The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven

by Joseph Caldwell

  14

  Declan had finished ridging the peaked roofs of the sheds, having felt beneath him the firm cushioning of at least a foot of thatch where the two sides of the roof’s pitch met, now capped with the dried sedge he himself had cut from the nearby bog. The sun was already lowering behind Crohan Mountain. He would do the edging of the gables tomorrow and then the work would be done, the castle reasonably restored to its modest but hardly negligible beginnings. It gave him an easy satisfaction that what he was seeing might be close to what his forebears had seen all those centuries past. And it almost saddened him to note that those same ancestors had been denied the sight of the red spikes and white flowers of St. Patrick’s cabbage, an outcropping between the castle stones, attesting to its age and its endurance. To him they were celebratory proclamations of the castle’s hard-won venerability.

  A deeper sadness came over him. Soon all this would be no more. His labors had become a final tribute, an insistence that, at the end, at the moment of its going, the castle would never have been more itself: the crude repository of battles lost and won, of bitter struggles and great rejoicings, of horror beyond imagining, of sorrows and splendors that told the tale of his countrymen’s glory. He thought it better not to dwell on the subject for too long, nor to allow himself some farewell gaze that might challenge his firm resolve. Not only would Brid and Taddy be released into bliss, but the man who dared to call himself Lord of the Castle would be dispatched, his howlings lost in the explosive sounds not heard since creation itself was unleashed into infinite space, never to find rest, never to know peace, a fiery hurtling without end. He, Declan, would see to it.

  He saw Kitty standing on the tower ramparts. Thoughts of her he added to all the others that crowded his mind. Among his early conquests, she alone had pleaded no unending repetition of the initial event. Although this had been his usual preference, a quick finish and a final farewell, a preference often enforced with ruthless cruelty, he was unnerved when the preference was hers, not his own. This was not as it was supposed to be. She had come to him with no importunings, no pleas, no offers of undying devotion, no threats of self-immolation. To sustain his self-regard, he had, not quite convincingly, decided that he had induced a satiety so sufficient that it needed no sustaining reenactments. From this had come a sense of incompletion, an uneasy feeling that their relationship remained unresolved. That Kitty herself seemed to experience no such unease, that she had no further need of him, was a notion he found impossible to entertain. The thought did intrude from time to time, forcing him to shake it off with the ruthlessness heretofore reserved mostly for the termagants who made it necessary for him to seek refuge for extended periods in distant places where he would initiate anew the process that would keep him constantly on the move.

  Seeing Kitty now, he quickly suppressed the knowledge that she would be unhoused, that she would leave to teach in Cork this very Saturday, Kieran and the cows accompanying her, computer in tow, never to return to these austere and ghosted halls. Still, he had thatched the sheds. She could see her domain fully restored. And she must have some sense of satisfaction, temporary though it would prove to be.

  Whether out of guilt or pity, he most definitely had the urge to go to her now, to experience at her side some final sharing of the castle, of the strange mysteries that, he realized, had bound them together in ways no mere sexual conquest ever could. Brid and Taddy, neither flesh nor blood, had achieved what no seduction, no yielding could accomplish: a common sympathy, a knowledge of the world in all its peculiarity, in all its unsuspected possibilities. Ghost-ridden, he and Kitty were, both of them, bound to this world and to the next. And bound, as well, to each other.

  On the first wide landing of the winding stair, he passed through Kitty’s work space, her computer and its components already cleared away, and all evidence of a manuscript as well. On the next landing were the loom and the harp, soon to be needed no more. As he was emerging onto the turret platform, he considered going no further. There was Kitty, seemingly caught in some reverie inspired by the late-afternoon light, the grazing cows, and, higher up the mountainside, Taddy with the ghostly pig and Brid down among the cows. Kitty, chatelaine of Castle Kissane, should be allowed some time alone, to see what she was seeing, to muse on what she was musing. Opportunities like this, as he well knew, were severely limited.

  When he put his right foot back down onto the step below, he heard Kitty say, “Come, Declan. Please. There’s glory enough for more than one.”

