The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven

by Joseph Caldwell

  Peter stood up, holding a small shard. After a puzzled search of the man’s face, he turned and ran toward the courtyard road where he’d left his bicycle. He jumped on, but when he tried to reach for the pedal with his foot, it missed and the bicycle tipped, falling onto the gravel with Peter beneath it. He raised the bicycle and ran alongside before swinging himself up onto the seat and pedaling as fast as he could, still clutching the fragment of bowl in his fist. He sped toward the road that would take him home.

  Kitty returned with a sizable chunk of Kieran’s home-baked bread—one day old, but home-baked nonetheless. (Kieran baked every other day. Every other day, it was day-old bread, but there had been no complaints.) “Where’d Peter go off to?”

  “Peter?”

  “The boy who was here. Who asked for the bread. And what happened to the soup? Is that why he went off? Just because he dropped the bowl and it broke?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Was he ashamed or what?”

  “Yes. Yes. He—he was ashamed.”

  “Well, then you’ll just have to eat it. The bread. I’m through running back and forth.”

  “All right then. Give it to me.”

  Kitty handed it over, then bent down and began slowly to pick up the shards.

  “I’ll do that. I was the one broke it. I’ll be the one to collect it. Leave it. I’ll do it.”

  “You broke it?”

  “I broke it. I knocked it from his hand.”

  “You what? Whatever for?”

  Declan shook his head. “No reason. No reason at all.”

  Kitty stood up and let the collected fragments fall back onto the gravel. When she turned to leave, she saw Peter, returned, dismounting his bicycle and taking a few cautious steps toward her and toward Declan. Kitty couldn’t help hoping the boy hadn’t come back to plead his cause himself. Declan was obviously in no mood.

  Peter stopped a fair distance away, his left hand steering the bicycle at his side, the right hand closed in a fist held against his thigh. “I’ve come, Mr. Tovey, not to bother you again when I made so much trouble before.”

  Kitty glanced at Declan. His face was impassive, his stance indifferent.

  “I only want you to know that it was all right you were so troubled and Mrs. Sweeney’s bowl all broken with the soup spilled. You had your reason, so if you feel wrong about it—and you do—you shouldn’t. It wasn’t your fault. Nor was it mine.”

  Declan had stiffened, but lowered his eyes. He muttered in a voice hinting at a renewed fear. “What is he saying?”

  “He says he doesn’t blame you,” said Kitty. “For breaking the bowl, for spilling the soup—and look, it’s all over his shirt.”

  Peter tugged his shirt forward and looked down at it. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “I won’t let my mother see it.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t blame you,” Kitty said to Declan, “but I—”

  “No,” said Peter. “You mustn’t. I understand. I really do.”

  Declan, his fear grown to desperation, said, “Please. Send him away.”

  “Why?” asked Kitty. “He’s a harm to no one. He even says he understands. What he understands, I don’t know. Ask him.”

  Without waiting for Declan to say anything, Peter continued. “If you’re wondering how I know this, I don’t know myself. I did know, but I forgot. I sometimes know things and then I forget them as soon as they come to me, and then they’re gone. It happened now, on my way home. I was that surprised by what happened, with the bowl broken and all, so I stopped for a bit. I leaned against the stones of the bridge crossing the stream to wait until I wasn’t so afraid. And I was looking at this piece of the bowl. I still had it in my hand. If you want it, Mrs. Sweeney, to mend it all back together—”

  “No,” Kitty said softly. “No. Let it be in bits. It’s all right now.” She thought a moment, then said, “But give it to me anyway, why not.”

  Peter opened his fist and regarded the fragment, then came to Kitty, his hand held out. “There was something came into my head—and I don’t know what anymore—but I can say now that I’ve understood. And it’s all right. That I can’t remember doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “No,” Kitty murmured. “It doesn’t matter. Not any more. But if … if you do remember—”

  “No,” cried Declan. “He doesn’t know. There is no reason. No one knows anything. Home to your mother now.”

