The Pig Comes to Dinner

by Joseph Caldwell

“I mean, perhaps just the two of us.”

  Mrs. McCloskey’s laugh was perhaps a bit more derisive than she had intended, since there was genuine joy in it as well, but Kitty nevertheless had to check an impulse to give her a smack. “There’s no need,” the good woman said. “The children have no interest I’m sure in anything you might want to say. May I assume it’s about you-know-whom you saw at the wedding?”

  “It is, I’m afraid.”

  Mrs. McCloskey patted Kitty’s knee. “Then let’s hear it.” The Hag then tugged a card from Margaret’s hand and placed it in front of Peter, who picked it up. “Just so you know I don’t play favorites,” she whispered. She took a few more sips of tea, then, with a small bit of ostentation, leaned back in her chair, letting Kitty know she was open for business.

  Kitty drained her cup, set it on its saucer, and wiped her lips with the back of her little finger. She stood up. “Perhaps another time.”

  “But we’re having tea. I made it special.”

  “And I thank you. But I must be going.” Kitty could hardly believe how polite she was being.

  “Well, if you have nothing you want to talk about, then I won’t keep you.”

  “Most kind.”

  “I do my best.” Mrs. McCloskey, too, was on her feet. “Peter, I’ll take over your hand. You walk Mrs. Sweeney—”

  “Ms. McCloud,” Kitty corrected.

  “Yes. Of course. I’d heard that but preferred not to believe it when Sweeney’s such a fine Kerry name.”

  “No more than McCloud.”

  “If you insist.”

  “I do.”

  Mrs. McCloskey heaved a sigh underscoring the one word she had to meet the occasion. “Well—” she said.

  Peter gave his mother his cards, tugged up his pants by the belt loops, let them fall immediately back into place, and started for the door.

  “It’s not necessary,” Kitty said. “It’s not that far, even though I decided the walk would do me good. And I surely know the way.”

  “But Peter would be so disappointed. And he’s been such a good boy.” Kitty took this to mean that a castle tour would be the only acceptable reward for the boy’s gallantry. Peter, holding open the door, had on his face—a face so open and cheerful—a look of proud anticipation.

  “But I mustn’t take you away from your game,” Kitty said to him.

  “Ellen can win without me. Can’t you, Ellen?”

  Ellen’s answer was limited to a muted, “Ssshh.”

  “See?” Peter, so pleased with his commission, wore a look of such pathetic expectation that Kitty had no choice but to say, “Okay, then. Let’s go.”

  A backward glance told her that farewells were not needed or even wanted, so intent were the players on their game. She was already forgotten and felt obliged to be gone without further ceremony.

  Outside they walked the path to the road, passed through an opening of the hedge and made the turn that would take them up the hills to the castle. (Kieran, measuring the distance, said it was one kilometer down and two kilometers up. Kitty agreed, as did anyone who had ever made the journey on foot.) Peter chose to half skip, half bounce as he took his place next to Kitty, an escort obviously energized by the honor.

  Late afternoon was about to become early evening. Soon the sun would be past the crest of the hill and long shadows sent out across the fields. The hill, some of it already dissolved in the mists, rose up to their right. Its downslope to their left, almost clifflike, was abundantly strewn with huge white boulders. At times the rocks seemed to Kitty like fossilized sheep.

  As the road turned to the right, then to the left, the scattered cottages down below were silent in the cooling air. To the west, not far off, was the sea, calm, with three curraghs and what could be a kayak making their way slowly, confidently, toward the island to the north. The clouds had not yet come, and it was the sea now and not the hills that would take the setting sun.

  Without consultation, as if responding to some ancient prompting born in the blood, both Kitty and Peter moved to the rock wall that hedged the road and looked out over the darkening water and the glistening narrow path, a silver lad- der that could, if legend spoke true, take one from the sea to the sun.

  It was Peter who spoke first, but quietly. He had picked from his nose a tiny bit of dried mucus and was examining it as if it were a computer chip holding within itself, like the contemporary equivalent of a crystal ball, a knowledge available nowhere else. He turned the chip held between his thumb and forefinger, curious as to what secrets it might impart when viewed from different perspectives. “My mother says you see Taddy and Brid. Is it so?”

