The Pig Comes to Dinner Read online

  Kitty looked in the direction Lolly’s out-thrust hand demanded. There was the pig, standing transfixed near the castle terrace, its gaze focused on the second-floor gallery that ran above the great hall. It didn’t move, a rare moment for this particular animal.

  “See?” said Aaron. “It likes the castle.”

  Kieran yelled back from the pasture where the flop was being recycled to improve—if such were possible—the planet’s greenest grass. “Sure. And I like Dockery’s pub, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to let me live there.”

  Kitty raised her hand, demanding silence. Aaron was relieved, since he had no answer to what Kieran had said and didn’t want to say something stupid in front of his wife. Lolly moved closer to him, a show of solidarity for the verdict about to be handed down. They both looked at Kitty, who was now staring at the castle.

  “Who’s that in the window the pig’s so interested in?” Kitty asked.

  “What window?” Aaron squinted to hide his lack of interest.

  “I think you mean which window,” said Kitty.

  Aaron didn’t flinch. “Which window?”

  “There above the great hall, the gallery, the second window from the left. The man standing there.”

  “What man?”

  “The second window. The young man watching us. Brown jacket.”

  Lolly shook her head. “I don’t see any brown jacket.”

  “Then get the hair out of your eyes. He’s there; he’s wearing a brown jacket and looking at us, and the pig’s looking at him.”

  “Kitty,” Aaron said, “I’m confused. I don’t see a man with or without a brown jacket. In the second, third, or fourth window.”

  “Are the pig and I the only ones not blind, then?”

  Lolly stretched her neck outward, Aaron crinkled his nose, each straining for a closer look. Kieran ignored the entire exchange and with noisy emphasis shoved the ramp back onto the bed of the truck.

  “There,” Kitty said. “Now he’s gone, so don’t even bother.”

  The pig clattered onto the terrace and began snuffling among the uneven stones.

  Kitty gave a short laugh. “He must be one of the squatters come back for something left behind. We threw out all the bottles and filthy mattresses littered all over the place. They’re in a heap in the far shed. But still inside is a loom. Up in the turret. And a harp with no strings. Would you believe the like? And a Ping-Pong table with paddles and Ping-Pong balls.” She raised her head and yelled, “Don’t take the Ping-Pong table. Or the loom or the harp. We’ll buy them from you.” She stopped. “There he is again, at the other window, at the end. Now can you see him?”

  Again Lolly and Aaron looked.

  “I still can’t see him,” said Lolly.

  “Kitty,” said Aaron, “there’s no one there. You’re seeing shadows, or maybe a mist is coming up.”

  “I’m seeing one of the squatters. And I’m going to go bargain with him.”

  Kieran busied himself with securing the back of the truck. “Do you want me to go with?”

  “No need. If he’s not as skinny as he looked, maybe he’d like a job. Help with the repairs they never finished. Like thatching the sheds.”

  Kieran gave the tailgate a good rattle. “I don’t need any help. If I can’t take care of a castle and a few cows and do a bit of roofing—with slate—”

  “With thatch!” Kitty inserted, reviving a previously stated preference.

  “To be discussed another time,” Kieran concluded. “For now, don’t expect me to train an apprentice in work you have to learn from the day you were born.”

  How fine he is, thought Kitty. Just like me: stubborn. Her impulse was simply to stand and admire her husband, but she knew that would unnerve him. “He’s as good as hired,” said Kitty. Then, to goad her husband into another point of contention, she added, “And we’ll keep the pig. It is, after all, the one being besides myself has eyesight enough to see what’s there for anyone to see.” She swept past them all, moving with elegant determination toward the castle. Raising her right arm, she waved at the young man in the window. That he failed to wave back distressed her not at all. That he simply vanished gave her only the slightest pause.

