The Good Good Pig

by Sy Montgomery

  But we never did.

  That Wednesday, when I phoned my mother, as I’d been doing daily since I learned of the cancer, she didn’t answer. I got the home nurse, who said they were going to the doctor. Fifteen minutes later, I phoned the doctor, who said they were going to the hospital. Next I phoned the hospital, and they said she was going to die.

  I booked the next flight to D.C. I asked Liz to drive me to the airport. I was in the air at seven, at my mother’s bedside by ten.

  She was on morphine for the pain, but still clear-minded. After about half an hour, she insisted I go back to the house and go to sleep. I was afraid I was keeping her up, draining her energy. I checked with the nurses. “She’ll be fine for the night,” they said.

  But that prediction did not hold true of things back home.

  The phone rang at 4 a.m. It was Howard. “Tess is having a stroke!” he said. She had soiled herself, fallen over, vomited, and now couldn’t stand. She was panting and agitated. “What should I do?”

  I’D BEEN PLAGUED BY NIGHTMARES LIKE THIS WHILE RESEARCHINGSearch for the Golden Moon Bear in Southeast Asia. I’d dream Tess or Chris was sick and I couldn’t get to them, and I would wake up screaming.

  Gary assured me there was a physical cause for my nightmares. Vivid dreams and even hallucinations were known side effects of the antimalarial drug we were taking. But I thought the real reason was one of the common ailments that shamans in this region are called upon to treat: a dangerous condition known as soul wandering.

  According to the hill tribes of northern Thailand—many of them migrants and refugees from another land—the soul is prone to wander, easily enticed away, and apt to flee in fear. Lost souls can fall prey to malevolent spirits, weretigers, and vampires. So the different hill tribes have devised many ways to recapture the wandering or lost soul, and shamans are specially trained in the art of soul calling. The Lahu and Hmong say that even a newborn’s soul might flee from loud noises. For this reason, mothers give birth in utter silence, and then embroider their babies’ clothes with soul-restraining designs: spiderwebs are one favorite, pigpens another.

  Loud noises weren’t my problem—although at one point, when we had visited Cambodia, Gary and I did hear a land mine explode from an area where we had just been walking, and it gave us a start. My soul was deeply disturbed by the incongruence of an Edenic-looking tropical rain forest beset with unexploded ordnance, banditry, insurgency, and a sickening trade using wild animals’ body parts for medicinal elixirs and tonics. Everywhere, on our trail to scientific discovery, we found horror and sorrow. In Cambodia, 1 in 236 people are amputees. In Laos, we were constantly warned against the dangers of unexploded ordnance from a war in which more bombs were rained on that small country than on Germany in World War II. In Thailand, we even met an elephant who was an amputee. She had stepped on a land mine while her mahout was using her for illegal logging in Burma. My dreams, I thought, were evidence that my soul was desperately, though unsuccessfully, trying to escape the nightmares that these people and animals live daily.

  When we visited a Lahu village in northern Thailand, only Gary and I knew about the dreams I’d been having, and yet the shaman seemed to sense them. He offered to perform a healing ceremony. While we sat on woven mats on the floor of the stilt house where he lived, he fetched a bowl of rice, a set of candles, some paper, and a ball of string. He did the same thing to both of us in turn. Holding a thread taut, he wiped one of our palms with it thrice before circling one wrist with it five times, closing the circle firmly with knots.

  He was tying our souls to our bodies.

  “You travel around, around everywhere,” the shaman said to me through our translator, “but in the end, you will come back. Your spirit will always come back.”

  A calm settled over me at that moment as I felt my soul restored. I realized I was meant to witness both suffering and hope on this journey—and that the strength I was given to do so was derived from a soul firmly bound to home.

  AT FOUR THAT MORNING, WITH MY MOTHER ON HER DEATHBED and Tess helpless in New Hampshire, I didn’t think things could get worse. My heart was torn in two. There are people who would be appalled at the thought of a daughter fearing for the life of a dog in the face of the death of her own mother. But as I sat by my mother’s side the next few days in the hospital, my thoughts were as much with Tess as with my mother.

