The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  And to Chris they would always return. At first, because people’s bodies, voices, and scents change so dramatically in adolescence, we wondered whether the pig would recognize his old friends when next he saw them. But even when many months went by between visits, Christopher always knew Kate and Jane. Each time they came, even before their hands touched him, Christopher issued the soft, blissful love grunts he always reserved just for them.

  AT OUR HOUSE, WE FOUND THE REAL ESTATE MARKET RATHER TOO brisk. Since we’d bought the place, we’d enjoyed a parade of wonderful tenants—but they kept on leaving, and when they did it was always a crisis for us. We needed the rental income that tenants would bring, but since they actually lived in our house—which was also our workplace—anything but the perfect fit could be a disaster. The same year the Lillas left, we found ourselves in this uncomfortable position again.

  Happily, Christopher Hogwood had always served as a litmus test for potential tenants. One trip to the barn made it clear that only pig lovers need apply. Mary Pat and John had considered Christopher a member of the family—despite the fact that the pig had nearly ruined her wedding dress. (She was carrying the dress, a Victorian drop-waisted confection made of handmade lace, home from the tailor’s on a naked coat hanger, when Chris came rushing up to greet her with his muddy nose. She dashed with the dress to safety just in time.) After Mary Pat and John moved out, another couple had moved in. He was an artist, and she worked at the hospital in Keene, whose cafeteria issued regular if rather bland slops, which were ferried faithfully home. Then came a writer and jazz musician who worked at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough. He turned part of the rental unit into a private-label beer-making enterprise, and gave the detritus of the process to a grateful Hogwood. Next, a fellow our age, with his white shepherd mix, moved in. They were refugees from a nasty divorce. One day he found that someone had left an unwelcome surprise on his doorstep—a plastic bag full of smelly garbage, with a tag that read FOR CHRIS. Our tenant’s name happened to be Chris, too. He thought it was from his ex until we told him about the slops deliveries.

  Now this tenant was leaving, and for the same reason everyone else had. We never raised the rent, and we assured all our tenants we would never kick them out. They all moved on because invariably, something wonderful happened to them. It was almost as if living in the house made wishes come true.

  Mary Pat and John had moved to buy their own home in Peterborough and start a family, as did the couple who followed them. The beer-making bookseller left to live his dream as a poet, essayist, and musician, moving to New York City. And one day while our divorced tenant was driving to town, he met the love of his life when a slender, athletic woman and her horse crossed the street a mile and a quarter from our house. He left us to move in with her.

  And this was just the sort of healing Selinda Chiquoine was seeking when she came to look at the apartment on the other side of our house on a gray day that next November.

  Selinda and her husband, Ken, had what looked like an ideal life. They were just a year younger than us, with good jobs and wide interests and a beautiful new home surrounded with gardens in the woods in the next town over from us. Ken made great money as a computer scientist, and Selinda worked as a technical editor at a computer magazine.

  Selinda had been trained as a geologist—she’d spent the summer before she graduated exploring a lead-zinc deposit in Alaska’s Brooks Range, thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle. She’d lived with fifty-five others—only four of whom were women—in a tent with a plywood floor and a kerosene heater. Daily she helicoptered to work in the field, surveying the grid, sampling rocks, and measuring the angle of drill holes. When she married her college sweetheart, that put an end to her geology work. But Selinda, a petite, outgoing brunette with the brisk, cheery energy of a chipmunk, was quick to embrace a new outdoor passion—gardening. When the couple moved to Sharon, just a twenty-minute drive from our place in Hancock, Ken built her a ten-by thirty-foot greenhouse where she could grow flowers year-round.

  But lately Selinda felt like she was foundering in a suburban housewife’s life. She didn’t really like her job at Byte. She wanted more time outdoors. She felt trapped. She and Ken weren’t getting along. When they talked, they talked about computers. Then they argued, and the arguments solved nothing. She loved Ken but couldn’t see a way to save the marriage. She felt the only thing to do was to move out.

