The Good Good Pig (7 page)

It then occurred to us that Tess should probably empty her bladder before coming into the house. I led her into the tall grass of the field. “Tess, pee,” I suggested, not particularly hopeful that anything would happen—but to my amazement, she squatted and took care of the matter instantly. “Good dog!” It was not so much praise, but a statement of fact.

“Tess, come,” we said as we invited her to the house. She followed us intently. And from there she commenced surveying our every move with her intense brown eyes, applying her considerable intellect to figuring out what Howard and I wanted her to do.

She would sit beside one of us for thirty minutes, keeping me or Howard in the laserlike focus of her stare as if it were some sort of tractor beam. Then she might switch to the other person. By the time an hour passed, we could feel the buildup of tension. We went outside to toss the tennis ball or Frisbee again. She was a Gold Glover, Howard said. She caught and retrieved anything you tossed with the same intensity, grace, and skill. But although Tess enjoyed catching the toys, we felt that to her, this wasn't play. It was work—work she loved—and she took it quite as seriously as we did ours. Perhaps she felt if she impressed us enough with her catching, we would let her stay.

Although her energy was frenetic, in other ways Tess was heartbreakingly reserved. She merely tolerated our petting her. She did not kiss us, sit at our feet, beg for food at the table, or solicit affection as other dogs do. She was too elegant and refined for that. But she did not want to be alone. Not even outside.

After we heard her whole story from Evelyn, we understood why. Tess's first family couldn't cope with her energy, Evelyn said. Any family foolish enough to adopt a border collie puppy and then leave her at home alone all day couldn't have possibly understood how to lovingly house-train an animal—even one as smart as a border collie. When Tess predictably destroyed the house, the family punished her. And then she was abandoned. At least the family had the good sense to place her with Evelyn. But next came her terrible accident, followed by two operations and a prolonged, painful recovery.

When finally Tess had recovered enough to adopt her out, Evelyn had lost our phone number and forgotten all about us. A retired couple had phoned later, and Tess went to live with them. They had loved her, and she had loved them. At last she had a home. But this lasted only one brief year. The couple lost their house in the recession. They had to move to a cheap, dog-free apartment. Reluctantly, they brought Tess back to Evelyn. And then finally, thanks to Mary Pat, Tess had come home with us.

She was understandably wary of her new family. When we patted the couch to invite her to sit with us, she stared at us in disbelief. When she finally hopped up, she seemed torn between fear of disobeying our command and fear she might be scolded for doing something that clearly had not been allowed before. When we invited her to sleep in our bed, she was incredulous. Tense, she would stand on the futon hesitantly, then leap down at the first opportunity, as if she expected us to shoo her away. She would eat her food only if we praised her lavishly afterward—“You ate your food! Oh, good dog! What a dog! Tess is so good!”—and then gave her a biscuit for dessert.

That whole first week we had her, she didn't once bark. Then the Fed Ex man came. (Howard was a proponent of the theory that dogs bark at delivery people believing that otherwise these shifty characters would
take
something
away
from your house. But because dogs bark, they
leave
something instead—a sequence of events that proves to dogs that their barking is indeed effective.) When Tess issued a series of arfs, we praised her as if this were the most inspired and original thing any dog had ever done.

She didn't chew things, either. And for her loo, she used the tall grass in the back field—not the lawn and never the house—but she didn't even dare pee unless we asked her. It was as if she felt that we, her third family, were her last chance, and she didn't want to blow it. But it also seemed as if she was always formulating a contingency plan in case we didn't work out. She seemed to be guarding her emotions, protecting her heart from being broken once again.

In bringing Tess home, we realized, we had taken on a monumental, lifetime commitment: we had to earn the love of this fiercely intelligent, beautiful, and mysterious creature. It was up to us to redeem the cruelty and sorrow of her past.

B
ETWEEN
C
HRIS AND
T
ESS AND THE
L
ADIES
, H
OWARD AND
I
WERE
now not only outnumbered but outsmarted—not to mention outweighed. What did we think we were doing?

Some people consider their animals their substitute children. Certain psychologists explain away the loving relationships between people and animals in terms of thwarted parenthood. These psychologists have identified a group of physical traits, such as the flat face and big eyes of pug dogs, that they call “baby releasers,” and claim the sight of these activate a torrent of misplaced maternal feelings toward animals. This suggests that any friendship between a human and an animal is really just some kind of wiring mistake, a person's thwarted yearning for a human infant—a simpleminded view that, in my opinion, insults mothers, diminishes animals, and underestimates the complexity of love.

Our animals were not our babies. True, Howard and I had raised Chris as a piglet—but there was no mistaking him for a baby anything now. By his first birthday, Christopher Hogwood was big enough to eat us. (That was another reason we didn't give him meat—we didn't want to give him ideas.) Our chickens were no longer babies, either (as their eighty eggs a week proved); they were adults, as we were. And no one could have mistaken Tess for anything other than an adult. She was a fully formed, mature creature with a mysterious past of her own.

