The Good Good Pig Read online

  The spot had been a garden once before. We remembered our landlord’s previous tenants had grown vegetables there. But after they left, it had reverted to grasses and goldenrods and ox eye daisies, indistinguishable from the rest of the unmown field that stretched between the back lawn and the woods by Moose Brook.

  When finally the threat of frost was past, Selinda began to till on June 1, as the wild strawberries began to bloom and the bobolinks first called. She pushed the heavy rototiller back and forth, back and forth, amid clouds of biting blackflies. It took Selinda three days to till the plot. The garden was enormous: twenty by fifty feet. We offered to help, but it was a one-person job. One person, that is, and one pig. From his tether, Christopher assumed the role of supervisor, following her work with great interest, ears forward, nostrils flared. The scents issuing from the freshly dug earth must have brought him a symphony of fragrance. Sometimes he called out to her to bring him something to eat. Often she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the rototiller, but she knew he was there, and he was good, cheerful company. When she paused, she would bring him a handful of juicy weeds and pet his furry ears as he chewed.

  And then it came time to plant. She had mapped out a circle of flowers in the middle: white narcissuses and low-growing twinkle phloxes, with daisylike calendulas and late-blooming dahlias toward the edge. A path ran around that circle, kept clear by cardboard under mulch to keep weeds out. Radiating from that circle were curved beds of lettuce. Irises would bloom in one corner and sunflowers rise from another. And there would be vegetables in abundance: arugula, chard, green peppers, Anaheim peppers, celery, spinach, green and wax beans, zucchini, carrots, cucumbers, and three kinds of tomatoes: Oregon Spring for sandwiches, plum tomatoes for canning, and cherry tomatoes for snacking. She planted herbs: scallions, parsley, dill, and thirteen kinds of basil. And she grew pumpkins. They were just for Chris.

  Over that summer, Selinda’s garden gave us its all. Before the Fourth of July, we were enjoying giant salads of peppery arugula and buttery lettuce. By the end of the month, the dinners we ate under the silver maple often came directly out of the soil: sauteed chard and red peppers, green and wax beans with dill. By August we were wondering what to do with all the zucchini—in a Methodist church cookbook, I even found a recipe that used up two cups of the stuff in a chocolate cake. (The cake was tasty but as heavy as lead.) As fall approached, Selinda made jar after jar of pesto to use up all the basil. The fate of the pumpkins, however, was ensured from the start.

  What was perhaps most astonishing about Selinda’s garden was that Christopher never invaded it. Our hens had no qualms about hunting bugs there, which was actually a boon to the plants and a strategy employed by many an organic gardener. Selinda’s Reba and Louie would sometimes follow her into the garden and step on her plants. Even Tess ran through the garden once or twice, in pursuit of an errant Frisbee. Deer occasionally visited to munch on the vegetables, as we could see by their hoofprints in the soft soil. But why not our pig?

  Because Selinda had maintained a border of tall grass around her garden—a strategy that discourages certain bugs—the garden could not be seen from a pig’s eye view. But Christopher couldn’t see the Amidon’s lettuce garden down the road either, and that never protected it from his incursions. Our pig could certainly smell every ripening vegetable from throughout a huge range, one that might extend for miles. The olfactory powers of animals are only now starting to be chronicled; a wildlife biologist I know, Lynn Rogers, believes that bears, for instance, may be able catch the scent of ripening hazelnuts forty miles away. Pigs’ sense of smell is legendary. They can even smell food underground, a talent people have exploited to locate prized truffles since Babylonian times. To this day, truf-fle pigs are still in service in the south of France, where they help to harvest the famous “black diamonds” of Périgord, which sell for up to $1,000 a pound. Sows are uniquely attracted to the scent of this truffle because it produces a steroid that is chemically identical to the testosterone present in the saliva of an amorous boar.