  How could this be? Leaving aside the issue of species, I had known Tess for only twelve years. I had known my mother for forty-five. My mother had given me my life. But I had not chosen the life she had wanted for me—and this was a sin she found very difficult to forgive. Early in life, my mother had learned to make sure she got what she wanted, and it worked: the daughter of an iceman and a postmistress from dusty Lexa went to college, learned to fly a plane, landed a glamorous job in Washington, and married a dashing war hero. I had been the first big disappointment of her life. Though she loved me, her love was conditional—and for most of my life, I met very few of her conditions.

  But I was Tess’s person. We were a unit. We were family. Because I loved her with almost drunken abandon, and because she loved me so completely and deeply, I believed I might love Tess back to life. I knew I could not do this for my mother. Her person was my father, and he had already passed on to a place she was eager to go. Yet I knew at that moment where I needed to be: in the hospital in Virginia, by my mother’s side, where perhaps there was still hope of another kind of healing.

  MY MOTHER WAS TIRED, BUT GLAD FOR COMPANY THAT NEXT DAY. I slipped out only when other visitors came to see her. I was deeply moved to see how many there were: women from the neighborhood, friends from church, old Army friends, bridge players, members of the Villamay Ladies’ Club, women from the sewing circle. At these times I would visit the hall pay phone and call Chuck to check on Tess.

  Chuck told me Tess had not had a stroke. Her disorder was called canine peripheral vestibular syndrome. No one knows what causes it, but for whatever reason, the animal is seized with a vertigo so powerful it cannot stand, walk, or eat, because its world is spinning—sometimes for weeks. The trick, Chuck said, was to find a way to get food into her and to keep her from succumbing to some other disease while the vestibular problem dissipated—or her brilliant border collie brain found a way to compensate.

  The timing could not have been worse. Howard had to fly to Pittsburgh that afternoon to give a speech on Friday. Because of Tess’s separation anxiety, for the last twelve years we’d made sure she never spent a single night apart from at least one of us except at Evelyn’s, where she had lived before coming to us. We had always been with her for every procedure at the vet’s, never leaving her for a minute. Now she would have to endure the scariest night of her life alone, locked in a cage in a veterinary hospital, the world swirling inexplicably around her.

  Tess was terrified, but my mother was neither sad nor frightened. Dying did not bother her at all. We had spoken of this a little in the weeks before. For her, death was the portal to my father. She was eager to see him in heaven. Only one thing bothered her: she was worried, incredibly, that my father might not be there.

  “Of course he is!” I cried, appalled. Who deserved heaven if not my father? “If my father’s not there,” I said, “heaven is full of idiots, and I’m not going.”

  My outburst did not calm my mother. Her worry was this: although my father’s religion was listed on his dog tags as Roman Catholic, she was not sure, she told me, that he really believed in Jesus. Heaven, she feared, excluded those who did not—condemning my Hindu friends in West Bengal, my Buddhist friends in Southeast Asia, most of my scientific colleagues (who were atheist or agnostic), Liz (a believer in Gaia), Gretchen (an animist), Selinda (an atheist), my in-laws, and my husband.

  At that moment I deeply regretted ever having told my mother about a phone call I had received before she got sick. A cousin I’d never known I had—a daughter of my father’s vanished brother, who had died before my birth—
had read a review of one of my books and found my phone number on the Internet. At first I was unsure that we were related at all. But as she told me details of my father’s family history, I knew everything she said was true—as well as wildly different from what I had earlier been told.

  My father’s ancestry was not Scottish and English, as I had believed. My father’s grandfather, an opera star, was from Italy. His name had been Montegriffo. His son, my grandfather, born in this country with blond hair and blue eyes, had changed it to Montgomery. Brilliant, ambitious, and blessed with total auditory recall, when he graduated from law school my grandfather had been courted by many law firms. But Italians were not then slated to become lawyers in America. What did Italians do? I remembered a little ditty my father would sometimes utter in my childhood, along with snippets of Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll: “Guinea, Guinea goo / Shine my shoe.” I didn’t realize until many years later that guinea was slang for Italian, nor that this little rhyme described why my brilliant grandfather kept his heritage—and my father’s—hidden for the rest of their lives.

