The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven Read online

  The Pig Goes

  to Hog Heaven

  ALSO BY JOSEPH CALDWELL

  FICTION

  The Pig Comes to Dinner

  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

  THEATER

  The King and the Queen of Glory

  The Downtown Holy Lady

  Cockeyed Kite

  Clay for the Statues of Saints

  The Bridge

  The Pig Goes

  to Hog Heaven

  _________________

  JOSEPH CALDWELL

  DELPHINIUM BOOKS

  HARRISON, NEW YORK • ENCINO, CALIFORNIA

  To

  My Mother

  Whose all-purpose expletive

  —in wonder or in wrath—

  was

  “Glory be to Saint Patrick!”

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The reader should assume that the native Irish 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.

  “All’s well that ends well.”

  —William Shakespeare

  famous Irish playwright

  The Pig Goes

  to Hog Heaven

  1

  Aaron McCloud, a reasonably young American writer as yet undistracted by fame or fortune, had come to Ireland, to County Kerry, to the shores of the Western Sea, to bewail the refusal of an inordinately plain woman to cooperate in his determination that he become the object of her undying love. However, through the inexplicable offices of a wayward and willful pig, he had, before his anguish had found meaningful expression, fallen in love with—and subsequently married—an inordinately beautiful auburn-haired Kerry swineherd, Lolly McKeever. Then, to further remove him from his American routine, Lolly, possibly through an osmosis derived from the age-old supposition that in marriage the two become as one, decided to become a writer, leaving Aaron to slop her pigs.

  This he had done, not without satisfaction. Swine-herding, he discovered, had more similarities than he had suspected to the writing of a novel: an unremitting commitment, an unrelenting discipline, an uncertain outcome, and, ultimately, the unpredictable prospects when the time for marketing arrived.

  For Aaron the swineherd, that day had come to pass. And it proved to be quite possibly the greatest triumph of his life. Riding now in the emptied truck, his adored wife driving at his side through the narrow roads of County Kerry, he had no means to suppress the euphoria surging through him. The sale of the pigs, fed and fattened under his tuition, had brought in profits well beyond even his wife’s encouraging expectations.

  His writing, two novels completed in his thirty-two years, had not gone unnoted, but they came nowhere near the remuneration the slaughterhouse had just forked over. In truth, this was the result he had obsessively longed for. A few semi-favorable reviews and an obscure prize were all well and good, but to have one’s labors—either as a writer or as a swineherd—given such an extravagant evaluation provoked in him a retroactive satisfaction for all the pig-filled days and nights when failure was a constant threat, fidelity its own reward, and marketing possibilities the source of an unbearable apprehension.

  To intensify his euphoria, there had arrived that very morning an e-mail from a Dublin literary agent—the same woman who had steered Aaron’s Irish aunt Kitty, also a novelist, to heights of renown, a pinnacle Aaron, in his more delusional moments, had presumed to be reserved for himself. That his wife would ascend in the same direction as his aunt was a thought he’d done his faltering best to avoid, but the fear, thank God, proved unfounded. The agent, to Aaron’s intermittently shame-filled relief, had been somewhat impolitic.

  “Lolly McKeever,” the e-mail began. (Lolly had submitted the manuscript under her birth name, not wanting to be confused with Kitty McCloud.) “I have read with some interest the novel you so kindly sent, and which will be returned to you shortly through the post. It is beyond doubt the most regressive tale about Ireland, about the Irish, written by a citizen of this country within the previous century or, quite possibly, within more than several centuries past. A haunted castle? Whatever were you thinking? And the ghosts, we are asked to believe, are actually present, not even justifying their appearance as the objects of a fevered brain. Soon you will be writing about leprechauns and little people and pots of gold and Hags and Seers and kingdoms hidden under the earth. Forgive me—or, rather, don’t forgive me—because it must be said: You’ve disgraced your native land and all the people in it. And your attitude toward the Anglo-Ascendancy? Cannot the past be relegated to the past? Are we expected to have our righteous wrath aroused by misdeeds committed so many years ago? Have we not advanced beyond the eternal cries against wrongs inflicted upon our ancestors long departed? Please allow me to offer some explanation for your misguided efforts. I have been informed that your husband, Aaron McCloud, nephew of the estimable Kitty McCloud, is an American and reputed to be a writer. It is my surmise that he, not you, wrote this abomination. No one native-born in Erin could possibly be so ignorant of what Ireland is and who the Irish are. Only an American of Irish descent—still wallowing in complaints long since exhausted—would dare to insult current Irish sophistication by claiming that ghosts roam the land and are seen and accepted by adults educated in Irish schools and reared in modern Irish ways. Only an American, whose people abandoned Ireland in distant times, would promote a sense of outrage against the English to whom we are now reconciled except for some sullen Catholics in the north. The British, after all, have become our most active trading partner and a ready market for Irish exports. I do hope this exoneration, this naming of your American husband, is, for your sake, applicable. Allow me, in charity, to assume so.

