Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (3 page)

“I bet there's not a pig in there, either,” I said. “I bet he ate half of them — in just a few days. You know, he stuffed himself! And then he sold the rest. He's been putting some money away, for precisely this occasion.”

“For
what
occasion?” some skeptic asked me. “If Piggy isn't in there, where is he?”

“If he's been out all night,” another said, “then he's
frozen
to death.”

“He's in Florida,” I said. “He's retired.” I said it just that simply — I said it as if it were a
fact.
“Look around you!” I shouted to them. “What's he been spending his money on? He's saved a bundle. He set fire to his own place,” I said, “just to give us a hard time. Think of the hard time we gave
him
,” I said, and I could see everyone thinking about that; that was, at least, the truth. A little truth never hurt a story. “Well,” I concluded. “He's paid us back — that's clear. He's kept us standing around all night.”

This made us Front Street children thoughtful, and in that thoughtful moment I started my first act of revision; I tried to make the story better, and more believable. It was essential to rescue Piggy Sneed, of course, but what would a man who couldn't talk do in
Florida?
I imagined they had tougher zoning laws than we had in New Hampshire — especially regarding pigs.

“You know,” I said, “I bet he
could
talk — all the time. He's probably
European
,” I decided. “I mean, what kind of name is
Sneed?
And he first appeared here around the war, didn't he? Whatever his native language is, anyway, I bet he speaks it pretty well. He just never learned
ours.
Somehow, pigs were easier. Maybe
friendlier
,” I added, thinking of us all. “And now he's saved up enough to go home. That's where he is!” I said. “Not Florida — he's gone back to
Europe!”

“Atta boy, Piggy,” someone cheered.

“Look out, Europe,” someone said, facetiously.

Enviously, we imagined how Piggy Sneed had gotten “out” — how he'd escaped the harrowing small-town loneliness (and fantasies) that threatened us all. But when the men came back, I was confronted with the general public's dubious regard for fiction.

“Irving thinks Piggy Sneed is in Europe,” one of the Front Street boys told the captain.

“He first appeared here around the war, didn't he, sir?” I asked the captain, who was staring at me as if I were the first
body
to be recovered from this fire.

“Piggy Sneed was
born
here, Irving,” the captain told me. “His mother was a half-wit; she got hit by a car going the wrong way around the bandstand. Piggy was born on Water Street,” the captain told us. Water Street, I knew perfectly well, ran into Front Street — quite close to home.

So, I thought, Piggy was in Florida, after all. In stories, you must make the best thing that
can
happen happen (or the worst, if that is your aim), but it still has to ring true.

When the coals were cool enough to walk on, the men started looking for him; discovery was a job for the men — it being more interesting than waiting, which was boys' work.

After a while, the captain called me over to him. “Irving,” he said. “Since you think Piggy Sneed is in Europe, then you won't mind taking whatever
this
is out of here.”

It required little effort, the removal of this shrunken cinder of a man; I doused down a tarp and dragged the body, which was extraordinarily light, onto the tarp with first the long and then the short gaff. We found all 18 of his pigs, too. But even today I can imagine him more vividly in Florida than I can imagine him existing in that impossibly small shape of charcoal I extricated from the ashes.

Of course I told my grandmother the
plain
truth, just the boring facts. “Piggy Sneed died in that fire last night, Nana,” I told her.

“Poor Mr. Sneed,” she said. With great wonder, and sympathy, she added: “What awful circumstances forced him to live such a savage life!”

What I would realize, later, is that the writer's business is
both
to imagine the possible rescue of Piggy Sneed
and
to set the fire that will trap him. It was
much
later — but before my grandmother was moved to the old people's home, when she still remembered who Piggy Sneed was — when Grandmother asked me, “Why, in heaven's name, have you become a
writer?”

I was “her boy,” as I've told you, and she was sincerely worried about me. Perhaps being an English Literature major had convinced her that being a writer was a lawless and destructive thing to be. And so I told her everything about the night of the fire, about how I imagined that if I could have invented well enough — if I could have made up something truthful enough — I could have (in some sense) saved Piggy Sneed. At least saved him for another fire — of my own making.

Well, my grandmother is a Yankee —
and
Wellesley's oldest living English Literature major. Fancy answers, especially of an aesthetic nature, are not for her. Her late husband — my grandfather — was in the shoe business; he made things people really needed: practical protection for their feet. Even so, I insisted to Grandmother that her kindness to Piggy Sneed had not been overlooked by me — and that this, in combination with the helplessness of Piggy Sneed's special human condition,
and
the night of the fire, which had introduced me to the possible power of my own imagination … and so forth. My grandmother cut me off.

With more pity than vexation, she patted my hand, she shook her head. “Johnny,
dear
,” she said. “You surely could have saved yourself a lot of
bother
, if you'd only treated Mr. Sneed with a little human decency when he was alive.”

