The Pig Comes to Dinner

The Pig
Comes to Dinner

A
LSO BY
J
OSEPH
C
ALDWELL

F
ICTION

The Pig Did It

Bread for the Baker's Child

The Uncle From Rome

Under the Dog Star

The Deer at the River

In Such Dark Places

T
HEATER

The King and the Queen of Glory

The Downtown Holy Lady

Cockeyed Kite

Clay for the Statues of Saints

The Bridge

The Pig
Comes to Dinner

J
OSEPH
C
ALDWELL

D
ELPHINIUM
B
OOKS

H
ARRISON
, N
EW
Y
ORK
• E
NCINO
, C
ALIFORNIA

To
Wendy Weil,
who inspires

Contents

Author's Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Acknowledgments

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

The reader should assume that the characters in this tale, when speaking among themselves, are speaking Irish, the first language of those living in County Kerry, Ireland, where the action takes place. What is offered here are American equivalents. When someone ignorant of the language is present, the characters resort to English.

The purpose of reality is to show the way to mystery—which is the ultimate reality.

—Sister Mary Sarah, SSND

The Pig
Comes to Dinner

1

K
itty McCloud, hack novelist of global repute, paced the pebbled courtyard of her recently acquired home— one Castle Kissane—on the pretext that she was waiting for her newly acquired husband, Kieran Sweeney, to arrive with his truckload of cows, thereby completing the domestic arrangements that would prove their conjugal claim to be, in the truest sense, a household in the age-old tradition of County Kerry, Ireland.

Although she had not articulated to herself the real reason for the repeated frantic backing and forthing—first in the direction of Crohan Mountain, which bordered their property in the northwest, then to the castle road on the south—she was, in reality, tormenting her imagination, determined to summon from its fertile depths a possible “correction” she planned to write to George Eliot's big mess of a novel,
The
Bloody Mill on the Bloody Floss—
the added expletives a measure of Kitty's consternation. The continuation of her career depended on her highly successful ability to pillage novels from the commonly accepted canon and rescue them from the misguided efforts of their celebrated authors.

What she hoped for was a rare insight similar to the one she had applied to Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre—
in which it is Rochester who throws himself from the attic in despair over Jane's rejection of a bigamous marriage, after which Jane, with her goodness and kindness, tames the Madwoman, and the two of them create for themselves a life of calm contentment fulfilled by weaving, making pottery, and the practice of animal husbandry.

So far, none of the possibilities for
The Mill
provoked her imagination into the state of high excitement and imperative promise without which she could do nothing. For her, only a near-hysterical propulsion would allow her to proceed, and she was, at the moment, grounded in an inertia that refused her every attempt to create even the slightest stir, let alone the volcanic eruption she so desperately craved.

Whether she should curse Ms. Eliot or her heroine, Maggie Tulliver, for this intransigence was not yet decided. (Never did Ms. McCloud consider that the source of the difficulty might lie within herself. Such a consideration lay well beyond even
her
considerable powers.) She raised her gaze to the top of the mounded hill that was Crohan Mountain and saw nothing but heather and gorse and a scattering of oblong stones, whitened with age. She turned to the castle road, praying that the truck would soon arrive and provide some surcease from her torment.

To some degree, her prayer was answered. Indeed, a truck was approaching. But instead of the arrival of the expected cows, as so often happens with prayers the answer came in a form much less welcome. There, moving toward her,
was
a small truck—what in America would be called a pickup—but it was one identifiable as belonging to her American nephew, Aaron McCloud, and his recent bride, Lolly McKeever, now also a McCloud. In itself, their approach could not be considered a cause for concern. They might be coming to help welcome the cows or to invite themselves to supper, or to commit some lesser intrusion.

What roused in Kitty no small suspicion that something more complicated might be involved was the presence, in the bed of the truck, of a pig. A pig all too familiar and not at all welcome. Its snout was raised to take in the castle air, its cloven hooves apparently firmly planted in the bed of the truck to counter the bounce and rattle over the uneven road.

