The Good Good Pig (5 page)

In our town, animals seem to require regular policing—from stray dogs to treed cats, and one summer an injured bobcat. Officer Steve Baldwin took that call. A bobcat had been hit by a car on Route 123. He scooped up the unconscious animal, wrapped her in a blanket, and laid her on the front seat of the cruiser as he sped to the vet. “Then she suddenly woke up,” Steve said, “and I knew I had made a mistake.” Luckily, the bobcat was in no mood to fight. Steve was able to get her broken hip repaired by veterinary specialists. He was present six months later at her release back into the wild, at the same spot he had rescued her.

Ed had led llamas, ponies, and cattle back home so often that he started to keep a bucket of grain in the trunk of the cruiser. But ours was the first loose pig of his police career.

On a warm September afternoon, Ed got a call about a pig in the road. The caller was pretty sure whose pig it was. Ed found Chris out by Route 137 down by Mike Cass's driveway. He parked the cruiser and tied a rope to the pig's neck, planning to lead him home.

Christopher, however, had other plans. “He didn't want to go at first,” Ed said. This was a problem, because by that time Christopher weighed more than Ed did. “He wasn't aggressive,” Ed said, “but he was pretty determined.”

When it became evident that Christopher was not easily taken into custody, Ed, calling on his abundant common sense, decided to wait. After a few minutes, Christopher changed his mind. In fact, his change of mind was emphatic. Chris took off at a brisk trot, pulling Ed on the rope behind him like a boat pulls a water skier.

Impressed by the sight of a uniformed police officer running along the road behind a young spotted pig, a driver stopped his car on the road and called out.

“What are you going to do with the pig?” he asked Ed.

“He's going to do whatever he wants,” Ed replied, still running. “I'll just follow him!”

Happily, Christopher was more of a sprinter than a marathoner. When the pig slowed down, Ed had a chance to notice some green apples beneath the tree on the triangle of ground between our street and Route 137. He pocketed a few of these and fed them to Christopher.

By the time we saw Ed and Chris coming up our road (we had been out looking for him in the opposite direction), they were walking together like old friends.

After that, Ed always kept some apples in his cruiser, too.

C
HAPTER 4

Give Me Shelter

E
VEN BEFORE
C
HRISTOPHER'S FIRST SUMMER WITH US ENDED, WE
realized our lives had become decidedly pig-centric.

We spent a lot of time with Chris. Mornings, before making our breakfast, I'd feed him first thing. It was a great way to start our day. He was always delighted with whatever I gave him—pig and sow pellets, stale muffins, banana peels. I was always delighted to watch him eat. For a few minutes, I would listen to the music of his lips slapping against his food before I returned to the kitchen for our own breakfast. Afterward, if the day was sunny, I would carry (and later lead) him down to the Pig Plateau. While Howard and I wrote, Chris would root, graze, sleep, wallow—and await our return. Or, perhaps, plot an escape.

How often we interacted with Chris during our writing day depended on a number of factors—most of them, like our pig, beyond our control. If he broke out, visiting with his growing circle of friends, we might spend an hour or more looking for him. This was enormously disruptive, of course, but our relief when he came home to us—and our gratitude to anyone who helped return him—erased any trace of anger over the lost time.

But even if he did not escape, our hours were increasingly ruled by our pig's needs. If he did not like the weather—he hated to be rained on—he would call for us to let him back in his pen. We would drop everything, midsentence, to rescue him.

We checked on him roughly once an hour. Was he getting too much sun? Pigs' skin can sunburn like a person's. Had he wrapped his tether around a tree? We'd have to untangle him. Did he need a drink of water? Did he need petting? Sometimes these checks led to pig petting sessions that might last fifteen minutes or more, whether Chris needed it or not. (I always did.) Soon our feet wore a path in the grass from the back door to the barn, and another from the barn to the Pig Plateau.

Of course, having a new member in your family always changes your life. They need feeding and cleaning and time and love. But because our new arrival was a pig, the change was particularly profound—because his needs were expanding as fast as his weight. And so was the growing circle of friends and family that would help us.

B
Y THE FIRST AUTUMN OF HIS LIFE
, C
HRISTOPHER'S EXPONENTIAL
growth had made it obvious that he would soon not only be able to escape, but also to completely destroy his makeshift pen in the barn. Earlier that summer, we had seen him walk through the wooden lattice beneath our front porch like Casper the Friendly Ghost. (That's where we and our twenty-something tenants, Mary Pat and John Szep, stored our garbage before we took it to the dump on Sundays, and one day Chris had smelled something especially appealing: to our mortification, it was the odiferous wrapper from our tenants' last package of breakfast bacon.)

Howard knew what had to be done, but the scale of the project, and my well-documented ineptitude with power tools, made this a job that demanded an expert.

