The Good Good Pig Read Online Free

Every night, before his promotion, we had a ritual: I would ride on his shoulders as he walked the green border of the oriental rug, pretending I was a circus girl and he was a giant gorilla walking a tightrope over a pit of snakes. He was teaching me to be brave, to fear nothing, to hunger for wild experiences. We were practicing, I believed, for adventures we would one day have together. We would explore the world—Africa, where the real gorillas were, and Australia, where strange and alluring pouched mammals such as kangaroos and koalas lived. But first, I would need to grow up, and he would need to trade the eagles on his shoulders for a brigadier’s stars. So each night, before bed, I would seize the moon and the stars from the sky and put them in the pocket of my father’s uniform, and kiss him goodnight.

    F INDING C HRISTOPHER ALIVE THAT MORNING REMINDED ME OF the comforting fact that the worst thing doesn’t
always
happen. Standing shakily, it was clear he was not a healthy pig. He was very skinny. His tail didn’t curl, but drooped like a dried-up umbilical cord. But he was stronger. He didn’t even seem lonely. Normally, wild pigs are gregarious creatures, living in groups called sounders of about twenty animals (though sometimes more than a hundred). Much like elephants, two or more pig families, composed of mothers and their children, may travel, play, feed, and rest together, the sounders staying stable until the mating season (when previously solitary males fight for females, mate, and then, mercifully, leave). On farms, pigs also enjoy the company of their fellows. Pig communities are called drifts—a word I always loved, for it evokes a group of animals moving as one, drifting like a cloud of pigdom over the landscape. Pigs snuggle together when they sleep, and if baby pigs are anxious, they’ll stick together so tightly that commercial hog farmers call the phenomenon “squealing super-glue.”
    But for Christopher, it must have been a luxury to spend the night alone. With a spacious, clean, dry pen all to himself, he was unencumbered by the squeal and sprawl of pushy, bigger siblings who always ate all the food. And he probably didn’t miss his mother, either—after all, if he complained, there was always the danger she’d bite him in half. It was probably a relief to have escaped from his pig family.
    That very first morning, Christopher Hogwood seemed to understand that things had changed for the better. His new family must have looked odd to him—vertical, hairless, and eight nipples short of the proper quota, among other inadequacies. This would require some accommodation, but he seemed game. Calm but curious, he looked at me with his humanlike brown eyes as if to say, “OK—
now
what?”
    I was wondering the same thing. But now it seemed a far more hopeful question.

    I WAS BURSTING TO TELL MY FATHER ABOUT C HRISTOPHER . M Y mother had stoically put up with all the creatures I’d had as a child—scaly, biting lizards who would escape while my father was at work and I was at school, parakeets who would perch on the chandelier and splatter droppings on the mahogany dining room table, turtles she’d find swimming with me in my bathwater—but my father truly loved animals. News of our little pig might have taken his mind off his illness.
    But I kept Christopher Hogwood a secret. There was no reason I could think of that my father wouldn’t like the pig. But if he hadn’t approved of this creature I so tenderly adored, it would have broken my heart—as had happened with my marriage.
    I had loved Howard all through college, though I didn’t realize it. We had worked together on Syracuse University’s daily newspaper, the
Daily Orange.
When Howard was managing editor, he had hired me as an assistant, and later we worked side by side editing the op-ed and editorial pages for eight hours a day, five days a week,