For the first time since Kitty had bought Castle Kissane, she wished it didn't lack the full complement of a moat and the attendant drawbridge, to say nothing of a portcullis that could be lowered in situations such as the arrival of this particular pig. The castle, to be sure, was not without its charms. It could claim a courtyard in which dogs might take the afternoon sun (should there be a sun). There were stables and sheds in arcades from which the healthy stench of manure could find its way into the great hall, where matters of state and strategies of defense had once been argued into incomprehension. At the top of its turret, reachable by a winding stone staircase at the end of a passageway that led past the conjugal bedroom, one could pace in the open air and participate in the life of the Kerry countryside. One could see the snow-dusted summits of Macgillicuddy's Reeks; one could count cows and sheep and search the horizon of the Western Sea for ships of friendly or unfriendly intent. One could smell the salt air, even at this distance, or the fragrant scent of gorse and heather, hawthorn and honeysuckle.

But truth to be told, the castle wasn't all that much. With its two-story crude stone bulk and its four-story turret, it resembled nothing so much as the architectural progenitor of a design that would find its ultimate statement on the central plains of America: the barn and silo—except that this mighty archetype was built for the ages. And, most to be regretted at the moment, it contained no keep into which Kitty could now withdraw, as had the populous of old, to escape unwanted encroachments.

Now, in the bed of the approaching truck, an unwanted intrusion was looking for all the world as if it had just won first prize at the fair and was being given a royal progress throughout the county, accepting with easy indifference the obeisance of those privileged enough to line its path.

So that it wouldn't seem that Kitty had been simply standing there as if waiting to welcome an unwelcome pig, and to let her nephew and his bride know that they were interrupting her at a task of some import, she gave a quick wave and, as best she could, tried to make it appear that she had been, before their arrival, on the way to the farthest of the courtyard sheds. There, in a great heap, was the refuse left behind by the previous tenants of the castle, who happened to be squatters: the stained mattresses, the broken lamps, the computer parts either obsolete or damaged in moments of exasperation; a broken guitar; shoes, boots, and sandals, most without mates; college texts (one in economics), tattered paperbacks (two of them Kitty's inimitable triumphs), magazines, and more than several works written in Irish, not only Peig Sayers, the bane of everyone's schooling, whose Irish writings were force-fed down their gagging throats, but also Sean O'Conaill and Tomás Ó' Criomhthain; and, crowning the pile, a television set with what appeared to be a kicked-in screen.

When the truck pulled to a stop, Kitty's nephew, Aaron, got out of its cab. He was wearing khaki pants, a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the word WISCONSIN, and a pair of muddy sneakers. Lolly dismounted from the passenger side. She was wearing a pair of oversized woolen pants, so large indeed that they could easily have belonged to some former lover who had left them behind on one of his more than several visits to the all-too-accommodating Lolly in the days— and nights—gone by.

Not infrequently did Lolly affect this attire. At times, Kitty considered it a permissibly mocking statement relative to her chosen profession of swineherd. A womanly pig person could surely be allowed to doff her fitted jeans and designer boots and don the obvious castoffs more appropriate to the disgusting chores her calling required.

In less charitable moments—of which there were a considerable number—Kitty convinced herself that Lolly McKeever, now Lolly McCloud, was indeed flaunting, for all to see, some past lover. That she could continue to indulge in this unseemly display even after her marriage to Kitty's nephew was surely an invitation to outrage. But Kitty counseled herself to refrain from a direct challenge during which she would have hurled not accusations but known truths that would shame even Lolly, who was, in most circumstances, almost as impervious as Kitty herself to any assault on her self-assured perfections.

Let her nephew—who, by the idiosyncrasies of Irish procreation, was only two years younger than herself—discover for himself, in the context of his precipitous marriage, the true nature of the hussy he had so ignorantly wed. Kitty would neither do nor say anything that might disturb the presumed bliss her nephew and her best friend Lolly—the slut— were inflicting on each other.

That Aaron, himself a writer, had failed to see more accurately the truth about his bride, that his perceptions were so faulty, Kitty accepted as the reason he was of a renown so distant from her own. Had he possessed his aunt's incomparable discernments, surely he, too, could have carried his bride across a castle threshold instead of installing himself in his wife's house, well within calling distance of the sty that gave their home its defining distinction. Because competition was never a consideration, Kitty felt quite free to praise and encourage him in the exercise of his decidedly inferior gifts.

As Kitty emerged from these reflections, Aaron went to the truck's tailgate, lowered it, and encouraged the pig to jump down, which it did with improbable ease. Without so much as a snort of greeting, it bounded down the slope toward the stream that flowed along the foot of Crohan Mountain. As she watched it cavort, Kitty experienced a growing certainty that some unilateral decision regarding the pig had already taken place.