The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (24 page)

“But then you'd know. And you want to know.”

“Peter, don't do anything that—”

“You'll be here with me. I was alone before. But now you're here.”

“You'd really …”

He lifted his head and held out his hand. Kitty came to him. She looked into his eyes. How soft they were, their quiet brown. He reached his hand out farther. Kitty gently put the coin into his palm. Peter drew back his hand. He waited a moment. He swallowed. Kitty didn't move. He looked down.

After another moment, without raising his head, he spoke in a low uninflected voice. “They were hanged. His name was Taddy. Her name was Brid. And they the fairest of all the county around. They'd done no wrong. They'd planned no mischief. But they were hanged there in the castle and no one to wash their muddied feet. And the hangman, and there was a woman, too, they were given payment, a coin all gold with a golden king to reward them for their deed. But a shame came over them. They whipped each other with reeds from a thorn bush, but it wasn't enough. So they whipped each other again until the blood came through what they were wearing. They kept the coin hidden between two stones at the side of the hearth, and explained to their children it was a kindly merchant gave it for the offering of themselves and the whipping his lordship had decreed. Because they confessed to their priest and did terrible penance for the rest of their lives, the youthful ghosts do not appear to their descendants as hanged, but as the wandering shades they had become, the same as they present themselves to the descendants of the Sweeneys and the McClouds because they knew nothing of Lord Shaftoe's decree and they were, in the end, innocent even if they were part of the cause of their deaths. But the coin was passed from generation to generation, never spent, so it could be seen how brave the beaten ancestors had been. But it was for the hanging it had been given.”

Transfixed, Peter continued to stare, unable to free himself of the vision. Kitty waited, fearful of breaking into his trance. Finally Peter looked up. “Mrs. Sweeney? You're here?”

She answered quietly, “Yes. I'm here.”

He blinked, then looked down into his open hand. “No! No! It isn't mine!”

Her voice still quiet, Kitty asked, “May I take it?”

“No. No one should take it. No one should have it. It should belong to no one. Ever. But, yes, take it. Take it away so I won't ever see … even …”

Careful to touch with only the tips of her fingers the soft flesh of the boy's hand, hoping to show some gentleness, Kitty lifted the coin and drew it away. Slowly she closed it into her fist.

Peter waited, then looked down into his empty hand. He, too, folded his fingers into his palm, then opened them. Assured that he held nothing, he raised his head. “I told you, didn't I?”

“Yes.”

“And you haven't forgotten?”

“No, I haven't forgotten.”

“Do you want to?”

“No, I don't want to.”

“I've forgotten. I forgot already.”

“Good.”

“But you remember.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Maybe I shouldn't have told you.”

Kitty shook her head. “You should have told me.”

“And I can go home now?”

“You can go home.”

“Yes. I'm going home now.”

“Will I walk with you?”

“I have my bicycle. It will be enough.”

He took the bicycle away from the stone wall where he'd leaned it, got on, and with neither a word nor a glance back, circled the car in the roadway and went up the second of the three hills that would take him home.

Kitty would not rebury the coin. She slipped it into the pocket of her slacks, then patted her thigh to make sure it was safely stowed. She would return it to Declan. Perhaps he already knew the truth. If he didn't, he would know it now. Just as she and Kieran had accepted the burden of shame passed on to them by their ancestors, Declan, too, must bear whatever the truth would lay upon him. It was not impossible he would dismiss it as being nothing of interest to him. He was not famed for the easy activation of his sense of shame. But at least he would know as she already knew, and as Kieran knew, that the consequences of ancestral deeds do not end with the final breath of the departed. They live on. And Declan must make of it what he will. Kitty would do her part.

Again she pressed her hand against her thigh. The coin was there, and the knucklebone as well. It was the coin that would be given.

14

D
eclan 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 gives 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.