  “One thing more: I suggest that your husband renounce all literary pretensions and, with your assistance and at your insistence, invite you—a born Irishwoman with, no doubt, tales of her own to tell—to take his place at the computer while he becomes, for once and forever, a keeper of pigs. I most strongly propose it. The future of Irish letters demands it. Most sincerely, Fiona O’Toole.”

  During her time as a writer, Lolly, if she had not lost all her mirth, had been deprived of a goodly portion of her characteristic enjoyment of calamity. Uncertainty and doubt, as well as fears for her self-sufficiency, were emotions so new to her that she lacked the equipment to control, if not conquer, them. Only when, with cheerful impatience, she had been schooling Aaron in the joys of slopping pigs did she again become herself, a reversion now completed, thanks to Ms. O’Toole’s brutality.

  Rather than dismiss the woman’s words as the blind and ignorant rant of an obvious incompetent—a reaction Aaron himself had had to resort to on more than one occasion—Lolly had, with raucous delight, required her husband to repeat out loud choice passages that intensified her hilarity and heightened the pitch of her laughter. She was, however, disappointed that Ms. O’Toole had failed to properly disdain the plot’s resolution: to be rid of the ghosts, blow up the castle. This
absurd denouement had been suggested by Kitty and her husband, Kieran, when Lolly had appealed to them for some way to bring the entire debacle to an acceptable conclusion And the absurdity increased when they further suggested that gunpowder was already planted in the flagstones of the castle’s great hall. Lolly was embarrassed by this want of invention, but, innocent that she was, she did as she was told. Why had the agent not remarked on this obvious failure of the imagination?

  But when Lolly had said to Aaron, “Read again the part about it must have been you who wrote it. That part.”

  “I think once is enough, thank you.”

  As the drive continued, he felt even more acutely an unease that had earlier intruded on his present satisfactions. With the delivery of the pigs that had so greatly benefited from his ministrations, and with the unmourned novel’s ruthless demise, he and Lolly would now return to their previous callings, he to his computer, she to her pigs. Why he failed to feel all that eager to get on with his career was a subject he preferred not to examine. He would concentrate, as much as possible, on the day’s triumph, with an unarticulated promise that, if necessary, he would allow the source of his unease to reveal itself at a time of its own choosing—which, if he were lucky, would be never.

  Intentional or not, their present seating in the cab of the truck symbolized the day’s reversion: On the way to market, with the pigs on board, Aaron had driven. Now, as they moved along the road with their lightened load, Lolly was driving.

  They had gone some distance when Aaron realized they were not headed for home, where the surviving pigs would be protesting the delay in their scheduled feeding. He had become aware that the truck was coming not just close to where the cliffs fronted the sea, but to the site where Aaron’s Aunt Kitty’s house once had stood. The altered landscape was now marked by a wave-battered cove; the house itself, as well as the garden, pasture, and an empty grave, had long been drawn down and swallowed by an adamant sea.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  “You’re going to where the house used to be. I can tell.”

  “If you can tell, what need is there for me to do the same?”

  “But why do you want to go there?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? It’s because I want to.”

  “There’s nothing there. Just the cliff and the sea and not even the land where the house used to be.”

  “If there’s nothing there, why object?”

  “I’m not objecting. I’m just curious.”

  “Maybe I have no reason.”

  “You always have a reason.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  When her husband failed to challenge her further, Lolly decided to apply a mild goad. “I don’t have to tell you everything. Can’t I have reasons of my own?”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  They were getting closer to the sea. Aaron sat up straighter in the passenger seat and examined his wife’s face in the rearview mirror. She was as exquisite as ever. As he watched, she reached up and smoothed an eyebrow that had no need of attention. She puckered then relaxed her lips. They were, as they had always been, full and luscious. Surely he was the most fortunate of men. He returned his gaze to the road ahead. This was the woman who loved him. Him. Aaron McCloud. Rather than ask outright for some verification of her affections, he said, “Is it because that’s where we realized we were in love? Is that why?”

  Lolly answered with a noncommittal no.

  “Is it because you want to see if anything of the house has washed back onto shore?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Fine with me, too.”

  “All right then.”

  With as much indifference as he could summon, Aaron glanced out the side window. They were on a narrow road that would intersect with the one that ran closer to the edge of the cliffs, the old boundary of the McCloud property that had boasted a house of stone, two stories high, with well-appointed rooms, some of their windows looking out over a stretch of meadow that ended at the precipice that dropped to the sea below. Nothing was left now, the meadow having been eroded bit by bit over the years, and the house itself ultimately delivered in one great gulp into the sea—after which Lolly McKeever and Aaron McCloud, Kieran Sweeney and Kitty McCloud, had all admitted to their love. It was as if, now free of the house and all its complicated history, they were able to see into their hearts and find there a surprising and inevitable ardor that would sustain their lives for all time to come. Or so they hoped. Or so they expected.

