The Pig Comes to Dinner

by Joseph Caldwell

  George Noel Gordon Lord Shaftoe turned his attention to his hostess. “You’ll be happy to hear that I intend to bring a celebratory mood to the neighborhood. I am already making plans for entertainments and revels that will no doubt bring considerable joy to the castle, inspiring similar festivities in the countryside around.”

  “Dances? Parties? And everyone invited?”

  “Oh, no. You misunderstand. I’ll entertain, bringing to the castle some of those illustrious personages absent too long from the district. It’s my belief that my gatherings will inspire a general mood of rejoicing, emanating as it will from no less a prominence than the castle itself. I consider it my responsibility to set a tone, as it were. And the tone I shall set, much to the advantage of the farmers and fisherfolk, and of the cottagers as well, will inspire others to respond with revels of their own devising and consistent with their own customs. I’m sure you see the logic in that.”

  Kitty’s calm stood fast, her patience intact.

  “Another benefit,” his lordship added, “is the employment I’ll bring. One can hardly live on the scale I expect to achieve without a full staff and, at times, temporary but sufficiently rewarded help. The attendant rise in the common prosperity will be appreciable, I’m sure.”

  Kitty was tempted to inform his Lordship that her country was no longer a prime incubator for a servant class. The common prosperity had arrived, with no help from Lord Shaftoe. The tide had been reversed. Girls from America were recruited for the summer tourist season as staff members in hotels and restaurants throughout the land. Young men from across the seas were welcomed as waiters and busboys. Perhaps Lord Shaftoe could scour the student bodies of American colleges for his menials, but any hope of finding them among the “locals” was destined for disappointment. Possessed as Kitty was by a serenity that had quieted her congenital contentiousness, she felt no need to discommode his Lordship with realities he would encounter soon enough.

  As a matter of fact, serenity or no serenity, it was impossible for her not to enjoy her complicity in the man’s delusions. Let him find out the hard way. Glee was threatening to overcome her calm, but tranquility restored and renewed itself when she heard Mr. Skiddings say, “Are we expected in two hours’ time to dine with her ladyship in Cork?”

  “Ah, her ladyship. Yes. And we must tell her of our own adventure. She will be highly amused, I’m sure.”

  Relieved as Kitty was by this prompting toward the door, it surprised her by its reference to her ladyship. George Noel Gordon was, she knew, unattached as of the moment. He had neither wife nor family, although he must now, as keeper of a castle, require an heir. Which would require a wife. It occurred to Kitty that the ladyship referred to was a candidate for the honor. It further occurred to Kitty that the poor woman was not allowed to see her future home until the necessary desecrations had been effected.

  Navigating among the cowpies, skirting both bovine and porcine piss, the two men made for the door with what alacrity their breeding allowed. “You do see possibilities, Mr. Skiddings?”

  “Many, I assure you.”

  “Pity you didn’t see the tower. It’s cluttered at the moment, as which space is not, but you’ll have opportunities undreamed of by any imagining.”

  “I can readily see them now.”

  “And, of course, you’ll have my generous assistance at every turn.”

  “I am much obliged to your lordship.”

  “I admit to a partiality for comfort.”

  Without waiting for the architect to make the demanded response, his lordship turned to Kitty and said, his voice and his face alive with pleased expectation, “I remember now: ‘House of Splendid Isolation.’ ”

  “Sorry,” Kitty said. “Edna O’Brien. Again.”

  “Fancy that. Oh, well.” And with that he passed through the door, saying to his accomplice, “I expect to make a suitable offer for the scullery. I wonder who actually did it.”

  With no words, no gesture of farewell or thanks, the two men continued on, unmindful of the drizzle that was replenishing whatever wet might have dried in their clothing during their time in the castle. Kitty watched them go, her patience and her calm still surviving well beyond the reach of rudeness and other known attributes of aristocracy. His lordship continued to talk; Mr. Skiddings continued to listen, a nod of the head his only contribution to that most civilized of human attainments, conversation.

