It wasn’t fair. I still helped out; I still cleaned the blackboard and watered the plants. But Miss McDonald wasn’t the same. She didn’t talk to me as much as she had before she was married; she went home right away after school, in Mr. Lumb’s horrible car. She even stopped wearing those Indian cotton dresses. And once, when I called her Miss McDonald in class, she actually snapped at me and said: “You know that’s not my name anymore!” It wasn’t like her. Not like her at all. And now I knew what it was at last; that horrible man had got into her, infecting her with the demon of sex.

Yes, I know. I was naive. But all I really knew about sex was what I’d seen in those magazines, and what I’d heard from sermons in Church. And I thought about the possessed man, whom Jesus cured by sending his demons into the swine, then herding them off a cliff. And I thought about those games with the mice. And then I thought about Piggy, and how he used to wheeze and cry when we drowned the mice. And the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. I needed to get Miss McDonald’s demons to leave, and go into something else, and then all I had to do was drown them, just like Jesus did.

And so I tried to think of a plan. Failing Miss McDonald herself, I needed something that belonged to her. I decided on her silk scarf, which used to hang on the clothes peg at the back of our classroom. One day, after school, I stole the scarf and took it away and hid it by the clay pits. It still smelled of her perfume, a mixture of incense and coconut. Now all I needed was the swine.

Mousey was in on the plan from the start. Because he didn’t go to Church, he never really understood how the thing was supposed to work. But that was okay. He went along. As long as he was drowning things, I don’t think he minded.

We started with mice, as usual. I’d collected about a dozen of them. How many swine make up a herd? I hoped a dozen was enough. Anyway, we took out the scarf. It still smelled of Miss McDonald. I wrapped it around my shoulders, and then I performed the exorcism. Obviously I didn’t know the right words for an exorcism, but I thought if you said thee and thou, like the preacher does in Church, the demons would get the picture. Then we herded the mice off the cliff (it was only a small cliff, only a clay embankment into one of the pits, but it must have looked bigger to the mice) and waited for the charm to work.