The Good Good Pig (9 page)

Christopher's last Christmas card
Photo: Author

Christopher's gravesite
Photo: Jarvis Coffin

The girls came up with the idea of feeding Christopher with a serving spoon. One day they decided that a half gallon of Häagen-Dazs was too freezer-burned for human consumption. Christopher shocked us all by launching from all fours to stand up on his back legs to receive the bounty. Resting his front legs on the gate, he brought his huge head level with Kate's—and towered above Jane's. He opened his cavernous mouth and awaited his due.

Interestingly, he seemed to understand the function of the spoon. Gently, he allowed the girls to slide it out from between his lips, even if a bit of ice cream remained on its surface: he was confident of refills. With what would pass for patience in a pig, he would wait, his trotters draped casually over the gate, for another spoonful, ropes of frothy drool flowing down his jowls.

Now, this was my idea of a good time.

Outside, there were also hens to pet, eggs to gather, Frisbees to throw. Soon the girls began to spend time with us inside, too. Their mom was commuting to Massachusetts on weekdays, earning a master's degree in expressive therapy at Lesley College. When Kate and Jane got home from school each day, their house was cold and empty—and once it was
haunted.
One day Kate and Jane came over screaming. The stereo, they said, had, “like, suddenly come on
for no reason?—
and then
Janis Joplin
was
singing? Like, really loud?
” Obviously the two-hundred-year-old cape was haunted by a troubled 1960s blues singer.

By then, though, the girls knew they were safe with us. After playing with Chris and Tess and the chickens, with eggs in our pockets, many afternoons we retreated to our tiny kitchen and made chocolate chip cookies together, baking them in the 1930s gas oven that warmed up the whole house. (We nearly always burned at least a few for Chris.) While I rolled out pie crusts on our single, three-foot-long countertop, the girls sat at the rickety card table where Howard and I ate, and drank milk with the cookies and talked.

At first, we mainly spoke of Christopher. How many different grunts did he have, and what did they mean? They identified the “Come over!” grunt, the “Feed me faster!” grunt, the “Let me out!” grunt, the “Rub more!” grunt, and an endless variety of others, including Christopher's special grunt for Howard: the deep, serious, “man-to-man” grunt. (And these were just the grunts. He also uttered growls, squeals, and snorts as well as a blood-chilling alarm bark.) Which foods hadn't Christopher tried yet? What might appeal to him? What had he been like as a baby?

I showed them his baby pictures. They could not believe he was once so small.

We discussed other species of pigs. I showed them the pictures of the babirusa and red river hog. They pronounced them gorgeous. Together we admired the bearded pigs of Indonesia, the cute peccaries of the Americas. Sometimes we talked about other animals around the world—orcas and wolves, elephants and monkeys. We would pick a category—weasels, for instance—and everyone would name their favorite animal among them. Wolverines, we decided, were very cool. But ferrets were, too. And otters were excellent. We looked up the animals' pictures and read aloud from my volumes of
Walker's Mammals of the World
and the Torstar Books series All the World's Animals, while our cockatiel chewed on the pages or flew from head to head.

Attracted by the smell of baking cookies, Howard would descend from his upstairs office. He was working on a book about New Hampshire aviator Harry Atwood, famous for his daring 1911 landing on the White House lawn. (President Taft waddled out to give Atwood a medal but was too fat to accept the invitation to fly.) Often Howard would eat cookies with us and then go next door and build a fire in the woodstove, so that when Lilla got home, the house wouldn't be so cold.

We called their home the Doll House. It was a small, sweet place, with a picket fence out front where roses bloomed in the summer and the rooms inside always smelled of bubble bath. With the Lillas Three in residence—the girls were exact miniatures of their slender, pretty mom—the house next door was a feminine universe, fragrant with fruity shampoos and exotic hand creams, littered with little girls' gloves and scarves and hair scrunchies, colorful with grade school artwork on the refrigerator and crystals and suncatchers in the windows. Sometimes we would join them over there and eat pizza. Jane would hop up and dance on the chair in front of the woodstove until her pants were really hot, then she'd eat an ice cube to cool off. Kate ran up and down the stairs, bringing us her drawings and poetry and stuffed animals.

One Sunday we went on an expedition together. Kate and Jane had wanted to visit George and Mary's ever since they'd seen Christopher's baby pictures. And as winter's snow melted into mud season, surely there would be baby pigs.

It was a merry journey, Kate and Jane chattering and giggling nonstop in the backseat. On the drive over to the farm, as we rounded the bend known as Cemetery Cove that curves around the lake, the girls cried, “Jack rabbit!” and held their breath until the first white house they saw. Why? They didn't know. (Howard did: “Because,” he explained, “they're seven and ten.”)

When we arrived, we went right to the barn. The baby pigs were all in with their huge moms—there were no stalls set aside for runts, as when Chris had been born. The girls leaned over the gates to the stalls until they were hanging like gymnasts with their legs up and their heads down, reaching to pet the babies. Kate was desperate to hold a baby pig. Normally Howard and I would have gone right in, but the possibility, though slight, that one of the girls might be injured by one of George's sweet, huge sows scared us. Instead, we urged the girls to explore the muddy barnyard, where they found rabbits and chickens to hold. As they picked them up, the animals became calm in their hands.

