THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

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THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Page 18

by Thomas M. Disch


  For the rest of the morning Diana busied herself with the laundry, including the sheets from Carl’s bed and seven pairs of his shit-stained underpants. A blessing to be done with that task! Though in another sense cleaning up after Carl would be a nastier chore than ever. Pig shit is notoriously noxious and plentiful. She hoped that Carl would still have some control over his sphincter even as a pig, and be able to dump his loads in a single latrine area. Some pigs are kept as indoor pets, and that suggested that they could be toilet-trained. She’d find out soon enough.

  While the first load of clothes was in the dryer, she spent fifteen minutes on the exercise bicycle, which had been bought ostensibly for Carl’s weight-loss program, though he’d scarcely sat his fat ass on it once. She used only a modest resistance, but by the time she was done she’d worked up a healthy sweat. A second load of heavier clothes and towels finished the spin cycle in the washer, and she took them out and pinned them on the clothesline. Gnat season had begun, and the insects formed a cloud about her as she worked.

  For lunch she had half a canned peach with a dollop of cottage cheese. Now that she no longer had Carl as an excuse, Diana was determined to cut down on the calories. She’d done it before and could do it again. She might never fit into a size six again, but there was no reason to settle for Bette Midler when Bette Davis remained a possibility.

  After lunch she phoned Navaho House and chatted with her mother (mentioning, by the bye, the phone call from the prison inquiring after Carl), then asked to talk with Alan. But he’d gone to the State Employment Office in Brainerd by way of indicating his immediate availability for work, a ritual he had to perform at monthly intervals.

  Then, for two solid hours, she enjoyed the luxury of a book: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, an utterly absorbing retelling of the story of King Arthur from a feminist point of view, with the good witch Morgan le Fay as its heroine and all the patriarchs of Christendom as villains. The book had been waiting on the shelf for years, but suddenly the time seemed ripe for her to read it. As the cover promised, the pages turned almost of their own accord, and Diana was spellbound.

  Shortly after three o’clock Kelly got home and Diana announced, “Don’t take off your jacket. We’re going outside. I’ve got a surprise I want to show you.”

  “A surprise? What is it?”

  “If I tell you what it is, it won’t be a surprise, will it?”

  Judy was waiting by the door. Cats must be psychic, Diana thought, because Judy was always on hand when she wanted her. Diana opened the door, and the cat and the child stepped outside. Then, as Diana stooped down to rebutton Kelly’s jacket, Alan came round the corner wearing the suit and tie he’d put on to go to Brainerd.

  “Alan! What a nice surprise.”

  “Hi. Your mother said you’d called. So I came over to tell you my news.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ve got a job. At least I think I do. I’ll find out on Friday.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. At least, I hope it’s wonderful.”

  “It is. I’ll be working with computers. What I do is go around for this operation called CyberWeb and help people get set up on the Internet. If I can sell them some of the extra services, I get a commission, but that goes on top of the basic salary, which is a hundred-fifty a week. Plus an allowance for the car. Neat, huh?”

  “Yes, since it’s what you like to do anyhow. That’s the best kind of job.”

  “Where’s the surprise?” Kelly insisted impatiently.

  “Oh, the surprise!” She smiled at Alan. “I’d almost forgot. We have a surprise, too. Come on this way, both of you.”

  “I want a ride,” Kelly demanded of Alan.

  “Kelly, he has his suit on,” Diana scolded.

  “That’s okay.” Alan got down on one knee and boosted Kelly up so that her legs straddled his neck piggyback-style. “Okay,” he said, rising. “Where to?”

  They proceeded up the hill in single file, the cat leading the way, then Diana, then Alan with the child on his shoulders. Diana was wearing a full maxi dress of thin cotton in a floral print, which the wind swirled and unfurled like a banner in an old-fashioned painting. When she reached the top of the hill, she looked like Morgan le Fay herself, a woman glamorous in the original, occult sense of that word. Alan couldn’t look away from her. He was enthralled—and in her thrall.

