The Good Good Pig Read online

  In their condolences, people recounted their memories: “We remember the piglet who escaped from your hands, dragging his leash, and ran into the horse pasture in search of delectable apples,” my literary agent from New York recalled from the first time she and her husband had come up to visit. “And Steve had to jump over the wooden fence to save him from the horses, who were very territorial….”

  “We have an indelible image,” wrote Eleanor and Dick Amidon. “A misty morning and two pointed ears coming up the driveway through the mist, headed straight to the new lettuce….”

  “I can’t believe how much I am feeling,” Mollie wrote. “No more slops feeding, washings, cajoling him back into his pen with chocolate doughnuts….”

  “If there was ever wondering about Hog Heaven,” wrote the postmistress, Pat, “Chris created it with everyone he saw. He is a legend and will go into the Hancock history books as the activist who brought people together with his beautiful love.”

  Christopher’s influence, in fact, extended far beyond Hancock. Another college friend wrote from New York about how much Chris had meant to her young son, even though they had never met: “How sad that Stephen knows Christopher only from pictures. But please be assured, he is a true character in Stephen’s life—as real as the boa constrictor his aunt saved from a careless pet owner who didn’t realize the snake would get that big, and far more real than Piglet and Edward Bear and Rabbit in his storybooks. Stephen loves animals, and we love to tell animal stories to him just as he is drifting off to sleep. Christopher Hogwood was remarkable material for his bedtime ritual, but always with the promise they would meet someday. So Christopher Hogwood has taught us yet another lesson in his passing—stay close to your friends because, although they may seem endless, tomorows are finite.”

  And Girindra, through our translator the schoolteacher, wrote me from India: “I came to know the death news of Christopher; it could live more as you have been nursing it warmly but its day were numbered, so the God called it to him in the heaven. Your dear Christopher’s death is a very painful shock to us, but as death is eternal and all soul use to rest in heaven, the pig should reach there leaving his old torn earthly body. May God bless him; he is a holy soul. I pray to Almighty for him. In this respect I shall say that you are the lucky one as you have served your best for relieving him. Who can do much more than this? It’s a great satisfaction.”

  JUST LIKE WHEN A PERSON DIES, PEOPLE BROUGHT FOOD, FOR FOOD is life. Rice and lentils from Liz’s daughter-in-law, Heather. The Mexican lasagna from Jane. Eleanor Briggs brought asparagus from her garden, as well as a nosegay of violets. Bobbie brought brownies—and so did Mary Garland, whose freezer, more than any other, had forever spoiled Chris’s appetite for ordinary slops after the ice storm of ’98. Chris would have approved.

  Flowers flooded the house. As people once brought Chris their frost-killed autumn vegetables, now they brought cuttings from their spring gardens: tulips, lilacs, pansies. The Lillas sent a dozen red roses. We filled every vase and then all of the pickle jars. An orange hibiscus the size of a cruise missile arrived from my mother’s friend, Scott Marchand, in Virginia. The publisher of my children’s books sent a huge bouquet. Gary sent a cherry tree. His assistant, who knew Christopher only from Christmas cards, sent two huge pink flowering astilbes. Beth, the sole victim of Christopher’s tusks, left a potted bleeding heart on the front step. I wondered if she remembered its bloody significance.

  There were tributes both private and public. The capital city’s daily, the Concord Monitor, reran the Ledger’s article about Chris as the lead story of the metro section in its Sunday edition. The original Christopher Hogwood, the famous conductor and musicologist for whom our pig was named, reran the obit on his official Web page. A local runner proposed to name an annual footrace after Christopher. Another friend arranged for a traditional Native American pipe and prayer ceremony to ease Christopher’s transit to the next world. The fire department, whose members had retrieved him from his breakouts in his younger days, paid tribute on their marquee. Along with learning the weekly fire index—a blue, rainy 2 on a scale up to a flammable red 5—everyone who drove past the firehouse read the sign:

  CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD

  RIP, ONE SPLENDID PIG!

