THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EPIGRAPH

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  THE SUB

  A Study In Witchcraft

  Thomas M. Disch

  To Latasha Pulliam, Mary Ellen Samuels,

  and the 37 other ladies on Death Row.

  I would like to thank Matthew Hummingbird, Geraldine Dublin, and Kurt Hagemann for letting me share their knowledge and expertise.

  The origin of the pig is shrouded in mystery.

  —Encyclopaedia Britannica

  “I used to be a very good person at one time.”

  —Dorothy Puente, age 64, after her arrest for the murders of nine tenants so that she might collect their welfare checks

  1

  “And what sound do pigs make, class?” Diana demanded of her children.

  There was only a scattering of giggles in reply. No one raised a hand. They seemed, to Diana’s practiced eye, unnaturally shy. Little wonder, in view of the media circus that the school had become in the last few weeks. The Goddess only knew what must be going through their minds. To carry on as though nothing had changed scarcely seemed possible, but Diana Turney was not one to be daunted by that. Impossible deeds could be done if you summoned the determination.

  “Lloyd.” She looked down at the Brandt boy in the front row of desks, where she put potential troublemakers. “Can you tell us?”

  Lloyd Brandt scowled up at her with a resentment that was pure instinct, as a small rodent might regard an object in nature that happened to have the shape of an owl or a fox. Diana intended him no harm, and yet there was a kind of wisdom in his scowl, for they were, at some primordial level, enemies. She knew the sort of man he’d become in the fullness of time. His fate was written in his face—in the set of his jaw and the squint of his eyes, in the bristling buzz-cut blond hair and rosy cheeks that would someday sprout whiskers and droop into jowls. Yes, he did well to fear her—or any woman who had her wits about her.

  “Well, Lloyd: a pig, what sound does it make? Does it go cluck-cluck?”

  The class giggled, which Lloyd took to be an act of communal betrayal, and he scowled all the fiercer.

  “Does it go moo?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then: tell us.”

  “Oink,” said Lloyd inexpressively, as though it were a word on the blackboard.

  “Oink,” she repeated, just as flatly, but pinning him down with her eyes. “Thank you, Lloyd. Now we all know what noise a pig makes. Now we can continue singing. Class.” She lifted her ruler, demanding silence.

  And then they sang, at the ruler’s bidding, the rest of the song—with an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there; here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink-oink. And so on with the clucks, the moos, the quacks, the baas.

  As they sang, she couldn’t keep from matching the various children with the animals in the song. Surely chubby little Cheryl Sondergard was destined to be a hen, and there were at least two blue-ribbon contestants in the bovine category. But the lambs were the great majority. When it came to a baa-baa here and a baa-baa there, some of the lambs could really get into it. Method acting in the second grade.

  Logically, that made her their shepherd—not a role she entirely rejoiced in, despite its venerable tradition. Jesus was the Good Shepherd, but what did He have for dinner on Passover? Not just bread and wine, in all likelihood.

  “That’s a fun song, isn’t it?” she said, setting the ruler down on her desk.

  They nodded warily—cowed (or chickened or pigged, as the case might be) by the automatic transmission of her confidence. That was the whole secret of teaching, whether one had to deal with second graders or seventh graders (and those were the worst). Even in the movies you could tell a good teacher by the way he (and they were usually he’s in the movies) took charge right off the bat. Okay, class, let me show you what I know about karate!

  “Okay, class,” she said brightly. “Have any of you ever been to a real farm?”

  Not a single hand went up.

  Amazing. Here they were in Minnesota, in a suburb, Willowville, that was bordered, at least on its northern edge, by working dairy farms, and none of these children had ever been on a farm. It was altogether possible that their parents hadn’t either. She might as well have asked them if they’d ever been to Rome or to Jerusalem. A farm to them was only an illustration in a picture book. If she’d been teaching in one of the inner-city schools, their ignorance might have been still more profound. Oink and moo and baa and cluck no longer related, for most children, to any observable reality. Farm animals were mythical entities, like dragons and fairies and wizards and witches, that belonged to a world that used to be and was no more.

  Diana Turney meant to correct that. “I grew up on a farm,” she told them. “A real farm, with all the animals that there are in the song. Cows and sheep and pigs and chickens. No ducks, except in the hunting season, when there were wild ducks. In the morning I used to go out to the chicken coop and get the eggs the hens had laid. They were there in the straw, still warm. Not like the eggs that come out of your mothers’ refrigerators. Sometimes there were little drops of red blood inside the egg, which meant it might have become another chicken if we hadn’t taken it out of the chicken’s nest and fried it.”

  Cheryl Sondergard turned sideways to her friend and cousin Gerry Kruger and made a face expressive of disgust.

  Diana smiled. “That’s where chickens come from, you know. They come from eggs. Did you know that, Cheryl?”

  “Yes, Ms. Turney,” said Cheryl, dismayed at having been singled out.

