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

then took off the coat he was wearing—the one with the brass buttons—and, slowly, carefully, and not without difficulty put it on the boy.
    It was when he was buttoning the coat that, informed by a prompting from nowhere, he realized he could not do what he was doing. He could not place the body in the ground. He could not accept that he must leave him there, alone and in the cold. He could not believe that the boy was truly gone, that he, Declan, had lost him. Forever. And that he would never see him again working away with the reeds on the rooftops, or hear again the happy voice telling tales from the distant past. Then, without warning, came a still more unacceptable truth. The boy in the grave would be alone. And with that came another thought: The boy had always been alone, a loneliness he had accepted with good cheer and an indifferent resignation. Declan had seen it in the isolation of the work, in the chattering and the tale telling, but he had never been aware of it until now. Recollecting it now, he reached a depth within himself he hadn’t even known existed. His heart broke, allowing the entry of a grief so profound it would find there a place where it would dwell forever.
    Slowly Declan lowered the boy back into the grave. Quietly he covered the body, making sure that the earth looked undisturbed by anything other than Kieran Sweeney’s plow. He made his way back to the truck, stumbling twice. Then he set out for the north.
    Declan had neglected to say a prayer, but remembered on the second day of his journey. He paused near a well and, before he drank, stood silently, inviting God to select from the confused vocabulary that crowded his mind and his heart the words He considered appropriate to the event. Declan drank but half a cup. Then he gave the rest to the ground at his feet and continued on to search out Kinvara.
    A mist had come up from the water, reminding Declan as he stood atop the cliff that the sea had ways to protect its secrets. While sometimes gentle, as now, it was potentially fierce and terrible. No longer could he see the curragh, no longer make sure that the boat had arrived safely at Skellig Michael. The gulls could be heard but not seen, their cries out of the clouds mocking any and all who might try to compete for dominance of the mist. There was no sea, no sky, and even the land was beginning to dissolve.
    From a distance, then closer by, came the sound of a car, or more likely a truck. Declan would wait until it had passed to make his descent down the stone steps to the beach below. The ancient passageway from the McCloud house to the sea had been an escape route for hunted priests in the days of suppression. Now, the stairs alone had survived the rampage that had delivered the house and the boy’s grave to the undeserving waves. Now he could tell it was definitely a truck, its arrogant growl too explicit to be mistaken for anything other than that. To his distress, it did not continue on by. It had stopped far enough away to be invisible, but near enough for him to be seen should the mist shift or be summoned back into the waters below. Now he could hear voices that managed to be intense but hushed. He might even have heard his name, but that could be an illusion prompted by the damage done to his concentration by the ear-numbing sound of the truck.
    He walked along the edge of the cliff, cautiously, more slowly than he’d prefer, but at a pace acceptable under the circumstances. He did not want to go as the house had gone, as the garden had gone, as the grave had gone—pulled from the heights down into the closing waters. A little way back from the cliffside he found the first of the steps hidden under some overgrown weeds. He began the descent, still cautious, still slow. The voices had faded or, possibly, ceased altogether. He doubted that anyone had seen him.
    The rising shroud had enveloped him, taken him into itself, with the whispered promise that it