The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  But lately, too many gorgeous days had slipped by. Our schedules had been crazy for years now. Howard was still promoting his last book, getting ready for publication of another, and circulating a proposal for a new one, which he was researching that very day at the library in Keene. I was at the point when I didn’t have time to cut my toenails, much less scrub the toilet, and dog hair rolled like tumbleweed through the house. I was now writing for film and for radio, for adults and for children. I’d researched my first children’s book—written for fourth through eighth graders, the age Kate and Jane were when I met them—in a pit full of eighteen thousand red-sided garter snakes in Manitoba. (And what were they doing in there? Copulating in huge mating balls of up to two hundred individuals—a scene I was confident would delight children as much as it appalled adults.) That same year I’d made my four expeditions to the Amazon and filmed Mother Bear Man. Now I was developing proposals for more kids’ books as well as a new project that would take me with Gary Galbreath on a quest to find a mysterious golden bear in Southeast Asia.

  So on this heartbreakingly beautiful day, I was stuck in my little downstairs office. None of the work I was doing was creative. It was all detail work, phone calls and e-mails and editing. I felt chained to the computer. At least Christopher could enjoy the sun. So I went to let him out to bask in the sun at the Pig Plateau.

  But Christopher had other plans.

  When I swung open the gate, Christopher stepped out eagerly. But he showed no interest in the can of grain I shook. He started off in the wrong direction—away from the Pig Plateau and toward the house. Quickly I ran to grab a slops bucket, featuring marinated wild rice and cubes of Gouda cheese, stale bagels and noodles in Thai peanut sauce. But he wasn’t interested in this either. Unbeknownst to me, one of Jarvis and Bobbie’s grandchildren had just fed him a bucket of apples. Christopher wasn’t the least bit hungry.

  He wasn’t in a hurry, either. He did not seem compelled by any particular errand. Christopher Hogwood was out for a stroll—a situation akin to a bulldozer running rampant through the neighborhood. He tore up a portion of lawn the size of a throw rug.

  “No, no, no, Chris! Don’t do that!” I cried. “Stop, stop!” Chris could not possibly fathom what about his activity displeased me, possibly because the entire idea of the lawn is patently absurd. People see a lawn as something you water and mow, and in too many cases fertilize and poison. Christopher’s view was far saner. Grass was for eating, smelling, and rooting.

  After excavating a roughly pig-sized hole, Christopher, seeming to heed my vehement protest, continued on his jaunt. He walked up toward the house, and touched it with his nose, causing a clapboard to spring from the wall.

  “No, no! This is dreadful! You dreadful beast, leave the wall alone!”

  Christopher looked up at me as if I were insane, and said, “Unh.” His grunt spoke volumes: “All right. Be that way. I’ll find something else to do.” He took a few more steps—and then effortlessly bit off a wooden plank from the back porch.

  “No, no, Pig Man! Come on, let’s go to the Plateau!”

  I didn’t have time for this. I was thinking of the list of office chores on my desk. Phone calls. E-mails. Correcting some galleys. I was behind on my Globe column. I owed National Public Radio a commentary.

  But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer.

  He wandered across the backyard, pausing to push his nose disk into the lawn here and there and creating foot-deep divots. He headed slowly toward the fenced field, which at the moment was bereft of visiting horses. With the tip of his nose, effortlessly he swung open the gate, which I can’t even lift, and entered the pasture.

  Lazily, Christopher began to stroll across the four-acre field. At the other end was Route 137. I had to stop him. Grain wouldn’t work; slops wouldn’t work. There was only one thing left to do.

  As I walked beside him, I began to rub his belly and grunt our favorite mantra: “Good, good pig. Big, good pig. Fine, fine swine. Good…good…good.” He crumpled to the ground and rolled over in porcine bliss. And then I lay down beside him beneath an apple tree. As long as I lay there and stroked him, he wouldn’t get up and leave. And that was how I spent that afternoon: lying beside someone I loved, watching the clouds and the dragonflies and the sun streaming through the leaves of the apple tree.

