The Good Good Pig (12 page)

“Take atop my love,” Girindra would write. “I pray you are well by the blessings of Goddess.” I prayed even harder for him and his family; after all, they lived on the outskirts of a reserve inhabited by five hundred man-eating tigers. “Thank you very much to write long treasurous letter. I used to wait for the same as a thirsty bird and inquire to the postal department….” I did, too. Pat knew well how eagerly I awaited Girindra's letters. We wrote each other about every two weeks, but it usually took a month for a letter to arrive, sometimes more.

Each battered airmail letter, covered with as many as fourteen stamps, was blessed proof the family had survived. In grateful reply I composed simple but detailed letters describing life in our village on the other side of the world. I sent photos: our post office and church in five feet of new snow; a picture of my father in his military uniform; Howard and me in parkas and snowshoes. I sent pictures of Kate and Jane and Lilla, Ed and Pat. And, of course, I often sent pictures of our animals. (“Your very large Hogwood pig is wonder to see,” Girindra wrote. “There is no such pig in Sundarbans. How can it be? It is as miracle to us.”)

But the miracle, to me, was in Girindra's world, where death in the jaws of a predator was a subject as familiar as the weather. “Rain has fled along with its wetty clumsyness,” he wrote in one letter; in the next paragraph: “A large grown-up crocodile has been a terror to the fishing persons. Five man and woman have been eaten within a month and a half.” Yet in Sundarbans, there would never be a posse of hunters tracking down a croc or a tiger, even a man-eater, the way New Hampshire's early farmers had persecuted Monadnock's last, crippled wolf. That was the central mystery in my book, the mystery that kept me returning to Sundarbans.

I learned the answer from the story of the tiger god. The story is retold in Sundarbans each January in a long poetic song, part of a day of praise and propitiation to Daskin Ray, ruler of Sundarbans. He is at once a tiger and a god. The crocodiles and sharks are his emissaries. Daskin Ray has always owned the riches of Sundarbans—the fishes, the trees, the bees and their honey—and it is only through his generosity that he shares these gifts with the people. But only if the people understand that the forest is his, and give both him and the land due respect. To this day, they say, the deity may still enter the body of a tiger at any moment, and if the god has been angered, he will attack.

The stories reflect a sophisticated understanding of ecology. The tiger protects the forest: fear of the tiger keeps woods-men from cutting down all the mangroves. The mangroves protect the coastline: their limbs and leaves soften the winds of cyclones. Their roots form nurseries for fish, which feed the people. The people understand that without the tiger, Sundar-bans could not stay whole.

That a man may be eaten by a tiger does not make life cheap. No; in Sundarbans, life is large, and gods are everywhere for the people to see. So the people see the tiger's mission in life—its dharma—as sacred. They see the holy goddess who resides in every cow. They remember that the great god Vishnu once came to Earth as a boar. And they see, as well, in the jaws of the tiger, the blameless perfection of the divine.

I
N ONE OF HIS BOOKS
, H
OWARD WRITES ABOUT A CONCEPT CALLED
tikkun:
it's a term coined by a Kabbalist mystic, and proceeds from an ancient Jewish story about the beginning of the world. The story has it that shortly after Creation, some of the Lord's light, the creative force, was spilled and lost by accident. It is our job, says the mystic, to try, in our actions, to gather up that spilled light—to restore the wholeness of the world.

But what is wholeness? How do we come to recognize it, and to realize when it is lost?

I know how wholeness feels. It feels like the soft summer evenings when I would close in Christopher and the chickens for the night. It feels like when Tess would lie on our bed and roll on her back to show us her white belly. It feels like the times I would linger by the barn as soft clucks and gentle grunts would wash over me like moonlight, and fill me with peace.

Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together. And for that, I must thank equally the foxes and the weasels, the tigers and the crocodiles. For the peace of the barnyard, I am grateful to the dangers and jaws of the jungle. For the belonging that is home, I can thank, in part, the exile that is travel. Though they seem like opposites, they are more like twins—two halves of a whole.

C
HAPTER 8

Celebrity

T
HE PHOTOGRAPHER HAD DRIVEN UP FROM
N
EW
Y
ORK.
H
IS CREDENTIALS
were impressive: he used to work for Time-Life. Bruce Curtis had covered the war in Vietnam, where he had been wounded three times. He had documented the student protests at home, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the famine in Biafra.

