The Good Good Pig (13 page)

Chris's photo appeared in the
Boston Globe.
It had nothing to do with my column. It was a stand-alone photo in the state section of the New Hampshire edition. I knew the photographer, because he specialized in wildlife and because he and his wife ran a rehabilitation center for injured owls in Massachusetts. He stopped by our barn to say hello one day when he was in the area. Next thing we knew, Hogwood occupied a quarter page of the Sunday newspaper. He was standing on his hind legs with his forelegs resting on the gate, foaming drool cascading from his jaws, anticipating a bagel. “Animals are favorite photo subjects and pigs can be very photogenic,” read the caption, “but Pavlov's hog, a.k.a. Christopher Hogwood, stretches things as he comes drooling toward the camera in search of dinner.” (I thought indignantly that the caption writer was too gauche to appreciate Christopher's fashion statement: a pig accessorizes with drool.)

His photo also appeared in the
Washington Post,
where Howard's best friend from college and his wife worked as reporters. (Their kids had done Pig Spa and loved it.) For several years after
The Hidden Life of Dogs
became a bestseller, Liz Thomas wrote a column for
USA Today
—and managed to work in a reference to Christopher Hogwood there. He was mentioned frequently on New Hampshire Public Radio. “That was Hayden's Symphony No. 84 in E-flat Major,” the classical music program's host would announce, “Christopher Hogwood conducting.” Occasionally he would also reference our barnyard opera-lover. Even when he did not, we got comments from our neighbors: “Heard your pig on the radio today.”

But Hogwood's most wide-reaching media coverage resulted from Howard's literary efforts.
Yankee
magazine often published Howard's articles on historic preservation and New England icons. Christopher became one of the latter. The editors titled Howard's article about Chris “It's a Hog's Life.” The subtitle asked: “Food, Visitors and Media Attention—What More Could a Pig Want?”

“Our pig is a Zen eater,” Howard explained. “He becomes his food. He is his food. He loves his food. No remorse. No guilty dinner chat about fat or sugar or pesticides. A pig brings us back to a simpler time in our dining history: all food is good food.”

No wonder, my husband wrote, that so many people bring him slops. “It's as if the whole world tilts and vegetables roll toward the commodious jaws of our pig….

“Over the past five years, “Howard boasted, “Christopher Hogwood has built a larger constituency than most congressmen…. For someone who spends most of his time in his penor outside sunning himself, he sure can network.”

As a result of Howard's story, the network only expanded. One day as we were leaving to visit friends for supper, a car with California plates pulled up in front of the house. “Does Christopher Hogwood live here?” the driver, a middle-aged fellow, asked. “My wife and I read about him in
Yankee.
We wondered if we could take a picture.”

We escorted the West Coast paparazzi to Christopher's stall. When we drove off, they were still taking photos.

A
S
C
HRISTOPHER'S NETWORK AND GIRTH EXPANDED, SO DID OUR
mailing list. More and more people wanted Chris's picture: the editors at all the papers, magazines, and publishers for which we wrote, Howard's associates in historic preservation, story sources at universities and museums. Most of them had heard a parrot squawk or a dog bark during telephone calls to us, and since I had taken to augmenting our chicken flock every second or third spring by raising baby chicks under a heat lamp in my office, often folks would hear chicks peeping as well. “Are you calling from a zoo?” they would wonder. Not exactly…but we would end up telling them about our animal family, and Christopher. We would send a card. They loved seeing a happy pig wearing pink sunglasses. They all wanted to know when the next card was coming out.

Christopher's holiday cards became a tradition, another way of marking time. There was the year Christopher wore the elf hat. Then there was the year we featured Chris drinking a Schlitz. (Some of our friends accused us of pig abuse. We weren't sure whether they thought alcohol wasn't good for pigs, or whether they simply didn't like Schlitz.)

One year, Jane's birthday fell during the Perseid meteor showers, and we all lay out in the backyard counting shooting stars. Between meteors, we wondered: what should we do for next year's pig photo? How can we top last year's?

But that was the summer Lilla told us that she and the girls would be moving away. The divorce and its aftermath had cleaned Lilla out. As a single mother with two kids to support, Lilla now turned to her own mother for help. But she lived in Connecticut. The family would have to move there.

