The Good Good Pig Page 19

  And now, with spring soon to flower, I was grateful.

  Soon there would be tulips, and then lilacs, and then strawberries. Feeling loved and lucky, I stood on the tender lip of spring, open to the healing summer.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Days Before the Lilacs

  THAT FRIDAY WAS A BEAUTIFUL MAY DAY—THE TREES AT LAST lush with leaves, the grass as emerald as a rice field. Our crab apple and quince were a mass of hot pink and salmon petals, heavy with bumblebees. In a day or two, the apple trees in the field would come into bloom, and soon thereafter, the lilacs I love would flower, arching over our doorway, filling the whole world with their scent.

  On a day like this, of course, Chris would want to be outside. So shortly before noon, although we were out of slops, I tried to lure him to the Pig Plateau with grain.

  Although he stepped over the threshold with relative ease, he wasn’t particularly interested in the grain. He had taken only perhaps thirty paces out of his pen when he made his decision: he had now arrived at the spot where he wanted to root with his nose, expose the cool, damp, fragrant earth, and lie down in the sun. There was nothing I could do.

  You try to be mad at a pig at a time like that. I needed to go inside and get to work. And the blackflies were swarming—which didn’t bother Christopher but really bothered me. “Terrible!” I said. “You’re being a terrible animal! A dreadful beast!” But, of course, I said this as I bent over to stroke his ear, and then leaned in to pat his belly—and next I found myself kneeling in the freshly dug earth, rubbing the length of his stomach. He grunted in a cadence that said ha-ha-ha, as if he was laughing at the joke he had played on me once again.

  I couldn’t blame him, of course. Why should he walk the additional yards down to the Pig Plateau when things looked so inviting here? For him, as always, the immediate fulfillment of pleasure was utterly, unquestionably paramount. His priorities were always clear.

  So he laid his huge body down in the dirt. And once again, swatting at blackflies, I was powerless before the great, swelling tide of Christopher’s desires.

  Ah, but there was one thing we could do: we could appeal to Chris’s Higher Power.

  I dispatched Howard to go get fresh slops.

  Fiddleheads came through, providing three buckets, one of which featured doughnuts floating in a sea of pancake batter. As Howard retreated from the flies, I fished out one of the doughnuts and dropped it inches from Christopher’s head.

  The pig stretched his huge head forward and tried to lengthen his lips to bring the doughnut to his mouth. He couldn’t. Getting the doughnut would require standing. And with the sun so warm, the earth moist and cool…well, after all, he wasn’t starving.

  But then a hen came to my rescue. Spotting the doughnut, she raced over, eyed it with surgical precision, and began to peck at it, enlarging the hole. Another hen saw the prize and joined in. In minutes, everyone in the barnyard would see the bonanza and come running. This was too much for Christopher. He rocked his bulk up sideways, pulled his feet beneath him, uttered a grunt of disapproval, and stood to eat the remains of the doughnut. I was able to entice him down to the Plateau with the remains of the slops. I poured out half, and, with his entourage of pecking chickens, he gorged until he was ready to lie down again in the sun.

  Unfortunately, he was still enjoying the sun at 6:15 and was utterly uninterested in coming inside. This was a problem. That evening we were planning to meet Liz’s daughter, Stephie, for dinner at 6:30. It was Howard’s and my first outing together for any length of time since Tess had become so frail, and Stephanie’s first without her family since she’d come from Texas to help with her brother’s rehab and the new baby.

  We all very much wanted to get together. Because of Tess’s condition, we didn’t want to leave her, but the single step to our front door made our house inaccessible to Stephie’s wheelchair. So we had decided to meet at the Hancock Inn, just a mile away from our house. One of us could drive back and check on Tess during dinner. We really didn’t want to drive off and leave our pig out, either—but it was clear, after my many unsuccessful efforts to rouse him, that this was what we would have to do.

  We had a lovely supper. After we finished our entrees, Howard went off to check on Tess and Chris while Stephie and I sipped tea. Howard returned looking concerned.