And now, with a car trunk full of camera equipment and costume props, here he was on our doorstep. Again, he was shooting on location.

His next stop was the Pig Plateau.

Bruce had heard about Christopher from his girlfriend, who had met Howard years before on a Victorian Society study program in England. Bruce had quit Time-Life and now worked freelance, hustling after any image that would sell: teddy bears wearing different outfits, bucolic landscapes. He thought a big spotted pig would make a great subject for a series of greeting cards.

The props reflected those he had in mind. For a birthday card, he envisioned the pig wearing a party hat, surrounded by festively wrapped packages with bows, and in the foreground, a birthday cake. For a new-baby card, he had made up signs that said
IT'S A BOY
! and
IT'S A GIRL
! and procured various pink and blue items for Christopher to wear to celebrate the appropriate sex. Then there was a wild and crazy party invitation idea, with an assortment of hats and some giant, hot-pink plastic sunglasses, the kind you get at an amusement park. Another theme would be the pig in a bubble bath, with all sorts of soaps and shampoos and a shower cap.

Howard and I welcomed him to New Hampshire. After all, he was a friend of Howard's friend. Besides, how could I refuse someone who considered our pig such a worthy portrait subject?

Howard didn't say so, but he did not think Chris would cooperate. My husband retreated to his upstairs office to write. Kate and Jane were off on some neighborhood adventure. I was left alone to work as Bruce's pig wrangler.

Bruce was initially enthusiastic. We had a beautiful July day. The light was clear and rich. Our barn was “the perfect color.” But when Bruce actually met Christopher, whom I had already put out on his tether, the photographer was taken aback.

“He's much bigger than I expected,” he said soberly.

“He's much bigger than we expected, too,” I replied.

Bruce studied the scene with his photographer's eye. “What's that nylon webbing around him for?” He was concerned that the makeshift harness, patched as it was with pieces of different-colored nylon from previous generations, would look bad in the photos.

“That's the only thing between us and four hundred pounds of loose pig,” I explained.

“You mean you
can't control him
?”

“Not at all,” I answered honestly. “He's pretty much the one in control around here.”

When he'd envisioned his project, Bruce might have hoped that Christopher would turn out to be a porcine version of one of William Wegman's vogueish weimaraners. But this was not to be.

Christopher hated the party hats. The flimsy elastic, made to stretch around the chin of a child's seven-pound head, instantly snapped when we tried to stretch it around Christopher's hundred-pound head and the commodious jowls that hung from it. We tried to perch the hats between his ears, but they tickled. If Kate had been on hand—her wardrobe genius now perfected in the fashion crucible of junior high—maybe she could have gotten him to wear them, but without her it was hopeless. Christopher shook each hat off in turn, and when it fell to the ground, he would pick it up in his mouth and deliver the death shake. We had a party pack of twelve shiny, pointy hats. Within five minutes, he had destroyed eleven of them.

We obviously needed to get a hat on him before we set out the birthday cake, which would last perhaps two seconds, if that, before Chris ate it. But perhaps we should try piling the gifts first, then the hat, and finally the cake, I suggested. Christopher knocked the boxes over instantly with his nose. He had pioneered the knocking-things-over game with our carefully stacked woodpile, but this was even more fun, because the next step, as he saw it, was obviously to rip off the gift wrap. He pinned each box with a hoof and then tore off the wrapping with his lips, giving this a shake, too, before shredding it.

Finally we decided to nix the gifts and just focus on the hat and the cake. Once the cake was served, we would have just one chance for the shot. Bruce set his camera on its tripod just out of nose-print range. I set a few bagels on the ground to occupy Chris while I got the final hat and the cake. I plunked the hat on the pig, set down the cake, and darted away from the camera. The hat fell off. Christopher plowed his nose through the blue
HAPPY
on the white icing, and then, in one bite, consumed one-quarter of the sheet cake.

Christopher was enjoying his modeling career immensely. The only parts he didn't like were wearing clothes and getting photographed.

For the new-baby card, Christopher shook off every piece of pink and blue ornament Bruce had to offer. He would not put his front legs through the sleeves of a sweater—and besides, it was the wrong size anyway. He pushed over, pulled up, shook and bit the
IT'S A BOY
! and
IT'S A GIRL
! signs until they were pulp.

