Declan was halfway along the castle road that led to the turn that would take him up to Maude McCloskey’s cottage. Kitty felt a slight urge to question his ghostly status. Maude, if anyone, would know she was engaging a phantom to cover her roof. Could there be another resolution to all these confusions, an unexplored explanation waiting to be considered?
But then she saw Declan stop. On a low stone wall sat Brid and Taddy, as if waiting to watch Declan pass by. With them was the phantom pig; it, too, seemed to be interested. Declan was observing them, even bowing slightly. Taddy and Brid made no noticeable acknowledgment, but that was their usual custom. She and Kieran had often passed or come upon them, and they’d give no special sign of recognition. But the spectral pig raised its snout in obvious salute. Declan lowered his bow further, then continued on his way. He and the ghosts were in communion. He was one of them.
“He’s back! He’s back!” Kitty’s wrath had returned. “Another ghost! And Declan Tovey at that! Quick. Give me the nettles. I’ll eat them here. I’ll eat them now. Quick. Give them to me!”
Kieran, ever alert to his wife’s sometimes impulsive demands, said simply, “Let me wash them first.”
“No! I’ll eat them as they are. And their sting be damned!”
3
Declan Tovey stood a few feet from the side of the narrow road that ran along the great rock cliff fronting the Western Sea. The breeze blew softly, lifting only slightly the black forelock that had fallen toward the scar above his left eye. His dark coat and pants, woolen and well made but more than slightly worn, were still damp from the ditch in which he’d slept the night before instead of returning to the Widow Quinn’s, where he had his lodging. He had wanted to be at the sea before the sunrise.
A three-day stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin with bristles not quite as dark as the hair on his head or the curled tuft springing from the open neck of his shirt. There was a pebble in his right boot, but he would tend to that later. Casting his gaze out over the water, he was lost in a meditation of the horizon, the sullen clouds in the growing light meeting the indifferent waters, their pale purple and gloomy gray obliterating the line intended to separate the things of the earth from the things of the sky. Only the birds, cormorants and gulls, shrieking as they swooped and then rose again, seemed aware of the difference, taking full advantage of their ingrained knowledge to plunder the sea and escape to the clouds. A lone curragh rode the uncresting waves with an ease not usual on this coast.
Also unhurried was a boat, possibly a decommissioned freighter, headed for Skellig Michael, the island farther south, miles from shore. The boat was most likely laden with tourists come to gawk at the abandoned hermitage hewn from the island’s crags and pinnacles, once home to the penitents of centuries long past, huddled as close as this world allows to the sheltering wings of Michael, the avenging angel himself.
Declan paid a momentary tribute to the island—how could he not as a son of Kerry, bred in the blood to revere the sacred precincts from which all Ireland had drawn strength and courage in the dark days only recently lifted. He, of course, was of two minds about the self-martyred hermits. To him, at times, it had seemed that with their denial of worldly pleasures, with their commitment to eat only what the barren ground would grow and what the sea and the sky might yield, they had brought into Ireland not the expected blessings, but a curse that had condemned people less eager for denial to experience—willingly or not—the same deprivations they themselves had so greedily embraced.
So pleased, apparently, was the Heavenly Father with the hermits’ atonements that He decreed that the entire people from whom they’d sprung should be given an unending opportunity to replicate their extravagant austerity. When Skellig Michael had exploded into the air from the rock bottom of the sea, it had been too hasty in its eagerness for the sky to collect fertile sediments from the ocean floor, and too exultant by its expulsion from the netherworld to allow the watery sea time to erode its craggy stones to a scape more homely if not more hospitable.
That Skellig Michael was a holy place none could argue, but to Declan, living in the land that had made possible its sanctity, born a recipient of its example and a child of the enforced replications of its hardships, all Ireland was, by indisputable logic, equally holy—but with a holiness it had not invited and a blessing that could easily pass as a curse.
These unavoidable thoughts, moving at a measured pace through his distressed mind, prompted him to shorten his gaze and observe the great gaping space before him, where there had once been a house and where a garden had grown. It had belonged to an impossible woman, one Kitty McCloud, a writer of some repute. Her fame derived from an uncanny gift for both exciting and assuaging the suppressed libidos of unsuspecting females (and not a few males as well), convincing them in English, Irish, and languages that spanned the globe that they were simply indulging in a well-told tale, the adult equivalent of a bedtime story, when in truth they were submitting themselves to an onslaught against their most protected secrets. Declan had often wondered if Kitty herself was fully aware of her unique achievements. In his pride, he preferred to think he was the only one.
Mediated by her books, these truths descended into regions where the subconscious, in all innocence, engaged in deeds the day would quake to look on. The readers’ conscious equipment assured them that these were fantasies, whereas in reality they were excursions into the seven secret places where the reader could range rampant and unconcerned among forbidden truths, thinking them no more than the crafty manipulations of an unscrupulous hack.
Declan had read Kitty McCloud’s work, first out of mild curiosity—she was, after all, a conquest of his earliest urges—then with actual interest, then in awe. He considered himself one of the few people who had deciphered the code and found his way into the inner temple where this votary of the truth labored away, secure in the knowledge that no one knew who she really was, where she had come from, and where she was leading them. Declan knew, but he would never tell—either about the code or about his youthful conquest.
