The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  BUT CHRISTOPHER HOGWOOD DID NOT GRUNT THAT FIRST NIGHT. His breathing was wet and noisy. His eyes were runny, and so was his other end. We had no pig medicine. We didn’t even have a proper sty. We didn’t know how long he’d live. We didn’t know how big he’d get. We didn’t have a clue what we were getting into.

  How long do pigs live? This was a question we would often be asked, and our answer always shocked everyone: six months. Most pigs are raised for slaughter, and this happens quite literally at a tender age, once they reach about 250 pounds. A few lucky sows and breeder boars will be allowed to live for years, but they, too, are usually dispatched when their productivity wanes. Even breeder boars seldom live past 6 or 7, because they become so heavy they would crush the young sows who produce the biggest litters.

  Relatively few people keep pigs as pets. Those who do usually keep Vietnamese potbellied pigs. Vietnam, with a porcine population of about 11.6 million (winning top honors for most pigs in Southeast Asia), manages to cram so many pigs into such a small area by breeding extraordinarily small pigs—but small is a relative term when it comes to swine. Vietnamese potbellied pigs, if allowed to live to maturity at about age five, typically grow to about 150 pounds. From Vietnamese potbellied stock, scientists have bred even smaller pigs for research purposes—“micropigs” who might weigh as little as thirty pounds and stand only fourteen inches tall, and who can make fine pets. But many pigs touted as tiny turn out to be of mixed porcine parentage and, to their owners’ horror, quickly outgrow their miniature dimensions, necessitating potbelly rescue groups such as Pigs Without Partners (Los Angeles) or L’il Orphan Hammies (in Solvang, California). Even the ones who stay small can mean big problems. One woman we know had to give away her Vietnamese potbelly because he would bite whenever he thought that she or her husband were taking up too much space in their communal bed.

  Christopher Hogwood was no Vietnamese potbelly, but there was a decent chance, Mary promised us, that he would stay small. That first night, we couldn’t picture him growing much bigger than the shoe box in which we carried his shivering, emaciated form. We couldn’t see that far ahead—and I didn’t want to. That spring, it seemed I woke every day to sorrow, as every day carried me closer to my father’s death.

  I could barely allow myself to hope Christopher would survive the night.

  CHAPTER 2

  Buying the Farm

  FOR SO LONG, EACH MORNING HAD FELT THE SAME. FROM SLEEP, consciousness came on like a slow sickness. For a moment I would wonder vaguely what was wrong. Then it would hit me—my father’s cancer, the looming deadline for the book, the home we were going to lose—and I would lie still as if pinned by its weight. “Now what?” I would think. I didn’t want to get up.

  Until the morning I woke up and remembered a baby pig was in the barn.

  Originally I had envisioned him sleeping with us, in the bed. Howard, possibly influenced by the leaky state of the sick pig’s rear end, had vetoed the idea. Chris should not be raised as a house pig, he insisted. My housekeeping was bad enough as it was.

  So that first night, Christopher Hogwood was exiled to the ground floor of the barn. We had prepared a cozy nest. There were no stalls in the barn, but no matter: among the charms of an old barn is a vast archive of farm and garden implements as well as leftover building materials and fencing supplies, the inherited riches of a century of previous owners and their animals. Our landlord’s three-level barn, for instance, contained, among other things, a trove of New Hampshire license plates from different eras, an ancient wagon wheel, a granite millstone, a lead-lined grain bin, windows, doors, and screens of various sizes, rolls of chicken and turkey wire, a pile of wooden loading pallets, a jumble of metal fence stakes, a 1980s Gone with the Wind poster parody (Margaret Thatcher in the arms of Ronald Reagan), a framed print of the Mona Lisa, and a boat toilet. From such a collection you can usually find, if not the very thing you want, at least something that will do.