  She stepped onto the terrace. As she passed through the heavy doors into the great hall, the pig followed, but stopped in the middle of the vast room and stared into a corner at the far end. There in the shadows was the young man, cap in hand. He wore a brown, crude-weave jacket over a tunic cinched with a cord that looked like rope. His pants legs went just below the knee. His feet were bare. He was looking at the pig, his brown eyes mournful yet expectant, his mouth and his entire face taut as if preparing themselves for whatever might happen.

  “There you are.” Kitty took a step forward. “I’m Kitty McCloud. I’ve taken the place, as you probably know. You’re one of the squatters. I’m offering you a job, if you’d like.”

  She spoke to him in Irish, the language the squatters had come from Cork to learn. But he made no response; then ceased to be where he had been. He had simply disappeared. Kitty herself, unmoving, did not take her eyes off the spot where the youth had stood. She blinked twice, then said in a whisper, “Well, then; I guess he doesn’t want the job.” The pig sent out from behind a parabola of urine to water the flagstone floor. It was then that Kitty remembered where she’d seen the young man before. At her wedding feast.

  2

  Kitty McCloud had astonished even herself when she realized she had wanted not Aaron’s and Lolly’s simple marriage ceremony but a lavish event starting with a nuptial mass presided over by Father Colavin—the pastor of St. Brendan’s for as long as anyone could remember—and followed by a feast in the great hall of her newly purchased castle.

  So profitable were her novels that she felt almost obliged to appropriate this enduring relic of Kerry history, installing herself and her newly acquired husband, both from County families of ancient lineage, within precincts too long desecrated by foreign usurpers bearing the signal name of Shaftoe. The Lords Shaftoe, to be exact. These usurpers had occupied Castle Kissane for more than a century, starting with the Cromwellian conquest in the sixteen hundreds. (It is possibly significant that Kitty invariably referred to her book profits rather than her royalties, eschewing a terminology dating back to the royal percentages exacted from the gold and silver mines operating within the kingly or queenly imperium. It is also possible that in the light of the Shaftoe dominion, in her present circumstance she was even a bit loath to use the term chatelaine, insisting that she was no more or less than a “steward” holding the castle in trust during the times she might be its humble and unworthy occupant.)

  In any case, it was these same Lords Shaftoe who had been responsible for a horrific curse being laid upon Castle Kissane, which for Kitty was not least among her new home’s attractions. She had not yet had an opportunity to give serious consideration to that curse. The great hall, where she had held her postnuptial festivities, had claimed her more immediate attention.

  The church ceremony itself had been something less than a complete success. Father Colavin had been persuaded beforehand not to quote St. Paul’s incendiary words, “Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord,” but Kitty’s American nephew had wept throughout, possibly because he and his bride had had to content themselves with a civil ceremony. This was Aaron’s second marriage, his first having been to a woman named Lucille who had subsequently run off with a baritone from their church choir in New York. Aaron’s divorce was the reason they weren’t allowed a church ceremony, but Lolly had consoled him with the prospect that the marriage to Lucille could readily be annulled by the Vatican based on the obvious truth that he had been far too emotionally immature at the time to have entered into a binding contract. The proof was his very choice of Lucille. That Aaron, presentable as he might be and amiable besides, might have contributed to Lucille’s change of partners was given no consideration. His certainty of his genius and the unassai
lability of his ego were subtracted from the equation, and Lucille alone was left to bear the blame.

  Once the ring was on Kitty’s finger, to the relief of some, the chagrin of others, and the astonishment of everyone else, Kitty kissed Kieran, Kieran kissed Kitty, and the liturgy moved forward as a prelude to the reception in the great hall of the castle.

  Not that the great hall was all that great. Since the castle had been built more as a fortification than as a seat of splendor, its boasts were limited to the impregnability of its walls and the narrowness of its deep-set windows. In truth, the hall had served, Kitty surmised, probably either as a barracks for the billeted warriors charged with fighting invading forces, or, more likely, a safe haven for the livestock during the cattle raids that provided repeated sport among the native earls and chiefs of earlier Ireland. There were no fireplaces, which suggested that the animal presence was the sole source of heat.

