The Good Good Pig (22 page)

“The reason I tell you this,” she said to me and Kate, “is that it was so wonderful to come here and find Christopher. I have always been upset over those pigs.” That's why it was so deeply satisfying, so healing for Bobbie and Jarvis to know Christopher. This is why the words of St. Francis had such special resonance at our barn. “Here was a pig that didn't have to go to market,” said Bobbie. “Here was a pig that did live through the winter. It just made me feel so happy that I could be friends with a pig and nobody was ever going to take him away. That he was going to live a good long life and die a natural death. Which he did. It helped a lot.”

As her words helped me.

Kate and I also interviewed Gretchen for her recollections. After we admired her new colt and petted her two mares, we sat on her couch with three Labradors and four cats and reminisced about Christopher. It was then that, for the first time, I heard the story of the Last Pig.

Long before I'd met Gretchen, back when her black hair hung to her waist and she lived in a solar-heated geodesic dome with her first husband, she used to raise pigs every year for meat. “It was back in the '70s, in the days when homesteading was in fashion,” she said. “I cured my own ham. I made my own head cheese. I made my own scrapple.” Each spring she'd get a couple of baby pigs. She'd give them good lives. She even gave each a six-pack of beer on their last day, so they'd be drunk before the butcher—amazingly, he was named Mr. Blood—came to shoot them. “But I never much thought about the pigs,” she confessed—until one year, she acquired two little pink females. One of them was special.

This piglet leaped out of her pen regularly. At the age of three months, she could clear four feet. Normally, a loose pig on a farm is quite a nuisance, but not this pig. She liked to hang out with Gretchen as she gardened and tended her horses. The pig was good company. Sometimes she was helpful. One day, as Gretchen was struggling to empty a heavy bag of horse manure into the garden, the pig grabbed the other end in her mouth at just the right moment to help her disgorge its contents. Only once did the little pig root up part of the lawn. Gretchen had gone inside the house, and when she came out, she had to tamp the sod back down. “I said, ‘No, we don't do that,' and put the sod back—and she never, ever, ever rooted again.”

Gretchen's stepchildren grew to love this pig as well. When she got big enough, the kids used to ride on her as she walked around. Eventually, she was loose all the time. She stayed on the farm even if the family had to leave on some errand, and when they came back, the pig, who had learned the sound of the car, would run up and greet them, happy as a dog for the reunion.

Summer turned to fall, and the day came that the pigs would be killed. But Gretchen wanted to spare this pig. She would make a great breeder sow, she decided; she would keep her.

“So Mr. Blood pulls into the driveway,” Gretchen told us, “and he has his .22, and of course the pig runs up to greet him like she did everyone else. And he said to me, ‘Is this one of them?' And I said, ‘Yes, but—'

“And he shot her in front of me.”

She never raised another pig. But she loved it that Christopher had come to live with us, and she felt that his life fulfilled an important purpose.

“Christopher's death,” Gretchen told me, “was the circle closing—the completion of a contract you had together.” My life with him, Gretchen said, was the domestic parallel to my work overseas, writing about jungles and exotic species and indigenous peoples, finding models of how animals and people can live together in the world. But beyond that, she said, Chris and I had entered into what she considered a cosmic pact: “His coming to you, and your loving him, was a counterbalance, in a way, to the world's mistreatment of pigs,” she said.

Gretchen does not feel that homestead farming is wrong; many animals live good lives on family farms. The cruelty happens on giant, crowded “factory farms,” where living animals are treated like industrial products, and where 80 percent of America's sixty million pigs are raised for slaughter each year. “Of course, Christopher's story doesn't cancel out all the horrors pigs have suffered all over the world for so many centuries,” Gretchen admitted. “But you and Chris created a different reality: of honoring a pig's life for the length of his natural life.”

It was a reality that gave hope and peace in more ways than I could then imagine. For I had not yet spoken to my pastor, Graham, after Christopher's death.

Actually, Graham wasn't my pastor anymore. Much had happened since the early days at fellowship, when Graham would introduce me to new members by announcing I lived with a pig. The month after my father had died, Graham's wife, my friend Maggie, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She died the following April. Since then, Graham had left our church, having been called to a new congregation. He is now happily remarried to a beautiful and accomplished art professor with three wonderful, now-grown children—all of whom, when they were smaller, came to know and love Christopher, bringing him slops and marveling at his size and gentleness and the spectacle of his greedy joy.

But Maggie's relationship with Chris had had a special intensity. It was not until thirteen years after her death, and a month after Christopher's, that I found out why.

“Didn't Maggie ever tell you about her childhood?” Graham asked.

She never had. Graham was surprised, given all the time we had spent together. When she was sick, I'd phoned her every day; near the end, I'd visited her in the hospital most days, often for hours. But we didn't talk about her past. Nor did we speak about her cancer. Mostly, we spoke of places we had traveled, animals we had known, and especially Christopher: what he had eaten, who had come to Pig Spa, tales of the latest escapes. I sent Maggie funny cards, usually picturing animals, and signed them from Christopher Hogwood. And she sent us cards equally funny, sweet animal cards, addressed to Chris.

“There's a reason she sent all those cards,” Graham said. Her kindness was rooted in almost unimaginable tragedy.

Maggie's mother had gotten sick with cancer almost the moment Maggie was born—a situation for which she felt responsible. Her mother had died when Maggie was five. Her father, bereaved, became a vicious drunk. When Maggie was nine, her father killed himself with a revolver. Her older brother, twelve, found him dying on the bed, twitching.

