The Pig Comes to Dinner (16 page)

A compact was being offered, an agreement that he would speak and she would answer with no less truth than he. Kitty had no choice but to say, “Yes. He sees them too.”

The boy nodded, acknowledging her acceptance of the covenant now formed between them. “And that's only natural.”

“Natural? Why?”

The boy let out more a snicker than a laugh and jerked his head upward a little as if the subject embarrassed him. “My mother says when two people get married they become as one. And you know what else she says?”

“No. But I'd like to hear.”

“She says since you saw Brid and Taddy and now your husband sees them, too, she knows which of the two of you you're likely to become. You. Because you saw them first. She seemed to like the idea. What do you think?”

“I can hardly contradict your mother, can I?”

“Best not.”

“And she laughed?”

“She was very proud of herself for thinking it.”

“Umm. Yes.”

“But she said you shouldn't worry. He'll never know it. About which one he's to become. Unless you choose to tell him.”

“I don't believe that would be—necessary.”

“That's what my mother said. Except she said it wouldn't be wise to tell him.”

“Thanks.” Kitty kept her voice as uninflected as possible. She would prefer if at all possible not to have the boy know
everything,
particularly some intimate thoughts not intended for communications to anyone, especially her husband, two-as-one or no two-as-one. Or to anyone else for that matter, prophet or no prophet, seer or no seer.

Confirming immediately Kitty's worst fears, the boy without pause said, “But you should know that this is just what my mother thinks, not what she really knows. She says she's not sure yet about what I just told you. It might be the truth—and it might not.” He paused, then said, “She's still working on it.”

“Oh?”

Before she could ask for elaboration and before he could give it, Joey came wagging up to them and put his nose between them. The boy moved quickly away. “Joey! You're not to be here. You're to be at home. You've got chores and you know it.” Joey, a breed of border collie with brown and black splotches on its white fur, wagged its tail even more enthusiastically at the admonition, then looked from Peter to Kitty, then Peter again. “Now I have to take him home,” he said. “He's to help with the cows.”

“But you were coming up to the castle, I thought.”

“Oh, no. I couldn't do that.”

“Oh?”

He'd been tickling Joey behind the ears. Joey wagged the back half of his body in appreciation. “I don't want to be there if now is when it blows up.”

“The castle is not going to blow up.”

“Oh, but it's supposed to. My mother says so.”

“Oh?” Kitty did not approve of her newly acquired habit of speaking in monosyllables, but there seemed to be nothing she could do about it.

“I have to get Joey back home.”

“But if your mother is so sure the castle is supposed to blow up, surely she can say when.”

“She can't.”

“And you. Can you?”

“I have to get Joey home. Or he'll get a beating.”

“But wait. You have to tell me what else you know. Or what your mother knows.”

Peter stopped tickling Joey and stood up. He looked down at his sneakers and wiggled the toes of his right foot. When he'd finished, he said, “You say my mother is a Hag.”

“I never said that!”

“To yourself you say it all the time. You said it three times: when my mother was helping Ellen with her cards, when she was watching the football, and when she told you about Margaret's asthma.”

Kitty thought it best that they part now. Whatever the boy might have to tell her she would do without. Such incursions into her innermost thoughts should never be allowed. Not when employed against her. He must also know she'd commented to herself about his unwashed neck. But she must stop thinking now. Not one more thought. Not until a safe distance could be put between herself and this—this— “I'm peculiar,” the boy said, providing her with the wanted word. “And my mother is peculiar. But in the way my mother told me peculiar means. It doesn't mean crazy or even strange. It means distinct. Set apart. Not like everyone else. And you're peculiar, too.”

“I?”

“You're a writer. Maybe that's why you can see Brid and Taddy. Because you're a writer. At least that's what my mother thinks it could be.”

“Oh?” Then, to break the hold the word had on her, she added, “Why because I'm a writer?”

“Because you live with ghosts all the time. People no one else can see. You're used to it.”

