The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (4 page)

Now he was come again, intent on yet another haunting of Castle Kissane. Of course, he
had
been murdered. This she acknowledged. But to return? Nothing could justify this intrusion. He had not been done in by her, not by her hand. Nor by the hand of—

Here her protestations stopped. At the wake, her now husband had boasted that he himself had killed the man, having struck him across the skull with the leggett, the most impressive tool of the thatcher's trade. Kieran had heard that she—
she, Kitty McCloud!
—had been called a cow-face by Declan Tovey. The murder was all too understandable. Kieran had obviously felled the blasphemous thatcher. If she had doubted Kieran's confession at the time, the proof of its validity was now coming closer to her castle courtyard. Declan had come to haunt his killer.

But another thought troubled her mind. If her husband had indeed murdered Declan, why was she, Kitty, seeing the man's ghost? Of course, she, too, had confessed to the killing, but it was only to protect her friend Lolly, who, Kitty had been convinced, was the actual murderer. Lolly certainly had good cause. Had Declan not preferred herself, Kitty, to the lesser Lolly? And did not Lolly verify Kitty's belief with her very own confession? But then, all three—Kitty, Kieran, and Lolly, each in turn—had laid claim to the well-deserved deed. Which was the legitimate claimant would probably never be known. But could a false confession alone allow even the innocent Kitty to be given the dubious privilege now being bestowed?

Kitty tried to foreclose all further speculations. She would surrender to the event, requiring no understanding, demanding no explanations. But before she could content herself with this reluctant resignation, an added complexity presented itself. Coming through the pasture grass beyond the courtyard sheds was her husband. Even in her distracted state, she had time to be annoyed that he was wearing, along with his everyday corduroy pants and a worn work shirt, the coat meant to be his Sunday best. Also, she had thought he was in the castle scullery—known in lesser accommodations as the kitchen—preparing, as was his habit, the evening meal. To her momentary puzzlement, she saw that there, in a heavily gloved hand, was a bunch of greens. Immediately she realized they must be nettles—or why the gloved hand? These she herself would simmer to a spicy broth, once the current situation had been resolved.

A greater unease came over her. Quite possibly Kieran, too, would see what she was seeing. Would he, before her very eyes, be confronted by the ghost of the man he may have murdered? As she watched, Kieran dropped the nettles. He had seen what she had feared he would see. Quickly, he leaned down and picked up the nettles. Then, with a sure step, he changed course and walked toward the advancing apparition.

Declan, in life, had been a man few would care to confront. Challenge of any kind would unfailingly animate his famous temperament: He could be, at one and the same time, both the most fearsome and the most irresistible. Women were known to capitulate after minimal urgings. Strong and brave men would usually manage to relax into camaraderie, some friendships sealed with an exchange of resounding thumps on the back or an occasional slap on the buttocks. No one was protected from a charm firmly grounded in a rascality so assured it never had to resort to arrogance. And besides, who would want to extinguish the least gleam that might diminish so compelling a radiance? Often enough Declan was identified with Lucifer himself, the Angel of Light, astride the threshold of heaven's gate, eagerly awaiting combat with a mere archangel. How could nothing more threatening than a fiery sword compete with the high pride that only an exalted and exultant sense of self could inspire? (As it happened, it had taken no more than Declan's own leggett to dispatch him when the time came to snuff out his own quite quenchable flame.)

In no way was it possible for Kitty not to be standing at her husband's side when he and the apparition would meet. She jumped, stumbled, and clattered her way down the winding stair. The great hall was crossed in what seemed a single bound and the door flung open with a ruthlessness that almost unhinged it. Having made an end-run maneuver that kept her clear of the visitor, she came to Kieran's side, where, with a breathless determination, she turned to challenge this latest haunting of her beloved castle.

But something was wrong. The ghost was talking—talking to her husband. He was speaking not of tenebrous things or sepulchral happenings, but of a subject so commonplace that he could be any Kerryman who had returned after a season's absence, expecting to be welcomed home.