The orphaned siblings were soon separated. When their father had been angry with them, he used to threaten: “I'll send you off to live with Aunt Frances!”—their mother's strict sister in Bangor, Maine. And this is what happened to Maggie. Aunt Frances didn't want Maggie, and she and her husband certainly weren't going to take Maggie's brother, too. So her brother was sent away to live with their father's brother in a different city.

I'd known Maggie was raised by her aunt, but not how awful it was—nor that her brother, a pharmacist, had become an alcoholic and committed suicide himself at age forty-one.

“Well, that's typical, never to talk about it,” said Graham. “But I think there was a connection between all that and Christopher.” He paused as I tried to imagine what connection there could be.

“Christopher was an orphan, too,” he said. “But he was adopted by a very different family. He had a very different life. She sent him cards because when she was a little girl, nobody sent her cards. In other words, Christopher's story was her story—but come out right.” In the life of this little runty piglet, Maggie could see her own story rewritten—transformed to a story of comfort and joy, a story with a happy ending.

C
HRISTOPHER
H
OGWOOD
, L
ILLA SAID TO ME SHORTLY AFTER HE
died, “was a big Buddha master for us. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you—to love your slops. What a soul!” she said. “He was a being of pure love.”

It's true. He loved company. He loved good food. He loved the warm summer sun, the belly rubs from caressing little hands. He loved this life. “That love,” Lilla promised me, “is not lost. It can never be lost.”

Christopher Hogwood knew how to relish the juicy savor of this fragrant, abundant, sweet, green world. To show us this would have been gift enough. But he showed us another truth as well. That a pig did not become bacon but lived fourteen years, pampered and adored till the day he died peacefully in his sleep—that's proof that we need not “be practical” all the time. We need not accept the rules that our society or species, family or fate seem to have written for us. We can choose a new way. We have the power to transform a story of sorrow into a story of healing. We can choose life over death. We can let love lead us home.

At the moment, the Pig Palace stands empty. People ask, “Will you get another pig?” This I don't know. But one thing I know for sure: a great soul can appear among us at any time, in the form of any creature. I'm keeping my eyes open.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the people and animals who helped me with this book appear in these pages, where I hope my gratitude is evident. A number of others are not mentioned by name, even though their kindness to us and to our pig mattered deeply, and in many cases their recollections importantly informed these pages. These good souls are too numerous to name, but nonetheless I wish to thank them here.

Quite a number of people generously read this manuscript from its very earliest stages, offered encouragement, and made crucial suggestions. I am extremely lucky that some of my favorite writers number among those who agreed to do so: the splendid memoirist Beth Kephart; the poet Howard Nelson; my mentor, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas; the wonderful author Brenda Petersen; and my favorite writer of all time, Howard Mansfield. I am also grateful for the careful eyes and enduring friendship of Selinda Chiquoine, Joel Glick, Rob Matz, and Gretchen Vogel. My literary agent, Sarah Jane Freymann, has been a close friend of mine for many years and, of course, knew Christopher as well. Her advice and encouragement on this project were, as always, essential. I am grateful to my fine editor at Random House, Susanna Porter, who knows the joys of the animal world through her pet snails, beta, and three turtles; and to her talented assistant, Johanna Bowman, whose e-mails are often enlivened with attached pictures of mandrills, red river hogs, or tree kangaroos.

Finally, this book owes much to the efforts of my friend and literary assistant, Kate Cabot. As this project began, she helped me conduct and transcribe a number of interviews. She interviewed Howard for this book, and also compiled archival research for me as part of an independent study project for Prescott College. It is she who titled this book. Thanks to Kate's excellent work, detailed recollections, and soothing presence here in the painful weeks after our pig's death, my heart was opened once again to Christopher's joyous spirit.

S
Y
M
ONTGOMERY
is a naturalist, author, documentary script-writer, and radio commentator who writes for children as well as adults. Among her award-winning books are
Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Spell of the Tiger,
and
Search for the Golden Moon Bear.
She has made four trips to Peru and Brazil to study the pink dolphins of the Amazon. On other expeditions she has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire, bitten by a vampire bat in Costa Rica, undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, and hunted by a tiger in India. She has also worked in a pit crawling with eighteen thousand snakes in Manitoba, handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana, and swum with piranhas, electric eels, and dolphins in the Amazon. She lives in New Hampshire.

A
LSO BY
S
Y
M
ONTGOMERY

FOR ADULTS

Search for the Golden Moon Bear

Journey of the Pink Dolphins

The Wild Out Your Window

Spell of the Tiger

Seasons of the Wild

The Curious Naturalist:

Nature's Everyday Mysteries

Walking with the Great Apes

FOR CHILDREN

Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics

The Tarantula Scientist

Encantado

The Man-Eating Tigers of Sundarbans

The Snake Scientist

Copyright © 2006 by Sy Montgomery

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montgomery, Sy.

The good good pig: the extraordinary life of Christopher Hogwood / Sy Montgomery.p. cm.

1. Swine as pets—New Hampshire—Anecdotes. 2. Montgomery, Sy. 3. Pet owners—New Hampshire—Biography. 4. Human-animal relationships—New Hampshire—Anecdotes. I. Title.

SF395.6.M66 2006
636.4'0887—dc22 2005057094

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

www.ballantinebooks.com

246897531

Book design by Susan Turner

eISBN: 978-0-345-49381-1

v3.0