So we summoned a retired engineer from America's top avionics corporation. Howard's dad, a veteran of Sperry Rand Corporation, drove up from Long Island. He made a point not to mention the purpose of his northward journey to his rabbi: he was going to help his son build a palace for a pig.

I'd been a little worried about how Howard's parents might feel about Christopher. After all, they were observant Jews, sufficiently Orthodox to keep separate plates and silverware for milk and meat in their home. It was enough that they had to tolerate a shiksa wife—but a pet pig?

To my relief, they had no problem with Chris. “Just don't eat him,” said my father-in-law. When it came to pigs, at least, I was in perfect accordance with the code of Leviticus.

Before his parents got here for Operation Pig Palace, Howard and I shifted things all over the barn, looking for hardware and lumber we might use. Useful items abounded, but they were not always easy to extract. One day, in an attempt to rescue a four-outlet box, we untangled a huge ball consisting of a tiller wrapped in a black wire spliced into a yellow wire, which ran into an orange wire, which was attached to the outlet box—all of it entwined with an old ball of rope. Beneath us, Chris bellowed all the while, as if we had forgotten him entirely.

In fact, Christopher bellowed for much of the next four days.

Sensibly, Howard and his dad were building the new pen on the site of the old one—which of course meant the pig had to be temporarily evicted. Normally he would have been happy out on his Pig Plateau. But, although Chris couldn't actually see the work crew in his pen, he knew something was going on. A pig's sense of smell is so refined that piglets know not only the scent of their mothers, but the scent of the particular teat that becomes their own personal feeding station. Experimenters have found that pigs who have nuzzled plastic cards can pick them out from a deck days later, even after the cards have been washed. Pigs' hearing, too, is excellent—with a frequency range that extends far above those of humans, and probably significantly below as well—and Chris's huge, rotating ears acted like radar dishes, tracking and pinpointing sounds. So it must have been obvious to him that a travesty was under way: something interesting was happening inside
his
pen—and he wasn't there to supervise.

To Howard and me, the meaning of Christopher's bellows were completely clear: “Hey. Hey!
Hey!
That's
my
pen! What's going on? Hey-y-y-y-y!”

W
ORKING NINE-HOUR DAYS
, H
OWARD AND HIS DAD ERECTED A PEN
worthy of
Sty Beautiful.
Inside the barn, they framed out walls with oversized lumber. With pink fiberglass we found in the barn's upper loft, they insulated the walls to an R-value of 22 (our house, in contrast, was insulated only to R-12). Modifying the setup Gretchen had originally erected from pallets, they installed a front gate on strong hinges. They put in a light.

My mother-in-law and I mostly hid inside the house, ostensibly cooking, for fear the men would ask us to hold some heavy, splintery object exactly two inches off the ground and keep it
perfectly still
while they hit it with a hammer. But we knew the building project was well supervised. While the pig bellowed at them from afar, the men were being scrutinized at close range by sixteen orange eyes, belonging to the eight shiny black hens we called the Ladies.

Gretchen had given them to us as a housewarming present. The Ladies looked like a small flock of cheerful nuns—if nuns had crimson combs and orange eyes and scaly yellow feet. With industry and precision, the Ladies pecked at bugs and seeds around the barnyard, stole scraps from Christopher's bowl when he wasn't looking, and generally kept the pig company when Howard and I were in the house writing. By fall, the hens were giving us eighty delicious brown eggs every week. But what we loved most about them was the way they greeted us.

“Do they
know
you?” Howard's dad had asked in astonishment the first time he saw the Ladies in action. “I didn't think chickens were that smart!” Howard's dad and mom had both grown up in the Bronx, where local experience with chickens was largely confined to the soup pot. But he was soon to expand his knowledge. Because Gretchen had raised these hens from chicks, and Howard and I had visited them almost daily during their upbringing, they didn't just
know
us; they were our biggest fans. When the Ladies saw us coming, they would race toward us, their wings held slightly open, and mob us as if we were the Beatles. Howard's dad really got a kick out of it. The Ladies believed we were bringing them cottage cheese, which was often true. Once they had finished all the cheese, wearing the avian equivalent of a milk moustache, they would wipe their amber beaks on the ground—or, endearingly, on my pants—and return to bug hunting, narrating their explorations all the while in their lilting chicken language.

During most days, the Ladies were free to wander the property, whose boundaries they instantly intuited (and, unlike Christopher, respected). They did not cross the street. They did not hop over the stone wall to the yard next door—even though that house was vacant. But during Operation Pig Palace, they restricted their travels largely to the area directly beneath Howard and his dad's feet. The Ladies were fascinated by the shiny nails and liked to peck at them, and they seemed transfixed by the men's tools, perhaps imagining the point of the project was to unearth more and larger worms than they were scratching up with only their feet. And not only were the chickens clearly observing the building project; they also seemed to be discussing it, querying and clucking with approval. Their interest was so appealing that Howard's dad—previously not the sort of person you'd expect to find talking to a chicken—began to address them directly. “Excuse me,” he would say in a gentlemanly, respectful voice as he bent his six-foot frame to lift a board on which a chicken was standing. “Pardon me,” he would murmur before he put his foot down where a couple of hens pecked and puttered. Soon he found himself helping Howard to erect a Chicken Chalet for them in addition to the Pig Palace.