  The rain had relieved itself of the greater part of its generosity, and Kitty could now return the cows and the pig to the well-washed air. When she turned around to coax the cows outside, she stopped on the threshold, then stepped backward, away, outside, into the drizzle and the rising mist. She stared into the great hall, at the milling cows, lowing and moving restlessly on the flagstones, tails swishing, their udders swaying with ponderous dignity beneath them. With determined effort, she forced herself to raise her eyes and look upward, to see again what she had already seen. There, hanging from the iron ring of the candled chandelier, were the young and beautfil bodies of Brid and Taddy, she in her simple brown dress of coarse wool, he wearing the brown tunic cinctured at the waist, the legs of his brown pants reaching to midcalf. Their muddied feet, as sweet as anything Kitty would ever see, bent downward, the toes pointing toward the darkening corners of the hall. There were the raw ropes burning into their slender necks, their eyes bulging in horror at what had been their fate, the swollen tongues strung sideways from their surprised mouths, tongues that would never speak again to tell their tale or speak their woes. Slowly they turned, surveying the hall for one last time, unmindful of the cows and the indifferent pig who went about their shitting and pissing, uncaring that so much splendor had been removed from the face of the earth.

  They were, Kitty knew, but shades. Still, they could not be left dangling there, disfigured, mute, blind, their crusted feet brushing against the head of one cow, the ears of another. She wanted to plead that they would vanish, that they would retreat to shadowed corners of the castle rooms or turn to the harp and the loom in the tower above. She refused to make her plea. She would stand there, the soft rain falling, the mist rising from the earth. She would let her eyes see nothing but these two ghosts. She would keep vigil until they dissolved into nothingness and went from her sight, free of the noose and free to wander again the castle, the pastures, the hills, the stone-pocked fields. If their hanging were to last her lifetime, she would not leave the spot where she was standing now. She would not abandon them to their horror and their final fears. She would be faithful to the last.

  The rain, still soft, began to cloud her eyes and the mist to seep into the great hall through the opened door. Kitty made no move. She would let happen what would happen. Softer fell the rain, blurring further her sight. Still she saw the forms, but through the growing mist. She knew whose presence had hanged them there. That they would be condemned to this horror ever again could never be allowed. Peace must come at last. They must be released and set free to join themselves. What must be done would be done. To this she swore, and it would be accomplished, or she was not who she was.

  At this, the mists separated, the rain lightened. Brid and Taddy were gone; they were nowhere to be seen. Kitty looked at the iron circle, then began slapping the rumps of the cows. “Move,” she said. “Come on. Yes, you, move. Everybody out. Move.”

  10

  In their first days and weeks in the castle Kitty and Kieran were not particularly well matched when it came to Ping-Pong. Neither was practiced in restraint, and Kieran simply had the harder slam, which Kitty was unable to return, the ball’s velocity exceeding that of a bullet and its apogee on her side of the net well beyond her reach. Kieran made no effort to conceal his jubilation when the ball smashed against the far wall behind his wife’s head.

  Kitty minded this not at all. His strength was a source of pride at all other times, and it would be ungracious to single out these moments of humiliation as a goad to resentment. Nor did she resort to the usual anti
dote prescribed for losers: it’s only a game. To play a game (in her view), one played to win. Defeat had nothing to recommend it, and the search for solace would be even more humiliating than the loss already experienced.

  Also, she was not a good sport. Her competitive sense was seldom inactive. Had she the strength of the man she loved she wouldn’t have hesitated to crack the Ping-Pong ball as if it were nothing more than the shell of a newly laid egg. Still, in seeming contradiction to her nature, she accepted Kieran’s accumulation of points, his triumphs at her expense, the undeniable advantage of his good right arm. And while she was sustaining her equilibrium she was also keeping her own counsel.