  Still, it had its finer features. A gallery ran alongside the outside wall with four mullioned windows looking out over the courtyard. There was a chandelier of heavy pounded iron, five feet in diameter, with two interior rings, all of them outfitted for candles, at least a hundred by Kitty’s count. The flooring was dark gray flagstone, aspiring to black, smoothed by the clatter of cattle and the cobbled boots of yeomen, archers, and, later, musketeers committed to the sanctity of their homeland against the invasions of the Danes, the incursions of the Normans, the coming of the Spanish, and, finally, the arrival of the Cromwellians.

  But now the hall was to fulfill its higher purpose: a place of revels and song, of dancing and rejoicing, of gluttonies most painful and of drinking most challenging. In the course of the marriage festivities the true purpose of Kitty’s and Kieran’s largesse would reveal itself. So eager were the guests to avail themselves of each and every opportunity for excess that the bride and groom were left mostly to themselves, with only the most distant of acquaintances or the most obsequious of strangers feeling obliged to thank the hostess and the host and wish them joy in the connubial adventure to which they had committed themselves. This gave Kitty and Kieran the chance—seated off to the side, away from the musicians—to discuss this man’s gorging and that woman’s drinking, and to agree that the expenditures were well worth it in the distractions they provided and the privacy they insured. There was also time to look, sometimes boldly, sometimes slyly, into each other’s eyes, each provoking in the other a longing and a passion that would later spend and replenish itself, then spend and replenish itself again and yet again until the dawn would decree some repose, some small respite in each other’s arms before disruptions of daily life would either nourish or destroy their earthly happiness.

  There were, of course, interruptions of their extravagantly purchased solitude, one of the more conspicuous being Maude McCloskey, self-proclaimed Seer of the County, a woman with powers descended from—according to legend—the Little People with whom her ancestors had interbred if not intermarried. (It had long been Kitty’s habit to think of her as a Hag, a term residing somewhere between an out-and-out Witch and the more acceptable Seer. Meanness had not prompted the choice. Kitty simply found the word more interesting, more evocative.)

  Maude, however, was far from the stereotypical crone, and showed in her height and in her fair form that the genetic contributions of the leprechauns and their like had long been absorbed by some highly handsome and sturdy Kerry folk. The Little People had left behind only their claims to heightened insight and prophetic certainties.

  “So Castle Kissane has come into the clutches of the McClouds, has it?” The good woman was cheerful, almost giddy at this consummation, her dark eyes beaming with approval, her full-lipped mouth wide with a near lascivious grin.

  Kitty drew the fringe of her bridal veil over her right cheek, shielding at least part of her face from Maude’s bright and unsettling gaze. “It would seem so,” she said.

  “Well, you’re the woman for it, if anyone is.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “And you’ve got Kieran Sweeney now, and that might be a help.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Kitty managed not to visibly bristle at the insinuation that she was in need of a man’s assistance.

  “Yes, yes,” Maude said, letting Kitty know she was fully aware of what she was thinking. “But you might need him all the same.”

  “Maude,” said Kitty, “if you’ve come to pronounce some waiting doom, make your pronouncement, please, and let me get on with my marriage.”

  Maude shook her head, still smiling. “If you knew what I know, you wouldn’t be so impatient to hear it all.”

  “Then you mustn’t let me keep you from your other pleasures.” Kitty turned away and made a point of looking at no one in particular. This gave her a moment yet once more to rehash Castle Kissane’s forbidding history. The eponymous Kissane, one of the mightier chiefs of seventeenth century Ireland, a patriot and a descendent son of Kerry going back beyond the time of Saint Brendan himself, had persuaded one and all that opposition to the Cromwellian heretics was useless. So, rather than shed the blood of men good and brave, he had negotiated a surrender that would leave them all unharmed—and able to fight another day. With that, the indomitable chief had tripped the light fantastic to France, where, rumor had it, he settled in wine country and lived to a besotted old age. His trusting countrymen who had served the castle were put to the sword: warriors and smithies, fisherfolk and farmers, shepherds and bards.