  Gretchen had come over to help us with the pig nursery. Raising organic vegetables, Siamese cats, and Connemara ponies on a hardscrabble farm in the next town over, she was an expert at making do: she had obtained the foam mattress for her bed from the dump (“before it had been rained on,” she boasted). The stone foundation of the barn would serve as one outside wall, and two old doors, set on their sides and propped up with concrete blocks, created temporary back and side walls. Although the lower level of the barn had a huge sliding door on rollers, the bottom had rotted out, and a piglet could easily crawl beneath it to escape. But Gretchen saw instantly how to proceed. In front of our temporary pen, she placed a two-by-four on its long side, into which, incredibly, precisely fitted the slats of one of the wooden pallets. Voilà: half a fence-like wall, about three feet high. Another pallet, tied with string to one of the barn’s wooden beams, created the other half, forming a gate we could swing open.

  On the barn’s dirt floor we had scattered two bales of clean, fragrant wood shavings. We made a bed from a couple of flakes of sweet hay. Here, on that first night, as I knelt beside him stroking and kissing his stunted, spotted form, Christopher Hogwood pushed his nose disk beneath the hay, tucked his hooves beneath him, and went almost immediately to sleep.

  Still, I had worried about him all night. What if he got sicker? Could we pay extensive vet bills on top of the airfares to Virginia? Or worse—what if I found his little body lifeless in the hay? I rushed out of the house still in my nightshirt to see him. Already, I realized, I loved him so much it scared me.

  ANIMALS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY REFUGE, MY AVATARS, MY SPIRIT twins. As soon as I learned to talk, I began to inform people I was actually a dog. Next, for an entire year, I insisted I was a horse. My father obliged by calling me “Pony,” taking me on endless pony rides, and patiently staring with me for hours at every animal in the zoo. The hippo, whose pen I toddled into at the zoo in Frankfurt, Germany, before I was two, failed to trample or bite me, instead behaving like most of the animals I met—as if I belonged with them. Dragonflies, butterflies, and wild birds would light on my shoulders. Beetles and spiders were welcome to crawl on my skin. I preferred their company to that of other children, whom I found noisy and erratic.

  When I was old enough to think about it, I realized I understood animals in a different way than other people, probably because I had the patience to watch them and see how interesting and compelling they really are. Perhaps animals revealed themselves to me because I didn’t wiggle and scream like other kids. Other parents were astonished to find I had sat still long enough for artists to complete two portraits of me before I was three—paintings showing an infant, and then a toddler, with an unusually intense, focused gaze. Motionless and silent for hours, I was watching the flame of a lit candle.

  My father was proud of my concentration. My mother feared I was retarded. Her worries deepened when I was sent home on my first day of kindergarten for biting a little boy after he tore the legs off a daddy longlegs. Even then I knew: the daddy longlegs and his kin were my tribe; the cruel little boy was not.

  It was not that I disliked people; some of them were interesting and kind. But even the nice ones were no more compelling or important to me than other creatures. Then, as now, to me humans are but one species among billions of other equally vivid and thrilling lives. I was never drawn to other children simply because they were human. Humans seemed to me a rather bullying species, and I was on the side of the underdog.

  Still, my mother cherished hopes I would turn out like a normal child. She bought me baby dolls. I flung them aside. But first I would strip off their clothes and use them to lovingly dress the stuffed baby caimans my father had brought back from South America. I would sometimes emerge from my room pushing a doll’s pram, displaying the toothy, dressed-up reptiles to the horrified wives of colonels and generals gathered for my mother’s bridge and cocktail parties.

  This wasn’t the sort of daughter my poor mother had in mind. On her Singer Featherweight, she sewed elaborate,
frilly dresses to go with the lacy little girls’ socks and patent leather shoes she bought at the PX. For her husband’s promotion to brigadier general, a ceremony at which he also took command of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, she dressed up her blond six-year-old like those baby dolls I had flung aside, complete with bonnet and little white gloves. I remember wishing I were wearing fatigues and combat boots like the other soldiers.