  After Peter had studied the man’s face again, he turned his bicycle around, swung himself up on the seat, and pedaled away, this time more slowly.

  Kitty glanced down at the shard. “You needn’t have been so harsh with the boy.” She looked at the bits of broken pottery on the ground, then at Declan. He had turned and was walking back toward the sheds. Kitty watched, then followed slowly. “Why did you have to be so mean? Peter said he knew the reason. Do you? Do you know why you treated him so rudely? You a grown man and him only a boy—and a skinny one at that?” Declan continued walking. “You were never a harsh man, Declan. And just now, you were. Why is that? Do you have an answer?”

  “There is no answer.” He spoke quietly and continued on. Kitty waited and watched. An uncertain stride had replaced the swagger that had characterized his walk all his life. Now, preoccupied still, he was removing from the farthest shed the last remnants left behind by the young squatters who had commandeered the castle before Kitty had made her purchase. Instead of simply tossing the refuse out onto the gravel as it deserved, he was carrying it, no more than several pieces at a time, and placing everything in as ordered a heap as possible. Clothing and cushions stained past rescue, shoes and boots, odd technological contrivances long obsolete, along with a disassembled guitar, a red wig, and half-filled bottles of lotions and unguents meant to assure anyone susceptible to the illusion that youth could be made to last forever. Carefully each armful was added on, each given a consideration it hardly deserved.

  The phantom pig had come to watch, the living pig asleep, content in its pen. Declan, carrying an armload of magazines, paused to acknowledge the ghostly pig’s interest, deposited the tattered remains on top of the accumulating junk, and then returned to the shed for yet more of the abandoned leavings.

  The pig had climbed to the top of the pile, and, without any effect, was rooting among the trash, as if the animal still possessed the means to disrupt any given accomplishment, even objects already declared worthless. Declan, carrying a mattress he was trying not to hold too close, stomped his foot in the vain hope of shooing the pig away. The phantom animal, unfazed, continued to stick its snout in among the objects it was sadly unable to move or shove in any direction whatsoever. Declan gave it a few more seconds, then simply threw the mattress onto the heap. Had the pig been corporeal, it would have suffered a considerable inconvenience. As it was, it simply reappeared at the foot of the pile and continued its observation.

  Kitty had been looking with perplexed exasperation at the shard, wondering how Declan—-Declan Tovey—could have done what he had done. She moved toward him and stood near, looking just past him, as if seeing nothing.

  Declan paused at his labor. “What?”

  Kitty looked again at the shard nested in the palm of her hand. She started to close her fist, but stopped and opened the hand completely. Again she tried to close it, but again could go no farther than halfway, as if the hand itself was resisting. Surrendering to the palm’s resistance, she let it open completely. The hand twitched slightly, then held still. Staring down at the shard, her voice barely audible even to Kitty herself, she said, “It’s a boy was found in the grave, the skeleton dug up by the pig. Or a young man it could be. He was an apprentice, learning the thatcher’s trade. He fell. His head. The cracked skull. He died. He was buried in the garden, a cap to cover his wound, a leggett in a sack at his side to honor his hopes of becoming a master. It was meant to be only for a time. You fled to the north, to find the family that would know him for their own. And we found the bones and washe
d and clothed them and gave a proper wake and dug a deeper grave.

  “But then the sea took sight of him and saw him about to be given back to the earth. A great rage came upon it. Too fine a man he was, lovely and good, and the sea must have him. The winds were summoned. The waves battered themselves near to death against the cliff. The winds howled the sea’s intent. And it was done. If the house, too, had to go, so be it. It was the young man was wanted. And the sea must not be blamed. So lovely and fine he was. And now he’s there. And we are here. And we wait and we search, but he’ll never come, not to the shore. Never.”

  Slowly she turned the shard over between her thumb and forefinger, then closed her fist, covering the broken bit completely, pressing it into her palm.

  With his voice even quieter than before, Declan said, “How is it you know these things when there’s none to have told you except the one who will never speak of it?”

