THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  She told Brenda of forced caresses; of being compelled to fondle Wesley’s sexual organ slimed with sexual discharges; of kissing him, and of his tongue’s trespasses on her twelve-year-old body; of his penetration, abrupt and merciless, while he held his hand over her mouth to prevent her outcry; of being locked, afterward, in the filthy smokehouse where the acts were done, nauseated, weeping, bereft.

  In telling Brenda these things, they became as real to Diana as if the same crimes were being committed on her flesh anew. She could feel each raw emotion as the child had felt it: her initial dismay, her mounting panic, the anguish of her actual violation, and the terrible despair that followed it. So real, so heart-wrenching, so painful, that by the time Diana fell silent, she had come to believe every word of it herself. She might have been lying (as, in a strict sense, she was), but these lies seemed, beneath the light of Brenda’s Tiffany lamp, more full of truth than the dry dust of old facts.

  Indeed, Diana had long since relegated those crumbly old artifacts to her mental attic, where, should she ever choose to sort through them, she might discover a few surprises among the brittle snapshots. Memories that were not so much “repressed,” in the sense Diana claimed for her memories of incest, as tucked away in a dark, cobwebby corner: not forgotten, but unvisited. Which, in practical terms, amounted to the same thing. Out of sight is out of mind.

  Did she feel anything like guilt in the matter of her father’s death? No, nor had she even dreamt, in her adult life, of his body hanging within the smokehouse, inverted, like the body of the Hanged Man on the tarot card, the blood flowing down from the crotch of his blue jeans and across the front of his flannel shirt, and beginning to form thin rivulets down his neck and across his cheeks. Her ears were deaf, now as then, to his choked voice, as it pronounced the single syllable of her name: “Di!” She might have said the same to him as she’d closed the smokehouse door.

  Those uglinesses were no part of the past Diana chose to remember. It is the survivors, after all, who write the history books. In effect, it had not happened and she had not seen it. But until that night at Brenda’s, Diana had not thought to paint over those deleted memories with images of her own invention. Even then it was not as though she’d thought to do it. It had happened to her, in the way that poems are said to happen to poets: by an inspiration, a kind of wind filling the sails of speech and sweeping her away.

  Cannot lies, like poems, represent a kind of higher truth? It was one of the ancient Fathers of the Church who said that he believed because the thing he believed was impossible. Otherwise faith would be nothing special. One doesn’t need faith to believe in the grime in the sink. But to look up into the mirror, and smile, and see there the beauty invisible to everyone else and to believe in the ultimate triumph of that beauty, that’s what faith is for.

  12

  Jim Cottonwood’s cellmate, Patrick Bryce, had been a Roman Catholic priest. In the joint he came to be known as Father Rat—not because he was thought to be a snitch, but just because it rhymed with the Father Pat he’d been outside. He was also, having been a pedophile, Pat the Bunny. But only to the guards. On the yard he insisted on being addressed as Clay, and since he was quite capable of flying off the handle for the least abridgment of what he considered his due respect, that is what the other cons called him, to his face.

  Pedophiles generally have a hard time of it in the joint, where there is an Old Testament sense of justice and the wicked have done unto them as they have done unto others, often on a daily basis. Clay had managed to make himself an exception to that rule by sending one of the first men who’d gang-raped him to the infirmary and another to the hospital in St. Cloud. Clay himself had incurred a broken tooth and lacerations about the face and neck, but he had established a reputation as someone who isn’t fucked with, and he had not had to defend his honor and his asshole another time.

  Clay had settled down to his twenty-five-to-life as one to the criminal underclass born, taking to the tank like a fish to water. He had the talk; he had the walk; he even had, across the knuckles of both hands, crude self-inflicted tattoos of LOVE and HATE.

  There were a few details that didn’t sort easily with his new persona. Clay came on like someone a good thirty years younger than the fifty-something Father Pat. Most of the cons who were up in their fifties had served so much time they’d lost their bounce. They had the wiped-out look of dead-end bureaucrats the world over. But Clay, despite that he was going gray and getting paunchy, had the attitudes and nervous energies of someone still tuned, internally, to MTV.

  Even more anomalous, and what made Clay, for all his flakiness, an ideal cellmate, was the range of knowledge and general couth that he had inherited from Father Pat. Jim accounted himself a good Jeopardy player and figured that he still might qualify someday as a contestant. But he was no match for Clay. In most categories, including even pop-culture trivia, Clay could come up with the right answer before any of the contestants had buzzed in. The capital of Ghana. What is Accra? Okay, anyone on Jeopardy is going to bone up on capitals and presidents and that kind of shit, but what about the eighteenth-century Frenchman who was the father of modern chemistry? That drew a blank from all three contestants on the show, but Clay came up with it just like that: Antoine Lavoisier. Guys made book on whether or not Clay would be able to answer the Final Jeopardy question. He did better than three out of five.