  “Yes indeed, every egg we eat might have grown up to be a chicken if it had been given the chance to do that.” This was not true, of course, for not every egg is fertilized, but children in second grade were not aware of such niceties, and the concept of fertilization was not in the assigned curriculum for second graders in Willowville’s public schools. Diana knew the boundaries of her position and took care not to overstep them.

  “And where do hamburgers come from? Does anyone know?”

  “From McDonald’s!” crowed the smallest and youngest of her children, little Earl Wagner, who knew perfectly well where hamburgers came from. He was teasing her, and showing off.

  “Quite true,” Diana replied, unruffled. “But of course you mean the McDonald’s in the Willowville mall, not Old MacDonald’s farm. I often wonder if there might be a connection. Maybe the McDon
ald’s in the mall gave itself that name to remind us of the song. Because the song is much, much older than the restaurant. I learned to sing it when I was the age that you children are now, and before that my mother and father sang it when they went to school. And that was a time when everyone, even the smallest children, would have known what a farm was like. Because Minnesota was filled with farms then. If you didn’t live on a farm yourself, you would certainly have relatives who did, and you’d visit them on the holidays. And so you would know where hamburgers come from. They come from cows. Surely you all knew that, didn’t you?”

  The children stared at her, in fear. Not of her but of what they sensed was coming next. Children know so many things that they would rather not know, and it is a teacher’s special vocation to make that knowledge tolerable. Were it otherwise, were she here only to din into their heads the simple mechanics of the three R’s, teaching the early grades would be pure purgatory. A computer could teach children arithmetic quite as well as she could. But no computer could unveil the mysteries that are the foundations not of knowledge but of understanding, of wisdom, of human existence.

  “Hamburgers come from cows. You know that. The cows that you can see off to the side of the highway, browsing on the lovely green grass. The cows that are milked every morning so that there will be cartons of milk the next day in the grocery stores. Of course, not all cattle are cows. Cows are women, and bulls are men, and there are also steers, and they’re men, too, but of a different sort. And when the steers and the cows are old enough, they’re sent away from the farms they lived on, and they’re cut apart and sliced up, and that’s where roast beef comes from and steaks and hamburgers. They’re all different parts of the cows. And it’s just the same with pigs, and chickens, and sheep. They all are slaughtered, which is another way of saying that they’re killed.”

  She let that sink in for a while, and then she smiled and said, “So, when we sing about Old MacDonald’s farm, with an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there, that’s what we’re really singing about. The dinner on our table.”

  Earl Wagner raised his hand.

  “Yes, Earl?”

  “Ms. Turney, are you a vegetarian?”

  The little devil: she should have guessed he’d be the one to bring that up. But of course, he had an older sister, Joan, who was in the fifth grade now, and he’d probably heard all kinds of stories about the legendary Ms. Turney from her.

  “A vegetarian? What do you mean by that, Earl? Someone who only eats broccoli and potatoes?”

  Earl shook his wise little head. “No. I mean someone who doesn’t ever eat meat.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, Earl, I don’t eat meat. Nor do I eat fish or poultry, which is to say, the flesh of any kind of bird, be it chicken or turkey or pheasant. I mention pheasant in particular, because this is the season now for hunting pheasant, and my father was a great hunter of pheasants. Oh my, yes. He would spend the whole weekend marching about through the corn stubble with his shotgun, and then he would bring home the poor dead, bleeding birds in a sack. And my mother would have to take off their feathers, such beautiful feathers, and chop off their heads, and take out their gizzards, which is another word for stomach, and cook them for our Sunday dinner. And that’s how I became a vegetarian. I could not eat a bite of those pheasants. I was twelve then, and I’d never had any problem with hamburgers, or steaks (though we didn’t often have steaks in our family), or chicken, or… whatever. But I could not eat pheasant.”

  “Didn’t your dad make you?” Lloyd Brandt asked, without raising his hand. “I gotta eat anything they put on my plate. Even if it makes me sick.”

  “Yes.” Diana nodded her head judiciously. “Yes, my father told me I had to eat it. And I did chew it up and swallow it. And I was sick, as I knew I would be. And then I was sent to bed. And the same thing happened the next time we had pheasant. I can still remember the taste of it. Have any of you children ever eaten pheasant?”

  Almost all the children shook their heads no.

  “Well, I hope you never have to. For Lloyd is quite right. We must all eat what is put on our plates. Because our parents have gone to a great deal of trouble to put it there, and we must be grateful to them.”

  “You mean,” said Earl Wagner, “that kids can’t be vegetarians? It’s like smoking.”

  Despite herself, she laughed. The incongruity of the comparison was simply too droll to resist.

  “Yes, you might well say that, Earl. Vegetarianism is like smoking. In the sense that it’s a choice that you can make once you’re a grown-up and in charge of your own life.”

  At the very back of the classroom, Sue Wong raised her hand. She was Chinese, the only Chinese student in the entire school, and her command of English was imperfect. She’d never raised her hand before in Diana’s class.