“But—”

“I have to get Joey home.” He stepped back onto the road. Kitty placed herself in front of him, blocking his path. Peter looked from Kitty to Joey, then back to Kitty. Joey moved back, away from Kitty, Peter at his side.

“You mean,” Kitty continued, “You mean that if I invite any of my writer friends to the castle—”

“You have no writer friends.”

“All right then. But in the unlikely event that I did have one and invited her—make that him—invited him over—”

“He wouldn't see them unless he's as good a writer as you.”

“I'm a very bad writer. Everyone knows that.”

“Maybe Brid and Taddy don't.”

“That's because they can't read. At least not English.”

“Oh, no. They recognize that you see things no one else sees.”

“Me?”

“You. And they know you look for the truth. When you're writing, I mean. You don't always find it, but when you don't, you accept it not like it's a failure but because you believe in mystery. You accept it. You're not afraid of it. You don't feel as if you have to explain everything. You've got not very many talents. As you said, you're a bad writer. But you don't put a rock wall around your imagination. You don't go running back to your brain, as if the truth can be figured out by the mind. It can't. The truth comes only through the imagination. If you were smarter, if you had more intelligence, you might be tempted not to use your imagination the way you always do now. That's what my mother says. And she's not a Hag.”

“You're making this up. Or I mean your mother is. The same as she made up the reasons my husband and I both see the ghosts.”

The boy and the dog skirted around her, Joey keeping an eye on Kitty, the two of them starting down the road. Kitty caught up. Peter, continuing on, said, “And if you don't believe what I say you won't be peculiar anymore. You'll be like all the others. They don't believe us either. Which doesn't bother me. I mean it doesn't bother my mother. She says—”

“Can't you tell me what
you
say?”

“My mother, she says it means what we say and what we see is the truth. But if everybody believed what we said, we'd know it couldn't be true. But you've believed it. Because you're not like them. I told you. You're peculiar.”

“Can't you think of another word?”

“A writer?”

“All right, then. Make it peculiar.”

“Joey, come on.” He moved faster, Joey at his heel. Kitty waited, not sure what she should do. Too confused, too agitated by so many unanswered questions to go on her way, she went after them. When she'd caught up, the boy snapped his fingers.

“Joey, over here.” Joey stopped looking up at Kitty and obeyed.

Kitty walked sideways, the better to see the expression on the boy's face. He was angry. “All right, then,” Kitty said. “Your mother is not a Hag. And even if she were, what's wrong with that? Doesn't a Hag know what no one else knows? Think of it. If your mother's a Hag, from what she thinks of me, I'm a Hag, too.” Kitty was supremely pleased with herself. “That's it. I'm a Hag. Look at me. I'm a Hag.”

“A Hag has no soul. A Hag can't die. My mother can die,” he said quietly. “And so can you.” He paused. “And so can I.”

So determined was his step, so quiet his voice as he said these words, that Kitty considered abandoning her quest for knowledge. In this, as in most cases, maybe ignorance was preferable. She must turn around and go up the hill, to her castle, to her ghosts. To her husband.

Peter had stopped and was picking his nose again, this time extracting an even tinier bit of dried snot. He regarded it with keen and concentrated interest. “If you want Taddy and Brid to go, blow up the castle. They'll go.”

Kitty wanted to stop, but the boy kept on walking. “How can I blow up the castle?”

“The gunpowder.”

“I don't mean
how.
I mean
why
would I want to blow it up?”

“So Taddy and Brid would go. If you want them to go, that's the only way.”

“I go out and buy some dynamite—”

“No need. I told you. The gunpowder. It's there.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Where's there?”

“My mother says details are sometimes left missing.”

“Oh, thanks. You tell me I'm sitting on a keg of gunpowder and then you won't tell me where it is.”

“Not even Brid and Taddy know.”

“How can they not know?”

“They know nothing. They knew nothing then. They know nothing now. They don't even know why they're there or what's happening to them. They only know they're supposed to be someplace else. But they're supposed to be in the castle, too. As long as there is a castle.”

“And blowing up the castle will send them there—wherever that might be?”

