The Good Good Pig Page 8

  “The moment I saw him,” Lilla remembers, “the cloud of anxiety and despair around our little unit just lifted away. The sensation went all over my body: everything’s going to be all right.”

  Our four blond heads now bent intently forward as eight hands reached to rub Chris’s pink, tight belly. Keeping time with his grunts, we repeated his favorite mantra:

  “Good, good pig. Good, good, goood…”

  “OK—I’M OPENING THE DOOR. ARE YOU READY?”

  Kate and Jane stood by, just off to one side of the barn and slightly uphill—a direction in which Chris was unlikely to run.

  “OK!” they answered. “Ready!”

  The girls knew the drill. By Christopher’s second year, we had perfected the Running of the Pig. We’d done this nearly every day that the sky had shown the least hint of sunshine and the ground was clear of snow. By now, it was a regular ritual, and its smooth operation depended on the girls’ well-honed execution of their tasks.

  One: Slops Standby. I would carry the heavy bucket, but at least one of the girls—usually both—stood ready with a particularly delectable item, such as a blueberry muffin or a bagel, with which to steer Chris if he went off course.

  Two: Wardrobe Management. Christopher had outgrown the extra-large dog harness, and now dressed for dinner in a more elaborate contraption we had to put on him after he exited the pen. It was an amalgam of previous outfits. At one point he’d worn a harness that we’d had custom-made by a manufacturer of spelunking gear, generously procured by Maggie and Graham’s daughter, Emily, who was dating a caver. But—disturbingly—it broke. So this became the substrate onto which bits of earlier harnesses were cleverly grafted, thanks to the skill and ingenuity of the only cobbler for miles around—a fellow whose shop was a half-hour drive away. (Chris was his only sixteen-toed client.) Kate, a fourth-grade fashion maven, carried the harness, and was the only one of us who could consistently negotiate the maze of buckles and loops necessary to put the thing on.

  Three: Border (Collie) Patrol. Jane helped me make sure that Tess, who, with her Frisbee, accompanied us on every trip we made outside for any reason, maintained her “stay” well afield of Christopher’s trajectory until the coast was clear. This was not as easy as it sounds. Even after a year with us, Tess was unconvinced we might not slip away from her. So whenever we were more than a few yards apart, Tess tried to creep ever closer to me unseen—even though once I gave the “stay” command she was invariably crouched down, immobile, every time I looked up. With Tess focused on me, and Chris on the slops I carried, an unwitting collision of the two animals was entirely possible—but for Jane. Jane’s attention was unwavering. Though she was only seven and short for her age, Jane’s sturdy determination was evident in everything she did, from her focused ferocity on the first-grade soccer team to the way she herded her free-spirited mom and older sister out the door so they would not be hopelessly late for every appointment. She was perfect for the job.

  Lastly, there was a fourth task, unstated but clearly understood: don’t get run over by the pig. We all knew this could pose a serious problem, because by the second summer of his life, Christopher Hogwood weighed well over three hundred pounds.

  A three-hundred-pound pig in the family seemed perfectly normal to me. Having children in my life, though, came as a huge surprise.

  Even for a childless couple, Howard and I had remarkably little contact with kids. Howard’s brother and sister-in-law had two fine sons, Eric and Scott, but they lived on Long Island and we seldom saw them. The friends with whom we spent the most time were older, their children grown—or they were child-free like us. Writing, as we did, for adult readers didn’t bring us in contact with many kids; our civic duties (I served on the conservation commission and as a deaconess at church, and Howard chaired the library’s board of trustees) didn’t, either.

  Which was fine with me. I’d never been one of those people who was “good with kids”—not even when I was a kid myself.

  My childhood playmates were mainly adult. Our Scottish terrier, Molly, and I had been pups together, but all the others—the parakeets and box turtles, fish and lizards—were grown when I met them. As for young humans, I knew little about them. When we’d lived at Fort Hamilton, I didn’t go to school with the other kids on base. Weekdays I rode into Brooklyn in a limousine to Packer Collegiate Institute, a private Protestant school with huge brass banisters coiling alongside curving wooden staircases, teachers who yelled if you put your elbows on the lunch table, and an hour of chapel every morning. My classmates lived too far away to play with regularly on weekends, and no kid on base wanted to play with the general’s daughter.