No, our animals were no babies. Besides, if we had wanted babies, we knew full well how to get them. But we chose not to.

Not wanting children is something many people don't understand. “Don't you feel your womb calling to you?” a woman acquaintance my age asked me. I replied that my organs seldom had much to say, and that I hoped things would stay that way. In fact, I was more adamant about staying child-free than Howard was. In our mid-twenties, he had broached the subject of children—once. My sensitive, wifely reply was something like: “Forget it.” I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth? I was about seven years old at the time and have never for a moment regretted the decision.

I never went crazy for babies the way a lot of other girls did. Babies would have been far more appealing to me if they had fur, like most normal mammals. Other mammals whose young are this naked wisely tuck their babies into holes, or if they happen to be marsupials such as possums or kangaroos, keep them hidden in a pouch, until they are cute and furry enough for public viewing. I didn't hate babies, of course. But having made my decision, I never nurtured a desire to produce one. So when I found myself happily married, fulfilled in my work, and surrounded with friends of many species, children were simply not part of the picture.

Until the day two blond-haired girls came pouring over the stone wall next door, drawn irresistibly to a black and white spotted pig.

S
TANDING IN A COLD, EMPTY HOUSE, THE FORLORN LITTLE GIRLS
and their mother wanted only one thing: to go home. But they couldn't. That was the very problem that brought them to the vacant house next door.

They were still reeling from the divorce. It had taken four years and three lawyers to end Lilla Cabot's marriage to the girls' father. The worst of it was that now, Kate, ten, and Jane, seven, were being forced to give up the home where they had lived all their lives.

Kate and Jane had loved the little shingle-style cottage in the middle of Hancock's deepest woods. It was near the nature center, surrounded by hundreds of acres of protected land. There, the sisters had learned the songs of chickadees and the drummings of woodpeckers, where to find salamanders, how to catch frogs. The cottage had been in the family since Lilla's great-great-grandfather built it. But now the house had to be sold.

At the time, New Hampshire, as well as the rest of the nation, was in the grip of a recession. Though money was tight, the local real estate market was hot. The day the divorce came through, the house sold within three hours of going on the market.

Now, Lilla and her daughters had to find a place to live—fast. The old house next door to us was the only one available for rent in town that would let them move in by January. The kids hated it instantly. Kate and Jane had never even been in an empty house before. It felt creepy. It was October, and already it was obvious the place had no insulation. “It was so uninviting,” Kate remembers. “One of those dark, old, run-down little houses that's colder inside than out.”

But they had no choice. In January, two other girls would be moving in to
their
house. Kate and Jane thought sadly of the other girls' dolls and dollhouses spread over the beloved old rooms where Kate and Jane had played with their stuffed animals—the big black and white orca whale and the howling Arctic wolf and the black panther. The sisters felt betrayed, and these cold, empty rooms were the very embodiment of how they felt inside.

With their mom, they walked outside, miserable. They wandered into their backyard.

Then Kate saw something big and black and white next door.

“Can we look? Can we look?” the girls asked their mother. Kate, who like her younger sister was enthralled by horses, had noticed the barn next door and thought maybe there was a pony. They took off, Kate first, Jane following.

Just as she leaped over the stone wall that separated the two properties, Kate saw Christopher's face.

“Wow!” she said to her sister. “This is even cooler than a horse! It's a
pig
!”

From the Pig Plateau, Christopher, Tess, and I looked up to see two beautiful little blond girls running toward us. Chris flexed his nose disk to catch their scent and uttered a grunt. “Come over and meet Christopher Hogwood!” I said. “And this is Tess…”

I didn't ask who they were, and I didn't introduce myself. We got right down to business.

“Sure, you can pet him! Here, feel behind his ears!”

“It's so soft back there!”

“He's got so much hair!”

“I thought pigs were pink….”

“Now, watch this,” I said, sure to impress our audience: “You rub his tummy, right over his nipples, like this—look at all the excellent nipples he has! That's right…stand back, he's going to go over….”

Christopher got that dreamy look in his eyes, dropped to his knees, and then rolled on his side, landing with a thud.

“Oh!” the girls gasped in unison.

“Unh!” answered Christopher. “Unn-n-n-n-h-h-h-h…”

“He wants us to keep rubbing,” I said. But Chris had already made this obvious, grunting in ecstasy in time to the rhythm of their little hands. “Wow—he really likes you both!”

Lilla, a thirty-six-year-old version of her golden-haired, blue-eyed daughters, crossed over the low stone wall to survey the scene: her girls, surrounded by eight curious hens and tended by a suspicious border collie, were completely absorbed in the task of petting and massaging a blissful, supine, black-and-white 250-pound hog.

“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
. A
RE 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.

 

F
ROM THE FIRST DAY THE
C
ABOTS 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 teeth 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