The day before the move, we held an all-day Pig Spa. Lilla was next door packing. Howard was upstairs in his office, trying to write, feeling empty and sad. Kate and Jane and I were down at the Plateau, brushing Christopher in the sun. Kate looked up. “I want to do Pig Spa again tomorrow!” she said.

We reminded each other that Connecticut was not so far away. We would visit. The girls would come back to Hancock for a couple of weeks every summer.

But there would be no Pig Spa tomorrow. The sweet old house next door would be empty. It seemed too awful to bear. The three of us flung our arms around each other and over the pig's prone body. As he grunted softly, we sobbed into his bristles.

C
HAPTER 9

Finding Eden

“T
HERE'S
J
ANE'S BUS.”
E
VERY MORNING, AS
I
SERVED THE EGGS OUR
hens had given, Howard would sit at the wobbly card table by the window and make this wistful observation as the elementary school bus went by. But Jane, of course, was not on it.

The Doll House stood empty. The sweet little cape now looked sad to us, as if it were as lonely for its former occupants as we were.

We missed the girls terribly, and we worried over who would move in next door. What if they had aggressive dogs who ran loose, or kids who chased or teased animals? Would our hens be safe? What if they didn't like our pig? Christopher's hefty manure heap was composting just inches from the stone wall that separated our two yards. What if the new people didn't like pig manure?

We had a long wait to find out. Though the owner of the house moved back in for a while, he lost his job as a buyer for a sporting goods company, and soon the bank foreclosed on the house. New Hampshire had hit another recession, and this time the real estate market, too, was slow. But in this case, the real estate agent had an additional challenge—one we didn't know about until Christopher's special friend, the software expert, Ray Cote, told us about a conversation he'd had with the agent at a Chamber of Commerce gathering.

“We had this couple up from New Jersey,” the agent told Ray. “They were looking for a nice, quiet place, sort of out of the way, so I showed them this house. We did the entire inside of the house and they liked it. They were very happy with it. We went outside and there was this beautiful garden back there, with flowers in bloom, and they were really enjoying it. They were
really
looking like they were interested in the house. I thought they were going to make an offer. The husband was just about to say something to me—at which point we heard this yell.

“And I looked over to this other yard, next door. And there is this little, skinny, five-foot-five woman, wearing these huge floppy boots, and she is running as fast as she absolutely could. And she is carrying this bucket, which is obviously heavy, and running like mad. Why on earth is she running?

“So we look behind her. And what we saw was this: The head of an enormous black and white hog. And then we saw the body of an enormous hog. And then some more of the body of this hog. This hog is thundering out of nowhere. And it's running after her making loud, snorting noises. Snort, snort, snort!
Snort, snort, snort!
And then the woman goes
flying
into the barn. And the pig goes
flying
into the barn. And then the door slams. And then there's silence.”

“So what did you say to the couple?” Ray asked.

“I turned to them and said, ‘So it's a nice neighborhood.'”

The couple left in stunned silence. They never called again.

H
OWARD AND
I
WERE PLEASED WITH
R
AY'S STORY.
W
E FIGURED
Christopher had done the neighborhood a service. Anyone who didn't want to live next door to a pig was certainly not worthy of our town.

But meanwhile, the house seemed lonely for a family. Lilla and the girls would be a tough act to follow. There was not a day we didn't think of them. But they kept their promise and came to visit us every few months. One year, they surprised Howard on his birthday, and the next year surprised me on mine. They came up summers. And we visited them at the house they were renting in Connecticut—a huge '70s contemporary with cathedral ceilings and a deck and sliders.

Their new town was a different world, the girls told us. Practically no one had two parents; lots of kids were on Prozac; everyone was in therapy. Kate explained the social strata of the high school: there were the popular jocks and jockettes, the freaks, the poseurs (who pretended to be something they weren't), and the “froseurs” (fake poseurs, every week pretending to be a new different thing they weren't). The popular style was to dress up for school—no jeans and sweatshirts like in New Hampshire. One time when we stayed overnight, in the morning Kate emerged from her bedroom dressed for school in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. Howard's bushy eyebrows shot up and nearly merged with his curly hair. Out of his mouth came words I had heard in my youth from my father, but which I'd never thought I'd hear from my own husband: “You are going to
school,
” he asked, “dressed like
that
?”