  “What’s wrong?” I was scared.

  “Our dog is OK,” Howard reported. “But Chris is lying in a strange position.” He was lying as he often did, on the downward slope of the Plateau—but with his legs facing up slope.

  “Is he upset about this?” I asked.

  “No—but there is no way he can get up from that position,” Howard answered.

  I looked at Stephie for help. She is in line with her mother and Gretchen for the award for Most Supremely Competent Person on Earth. And in this case she was particularly qualified. As a disability rights activist, she might have some advice on how to help an arthritic pig rise to his feet.

  In fact, she did. “You need a Hoyer lift. It’s not made for pigs,” she stated, almost apologetically. “It’s for people who can’t get out of bed. But it might work for Chris. There are some really big people out there now.” She paused.

  “Do you have one?” I asked.

  “I bet you could order one on the Internet,” she said. “It won’t do you any good tonight, though.”

  (Note to self: order Hoyer lift. Do not mention to salesperson it’s for a fat, arthritic pig.)

  Stephie wanted to come with us and help get Chris up. But considering the steep, dirt slope and the coming darkness, we all pictured what might happen and decided against it. Stephie promised to alert the family when she got back from dinner. If we needed them, she said, just call. Everyone—Ramsay, recovering from his brain injury, Heather, less than two weeks after giving birth, Liz, mostly healed from her surgery, and Steve—all of them would be standing by to help our pig.

  Howard and I raced home, hoping that Christopher might have somehow changed position on his own. He hadn’t.

  “Christopher, how are you, sweetie?” I asked him.

  He grunted softly. He was not in the least upset.

  “Chris, come on, fat man. Get up,” said Howard.

  Christopher wouldn’t move.

  No slops would rouse him. We pulled at his harness to urge him up, but he seemed to realize he couldn’t rise from this position. Yet he was strangely serene. He seemed confident that Howard and I would come up with a solution. He was content to lie there and wait until we did.

  Howard and I discussed our options.

  “Should we roll him?”

  “He’s not going to like that.”

  “What if we tried to move his hindquarters so they were facing downhill? Then he would have his powerful back legs in position to rise.”

  “I think he’s too heavy. I’m also afraid of pulling his legs and hurting him.”

  “If we roll him, he might keep rolling.”

  “And right downhill is a giant pricker bush.”

  “A seven-hundred-pound pig stuck in a pricker bush—at night.”

  “This isn’t good.”

  “This is terrible.”

  “You are a terrible beast!” I scolded the recumbent pig. “But we’re going to help you. We love you so much.”

  We couldn’t get his hindquarters in position, so we decided to roll him. This required that the pig be completely upside down for a second, with his legs sticking straight up in the air—a position we were sure would not make him happy. He might thrash. He might scream. He might bite. But there was no other option. I took his front legs and Howard took the back.

  “One…two…three!”

  He rolled over and hit with one air-expelling grunt. Then he kept sliding—long enough for us to wonder when he’d stop. But once he did, he got up calmly, as if nothing unusual had happened at all. After frowsting in the grass for a bit, and then stopping to scratch his head on the back wall of the writing studi
o, he followed Howard and me and the slops bucket, meandering slowly, and with dignity, back to his pen.

  THE SUNNY WEATHER DIDN’T HOLD FOR THE WEEKEND. CHRIS stayed in his pen Saturday, as it was clouded over and a little windy. On Sunday, the day I was to receive an honorary doctorate of letters from Keene State College, it was raining. I processed to the outdoor stage damply, along with the college president, trustees, and the rest of the platform party who would address the graduates and their families.

  The sun began to peek out during the actual ceremony. Howard had to stay with Tess, so Liz, Selinda, Gretchen, and Gretchen’s new husband, Peter—a horse trainer turned mortician that she had met at an equine event—were my guests.

  “I wish my parents were alive,” I began my address, “but today I am surrounded by a significant portion of the people I love most in the world—as are you. So it seems an appropriate moment to talk about blessings.”

