The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven by Joseph Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page A

remembered, like Finn MacCumhaill tales, and some he’d never heard, like “The Old Woman in the Chest” and “Crooked Tadhg’s Way to the Island.” But now the boy was dead, there, against his shoulder.
    Slowly the dark came down. A half moon rose over the hill. Declan went to the truck and opened the door on the passenger side. Then he went back, crouched down, and raised the body in his arms. The legs and arms dangled freely, but the head was held in the crook of Declan’s arm. He propped the boy on the seat and lowered the head onto the his chest.
    Declan went around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the truck’s motor. He saw the lowered head. It looked as if the boy felt he had done something shameful and had forbidden himself to hold his head high. Declan put his hand under the chin and raised the head. He leaned it against the back of the seat, but again it fell forward. Declan put the truck in gear but couldn’t place his foot on the accelerator. The head should not be lowered in shame.
    He reached his arm over, drew the body closer to himself, and let the head rest on his shoulder. The truck drove off.
    As they went slowly along the dark lanes, Declan realized why he had waited so long to take up the body. He had come to know that he would never deliver the boy into the hands of others, who might bury him in common ground if his family couldn’t be found. He, Declan himself, would find them in the far north. This thought advanced from a decision to a determination to a vow. For now he would simply bury the body in a place where it could safely wait for his return.
    Her house had been dark when Declan reached the garden of Kitty McCloud. He had seen the newly turned soil plowed two nights before by Kieran Sweeney, sworn enemy of Miss McCloud and all her kin, who loved her above all women in the world but was forbidden by an age-old feud to declare his ardor. Still, every year since Sweeney was fifteen he would secretly, with his small plow, prepare her soil for whatever she might choose to grow, usually cabbages.
    The plowing was not especially deep, so Declan, with a spade—an implement for cutting peat from a bog bottom—he found leaning against her tool shed dug down to a decent depth. The grave would be only temporary, until he could take the young man home to the north. After a moment’s pause, he sat down next to the hole he’d dug and pulled off his right boot. He thrust his hand inside, felt around, then upended the boot and gave it an impatient shake. Out onto the ground fell a coin, gold and imprinted with the profile of the monarch who had reigned more than two centuries before, George, third of that name. He picked it up and held it between his thumb and forefinger. As he turned it over, then over again, he wondered why he’d felt a strange compulsion to place it in the grave, but after looking at it a while more, he shrugged, put the boot on, and slipped the coin back inside. To have buried it with the boy would have bestowed on him the highest honor within his power to give. For generation upon generation it had been passed along, from the time of the imprinted monarch to this present day, a token of a great deed done by Declan’s ancestors and sacred to their memory. It was his duty to pass it on to the next generation, and it had been an aberrant thought to even consider burying it alongside the fallen apprentice. The boy was not his son. He was his apprentice. Declan did, however, take off the baseball cap he always wore and placed it on the boy’s wounded head. And, even though the youth had not yet completed his apprenticeship, Declan, bowing to an instinct he felt no need to understand, placed his sack of thatcher’s tools inside the grave.
    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,