And now her house and the garden had been taken into the sea, leaving behind an emptiness into which had rushed the giddy waves, reveling in this newly gouged cove. Gone, too, was the grave he’d dug in her garden, the grave into which he had placed with a tenderness uncommon to him the boy—sixteen? seventeen?—who’d been his apprentice, a cheerful and eager young man who had begged to be taught the thatcher’s trade. The boy’s name was Michael, and he’d come from an island in the north, which island Declan would never know. When he’d name one, the boy would always answer, “No. Not that one. Another one. To the north.” When asked the name yet again, he would only say, “It has so many names, each different, depending on whom you ask.”
“Fine. And I’m asking now.”
“All right, then. To my family, to us, it’s been always known as Kinvara. But don’t say it to others or they’ll claim there’s no such place. But to us it’s Kinvara. There. To the north.” And he would point out to sea.
After Declan had buried the boy for safekeeping in the newly dug garden of Kitty McCloud, he had set out to the north, to find Kinvara and the boy’s family, to bring him home so he wouldn’t lie among strangers. More than a year of wandering had taken him to far places, to islands no map had ever shown, to villages unvisited by travelers, to towns where no one recognized from Declan’s words a young man who had wanted to be a thatcher: he of the dark brown hair and deep blue eyes, the straight broad shoulders and the skinny arms but powerful hands; he of the marked cheek, the right one, where a thrown stone had missed the eye toward which it had been aimed by an older brother. He of the confident nose and the innocent lips, the negligible chest and the long thin legs, the happy insistence that he become a master of his chosen trade. He of the high laughter and low sighs, the easy smiles, the hidden sorrows and the big feet. He of the unknowable mystery of himself, all gathered together in the name of Michael—the Hebrew word the boy had told him meant �
�Who is like God.”
His death was unexpected but not sudden. They had been thatching a cottage roof off a road that would end before it reached the top of a great hill, giving way to rocky pastures where the sheep would graze. The thatch was of combed wheat, guaranteeing long service and certain shelter. Declan had decided from the first that at least one layer of the old thatch should be removed, the gulley indentations filled with new reeds, creating a firm foundation for the next course.
It was while Michael was filling in the gullies near the roof beam of the high-pitched roof that, for whatever reason, he decided to stand upright, perhaps to relieve a crick or a cramp, maybe just to be free of the blunted scent rising from the reeds. He slipped, he slid, he fell, and Declan was helpless to do anything but cry out, “Don’t!”
Michael’s head hit the flat stone sunk in front of the cottage door. But no sooner had the boy straightened himself out full length than he sat up, raised both his arms, looked at Declan, and smiled and shrugged, congratulating himself for not having been subject to the punishment he deserved for contradicting his master’s instruction about not taking unnecessary risks.
He got up, put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and made the ascent, unfazed by the fall and the flat stone. Together he and Declan worked until sundown. During the walk back to the truck Michael stopped, went to the side of the road, leaned against a fence bordering a sheepfold, then carefully began lowering himself onto the ground, his eyes showing surprise more than hurt. He lay back his head but had not yet straightened his legs out in front of him when the legs simply fell sideways and his body tipped slowly toward the ground. He had died.
Declan sat down next to him and drew his body into a sitting position. To keep it from tipping again, he put his arm across the boy’s shoulders and drew him closer. Declan would wait a moment, then take the body to the hospital in the next village and report what had happened. The authorities could then locate the boy’s family and arrange for a proper burial.
The moments passed and still they sat there. Then Declan recalled all those times when he had been too tired to roam (if such a thing were imaginable)and the boy would recite the old tales and legends sent down by mouth or set down by a seanchaí, stories retrieved from ancestral memory. Some Declan remembered, like Finn MacCumhaill tales, and some he’d never heard, like “The Old Woman in the Chest” and “Crooked Tadhg’s Way to the Island.” But now the boy was dead, there, against his shoulder.
Slowly the dark came down. A half moon rose over the hill. Declan went to the truck and opened the door on the passenger side. Then he went back, crouched down, and raised the body in his arms. The legs and arms dangled freely, but the head was held in the crook of Declan’s arm. He propped the boy on the seat and lowered the head onto the his chest.
Declan went around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the truck’s motor. He saw the lowered head. It looked as if the boy felt he had done something shameful and had forbidden himself to hold his head high. Declan put his hand under the chin and raised the head. He leaned it against the back of the seat, but again it fell forward. Declan put the truck in gear but couldn’t place his foot on the accelerator. The head should not be lowered in shame.
He reached his arm over, drew the body closer to himself, and let the head rest on his shoulder. The truck drove off.
As they went slowly along the dark lanes, Declan realized why he had waited so long to take up the body. He had come to know that he would never deliver the boy into the hands of others, who might bury him in common ground if his family couldn’t be found. He, Declan himself, would find them in the far north. This thought advanced from a decision to a determination to a vow. For now he would simply bury the body in a place where it could safely wait for his return.