Little girls no more, Kate and Jane were changing into beautiful young women. Yet they remained, in an important way, part of Hancock, part of our family, forever rooted to the joys of Pig Spa, of reading
Walker's Mammals
and dreaming of adventure with orcas and wolves and otters at our kitchen table. Jane was accepted at a private school that had its own zoo, where she particularly enjoyed caring for the captive emus. She excelled in art and biology. Kate, who had always struggled with dyslexia, now loved both reading and writing. Her reports on wildlife and essays about conservation and animal rights impressed her teachers. It was clear that both girls would grow up knowing how to find their bliss. They knew what bliss looked like: it looked like a black-and-white sleeping hog.

And to Chris they would always return. At first, because people's bodies, voices, and scents change so dramatically in adolescence, we wondered whether the pig would recognize his old friends when next he saw them. But even when many months went by between visits, Christopher always knew Kate and Jane. Each time they came, even before their hands touched him, Christopher issued the soft, blissful love grunts he always reserved just for them.

A
T OUR HOUSE, WE FOUND THE REAL ESTATE MARKET RATHER
TOO
brisk. Since we'd bought the place, we'd enjoyed a parade of wonderful tenants—but they kept on leaving, and when they did it was always a crisis for us. We needed the rental income that tenants would bring, but since they actually lived
in
our house—which was also our workplace—anything but the perfect fit could be a disaster. The same year the Lillas left, we found ourselves in this uncomfortable position again.

Happily, Christopher Hogwood had always served as a litmus test for potential tenants. One trip to the barn made it clear that only pig lovers need apply. Mary Pat and John had considered Christopher a member of the family—despite the fact that the pig had nearly ruined her wedding dress. (She was carrying the dress, a Victorian drop-waisted confection made of handmade lace, home from the tailor's on a naked coat hanger, when Chris came rushing up to greet her with his muddy nose. She dashed with the dress to safety just in time.) After Mary Pat and John moved out, another couple had moved in. He was an artist, and she worked at the hospital in Keene, whose cafeteria issued regular if rather bland slops, which were ferried faithfully home. Then came a writer and jazz musician who worked at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough. He turned part of the rental unit into a private-label beer-making enterprise, and gave the detritus of the process to a grateful Hogwood. Next, a fellow our age, with his white shepherd mix, moved in. They were refugees from a nasty divorce. One day he found that someone had left an unwelcome surprise on his doorstep—a plastic bag full of smelly garbage, with a tag that read
FOR CHRIS
. Our tenant's name happened to be Chris, too. He thought it was from his ex until we told him about the slops deliveries.

Now
this
tenant was leaving, and for the same reason everyone else had. We never raised the rent, and we assured all our tenants we would never kick them out. They all moved on because invariably, something wonderful happened to them. It was almost as if living in the house made wishes come true.

Mary Pat and John had moved to buy their own home in Peterborough and start a family, as did the couple who followed them. The beer-making bookseller left to live his dream as a poet, essayist, and musician, moving to New York City. And one day while our divorced tenant was driving to town, he met the love of his life when a slender, athletic woman and her horse crossed the street a mile and a quarter from our house. He left us to move in with her.

And this was just the sort of healing Selinda Chiquoine was seeking when she came to look at the apartment on the other side of our house on a gray day that next November.

Selinda and her husband, Ken, had what looked like an ideal life. They were just a year younger than us, with good jobs and wide interests and a beautiful new home surrounded with gardens in the woods in the next town over from us. Ken made great money as a computer scientist, and Selinda worked as a technical editor at a computer magazine.

Selinda had been trained as a geologist—she'd spent the summer before she graduated exploring a lead-zinc deposit in Alaska's Brooks Range, thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle. She'd lived with fifty-five others—only four of whom were women—in a tent with a plywood floor and a kerosene heater. Daily she helicoptered to work in the field, surveying the grid, sampling rocks, and measuring the angle of drill holes. When she married her college sweetheart, that put an end to her geology work. But Selinda, a petite, outgoing brunette with the brisk, cheery energy of a chipmunk, was quick to embrace a new outdoor passion—gardening. When the couple moved to Sharon, just a twenty-minute drive from our place in Hancock, Ken built her a ten-by thirty-foot greenhouse where she could grow flowers year-round.