  Next door, Jarvis built a little bench at the edge of their backyard lawn, down by Moose Brook, and installed on it a small plaque. It read:

  IN MEMORY OF CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD

  A GOOD NEIGHBOR AND PIG

  The Miller-Rodats discussed whether they should drive up from Cambridge to make a monument to their friend. Maybe the boys could carve or build something for Christopher’s grave, Mollie suggested. But Jack had a different idea: “We should dig a huge hole, like Christopher used to dig,” he said. “But leave a big hole there. A hole like he used to dig. A hole like in everybody’s lives.”

  THE HOLE IN MY HEART WAS GAPING. HOWARD WAS STRONGER than I. Now he fed the hens in the morning for me; he knew I couldn’t go near the barn without falling apart, and unlike the times I had taken my sorrows to Christopher’s stall and wept, now crying didn’t make me feel better. My friends promised that time would help.

  The bouquets dropped their petals. The new plants took root over Christopher’s grave. A little more than a week after his death, Kate came home from college in Arizona and drove up with Lilla from Connecticut to say good-bye to Chris. Jane, in college in Colorado, would have come, too, but she was on a trip with a classmate’s family.

  I had saved all the petals from the flowers. Kate, Lilla, and I took the bowl of petals with us as we went out to the barnyard. Christopher’s fresh grave was like a raw wound that love had tried to bandage with all those pretty plants. George, too, had come by, the day after Chris’s death, bearing a pot of low-growing phlox and a small clay figurine of a smiling pig. The little statue served as a headstone. So now, as Kate, Lilla, and I knelt by the grave, we found ourselves together once again by the barn, looking into the face of a smiling pig.

  Lilla took a handful of petals from the bowl.

  “Thank you for the love grunts,” she said, and placed some petals on the grave, like an offering.

  Kate did the same. “Thank you for being, sometimes, my only friend.”

  “Thank you for laughing at us,” I said.

  And we continued, until all of the petals were gone:

  “Thank you for eating all those slops.”

  “Thank you for your beautiful, soft ears.”

  “Thank you for digging great holes.”

  “Thank you for Pig Spa.”

  “Thank you for your great soul—for that gaze into our hearts.”

  “Thank you for all the friends you brought me.”

  “Thank you for loving all those days in the sun.”

  “Thank you for showing us your heart—for inviting us into such a happy heart.”

  SINCE THEN, I’VE HAD MANY MONTHS TO PONDER THE GIFTS THAT Christopher Hogwood, a runt pig who started out almost too small to live, had bestowed on those of us who knew him. Of course I had loved him; the fact that he was an animal was not a barrier to me, but a bridge. But what was it about this life that touched so many others so deeply?

  His appeal was easy to see. He was adorable as a baby, and then delightful because he was so huge. Bringing him slops appealed to the Yankee sense of thrift; bringing him children made memories that would last kids a lifetime. People loved him because he was so happy. People loved him because he was so greedy. People loved him because he was so porcine—and people loved him because he was so human. Folks loved his gentleness and humor. But for many of his friends, it ran far deeper than that, as I found out in the months after his death.

  THE REVELATIONS BEGAN WITH BOBBIE AND JARVIS.

  A few weeks after Christopher’s death, I went over to their house to talk. It was more than a social visit. Kate came with me. As a summer independent study for college, Kate was acting as my assistant as I began to research this book. We came
back to the Doll House to record our neighbors’ recollections of Christopher. And then talk turned to Bobbie and Jarvis’s own pigs.

  “I really loved those pigs,” Bobbie told me and Kate, “and so did our boys.” She remembered how their middle son used to come home from his first job after college and sit in the pigpen and have a soda with them after work. Bobbie remembered saying to her friends in upstate New York, “‘I don’t know how I am going to stand it when these pigs go to market. I am so attached to them!’ And they would say, ‘You know, Bobbie, you have to be practical, they can’t go through the winter.’ And I believed them.