  It was a little unplanned holiday in the middle of the work week. Some say happiness lands lightly on you, like a butterfly. Sometimes this is so. But sometimes happiness comes lumbering toward you, like a fat, satisfied pig—and then thuds, grunting, by your side.

  CHAPTER 11

  In Sickness and in Health

  “THERE’S A BIG BLACK-AND-WHITE SPOTTED PIG ON OUR LAWN.” The Sunday morning phone call was resoundingly familiar. “Is it yours?”

  Minutes before the phone rang, I had returned from feeding Christopher his breakfast in his pen. He didn’t break out much anymore. Howard said Chris reminded him of a major league baseball manager: “You know, those men who gravity is pulling toward a pear shape, but who still must dress in a young man’s uniform. When they head out of the dugout to talk to their pitcher, they come trotting out, maybe trying to match pace with a younger pitching coach—but once they hit the foul line, they break into a walk.”

  Our pig was like that now. No longer did he shoot out of his pen like a snorting cannonball. He trotted out sometimes. More often he stepped out. And sometimes he had to be coaxed. Once out, he might wander, but seldom far. That he would be visiting these callers was extremely unlikely: Bud and Sarah Wilder lived over a mile away, over by the apple orchard, up a long, steep hill.

  For once, I could pretty confidently reply that no, it must be some other pig.

  In fact, it was. Howard and I rushed over to offer a pig assist and found on the Wilders’ lawn a beautiful, young Gloucestershire Old Spot, a rare but venerable western English breed with distinctive heavy, drooped ears. Her name was Annabelle, and she belonged to the Primianos, who lived just down the road from the Wilders. Annabelle ate grass happily, as if she was just passing time as she waited for the Primianos to come pick her up in their trailer.

  Although I still considered Christopher the epitome of porcine beauty (and I even preferred his tall, furry ears to Annabelle’s pretty floppy ones), I envied Annabelle her youth. Christopher was now an elder statesman. At age ten, he had passed what Walker’s Mammals had said was the average length of a pig’s life. We had never learned for sure how long a pig could live, but Chris had certainly outlived all his littermates by nine and a half years.

  With the graces of porcine seniority also came some of the ailments of old age. Though his diet had lessened the stress on his joints, now he had real arthritis. Chuck had us treating it with a pelleted, molasses-flavored horse version of the dietary supplement for joint health, glucosamine, and with the equine painkiller phenylbutazone, which we gave him with his meals twice a day. Because the bute could upset his stomach, we also gave him antacids—in huge quantities. On his rare expeditions to the discount chain store in Keene, Howard would pick up twenty packages of the stuff. (“You’d think the clerk at the cash register would ask, ‘Hey, are you OK?’” he once reflected. But no; this was a chain store and Keene was the big city.) Each morning and evening, I would stuff all Christopher’s medications into a pastry from Fiddleheads—and if we were out of pastries, I would make peanut butter and drug sandwiches.

  Christopher had also developed what we called porcine pattern baldness. It wasn’t on his head, but the bald spot occupied an increasing amount of real estate between his neck and his shoulders. Chuck took skin scrapings to see if it was some sort of mite or disease, but it was not. It was the same sort of skin problem that older people tend to get.

  In fact, pigs are so like us that we are prey to many of the same ailments. When Chris was twelve, he suffered what is known in people as a transi
ent ischemic attack, or mini-stroke. I was able to recognize it immediately, because only weeks before, the same thing had happened to Tess.

  One June morning, as we were just waking up, she’d fallen over. At first I thought it was her arthritis. By then Tess was fourteen, and between her age and the damage from her youthful collision with the snowplow, some mornings she was stiff and would sometimes limp or trip. But then I saw her eyes—she was dazed, as if drunk. I phoned Chuck at home, where we were always welcome to call. He said to immediately give her three baby aspirins. Later she came in for blood work to make sure that no organs had been damaged; they were not. When we came home, we were so terrified and exhausted by the ordeal that we slept through the rest of the day. But the next morning, ever cheerful, she was playing with her ball.