  He climbed the top step. “How did you know I was here? I thought I was making no noise.” He had come to her side; he, too, looking out at the nearby slope of Crohan Mountain, the westward sun casting the lengthening shadows of the cows on the grass where they fed. Brid and Taddy and the pig cast no shadows, for they were already shadows themselves. No sun, rising or setting, would ever give them reassuring proof of their existence thrown against a well or stretched out upon the mountain green.

  Although Kitty didn’t bother to turn toward him when she spoke, he could see, at the periphery of his vision, a faint smile hovering. “Name the woman who’s unaware of you, Declan Tovey, and you no more than a few steps away.” She faced him directly, “You’ve been up here before?” The words were only part query, but the rest was said with a certainty that made the questioning intonation irrelevant.

  “Often. But a long time ago.”

  “And you’d see Taddy and Brid.”

  The words failed to surprise him. Surely the time had come for the two of them to acknowledge openly their shared gift. And the pig, too. Setting his eyes on the mounded top of the mountain, he nodded, then said, “And you, too. Were they the reason you bought the castle?”

  “No. I didn’t know they were here, nor did Kieran, until I saw them on our wedding day, at the feast in the great hall. I thought they were the last of the squatters who’d been staying here and the two of them dressed as peasants to mock my pretensions in buying a castle. I learned different. And Kieran, too. And then we learned the why of it.”

  “I always supposed it was the same for you as for me. That somewhere in the past a kindness had been done to them.”

  “A kindness done? Not a bit of it I’m afraid.”

  “Oh?”

  Taddy and the pig had been joined by Brid, and they were slowly moving toward the top of the hill. Kitty watched, and Declan, too. “It was a McCloud and a Sweeney were to carry out the plot to keep the Lord Shaftoe of that time from living in the county. It would mean the castle destroyed and him, the lord himself, his body sent skyward toward heaven, his soul pitched down to where he was already well known. But they’d gone away, and the two young people taken, then hanged.” She brushed a strand of hair fallen to her forehead. “The rest you must know. And maybe what I’ve already said as well.”

  “I do.”

  “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter, not really.”

  Kitty considered this, then shrugged her acceptance of the evasion. It was hardly a story she enjoyed telling.

  Declan raised an arm and pointed to where Brid and Taddy were making their slow ascent up the mountainside. “See them now. Is it the sunset they want to watch, do you think?”

  “Not the sunset itself,” Kitty said, “but the sign given that she go to her loom and he to his harp. It’s always been so. At sunset, they are there. He to pluck the harp, she to put her foot to the treadle of the loom.”

  Declan was tempted to say, “That much I know. I’ve found the book, the catalog, and the notes and diagrams. According to your plan, Taddy would pick up the harp or Brid press down on the treadle, and the flagstones would do their work. But I’ve improved on that. His lordship will lift the latch to the door to the master bedroom—but you’ll be on your way, and his lordship, in the lifting, be sent away as well, but not to Cork.” He said instead, “They come to us because of what was done long before we ever were.”

  Kitty nodded. “It’s a great guilt and a shame that gi
ves them to me and to Kieran.”

  “I’m sorry for your shame, but it wasn’t you and Kieran had done it. Nor your ancestors from cowardice.”

  “It was a McCloud did it. It was a Sweeney did it. Or failed to do it I should say. The hanging. And you, Declan Tovey?” In a gesture Declan didn’t understand, she gripped her thigh as if to reassure herself that something tucked into her pocket was still there, or, more likely she’d felt there a sudden twitch she wanted to calm. With a slow shake of his head, Declan turned his gaze from Kitty out toward the mountain. Brid and Taddy and the pig, too—they were gone. “Are they there now?” he asked. “Brid at the loom? Taddy at the harp?”

  “Soon. Wait for the sun to lower a bit.”

  “And this every day?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And is it there they spend the night, not needing the sun?”