  Unfortunately, her options were limited. She didn’t have a whole lot of money. Very few rental units would accept dogs—and she desperately wanted their two sixty-pound dogs, Reba and Louie, to live with her at least part of the time, as well as her cat, Tigger. Reba was a three-year-old black lab-setter mix, and Louie was a four-year-old white shepherd-lab mix. When she heard about our place, she was excited—and nervous. She didn’t want to blow it.

  Selinda was especially nervous about meeting Tess. She understood intuitively that it was important that Tess like her, and that Tess’s opinion would inform our decision. Tess of course barked hysterically when Selinda came to the door, but after a toss of the Frisbee, she vacuumed Selinda with her nose. She approved.

  Selinda didn’t realize she was also going to be introduced to a pig whose opinion we considered equally astute. Next we went to the barn. Christopher grunted his approval.

  Tess and Chris liked her. That was good enough for us.

  So we showed Selinda the tenant’s side of the house: the big living room and fireplace downstairs, the sunny kitchen/ sitting room that used to be an enclosed porch, the old clawfoot bathtub the previous owners had painted pink, the slanted atticlike ceiling upstairs that made sleeping in the bedroom feel like a night in a tree house. Outside, I also pointed out a feature that perhaps other landlords might have skipped: Christopher and the chickens’ manure pile. But I knew how to impress a gardener. Having a pig was like putting your compost on fast-forward.

  Selinda was delighted. She loved our old white clapboard farmhouse. She loved the porchlike feel of the south-facing apartment, and the way sunlight flooded in through the big windows. And she was very impressed with the manure pile.

  I baked a carrot cake to welcome her when she moved in. It was a snowy day in January. But she was already thinking of the garden she would plant in the backyard come spring.

  PEOPLE OFTEN ASKED US WHY WE’D NEVER HAD A GARDEN. FOR one, Howard was never interested. As for me, although I love all the plants on our property—the lilacs arching over the doorway, the great silver maple and its feathery neighbor, the tamarack tree, the perennial beds of phlox and hostas, the flowering quince and crab, the forsythia and the tall yellow Jerusalem artichokes by the barn—I’ve never tended a formal flower garden. I’ve never planted vegetables. Farmer Hogwood, however, unwittingly nurtured a squash and pumpkin crop: every year we noted a number of squash vines snaking out of the compost pile, recycling the bounty of the previous Halloween. Many of the species hybridized, and by first frost, we usually had enough weird vegetables for an attractive Halloween display by the front door—which we would then feed back to Chris again come winter. But even with New Hampshire’s famously short growing season, I could never count on being here long enough to make the commitment to a real garden. And soon I would be journeying again.

  While Selinda dreamed of gardens that winter, I dreamed of the jungle. For my next book, I was planning a series of expeditions to the Amazon. I had always wanted to visit this greatest of rain forests. My father had gone there several times, both while in the Army and then after he had retired from the shipping business and was working as a private consultant. In the ’80s, he’d spent a week traveling the Peruvian Amazon on a boat, a pet capuchin monkey and a tame scarlet macaw on board. My mother had flown to meet him in Iquitos, and from there they traveled together to Brazil, to more civilized venues my mother would enjoy. But I know my father’s favorite part. I have a wonderful picture from that South American trip in which he is holding a relaxed young three-toed sloth, its hai
ry arms and long claws reaching around his waist. My mother worried it would bite or scratch or pee on him. My father was beaming as if the sloth were the prize of the expedition, the most adorable and beautiful and unlikely creature on the planet.

  For me, the Amazon was the ultimate Eden. The river embraces a jungle the size of the face of a full moon. With ten times more fish species than the Congo, electric eels that grow as long as limousines, and five thousand species of orchids, the Amazon’s diversity dazzles; its vastness overwhelms. I always knew I would one day explore this richest of rain forests, but first, I would need an extraordinary guide to fathom it.

  I had glimpsed that guide, oddly enough, in Sundarbans, on a day when the muddy waves opened and I saw into the future. There, in a tributary of the Ganges, I saw rising from the water the pinkish dorsal fins of three river dolphins. I saw them again and again on my travels there, brief glimpses only, but I never forgot them; sometimes they swam through my dreams. When I attended a marine mammals conference in Florida, I met a man who told me why.