  Kitty’s impulse was to turn to the boy and express her annoyance that his mother had opened her big fat trap. What right or reason had she to tell a child about something as intimate as her seeing ghosts? It was no one’s business. Now the word would spread, and she’d be regarded as some kind of nutty woman given to visions and other forms of superstition. But as soon as the thought came she dismissed it. What did she care who thought what? Never had she concerned herself with the opinions and judgments of others, and she saw no reason to begin now. Almost defiantly she said, “Yes. Of course I see them. They come with the castle.”

  “My mother thinks not.”

  “Not what?”

  “They don’t come with the castle. I mean—other people come to the castle, they don’t see them, do they?”

  “How would I know?”

  “They’d tell you, the other people would. Or they’d tell someone, who’d tell someone else. Who’d tell you.”

  Kitty did not like being contradicted, especially by a boy small for his age, with freckles across his nose and—from the evidence she’d observed—who didn’t wash his neck when he washed his face. Still, she didn’t want to be rude. Or even interfere with his interest—an interest obviously informed by what Kitty herself had wanted to find out from his mother.

  And then it struck Kitty that Mrs. McCloskey had purposely sent this surrogate, unbeknownst even to himself, to deliver the message Kitty had come to their cottage to collect. The boy would tell her all she wanted to know. Or at least all that Maude McCloskey knew from her divinations, or, more likely, what she had collected from stories, from lore, from the legends that had been passed from generation to generation. The boy, quite likely, had, for whatever reason, been elected the new repository of hidden knowledge, and it flattered Kitty to believe that she herself was, in turn, elected the first beneficiary of this initiate’s recently consecrated calling. Much had been entrusted to him and great must be his mother’s faith in his gifts. “Peter’s the one to watch.” How Maude might have discerned these gifts Kitty would never know, nor did she require that she should. All that was demanded of her now was a show of respect, and perhaps a bit of sympathy for the burdens of truth placed on the boy’s scrawny shoulders. His would be the prophet’s knowledge, refused or avoided or denied by other mortals; upon him would be heaped the scorn and ridicule, the awe and fear his seerlike propensities would earn for him. He was set apart, and difficult would be his way: to speak the truth and be disbelieved. But Kitty would try to believe him now. Whatever he might prescribe she would, if possible, obey.

  As if fully aware of her resolve, the boy, scratching his left calf with the toe of his right shoe, still staring with considerable intent at the mucus he had retrieved from his nose, said, “Your husband sees them. But he’s the only other one.”

  A compact was being offered, an agreement that he would speak and she would answer with no less truth than he. Kitty had no choice but to say, “Yes. He sees them too.”

  The boy nodded, acknowledging her acceptance of the covenant now formed between them. “And that’s only natural.”

  “Natural? Why?”

  The boy let out more a snicker than a laugh and jerked his head upward a little as if the subject embarrassed him. “My mother says when two people get married they become as one. And you know what else she sa
ys?”

  “No. But I’d like to hear.”

  “She says since you saw Brid and Taddy and now your husband sees them, too, she knows which of the two of you you’re likely to become. You. Because you saw them first. She seemed to like the idea. What do you think?”

  “I can hardly contradict your mother, can I?”

  “Best not.”

  “And she laughed?”

  “She was very proud of herself for thinking it.”

  “Umm. Yes.”

  “But she said you shouldn’t worry. He’ll never know it. About which one he’s to become. Unless you choose to tell him.”

  “I don’t believe that would be—necessary.”

  “That’s what my mother said. Except she said it wouldn’t be wise to tell him.”

  “Thanks.” Kitty kept her voice as uninflected as possible. She would prefer if at all possible not to have the boy know everything, particularly some intimate thoughts not intended for communications to anyone, especially her husband, two-as-one or no two-as-one. Or to anyone else for that matter, prophet or no prophet, seer or no seer.