  Christopher’s path from the barn to the Pig Plateau took him within five yards of Selinda’s garden. And while it’s true that every morning when I let him out of the barn, and every evening when I’d put him back in, I ran ahead and lured him with fragrant, enticing slops, it remained a mystery why he never once visited the garden or violated its sanctity. He could have destroyed it in a quarter of an hour had he wished. But Selinda never worried about this. Christopher was her gardening buddy. There was no reason she could see that he should do anything but help her in her work.

  By the end of the growing season, Christopher got his pumpkins, and Selinda had found her bliss. Through the long winter—through canning and Christmas cookies, through tedious hours at the computer magazine and snowy walks with the dogs—the seeds Selinda had planted that first spring in our backyard stayed alive. By the following spring, she knew what she would do: she would start her own landscaping company.

  Other friends discouraged the new venture—starting a business is risky. But I’m not a risk-averse person; Howard and I encouraged her. Far too many of us cannot see the heaven under our feet, but Selinda had found hers. Go for it, we told her. She quit her job at the computer magazine and began gardening full time.

  And as revelations often do, this one led to another. From the moment she had moved in with us, Ken had unfailingly sent Selinda flowers every week. He was still courting his wife. Sometimes we saw him on the doorstep, a tall, slender blond with a handsome, eager face. In addition to the flowers, Ken took Selinda out to dinner each week. One day in late spring, she realized that her marriage was part of her bliss, too. After a year and a half living with us, she moved back in with her husband.

  In our yard, Selinda’s garden quickly grew over in wildflowers and grasses, but every year the narcissus still blooms from its former center. And our friendship continues to flourish. Every summer we still put up blueberry jam together, and every winter we make Christmas cookies—only at Selinda and Ken’s house, because the kitchen is much bigger over there. And several times a year, Selinda sends a special cutting to Howard: the spectacular, half-foot-long orange and blue blooms of her bird of paradise.

  AFTER SELINDA LEFT, HALF OUR HOUSE WAS VACANT ONCE MORE. But at last, after standing empty for years, the Doll House again found a family.

  When the real estate agent showed Bobbie Coffin the place, she laughed. Nobody knew where the septic system was—if one existed at all. Nobody was sure where the well was located. Much of the house was uninsulated. The kitchen needed to be redone. Bobbie and her husband, Jarvis, were already grandparents eight times over, and the thought of fixing up the old house at their age was just ridiculous. It was too much work.

  They knew, because they’d done it before. They’d restored and repaired several old wooden houses in both Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York, where Jarvis brokered waste fibers to paper companies. They’d renovated the buildings, adopted dogs from the shelter, raised three boys, coaxed beautiful flowers and vegetable gardens from the clay soils—and raised chickens and pigs, too.

  The pigs and chickens were Jarvis’s idea, but Bobbie was a quick convert. When Jarvis brought home two not-yet-weaned pigs from an auction, Bobbie thought, “Oh my Lord! I’ve never had a pig before—how repulsive!” Within twenty-four hours she was bottle-feeding the pair, GubGub and Snooty. The next year, Jarvis went back to the auction and got three more piglets, to be co-owned by a syndicate of four of his friends. To Jarvis’s dismay, once he got the pigs home, he discovered that one had a pronounced bulge under his tail. He consulted a vet and discovered he had bought what is known as a “busted pig.” He was the victim of a sloppy castration: the pig had a hernia. The vet suggested they euthanize the animal.

  But one member of the pig-owning syndicate happened to be the chief of pediatric surgery at Buffalo Hospital. “What are you talking about?” he said, when Jarvis related the vet’s sobering news. “I fix those t
hings every day!” The surgeon operated on the pig in a makeshift outdoor O.R. in Bobbie and Jarvis’s backyard, using a plank and some sawhorses as an operating table. Jarvis (whose father was a doctor) acted as surgical assistant while the third member of the syndicate, the Episcopal bishop of western New York, looked on with interest. The pig, Benjamin, was fine in a week.

  Those days were behind them now. They were looking for their retirement home. This would obviously not do at all. The old house would need careful restoration, as well as insulation. It was too small. They’d be uncomfortable. And then there was the question of the well and the septic system.