  “So the day came in the fall when they were going to be picked up by the man who would execute them,” Bobbie continued, “and I was going to work. And I said to Jarvis, ‘I want them picked up before I come home, because I just can’t stand it, and I don’t want to see them go.’” But that fall day was rainy. The butcher’s truck got stuck in their long, muddy driveway. When Bobbie came home, the butcher’s truck still was there. She could hear the pigs squealing as they were pushed into the truck that would take them to be slaughtered.

  “The reason I tell you this,” she said to me and Kate, “is that it was so wonderful to come here and find Christopher. I have always been upset over those pigs.” That’s why it was so deeply satisfying, so healing for Bobbie and Jarvis to know Christopher. This is why the words of St. Francis had such special resonance at our barn. “Here was a pig that didn’t have to go to market,” said Bobbie. “Here was a pig that did live through the winter. It just made me feel so happy that I could be friends with a pig and nobody was ever going to take him away. That he was going to live a good long life and die a natural death. Which he did. It helped a lot.”

  As her words helped me.

  Kate and I also interviewed Gretchen for her recollections. After we admired her new colt and petted her two mares, we sat on her couch with three Labradors and four cats and reminisced about Christopher. It was then that, for the first time, I heard the story of the Last Pig.

  Long before I’d met Gretchen, back when her black hair hung to her waist and she lived in a solar-heated geodesic dome with her first husband, she used to raise pigs every year for meat. “It was back in the ’70s, in the days when homesteading was in fashion,” she said. “I cured my own ham. I made my own head cheese. I made my own scrapple.” Each spring she’d get a couple of baby pigs. She’d give them good lives. She even gave each a six-pack of beer on their last day, so they’d be drunk before the butcher—amazingly, he was named Mr. Blood—came to shoot them. “But I never much thought about the pigs,” she confessed—until one year, she acquired two little pink females. One of them was special.

  This piglet leaped out of her pen regularly. At the age of three months, she could clear four feet. Normally, a loose pig on a farm is quite a nuisance, but not this pig. She liked to hang out with Gretchen as she gardened and tended her horses. The pig was good company. Sometimes she was helpful. One day, as Gretchen was struggling to empty a heavy bag of horse manure into the garden, the pig grabbed the other end in her mouth at just the right moment to help her disgorge its contents. Only once did the little pig root up part of the lawn. Gretchen had gone inside the house, and when she came out, she had to tamp the sod back down. “I said, ‘No, we don’t do that,’ and put the sod back—and she never, ever, ever rooted again.”

  Gretchen’s stepchildren grew to love this pig as well. When she got big enough, the kids used to ride on her as she walked around. Eventually, she was loose all the time. She stayed on the farm even if the family had to leave on some errand, and when they came back, the pig, who had learned the sound of the car, would run up and greet them, happy as a dog for the reunion.

  Summer turned to fall, and the day came that the pigs would be killed. But Gretchen wanted to spare this pig. She would make a great breeder sow, she decided; she would keep her.

  “So Mr. Blood pulls into the driveway,” Gretchen told us, “and he has his .22, and of course the pig runs up to greet him like she did everyone else. And he said to me, ‘Is this one of them?’ And I said, ‘Yes, but—’

  “And he shot her in front of me.”

  She never raised another pig. But she loved it that Christopher had come to live with us, and she felt that his life fulfilled an important purpose.

  “Christopher’s death,” Gretchen told me, “was the circle closing—the completion of a contract you had together.” My life with him, Gretchen said, was the domestic parallel to my work overseas, writing about jungles and exotic species and indigenous peoples, finding models of how animals and people can live together in the world. But beyond that, she said, Chris and I had entered into what she considered a cosmic pact: “His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world’s mistreatment of pigs,” she said.