  Confirming immediately Kitty’s worst fears, the boy without pause said, “But you should know that this is just what my mother thinks, not what she really knows. She says she’s not sure yet about what I just told you. It might be the truth—and it might not.” He paused, then said, “She’s still working on it.”

  “Oh?”

  Before she could ask for elaboration and before he could give it, Joey came wagging up to them and put his nose between them. The boy moved quickly away. “Joey! You’re not to be here. You’re to be at home. You’ve got chores and you know it.” Joey, a breed of border collie with brown and black splotches on its white fur, wagged its tail even more enthusiastically at the admonition, then looked from Peter to Kitty, then Peter again. “Now I have to take him home,” he said. “He’s to help with the cows.”

  “But you were coming up to the castle, I thought.”

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Oh?”

  He’d been tickling Joey behind the ears. Joey wagged the back half of his body in appreciation. “I don’t want to be there if now is when it blows up.”

  “The castle is not going to blow up.”

  “Oh, but it’s supposed to. My mother says so.”

  “Oh?” Kitty did not approve of her newly acquired habit of speaking in monosyllables, but there seemed to be nothing she could do about it.

  “I have to get Joey back home.”

  “But if your mother is so sure the castle is supposed to blow up, surely she can say when.”

  “She can’t.”

  “And you. Can you?”

  “I have to get Joey home. Or he’ll get a beating.”

  “But wait. You have to tell me what else you know. Or what your mother knows.”

  Peter stopped tickling Joey and stood up. He looked down at his sneakers and wiggled the toes of his right foot. When he’d finished, he said, “You say my mother is a Hag.”

  “I never said that!”

  “To yourself you say it all the time. You said it three times: when my mother was helping Ellen with her cards, when she was watching the football, and when she told you about Margaret’s asthma.”

  Kitty thought it best that they part now. Whatever the boy might have to tell her she would do without. Such incursions into her innermost thoughts should never be allowed. Not when employed against her. He must also know she’d commented to herself about his unwashed neck. But she must stop thinking now. Not one more thought. Not until a safe distance could be put between herself and this—this— “I’m peculiar,” the boy said, providing her with the wanted word. “And my mother is peculiar. But in the way my mother told me peculiar means. It doesn’t mean crazy or even strange. It means distinct. Set apart. Not like everyone else. And you’re peculiar, too.”

  “I?”

  “You’re a writer. Maybe that’s why you can see Brid and Taddy. Because you’re a writer. At least that’s what my mother thinks it could be.”

  “Oh?” Then, to break the hold the word had on her, she added, “Why because I’m a writer?”

  “Because you live with ghosts all the time. People no one else can see. You’re used to it.”

  “But—”

  “I have to get Joey home.” He stepped back onto the road. Kitty placed herself in front of him, blocking his path. Peter looked from Kitty to Joey, then back to Kitty. Joey moved back, away from Kitty, Peter at his side.

  “You mean,” Kitty continued, “You mean that if I invite any of my writer friends to the castle—”

  “You have no writer friends.”

  “All right then. But in the unlikely event that I did have one and invited her—make that him—invited him over—”

  “He wouldn’t see them unless he’s as good a writer as you.”

  “I’m a very bad writer. Everyone knows that.”

  “Maybe Brid and Taddy don’t.”

  “That’s because they can’t read. At least not English.”

  “Oh, no. They recognize that you see things no one else sees.”

  “Me?”

  “You. And they know you look for the truth. When you’re writing, I mean. You don’t always find it, but when you don’t, you accept it not like it’s a failure but because you believe in mystery. You accept it. You’re not afraid of it. You don’t feel as if you have to explain everything. You’ve got not very many talents. As you said, you’re a bad writer. But you don’t put a rock wall around your imagination. You don’t go running back to your brain, as if the truth can be figured out by the mind. It can’t. The truth comes only through the imagination. If you were smarter, if you had more intelligence, you might be tempted not to use your imagination the way you always do now. That’s what my mother says. And she’s not a Hag.”