  After a glance in his direction, Kitty pressed both hands together, the shard held between her palms. When she stopped and had returned it to the right hand and pressed it into her flesh, she said, “Know what?”

  “What you said.”

  “I said? I said? Said what? I said nothing.”

  “You told it as it should never be told.”

  “Told what?”

  “His name was Michael—and will always be. The rest you know.”

  “I … I know nothing. What are you talking about?”

  “Just now. You were looking down into your hand. At that bit of the bowl. And you saw there all that has happened. And all of it the truth.”

  “I … I …” Kitty looked down at her fist, then opened it. There was the fragment. She closed the fist, fast enough for the shard to cut into her palm. “I … I did what? I said what?”

  “Everything.”

  “But I know nothing.”

  “You do. All of it. It was from a roof he fell and lived the rest of the day, and was just leaning against a stone wall and he … he …”

  Kitty again opened the fist and again stared at what was in her hand. “No! I refuse! I saw nothing. I know nothing. I swear!”

  “Maybe you know nothing now. But you knew it when you were speaking it.”

  “No. I refuse. Do you hear? I refuse.”

  “Refuse what?”

  “To … to know anything … to see anything …”

  “You saw a boy you said, a young man was in a grave and now he’s in the sea.”

  “I said that? I couldn’t have.”

  “But you did. You said it was an apprentice—”

  “An apprentice? But that … oh that. That would make sense, then. I must have been referring to the way you treated Peter about being an apprentice. I could easily have—”

  “And did you know I’d gone to the north to find the family? To bury him there so he wouldn’t be where he was never known?”

  “I … I …”

  “And did either of us know it was the sea that had to have him—he was that fine?”

  “I said that?”

  “You did.”

  “Then I … I made it up. I must have. I … I’m a writer. I make things up all the time. I embellish. I make them as interesting as—”

  “ ‘But then the sea took sight of him’ ”—he began repeating her words—“ ‘about to be given back into the earth. A great rage came upon it. Too fine a man he was, lovely and good, and the sea must have him. The winds were summoned … ’ ”

  Kitty flung the shard onto the piled trash. “It was Maude McCloskey did this. She … she … Maude. It was Maude. And tell her for me I refuse! I will not be a Hag! It’s a terrible thing she’s done.”

  A coven of crows had been cackling overhead, mocking Kitty’s protest, flying high over the castle turret, then swooping down over the heap, on the lookout for prey. Kitty started to raise a fist, to threaten them with some dire vengeance yet to be devised, but noticed that Declan had started to walk away. He was returning to the farthest shed, again his movements slow, again his head bowed.

  Kitty knew now why he had become a man of sorrows. She herself had apparently, unknowing but all-seeing, spoken of the young man’s death, of his master’s search in the far north. And now not even his skeleton awaited Declan’s return so it could be given the obsequies the thatcher had needed to perform.

  He was lugging more from the shed and adding it to what he’d already brought. The crows settled along the newly raised roof beam of the far shed to watch. The pig, too, was still in attendance, its pig habits keeping it alert to the possibility that something of interest might appear. Kitty had the urge to go to Declan, to speak of the sorrow she, too, now felt herself. For him. For the young man dead. For Declan’s loss that nothing could appease.

  He had placed on the top of the pile a brightly colored sheet and a pillow leaking feathers. That seemed to be the last of it. He stood there, regarding his achievement.

  A crow flapped down and perched on the discarded pillow, spreading its wings wide and taking possession in the name of the coven of all that was piled beneath it. The pig, meanwhile, taking advantage of its incorporeal status, disappeared into the mound about halfway up. It must have seen something discarded that appealed to its porcine aesthetic and decided it deserved one last snouted inspection.

  Kitty believed it would be better if she went no nearer. She would respect Declan’s solitude, allow him the grief upon which no one should trespass. Not daring to give voice to her sympathies or to her own newfound sorrows, she slowly turned away and went not back to the castle but off toward the rising slope of Crohan Mountain. She would wander quietly, slowly, among the ruminating cows. The walk would do her good. If good in this instance was possible. Including the threat that she was to become a Hag.