  But no matter. Outside, I didn’t want to play kickball in the street, anyway; I wanted to walk with Molly and see what she was smelling. Indoors, I didn’t want to play with other girls and their silly dolls; I preferred the prehistoric inhabitants of Purplenoiseville, a dinosaur village ruled by a battery-powered foot-tall purple and green tyrannosaur named King Zor, who rolled forward spitting sparks and rubber-tipped darts to keep the smaller brontosaurs, ankylosaurs, and ceratopsians in line. The dinosaurs were surprisingly devoted. Purplenoiseville had been settled when I was four and we lived in Alexandria, Virginia; I’d assumed that when we moved, since we couldn’t take Alexandria with us, we couldn’t take Purplenoiseville either. But one day shortly after the move to Fort Hamilton, the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find King Zor waiting on the doorstep. In the coming days, I would breathlessly report to my parents how, one by one, all the dinosaurs appeared, having journeyed all the way from Virginia to New York. If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said I had plenty of friends.

  By fifth grade, when my father retired from the Army and we moved to New Jersey, I was earning straight A’s, had memorized the Methodist hymnal, and read French and English at a high school level. But I had no idea how to play with children. A quarter century later, I still hadn’t learned.

  But Christopher Hogwood changed everything.

  FROM THE FIRST DAY THE CABOTS MOVED IN THAT JANUARY, A white, five-gallon plastic ice cream bucket dominated their kitchen counter. This was the slops bucket, the focus of every meal.

  “Oooh—pasta!” the girls would cry in delight on a night Lilla made spaghetti. “Christopher would really like that!” The girls would eat just the tiniest bit for dinner in order to leave more for the pig’s enjoyment.

  “Bagels! Great!” they would exclaim at breakfast, making sure there were plenty of leftovers for the pig. At their house, burned cookies were cause for rejoicing, and when one day a whole watermelon splattered on the floor, the fallen fruit was greeted with a whoop of pleasure, as if a skilled basketball player had landed a slam-dunk…right into Christopher’s pen.

  When the family had moved in, I had told them to feel free to bring treats for Chris at any time, but to make sure to come see me first. Possibly Lilla thought this was a neighborly gesture to ensure her small daughters were not stepped on or bitten by an enormous hog. This was not the case. Actually my main concern was that no one fed Christopher anything unsavory. (People new to feeding pigs, I’d found, were apt to forget about Christopher’s meat taboo or his dislike of onions and citrus, and might even carelessly toss a plastic wrapper or a toothpick into the pig garbage.)

  The first afternoon after the girls moved in, they came bearing slops. I was deep in writing my monthly nature column for the Boston Globe, this time on what bugs do in winter. (Our house was a living laboratory of answers, with pupal cases and egg sacs in many corners, safe from my little-used vacuum cleaner.) As happened every time there was a knock at the door, Tess exploded into hysteria, shattering my concentration. Often she barked so loudly we couldn’t hear the knocking that prompted it. But in this case I knew from her tone that something truly alarming was trying to get in the house: children.

  Tess did not trust children. Perhaps they reminded her of unruly sheep. When I opened the door, she snapped her tee
th in the girls’ faces. A border collie’s snap is not a bite that misses its mark; it’s a gesture made specifically for the sound. It helps them herd sheep, like you might click your tongue to gee a horse along. Unfortunately most people don’t know this—the children start to cry and the parents shrill in alarm.

  But this is not what happened at all.

  In response to Tess’s assault, little Jane bravely stood her ground; Kate knelt to pat Tess: “Hello, Tess! Remember us?” (Tess probably did, but she also remembered Mary Pat and John, and still barked relentlessly every time our tenants entered or left the house, which was several times a day.) Over the din, Lilla tried to apologize for the interruption, and explained they’d only come to see if they could feed Christopher.

  “Tess!” I barked, grabbing my ski jacket. “Get your Frisbee, Tess!” The tone of Tess’s voice changed from hysterical to victorious. Thanks to her barking, instead of being abducted by aliens, we would now be able to play Frisbee. Remarkably still able to bark with the toy in her mouth, Tess flew down the icy back steps with the four of us, leaping into the air to grab the disk as we tossed it to her over the crusty snow on the way to the barn.