“I wasn't looking for it to be that way,” he was saying. “I went to the cliffs, and I was sure the house would be there along with the stretch of pasture, but there's not so much as a single stone to say where it had all once been.”

“The sea took it,” Kieran said, his tone as conversational as if he were dispensing information about any everyday happening.

“That I could tell. But it's a bit of a surprise to someone not that long away.” During this last, he took note of Kitty standing there, her hand holding fast to Kieran's arm. “But you've got the castle,” the apparition continued, “so I needn't feel too much regret, should I?”

“No.” Kitty found it impossible not to whisper. “No need for regrets.”

“But you miss it, the house.”

“I … I … yes, I miss it. I think I miss it.”

“A lot was lost.”

“Yes. A lot. Lost.”

“Taken into the sea.”

“All taken.” Kitty tried to achieve her husband's simple conversational tone, but she couldn't quite do it. “Yes. All. The sea. It … it was the sea that took it.”

She did not say that the sea had taken him—or, rather, his bones—along with everything else, that she had seen the house become his private mausoleum as he and it sank, without struggle, into the eager waves.

“And the garden, too, went along.”

“The garden. Yes. The garden.”

“And all that was in it. Cabbages. Everything.”

“Yes. Everything. Everything that was in it.”

Kieran seemed quite willing to let Kitty do the talking, but she had no idea what she should be saying. She knew she was staring, unable to blink, transfixed. Her lips, too, had lost their easy, effortless mobility, their habit of forming words. Had he come to inquire as to the whereabouts of his remains, to be given some clue that might lead him to the place of his final disposal? Would he hold Kitty accountable for the disappearance of his mortal leavings? All Kitty could hope for at the moment was that, as Taddy and Brid were wont to do, he would vanish. Surely he had accomplished what he had come to accomplish: to announce his presence, charged with the promise that he would reappear from time to time and, in a revision of the usual ghost protocol, engage her and Kieran in conversation.

But he did not vanish. He simply shifted the sack he was carrying from his left hand to his right, causing the tools inside to clank against one another, a sound not unlike the rattle of collected bones. Was he about to throw at their feet this retrieval from the ocean floor? Would this meeting become a confrontation between the quick and the dead, between Declan Tovey's indestructible spirit and her and Kieran's challenged credulity? If Declan had come to accuse, let him. She was tempted to cry out, “Do it and be done!”

But before she could act on this latest impulse, she saw that something else was not right. Declan dead looked not at all like Declan living. This was truly his ghost. Gone was the amused invitation that dared the onlooker to search out the secrets implicit in his knowing smile. Apparent no more were the unsettling stares that had promised the presence of mysteries in the depths of his dark, dark eyes. Even the arched brows, full and black, seemed to have lost the sense of amazement that had unfailingly suggested that the object of his gaze possessed enticements that he could not be expected to resist. And the entire face, ever alive and eager, hungering to dispense pleasures as yet undreamed of, had fallen into disrepair—not aged, but lacking the upkeep that his indomitable spirit had always provided, the expectation of a profitable encounter, the offer of thrills heretofore inexperienced by the recipient of his attention.

The eyes were the most troubling of all. Still of unfathomable depths, they seemed to have taken into themselves a great sorrow, not drowning it, but giving it a refuge where it could dwell, guarding an implacable grief. The eyes' one source of life was a bewilderment, a searching, a quest that held fast a forlorn hope that might yet be fulfilled—should the gods bestow a blessing that could be well beyond even the powers of their divinity. His voice seemed tentative where it had been so self-assured before. A note of pity sounded somewhere in its depths, a complement to the sorrow in his eyes. And before Kitty could fend it off, a corresponding pity welled up within herself, already reaching out with a longing of its own that, if she weren't insistent, could summon again an old arousal.

“And none of the house,” Declan said. “I mean not the house, that couldn't possibly happen, stones being what it was made of, but, well, anything that fell into the sea—nothing surfaced? Nothing came ashore? Or did you never bother to look?”

“Nothing,” Kieran said.

