The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (6 page)

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 dominance 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.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto the strewn beach, stumbling on a stone, his progress from then on limited to lurches and sudden fits of thrown balance. It was not that he ignored what was at his feet. The mist wasn't
that
dense, but his eyes had been instructed to disregard anything set in his path and keep themselves alert for any least object the sea might have decided was no longer of interest to itself. He was foolish enough—
crazed
might be the better word—to hope he could find a less primitive entity than salted kelp. He was foolish enough to expect that there at his feet might be a shred of clothing, the cap maybe, or the saddest prize of all, the wounded skull where the fish might have made their home. Anything. Anything at all that he might hold long enough for him to know that there, in his hand, was some remnant of the lost boy. He wanted to hold whatever it might be long enough to feel he had said the final farewell he had saved for the moment he would bury the youth in the soil of Kinvara.

Should he find anything, words might come to him. He would say them, wait for the tide, then return to the grave what had been given by the sea. Declan asked no more. He wanted to be a participant. He wanted to be included in the obsequies. Michael should not have been sent to this lasting rest either in Kinvara or in the sea without some sign, some gesture, some final permission to take leave of this world, to know of Declan's surrender of the boy to the peace that only the grave can give.

Driftwood there was in abundance, some pieces smoothed, polished clean, others, more recent, rough and splintered, torn loose from a sunken boat and sent back to a world that no longer had any use for it. Kelp and weed, frothing as if they were a strung series of mouths gone mad, marked the farthest reach of the receded tide. There were plastic bottles, none capable of offering the final fulfillment of beach glass, its magical colors rivaling the panes set into church windows at a time when it had been thought that faith and glory were one and inseparable. He did find a shoe, but it wasn't Michael's. He didn't even bother to pick it up, much less look for its mate.

He stopped and turned to face the sea. The swelling waves had given him nothing he had sought. He would not complain. The sea was the sea. To rage against it defined absurdity.

The tide had turned again. The beach was narrowing. The mist was being drawn up into the low clouds above. Declan turned to his right and gave one last look at the stretch of beach ahead. Whatever it might hold would have to wait for another time. For an instant the thought came to him that he would continue his search, that the incoming tide would continue its advance at whatever speed it preferred. He would go on. The tide would rise. It would reach the foot of the cliff, and it would continue to rise. Declan's feet, his ankles, calves and thighs, his chest, his shoulders, neck and head would accept the water's arrival, and still he would continue on. He would be drawn into Michael's grave, where he would find the boy waiting, shifting slightly as the swells moved overhead. He would be as he had been when Declan had placed him among Kitty McCloud's cabbages.

The water had come closer. The thought, the intent to seek further, passed on. Declan would go no nearer to where the boy would be. He would simply endure—and give thanks that his grief would never end. There would be other forays, other gleanings, perhaps a finding.

On the beach, about ten feet from the bottom of the stairs, tipped up against a stone, was a book, opened. He stooped and picked it up. Most of the pages were stuck together, sodden, suggesting a long immersion. His nostrils took in the full salt scent the book released as, with limited success, he tried to flip his way through. It was as though the words had been set down not in print or even in ink, but were the product of tears fallen one by one onto a piece of paper and then gathered together to become a book. That the book should be drenched seemed only right. Declan read the words on the title page:
The House
of Mirth
. “By Edith Wharton.”

It was from the shelves of Kitty McCloud. That much he knew, a book that might require one of her famous “corrections.” Would he restore it to Miss McCloud? That it had come from Michael's grave was a claim he could rightly make for himself. But of what interest was it? Could the sea possibly exchange it for something more intimate? The baseball cap, for instance.

He would return the book to Kitty. It was hers, not his, nor was it Michael's. Let the cap come. That he would accept. Nothing less.

4

T
he cross-eyed pig screamed and squealed as if it were being tormented by a thousand pig demons—even though it was merely being encouraged to walk the ramp onto Lolly and Aaron's truck for transport to Castle Kissane. Head raised, ears pulled straight back, it entreated whichever deities might be attentive to the lamentations of a pig to take pity on its plight, honor its dignity, and smite its tormentors. In partial answer to its prayer, it was awarded new modulations: a more varied pitch and an increase in decibel levels that reached the limits of human hearing.