But lately Selinda felt like she was foundering in a suburban housewife's life. She didn't really like her job at
Byte.
She wanted more time outdoors. She felt trapped. She and Ken weren't getting along. When they talked, they talked about computers. Then they argued, and the arguments solved nothing. She loved Ken but couldn't see a way to save the marriage. She felt the only thing to do was to move out.

Unfortunately, her options were limited. She didn't have a whole lot of money. Very few rental units would accept dogs—and she desperately wanted their two sixty-pound dogs, Reba and Louie, to live with her at least part of the time, as well as her cat, Tigger. Reba was a three-year-old black lab-setter mix, and Louie was a four-year-old white shepherd-lab mix. When she heard about our place, she was excited—and nervous. She didn't want to blow it.

Selinda was especially nervous about meeting Tess. She understood intuitively that it was important that Tess like her, and that Tess's opinion would inform our decision. Tess of course barked hysterically when Selinda came to the door, but after a toss of the Frisbee, she vacuumed Selinda with her nose. She approved.

Selinda didn't realize she was also going to be introduced to a pig whose opinion we considered equally astute. Next we went to the barn. Christopher grunted his approval.

Tess and Chris liked her. That was good enough for us.

So we showed Selinda the tenant's side of the house: the big living room and fireplace downstairs, the sunny kitchen/ sitting room that used to be an enclosed porch, the old clawfoot bathtub the previous owners had painted pink, the slanted atticlike ceiling upstairs that made sleeping in the bedroom feel like a night in a tree house. Outside, I also pointed out a feature that perhaps other landlords might have skipped: Christopher and the chickens' manure pile. But I knew how to impress a gardener. Having a pig was like putting your compost on fast-forward.

Selinda was delighted. She loved our old white clapboard farmhouse. She loved the porchlike feel of the south-facing apartment, and the way sunlight flooded in through the big windows. And she was
very
impressed with the manure pile.

I baked a carrot cake to welcome her when she moved in. It was a snowy day in January. But she was already thinking of the garden she would plant in the backyard come spring.

P
EOPLE OFTEN ASKED US WHY WE'D NEVER HAD A GARDEN
. F
OR
one, Howard was never interested. As for me, although I love all the plants on our property—the lilacs arching over the doorway, the great silver maple and its feathery neighbor, the tamarack tree, the perennial beds of phlox and hostas, the flowering quince and crab, the forsythia and the tall yellow Jerusalem artichokes by the barn—I've never tended a formal flower garden. I've never planted vegetables. Farmer Hogwood, however, unwittingly nurtured a squash and pumpkin crop: every year we noted a number of squash vines snaking out of the compost pile, recycling the bounty of the previous Halloween. Many of the species hybridized, and by first frost, we usually had enough weird vegetables for an attractive Halloween display by the front door—which we would then feed back to Chris again come winter. But even with New Hampshire's famously short growing season, I could never count on being here long enough to make the commitment to a real garden. And soon I would be journeying again.

While Selinda dreamed of gardens that winter, I dreamed of the jungle. For my next book, I was planning a series of expeditions to the Amazon. I had always wanted to visit this greatest of rain forests. My father had gone there several times, both while in the Army and then after he had retired from the shipping business and was working as a private consultant. In the '80s, he'd spent a week traveling the Peruvian Amazon on a boat, a pet capuchin monkey and a tame scarlet macaw on board. My mother had flown to meet him in Iquitos, and from there they traveled together to Brazil, to more civilized venues my mother would enjoy. But I know my father's favorite part. I have a wonderful picture from that South American trip in which he is holding a relaxed young three-toed sloth, its hairy arms and long claws reaching around his waist. My mother worried it would bite or scratch or pee on him. My father was beaming as if the sloth were the prize of the expedition, the most adorable and beautiful and unlikely creature on the planet.