But Kate was disappointed. She had really wanted to hold a baby pig.

As we were leaving, George appeared as if from nowhere. He looked like a caricature of a man late to a fire, running as fast as he could, carrying a bucket in one callused, ungloved hand. One of his draft horses was loose, he called to us as he ran by. It might be halfway to Keene by now.

“George, we'll catch up later…you go!” Howard and I told him.

But then Kate, whom George had never met, called after him plaintively, “We wanted to hold a baby pig….”

George stopped in his tracks. He set down the bucket. He opened the gate to a maternity stall, picked out two pink piglets, and handed one to Kate and one to Jane. Then he ran off and reappeared with a half gallon of maple syrup for Howard and me. Finally he put the piglets back in the stall—and then took up the bucket and continued his high-speed chase after the loose draft horse.

 

T
HE VISIT TO
G
EORGE AND
M
ARY'S SIGNALED THE END OF ONE OF
New Hampshire's fiercer winters. At our house, as Christopher slept snug in his bed of hay, and hens roosted warm in their nest boxes, our upstairs windows frosted over, so we could see only out of a one-inch porthole. Tess, Howard, and I huddled close together in our bed. Some nights the wind howled so loudly our walls seemed to sigh. But it was much worse next door. At night, Kate and Jane could see their breaths in their uninsulated upstairs bedrooms. One night, snow piled on Jane's bed from a broken skylight. To try to warm up before bed, the girls would take hot showers and then burrow under the covers. The damp bath towels would be frozen stiff by morning.

For the girls, the winter had been difficult in other ways, too. Fourth grade was Kate's first in public school—like me, she'd gone to a private school, and she found the transition to a public one difficult. It was hard to fit in. Her schoolwork was frustrating, especially because Kate had dyslexia. And the whole family had problems with the girls' father.

But they had a way to cope. I didn't know it at the time, but the younger Lillas would do exactly what I did when I needed to cry: go to Christopher's pen. At these times, he did not demand food. He grunted softly as we confided our private troubles and scratched his ears. In his huge presence, our sorrows somehow felt smaller.

The old house, as it turned out, was just as cold as everyone had feared it would be. But because of Chris, the move was not nearly as lonely.

The hens were the first to realize the change that had occurred. At some point that winter, Howard and I noticed they had begun hopping over the low stone wall that separated ours from the yard next door. As far as the Ladies were concerned, they, Christopher, Tess, Howard, Lilla, I, and the two girls had become one unit.

“OK!” I
WOULD SAY WHEN EVERYONE WAS READY
. A
T THIS POINT
in the Running of the Pig, Christopher would be bellowing in anticipation, rocking the gate violently with his nose.

I'd slide back the bolt, swing open the door, and shout,
“Go!”

Christopher surged out of his pen, bucking and snorting. Any chickens in the way burst like grouse from cover and flew off in all directions. I ran ahead like a madwoman, struggling with the main slops bucket to get to the Plateau before Chris. The girls brought up the rear, as fast as their legs would carry them.

Christopher was young and powerful—a speeding pig bullet. I think he felt his strength and youth all the more in the limelight of our admiration. He enjoyed putting on a show. Watching a three-hundred-pound beast charge at top speed “was just a little bit scary,” Jane admitted later—“and that made it exhilarating.” It was all part of a game. Even as we ran, we could see that Chris looked each one of us in the eye, as if to make sure we were playing our parts.

Three pairs of pounding boots, sixty-four scaly chicken toes, and four thundering hooves all raced toward the finish line at the Pig Plateau and its rewards. There was a prize for everyone. Chris would receive his beloved slops. While he was communing with his Higher Power, Tess would rise from her “stay” for play with the Frisbee. The hens, too, got treats. They darted in to seize morsels from the edges of Christopher's slops pile, then raced back out of range, their beaks trailing carrot peelings and spaghetti.

And then, if the day was sunny and the weather fine, came the best part of the whole operation. After Christopher had eaten his fill, as Tess's tongue hung out from catching and retrieving the Frisbee, after the hens had stolen enough scraps to turn their attention to the bugs in the taller grass of the field, came the main event of our summer days.

It was an activity that Kate and Jane perfected, one that eventually became a summer institution that drew children to the Pig Plateau in Hancock for a dozen years. We called it Pig Spa.

 

N
ONE OF US CAN REMEMBER THE SPECIFIC MOMENT THE GIRLS
made the leap of imagination that transformed plain old tummy-rubbing into Pig Spa. But we are fairly sure the inspiration was Christopher's tail.

Like all the parts of our pig, his tail was extraordinary. It never achieved the tight curl of picture-book pigs, but Christopher Hogwood's back end nonetheless ended with a great flourish: the coarse white hair on his tail grew nearly a foot beyond the fleshy tip, and it cascaded to the ground in a thick, appealing ringlet.

At least it had been appealing the previous fall. Winter is hard on a pig's tail. There are many days in winter when a pigpen simply can't be cleaned. You can't push a wheelbarrow to the compost pile through deep snow (though there were days we loaded piles of manure on a sled we had found at the dump). But some days, everything you'd want to move is frozen solid anyway. When it does begin to warm up, the opportunities for a long tail to trail into softening slopsicles and melting manure are myriad. By spring, Christopher Hogwood's magnificent tail was a mess: matted, tangled, and embedded with detritus.