“And Kitty, you … ?” Declan was looking at her with such needful pleading that she had to look down at her shoes, actually a pair of sneakers, footwear she had long disdained. So mundane, so insufficient to the moment were they that, ashamed, she looked up again and into the man's mournful countenance. “No,” she whispered. “I've looked. And still do from time to time, but no, nothing.”

She wanted to add, “Not even your bones, if that's what you're wondering.” But she lacked the courage to introduce the one subject that hovered over everything being said: that he was dead. He was a specter. And then came an obvious afterthought: Perhaps he didn't know this simple fact. If so, how could she bring herself to tell him? How could she add, to the sufferings already too apparent, the stunned amazement, the unavoidable acceptance of his own death and eternal expulsion from the land of his birth? Perhaps it was himself he was mourning. The sorrows of Taddy and of Brid were as nothing to what death and insufficient resurrection had inflicted upon this man who had once stood indomitable astride all the bent world.

Again a surge of pity threatened to topple Kitty into a familiar abyss. She had not long since surrendered to the dangerous sympathies awakened by the mournful ghost of Taddy. And now she was being tempted by another urging toward an idiocy similar to the one she had so recently renounced: a helpless attraction to Taddy, to the ghost of Taddy. She loved her husband. He was magnificence made flesh. There could not possibly be a need for any other. Foolish she might be, but mad? The hapless victim of every needful spirit that might come to haunt her castle? Again she protested. This could not be allowed. It was enough that she was subject to these ghostly visitations. It was enough that she had managed to cling to her sanity and, at the same time, accept their reality and accommodate their presence. But to have demands made again not only upon her brain but also upon her heart was more than she was willing to accept.

If Declan Tovey, by the exercise of some shenanigans of unknowable origin, had been allowed to tread again upon Ireland's holy ground, let him limit his hauntings to the place of his burial, the cliff side and the beach where her house had stood, where his grave had been. Or, were that not acceptable, let him return to the burial plot prepared for him, now become sediment at the bottom of the sea. Even Kerry hospitality had its limits—limits, as everyone knew, that already reached beyond the boundaries of infinity.

But Declan, having been consigned to realms not within the known world, could no longer make legitimate claim to its welcome. Kitty already had two ghosts—three if she counted the slain pig, the very pig that with its undisciplined snout had dug up Declan's buried remains. Her affliction caused by the handsome Taddy should have granted her immunity from a repeat contagion. She became impatient. She'd had enough; she'd accept no more. “Go if you want,” she said. “Go to where the house was. And where the garden grew. Go down to the water's edge at the foot of the cliffs and see for yourself what might be there. The sea has ways of its own. What it might yield today or tomorrow no one knows. But that's the one way you might find out.”

Kieran, either more brazen or more foolish than his wife, asked outright, “Is there something in particular you're looking for? Have you lost something that you've a need for now?”

“Oh, no. No. Nothing. I only came to say I'm sorry it all was lost. I've been away. It was a fine place you had, and all the McClouds before. And now it's gone—and into the sea. Well, it's an honored Kerry way to go, isn't it?” He switched his sack from the right hand back to the left, signaling the end of what he had to say. Except he had more: “But … I mean … if ever you do find … No. No. Let it be.”

With his persisting look of soulful mourning, he had the good grace to lower his eyes so Kitty could not see what she knew would be a deeper, darker depth than she had seen before. Were she allowed speech, she would have begged him to disappear or to go—and quickly, too.

“Can you come in and have a bit of something to eat?” Kieran was saying. “If nettle soup is to your liking, no one makes it better than my wife.”

Within Kitty rose the impulse to do away with her husband—until she was rescued by a sudden realization: Ghosts don't eat. Kieran, in his superior wisdom, was putting Declan to the test. If he were to accept, if he were to actually sit down and eat …

Kitty was spared the completion of her thought. A wan smile had come to Declan's face. “No. Thank you, no. I've got to be going back the way I came. Maude McCloskey up the road, she might want me to replace her roof slate with thatch. To preserve the old ways. Thatch was the original and the slate considered an improvement by her husband long moved away. She's thinking she might go back to thatch, so he'll see it if he should ever come home.” He laughed less than half a laugh. “And God save us all.”