  Gretchen does not feel that homestead farming is wrong; many animals live good lives on family farms. The cruelty happens on giant, crowded “factory farms,” where living animals are treated like industrial products, and where 80 percent of America’s sixty million pigs are raised for slaughter each year. “Of course, Christopher’s story doesn’t cancel out all the horrors pigs have suffered all over the world for so many centuries,” Gretchen admitted. “But you and Chris created a different reality: of honoring a pig’s life for the length of his natural life.”

  It was a reality that gave hope and peace in more ways than I could then imagine. For I had not yet spoken to my pastor, Graham, after Christopher’s death.

  Actually, Graham wasn’t my pastor anymore. Much had happened since the early days at fellowship, when Graham would introduce me to new members by announcing I lived with a pig. The month after my father had died, Graham’s wife, my friend Maggie, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She died the following April. Since then, Graham had left our church, having been called to a new congregation. He is now happily remarried to a beautiful and accomplished art professor with three wonderful, now-grown children—all of whom, when they were smaller, came to know and love Christopher, bringing him slops and marveling at his size and gentleness and the spectacle of his greedy joy.

  But Maggie’s relationship with Chris had had a special intensity. It was not until thirteen years after her death, and a month after Christopher’s, that I found out why.

  “Didn’t Maggie ever tell you about her childhood?” Graham asked.

  She never had. Graham was surprised, given all the time we had spent together. When she was sick, I’d phoned her every day; near the end, I’d visited her in the hospital most days, often for hours. But we didn’t talk about her past. Nor did we speak about her cancer. Mostly, we spoke of places we had traveled, animals we had known, and especially Christopher: what he had eaten, who had come to Pig Spa, tales of the latest escapes. I sent Maggie funny cards, usually picturing animals, and signed them from Christopher Hogwood. And she sent us cards equally funny, sweet animal cards, addressed to Chris.

  “There’s a reason she sent all those cards,” Graham said. Her kindness was rooted in almost unimaginable tragedy.

  Maggie’s mother had gotten sick with cancer almost the moment Maggie was born—a situation for which she felt responsible. Her mother had died when Maggie was five. Her father, bereaved, became a vicious drunk. When Maggie was nine, her father killed himself with a revolver. Her older brother, twelve, found him dying on the bed, twitching.

  The orphaned siblings were soon separated. When their father had been angry with them, he used to threaten: “I’ll send you off to live with Aunt Frances!”—their mother’s strict sister in Bangor, Maine. And this is what happened to Maggie. Aunt Frances didn’t want Maggie, and she and her husband certainly weren’t going to take Maggie’s brother, too. So her brother was sent away to live with their father’s brother in a different city.

  I’d known Maggie was raised by her aunt, but not how awful it was—nor that her brother, a pharmacist, had become an alcoholic and committed sui
cide himself at age forty-one.

  “Well, that’s typical, never to talk about it,” said Graham. “But I think there was a connection between all that and Christopher.” He paused as I tried to imagine what connection there could be.

  “Christopher was an orphan, too,” he said. “But he was adopted by a very different family. He had a very different life. She sent him cards because when she was a little girl, nobody sent her cards. In other words, Christopher’s story was her story—but come out right.” In the life of this little runty piglet, Maggie could see her own story rewritten—transformed to a story of comfort and joy, a story with a happy ending.

  CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD, LILLA SAID TO ME SHORTLY AFTER HE died, “was a big Buddha master for us. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you—to love your slops. What a soul!” she said. “He was a being of pure love.”

  It’s true. He loved company. He loved good food. He loved the warm summer sun, the belly rubs from caressing little hands. He loved this life. “That love,” Lilla promised me, “is not lost. It can never be lost.”

  Christopher Hogwood knew how to relish the juicy savor of this fragrant, abundant, sweet, green world. To show us this would have been gift enough. But he showed us another truth as well. That a pig did not become bacon but lived fourteen years, pampered and adored till the day he died peacefully in his sleep—that’s proof that we need not “be practical” all the time. We need not accept the rules that our society or species, family or fate seem to have written for us. We can choose a new way. We have the power to transform a story of sorrow into a story of healing. We can choose life over death. We can let love lead us home.