Hog of the Forsaken

The mud of the street in the town of Dogs Breakfast avoided the shoes of the townsfolk as much as it could in that wet spring of ’49 but still revealed their treks back and forth like casts taken from a crime scene. To the inhabitants it always seemed that what they needed next was in a store or office opposite behind the weathered rough-hewn timbers that resembled the faces of the old timers who sat on the veranda outside the saloon, hoping to cadge a drink, smoking and remembering their youth. The only ones who liked the mud were the pigs in a sty in the part of town called the Badlands. They were well fed on slops and food waste but looked forward to the fairly frequent arrival of the corpse of some unfortunate who had recently lost an argument or fallen foul of somebody with an itchy trigger finger and a bad hangover. “Don’t talk with your mouth empty,” said Henrietta, the mother of Paul the thirteenth, “it’s bad manners.” “Yes, yes,” said Paul with exasperation as he inserted his snout into the abdomen of the recent owner of a large gold nugget who had mistakenly displayed it ostentatiously in the saloon the previous evening to demonstrate his contention that, as his grandmother always said, “that kid has the luck of the Irish”. This was certainly true, referring as it did to Irish gold miners. The grandmother’s prescience was, however, lost on his audience as indeed it was on a family who were decimated by the famine of 1740 at the end of the Little Ice Age and whose descendant demonstrated both forms of Irish luck, as it turned out, in rapid succession.