  Indeed, in reading the citation conferring my honorary degree, the robed college trustee had recounted into the microphone some of the unique blessings that I had enjoyed in the past fourteen years of my odd career: “On assignment, you have been chased by an angry gorilla, hunted by a tiger, bitten by a vampire bat, and undressed by an orangutan…”

  And in my speech, I recounted yet more blessings. I told about my first trip to India, when I was working on Spell of the Tiger. My translator, speedboat, scientist, and guide had all fallen through, and I was stuck for a month in a mangrove swamp full of man-eating tigers; my language-tape Bengali was my only means of communication. That was when I had hired Girindra—and acquired a Bengali brother I’d never known I had. I recalled my very first book, Walking with the Great Apes, written about my heroines, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. On my final expedition to Africa to research it—a trip that had been repeatedly rescheduled to fit Jane’s busy schedule—Jane, my childhood icon, had broken my heart. I had arrived at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Reserve to find that she had stood me up, leaving me alone with one African research assistant, no food, and the chimps. Instead of chasing Jane, I tracked the chimps myself.

  Blessings, all. In each case, I hadn’t found what I had hoped for or expected. Instead, I’d discovered something far more exciting or profound—an unexpected insight, a surprise gift. “And that’s a pretty good working definition of a blessing,” I said. “So go out into the world where your heart calls you. The blessings will come, I promise you that.”

  I had never made a promise so public. This was the largest audience I had ever addressed: six thousand people. But I was certain this was the deepest truth I knew. “I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such,” I said, “and sometimes this is hard. But you’ll know it’s a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It is your job to recognize them.”

  AS LIZ DROVE ME HOME, I FELT AWASH IN JOY. RADIANT WITH THE love and pride of my dearest friends, I carried home a bouquet of tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils from Selinda’s garden, in a vase she had thrown herself at her pottery class. I came home to a house full of flowers. Howard had stepped out briefly to visit artist friends who were great gardeners and come back with armloads of gigantic parrot tulips, the kind with splayed, fringed petals, like flamboyant kisses. I hugged Howard and petted Tess and went out to the barn to see Christopher.

  He was cheerful, standing, and eager to come out. Even though it was 5:00, when I opened the gate to go in to pet him, he thrust his big head out and stepped eagerly over the threshold. We walked together to the Plateau. He enjoyed half a bucket of slops—featuring noodles, croissants, strawberries, and some sort of creamy sauce—and he stayed outside until the light began to fade. He was already on his feet when I came to let him in, and he walked back to his pen hardly limping at all. I was thrilled to see him looking so robust. And when he came in, I poured more delicious slops into his bowl, and he was grateful for them, grunting with happiness as he picked out the strawberries first.

  More slops were on the way. That night, as I was washing dishes, I heard something fossicking in the slops buckets on the back porch. I opened the door hoping to see a raccoon. Instead, it was Mollie and Bob, who had stopped over on their way back to their other home in Cambridge. They were not raiding the slops buckets but adding to them, decanting a cornucopia of stale baked goods that Ned and Jack had been saving for Chris for the past month or so in their freezer. I noted this was a particularly fine selection, including loaves of French bread, frozen waffles, and chocolate cupcakes with green icing.

  After dark, once I closed the chickens in, I slid the barn door shut to Chris’s pen as always. “Goodnight, my good, good pig. I love you.” And he grunted his goodnight grunt.

  I FOUND HIM IN THE MORNING LYING IN HIS USUAL COMFORTABLE position, on his side, trotters outstretched. His eyes were shut, his face peaceful. But I knew right away something was terribly wrong. His stomach was hideously bloated. Probably quite some time earlier, certainly before midnight, Christopher had died in his sleep.

  I threw myself upon his great, prone body, as I had done with so many other sorrows before. “No, no, no!” I cried. “How can this be? I love you!”

  It seemed impossible. “Wait,” Howard said. Looking upon Chris’s body, Howard thought surely he would draw another breath. But none came.

