sorrows.

  On the other side of the doorway were framed photographs, yellow brown by now, of the priest’s parents, the man uncomfortable in a high stiff collar, the woman, born Fitzgibbons, looking rather pleased with the lace around her neck and the brooch worn at her throat. The windows opposite the sideboard were curtained with a sheer gauzy cloth; the drapes were velvet, a plush amber, held back by braided cords that might have done previous service as the belting for a bathrobe. The rug underfoot was so thin and the weave so worn that it was constantly being crumpled by the least movement of anyone’s foot.

  Father Colavin folded his hands on the table top, looked wearily at Kitty, and said, “You’ll have to forgive me. There’s the roof and none but the devil to mend it.”

  Kitty had learned from experience that the priest was not coercing her into making a contribution but offering her a bargaining chip. She was there to ask a favor. Few came to see him for reasons other than to complain about the music, the homily, the behavior of fellow congregants, the altar boys and girls scratching themselves in forbidden places. Unfailingly, Father Colavin would greet such “suggestions” with awed gratitude for the information, offer a hint that heresies, liturgical abominations, and public sinning would soon become the object of his full attention, then go about his business with an equanimity available only to those capable of ignoring the presumptions of upstarts.

  More often than not, Kitty was grateful for his barricades. Given any proximity she would have been unable to resist the urge to reach out and plant a kiss on the dear man’s time-furrowed brow. She didn’t doubt that the impulse would recur during this present session, especially since the opening moments—ledger, groans, despair—indicated that all would go according to plan, ending with Kitty pledging a sizeable sum to repair the very roof that she had already paid to fix after her previous intrusions concerning the wedding.

  Also, Kitty was particularly grateful that this was the day set aside for her appointment. She’d just returned from Cork and a session with her lawyer, one Debra McAlevey. Ms. McAlevey had summoned her after Kitty had ignored a series of e-mails informing her that the current Lord Shaftoe, George Noel Gordon Lord Shaftoe no less, had hired solicitors in London to represent his charge that he alone, and neither the Crown nor the Republic of Ireland, was claimant to ownership of Castle Kissane. Kitty had dismissed the previous e-mails and their content as unworthy of her attention— until Ms. McAlevey had threatened to resign as her advocate should she persist in her silence.

  That very morning Kitty had been told that his Lordship’s case was far from negligible. Documents had been presented that might possibly contradict previous assurances that the castle had, through a longtime failure to pay taxes, come finally into the possession of the Republic from which Kitty had made the purchase. She must respond. There were papers for her to sign, affidavits to which she must subscribe and, in general, she must be more attentive to her predicament.

  All of this, she told herself, was no more than an annoyance. Her right of purchase had been thoroughly researched and duly processed. Her claim was as solid as the walls of the castle itself; no one could announce himself after an absence of two centuries and presume to lay a bloodied hand on a sin- gle inch of Irish ground. Although she had signed on every dotted line Ms. McAlevey had placed before her, she had drawn on her inexhaustible fund of displeasure, allowing herself the certainty that these proceedings were meant to do no more than offer a feeble and temporary diversion from the real difficulties with which she was currently besieged—difficulties that had brought her to Father Colavin’s rectory, to her side of the table.

  Father Colavin was again shaking his head, staring down at the intractable ledgers before him. “First,” he said, “the Son of God had no place to lay his head, and now He’s to have no roof over it either. But that’s hardly your concern. You’ve no doubt come on more urgent business.” Kitty considered, by way of experimentation, making a pledge now and getting on with her purposes for being there. But then Father Colavin, in his wisdom, might interpret her opening offer as an invitation to bargain once her needs were made known. No outright increase would be asked, merely repeated interruptions of her cause, Father Colavin noting sadly the challenges to his concentration occasioned by the imminent collapse of his roof. To relieve his worries and focus his concentration, she might consider upping the pledge just a wee bit.

  Kitty decided to stick to the old ways: plead her case now, bargain later. She was fully aware that, before this meeting would be brought to its conclusion, not only the roof but also a stained glass window or two, plus a new bell for the belfry, might be put on the table as bargaining chips in the soughtfor resolution of her requirement that the castle be relieved of one ghost but not the other. She was prepared to include the bell but not the windows. Some things must be kept in reserve for future emergencies.

  “Now then, Caitlin”—Father addressed her with the name he had bestowed on her at the font—“tell me what I can do for you and rest assured I’ll do it if it’s within my feeble powers.”