  He studied a different species of river dolphin, Inia geoffrensis, which lives in the Amazon. He told me the river people say these dolphins are shape-shifters. These dolphins can turn into people. They show up at dances (wearing hats to disguise the blowholes) and seduce men and women. And you must be careful, the river people told him, or the dolphins will take you away to the Encante, the enchanted city beneath the water—a place so beautiful, you will never want to leave.

  I knew then what my next book would be: I would follow the pink dolphins of the Amazon. I wanted to follow them to Eden. I wanted to follow them to the Encante.

  I wanted to follow them back, down, deep into the watery womb of the world, to the source of beauty and desire, to the beginning of all beginnings—and through their story, to show again the power of animals to transform us, to lead us home to Eden, and to remind us we can always start anew.

  WHILE HOWARD AND I WERE EATING DINNER ONE NIGHT, SELINDA knocked at the front door. Since she’d moved in, we visited often. We made cookies together, commuting with our baking sheets between ovens at opposite ends of the house. We canned jam, shared dinners, and sometimes went cross-country skiing with the three dogs on winter afternoons. The elegant Tess was disdainful and aloof among Selinda’s rambunctious larger dogs. Howard nicknamed them Numskull (Reba) and Knucklehead (Louie) because they stole Tess’s Frisbee, chased the wild turkeys that the neighbors fed with grain, and once ate an entire pan of fudge that a neighbor had set out to cool.

  But this time Selinda had a request. “I was wondering,” she asked, “if Howard would help me bring in a plant.”

  Selinda had transformed the rental unit into a cross between a greenhouse and a florist shop, with an excellent natural history library and some antique furniture from her grandmother’s tossed in. I called her the Plant Goddess. She had well over a hundred leafy creatures crammed into the downstairs, drinking in the southern light: slipper orchids, purple shamrocks, bromeliads, jasmines, begonias, Amazon lilies, a tall jade plant, and at least thirty African violets. Potted plants hung from nails in the rafters, perched on plates by the windows, crowded the floor. Also, she usually had at least one vase of fresh flowers—Ken, from his lonely exile at their home, sent flowers every week. Selinda sometimes bought more at the local florist. She was always on the lookout for new plants, and seemed to be adding to her botanical collection every week.

  “Oh—I can help you bring in a plant,” I offered. How difficult could that be? But Selinda was adamant: “I think I really need Howard.”

  Howard was not delighted to have our dinner interrupted. But it was winter, and if the plant was not soon rescued from Selinda’s car, it might freeze. He pulled on his parka and boots and trudged outside to see her latest prize. To his horror, he discovered a five-foot-tall tree lying on its side in her pickup. The sixteen-inch-diameter pot contained perhaps seventy pounds of soil. “If only we could harness Christopher to this job!” he said. But no; Chris would certainly have knocked the pot over, and then begun scattering the dirt with his nose. Besides, there was snow on the ground, and Chris did not like the feel of snow on his trotters for very long. Let outside, he’d run and push his snout through the snow, and then his feet would get all pink and cold and he’d rush back into his warm pen.

  It was all Selinda and Howard could do to push the huge tree to the house through the snow in a wheelbarrow. Howard wrestled the thing to the front step, then onto the porch, then up another step through the door, fighting his way through the existing foliage in the hallway to install the new plant near an east-facing window in Selinda’s kitchen.

  This newest photosynthetic roommate was a tropical creature, a member of the same botanical family as the banana, Selinda explained. In fact, its leathery, blue-gray leaves were shaped like bananas. It had no flowers—yet. But it was the promise of these flowers that had made Selinda bring the huge, expensive plant home on a day when she had been feeling low. One day it would produce a riot of orange and yellow color, the spikes of its blooms splayed out like the crest of some imaginary tropical bird, opposite of which a bright blue tongue curved forth like a beak. The unborn but hoped-for flowers gave the plant its name: bird of paradise.

