The Good Good Pig Read online

  When it got warmer, we’d take him out in the greening grass and watch him mince around on his tiny, perfect hooves. Christopher was silent at first, but after a while, he found his voice and began to emit thrilling little grunts. He’d visibly compress his emaciated belly with each one, like an animated squeaky toy. He began to greet Howard and me in this way, and soon he grunted at the sound of our footsteps approaching his pen. Each morning, when I came to bring his breakfast of warm mash and table scraps, we called to each other:

  Chris (sleepily): “Unh. Unh. Unh.”

  Sy: “Good morning, Pig-Boy!”

  Chris (inquiringly): “Unh-unh-unh? Unh-unh-unh-unh?”

  Sy (closer): “Your delicious breakfast is coming!”

  Chris (with building excitement): “Unh! Unh! Unh! Unh!”

  Although he was eating well now, Christopher Hogwood stayed remarkably small. When he had arrived, he was about the size of a young, short, skinny cat. After a month with us, he was still cat-sized, though stockier. Maybe, just like Mary said, he would never get terribly large. Which was a good thing, because once the house we were living in was sold, we might have no place to put a great big pig.

  REAL ESTATE AGENTS WERE SHOWING US AN INCREASINGLY DISCOURAGING crop of houses for sale. We had clearly told them what we wanted: an old house, a barn, a little bit of land, a quiet neighborhood—preferably in the town where we were already living.

  The village of Hancock embodied all the reasons we had moved to New Hampshire from strip-malled, suburbanized New Jersey. Much of Howard’s writing examined the forces disassembling American places—how we are “using the world’s greatest wealth,” as he put it, “to create ugliness.” We longed for woods and wetlands, fields and farms, and for neighbors who knew each other as well as the land and its history.

  A friend had told us that in New Hampshire in the 1980s, you could rent a huge farmhouse for $100 a month. This turned out to be false. Instead, we’d found a little carriage house for $400 a month—an accessory to a huge 1880s Victorian that sat like a beached steamship on a hill on the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The town was then on the cusp of a building boom. Still, we lived there happily for three years until one day disaster struck: our ferrets were stolen from their hutch in the side yard. We tried everything to find them, including hiring a private investigator with our meager funds, to no avail. But the PI told us he’d discovered that people’s dogs were also disappearing from the neighborhood, probably being sold to medical research labs. That’s when we moved in with two friends, renting half of their two-family farmhouse in Hancock.

  Immediately we felt safe. With a two-hundred-year-old, white-steepled meetinghouse, only two stores (a video rental shop and a grocery, the Hancock Cash Market), one full-time cop, and a population of fifteen hundred, this was the sort of place where the only reason you’d lock your car was if you didn’t want people leaving zucchini in the backseat while you were at church.

  It would be a good place, we now thought, to raise a pig.

  But what could we afford? Nothing in town, apparently. And the pickings were slim in surrounding towns. There was Trak-Vu, a dark, low-ceilinged house overlooking abandoned railroad tracks, in whose upstairs bedrooms Howard could not stand upright. Farther away, there were the hastily built A-frames on quarter-acre lots, houses that people used on ski vacations—exactly the sort of development we hated. And we certainly didn’t want to build—that would only contribute to the sprawl we had fled. In another town, one agent showed us a house next door to a working quarry. The heavy machinery would only be running weekdays, from nine to five, the agent informed us cheerfully.

  Meanwhile, surveyors had descended on the Hancock house, in preparation for putting it on the market. Oddly, they kept coming back. They measured twice, then three times. Howard thought something was up.

  But I was only dimly aware of this, as by that time I was shuttling ever more frequently back to Virginia, where my father’s last battle raged. Though he never spoke to me of the war, when I’d been a little girl I used to lie awake at night sometimes, wondering whether I could withstand torture. Now, two decades later, I had my answer: yes, I could. Once, at the hospital, medical technicians removed a tube the size of a garden hose from my father’s lung. Two men in fatigues yanked it from his chest with such force that the effort threw them against the wall and sent lung fluid spraying across the room. I held my father’s hand. He didn’t even squeeze it. Neither of us flinched. Neither of us said a word. Afterward, he smiled at me. It was as if he had said: “We can take it. We can do this. We are that tough, you and me.”