  But then Bobbie stood in the street and looked at the sweet old house, with its white picket fence covered with antique roses. She imagined a vegetable garden in the backyard, an herb garden off the kitchen…

  They bought the house. The only thing they would miss from their old life, they thought, would be raising the chickens and the pigs. They hated to be leaving that life behind.

  But that was before they knew who was living in the barn next door.

  CHAPTER 10

  A Hog’s Holiday

  “HELLO, CHRISTOPHER! YOU’RE CERTAINLY LOOKING WELL today! Now, hold on—I have brought you something to eat, if you will just be patient….”

  Jarvis’s cheerful, confident voice boomed into my office, answered by deep and appreciative grunting. Then came the crunching noise of the green apples that Jarvis had brought Christopher from the tree in the Coffins’ front yard, fruit being ground into pulp. “Yes, ladies, I have something for you, too,” Jarvis continued as the hens’ interested queries swelled around him. Then came Jarvis’s footsteps on gravel, the crunch of the metal scoop gathering cracked corn from the grain bin, and the happy clucks and mutterings of the chickens as they pecked at the feast our neighbor spread at their scaly feet.

  I could hear the whole exchange on the baby monitor.

  The baby monitor had been Bobbie’s idea. Shortly after we had met, she and Jarvis had enthusiastically volunteered to look after Chris and the chickens whenever Howard and Tess and I went away, be it for an afternoon or a weekend. Having our hens visit their yard was one of Bobbie’s deepest joys. She had adored her own little flock in upstate New York, the hens tended by a series of handsome and courageous roosters. Bobbie was thrilled to find friendly, clucking chickens back in her life again.

  But, even though Bobbie had a far better view of our chickens from her house than we did from ours, she fretted about a fox attack. So she had set up the baby monitor she used when their youngest grandchildren visited, putting the transmitter by the Chicken Chalet and the receiver by her kitchen. Howard saw the wisdom of the device and bought one of our own. From that point on, with the receiver in my office, I wrote my books and articles to an edifying fugue of clucks, cackles, and grunts.

  “What do you suppose they are saying?” I would ask Howard at lunch. “Maybe they are saying something really brilliant and I’m just missing it.” One day I thought I could almost make it out:

  “Eeee! Eeee! Eeeee! Eeequals! M C squared!”

  It was Howard down by the transmitter.

  There were times I had to turn the thing off. Sometimes, when a chicken cackled with particular enthusiasm, Tess would break out barking in alarm. But even with the monitor silent, I didn’t much worry about the hens. Bobbie and Jarvis would watch out for them.

  They took our animals’ safety and comfort seriously. One time we returned from a three-day trip to find that Jarvis had built the Ladies all new, super-snug nest boxes. Another time, he rebuilt their perches, offering different shapes and thickness so each hen could choose the perch best suited to her individual comfort.

  Bobbie and Jarvis were the perfect grandparents—to their children’s children, and to our animals. Slender, beautiful Bobbie was always giving the hens little treats. When Bobbie and Jarvis would visit the barn, Chris would greet them as soon as he heard their distinctive footsteps striding over the stone wall. Jarvis and Bobbie visited Chris and the hens so often that Jarvis built a wooden walkway over the boggy area (which proved to be the location of the mysterious septic system) between their yard and ours. The barn became a destination for their grandchildren to visit, and feeding their table scraps to Chris and the chickens became a family tradition, just as it had been with the Lillas.

  One summer day the Coffins brought Christopher a bonanza. The couple had returned from the annual Republican party picnic (a pig roast, I learned to my dismay), where bushels of roasted corn and baked potatoes had gone uneaten. Jarvis and Bobbie had packed up all the leftovers in huge food coolers, loaded the bounty into their car, and then—in a feat that amazed me, even though I knew our stocky, barrel-chested neighbor was immensely strong—Jarvis had somehow carried them about three hundred yards from their car to the woodpile by Christopher’s pen. Even though Howard and I were Democrats, we couldn’t say the Republicans never did anything for us. This was true pork-barrel politics.