  PARADISE: THE NAME EVOKES AT ONCE HEAVEN AND EARTH. IT names a whispered longing; it tugs at our wishes and then spirits them away. Dictionary definitions imply that paradise is not of this life. Paradise is an afterlife, or a vanished Eden, or an idea that exists only in the minds of the holy men who wrote the texts of the great religions, an exhortation to a perfection we lost but still crave, or a promise of delight deferred. Paradise is what we want, and yet we are told that by definition we can’t have it.

  Ever since Sunday school, I’d been intrigued by the notion of Eden. It irritated my Methodist teachers that Eden appealed to me far more than heaven. Heaven you might get to after your death, if you were good—but there was no hope, I was told, of finding Eden. Heaven seemed boring, though. There is no mention of plants or animals there, whereas Eden was full of them. In Eden, the animals spoke (at least the snake did), and we understood what they said. In heaven you had to live in a building (“In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” Jesus said), and I wanted to live in a hollow tree. In Eden, there were not too many people (only two), whereas heaven sounded like it would be miserably crowded, considering everyone who thought they were going there. It would surely be even worse by the time I got there, if indeed I were headed that direction—of which my Sunday school teachers weren’t so sure. To their dismay, I also stubbornly refused to blame the snake for all the trouble with Adam and Eve. I suspected God did, too. After all, He kicked the people out of Eden, but He let the snake stay.

  Ever since we left that garden, we have been longing for Eden. It is a testament to human blindness that so few of us find it. “Heaven” wrote Thoreau, “is under our feet.” Heaven, Eden, paradise, the Encante—call it what you will. It is as close as a backyard or a barnyard, and as extensive as the Amazon. Granted, in the Amazon, one might need a dolphin as a guide. But in Hancock, all you needed to point you to Eden was a good pig.

  ONE DAY SHORTLY AFTER SHE ARRIVED, SELINDA BEGAN TO SUSPECT that the place she had chosen to live was very unusual indeed. She came home from work in Peterborough and noticed a pickup in the driveway. As she got out of her truck, she heard opera music coming from the direction of the barn—a wonderful tenor voice. She approached quietly. Harlow was singing the score from The Gondaliers to Christopher as he filled his dish with burned bagels, dill Havarti cheese, and cream of potato soup.

  Several times each day, as she played in the yard with her dogs or collected firewood from the woodpile for the stove, Selinda’s travels would bring her near the barn. Chris heard her footsteps and called to her: “Unh! Unhh! Nunhhh!” If she didn’t come over, the calls reflected Christopher’s growing irritation: “Unnnnhhhhh! Unnnnnhhhhhhhhhhh! Unhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Finally, if she sti
ll didn’t come over, he would start banging the gate back and forth on its hinges with his nose, like a frustrated restaurant patron might bang a spoon trying to catch the ear of an inattentive waiter.

  “OK! OK!” she’d call to him. “I’m coming!” Selinda was quickly trained not to leave the house without a carrot or an apple for Chris, or if there was none handy, to immediately swing by the grain bin and scoop up some pig and sow pellets to pour directly into his mouth. Except for orange peels and onions, she didn’t save anything for the compost pile anymore. She fed it directly to Chris. And this, she realized, was in her own self-interest. As winter melted into mud season, as the March songs of returning phoebes and red-winged blackbirds gave way to the sleigh bell calls of the spring peepers in April and May, Selinda was counting the days till she could plant her garden.

  THE GARDEN WAS EVERYTHING TO SELINDA. SHE IMAGINED IT IN her spare moments. She designed it in her head and on paper. From her second-story bedroom, she would look out at the area she would soon dig. Although she was still working at the computer magazine, in her mind, as she told me, “the garden was really what I was doing with my life at the time.”

  It was a garden with mostly annuals. She knew she wouldn’t live at our house forever—though she was surely welcome to. It would be completely organic—no pesticides, no weed killers, no fertilizer other than Christopher’s. The garden would supply much of the food we would eat that summer. But it was also a garden to feed the soul. “I want it to be a pretty garden to hang out in,” she said. It would have not only vegetables, but also flowers and fragrant herbs: “I want it all!” she said. Even before she tilled its soil, the garden was “my world,” as she put it, “my refuge.”