  But despite courage and stoicism, despite surgery and chemo and radiation, the cancer spread to my father’s brain. First he could no longer walk, then he could no longer stand. (He could, however, still phone his broker from his bedside, which he did regularly, making stock trades that made my mother increasingly nervous.) My mother, beside herself with fear and rage and grief, increased her martini intake, and we fought bitterly.

  On Father’s Day, as he lay on his deathbed, I told my father I had finished my book. I read to him the last lines of the acknowledgments: “And finally, I would like to thank my father, Brigadier General A. J. Montgomery, whose idea it was that I make my first trips to Africa and Australia, and in whose intrepid footsteps I falteringly follow.”

  He died three days later, fighting for breath, as my mother and I held his hands. He was buried in Section 1 of Arlington National Cemetery, with full military honors.

  WHILE I WAS AWAY, TWO MAJOR EVENTS TOOK PLACE BACK home—the significance of which would soon prove profound. One was that Howard wormed the pig.

  Christopher Hogwood was now four months old, and while he was much stockier, he was still no bigger than a cat—albeit a cat made out of cast iron. Howard knew what to do. Growing up on Long Island before the housing boom eradicated his neighborhood’s last farms, on Saturday mornings, awaiting the cartoons, he used to watch The Modern Farmer. The show touted the benefits of building modern, hygienic cowsheds. And it stressed the importance of regularly dosing your pigs with medicine to rid them of intestinal worms. If you don’t, you’re feeding the worms and not the pig.

  Twenty years later, The Modern Farmer still exhorted my husband to agricultural excellence. He presented himself to the clerk behind the counter at the local Agway feed store.

  “Time to worm the swine herd!” Howard announced.

  “How many do you have?” asked the sales clerk.

  “One,” my husband replied confidently.

  “Oh.” The clerk seemed disappointed, but nonetheless handed over a packet of swine wormer—molasses-flavored pellets that Christopher devoured greedily. In his frail infancy, the medicine hadn’t done him any good. But now he was healthy enough to benefit. Thus began the transformation that would change Chris’s figure, and our lives, forever. Or, as Howard likes to say, the rest of the story is lard.

  The other event that would change our lives was a discovery: Howard found out why the surveyors kept coming back to the house. They couldn’t quite make the property come out to eight acres—land enough to subdivide into two lots, according to local zoning laws. This had been our landlords’ plan from the start, and the windfall they expected from such a deal was one reason their parents had so eagerly bankrolled the property. For them, it was less a home than an investment.

  But the surveyors’ measurements kept coming up short. It turned out that a tiny sliver of the land—about the size of a parking space—was actually owned by a neighbor. Our landlords tried in vain to buy it from her. They could not fathom that she might have wanted to keep that land precisely to prevent another house from being built on the open pasture—a place where she and other longtime residents had enjoyed watching horses and sheep graze for decades. In fact, a neighbor’s horses were grazing there now, an arrangement that we, as caretakers, maintained in lieu of mowing.

  We were delighted that the field would never be turned into
some suburban lawn. But we did not realize quite yet what this discovery meant for us: now the price of the house and land were within our reach. Because the landlords and we were friends, we could skip the considerable expense of a real estate agent. Because it was a two-family house, we could rent out half—generating regular money the banks considered far more secure than our irregular incomes as freelance writers. By summer’s end, we would buy the farm.

  BY THE TIME I RETURNED FROM MY FATHER’S FUNERAL, THOUGH, summer was just beginning. While I’d been gone, the ferns had uncoiled and the violets had bloomed. Thrush song spiraled downward from the edge of the woods, and ovenbirds were crying their familiar “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” Exhausted and shaken and empty, I was numb to beginnings when Howard picked me up at the airport that day. But on the way back home, we stopped at a farm to pick strawberries. Before us stretched row after row of plants, laden with juicy, heart-shaped fruits. They felt warm, like the sun, in our fingers. They tasted like life itself. Their fragrance was intoxicating. The very air was like champagne.