  “What I have to say, Father, isn’t very easy.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me! Not you and Kieran.
Not trouble so soon!”

  “Oh, no, Father. Not that. Or—no—not really—”

  “Then praise be! You gave me a fright I haven’t had since the reforms of Vatican Two.”

  The good priest had been horrified by the conciliar changes: the idea of the Pope acting in concert with the bishops instead of ruling by fiat from the Chair of Peter had unsettled him completely. Fortunately for the aging priest, succeeding Popes—men of insufficient faith to trust in the workings of the Holy Spirit, as Pope John XXIII had done— had, with the craven acquiescence of those same bishops the council had meant to empower, nullified the reform. In doing so, they safely placed the children of God back into the grip of a mortal man too uneasy to expand the bounds of the universal church to include the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.

  The reform they retained—the liturgy in the language of the congregants—was, however, much to Father Colavin’s liking. That he should celebrate the divine mysteries and expound the good news of salvation in Irish seemed to him the just reversion of an ancient wrong that had been inflicted long centuries ago—against all common sense—to retain Rome as the Seat of Peter rather than transfer it to the one place on earth untouched by the barbarian rampage that had imposed illiteracy on an entire continent. It was an article of faith for Father Colavin to believe that it had been an Irish monk, schooled in an Irish abbey, who had journeyed to the land of the Franks to teach Charlemagne how to read. It was only too apparent that Dublin should have been declared the heart and head of Christendom, surrounded as it was by saints and scholars obviously able to rekindle the civilization of an extinguished continent. The suppression of this inspiration had been a torment to the priest, but still, he did have the consolation that it was now Gaelic words that summoned into the sacrifice of the mass the very presence of God himself. Of course, that this bit of Irish speaking in the liturgy was confined to a small patch of the planet along the coastlands of the Western Sea did, at times, disquiet him, but then he would celebrate yet another mass in the Church’s rightful tongue—Irish—and feel the triumphant swell within his breast available only to those who had waited patiently for this remediation of history.

  Kitty looked down at the shawl covering the table. “It’s not about Kieran I’ve come.”

  “Ah—answered prayers. I must remember to give thanks.”

  “Yes. Please do.” Kitty then, like Father Colavin, folded her hands on the tabletop. She was ready to begin. Or, if she was not ready, she would begin anyway. “There are ghosts in the castle,” she blurted.

  “Ghosts in the castle,” Father Colavin repeated, nodding his head in ready belief. “Ah, yes. I’m not surprised. Interesting.”

  “You believe me?”

  “Brid and Taddy. Are they the ones?”

  “You know their names?”

  “Doesn’t everyone? And anyway, one of the few disadvantages of a long life is that so much knowledge is heaped upon my head that I sometimes worry my poor skull is going to crack under the weight and my brain drip down onto the floor like puffin droppings.”

  So surprised was Kitty by this easy acceptance that she wasn’t prepared to move on to the next phase of her mission: the actual request for an exorcism or whatever might be required to rid her marriage of this impermissible threat, the ghost of Brid. She had expected a lengthy discourse complete with Father Colavin’s disbelief, followed by Kitty insistences, then his demands for common sense, then her reiterated assurance that the supernatural was at work in her castle, then his attempt to cajole her by offering counsel often needed by newlyweds that some susceptibility to the extraordinary had to be expected, her growing anger and anguish, and, finally, his pretended acceptance—a condescension meant to prevent her agitations from evolving into hysterics.

  But this hadn’t happened, and she was stuck with the need for adjustment with no time left for the summoning of her craft, the invocation of her cunning, powers derived from her presumed female helplessness, which would make its appeal to the immensity of the spiritual powers bestowed on her pastor.

  She, being Kitty McCloud, effected her recovery in so short a time that her bafflement remained imperceptible to Father Colavin and was, to Kitty, only a momentary hiccup in the ongoing presentation, not requiring further consideration.

  Father Colavin cleared his throat. “But surely you knew about Brid and Taddy before you bought the castle.”

  “Well, yes. In a way. There are always the old stories—”

  “I remember only too well,” Father Colavin interrupted. “ ‘Be home before dark, or Taddy’ll take you and lock you in the tower.’ ”

  Kitty tried to tell the priest that her parents, her entire family, were too concentrated on the blood feud with the Sweeneys—“The Sweeneys will get you!” or “I’m going to give you to the Sweeneys!”—to need recourse to the ghost threats of Brid and Taddy, but the man was too deep into his subject for possible extrication.