“The castle is where they were hanged and didn't know anything about anything. The castle was supposed to die. Not them. Until it does, they have to stay.”

“And that's the only way? Blow up the castle?”

“My mother says it is. And this she doesn't just think. She knows.”

A new thought came into Kitty's head. Maude McCloskey
was
a Hag. A Witch. A Sorceress. It was Mrs. McCloskey who had summoned the shades of the grieving Brid and the bewildered Taddy. Hers was the witchcraft that had brought them there for the sole purpose of getting Kitty McCloud out of the castle. She was envious of Kitty's success and wealth, of her beauty and her capture of the best man on the face of the earth. Kitty had made herself an object of the world's envy— but given her gifts, had she any choice? What the boy had said about her imagination, her so-called peculiarity, was crafty and cunning, a form of flattery to which she was, for those moments only, susceptible. But her susceptibility had come to an end. She would free herself from the thrall of the resident Seer. She would dismiss all that had been said. She would certainly not blow up her castle.
Her
castle. She would get Father Colavin to come again and this time rid the premises of unwanted spirits. There would be no more nonsense. With the right words, the right blessings, he'd dispatch—

Here she stopped. Suddenly, she realized she could never do that—terrorize them with bell, book, and candle. Drive them off
—evict
them as if she herself were the Anglo Ascendancy returned to do unfinished work.

Let Kieran love the lovely Brid. She was a ghost, a shadow, a wandering shade. Surely Kitty had charms, all palpable and present, that should without too much difficulty distract a man as needful as her husband, heaping upon his splendid person prizes only she could provide. She had already proved she had no fear of ghosts. What she must do now is extend even further this admirable trait; she must encompass this latest intrusion to include the natural order— a natural order in which it was decreed that she would experience no competition for the full and undistracted devotion of her husband—she must embrace it, accept, and ignore it.

How she would do this, given the wrath that had arisen even as she was thinking these extravagant thoughts, she had not the least idea. But if it had to be done, she would do it. Her inborn competence would rescue her. It would more than rescue her. It would, as it so often did, make her triumphant.

Kitty felt herself nudged toward exultation, but, alas, before she could effect her arrival to that blessed state, there came to her one final thought. Keats's Grecian Urn came crashing down right on top of her incomparable head: the youth pursuing the maid, the two of them stuck for all eternity on a piece of pottery, but bearing the news that threatened now to send poor embattled Kitty into a swoon. “Though winning near the goal,” Keats says to the youth, “forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
And she be fair!
Forever!
Kitty, a child of unrelenting time, destined to age, to grow fat perhaps, then to wither. And
she
be fair!

Had she the means at hand, the castle would be blown up by sunset. Or, better, let Father Colavin come. Let the dastardly Brid be driven Eve-like into the savage unknown, with or without the requisite fig leaf. Let her howl and shriek. And let her take Taddy with her.

Mournful, bewildered Taddy. Exiled. Away from Kitty's sorrowing eyes. Gone. To be seen no more in the shadowed halls. Never again to play the plangent tunes that only he could summon. To lay down the harp one final time, and be gone forever.

If Kitty McCloud could be given an action commensurate with her feelings, she would—no gunpowder needed—blow herself up into a thousand pieces, scattering over the Kerry countryside and out over the sea itself bits of flesh and hair and bone, remnants of her spleen, gobs of her overburdened brain, slivers of skull, and, more far flung than any, the exploded heart into which she had implanted more confusion than it was meant to bear.

But so simple a resolution to the contradictions battering her about the head and heart was not available. Instead, she must turn away and walk a fairly straight line up the narrow and increasingly steep incline that would take her home. To the castle. To the bloody castle. Blood. Blood. Blood was what she wanted. But whose? No one's. Not Kieran's. Not hers. Not even—were it possible—the blood of Brid or Taddy. Only one thought was permitted to her now. The curse had descended. The curse of confusion and contradiction. And it had come down like a shroud over good, sweet, blameless Kitty McCloud.