  The same thing happened to Christopher that same summer—except on a larger scale. One Sunday morning, he didn’t want to get up. When I finally urged him to his feet, his huge head was cocked eerily to the side. One pupil was large, the other small, and he swayed on his trotters so badly I feared he would fall. When I couldn’t reach Chuck, Liz came rushing over. We calculated the proper dose of aspirin for a seven-hundred-pound pig from what Chuck had prescribed for a thirty-pound dog and hid the pile of aspirin in chocolate chip cookies. Chris had dramatically improved by the next morning, just like Tess.

  We knew how lucky we were. Our animals were now roughly the same biological age as our parents. Howard’s mom and dad had both been through cancer scares but were now fine. My mother had high blood pressure and other circulatory problems, but she was still active, enjoying church, the sewing circle, and ladies’ functions, living on her own, presiding over the five-bedroom house in Alexandria. We were acutely aware that age has its hazards—but that old age can also be rich, vibrant, and long. We had Liz’s mother, Lorna, as our example.

  At age ninety-seven, she had finally moved in with Liz and Steve. She could still drive, and unlike many of the elderly residents of our town, she never hit anything; but her joints hurt sometimes, and walking the flight of stairs to her bedroom at the big old Cambridge house was getting to be a chore. Lorna published her last book at age one hundred; Liz and Steve rented a tent and held a huge publication party in the backyard, and borrowed a lion cub and an adolescent tiger from a private zoo to mix with the guests, who had come from as far away as Australia to attend the celebration. Lorna entertained a fairly constant stream of visitors and admirers thereafter—until the night a few years later when she spoke her last, loving words. “Bless you,” she said to Liz. And then she closed her eyes and died peacefully at home, surrounded by those she loved, just a few weeks short of her 104th birthday.

  Although they were aging, our animals were in relatively fine fettle. Tess still charmed visitors with her athleticism and wit. She still had more energy than anyone we knew. She still leaped to catch the Frisbee. She still anticipated our every move. No matter what time of day, and absent any visual clues that we could discern, Tess knew when we were going to the top part of the barn for a rake or shovel, and got there ahead of us. She knew, long before we made the turn toward the bottom floor of the barn, when we were going to see Chris and the chickens instead. She still did everything a person could ask of her, usually before we even uttered our wishes aloud.

  But then, one day, distracted by an interesting smell, Tess dropped her Frisbee in the tall grass. Usually when this happened, all Howard had to do was remind her, in a normal conversational voice and without pointing, where her toy was, and she would go pick it up. This time she stared at him blankly. Then we realized that Tess was deaf—and probably had been for months.

  Christopher continued to amass appreciative acolytes for Pig Spa. He had acquired new devotees when the Miller-Rodat family moved from Los Angeles and bought a house in town. Mutual friends introduced us to Mollie and Bob because Bob Rodat had written the script to one of my favorite films, Fly Away Home, about orphaned geese whose adoptive parent, a pilot, flies along with them on their first migration; later Bob wrote The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan, and many others. Howard’s and my claim to fame? We had a giant pig. We quickly made a date for Chris to meet Mollie and Bob’s sons. Jack was seven and Ned four.

  Chris made a huge impression. Jack wowed his first-grade class with the August 25 entry from his “Summer Fun Journal”: “Today,” he wrote, “we went to feed our friend Christopher Hogwood. The same day Christopher escaped. He ran around the yard. He knocked things over. He dug a huge hole in the backyard. When we gave him his food we poured it on his head.” Almost as an afterthought Jack added a last line: “He is a pig.”

  Soon, Jack and Ned were saving their banana peels and corncobs, their leftover pancakes, cupcakes, and Danishes; because the family lived part-time in another home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they had to freeze it. “We wouldn’t buy stuff for ourselves because the freezer was filled with stuff for the pig,” Mollie told us. “Our ice cream smelled like corncobs and old pancakes—but we didn’t care. We knew how much Christopher would appreciate it.” When they’d come up to Hancock, often each boy would bring a friend or two with them, and together we’d do Pig Spa. “It was part of the Hancock tour,” Mollie said: “Go see the Elephant Rock. Go to Spoonwood Pond. Do the rope swing on the lake. And go see Christopher.”