  “I don’t see any surprise,” Kelly complained.

  “I think he must be hiding from us,” said Diana. “But I know he’s there.”

  The cat looked up at Diana inquiringly and then, obedient to her unspoken command, trotted toward the willow tree by the sty. They followed, but even as they stood beside the refurbished fence, there was no sign of Carl.

  “Soo-ee! Soo-ee!” Diana cried, and Carl appeared from inside the little outbuilding that opened to the compound, responding to the traditional summons to the trough.

  “It’s a pig!” Kelly cried.

  “It’s a big pig,” Alan agreed.

  “Are you surprised?” Diana wanted to know.

  “Is he going to live here?”

  “Yes. Why do you think Alan has been going to such trouble all this while?”

  “He is big,” Kelly observed. She seemed more dismayed than pleased.

  “That’s what one looks for in a pig,” said Diana. “The bigger they are, the more money they bring in.”

  “You actually intend to run a commercial operation here?” Alan asked. “Not just… the one pig?”

  “When I was a girl, we had fifteen or twenty pigs. We’ve got the room, and the water, and Kelly will be in charge of feeding them. She’ll be a proper farmer’s daughter now. She’ll enjoy that. Won’t you, darling?”

  Kelly regarded the broad mass of her father dubiously. “Are there going to be a lot of pigs?”

  “In due course, I suppose, yes. For now there’s just this one. Do you want to give him a name?”

  Kelly shook her head.

  “Alan? A name?”

  “Well, he’s evidently a boy pig. How about”—he grinned—“Hamlet?”

  “Hamlet he is!”

  Judy, who had been brushing up against Alan’s trouser cuffs, suddenly sprang up and alighted on the top railing of the fence.

  Diana regarded the two little families before her with the quiet pride of a 4-H exhibitor at the county fair. Father and daughter, mother and son.

  If only she had a camera.

  31

  Kelly was crying. She was all alone in her bedroom, having been put to bed early as a punishment for misbehaving, but she was not crying for effect. She knew there was no one on the other side of the door listening. Someone who might say, “Kelly, you can come down and have dinner. Everything’s okay.” Because it wasn’t. Her mother was in prison, and her father had gone away somewhere, and there was no one left at home but Aunty Di, and she hated Aunty Di, and Aunty Di hated her right back. But Aunty Di was in charge now.

  Kelly had seen it coming for a while already. The first time was when Aunty Di took her into the Shop ‘n’ Save and said no, she wasn’t going to buy the box of Froot Loops, and when Kelly put it in the shopping cart anyhow, Aunty Di put it back on the shelf, and when Kelly made a scene and threw herself on the floor and screamed, Aunty Di just pushed the cart somewhere else and left her there on the floor kicking and screaming until she finally stopped and had to find where Aunty Di had gone to. She was standing at the checkout counter bagging the groceries as the woman at the register rang them up. “Oh, there you are,” Aunty Di had said, “I was wondering.” And ever since it had always been oatmeal for breakfast, or Cream of Wheat. Maybe with raisins or bananas, but usually without. And only one spoonful of sugar, because Aunty Di said sugar was a bad habit.

  And now she had to feed the pig. Twice a day, once before the school bus and again as soon as she got home, she had to take a bucket of this stinky yellow powder that made her sneeze and mix it with a lot of water so it turned into goop that
got poured in the trough. The stuff would spill out of the bucket and get on her clothes, and the pig made awful noises. Kelly had always thought pigs were cute, but those were the pigs in books. This pig was enormous. Its head came as high as Kelly’s shoulders, and when it reared up, with its front feet on the trough, it was taller than she was. Of course, she didn’t go inside the trough. She climbed a little set of stairs alongside the fence and poured the glop down to where the pig was waiting for it. But the pig was always so hungry, and made such noises, that it was scary. And it didn’t make any difference what the weather was like, she had to bring the pig his food, including a trip to the sty after dinner if there were lots of leftovers. She was only five. She didn’t know any other five-year-olds who had to feed pigs. It just wasn’t fair. So this afternoon when she got home, she didn’t feed the pig. She forgot. And when Aunty Di asked if the pig had been fed, she nodded her head, and somehow Aunty Di knew she was lying, and when it was time for dinner—a chicken pot pie, not frozen but made from scratch—Aunty Di said, “Do you remember the story of the Little Red Hen?” Kelly knew what was coming next. There was no chicken pot pie for her because she hadn’t fed the pig and then lied about it. “There won’t be any liars in this house,” Aunty Di had declared.

