Free The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery Page B

and joy? Never could you find anyone more responsive to caresses. His bliss was contagious.
    â€œGood, good pig,” we would croon to our prone beast as we rubbed him, loving as a lullaby. “Good, good pig. Good big pig. Fine, fine swine. Good, good, gooood.” He would grunt back to us in exactly the same rhythm, slowing down as he lolled toward slumber.
    Belly rubs were usually the grand finale to all of Christopher’s public eating performances. And, of course, this is what we did after Christopher finished Liz and Lorna’s birthday watermelon.
    But first, Howard took a photo to commemorate the event. We lined up to face the camera in ascending seniority: Christopher, age one; me, thirty-three; Liz, sixty; Lorna, ninety-three. “We’re all thirty years apart,” Liz observed. “Yes, here we are,” said Lorna, “four generations.” It felt for all the world like a family photo. Except that only two of us were genetically related, and one of us had a flexible nose disk and a hairy tail.

C HAPTER 5
    A Blended Family
    C HURCH PROVED ANOTHER VALUABLE VENUE FOR SOLICITING SLOPS.
    The minister was in on our scheme. “This is Sy Montgomery,” he’d introduce me to new members and visitors in hopes of securing edible garbage. “She lives with a pig. And I’m not talking about her husband.”
    We did get some takers that way, but a more reliable source of slops was the minister himself. Graham and his wife, Maggie, would come over whenever they had a compost buildup. Maggie adored Christopher and kept a photo of him as a piglet on the window sill above the kitchen sink in the parsonage. That first summer we spent with Chris, Maggie had started feeling sick from time to time, but she always felt better around Christopher. And I always felt better around Maggie and Graham.
    They were a little older than us, and both of them were scholars. Maggie had once been the dean of a women’s college (though when Graham was called to our congregation she had to switch to waitressing at the local inn’s restaurant). Graham had studied geology before switching to theology. Both of them read widely and thought deeply. Our discussions were always lively and sometimes profound—and often further stimulated by the edifying experience of watching a pig eat.
    â€œOne of the first things Jesus did was to drive demons out of a person and cast them into swine,” Maggie remarked one day as Christopher chewed an overgrown zucchini she had brought from her garden. “I always thought that was no fair.”
    â€œWell, Jesus doesn’t go around just being a nice guy,” Graham said. “He’s an exorcist. We forget this today. But the real problem with humans is, we’re possessed with destructive spirits. So Jesus casts them into a herd of swine and sends them over a cliff.”
    â€œBut what did the pigs do wrong?” I asked. “They were innocent bystanders. What did Jesus have against them?”
    â€œJesus probably hated pigs,” Graham said.
    I was stunned.
    â€œThis is a real challenge to my faith, Graham!”
    The minister laughed. In his sermons, he often stressed the value of understanding the Bible in its historical and cultural context. Jesus, he pointed out, was, after all, a Jew living in Israel under Roman rule—a time, place, and culture where swine were considered vile, filthy animals.
    Why this prejudice against pigs?
    It could have simply been practical. Maggie (a superb cook, with whom I often swapped recipes) suggested that possibly the taboo against pork was a divinely inspired health ordinance. Eating undercooked pork carries the threat of trichinosis. The Koran, too, forbids the eating of pork, possibly for the same reason. (But actually you can get trichinosis from any insufficiently cooked meat.)
    It could have been ecological. In
The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig,
the controversial anthropologist