Her house had been dark when Declan reached the garden of Kitty McCloud. He had seen the newly turned soil plowed two nights before by Kieran Sweeney, sworn enemy of Miss McCloud and all her kin, who loved her above all women in the world but was forbidden by an age-old feud to declare his ardor. Still, every year since Sweeney was fifteen he would secretly, with his small plow, prepare her soil for whatever she might choose to grow, usually cabbages.
The plowing was not especially deep, so Declan, with a spade—an implement for cutting peat from a bog bottom—he found leaning against her tool shed dug down to a decent depth. The grave would be only temporary, until he could take the young man home to the north. After a moment’s pause, he sat down next to the hole he’d dug and pulled off his right boot. He thrust his hand inside, felt around, then upended the boot and gave it an impatient shake. Out onto the ground fell a coin, gold and imprinted with the profile of the monarch who had reigned more than two centuries before, George, third of that name. He picked it up and held it between his thumb and forefinger. As he turned it over, then over again, he wondered why he’d felt a strange compulsion to place it in the grave, but after looking at it a while more, he shrugged, put the boot on, and slipped the coin back inside. To have buried it with the boy would have bestowed on him the highest honor within his power to give. For generation upon generation it had been passed along, from the time of the imprinted monarch to this present day, a token of a great deed done by Declan’s ancestors and sacred to their memory. It was his duty to pass it on to the next generation, and it had been an aberrant thought to even consider burying it alongside the fallen apprentice. The boy was not his son. He was his apprentice. Declan did, however, take off the baseball cap he always wore and placed it on the boy’s wounded head. And, even though the youth had not yet completed his apprenticeship, Declan, bowing to an instinct he felt no need to understand, placed his sack of thatcher’s tools inside the grave.
As he was lowering him into the opened earth, he could feel again the cold ground he’d been digging. He lifted the body back up and leaned it against the mound of earth, then took off the coat he was wearing—the one with the brass buttons—and, slowly, carefully, and not without difficulty put it on the boy.
It was when he was buttoning the coat that, informed by a prompting from nowhere, he realized he could not do what he was doing. He could not place the body in the ground. He could not accept that he must leave him there, alone and in the cold. He could not believe that the boy was truly gone, that he, Declan, had lost him. Forever. And that he would never see him again working away with the reeds on the rooftops, or hear again the happy voice telling tales from the distant past. Then, without warning, came a still more unacceptable truth. The boy in the grave would be alone. And with that came another thought: The boy had always been alone, a loneliness he had accepted with good cheer and an indifferent resignation. Declan had seen it in the isolation of the work, in the chattering and the tale telling, but he had never been aware of it until now. Recollecting it now, he reached a depth within himself he hadn’t even known existed. His heart broke, allowing the entry of a grief so profound it would find there a place where it would dwell forever.
Slowly Declan lowered the boy back into the grave. Quietly he covered the body, making sure that the earth looked undisturbed by anything other than Kieran Sweeney’s plow. He made his way back to the truck, stumbling twice. Then he set out for the north.
Declan had neglected to say a prayer, but remembered on the second day of his journey. He paused near a well and, before he drank, stood silently, inviting God to select from the confused vocabulary that crowded his mind and his heart the words He considered appropriate to the event. Declan drank but half a cup. Then he gave the rest to the ground at his feet and continued on to search out Kinvara.
A mist had come up from the water, reminding Declan as he stood atop the cliff that the sea had ways to protect its secrets. While sometimes gentle, as now, it was potentially fierce and terrible. No longer could he see the curragh, no longer make sure that the boat had arrived safely at Skellig Michael. The gulls could be heard but not seen, their cries out of the clouds mocking any and all who might try to compete for do
minance of the mist. There was no sea, no sky, and even the land was beginning to dissolve.
From a distance, then closer by, came the sound of a car, or more likely a truck. Declan would wait until it had passed to make his descent down the stone steps to the beach below. The ancient passageway from the McCloud house to the sea had been an escape route for hunted priests in the days of suppression. Now, the stairs alone had survived the rampage that had delivered the house and the boy’s grave to the undeserving waves. Now he could tell it was definitely a truck, its arrogant growl too explicit to be mistaken for anything other than that. To his distress, it did not continue on by. It had stopped far enough away to be invisible, but near enough for him to be seen should the mist shift or be summoned back into the waters below. Now he could hear voices that managed to be intense but hushed. He might even have heard his name, but that could be an illusion prompted by the damage done to his concentration by the ear-numbing sound of the truck.
He walked along the edge of the cliff, cautiously, more slowly than he’d prefer, but at a pace acceptable under the circumstances. He did not want to go as the house had gone, as the garden had gone, as the grave had gone—pulled from the heights down into the closing waters. A little way back from the cliffside he found the first of the steps hidden under some overgrown weeds. He began the descent, still cautious, still slow. The voices had faded or, possibly, ceased altogether. He doubted that anyone had seen him.
The rising shroud had enveloped him, taken him into itself, with the whispered promise that it would protect him in this moment of need when he sought nothing but solitude, a separation from the world and all the people in it. He would make his search unseen, unchallenged.
The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven Page 4