  The relation of the ball to the paddle, the interdependence of the arm and the eye, the role of both as servants to the brain, the coordination of all the elements involved— every aspect of the game was closely observed, minutely analyzed, and subject to constant experiment. Also, it didn’t hurt that she had a highly developed habit of concentration. Bit by bit her game—almost imperceptibly—improved. The points her husband earned with his unrepentant slams were conceded. But there came a time when he made fewer and fewer of them. When Kitty won for the first time, Kieran rejoiced. When she began to win two out of five, then three out of five, he, in turn, was proud of his wife—even as he was bewildered by what he thought was an inexplicable diminution of his own powers.

  Then Kieran, without full awareness, set out on the path along which his wife had already advanced. He, too, took into account sophistications latent within the game that he, in his brutality, had long ignored: a practiced spin on the ball, a quick flick of the paddle at just the right moment, a twist of the wrist, a judgment of the eye too quickly made for conscious credit, and, most pleasing of all, a heightened sense of the woman opposite him, her skills and her determinations, her cunning response to his every move, her relentless insistence that she give him all she had.

  The game had a purpose beyond the heated pleasure it unfailingly aroused. At times in counterpoint, at other times in accompaniment to the rhythms of the game, husband and wife would take advantage of this time together to discuss— with digressions into argument or explanation, reasonings or intractabilities—subjects of common interest. With Kitty at her computer or in her garden and Kieran in his kitchen—to say nothing of his attention to the cows and the orchard and the fields—time together was limited. Conversation was thus all the more welcome when the paddles were taken in hand, the ball put into play, and enterprises of great pith and moment could be addressed without the possibility of one or the other stalking off in a fit of intransigence.

  It had been during a game earlier in the summer that Kitty had informed her husband that the castle might well be lost, and he, respecting this method of communication even in so fatal a circumstance, kept the ball moving, as did his wife. Once in a while a serve was postponed briefly for questions, but not for answers. But then, the first half of the first game had threatened to become desultory, its customary verve drained by the possibility of losing the roof over their heads, the ground beneath their feet, and the castle stones they had come so readily to love. At one point, Kieran had seemed deliberately to place a shot so Kitty could make a telling return—an attempt perhaps to cheer her up, to compensate for a tragedy for which no compensation was possible—so Kitty had slashed at the ball, driving it back to Kieran, who, out of habit, responded to the corrective emanations projected by his wife and spun the ball so that it dropped just on Kitty’s side of the net, making a return impossible. From then on they proceeded to a five-games-to-three win in Kieran’s favor, each game an honorable win for the victor, an honorable loss for the loser.

  Also, as the games played themselves out, Kitty, her temperament disciplined by the needs of the contest, was able without advancing into paroxysm to put forth the perfidies of Lord Shaftoe and the law’s complicity in their expulsion. Kieran, no less than his wife, took out his disbelief, his execrations, and his oaths, on the demands of the ball that, it seemed, never ceased to require his attention. The shared satisfactions of Kieran’s win had helped temper the fury and outrage that would have consumed them both had they gripped the paddles and insisted that nothing—nothing—would deny them the full pleasure of their sport or distract them from the exercise of the conjugal exchange and its attendent conversations that the game had become.

  The day for the feasting was fast approaching. Kitty took the ball lightly in her left hand, careful not to pinch the celluloid. She must not dent the surface and disqualify the ball from further participation. This was the last undamaged ball; both she and Kieran had forgotten to arrange for a fresh supply. That this should inhibit their game had been considered, then dismissed.

  They would play as they had always played, and the ball would have to take its chances. If they had not completed the designated discussion by the time the game was over or the ball broke, they could repair to the scullery, where a chessboard had already been set up in anticipation of any drastic eventuality. Kitty made the serve. Kieran made the return— and the game began.

  “Have you given enough thought to the pig?” he asked.

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough to agree with me.”