  Christopher heard our footsteps and began to call to us: “Unhhhhhh? Nhhhhhhhhhhhhh? Nhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  “Hello, Pig Man!” I answered. “Visitors!”

  We rounded the corner to the barn.

  “He’s even bigger!”

  “Look at his ears!”

  “He’s so furry!”

  “Can I feed him?”

  “Ooh, please, let me!”

  The girls were hooked.

  After school, right off the bus, the sisters would head straight for the pen and place their uneaten lunch sandwiches into the pig’s mouth. “I don’t know why I even pack their lunch,” Lilla once joked with Howard. “I could just put it in the slops bucket right now.”

  Christopher Hogwood comes home—in front of our barn, as a baby. Photo: Author

  Even when he began to bulk up, at first, Chris stayed about the size of a cat. Photo: Howard Mansfield

  Quite early in life, Christopher began to probe his pen for a means of escape. Photo: Howard Mansfield

  Off to the Pig Plateau…Chris, Tess (with Frisbee), and Sy (with slops bucket). Chris is about one and a half years old here. Photo: Howard Mansfield

  Chris as a young adult wearing a large dog harness. Later, our cobbler friend would have to sew together the parts from several dog harnesses to accomodate Chris’s girth. Photo: Author

  Christopher begins his career as a fashion model—this photo became the first Chris-mas card. Photo: Bruce Curtis

  The ladies spill out of their newly completed Chicken Chalet. Photo: Pincus Mansfield

  Chris as a young adult resting on the Pig Plateau and enjoying a belly rub Photo: Ian Redmund

  Tess soars to catch her beloved Frisbee. Photo: Pincus Mansfield

  Antioch biology professor Beth Kaplan and her daughter Stella at Pig Spa Photo: Author

  This Christmas card photo showcased Chris’s tusks—before we had to have them trimmed. Photo: Author

  Sy and Jane with baby chicks, who arrived in the mail to supplement the ranks of the aging Ladies. Photo: Howard Mansfield

  What is beer but liquid grain? Christopher enjoys a Schlitz. Photo: Author

  Ned Rodat relaxes with Chris, an elder statesman at the time. Photo: Mollie Miller

  Christopher’s last full summer, at age thirteen. Pig Spa with Kate (left) and Jane. Photo: Lilla Cabot

  Christopher’s last Christmas card Photo: Author

  Christopher’s gravesite Photo: Jarvis Coffin

  The girls came up with the idea of feeding Christopher with a serving spoon. One day they decided that a half gallon of Häagen-Dazs was too freezer-burned for human consumption. Christopher shocked us all by launching from all fours to stand up on his back legs to receive the bounty. Resting his front legs on the gate, he brought his huge head level with Kate’s—and towered above Jane’s. He opened his cavernous mouth and awaited his due.

  Interestingly, he seemed to understand the function of the spoon. Gently, he allowed the girls to slide it out from between his lips, even if a bit of ice cream remained on its surface: he was confident of refills. With what would pass for patience in a pig, he would wait, his trotters draped casually over the gate, for another spoonful, ropes of frothy drool flowing down his jowls.

  Now, this was my idea of a good time.

  Outside, there were also hens to pet, eggs to gather, Frisbees to throw. Soon the girls began to spend time with us inside, too. Their mom was commuting to Massachusetts on weekdays, earning a master’s degree in expressive therapy at Lesley College. When Kate and Jane got home from school each day, their house was cold and empty—and once it was haunted. One day Kate and Jane came over screaming. The stereo, they said, had, “like, suddenly come on for no reason?— and then Janis Joplin was singing? Like, really loud?” Obviously the two-hundred-year-old cape was haunted by a troubled 1960s blues singer.

  By then, though, the girls knew they were safe with us. After playing with Chris and Tess and the chickens, with eggs in our pockets, many afternoons we retreated to our tiny kitchen and made chocolate chip cookies together, baking them in the 1930s gas oven that warmed up the whole house. (We nearly always burned at least a few for Chris.) While I rolled out pie crusts on our single, three-foot-long countertop, the girls sat at the rickety card table where Howard and I ate, and drank milk with the cookies and talked.