  “You’re making this up. Or I mean your mother is. The same as she made up the reasons my husband and I both see the ghosts.”

  The boy and the dog skirted around her, Joey keeping an eye on Kitty, the two of them starting down the road. Kitty caught up. Peter, continuing on, said, “And if you don’t believe what I say you won’t be peculiar anymore. You’ll be like all the others. They don’t believe us either. Which doesn’t bother me. I mean it doesn’t bother my mother. She says—”

  “Can’t you tell me what you say?”

  “My mother, she says it means what we say and what we see is the truth. But if everybody believed what we said, we’d know it couldn’t be true. But you’ve believed it. Because you’re not like them. I told you. You’re peculiar.”

  “Can’t you think of another word?”

  “A writer?”

  “All right, then. Make it peculiar.”

  “Joey, come on.” He moved faster, Joey at his heel. Kitty waited, not sure what she should do. Too confused, too agitated by so many unanswered questions to go on her way, she went after them. When she’d caught up, the boy snapped his fingers.

  “Joey, over here.” Joey stopped looking up at Kitty and obeyed.

  Kitty walked sideways, the better to see the expression on the boy’s face. He was angry. “All right, then,” Kitty said. “Your mother is not a Hag. And even if she were, what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t a Hag know what no one else knows? Think of it. If your mother’s a Hag, from what she thinks of me, I’m a Hag, too.” Kitty was supremely pleased with herself. “That’s it. I’m a Hag. Look at me. I’m a Hag.”

  “A Hag has no soul. A Hag can’t die. My mother can die,” he said quietly. “And so can you.” He paused. “And so can I.”

  So determined was his step, so quiet his voice as he said these words, that Kitty considered abandoning her quest for knowledge. In this, as in most cases, maybe ignorance was preferable. She must turn around and go up the hill, to her castle, to her ghosts. To her husband.

  Peter had stopped and was picking his nose again, this time extracting an even tinier bit of dried snot.
He regarded it with keen and concentrated interest. “If you want Taddy and Brid to go, blow up the castle. They’ll go.”

  Kitty wanted to stop, but the boy kept on walking. “How can I blow up the castle?”

  “The gunpowder.”

  “I don’t mean how. I mean why would I want to blow it up?”

  “So Taddy and Brid would go. If you want them to go, that’s the only way.”

  “I go out and buy some dynamite—”

  “No need. I told you. The gunpowder. It’s there.”

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “My mother says details are sometimes left missing.”

  “Oh, thanks. You tell me I’m sitting on a keg of gunpowder and then you won’t tell me where it is.”

  “Not even Brid and Taddy know.”

  “How can they not know?”

  “They know nothing. They knew nothing then. They know nothing now. They don’t even know why they’re there or what’s happening to them. They only know they’re supposed to be someplace else. But they’re supposed to be in the castle, too. As long as there is a castle.”

  “And blowing up the castle will send them there—wherever that might be?”

  “The castle is where they were hanged and didn’t know anything about anything. The castle was supposed to die. Not them. Until it does, they have to stay.”

  “And that’s the only way? Blow up the castle?”

  “My mother says it is. And this she doesn’t just think. She knows.”

  A new thought came into Kitty’s head. Maude McCloskey was a Hag. A Witch. A Sorceress. It was Mrs. McCloskey who had summoned the shades of the grieving Brid and the bewildered Taddy. Hers was the witchcraft that had brought them there for the sole purpose of getting Kitty McCloud out of the castle. She was envious of Kitty’s success and wealth, of her beauty and her capture of the best man on the face of the earth. Kitty had made herself an object of the world’s envy— but given her gifts, had she any choice? What the boy had said about her imagination, her so-called peculiarity, was crafty and cunning, a form of flattery to which she was, for those moments only, susceptible. But her susceptibility had come to an end. She would free herself from the thrall of the resident Seer. She would dismiss all that had been said. She would certainly not blow up her castle. Her castle. She would get Father Colavin to come again and this time rid the premises of unwanted spirits. There would be no more nonsense. With the right words, the right blessings, he’d dispatch—