  After all, hadn’t I helped my father get his general’s stars? Every night, before his promotion, we had a ritual: I would ride on his shoulders as he walked the green border of the oriental rug, pretending I was a circus girl and he was a giant gorilla walking a tightrope over a pit of snakes. He was teaching me to be brave, to fear nothing, to hunger for wild experiences. We were practicing, I believed, for adventures we would one day have together. We would explore the world—Africa, where the real gorillas were, and Australia, where strange and alluring pouched mammals such as kangaroos and koalas lived. But first, I would need to grow up, and he would need to trade the eagles on his shoulders for a brigadier’s stars. So each night, before bed, I would seize the moon and the stars from the sky and put them in the pocket of my father’s uniform, and kiss him goodnight.

  FINDING CHRISTOPHER ALIVE THAT MORNING REMINDED ME OF the comforting fact that the worst thing doesn’t always happen. Standing shakily, it was clear he was not a healthy pig. He was very skinny. His tail didn’t curl, but drooped like a dried-up umbilical cord. But he was stronger. He didn’t even seem lonely. Normally, wild pigs are gregarious creatures, living in groups called sounders of about twenty animals (though sometimes more than a hundred). Much like elephants, two or more pig families, composed of mothers and their children, may travel, play, feed, and rest together, the sounders staying stable until the mating season (when previously solitary males fight for females, mate, and then, mercifully, leave). On farms, pigs also enjoy the company of their fellows. Pig communities are called drifts—a word I always loved, for it evokes a group of animals moving as one, drifting like a cloud of pigdom over the landscape. Pigs snuggle together when they sleep, and if baby pigs are anxious, they’ll stick together so tightly that commercial hog farmers call the phenomenon “squealing super-glue.”

  But for Christopher, it must have been a luxury to spend the night alone. With a spacious, clean, dry pen all to himself, he was unencumbered by the squeal and sprawl of pushy, bigger siblings who always ate all the food. And he probably didn’t miss his mother, either—after all, if he complained, there was always the danger she’d bite him in half. It was probably a relief to have escaped from his pig family.

  That very first morning, Christopher Hogwood seemed to understand that things had changed for the better. His new family must have looked odd to him—vertical, hairless, and eight nipples short of the proper quota, among other inadequacies. This would require some accommodation, but he seemed game. Calm but curious, he looked at me with his humanlike brown eyes as if to say, “OK—now what?”

  I was wondering the same thing. But now it seemed a far more hopeful question.

  I WAS BURSTING TO TELL MY FATHER ABOUT CHRISTOPHER. MY mother had stoically put up with all the creatures I’d had as a child—scaly, biting lizards who would escape while my father was at work and I was at school, parakeets who would perch on the chandelier and splatter droppings on the mahogany dining room table, turtles she’d find swimming with me in my bathwater—but my father truly loved animals. News of our little pig might have taken his mind off his illness.

  But I kept Christopher Hogwood a secret. There was no reason I could think of that my father wouldn’t like the pig. But if he hadn’t approved of this creature I so tenderly adored, it would have broken my heart—as had happened with my marriage.

  I had loved Howard all through college, though I didn’t realize it. We had worked together on Syracuse University’s daily newspaper, the Daily Orange. When Howard was managing editor, he had hired me as an assistant, and later we worked side by side editing the op-ed and editorial pages for eight hours a day, five days a week, for two years. I enjoyed everything about him—his brilliant wit, his bewildering abundance of ideas, his forceful, surprising writing, his commitment to bettering the world. I loved his loud laugh and his bushy black eyebrows and his mass of unruly curls that reminded me of a Cotswold sheep. But we were friends. We’d never dated.

  Three months after graduation, with a contract to publish his first book, Howard was temporarily without an apartment. Since I had a job on a New Jersey newspaper and a rented cabin at the edge of a wood, I invited him to stay with me. He said he would only need to stay till Christmas.

  He didn’t say which Christmas. But in the meantime, each morning he would wake me by playing my favorite record, Songs of the Humpback Whale, and place a ferret or two in my bed. By day, we would both write—he at the cabin, me at the newspaper—and phone each other with writing questions. Would this lead work? How to handle that transition? We would both write about fourteen hours a day, often six days a week. We were on fire with words we hoped would elucidate and preserve what we found beautiful and important in the world—its historic and natural landmarks, its wild lands and creatures, our understanding of our place on the planet. Howard inspired me with his dedication and intellect, and delighted me with his gentleness and humor; he came to love my intensity and joy.