The only thing Hogwood consented to wear was a red kerchief around his neck, which Bruce put on to cover the unsightly harness. That, and—oddly—the giant sunglasses. He liked them. They perched comfortably on his wide snout, and the colored lenses ended up positioned, uncannily, directly in front of his eyes. He walked around with the glasses on his face for about a minute. Bruce got several shots before they slid off Chris's head.

Finally—the props broken, the cake eaten, the wardrobe destroyed—Bruce and I made the final effort, the bubble bath scene. The harness would have to come off, Bruce said; Chris had to be naked for the bath. We frothed up some bubbles in a bucket of warm water and I unbuckled the harness.

But Christopher Hogwood had had enough. He took off at a trot to a neighbor's house, where he could smell their wild grapes ripening.

B
RUCE'S HARD DAY'S WORK, WE FEARED, HAD BEEN A BUST
. B
UT
this was not true. The shot of Hogwood wearing the giant glasses came out beautifully. Bruce generously sent us a copy with his permission to use this however we liked. It gave us an idea.

For years, we had received holiday greetings from our smiling friends in their gracious homes, photos of their chubby-cheeked infants, and newsletters detailing the academic and sporting achievements of their successful children. A writer for the
New York Times
style section once called the annual family Christmas card “a billboard of wealth, position, marital status and procreative success.” Now we could join that tradition. Except we were unemployed, childless freelance writers. It was obvious what we should do: send out holiday photos of our pig.

We figured we owed as much to our friends. For Christopher was, in a sense, a community effort. By now, Christopher commanded a vast slops empire. Besides the girls next door, the postmistress, and the minister, regular contributors included the world's top experts on wildebeests. Lovers of all hoofed creatures, Dr. Richard Estes, a biologist who has spent half a century flying between New Hampshire and Tanzania studying antelopes, and his wife, Runi, whom he had married during a break in the wildebeest rut, saved their kitchen garbage for Chris all week, keeping it in bags in their freezer. I picked it up at their house on Saturdays (and more than once brought home a bag of frozen shrimp or a whole frozen chicken by mistake). Cindy Dechert, who lived across from her parents, the Amidons, brought Christopher an old-fashioned leafy forage called mangles, cut fresh from her garden. Barry Estabrook, the editor of my first published collection of
Boston Globe
columns, mailed Chris stale bread from the bakery across the street from his office in northern Vermont. In late summer, Hogwood's bowl overflowed with Hancock's surplus zucchini; at first frost, gardeners brought him green tomatoes caught on the vine; after Halloween, the wheelbarrow in the upstairs barn was heaped high with donated pumpkins.

And all this on top of perhaps the most impressive slops score of Christopher's career: the Wide World Cheese Shop. Although Howard and I could rarely afford to eat out, our pig now enjoyed a regular supply of gourmet foods from one of the most popular luncheon spots in the area, a seven-mile drive away, over in the next town.

Red leaf lettuce. Sourdough bread. Dill Havarti cheese. The first and last slices of the tomato. And soups—lots of soups. “If it burned,” the cheese shop's chef and owner, Harlow Richardson, told us, “the soup went Cajun. But if it went beyond that, it went to Christopher.” All these delicacies went into the green, five-gallon pickle pails stationed beneath the prep counter, and from there into Harlow's Chevy pickup. In a rural area where even pizza delivery was unheard of, Christopher Hogwood alone received regular door-to-stall deliveries. Harlow even served Christopher music with his meal. Harlow usually showed up singing—
The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, Orpheus in the Underworld,
whatever community performance for which he was currently rehearsing—and Christopher quickly grew to love opera.

We owed many others in town for their escort services. How many times had Ed rescued Christopher? How often had Mike herded him off the dangerous state road? Then there was the time we had driven to Long Island for Thanksgiving and returned to the scene of every homeowner's worst nightmare: the entire volunteer fire department was at our house. We saw no fire truck, but we recognized everyone's car. As it turned out, Chris had escaped and everyone had shown up to make sure he got back to the barn safely.

We initially sent out a hundred Christopher cards. Then we started getting requests from people who hadn't gotten one. We had to go back to the camera shop and ask them to print more.