Aaron gave its hams another slap. The pig, believing itself a horse, reared on its hind legs and would, if it could, have trampled Aaron with its cloven hoofs. “Tell it it's going back to the castle, not to the slaughterhouse,” he told his wife.

“I did tell it. It won't listen.”

“I can't hear. It's making too much noise.”

Lolly, fortunately, had a history of enjoying confusion and calamity, an idiosyncrasy that was a help with the situation now. Adding her happy laughter to the pig's pleadings, she climbed the ramp onto the bed of the truck. After she'd gone as far as the back of the cab, she turned and called out to her husband, “Come on up.”

“What?”

Lolly mouthed rather than spoke the words.

Aaron understood. “Why?” he yelled.

Lolly made the appropriate gestures, inviting him to join her. He climbed the ramp. As soon as he was aboard, Lolly kicked away the ramp and put in place the tailgate that fenced the bed of the truck. The pig became silent.

“Face the other way,” Lolly said. “And come back here.” She returned to the far end.

Aaron followed. “What are we doing?”

“We're letting the pig know we're going without her and leaving her behind.”

“We are?”

“We're pretending. Surely you know how to pretend.”

“I guess so.”

“Then pretend.”

Aaron, with a nonchalance so fake even a pig couldn't accept it, looked to his left, then to his right, then up at the sky.

“You're not pretending. You're acting. Pretend for real. Pigs aren't stupid, you know.”

Aaron decided to do nothing, an action at which he was more than particularly adept. The pig, moving slowly onto the fallen ramp, came to the end of the truck and snorted softly. Without moving her lips, Lolly said to Aaron, “Don't do anything. Let her beg just a bit more to make sure she got the message.”

Aaron stood at his wife's side, trying with all his might to clear his mind of all the thoughts racing through it, the least of which would force from him some gesture, some shifting of his feet, some stretching of his neck. It was not easy for him to pretend upon demand.

After the pig had repeated its soft snortings three times, Lolly, in mercy, removed the tailgate, jumped down, replaced the ramp, and watched as the pig trotted aboard. It went directly to Aaron and rubbed its ringed snout against his pants leg. “You'll have to stay there with her. I don't want her to think she's been tricked,” said Lolly. She shoved the ramp up onto the truck bed, told Aaron to replace the tailgate, then went around and climbed into the cab. Smiling widely, she waved through the rearview window, thumped twice against the back of the cab, and drove off to Castle Kissane.

Until now, neither Lolly nor Aaron had been able to figure out what to do with this particular pig. It seemed to be subject to fits, but the summoned veterinarian could find nothing wrong. Various tests validated his prognosis. For the inexplicable episodes of screeching and screaming, no explanation presented itself. And when it repeatedly butted its formidable head against the fences of the penned area, desperate to be set loose, there were fears that it would damage itself, to say nothing of the pen. Also, it would shriek, snout raised skyward, to ward off any other pig that might come too close, creating around itself an impenetrable barrier that none of the other pigs would dare to violate. Intermittent periods of repose seemed more the result of exhaustion than the arrival of some newfound serenity.

This behavior could not continue. It agitated the entire herd. Loss of appetite was the most disturbing symptom. Here, too, the veterinarian could offer nothing but a shake of his head. But if a pig doesn't eat, it doesn't fatten. And if it doesn't fatten, then its sole purpose for being a pig is nullified. A trim and slender pig is not what nature had in mind when the species evolved to its present preferred state: gross and repellent. Slender and cuddly was not an acceptable alternative.

To isolate the pig achieved nothing. The farm's acreage, limited as it was, failed to provide a place that would enable the animal to be out of earshot not only of the herd but of Lolly and Aaron themselves,—not to mention their neighbors. Slaughter was the only solution. This pig, after all, had once been chosen from among the entire herd for such a fate. Its eviscerated, spitted, and roasted carcass had been the intended centerpiece of a communal celebration, a general rejoicing justified by Aaron's aunt Kitty and her husband's having taken possession of Castle Kissane, a bit of real estate distinguished more by its want of lordly proportion than any claim to an imposing dynamic. A castle, however, is still a castle, with a dank dungeon as well as a great hall crowned with an iron chandelier that could accommodate a hundred candles.