  My father’s mother was also a lawyer—a fact that I had been proud of growing up. That was all I had known of her, that and the single six-inch-tall photo that sat in its oval golden frame on a desk in a spare bedroom. She was an elegant and pretty brunette, wearing pearls and lace and a feathered hat. I had always been told her name was Augusta Black. Her name, my cousin told me, was, in fact, Augusta Schwartz. I recognized the word: it was Yiddish for “black.” My cousin told me that my grandmother’s parents had emigrated to the United States from Austria, fleeing religious persecution. She was Jewish. Her law degree had been financed by B’nai B’rith. Of course when she married my grandfather, she had acquired his rewritten, Americanized name, and all outward evidence of her heritage disappeared. But that didn’t change Jewish law—nor the tradition that any children born to a Jewish mother, no matter who the father, are Jewish, too.

  When I had told my mother these things, there had been a long silence. I realized I never should have mentioned this. It was miracle enough that my mother and I could love each other at all, after everything that had happened; nothing would ever make her accept my husband. I certainly did not wish to undermine her love of hers. My mother confirmed that yes, the woman who had called me was indeed my cousin—but she must have gotten her story wrong. She changed the subject, and we never brought it up again.

  Only after my mother’s death did I learn, from an old family friend in whom my father had once confided, how fiercely my father had guarded his secret: while my father lived, my mother had never known that her husband, like mine, was Jewish.

  THE DOCTORS WERE FRANK: THERE WAS NOTHING THEY COULD DO for my mother but turn up the morphine. So I slept beside her each night, holding her hand. Once she brought my hand to her mouth and kissed it. After this, she no longer spoke. She no longer needed to say anything. I spoke very little: “I love you, Mother. I’m here, Mother.” That was all. And it was enough.

  During those days, I came to know some of the eclectic friends who had peopled her weekly letters, folks I had only met briefly. Of course I already knew some friends from when I’d lived in Virginia in junior high: the neighbors next door, whose son and daughter I used to babysit for twenty-five cents an hour. The folks whose backyard abutted ours, whose daughter had shown me the local creek and how to find box turtles there. My mother also had many friends from the military, especially from the Army’s Transportation Corps. But in the years since my father died, my mother had made new, young friends as well: Scott Marchard, originally from my mother’s home state of Arkansas, a dapper florist in his forties with a single earring, sat next to my mother in church. In the hospital, the nurses assumed he was her son. Silver Crossman, a fit, witty, single woman a little older than me, with a beloved puppy named Summer. For years, my mother had called Silver “daughter number two.” In her isolated widowhood, my mother, like me, had surrounded herself with an alternative family.

  Meanwhile, when I was in Virginia, my alternative family did for me what relatives are supposed to do: they took care of my loved ones in my absence. When Howard was in Pittsburgh, Gretchen and Liz visited Tess in the animal hospital. Liz went to the house first and picked up my barn coat. She placed it beside Tess in her hospital cage so she could inhale my scent. Immediately, Liz told me, Tess’s ears relaxed, her face assumed a peaceful expression, she uttered a sigh, and she shut her eyes.

  Jarvis and Bobbie and our new tenant looked after Christopher and the hens. And when Howard came back to find a March thaw flooding the chicken coop with snowmelt, Selinda’s husband, Ken, came with a sump pump—Howard couldn’t leave Tess alone in the house long enough to buy one. To tempt Tess to eat, Selinda brought her homemade meatballs; Gretchen brought ground raw venison.

  Back in the hospital room, as my mother’s life faded, her friends came and went: The pastors from the Methodist church. A retired WAVE nurse from Bethesda—she had met my father long before he knew my mother, when he was testifying at the war crimes trials in Japan. On Sunday morning, Silver and Scott came by. And that was when she died—surrounded by friends, free of pain and fear. I was holding her hand.

  EACH CHRISTMAS SINCE MY FATHER DIED, MY MOTHER USED TO invite me to come “home” for the holiday in Virginia. Of course she never invited Howard. So I never came.