B
RUCE DIDN'T REALIZE IT, BUT HE WAS FOLLOWING IN A GRAND
tradition. The oldest known picture of a pig is the image of a leaping boar painted forty thousand years ago in the cave of Altamira in northern Spain. Artists have drawn fresh inspiration from pigs ever since. One source, the artist-author of
The Pig in Art,
even suggests that the most famous early image of a woman—the zaftig limestone figurine known as “Venus of Willendorf,” dated between 24,000 to 22,000
B.C
.—might really be an indirect homage to a pig. (The idea is less outlandish than it sounds, considering that pigs have long been seen as symbols of fecundity. And no one would deny that this Venus looks pretty porky.)

The first domestic pigs depicted in human art seem to be Chinese offerings found in Zhou tombs dated to the ninth century
B.C
. Since then, as pigs have continued to inspire us with their bravery and fecundity, as they have fed both our bodies and our spirits, it's no wonder humans have celebrated pigs in almost every imaginable medium: Chinese pigs of jade, Egyptian swine of ebony. Pigs carved from rhino horn and elephant ivory. Pigs in terra cotta and porcelain. The Vatican houses a life-sized marble sculpture of a great white mother pig, and the Louvre enshrines a frieze of an Assyrian sow and her piglets among its art treasures.

When we sent out those first pig Christmas cards when Chris was only five, we had no grandiose plans. But Chris had been born beneath a lucky star. He had what every great soul needs to make his mark in the world: gravitas. (At five hundred pounds and counting, that is true gravitas.) Fame, of a sort, found him.

Letter addressed to Christopher Hogwood, from Blanchard & Blanchard Ltd. of Norwich, Vermont, manufacturer of “pure and fancy foods from Vermont”:

Dear Mr. Hogwood,
We know you appreciate fine gourmet foods…

Tess, too, had been the recipient of bulk mail sent to our address (One read: “As CEO of your company, you…”) But this one was unnerving.
How did they know?

From the police log of the
Monadnock Ledger:

HANCOCK
—Fame was too much for Christopher the pig, who appeared on the Boston television show
Chronicle
on Thursday. The day after his appearance Christopher escaped from his home. Police responded to Old Antrim Road and looked for him, but could not find him. His owner, Sy Montgomery, found him later. Said Chief Ed Coughlan, “He can't take the publicity.”

From the
Peterborough Transcript:

A photo op with Christopher Hogwood, a huge pig owned by Sy Montgomery and Howard Mansfield of Hancock, was one of the prizes auctioned off at a fund-raiser for Peterborough's cultural museum, the Mariposa Museum. The highest bidder—Jim Jenkins of Antrim—was named Hog Reeve for Life.

From election news in the
Keene Sentinel:

HANCOCK
—No one filed for election as town moderator and Thomas Ward won with 69 write-in votes. He easily beat Selectman Neal Cass and Christopher Hogwood, who each got three write-in votes. Hogwood is a pig owned by Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery. Voters apparently want an exciting town meeting next year; their new moderator isn't a boar.

Howard sometimes accused me of being a stage mother. This wasn't really true. Yes, if the local press needed a photo when I had a new book coming out, I always wanted Chris in the picture. I was proud of our pig. But I was also shrewd enough to realize that the wrong camera angle can make even a size four look fat—but not if I'm standing beside an enormous hog.

Our photos together appeared in the local weeklies. We were in the big-city daily, the
Keene Sentinel.
(The
Sentinel
reporter's first question to me was about Chris, and, I thought, rather personal. “Does he fart?” he asked. “Rarely,” I demurred.) We were also on TV together. The editor who had mailed Christopher bread from a Vermont bakery had published a second collection of my columns, among which was an essay on mud—New Hampshire's most abundant natural resource during the month of March, and the subject of a segment on the Boston TV show
Chronicle.
But Christopher, as always, stole the show. He was, after all, a bigger expert on mud than I. The cameraman wisely devoted much footage to letting Hogwood demonstrate the highest and best use of this splendid substance. He pushed it around with his nose, looked at the camera, pronounced “Unh!” (as if to say, “Like so”), and rolled over. George happened to be over at Gretchen's house, shoeing one of her ponies, when the program aired. “George, you won't believe it!” Gretchen cried, “Christopher Hogwood is on TV!” George raced inside to watch. All through the segment, George was silent, shaking his head in amazement. Finally he spoke. “That pig,” George said to Gretchen, “has done awfully well for himself.”