  “I don’t know. And I’ll do nothing to find out.” A lock of hair had fallen to her forehead. With impatience, she brushed it away. “But I asked you a question. And you, you have no guilt? You have no shame?”

  “You don’t know our story?”

  “Rumors are what one hears. But the true story, can you tell it? I’d like to hear.”

  Declan was confused as to why the woman sounded almost severe. What had he done? What had he said? But he was immediately given the reason: of course she would resent a family history very much the opposite of her own, the heroism of his ancestors as opposed to the shame inherited by the Sweeneys and the McClouds. However, if she insisted, the intensity of her shame would hardly be his fault. His story had hardly been a secret. All through the village, it had been passed on from generation to generation. She must know it already. Of course it made her angry. Now he understood as well the pressure she kept supplying to her thigh. It was to control a rising resentment.

  So he began his tale, hesitant, reluctant, the ancestral offer, the scornful refusal. The whipping. And Brid and Taddy hanged for all their want to save them.

  When he finished, Kitty’s response was close to what he expected, the words clipped, the tone bitter. “And that’s the way it happened? That’s the true tale?”

  He wanted to say something conciliatory, but he could think of nothing. He continued to search the place where only moments before young Brid and Taddy had been. “They’re gone,” he said quietly. “Why, in their place—or even there beside them—can’t there be some vision of young Michael as well? He was even younger, and surely as fair.” Slowly he shook his head. “Had I known the boy’s fate, would I have cried out my ancestral cry: ‘Let me fall and the stone be where I’ll lay my head! I will fall. I will die and be taken by the sea’?” Even more slowly his head went from side to side. “I could never have said those words. Descended from heroes, I am a coward. Let it be Michael who dies. I’ll not give myself instead. To the boy’s fate I give assent. For me it can be no other way. And I’ll say no more.”

  Kitty had taken her hand away from her thigh and placed it, almost tenderly, on the parapet stone. “You have no Michael,” she said. “But we’ll always have Taddy. We’ll always have Brid. And let that be enough.” Declan said nothing. Kitty continued. “We will have them all our lives, and no matter what the cause. You have told your family’s tale. Now let it go. And we have ours. And that is how it will always be. For us and for them.”

  The time had come for Declan to go. If he stayed he might let Kitty know how wrong her words had been. Soon Taddy and Brid would be gone forever. The sun was on its way to the Western Sea. Soon Kieran would climb the hill and fetch the cows. Still, Declan felt something that could be said had been left unsaid. And so he said it. “Is it true what’s been told? That to free them from the castle, to end what’s happening to them, keeping them here, the gunpowder must be found and set off at last?”

  Kitty didn’t answer. She lifted her hand from the battlement stone, held it there, then slowly rested it where it had been. “How diminished our world would be without them” is all she said.

  “But—”

  “Yes. I know. We see their sorrow and how bewildered they are. Could they have given their assent to this? Did they want to be here with us and with those who will come after? That they not be forgotten? That what was done to them should never be lost to those who’ve been given eyes to see? Do we know for certain? Can we be sure of anything? Yes, it’s right that we should want to send them to the reward their martyred bodies have earned with all that horror. But is there more to it than that? It’s foolish, I know, to even think it. But can’t we be forgiven if we want them here? Selfish? Yes. Most likely. Still, all is speculation in the end. But can’t it be simply that our pride insists all mysteries must be resolved? And always, according to our interpretations, to justify our own speculations? To be honest, I don’t know. Except I would be bereft without them.”

  “What you say makes no sense.”

  “Don’t I know that? But what sense does it make they’re here in the first place? Yes, we want everything to make sense, to be ‘understood.’ And who would blame us for that? We are born into chaos. We are visited by confusions. Surely we can be forgiven if we misjudge what was intended. If someone who comes after, even if it’s kin of mine, and brings all of this to rubble, and Taddy and Brid, they have no earthly home and are gone to a great joy, I’ll have no blame to rightly lay on them. Nor should they blame me for not having done what they—our children, or our children’s children—decided should be done. And there’s the end of it.”