Failing that, I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed —
and
trying to save him — again and again; forever.

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1982)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

My grandmother, Helen Bates Winslow, died in Exeter, New Hampshire, only a few days short of her 100th birthday and not long after this memoir was originally published in
The New York Times Book Review
(August 22, 1982). As you may know, the
Today
show routinely wishes Happy Birthday to every 100-year-old in the United States — provided that the
Today
show knows about it. At my mother's request, I had alerted the
Today
show; they knew that my grandmother's 100th birthday was pending, when — quietly, and almost purposefully before the great event — my grandmother died. I suspect that she had been dreading such a public announcement; she probably believed that her 100th birthday was nobody's business but her own.

Later, in my novel
A Prayer for Owen Meany
(1989), I gave these particulars to a fictional grandmother, Harriet Wheelwright; in that story, Mrs. Wheelwright would have been 100 years old on Halloween. In several interviews I have admitted that Harriet Wheelwright is the most autobiographical character in any of my fiction, and that the details of Mrs. Wheelwright's death are as close as I could come to imagining the death of my grandmother, Mrs. Winslow. I see now that “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed” was the beginning of
A Prayer for Owen Meany
, and that the description of Harriet Wheelwright's death in that novel is an alternative ending to the memoir about my grandmother. Therefore, it seems only fitting that I should attach the description here.

In my prep-school days, at Exeter, Creative Writing wasn't taught — the essay was all-important there — but in my years at the academy I nevertheless wrote more short stories than anything else; I showed them (out of class) to George Bennett, my best friend's father. The late Mr. Bennett was then Chairman of the English Department; he was my first critic and en-courager — I needed his help. Because I failed both Latin and math, I was required to remain at the academy for an unprecedented fifth year; yet I qualified for a course called English 4W — the “W” stood for Writing of the kind I wanted to do — and in this selective gathering I was urged to be Creative, which I rarely managed to be.

In my memory, which is subject to doubt, the star author and most outspoken critic in English 4W was my wrestling teammate Chuck Krulak, who was also known as “Brute” and who would become General Charles C. Krulak — the Commandant of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No less a presence, and as sarcastic a critic as the future General Krulak, was my classmate in English 5, the future writer G. W. S. Trow; he was just plain George then, but he was as sharp as a ferret — I feared his bite. It was only recently, when I was speaking with George, that he surprised me by saying he'd been deeply unhappy at Exeter; George had always struck me as being too confident to be unhappy — whereas my own state of mind at the time was one of perpetual embarrassment.

I could never have qualified for Exeter through normal admissions procedures; I was a weak student— as it turned out, I was dyslexic, but no one knew this at the time. Nevertheless, I was automatically admitted to the academy in the category of faculty child. My father taught in the History Department; he'd majored in Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard — he was the first to teach Russian History at Exeter. I initiated a heightened level of intrafamily awkwardness by enrolling in his Russian History course. Dad rewarded me with a C+.

To say that Exeter was hard for me is an understatement. I was the only student in my Genetics class who failed to control his fruit-fly experiment. The red eyes and the white eyes were interbreeding so rapidly that I lost track of the generations; I attempted to dispose of the evidence in the drinking fountain outside the lab — not knowing that fruit flies could live (and breed) for days in the water pipes. When the unusable drinking fountain was declared “contaminated” — it was literally crawling with wet fruit flies — I crawled forth and made my confession.

I was forgiven by Mr. Mayo-Smith, the biologist who taught Genetics, because I was the only townie (a resident of Exeter) in any of his classes who owned a gun; the biologist needed me — more specifically, he needed my gun. Boarding students, quite understandably, were not allowed firearms. But as a New Hampshire native — “Live Free or Die,” as the license plates say — I had an arsenal of weapons at my disposal; the biologist used me as the marksman who provided his Introductory Biology class with pigeons. I used to shoot them off the roof of the biologist's barn. Fortunately, Mr. Mayo-Smith lived some distance from town.

Yet even in my capacity as Mr. Mayo-Smith's marksman, I was a failure. He wanted the pigeons killed immediately after they'd eaten; that way the students who dissected them could examine the food contained in their crops. And so I allowed the pigeons to feed in the biologist's cornfield. When I flushed them from the field, they were so stupid: they always flew to the roof of his barn. It was a slate roof; when I picked them off—I used a 4X scope and a .22 long-rifle bullet, being careful not to shoot them in their crops — they slid down one side of the roof or the other. One day, I shot a hole in the roof; after that, Mr. Mayo-Smith never let me forget how his barn leaked. The fruit flies in the drinking fountain were the school's problem, but I had shot the biologist's very own barn — “Personal property, and all that that entails,” as my father was fond of saying in Russian History.