  Christmas meant nothing to Howard, but it was important to me. We had a holiday ritual. Chris would have a special breakfast. I’d make hot popcorn for the hens. Tess would come with us as we drove to our friends’ houses to exchange gifts and visit: sometimes to Liz and Steve’s, sometimes to Eleanor’s, sometimes to Gretchen’s. Always, though, I wanted to begin Christmas Day much as Jesus had—in a barn.

  But the Christmas after my mother died was different.

  That morning, after I’d given Hogwood his holiday slops, I was bringing the Ladies a bowl of hot popcorn when I found a hen dead on the coop floor. Her head was wedged down a hole in a corner. Whoever had killed her had dug its way in. I bent over to pick her up by her feet—and found that someone else had a hold of the other end of the chicken!

  I pulled her carcass free. And then, out of the hole in the corner popped a tiny, pure white head. It stared at me with fearless black eyes. It was an ermine.

  Ermine is the name by which we call both of our tiny New Hampshire weasel species when they’re dressed in their white winter coats. I had never seen one before. They are only a few inches long, and exactly the color of snow.

  Without backing down, the ermine looked at me, square in the eye, for perhaps thirty seconds. I had never seen a gaze so exquisitely fierce, so intense, so filled with the moment. Ermines may weigh as little as five ounces, less than a handful of coins, yet they are as fearless as God. They stop at nothing to capture their prey: they snake down tunnels, they hunt beneath the snow, they will even leap into the air to catch birds as they take flight. With their tiny hearts pounding 360 times a minute, ermines must eat five to ten meals a day. They are fierce because they have to be. This is part of what makes ermines what they are. Ferocity is their dharma—as pure, and as perfect, as their dazzling white winter coat.

  The ermine had just killed someone I loved. Yet I could not have felt more amazed, or more blessed, if an angel had materialized in front of me.

  My sorrow vanished. Holding the still-warm body of my hen in my arms, I felt, in that moment, the lightness of a heart relieved of the burden of anger—and the freedom that comes with forgiveness.

  CHAPTER 12

  Coming Back to Life

  IN YOUNGER DAYS, AFTER WE’D CLOSE CHRIS IN FOR THE EVENING, right before we would go upstairs to bed, Tess, Howard, and I would always play a final round of Frisbee in the yard. On full-moon nights, Tess had looked so beautiful: her sleek black and white form flying over the field like a spirit, leaping to catch the toy in her jaws, then racing back to us, gilded in moonlight.

  But she was even more beautiful on inky, moonless nig
hts, when we couldn’t see her at all. Of course, back then, Tess could see perfectly in the dark. The tapetum lucidum—the light-gathering reflector in the eye that makes dogs’ eyes glow when they catch the light at night—guided her through the blackness, the heritage of a predator who hunted both day and night. Humans, like pigs, lack such night vision. But we can enjoy the next best thing: the company of a dog.

  Howard and I would follow Tess into the night, listening to the jingle of her tags, down to where the lawn leveled out to the field. Then we would whisper: “Tess—go!” and toss the Frisbee into the darkness. A second or two later, we would hear the dramatic click of her teeth on the plastic and know Tess had leaped into the air and caught it. The scene was all the more beautiful for the fact it was invisible. It was our private little miracle: each time she brought us the Frisbee, she gave us the gift of navigating through the dark.

  With the events of March, we had left those days behind. Never again did Tess play Frisbee with us. It was weeks before she could even walk. She had the heart of a lion. The same way my dying father had struggled for that last, delicious breath of air, Tess—deaf, wobbly, and now nearly blind—had fought for a life she still found full of joy and meaning, rich with scent, full of tasty treats, and secure in the company of those she most loved.

  By the time the wood frog chorus swelled in April, Tess was strong enough to walk outside with us again. Now she would stay close by, following our heat and scent. I remembered the lost magic of her younger nights, how she’d leap through the dark to catch the unseen Frisbee. But then I realized she had not lost that gift; she had simply brought it back to us, like the Frisbee. Now it was our turn; now we would lead her through the darkness.