  Declan, too, lay his hands on the battlement stones. “I’ll go now,” he said.

  Kitty nodded, then, searching the mountainside, perhaps for the vanished ghosts, she said, “I’ll stay.”

  No more was spoken.

  When he reached the landing below, Declan paused on the lowest stair. Brid was at the loom. Taddy, the harp held against his chest, was strumming the long-gone strings. Declan crossed the landing, his step hurried, almost desperate.

  Kitty looked down and watched the thatcher, once the scourge of the countryside, now mournful as he made his way to his time-battered truck. Never would she confront this man with the coin and thrust at him the truth of what it had revealed. There had been a moment when she’d felt obliged to carry out the pledge she’d made after Peter’s harrowing revelation. So incensed had she been by the boy’s distress that only the infliction of the savage facts could begin to compensate for what the coin had done to him.

  But Declan had been wounded enough. He had his sorrows, some known, some never to be known. She would become his protector—to the degree that protection was possible. Further woundings might await, but they would not be inflicted by the hand of Kitty McCloud. Not even the knucklebone would she give, a reminder of his loss. It would be returned to the sea, to the one to whom it rightly belonged.

  As for the coin, she would see that it was delivered anonymously to his lordship. Not for a moment did she doubt that he would accept it, slavering at its worth, certain that it had come from some secret admirer, grateful for the honor of his acknowledgment on some occasion he felt no need to remember. If the coin carried a curse … well, she would not dwell on that.

  Declan had arrived at the truck and was hoisting himself up. The door was closed, then the truck started out of the courtyard and up the castle road. When she shifted her gaze back to the mountain, with Taddy gone and Brid as well, and no Michael to take their place, it came to her that Declan, too, was a wandering shade, for all his fleshly presence. What he had considered pursuit was flight. What occasioned this, she would never know—no more than he. But his doom had come down, and release was nowhere to be found. Kitty spoke the words aloud: “Come back again, dear Declan. Here will be the waiting ghosts, I promise you. It may well be that the day will come when they’ll be all you have.”

  The truck made the turn off the castle road and disappeared.

  15

  Kitty regretted that she’d called Lolly and told her to come collect her pigs, w
hich, by whatever means, seemed to have strayed onto the slope of Crohan Mountain. She should have known they couldn’t be Lolly’s. The distance was too great from there to here. When the first one had appeared, Kitty surmised that the animal, calmed and fattened under the influence of the sensed presence of its ghostly love, had escaped the butcher’s blow and found its way back to the place of its contentment.

  But then another pig arrived, and then two more before the morning was done. Annoyed, she phoned Lolly. Lolly, equally annoyed at the absurdity of what she was being told, said she’d check her herd and call back.

  She checked her herd. She called back. All her pigs were accounted for. Kitty did not believe this for a moment. Lolly—and only Lolly—in all of Ireland was obstinate enough to continue raising pigs when every other swineherd in the country had surrendered their animals to “intensive.” Lolly must come and cart off her beasts without delay. They were not grazing animals, and before too long they would have uprooted the entire mountainside, denuding it of the heather and gorse, robbing Kitty’s cows of their next meal. If Lolly weren’t there by sundown, Kitty herself would round them up, take them to the slaughterhouse, and pocket the profits.

  Kitty had acted precipitously. The next time she checked the mountain, she counted seven pigs. Her exasperation increased. Then, as she was watching from the gallery window of the great hall on the way to her turret study, she saw Taddy and Brid moving among the herd. And, if Kitty was not mistaken, they had been joined by Kitty’s own pig, the ghostly one, snuffling with the rest of them, then raising a snout to take in the mountain air. The animal seemed to consider itself in familiar company. Also, none of the pigs was damaging the least bit of turf. They were not being pig-like.

  It was when yet another animal appeared (yes, “appeared”) in their midst that Kitty stopped breathing. The newly arrived animal had not come up the mountain slope. It was simply there. Kitty exhaled. By her accounting, eight pigs, as ghostly as her own, were gathering on the mountain. This could not be. It must not be.