  He was also an ace Scrabble player, and that was rare in the joint. He knew all the funny two-letter words like “ut” and “re” and “nu” that were basic to high-powered Scrabble, but he also had a shitload of fancier words that were in Webster’s, even if he didn’t know exactly what they meant. “Quale,” which is “a property, such as whiteness, considered independently of things having the property.” From the Latin, naturally. The guy had been a priest, even if he claimed that whole part of his life had been lived by someone else. The words were there but not, he claimed, the memories. Whenever such knowledge surfaced, Clay seemed just as surprised by it as Jim. The guy was a flake, no doubt about it, but not a fake.

  It was in one of the Scrabble sessions that they’d hit the word “mandragora.” It was right at the start of the game. Jim had had to go first, and his letters were impossible. One vowel, an A, and then Q, G, S, S, R, and V. He wasn’t going to waste an S on GAS, so that left one possibility that he could see: RAG. Eight fucking points.

  Clay stared at the board, which was just a sheet of paper that Jim had drawn up from memory, and stared, and stared, rubbing the stubble of his buzz cut, and then he smiled and said, “Eureka!”

  He put down all seven of his letters, one by one, and then, before Jim could raise an objection, he said, “ ‘Mandragora.’ Sixty-eight points. It’s in the Bible, and I think it’s in Shakespeare, too, so it’s got to be in Webster’s. It’s a plant. Look it up.”

  “I will.”

  Not that Jim doubted it would be there. And “mandragora” was there, though all Webster’s said was “mandrake.” But “mandrake” was the very next word, and just as Clay had said, it was a plant, which, to Jim’s dismay, Webster’s defined as “a poisonous plant of the nightshade family, found in Mediterranean regions.” The definition continued: “It has a short stem, purple or white flower, and a thick root, often forked, used in medicine for its narcotic and emetic properties.” After that was a second definition, “the root formerly thought to resemble the human shape,” and a third, “the May apple, native to North America.”

  “Shit,” said Jim.

  “Sixty-eight points. Write it down.”

  “Yeah, right.” He set down the sixty-eight points, then leaned back in his bunk and said, “Christ.”

  “Hey, the game’s just started.”

  “Yeah, I know. The thing is, mandrake.”

  “It’s there, in the dictionary.”

  “No, I got no argument with that. It’s not the word. It’s the plant, mandrake. I’ve been using it.”

  Clay chuckled. “No shi
t? For its emetic properties?”

  “No, for the sweat lodge.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s impossible. Like the dictionary says, it’s Mediterranean. It’s famous over there. You must have got hold of the other mandrake.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. ‘Cause I’ve been using this root, and the first time I saw it I thought how it looked like the lower part of a guy’s body. If the legs were twisted round.”

  “Where’d you get it from?” Clay asked.

  “Through the chaplain. That’s how I get all the stuff for the sweat lodge. Sage, mainly. Cedar. Sweet grass. And then this mandrake. The chaplain isn’t all that happy to order it, but he has to. There was the Indian Religious Freedoms Act, in Seventy-six, just after I got sent here, which said that every prison had to provide a sweat lodge as part of our religion. So I got in touch with this medicine man at the Wabasha rez, where I knew some guys, and he sent me this list of things to use for the tea in the sweat lodge.”

  “Tea? You drink tea in the sweat lodge?”

  “We drink some of it, but mostly it gets poured over the rocks. When it hits the rocks, the smell of it is something else. But then, after you’ve breathed it in a while, you don’t notice it that much. The sage is the main element. Demons can’t stand the smell of sage. A lot of the guys can’t either. Probably ‘cause they got demons in them. Anyhow, it’s powerful, the sage. But it’s not just the sage that’s in the tea. There’s cedar, and sweet grass, and, like I said, this mandrake.”

  “You know, I think your chaplain may have got things confused. Or someone did. There’s May berry that grows in Minnesota, but that could be like hemlock. In America there’s hemlocks that are like a kind of pine tree, but they’re not the same as the hemlock that Socrates drank, that killed him. Or robins—what we call robins here isn’t what robins are in England. The people who came here applied the old words they knew to the plants that were here. You must have got hold of the real thing. The Mediterranean variety.”

  Jim laughed. “And it’s an emetic? It gives you the shits?”

  Clay smiled in the sinister way he had sometimes. When he smiled that way, you could imagine how he could have actually done the shit he’d got put away for. “It can do more than that,” Clay said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s an aphrodisiac. At least by reputation. In the Bible, they call it love apples. And that’s before tomatoes had the name. Which are also in the nightshade family, the same as tobacco. Who knows what’s an aphrodisiac? Some people think oysters do the trick. But mandrake must do something special. There’s a story somewhere about a general who leaves a lot of wine around where he knows the army he’s going to fight will find it. And he doses it with mandragora. So they drink it, and they nod out, and the general wins the day. It’s a legend, probably. But hey, there’s a better legend than that. The root of the thing when you dig it up is supposed to let out a scream. And if you hear it, you go crazy. So, in order to avoid that, what you have to do is, you tie the root to a dog, and you have the dog pull it up while you have got wax in your ears and blow some kind of horn, so you won’t hear the scream. But the dog hears it, and the dog dies. How about that?”

  “Sounds crazy.”

  “Ask the dog.”