  Pock-pock, pock, pock-pock-pock went the ball, back and forth over the net, Kieran and Kitty each performing a dance choreographed by the other, stepping backward, moving forward, shifting to the right, to the left, leaning over the table, drawing back, the paddled hand gesturing with a quick grace that seemed at times to be of Hindu origin. After Kieran had accumulated five points to his wife’s one, Kitty said, “That we’re supposed to eat it?”

  “We’ve certainly fattened it enough.”

  “Being fat is not the issue.”

  “We certainly can’t give people a skinny pig.”

  “There are other pigs. Lolly has enough to convince me more often than not that she’s really Circe, and Aaron had better watch out. Although to turn my nephew into a pig should be well within anyone’s competence.”

  The score rose to twelve-seven, Kitty’s favor. When Kieran started closing in at thirteen-eleven, he said, “Well, she’s done the next best thing. More to her advantage I should say.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was driving by yesterday, and there was Aaron in front of me on the road, herding the pigs from here to there, wherever that might be.”

  “Aaron?”

  “Aaron.”

  “Lolly’s changed him into a swineherd? Well, considering his gifts as a writer, he’s ascended to a far higher calling.” Kitty had backed to the wall, positioning herself for the good whack that sent the ball at the speed of a humming bird over to her husband. Kieran simply leaned forward and, with an expert twist of the paddle, plopped the ball just over the net. It fell like the droppings of a low-flying gull. “It gets better than that,” he said.

  “Tell.”

  Kieran waited until they changed serves. “It’s Lolly who’s now the writer. She’s writing a novel.”

  Kitty let out an almost triumphant guffaw. This supposedly startling news failed in every way to astonish her, much less affect her game. All during her long “best girl friend” association with Lolly McKeever, Kitty had had to hear the woman’s amused disbelief at whatever difficulties Kitty might be confronting with her writing. “What are you talking about?” she’d say. “Who can’t write a novel? I’d write one myself if I had the time. Who wouldn’t? Who couldn’t?”

  On occasions such as these, Kitty would draw upon her limited fund of pity and her ample fund of disdain, and choose, for Lolly’s sake and for the poor woman’s survival on this earth, to simply respond, “Of course. Your swine are far, far more important.” And now poor Aaron, promoted to swineherd, had finally given Lolly her longed-for opportunity.

  Kitty’s only gesture had been to back herself against the wall. And her only words were, “I can hardly wait.”

  Before she could make the serve, Kieran said, “Aaron admits he’s relie
ved he doesn’t have to write anymore. Only too happily has he passed the burden on to his wife.”

  Kitty made the serve. It went past the table, past her husband, into the wall behind him. While Kieran was retrieving it, she said, “Which means Aaron’s the one to pick out the pig for the famous feast observing our loss of the castle.”

  “I don’t see why that will be necessary, to pick out one of theirs.” Kieran flicked his wrist and sent the ball to the table’s edge. “We have a winning candidate already in residence. It’s a way of keeping the event completely within the family.”

  As if to cry out in protest at the mere suggestion of such a possibility, a piercing scream that modulated into a shriek, then toned back to a scream, came through the open window. Kieran hit a net ball. Kitty let it stay where it was. “The pig,” she said.

  “Someone must be slaughtering it even as we speak.”

  Kitty went to the window.

  Kieran picked up the ball. “We can’t stop every time the pig decides to vocalize.” When Kitty said nothing, he asked, “Is someone looking at it cross-eyed? That’s all it takes on most occasions.”

  “One of the cows seems to have its hind legs stuck in a hole.”

  “That is not a cow’s complaint we’re hearing.” He, too, went to the window.

  In a field on the far side of a stone wall was a cow with, indeed, its hind legs down in a hole too narrow for it easily to pull itself out, try as it might. And the pig had taken up its cause. There the animal was, off to the side of the cow, snout raised heavenward, addressing in sounds no deity could ignore its plea for immediate deliverance. The plight of its companion was obviously more wounding than the slaughterer’s knife or even the herder’s switch or, to note the ultimate provocation and response, impatience when being served its dinner.