By the time Howard's parents left, the Pig Palace was complete, and the Chicken Chalet nearly so. “It was a unique experience,” Howard's dad said of the building project, with a big smile. Admittedly, the pay wasn't great—scrambled eggs, vegetarian lasagna, and apple pie—but at least the hens were more consistently cheerful and encouraging than had been his supervisors at Sperry. Working on government contracts, he said, he had certainly toiled on pork-barrel projects before—but this was his first for an actual pig.

“I
S YOUR PIG SMART?” PEOPLE WOULD ASK US.

“He's smarter than we are,” Howard and I would readily admit. “He's figured out how to get a staff of two college-educated people working for him full time and for free.”

Even away from home, our servitude continued. We were always working the slops circuit.

Sure, we kept a sack of pig and sow pellets around, and Chris liked this fine. But pigs, like people, relish variety. And like our thrifty Yankee neighbors, we welcomed the idea of feeding our pig good food that otherwise would be thrown away. Unlike George and Mary, we didn't have enough pigs to consume truckloads of expired Twinkies from a manufacturer, or an entire elementary school's worth of discarded macaroni and cheese. But there were other places to score slops, and these we ambitiously mined.

One site was the post office. Our silver-haired, blue-eyed postmistress, Pat Soucy, was an avid gardener and talented cook. When she had accumulated enough watermelon and cantaloupe rinds, broccoli stalks, and potato peelings, she'd bring them to work in a bucket, and Howard would pick it up when he drove the mile into town for the day's mail. Sometimes, on fine, warm days, Pat would come along with the slops on her lunch break. She'd eat with us at our picnic table under the big silver maple, while Chris ate his lunch on the Pig Plateau.

Then there were parties. I used to dread them. I could never think of anything appropriate to say. My innate idea of a great conversation starter is something like “A blue whale's tongue weighs as much as an elephant!” This opener often causes strangers to move away. Another party strategy that I've found doesn't work is staring at the floor. At one reception I had to attend because I was getting an award, I stared at the floor so intently that other people thought I had dropped something and offered to help me look for it.

But now—thanks to Chris—I had a mission at parties. Finally, I had something to talk about.

I didn't even have to bring it up. Often, when we met new people, our hostess would introduce us: “And this is Sy and Howard. They have a pig.” The questions would naturally follow:

“What kind of pig is he?” (There are more than three hundred different pig breeds from around the world, from the fat Poland China developed in Ohio to the long-bodied Yorkshire from England. From New Zealand breeders come the small, docile Kune-Kunes, with cute dewlaps hanging from the lower jaw. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire came the fleecy-coated Swallow-Bellied Mangalitsa, bred for meat suited to Hungarian salami. But as for Chris, Howard would answer confidently, “Hampshire Hill hog,” which is not actually a breed, but was Howard's shorthand for describing George's pigs, swine of mixed parentage, bred for sweetness of spirit.)

“How much does he weigh?” (We would give the latest tally.)

“Does he live in the house?” (“No, but if you saw the inside of the house you might think so.”)

And always, the question we waited for: “What does he eat?” (“As much as he possibly can.”)

Here we began our subtle pitch. We explained what Christopher liked and didn't like. For some reason, he eschewed all members of the onion family, including scallions, leeks, and shallots. He wouldn't eat citrus fruit. And we didn't let him eat meat.

Pigs don't need meat. Although in the wild, pigs will happily devour any carcass or any tasty, helpless animal they come across, they don't usually hunt on their own. Their teeth—blade-shaped incisors and grinding molars, like ours—show that pigs, like us, are true omnivores and can live long, healthy lives fueled by vegetables, fruits, grain, nuts, beans, and roots, just like we can. Because I don't buy meat, Howard and I never had meat leftovers, of course. But I also asked folks who donated garbage to weed out the meat.

Why? The answer was simple: pig manure. (This might not seem like a good topic of conversation for a dinner party, but we live in New Hampshire.) Meat, I would explain to my fascinated audience, makes pig manure smell bad. A vegetarian pig's manure has a nice earthy smell to it, as well as a pleasant shape and texture, rather like a small loaf of braided bread. But add meat to the diet, and it stinks, gets all sticky, and falls through the tines of the pitchfork. It also ruins the compost pile. Do you add dog droppings to the tomato patch in the summer? Of course not. But a vegetarian pig's manure is garden gold.