  I remembered how my father had fought like a soldier for his last gasp of air. I remembered, too, a speech he had given at the commemoration of a memorial for the POWs captured in the Philippines. All these years later, with starvation, captivity, and dehydration so far behind him, still, he told the audience, he would often purposely let his thirst grow sharp—to better relish the delayed delight of a cool, clean glass of water.

  He had loved so much in his life: cooking and serving and eating fine food. Cocktail parties, banquets, parades. Golf and swimming and dancing. Travel and music, movies and books. One by one, cancer and chemo stole my father’s strength, dulled his senses. But there was always, still, the prospect of a drink of cool water.

  My father was not afraid to die. But even in his diminished state, even as Valhalla, that heroes’ paradise, beckoned like a finish line to a race well run, I think my father just wanted one last, delicious taste of the sweet breath of life.

  And I remembered that now, the sweet, warm New Hampshire summer was waiting for me: a new beginning, fragrant, abundant, and ripe.

  I couldn’t wait to get home and give Christopher some strawberries. He surely smelled them before he heard me coming around the bend to the barn. But I imagined that his greeting grunts were just as much a welcome for me, as for his food.

  He looked wonderful. As he delicately grasped each strawberry in his flexible lips, emitting grunts of pleasure, I saw that his black and white coat had grown glossy, and his tail (though still not curly) now swished from side to side, wagging like a dog’s, when he was happy.

  During the two weeks I’d been gone, the wormer had worked its wonders. Christopher’s tummy had begun to fill out. His voice had grown deeper and more authoritative. When we let him out, he began to push his nose into the earth and produce impressive divots in the lawn.

  To our delight, the Spotted Thing was growing stronger every day.

  CHAPTER 3

  Breaking Out

  “THERE’S A BLACK-AND-WHITE PIG ROOTING UP OUR LAWN. IS IT yours?”

  This is the sort of phone call you don’t want to get early on a Sunday morning. But it is also one that cannot be easily ignored.

  A pig on the loose—even one not much bigger than a cat—is a force to be reckoned with. Now that Christopher was no longer sick, the power of his little snout was unleashed. It was a force of nature. Christopher would touch a piece of earth with his nose, and an impressive hole would open. With just a step or two, pushing forward with his nose disk, Chris became a miniature bulldozer. The hole became a trench, and the trench became a chasm. Sod peeled away from him as easily as the skin off a banana. And with neighbors’ gardens ripening with summer lettuce, beanstalks, broccoli—and by early fall, pigs’ favorites, pumpkins—the carnage was too awful to contemplate.

  “I’ll be right there!” I’d promise the caller—and race across the street barefoot and pillow-haired, still in my nightshirt, to scoop Chris up in my arms and carry him back to his pen.

  Where he would stay…for a while. But not for long.

  How Christopher Hogwood staged his escapes was a mystery Howard and I could not initially penetrate. He wasn’t bulling through our makeshift gate—he didn’t yet weigh enough to do that. What was happening was actually more disturbing. At first, he had learned to untie the string that kept the gate shut. Later we switched to bungee cords, and he had figured out how to undo these (we suspected with his lips, but we never saw). And finally we had installed a bolt that not only slid sideways to close but also required me to flip it downward to fit a curve in the latch into a metal placeholder. Somehow, the little pig had figured out how to push his nose disk and lips between the slats of the gate to open this device from the inside.

  Truth be told, I was rather proud of his feat. In fact, everything he did thrilled me. In Howard’s words, I had gone “hog wild.” When I was not actually with Chris or out looking for Chris, I found myself admiring pigs in general. From my extensive personal library on animals, I unearthed stories and pictures of giant forest hogs, hairy, six-hundred-pound pigs of East Africa; red river hogs, long-faced African pigs with elfin ears; babirusas, wild Indonesian pigs whose faces are nearly obscured by a thicket of ivory tusks. (When I raced upstairs to show Howard a babirusa photo, he pronounced it “ugly as sin.”)

  I finally even told my mother about Christopher. In my phone calls to Virginia each Sunday after church, I tried to counter her grief with tales of the pig’s escapes, what he ate, who came to visit him. He became the star of my weekly letters to her. And in her neat, typewritten replies, my mother always asked after Christopher.