  Eight years later—after I’d quit the paper, lived for six months in a tent in the Australian outback, rejoined Howard in a rented carriage house at the New Hampshire–Massachusetts border, and moved, again, to the house our friends owned—we were still living together. I had not mentioned this to my parents. I hadn’t, in fact, mentioned Howard at all. My mother had strong views about the “right kind” and “wrong kind” of people to “cultivate.” This tall, skinny Jewish liberal with wild, curly hair was not one of them.

  When we announced our plans to marry, Howard came to Virginia. My father was pained. He knew what was in store. My mother was livid. Speaking to me even more slowly than her Arkansas accent normally flowed, as if belaboring the obvious, she detailed Howard’s unsuitability: he didn’t have a “real” job, he laughed too loudly, his hair was wild, and his sneakers were coming untied. Then, attempting to sound sympathetic, she added, “And he can’t help it that he’s Jewish.”

  Howard’s parents, on the other hand, had known about me all along. Relieved we were going to legitimize our relationship, they forgave the cross around my neck. They assured me my parents would come around. After all, they said, we were family.

  Frankly, family meant little to me. Almost everyone in my extended family was dead before I was born—my father’s mother and brother, my mother’s father—and those few who survived to my birth lived too far away to often see. If family was really some cohesive, committed unit, how could my parents so adamantly reject the chosen spouse of their only child? To me, family meant a mother and a father and the offspring that biology dealt them—often to their mutual sorrow. I wanted none of it.

  After our wedding, which they did not attend, my parents sent me a letter in which they formally disowned me. I can’t remember the words—Howard took the letter away—but I remember the shock of seeing the handwriting: it was written in the forceful, familiar, beloved hand of my father.

  Why had my father written it? The question plagued me. My father was less prejudiced than most men of his era. He got along with everyone—black, white, Christian, Jew, Yankee, Southerner. He did not even hate the former enemy, the Japanese. But on the issue of my husband, I finally decided, he had capitulated to my mother’s vehemence; after all, he lived with her, not me.

  We had no communication for two years. And then I got a letter from my father’s sister in California. The doctors had found a spot on his lung. I called the hospital, discovered it was cancer, booked the next flight to D.C., and walked into his room at Walter Reed.

  My parents were glad to see me. But over the months I would fly back and forth to Virginia to care for my father, b
oth of my parents periodically shot me stinging barbs about my husband.

  I wasn’t about to give them the chance to insult my pig, too.

  EVERYONE ELSE, THOUGH, WAS THRILLED ABOUT CHRISTOPHER. Our friends came over to see him, much the way people come to see a new human baby. But unlike human babies—most of whom, bald, pink, and larval, look exactly like, well, typical human babies—Christopher Hogwood did not look like a typical baby pig. The pastor, Graham Ward, dropped by with his wife, Maggie, and admired Christopher’s lavishly furry ears. Eleanor Briggs, a photographer and philanthropist who had founded a conservation center in our town, naming it after Harris, her cat, was impressed with his huge, almost unwieldy head.

  But Elizabeth Thomas, a well-known author who had become a friend and mentor in the three years I had known her, was struck most by Christopher’s frailty. Liz knew a great deal about animals around the world. She had lived in Africa among the Bushmen of Namibia, studied elephants in South Africa and wolves on Baffin Island. Normally, she knew, baby pigs, like baby warthogs, are as sturdy as little tanks. Christopher was spindly and wobbly, his hips so slender that his back hooves nearly touched. Liz was worried whether Christopher would make it—but, seeing my joy in the piglet, she kept this concern to herself.

  Luckily, I had friends whose idea of a good time was to hang out in a pigpen. We’d kneel in the shavings and let him explore our hands with his wet, quivering nose disk. We’d feed him tidbits of apple and carrot and grain. We’d delight in the flexibility of his lips, the lapping of his quick, pink tongue. Even when he would sleep, twitching now and then with piglet dreams, we would stare at him like he was the Yule log on TV, a focal point of communal comfort and joy.