The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven by Joseph Caldwell

many times there are when you have to get away. And I learned—because I had to. Now I can outrun anyone. And the ball, so many times things were taken away from me. But now, running, and my foot guiding and kicking the ball, I dare anyone to try to get it away from me. They never do. Well, hardly ever.”
    â€œI must come watch.”
    â€œOh, no. Today was the last time for a while. I worry it wears my mother down to beat me. She starts losing her breath, and she’s only through with one side of my head and the other side still to be done. I can’t do that to her. Not for a while at least. And before I forget, my mother says you’re an old friend of Declan Tovey’s and maybe you could talk to him and tell him he should take me on and teach me the ways of a thatcher. My mother said she asked him and he only spoke two words: ‘No. Never.’ And he’d give no reason why. My mother says it’s a dying art and I should learn it before no one knows it at all. But he, Mr. Tovey, he wouldn’t take his words away. Except maybe if you talked to him—because he’s your close friend, my mother says, and people do things for close friends. Can you do that?”
    Well, thought Kitty, now I know the reason for the invitation. Then, unable to restrain herself, she had to ask, “But isn’t your mother a close friend of Mr. Tovey’s, too?”
    Before he could answer, there was Maude herself at her open door and Kitty and Peter not ten feet away, Maude in her black skirt and white blouse that, to Kitty’s thinking, almost replicated the school uniform that represented the first flowering of Maude’s approaching glory. It is not uncommon, Kitty thought, for people to cling to the costuming they believe contributed to the allure of their youthful days, but it had always bewildered Kitty that Maude had felt the need. True, she, like Kitty herself, had been a bit late coming into her destined splendor, but most surely it had arrived by now. And Maude could well afford to clothe herself in raiment better than that imposed upon a gawky girl in school.
    The woman, her lips given over to a happy and expectant grin, said, cheerful as was her way, “I knew it was you.”
    Of course she knew. Maude had invited her. Still, the words bothered Kitty. Did the Hag’s clairvoyance track her every move, or did Kitty have to come within a given radius to have her movements observed? With a cheerfulness confidently competitive with Maude’s, Kitty said, “The promise of a boiling kettle? How could I not be here?”
    â€œYes, it does enjoy a good whistle now and then. As who doesn’t.” She stepped aside to let the chatelaine of Castle Kissane cross her threshold. Which Kitty did, hearing the words the woman spoke to her son: “And you, young man, might want to change from your good school clothes before I have a chance to see them all messed and ruined the way they are.”
    Peter rushed past Kitty and through a door to the right, his shirttail flapping in the breeze his swift passage had created.
    â€œThe girls, Margaret and Ellen, are at play practice, the school pageant,” Maude said. “Singing, dancing, as only they can, the loves. They’ll weep to know they’ve missed you. Sit yourself down and I’ll be back in a jiffy. You’ll probably hear the kettle as well as I.”
    â€œAnd a lovely sound, too.”
    â€œThe best there is.”
    Nearly knocking over a small table to the left of the kitchen door, Maude managed to make it out of the room. For all her Seer-like attributes, she had been denied the simple gift of seeing what lay directly in front of her.
    The television was on but the sound taken down. Kitty couldn’t believe what was being shown. A rerun of a popular miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with an actress whose name was, if Kitty remembered correctly, Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, and Colin Firth,