  8

  The obstreperous cross-eyed pig that Lolly and Aaron had given back to Kitty and Kieran—the one originally intended for the great feast—had, for whatever reason, calmed down during the days since its return to Castle Kissane. It had become docile and cooperative, which meant it ate and ate and ate and was now sufficiently fattened for advancement into the final phase of its prescribed destiny. It would now be surrendered to the butcher in Tralee. Both Kitty and Kieran had been given hints as to the source of the pig’s serenity: the ghostly presence of the eaten pig.

  As far as Kieran and Kitty could figure out, the living pig sensed rather than saw the phantom pig and the phantom had instilled a composure that bordered on joy. In an attempt to bring common sense—a contradictory phrase if ever there was one—to what they were witnessing, they decided that it was nothing less than true love, a love strong enough to defy death and find solace and even happiness in the sensed presence of the departed beloved. Had not the original pig, now the ghost of its former self, been given to Lolly because she was a committed swineherd? And was it not given back because it had lesbiotic leanings, the exercise of which had maddened the male swine, even though it had seemed not to have bothered the sows chosen as the objects of its heartfelt affections? It was more than possible that during the time of their shared residency, that of the original pig and the one originally chosen for the feast (the one now at Castle Kissane), that a relationship made in hog heaven had flourished, and when fate (also known as Kitty McCloud) had intervened, the surviving pig had been returned to its herd, where any sexually aroused shoat could intrude upon its bereavement with importunings that had cried out to that same heaven for rescue.

  To some degree, answered prayers had sent the anguished animal back to the castle, there to be given the unseen company of its beloved. The upshot, of course, was that the pig had grown obese with contentment, and the end of this particular tale was now to be a lovers’ parting.

  Lolly swung the truck into the courtyard. The porked-up pig was slothfully sunning itself near the sheds where Declan was busy going about his thatching. She brought the truck to a sudden halt, got down from the cab, and regarded the fattened animal with satisfaction, ignorant that the court
yard was somewhat heavily populated. Brid and Taddy were solemnly watching Declan laying thatch on the second-farthest shed. The phantom pig was there as well, keeping faithful watch over its slumbering inamorata. Thinking she had Declan all to herself, Lolly strode toward him with a most unhesitant stride.

  “Declan,” she called out, her tone exuberant, without the least trace of the uncertainties that had characterized her behavior when she had seen him here in this very courtyard, before she had taken refuge in the scullery rather than confront him directly. Her step was purposeful, her attitude confident. It was as though a spell had been lifted, some evil enchantment exorcised. This was Lolly of old, the self-approving woman who had found amusement in adversity and an easy pleasure in companionship, be it human or porcine.

  “Surely the work you’re doing restores Kerry to itself. How handsome it’s all going to look.”

  Declan nodded, his concentration not willing to accommodate interruption at this particular moment. Expertly he lay the reed in its course, careful not to show favoritism to one part of the roof over another, even more careful that the thatch be looser on the surface to ensure the rain’s swift descent down the pitch of the roof. What could Lolly do but laugh at such determined indifference?

  “No need to stop for me. I’ve not come to make a further spectacle of myself. You’ve been spared few things in your life, but let my foolishness be one of them. It was Lolly McCloud you were seeing those other times. And please, let’s forget that unfortunate encounter in Caherciveen with that ridiculous woman.” (Lolly had apparently decided to overlook her own strange behavior and Declan’s as well, as if poor Lucille had been the sole cause of the event’s bizarre exchanges. Anything that would make possible the return of the Lolly Declan had always known.)

  “Now I’m Lolly McKeever again. Oh no, I haven’t shed my husband whom I dearly love, but I’ve recovered my calling … and my sanity. I’d only pretended to be a McCloud, as if a name legally taken could make a writer of me. I even wrote a book. As stupid a bit of nonsense as was ever put to paper. Can you believe that a woman of my intelligence and good sense would write a novel about ghosts and people crazy enough to fall in love with them?”