Properly Pigheaded
Blaze is, in every way I know of, a satisfactory--which is to say a playful and pigheaded--pig. The poet Fred Lape says, “Nothing can make a pig look sad; his built wrong for it.” The poem goes on to say that “the soil’s good humor runs inside his veins” and “Maybe the earth herself had a good belly laugh / the era that she first gave birth to pigs.” I happen to know this isn’t so. Pigs can look ill-tempered, depressed and tired; they can suffer and show it. But satisfactory pigheadedness entails a pig’s living up to the way the eyes and mouth form a grin, and the way the nose wrinkles, as with laughter, with every move the pig makes. This Blaze does. It isn’t Blaze that is unsatisfactory, it’s civilization.
Caleb Trainer had always wanted a pet, but he’s allergic to every form of dander that nature and man have come up with. Pigs, however, aren’t allergenic. And there was a book--there is almost always a book before there is a pig--that revealed to Caleb the true glory of the nature of pigs. The reading experience, said Bertie Lewis, was “visionary, don’t you see, for Caleb.” Caleb realized his vision, without telling Bertie, who said that the first she knew of it was the day when there was suddenly a burlap sack hopping around the kitchen floor.
The difficulty with the civilized world is that it is the wrong size for pigs, although it’s about right for piglets. Caleb had been looking for a runt and found one. The farmer who sold it to him responded to Caleb’s worry about the potential size of Blaze by suggesting that a shot of Southern Comfort spread over his evening meal might stunt his growth. This didn’t work. Bertie said: “We gave that up in two or three weeks. They grow a bit every day, and you notice this right off.”
Caleb said: “He’s playful and, you know, pigheaded. When he found our hardwood floors were a problem, he learned to work up a good speed, set himself, and ski on them.
“Also, he likes to take your shoes off and run away with them. After a while, he was 2 years old, and getting pretty big.”
This changed things because “he became uncomfortable about being in the house. One day, he stood up under the kitchen table, and it came off the floor, and there were dishes broken and noise and clatter. After that, he felt that the house wasn’t fit for him.”
I queried Caleb on this point, because the usual result of such a situation is for the humans to be uncomfortable, not the pig. I had also learned that it amused Blaze, when Bertie and Caleb weren’t at home, to come into the house and rummage through drawers and things, leaving muddy hoof prints and nose prints here and there. This can be hard on a marriage, as in the case of the time Caleb accused Bertie of coming into the house with muddy shoes. A friend of mine said that on the farm you don’t have to do any philosophy to figure out which are the animals and which are the humans. You don’t go by behavior--the humans are the ones who live in a house and don’t outgrow it.
But Caleb is no farmer. Caleb explained that, “Of course, by now he was big enough to open gates and doors and could come and go at will, but he just stopped coming inside.”
Then Blaze went to live with Jeryl Cleary, a friend and neighbor of Caleb and Bertie’s in Desert Hot Springs. Caleb and Bertie moved Blaze because he was lonesome. They worked all day, they had no other animals because of the allergies, and Blaze liked to play with dogs. Cleary has quite a collection of goats, horses, cats, dogs, and so on, and Blaze was welcome. Blaze fits fine at Jeryl’s place even now that he is full- grown--about 500 pounds, the size of a razorback.
Circumstances in the form of worries about Bertie’s career in sculpture eventually took the two of them to San Francisco, where they now live. This may sound like the familiar story of an animal’s being abandoned when ambition interferes. I wouldn’t be telling you this tale if that were the case.
The way I know it’s not the case is the same way you know: Just look at Blaze. He is still, at 8 years old, pig-headed and smiling proof that the soil’s good humor runs in his veins.