  “But a lot of people did believe that?”

  “A lot of people will believe anything, Jim. Me, do I believe it? You got some of the stuff, I’ll test it out, and then I’ll tell you. But not if it means I got to fast two days before I go into your sweat lodge. Anyhow, I don’t need an emetic. Or an aphrodisiac. And I got sixty-eight points, bro. Write ‘em down.”

  13

  It had been years since the possibility of suicide had crossed Diana’s mind. She’d come to think she’d put all that behind her. Now the blackness had returned like an unwelcome lover, someone you hated but at the same time could not resist. Come in, you tell him, come in, and there he is, a permanent guest, with his suitcase in your closet and his shoes under your bed.

  It was there like the moon, noticed only at intervals, but always present, even when you couldn’t see it, pulling at her. Telling her, you’re mine, you’ve always been mine. Your very name is my name, too. Diana.

  It was with her day after day, unrelenting, like this winter, the worst in decades. The snow piling up higher week by week, with never a thaw, one blizzard after another. The drifts on the north side of the house had built up to the level of the windows, and they were solid, impacted, unshovelable. On the coldest days, Carl’s Chevy wouldn’t start, despite every kind of pampering, and so he would borrow Diana’s Camry, and she would be marooned in the house for the rest of the day.

  She tried to read, but her mind wouldn’t stay focused for more than fifteen minutes at a time. She would watch the TV, but then she would begin to hate herself for becoming just another damned housewife, glued to the soaps and snacking constantly. In the five weeks she’d been back at the farm, she’d put on ten pounds. At that rate, by April she’d be back to her all-time worst. What was really awful was she didn’t care. Not about the weight. Not about the meat she was eating, along with Carl and Kelly, almost every day. Not about the way she was slacking off on every good intention that she’d formed before she’d finally agreed to come here. Anna Karenina? Seventeen pages. She had read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and it had shattered her, but that was the only book she’d read in five weeks. Some intellectual.

  When she thought about it, the bottom line was, in the words of Martha Washington: Fuck that shit. Martha Washington was not the wife of our first president, but an African-American woman that Diana had got to know at Thursday-night meetings of Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA), back in Willowville. Martha had an ability, which Diana greatly envied, of saying exactly what she felt. Martha’s verdict on all sorts of matters that other people at the meeting would get wrought up about was, quite simply, Fuck that shit. It was a formula that solved almost any otherwise intractable problem. But what if you considered it as a philosophy of life? What if nothing mattered, really? What if the best idea was just to walk out the exit? What if death was what it seemed to be when you were drunk and listening to the right music? Beautiful all by itself.

  In this, the worst winter of the century—the worst, anyhow, that Diana could remember—the weather itself seemed to point the same moral. The snow, especially when the moon printed the shadows of the trees across it, was beautiful. The total blackness of the sky on cloudy, moonless nights—that was beautiful, too. And what was most beautiful was the silence when she stepped outside the house and tuned in to the absolute zero of winter. A silence that asked you to join in, as though you were at a Quaker meeting, where there were no hymns or sermons, only the immense, unspoken admission that there was nothing that needed saying, nothing that needed doing, nothing better than nothing at all.

  Life disagreed, of course. Life bundled up against the winter and bided its time, certain that eventually things would start to stir. The snow would melt. The moon would sink in the west, and the sun would take charge, and the old cycle of eating and breeding would kick in again.

  The Goddess, for all her sometime cruelty, was a goddess of life; of seeds and growth and new beginnings. And Diana knew what Martha Washington would have said about giving in to depression and trying to make something romantic and beautiful out of death. She wanted to be on the side of the Goddess and Martha Washington. But when she went out the back door and felt the sting of the cold, the idea would return, like a tune that wouldn’t stop playing inside her head.

  And, indeed, that was the case. Like a radio that could not be turned off, she was receiving signals. It was her father who spoke to her in the gleamings of the snow, in the shadows cast by the moon, in the deathly silence of the February nights. She had helped him to his death, and he meant to do the same for her.

  It would not be an easy task. Diana was tenacious of life, and she resisted any direct awareness of his presence, even though he was now so near
her. When he exerted his influence, she would look the other way. She would feel an encroaching darkness, but she did not give it his name.

  But if not her death, the ghost insisted, then another must be exacted. There must be a death. Many deaths. This is the one thing ghosts insist on. The only thing they know.

  14

  Back when he had had a Star-Tribune paper route, Alan had ridden by Navaho House every morning, or trudged past the place if it was weather like this, too treacherous for two wheels. But all the time he’d had the route, he’d never gone up to the front door and asked if they wanted to have the paper delivered. There were six or seven old ladies living there on county assistance, and on summer evenings you could see them all lined up in a row on the front porch. Like the ragged odds and ends that got dumped in the box of things you could take for free at the garage sale at his grandpa’s church. Nobody ever took away any of it, and after a while, seeing the same stuff every Saturday, week after week, you got to feeling sorry for all that junk. Electric can openers that didn’t work. Old flannel shirts with most of the buttons missing. Tin ashtrays. Peculiar-shaped glasses.