  Never did she ask about Howard, though. It was clear my husband wouldn’t be welcome in Virginia—and that I wouldn’t be going back there anytime soon.

  CHRISTOPHER’S MOTIVES FOR ESCAPE WERE AS VEXING AS HIS MYSTERIOUS methods. Didn’t he like his pen? He had wood shavings and hay into which he could burrow for warmth, and a dirt floor into which he could dig should he prefer to cool off. He always had plenty of fresh water. He always had plenty to eat. When we slid the barn door open each morning, sunlight flooded into the front of the pen during the day, but there was always cool shade at the back. At night he was closed in snugly. What was there not to like?

  Maybe he was out looking for us. From his happy greeting grunts and the sparkle in his eyes, we could tell he enjoyed our company. I came out to see him about once every hour or two, to pet him or offer him a treat. I called out to him when I came, but didn’t have to. He listened for footsteps. In fact, if we walked anywhere near his pen and did not come over, he would bellow till we did. But Christopher, we thought, did not actually know where we lived. Howard was adamant that the pig should never find out. We never let him see us pass through any of the house’s three entrances lest he one day decide to storm through a screen door, seeking our company and discovering the recreational opportunities of upending our refrigerator. We assumed Chris could smell us, though, even when he couldn’t see us. Surely he knew we were out there somewhere, and maybe this explained his wanderings.

  Or perhaps, we mused, Christopher broke out for the same reason as do many young males. Maybe he was looking for beer.

  During the hot summer, we’d often let Chris out with us while Howard was enjoying the occasional cold one. Generously, Howard thought he’d let Christopher try a swig. He figured he’d like it. “After all,” Howard reasoned, “what is beer but liquid grain?”

  Howard was all too right. Christopher enjoyed his first Rolling Rock, which he slurped out of the bottle. Then he tried a Corona, fitting his lips around the spout like an expert. He liked that, too. He drank a Genesee Cream Ale. Mmmm. Christopher soon discovered that he loved beer—to the point that if he saw anyone holding a bottle of any kind, he would chase them until they surrendered and let him suck it dry.

  Howard began to make frequent forays to the beer store to buy the cheapest brand he could find. “It’s
for my pig,” my husband would explain to the employees, lest word spread that he had a drinking problem—or, worse, extremely poor taste in beer. The beer guys got to know Howard pretty fast. Each time he would stop in, the clerks would inquire after Christopher’s latest weight gain. (This we tracked with a calculation we learned at the swine booth at the county agricultural fair: To get the weight of a pig, you measure the animal’s circumference just behind the forelegs, called the heart girth. Then you measure the pig’s length, from the base of the ears to the base of the tail. Square the heart girth, then multiply it by the length, and divide the total by four hundred for weight in pounds.) Each time they saw Howard, the beer store employees would calculate how much beer they thought the pig could drink before getting drunk. “Oh my God, he could drink two six-packs!” came the realization after Chris topped 250 pounds. Before long, our pig was an object of some envy. Eventually, they figured with awe that he could do half a keg.

  That summer, though, Chris wasn’t there yet. But one thing was clear: thanks to the wondrous alchemy of swine wormer combined with Schlitz, by July we could see that Mary’s prediction that Christopher would stay small was unlikely.

  As Christopher’s girth increased, so did our doubts about who was in charge at our house. Not only was Chris destined to vastly outweigh us, but we faced a growing realization that our pig was dangerously, possibly diabolically, brilliant.

  THE GENIUS OF PIGS HAS BEEN ADMIRED FOR CENTURIES. PIGS’ EXCEPTIONAL intelligence has been noted by no less of an authority on animals than Charles Darwin. “I have observed great sagacity in swine,” he wrote, assuring his readers that pigs are at least as smart as dogs. (In fact, in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, poor people often used pigs in place of hunting dogs, as the latter were permitted only to the English aristocracy. In Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s wonderful book on the emotional lives of farm animals, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, we learn of a black sow named Slut who lived in the New Forest of Hampshire, England, in the mid-1800s, where she was trained to find, point, and retrieve partridges, pheasant, snipe, and rabbits “as well as the best pointer.”)