  At first, we mainly spoke of Christopher. How many different grunts did he have, and what did they mean? They identified the “Come over!” grunt, the “Feed me faster!” grunt, the “Let me out!” grunt, the “Rub more!” grunt, and an endless variety of others, including Christopher’s special grunt for Howard: the deep, serious, “man-to-man” grunt. (And these were just the grunts. He also uttered growls, squeals, and snorts as well as a blood-chilling alarm bark.) Which foods hadn’t Christopher tried yet? What might appeal to him? What had he been like as a baby?

  I showed them his baby pictures. They could not believe he was once so small.

  We discussed other species of pigs. I showed them the pictures of the babirusa and red river hog. They pronounced them gorgeous. Together we admired the bearded pigs of Indonesia, the cute peccaries of the Americas. Sometimes we talked about other animals around the world—orcas and wolves, elephants and monkeys. We would pick a category—weasels, for instance—and everyone would name their favorite animal among them. Wolverines, we decided, were very cool. But ferrets were, too. And otters were excellent. We looked up the animals’ pictures and read aloud from my volumes of Walker’s Mammals of the World and the Torstar Books series All the World’s Animals, while our cockatiel chewed on the pages or flew from head to head.

  Attracted by the smell of baking cookies, Howard would descend from his upstairs office. He was working on a book about New Hampshire aviator Harry Atwood, famous for his daring 1911 landing on the White House lawn. (President Taft waddled out to give Atwood a medal but was too fat to accept the invitation to fly.) Often Howard would eat cookies with us and then go next door and build a fire in the woodstove, so that when Lilla got home, the house wouldn’t be so cold.

  We called their home the Doll House. It was a small, sweet place, with a picket fence out front where roses bloomed in the summer and the rooms inside always smelled of bubble bath. With the Lillas Three in residence—the girls were exact miniatures of their slender, pretty mom—the house next door was a feminine universe, fragrant with fruity shampoos and exotic hand creams, littered with little girls’ gloves and scarves and hair scrunchies, colorful with grade school artwork on the refrigerator and crystals and suncatchers in the windows. Sometimes we would join them over there and eat pizza. Jane would hop up and dance on the chair in front of the woodstove until her pants were really hot, then she’d eat an ice cube to cool off. Kate ran up and down the stairs, bringing us her drawings and poetry a
nd stuffed animals.

  One Sunday we went on an expedition together. Kate and Jane had wanted to visit George and Mary’s ever since they’d seen Christopher’s baby pictures. And as winter’s snow melted into mud season, surely there would be baby pigs.

  It was a merry journey, Kate and Jane chattering and giggling nonstop in the backseat. On the drive over to the farm, as we rounded the bend known as Cemetery Cove that curves around the lake, the girls cried, “Jack rabbit!” and held their breath until the first white house they saw. Why? They didn’t know. (Howard did: “Because,” he explained, “they’re seven and ten.”)

  When we arrived, we went right to the barn. The baby pigs were all in with their huge moms—there were no stalls set aside for runts, as when Chris had been born. The girls leaned over the gates to the stalls until they were hanging like gymnasts with their legs up and their heads down, reaching to pet the babies. Kate was desperate to hold a baby pig. Normally Howard and I would have gone right in, but the possibility, though slight, that one of the girls might be injured by one of George’s sweet, huge sows scared us. Instead, we urged the girls to explore the muddy barnyard, where they found rabbits and chickens to hold. As they picked them up, the animals became calm in their hands.

  But Kate was disappointed. She had really wanted to hold a baby pig.

  As we were leaving, George appeared as if from nowhere. He looked like a caricature of a man late to a fire, running as fast as he could, carrying a bucket in one callused, ungloved hand. One of his draft horses was loose, he called to us as he ran by. It might be halfway to Keene by now.

  “George, we’ll catch up later…you go!” Howard and I told him.

  But then Kate, whom George had never met, called after him plaintively, “We wanted to hold a baby pig….”