  “ ‘Brid and Taddy are wanting a little boy answers to the name of Colavin, and I’ve a mind to tell them where you sleep and they’re welcome to you. …’ Ah, how can I forget? My mother—” Here he stopped, his eyes gone into the distant past, a sad smile on his face, his mother, his care-worn mother, not raising her head from her sewing while persuading him to stop tormenting the cat and to bring in more turf for the fire as he’d been told. Or to do his studies instead of making mischief with his sister’s pigtails. “Taddy and Brid, Brid and Taddy. Ah, yes—” And then he said no more.

  Kitty waited to make sure his reverie had ended. “You saw them then?”

  “Oh, no. I did as I was told and they were never sent for.”

  “If you want to chance it, come to the castle.”

  “And I’d see them?”

  “Maybe.” Kitty knew there were no guarantees, and she hardly wanted to make claims she couldn’t honor, so she added, “Only Kieran and I have. So far. But you’re welcome to give it a go.”

  The priest shook his head. “I know you mean to be generous, but they’re the last ghosts I’d want to see. Terror is what I’d feel. From birth I was taught they were evil spirits, staying behind their time so they could roam the roads and the hills, appearing in and out of the mists, grabbing up wicked boys and bold girls and doing to them things beyond what can be imagined by anyone still in possession of his own soul.”

  “But you imagined anyway.”

  “Of course. How could I not?”

  “And what did you think might happen?”

  Father Colavin lowered his head and put his right hand to his chest. “I was afraid they would hurt my mother and I not there to protect her.” Again he shook his head, bidding the memory to release him and let him go. He looked up at Kitty and put his hands again on the ledger, his voice now an eager whisper. “What do they look like?”

  This is not how Kitty had expected the interview to go. She had come to rid herself of ghosts and now she was having to summon them—even if it was only in her mind—and make them present to the priest whose aid she would ask in banishing them.

  “They have bare feet,” she said, not looking up. “And around their necks, each of them, the flesh raw from their hangings.”

  “No,” interrupted the priest. “No more. I don’t want to hear.” He then added quickly, “But I do want to hear. Tell me.”

  “Their eyes are so sad, so very sad, and they seem not to know why they’re there, in the castle still. They wear brown, Brid a plain dress to just above her ankles. Black hair. High cheeks. Young lips. They both look to be seventeen.”

  “And so they were. And so they are.” He paused and Kitty had a strong sense that he was breathing a prayer. She waited until he was ready to speak again. “And Taddy?” he finally said.

  “A tunic tied at the waist. Brown jacket, brown homespun pants to just below the knees. Brown hair. Dark brown eyes. Calluses on his hands, mended cracks where the work was too much. He plays the harp. She works the loom.”

  “They do that? A
nd you see them doing it?” He was almost breathless with wonder.

  “Sometimes. Just before the sun goes down. She spends most of her time with the cows, going where they go, just being with them. And he wanders around with a pig we have. They’re lost. They don’t know where to go.”

  “But they don’t frighten you?” He asked this as if not quite sure he was prepared to believe any answer other than yes.

  “No. Why would they frighten me? My mother never said anything about them. I was never—threatened.”

  “But still. They are ghosts.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “And you aren’t afraid of ghosts?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. And I hope never to see one. It would be the death of me, I’m sure.”

  “You’ve nothing to fear. Not from them.”

  “Just the sight of them—No! I couldn’t. I’d be destroyed.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. It would break your heart. And it would make you want to rise up again against those who did the hanging.”

  “Those days are gone. And we must thank God for it. And I’ve no need of having my heart broken. Not again.”

  “Oh?”

  “Never mind. Nothing more than we all suffer, living in the world.”

  Kitty waited to see if he would elaborate. He did, but only in his thoughts, his inward gaze off now to the curtained windows as if ghosts of his own were appearing through the scrim. He waited for them to vanish, his closed lips pressing one against the other, trying to keep any sound, any word, from escaping. His mouth relaxed. His gaze was diverted to his hands. He took in a breath and let it fill his lungs and expand to what degree they could in his frail and sunken chest. “Is there more you want to tell me?”

  “Is there some way they can be made to go?”

  “You want them to leave?”

  “Of course. You said yourself you wouldn’t want ghosts wandering about.”

  “That’s because it’s a mystery my faith can’t comprehend.”