  Bobbie and Jarvis’s motives, though, couldn’t have been purer. One day Jarvis made a laminated sign and put it up on our barn. It was a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals: “Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it.”

  I loved the quote, and loved that Jarvis had put it there. For me, the saint’s words rang true far beyond our barnyard: they named the reason for the work that carried me around the world, and the force that drew me back home again.

  I didn’t realize then that Jarvis did not put up the sign for my benefit alone. It was for him and Bobbie, too. Not until years later would I fully understand why tending to Christopher gave our neighbors such special satisfaction.

  But perhaps I should have guessed: satisfaction was our pig’s specialty. The word owes its roots to the Old French for “to make full.” That certainly described the goal of Christopher’s eating career, but more than that, it described his effect on the hearts and lives of his closest companions.

  OUR PIG-O-METRIC MEASUREMENTS REVEALED THAT BY THE END of the first year that Jarvis and Bobbie were in residence, Christopher had topped seven hundred pounds.

  “Will he ever stop growing?” people asked us. We thought so—eventually. But we weren’t sure. A few animals, including sharks, spiders, and lobsters, grow throughout their lives. Sharks can grow endlessly because their skeletons are made of cartilage, not bone, and they live in the weightless environment of the oceans. Spiders and lobsters, as well as many other invertebrates, can keep growing because they wear their skeletons on the outside; they can simply shed them when they get bigger. But most of us with internal skeletons, like people and pigs, must stop growing at some point. With Chris, we didn’t know when that point would come. We didn’t know when he had passed the porcine equivalent of adolescence. We didn’t know when he might enter middle age—possibly he was there now. But if you can’t guess the end, how do you find the middle? We still had no idea how long a pig might live. Walker’s Mammals said that the average longevity for wild pigs was about ten years. But I knew of one sow at a children’s petting zoo who was said to be nearly twenty. Whenever I met veterinarians, I asked them what they knew of this. Most felt a pig ought to live as long as a dog. But a few wondered if one might live as long as do some of their fellow ungulates—a cow can live to be twenty, and a horse, with luck, can make it past thirty.

  So few people have allowed pigs to live long enough to answer these questions. We were on the cutting edge of knowledge in this department.

  We knew for certain, though, that Christopher Hogwood was not the biggest pig who had ever lived—not by a long shot. The heaviest pig on record was named Big Bill, a Poland China hog owned by Burford Butler of Jackson, Tennessee. The Poland China breed, with its droopy ears, black body, and white snout, tail, and socks, was originally developed for its ability to produce lard. When Big Bill was measured in 1933, he stood five
feet tall at the withers, measured nine feet long, and weighed 2,552 pounds. His belly dragged on the ground.

  We didn’t particularly want our pig to weigh more than our car. Seven hundred pounds seemed a nice, round number, and Christopher, at age seven, seemed a nice, round pig. He was about five and a half feet long, and when he was standing on all fours, the top of his head reached about three feet high. We thought that was about perfect. We thought Christopher’s weight had finally reached its zenith.

  But that was before the ice storm of ’98.

  I WAS IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WHEN IT HIT, WORKING ON A FILM for National Geographic. Two years earlier, a film crew from its Explorer TV program had come with me to Sundarbans to make a documentary on the tigers and the villagers’ wisdom, and they had asked me to write the script. Now I had another idea. A wildlife rehabilitator friend of mine, Ben Kilham, was raising three orphaned black bear cubs near his home in central New Hampshire in an unusual and important new way. He was not raising them like a person typically raises baby animals, but like a mother bear raises her cubs—by spending ten hours a day in the woods with them. In the process, he was getting an extraordinarily intimate insider’s view of what life is like for American black bears. I proposed the idea over the phone, and as usual, our cockatiel was sitting on my head. I had taught her to whistle the National Geographic theme song, and the idea occurred to me that the folks at the organization’s top echelon might like to hear this. She whistled it on request—and, charmed, the executives quickly agreed to back the bear project.