  Sometimes, if Kelly had done something really bad, such as the time she’d broken the recliner by rocking it too hard, she had been sent to bed without dinner, but her mother had always brought up a tray eventually. With Aunty Di it wasn’t like that. No dinner meant no dinner. Stay in your room meant stay in your room. It meant no TV. She could play with her Trolls, but she didn’t want to, and besides, her favorite Troll, Orangey, was missing, and Kelly was certain she knew what had happened: Ginger had gone off with her. Once she’d caught Ginger biting Orangey. Maybe the cat thought Trolls were like mice. Her family had disappeared, and now the Trolls were disappearing, too.

  Later, when it was dark outside, the phone rang. The phone calls were always for Aunty Di, so Kelly did not pay much attention, but then Aunty Di called upstairs: “Kelly, it’s your mother. Come say hello.”

  When she got to the phone, Aunty Di put her hand over the part you talk into and said, “I didn’t tell your mother that you’d been sent to your room for lying, so there’s no need for you to say anything either. Okay?”

  Kelly nodded.

  Aunty Di handed her the phone.

  “Hello? Mom?”

  “Hello, darling. How are you tonight?”

  “I’m okay.” She couldn’t think of anything to say to her mother except what Aunty Di had just told her not to. Finally she thought to ask, “Mom, when are you coming home? Daddy isn’t here.”

  “I know that, sweetheart. And I wish I were there with you right now. But it isn’t up to me. You know that.”

  “You’re being punished.”

  “You got it, sweetheart. What’s happening there?”

  “We have a pig.”

  “A pig? A live pig?”

  “Yes, and he’s really big, too. And I have to feed him.”

  “For heaven’s sake. Why?”

  “Because he’s hungry all the time.”

  “Yes, of course. I mean, why do you have a pig?”

  “Well, first Alan fixed up the old pigpen, and then the pig came to live in it.”

  “Who is Alan?”

  “The guy who lives with Grandma Turney. He named the pig. We have a cat, too.”

  “You’ve told me about the cat. Her name is Ginger, right?”

  “And the pig’s name is Hamlet.” Without any warning, simply because everything was so awful, Kelly started crying. And in her prison, off in Mankato, her mother started crying, too.

  Aunty Di signaled for Kelly to give her the phone. “Janet?”

  Kelly strained to hear her mother’s reply, but without having the phone against her own ear the separate words didn’t register.

  “Janet, things’ll be okay. Kelly misses you, that’s only natural. But you’ll be back, maybe sooner than you think. Your lawyer says there’s a good chance you’ll be let off early if Carl doesn’t show his face pretty soon.”

  There were more words at her mother’s end, to which Aunty Di responded with an “Mm-hm,” and then again, “Mm-hm,” and then, to Kelly, “Upstairs, young lady.”

  When Kelly got to the top of the stairs, there was Ginger, outside the door to her room. As though the cat knew where she was supposed to be, as though the cat were like Mrs. Waller, the old black woman at school who was in charge of things when the teacher wasn’t there.

  32

  Judy had found that in her dreams many of her old, human capabilities were restored. She could sit down at a table and eat with a knife and fork; she could drive a car; she could put on makeup; and best of all she could talk. She remained a cat all the while, but the other figures in her dream treated her like a person, not an animal or a child. The worst part of being an animal (or a child) is being ignored or taken for granted.