  We knew that, on a warm day like this one, we could not let his body rest in his stall for long. We would have to bury him right away.

  Howard called Bud Adams, whose backhoe attends the funerals of nearly all the large animals in town. He was in the driveway twenty minutes later. Meanwhile, I called Gretchen, Liz, and Selinda. Each one said the same thing, immediately and without question.

  “I’m coming—I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Hog Heaven

  “THIS LETTER IS AN OBITUARY FOR AN ANIMAL,” LIZ WROTE TO the newspapers’ editors, “a pig named Christopher Hogwood, who died in his sleep on May 9, at age fourteen, in Hancock. From the time he entered their home as an infant until the day of his death last Sunday, he was the beloved companion of Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery. We seldom honor animals by noticing their deaths, and the obituary pages, of course, are closed to them. Nevertheless, their passing can leave large holes in our lives—we mourn for them as we mourn for the human members of our family, although our mourning is not acknowledged.

  “Christopher was well known, not just in Hancock but throughout New England, as the result of his appearances on various television programs. When a local storekeeper was reluctant to accept my check drawn on an out-of-state bank, he changed his mind and took the check when I named Christopher Hogwood as a reference. Yet it was Christopher’s persona, not his fame, that makes his death so saddening. Pigs get bigger as they get older—Christopher must have weighed about 750 pounds. Yet he was discriminating, totally the opposite of the stereotype of his species. It was a pleasure to watch him delicately lift a single strawberry or small cookie from his plate of food as he prepared to savor that morsel before continuing his meal. But such delicacy was in keeping with his character—he was wise and gentle, and very intelligent, with a remarkable memory for people, whom he recognized by voice as well as by appearance, even those he had not seen for many years. Not many people could do as well. We believe animals to be lesser than ourselves but that is because we do not know them. By allowing us to know at least one of his kind, Christopher did us a great service.

  “He lies in a grave in Hancock, near the barn that was his home.”

  THIS LETTER RAN IN THE TWO LOCAL WEEKLIES—PAPERS THAT had carried the news of Christopher’s trespassings in their police logs in his younger days.

  One of the papers didn’t stop there. Alerted by Liz’s letter, our friend, the Monadnock Ledger’s editor and novelist Jane Eklund, realized that Chris’s death—and life—was news. The next day she came over, bearing a Mexican lasagna for dinner, to interv
iew Howard and me for a longer article.

  It ran as the lead story on the front page, complete with his photo—poking his great head through an oversized picture frame Howard had found at the dump, the pose from our latest Christmas card. “Christopher H: A Life Well Lived,” read the banner headline. “Famous Pig Laid to Rest.”

  But by the time the papers came out, many people, both in town and beyond, already knew.

  After I called my three closest women friends, I was able to speak to only a handful of others the day of Chris’s death. I phoned Jarvis and Bobbie, and not only because they had been such good friends to Christopher; they would surely wonder what a backhoe was doing in the barnyard. I called Fiddleheads to stop the flow of slops. I called Gary. I could not bring myself to speak to anyone else. I asked Gretchen to call George and Mary; Liz promised to tell our vet, Chuck, and his staff.

  But word spreads fast in a small town. The news was on everyone’s lips, from the Cash Market to Fiddleheads to Roy’s grocery in Peterborough, where the image of Chris on his Christmas card was posted behind the meat counter.

  The phone rang and rang. The answering machine overflowed: “I’m so sorry.” “I can’t believe it.” “He was really special.” “Let me know what I can do.” “He really was some pig!” To notify our out-of-town friends, Howard and I e-mailed Liz’s beautiful tribute.

  A classmate who had lived all of his life in cities and who now worked as a magazine editor in New York called to tell us, with great sincerity: “Of all the pigs I’ve known, yours was the coolest.”

  Cards and e-mails poured in. A producer from the public radio station, where so often our pig had been mentioned on the classical music program, sent my favorite pig quote, from Dylan Thomas: “The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town…Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit.” And this was her wish: “May Christopher always be dreaming of the acorned swill of the world.”