  For a time the intruders thrived under the tyrannies of the aforementioned Lords Shaftoe, who had been given the better tracts of Kerry land as a reward for the perfidies oft told, one Shaftoe generation succeeding the other in unopposed possession, with the exception of a few thrown stones, a maimed cow here, a poisoned well there, followed by a hanging there and an eviction here. Eventually the Shaftoe line wearied of its discomforts and repaired to London, leaving in their steads a series of agents, few of whom died in bed.

  Then came the curse that so enticed Kitty and forced her expectant hand as it signed the document proclaiming her ownership. In the early eighteen hundreds, the latest Shaftoe in the succession declared himself once more Lord of the Castle, and preparations were made for his return. As he progressed beyond the pale, rumors reached him that among the improvements intended to guarantee his ease in so cold and crude a land was a built-in cache of explosives that would be ignited as the primary manifestation of his welcoming.

  This deterred him not at all. Upon his arrival, the gentry were summoned to the great hall and questions put. Where was the gunpowder? Who had provided it? Who was elected to ignite it? No answers were forthcoming. Practiced in the ways of persuasion, his Lordship selected two youths, the handsomest of the young men and the fairest of the young women, both about age seventeen. They were to be detained for twenty-four hours. If, within that time, no answers to his questions had been proffered, the youths would be hanged.

  And so the youths were hanged. Soon after, their lithe and lovely bodies were cut down and buried in a far and secret place to deprive the populace of the martyrs’ graves that could become a place of pilgrimage and a source of discontent. His Lordship, under cover of night, set sail for Dingle on a voyage that would eventually land him in far Australia, where, as he must have expected, his despotic talents could still be exercised to the full.

  Castle Kissane remained unoccupied. Few would even venture near. There the gunpowder waited. No one doubted it. Everyone continued to expect the eruption at any time. But those commissioned to carry out the plot seemed to have vanished. New rumors arose. Perhaps the handsome boy and the fair, fair girl had been, after all, the designated torchbearers. Perhaps his Lordship had been more prescient than he would ever know, which meant that no one living could dispose of the powder and the danger would forever remain until some chance gesture, some random action, would grant its release.

  But then, after the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had run their troubled course, a new breed, a gro
up of determined squatters, young women and men from Cork eager to defy augury, had taken over the castle. No one in the countryside objected. The squatters had come into the Gaeltacht, the truer Ireland that fronted the Western Sea where Irish was still the first language, where the Gaelic tongue had never been stilled. They had arrived to reclaim the long-suppressed and abandoned words and sounds that had, in distant times, proclaimed the presence of a people saintly, scholarly, and given greatly to over-rejoicing—and, one might add, a susceptibility to the myths that alone could give measure to their imaginations.

  Due to taxes unpaid by the absentee Shaftoes, the castle had passed on to the nation, and no particular bureaucracy took enough interest to evict the newcomers, especially since they repaired some of the pasture stone walls, partly restored the courtyard sheds, and cleared the underbrush from the orchard, using the twigs and bramble to warm the castle hearths. They also made resident again music and laughter, lust and lovemaking, with a feud or two thrown in to prove the Irish presence.

  And so it came to pass that, just as the squatters were beginning to decamp for Donegal there to seek added experience, Kitty—rich beyond repair, famous far beyond her deserving—cajoled, badgered, and beguiled enough bureaucrats so that Castle Kissane, curse and horror and history and all, now came into her possession. This seemed only fair, since her own cliffside home, long inhabited by her Kerry ancestors, had been tumbled into the all-devouring sea by the unlikely concatenation of events that had brought Kitty and Kieran to the blissful contentions that were a favored part of their current conjugal happiness.

  Maude broke into Kitty’s musings. “I could do with a drink, I suppose,” she said.

  “And welcome to it.”

  “And may I drink to your rescue—and Kieran’s, too— from the curse the castle holds fast in its every stone?”

  “Drink. And drink again.” Kitty made a low bow.