  It must be much the same to be put in prison. Until her enchantment, Judy hadn’t given much thought to prison or the man she’d put there. Now she was in prison. She chafed at every restraint, at every enforcement, as though they were chains. When Kelly dragged her round by her collar, or Diana scooped her up in her arms and dumped her outside, she would fume—but, except for a hiss of protest, she could not complain. If someone said something stupid, she could not say, “I don’t agree with you there.” Speechlessness was a kind of muzzle. She would open her mouth to say something, but the words weren’t there. She couldn’t even think the words—except in her dreams.

  Summer had begun. The dreary days were longer, the nights shorter but richer in life. She could roam free, responsive to the lattices of vagrant scents that might lead to prey or to nothing at all. Her world widened, her territory expanded. Some days she did not return at all to her customary station beneath the farmhouse porch, but drowsed away the hot afternoons in hollows cushioned by moldy leaves beside a sun-drenched rock deep within the woods. It was here, far from the farmhouse and the shadow of her servitude, that she would become, in her dreams, almost human again.

  And it was here that her father appeared to her in his new, so much diminished form as a spider. She had studied this particular spider often back at the farmhouse, in the little space it had staked out for itself between the windowpanes above the air conditioner in the master bedroom. There, among the husks of flies stuck to the cobwebs in that narrow space, it had spun new tapestries and bided its time. Judy, as a cat, had not recognized the spider as her sometime father, but she had felt the same morbid fascination in his quiet toil that she had felt as a teenager, curled up on a sofa in his study, watching him write his sermon for the next day, awaiting the signal for sex. He rarely spoke on those occasions, but the silence they shared was the closest they ever came to a feeling of intimacy, for their sexual relations were abrupt and hurried. A smile was the most that could be hoped for, and even then it would be a careless, absentminded sort of smile.

  Such a smile as the spider directed at her now. “Judy,” said the spider. “You’ve changed.”

  “I could say the same, you know.”

  “But you would be wrong.”

  “You’re dead now, Daddy. That’s one big difference.”

  “You thought I’d go to hell.”

  “Being a spider is better?”

  For a long while Reverend Johnson said nothing. He was a very small spider, and his mental powers were even more limited than they had been when he was human. There were certain people he still wanted to hurt: his daughter, their son, the woman who—all unaware—had whisked his spirit from the place where he had died. Only in these corners of his diminished psyche, which could still hate in the old, accustomed way, did the spider have spirit or spite enough to muster words that would express its thoughts.

  “I know whose slave you are now,” he told his daughter with satisfaction. “I’ve seen her command you.”

  To that Ju
dy could make no reply. A cat is powerless against the truth. She could only stare at the small creature with its nervous legs and swollen abdomen.

  “And I know what she will do to you. In the fullness of time. Do you? Have you guessed?”

  Judy remained mute. She had her suspicions but wasn’t about to share them with the spider.

  “She’ll kill you, too,” the spider went on cheerfully. “She will never allow you to be human again, you may be sure of that. You say that I am dead, but is your life now any better than my death? She’ll keep you about for a while longer, to play with, as you might play with a mouse. But she will grow bored with teasing you. She will kill others, too. Her hunger grows by feeding. Yours does, too. And mine. We are all killers. Thirsty for blood. There is so little blood in a gnat. And even in you, how much? A quart, at best. But in your son, just think! There must be gallons.”

  “I have no son,” Judy lied. (For cats can lie.)

  “No?” the spider replied. (For spiders, liars themselves of the subtlest skill, can detect less capable impostors.) “Why, then, I’m wrong. And yet I’m sure that one way or another his blood will flow. But if he’s not your son, or my son either, then that is no lookout of ours, is it? He’ll die, you’ll die, we all die when our time has come. But it’s not true, you know, that cats have nine lives. They have just one, and it is usually quite short.”

  “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t leave. I’m bound to her.”

  “But the bond is weaker where you are now, so far from the house. Go farther off, it will be weaker still.”

  “She feeds me.”

  “I fed you, but you were able to leave me.”

  “Why do you tell me this?”

  “Oh, not to help you save your life. To do her a mischief. If you could do her any worse harm, I would urge you to do that. If you leave her, she will begin to doubt her power.”

 

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