  One day after Pig Spa, Christopher lay in such peaceful bliss that Jack thought to join him. Very gently, and with great respect, Jack climbed on top of him. He lay with his head on Chris’s shoulder. Christopher’s skin felt like cardboard and his bristles were spiky, but Jack was enchanted. He could hear the pig’s breathing. He could feel the beating of his huge heart. “He was really gentle and really nice,” Jack said. “It felt really, really good.” Next, the boys switched positions and Ned lay down on Christopher.

  Remarkably, Christopher didn’t object at all. Had he been the least bit uncomfortable, he wouldn’t have been shy about showing it. Even Bob, who is far more in tune with people than with animals and who had initially been quite fearful for his kids around this huge beast, could see: “He clearly enjoyed Jack and Ned lying on top of him,” Bob said. “He didn’t want it to end.”

  Mollie snapped a picture, and that became our holiday pig card that year.

  Time had been good to us: our animals were older but still vigorous. Howard was happily at work on a new book about our oldest landmarks, trees and rocks, and our allegiance to the natural markers that tie us to the land. I had spent part of the fall in French Guiana chasing after quarter-pound goliath bird-eater spiders for a book for kids about tarantulas. Afterward, sometimes I would enjoy happy dreams of tarantulas crawling on me, reliving the feel of their clawlike tarsi on my skin.

  Just before I’d left on that expedition, though, I’d made a far more momentous trip: one to Virginia, to see my mother. On and off for the previous two years, I’d traveled with Gary to Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos in search of a mysterious golden bear unknown to science—which we found, among many other adventures. I dedicated the resulting book to my mother, and we celebrated at a local bookstore by a reading and signing attended by all her friends. At that moment, I knew that whatever else had happened between us, she was proud of me. I stayed over at her house for the first time since my father had died.

  It seemed a good way to close out the year: everyone I loved was well, and all was right with the world.

  Our Christmas card that year bore the message, “Peace.”

  AND THEN, ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON IN MARCH, MY MOTHER began to die.

  We’d known something was wrong for only a couple of months. She’d gotten the bad news on Martin Luther King Jr. Day but didn’t phone me. She waited for my usual Sunday after-church call. She went in to her doctor at Fort Belvoir with a stomachache, she said, and came out with pancreatic cancer. The doctors gave her a year.

  So began another flurry of flying to and from Virginia. Still, Howard was unwelcome. He stayed in Hancock, working on his next book, and took care of our aging
animals. I arranged for some relatively gentle chemo to slow the disease’s progress, hired nurses and housekeepers, and cooked and froze piles of collard greens, cornbread, and fried fish.

  But the disease kept racing ahead of us. That particular Wednesday was just four days shy of a scheduled move to an elegant new assisted-living facility we had selected, just a few miles from her house. Surprisingly, my mother looked forward to the move; she’d have the best of both worlds. We’d keep the house, and when I’d come back to Virginia, we’d stay there together, where I could take care of her.

  We planned on plenty of time together in the months ahead. I could not make her approve of my life, but I could learn more about hers. She could not bring herself to love the man I had married, but I could accept the love she gave me, and love her fully in return. There would be good days, many of them, the doctors told us—and we would spend them talking together, reminiscing, looking through photo albums.

  While my father was alive, he dominated our conversations, for both my mother and I adored him and hung on his every word. Now, for the first time in my life, I would learn the details of my mother’s youth in Arkansas: how she had learned to shoot a gun and fly a plane, how she was recruited from Arkansas Tech to work for the FBI. I’d learn about the early days of her courtship and marriage to my father. We would go through everything carefully, lovingly—the memories, the jewelry, the heirlooms—and in so doing, at the end of her life, I would finally come to know my elegant, enigmatic mother. We would pack each gem of her life away as gently as the hand-crafted glass ornaments my parents had bought in Germany for year after year of our Christmas trees, and gracefully, gently, say our good-byes.