The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (25 page)

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

K
itty regretted that she'd called Lolly and told her to come collect her pigs, which, 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.

Unmindful of the thickly strewn straw that tangled her feet, she fought her way across the great hall and out the door to the courtyard. There on the mountain Taddy and Brid seemed to be herding the pigs closer to the top of the hill. With uncommon acquiescence, flicked by no switch, with no hams slapped in encouragement or shins nipped by an officious dog, they slowly moved to higher ground.

They were ghosts come to keep the company of Taddy and Brid. To what purpose she had not the least idea. In her increased exasperation she decided to put the blame on herself. Accept one phantom pig on the premises and before you know it, the place would be overrun—as was happening now. Unchecked, they would claim the entire eastern slope, or more—one massive huddle of swine-backs and hog-hams crowding against each other, obliterating the mountain green. Lolly had better get a move on before Kitty's exasperation exploded into expletives not fit for a castle chatelaine.

Lolly was a pig person. She'd know what to do. But what could that possibly be? Totally inexperienced in the ways of a ghost (except for her recent ill-fated novel), she would be of no help whatsoever. Typical Lolly. Here Kitty was, Lolly's best friend, and what use would Lolly be in this moment of pig crisis? None. None at all. It had been so all their lives, and nothing would change. Ever.

It then occurred to Kitty that she must rescind her demand that the pigs be collected. Should Lolly arrive, no pigs would she see. And, not without cause, she would consider Kitty deranged. Kitty would be ridiculed. As eager as Kitty considered herself for Lolly's happiness, this particular form of enjoyment, her ridicule, was not within the prescribed limits.

As she started for the phone, she realized that it was to her benefit that Aaron was not coming instead of his wife. A McCloud like herself, he'd see the phantom pigs. He'd be amused. He'd return to his wife and—A sudden realization entered Kitty's mind, scattering all other concerns beyond the farthest reaches of the four winds, and appropriating to itself every mental faculty and more than several of her emotional ones. It caused her jaw to drop and her eyes to widen into an unblinking stare. Her nephew Aaron was not her nephew. Far, far worse: he wasn't even a McCloud. It had come to her like a blow struck by an uncaring fist.

Aaron had not seen her own phantom pig. Nor had he ever seen Brid or Taddy when they were manifestly present to any McCloud with eyes to see. Her oldest brother, in America, was vindicated. He had claimed years ago, at the time of his divorce, that his wife, herself a Kerry woman, had sullied her heritage, to say nothing of her marriage, by a susceptibility to a man emigrated to America from County Cavan, a susceptibility she chose not to resist.

Kitty's mother had been resolutely contemptuous of her son's insistence. No daughter of Kerry would degrade herself to such a depth as to consort with a Cavan man. Kitty had seen no reason to contest her mother's responses. She subscribed to it with an ease reserved exclusively for any and all denigrations particular to her brothers.

This, in turn, had allowed her, from the first, to welcome the gawky and bewildered boy—her presumed American nephew Aaron—and do what she could to remake him, during their childhood summers together at her ancestral home, in her own image: a transformation not spectacularly successful, but sufficient for her to invest in him a durable affection and an amused indulgence for his considerable shortcomings.

Slowly Kitty closed her mouth. Deliberately she blinked her eyes. Her spine stiffened; her mind was calmed. The new knowledge was still there, but her resolve was more than a match for its invasive presence. Never would she permit this revelation to reach her onetime nephew. More than sufficient was her old affection that she would, under all circumstances, spare him the devastation that would attend his being told he was not a McCloud. For her to rob a man of what was obviously his most valued possession would make mandatory her own damnation. The archangel's Edenic expulsion of Adam and Eve would become, by comparison, a casual inconvenience.

Love, born of pity, flooded her entire being. For the first time she cared deeply, very deeply for this man, now cast out, bereft of a lineage that had been blessed by the gods going back to the Druid days of yore. His secret was safe. He would never know of his newly revealed nullity. His no-longer-aunt Kitty McCloud would see to that. If she could extend a dispensation from unwelcome knowledge to Declan Tovey, she could do no less for her hapless ex-nephew.

Kitty's follow-up phone call was too late. Aaron informed her that Lolly was on her way. He added that his wife considered the trip a fool's errand and that Kitty should be prepared to be labeled the fool. As much as she resented the obvious pleasure he took in her imminent humiliation, it saddened her to hear his cheerful voice. Little did he know she possessed the means to wipe this and any future smile from his slaphappy face. And even less did he know she would never be so cruel as to use the deadly weapon so recently placed at her disposal.

The truck drove into the courtyard before Kitty had time to hang up.

Lolly greeted her friend with an enthusiasm that boded no good. Lolly was apparently anticipating an easy triumph. To respond in kind, Kitty waved with no less enthusiasm. She called out Lolly's name. She let out a trilling laugh that sickened her, so blatantly false was it, so obviously fake. “It's all right,” Kitty yelled. “It's been taken care of.”

Lolly slammed the door of the truck. “What's all right? What's been taken care of? I didn't come here to make sure everything was ‘all right.' Where are these crazy pigs so I can prove they're not mine?”