  “Yes, Sue?” she asked, with a special solicitude.

  “Can I leave the class, Ms. Turney?”

  “Leave the class, Sue? Why do you want to do that?”

  In reply, Sue Wong regurgitated her cafeteria lunch of chicken chow mein, three-bean salad, and a Milky Way candy bar across her desk.

  2

  Janet Kellog’s trial for first-degree assault had been going on for three days when the prosecution called Dana Quigley to the witness stand, but practically speaking, it was just getting started, because Janet’s husband had refused to testify against his wife, and Dana, who’d been there at the Leech Lake Motel when Janet had put the bullet through him, was the only other person who knew just what had happened that night. She didn’t exactly appreciate being in the spotlight like this, since the part she’d played in the story was nothing to be very proud of, but there was a certain grim satisfaction to be had in seeing that Janet got put behind bars. She’d heard that Carl was hoping his wife would get off with probation and that was why he wouldn’t get on the witness stand himself. He didn’t have to testify, being her husband. But Carl must have been wondering who, if Janet went to jail, was going to cook his meals and take care of the kid and, most of all, who’d haul his ashes. That had to be why Carl was keeping mum, not out of Christian charity and turning the other cheek, because Carl was not particularly bighearted. He probably figured he could make Janet’s life more miserable if she stayed at home than if she was sent to Mankato state prison. And he probably could have. He was professionally qualified to do so, having been a prison guard for most of his adult life.

  But Dana didn’t give a shit about Carl’s convenience. He could eat canned corned-beef hash and chili for the rest of his life for all she cared. On the night Carl was shot in the arm, Dana herself could have been killed. That had been the intention of the first five shots Carl’s wife had let off into the motel bathroom where Dana had taken refuge, and Dana had no intention of turning her other cheek, even though she considered herself a good Christian. The Bible didn’t say nothing about testifying in court, unless it came under the heading of Thou shalt not bear false witness, and she wasn’t about to. She’d just tell the god-damned truth.

  They went through the whole rigmarole that the district attorney for Leech Lake County had rehearsed with her. Yes, she was Dana Quigley, and yes, she could identify the defendant, Janet Kellog, who was sitting there at the table beside her yuppie lawyer, crying crocodile tears. Dana knew better than to make any comment about Janet’s knack for tears. Janet was the queen of self-pity, but if the jury hadn’t already figured that out, then the prosecution might as well call it a day. Because the only thing that Janet had going for her, as far as Dana could see, was Carl’s silence and her own blond pathos and good looks.

  But those assets weren’t going to get her very far with this jury, if Dana was any judge. The ones who weren’t ready to go to Florida and die were sinfully homely. The D.A. said they were an ideal panel for this particular case. Now Dana could see why. They’d identify with Dana, who was not all that good-looking.

  Finally the D.A. got around to what had happened on the night of Octo
ber 13, and Dana, in her own words (interrupted at regular intervals by Janet’s yuppie attorney, Ms. Tryon), explained what had happened:

  She had attended a Friday the 13th party at the home of the accused, having been invited by the accused, whom she had known in high school some years earlier. There she had unwisely had too much of the punch provided by her hosts, and at either ten-thirty or a quarter to eleven, feeling unable to meet the challenge of night-driving on Route 97, she had asked her hosts if one of them might drive her home. Carl Kellog had agreed to drive her home, and yes, it was true that she had not gone home directly. She had asked Carl to pull over at the Leech Lake Motel because, firstly, she was feeling queasy, and, secondly, she had wanted to phone her baby-sitter, Elizabeth Lifton, to explain that she would be home later than she’d said.

  Yes, they had rented a room at the motel, she didn’t know if it was in Carl’s name or hers, and the reason for that was, as she’d stated, that she had not been feeling well and had wanted to have the option of crashing at the motel. It was then—she couldn’t be sure of the time, somewhere toward midnight—that the accused had come busting into their room—or, rather, her room—with a loaded pistol—no, Dana could not be more specific, she was not a gun expert—and threatened both Dana and her own husband, Carl. Dana showed the jury how, as she best remembered, Janet had waved her gun about.

  There were objections. The D.A. and Janet’s lawyer approached the bench. Dana just sat there in the witness chair and fixed her eyes on Janet Kellog until, gradually, Janet got the message and looked up at her. And Janet knew, without a wink or a nod, what Dana wanted her to know, that she was fucked. When she knew that Janet knew, Dana allowed herself a small, triumphant smile, and then, when the judge said for her to go ahead with her story, she went ahead and told how she had locked herself in the bathroom, to allow Mr. and Mrs. Kellog to have a chance to talk together. How bullets had then ripped through the door of the bathroom, bullets that might well have killed Dana if she had not had the foresight to hide within the bathtub provided by the Leech Lake Motel. The door of the bathroom had been splintered, the mirror shattered, and Dana declared that she was grateful to be alive.