  It should be mentioned that it wasn’t just the remnants of the meadow and the fine stone house that had been claimed by the waves. Nor was it only the chattel accumulated by more than several generations of McClouds. In the house at the time of the havoc wreaked by the roiling waters and the insistent winds was a laid-out skeleton, handsomely clothed, resting in a coffin of fine boards and embroidered cushions. The bones of Declan Tovey, master thatcher and celebrated seducer, who was murdered and then buried with the tools of his trade in the garden of Aaron’s aunt, had been unearthed by the rootings of a pig.

  The murder had never been solved, the identity of the murderer complicated by the last-minute confessions of no fewer than three of those attending the irreverent Irish wake of the unfortunate Mr. Tovey: Lolly McKeever, Aaron’s Aunt Kitty, and Kitty’s new husband, Kieran Sweeney. One by one each had claimed credit for the thatcher’s despatch, complete with motive and method. Aaron himself, the fourth participant in the burial rites, suspected but couldn’t verify that each in turn might be protecting one of the others, making it impossible to identify the one true malefactor among them.

  (The authorities, of course, were not allowed to get involved. The crime concerned Lolly, Kitty, and Kieran, and no one else. Also, who would go to the gardaí and implicate one of their own? Although years had passed since the days of Irish oppression, the word informer still retained a stench sufficient to gag even the most vengeful proponent of that most elusive ideal of all: justice.)

  It should be remembered as well that part of the attraction that fulfilled itself in the marriage of Lolly and Aaron, then of Kitty and Kieran, was the possibility that one might be marrying a murderer, bringing to the conjugal couch an implicit forgiveness along with a hint of courage that one would place oneself in so perilous a situation for the rest of one’s life. To sleep night after night next to a possible killer is hardly conducive to deepest repose, but since all marriage commitments are founded on risk, on the unknowable, on the brave surrender to uncertainty, why would something so touchingly rash as a killer’s confession be considered an impediment? Did love not conquer all? Did it not consist, in part, of an attraction to mystery and its corollary, danger? And so each had found in the other an increase of interest in that very element that might have discouraged someone less willing—or less able—to accept a wider range of possibility, a deeper complexity, in one’s choice of an everlasting mate. Declan Tovey, dead, had achieved the impossible: the joining of two of the least likely couples imaginable, Leda and the swan and Titania and the ass included.

  As the truck lumbered along, Aaron could see, off to his left, evidence of the changes that were altering the countryside in recent years. Prosperity had shocked all Ireland into rejuvenation. Whole villages were springing up, with “holiday houses” meant to lure not only intruders from abroad, but also Irish urban dwellers denied, until now, the means to mingle among the agreeable company that the truer Irish County Kerry could so readily provide.

  Bereft of their poverty, the Irish now had to adjust to changes just as challenging as the coming of freedom, if not more so. That they deserved both freedom and prosperity and had dearly earned them was beyond question; still, it was change. Aaron could hardly mourn his people’s loss of hardship. He couldn’t wait to see them adjust. He reveled in
the awakening. Lolly, of course, might worry that it could make even more archaic her pig farming. Would the avalanche burying the past doom her show of independence, which had planted its standard in the muck and mire of her beloved farm, the stubborn flag uprooted as if it were a mere sapling, highly qualified for extinction? Aaron devoutly hoped it would not.

  A settlement of the aforementioned “holiday houses” was behind them after a turn in the road. Up ahead, however, an equally unnerving spectacle confronted them. On the far side of a field to the left, an aggregate of equipment was arrayed along the road that bordered what had been part of the McCloud property. Tarred gravel was being spewed onto a widened roadbed, and an elephantine steamroller advanced slowly, almost solemnly, behind, the newly paved portion reaching almost into the ditch that ran between the meadow and the road. Aaron’s first thought was that, surely if God still loved Ireland, the equipment would be tipped into the ditch before more desecrations could complete themselves. But then a native sympathy intervened, and he quickly wished no evil upon those earning their daily bread (and beef and stout and fish and vegetables and fruit and tarts and french fries) by the sweat of their swarthy brows. These men had jobs. If anyone were to complain, it wouldn’t be Aaron McCloud.

  This did not prevent him from saying to his wife, “We have to go back,” his relief at the necessity badly disguised. “We can’t turn onto the road where they’re working.”

  “Nonsense. We’ll just get out and walk across the field, then up to the edge of the cliffs.”

  “There’s a ditch just to our left.”

  “Why would a ditch stop us?”

  “It’s a very wide ditch. And there’s water at the bottom.”

  “If we get wet,” Lolly said, “we’ll get dry”—an age-old assurance central to Irish survival. She stopped the truck, opened the door, swung her legs around, and let herself out onto the road. To give emphasis to what she’d said, she slammed the door shut, went around to the front of the truck, and started down into the ditch. “Uuh. Nice and mucky. You’re going to love it.”