Giles Goat Boy (17 page)

Who buried Redfearn’s Tommy, for example, I cannot say: I was bedded down at once on our return to the barn, more weakened than I knew, and thus spared further sight of my misdeed. Most likely it was George Herrold did the mournful work, for after my Maximizing in the branch library my keeper gave over to him entirely the management of the herd. G. Herrold’s
rapport
with the goats (thus we called him, by his last name only, when I took his first) was instant and fine; he forsook his beloved sweeper for the shophar and went daily into the fields—splendid he looked, too, like some chancellor-chieftain out of dark Frumentius, with his white fleece cap and the horn on his good black arm. If the weather was fine we went with him; otherwise we closeted ourselves in the barn or the livestock-stacks, for Max’s physical condition, at least, declined in these years from wiry good health towards thin senescence. In any case, we applied ourselves altogether to the work of my education.

“We got catching up to do,” Max declared. “What we’ll do, we’ll study the University in general and you in particular; then when we find out what you want to do in the University we’ll study that.”

“I already know what I want to do,” I said. “I want to be a great student and pass all my tests. And I want to make WESCAC tell me about my parents. And punish your enemies.”

It was explained to me then that unlike the goats, whose one desire (if something unconscious may be called that) was to be supremely goatish, human beings did not aspire to be supremely human. Rather, they chose some single activity of life such as watching stars or making music and strove for excellence there exclusively, ignoring the rest. This notion of
majors
and
vocations
was not easy for me to understand: Brickett Ranunculus had been a stud—that is, a major as it were in the impregnation of nannies—but his excellence in this line was a feature of his goatly magnificence in general, just as Mary Appenzeller’s record milk-yield was of hers; neither virtue was a matter of election, and neither was developed at the expense of other merits. On the contrary. Why needed the case be different with humans, I wanted to know; was not an un-athletic scientist as inconceivable as a barren milch-goat?

Alas, you see, I was not always a ready and tractable student. My
grand-Gruffian resolve I still officially subscribed to, but as much to spite Max as to do him honor, for he himself most gently pointed out, as did the passing years, its boyishness. WESCAC was no troll, I came to understand, unless metaphorically, and with figurative monsters one did not do literal battle—the only sort I had a taste for. It was as evident to me as to him that the real task before us was the unglamorous one of making up for the lost years of my kidship. In principle I was eager to learn all I could about the mysterious real University of human studentdom; but in fact, however genuine Curiosity, Pride balked at the knowledge that I could never truly “catch up” with my future classmates. I would not ever be like them; surely I would fail all my examinations and pass none. Mixed with my gratitude, therefore, for Max’s devotion to my tutelage, was resentment that he’d not schooled me with my fellow humans from the first. Never mind that I owed him my life, if thanks to his way of preserving it I must work harder than the others to distinguish myself!

Thus the fondness I acquired for disputation was not altogether honorable: there was something in it of pure captiousness. On the other hand I labored under bonafide handicaps. My quickest progress was in mathematics, formal logic, grammar, and theoretical science—subjects which required for their understanding no particular involvement in human affairs. But their very abstraction from the realm of student experience made them uninteresting to me. More engrossing were matters of physical nimbleness, wherein my former goatship was often an asset: I enjoyed not only gymnastics and wrestling (which I learned from good G. Herrold, in happier days an athlete and still adept despite his age and madness), but also toolwork, handicrafts of every sort, and even music, which I played upon a row of elderberry-twigs I’d fashioned into little pipes.

Yet in the fields where I was most inclined to forage I showed least aptitude. My first exposure to the written word—those sessions in the hemlock grove with Lady Creamhair, when she had read me
The Founder-Saga
and
Tales of the Trustees
—affected me more deeply than I could have supposed. I still preferred literature to any other subject, and the old stories of adventure to any other literature; but my response to them was by no means intellectual. I couldn’t have cared less what light they shed upon student cultures in ancient terms, or what their place was in the history of West-Campus art; though my eyes and ears were keen enough, I took no interest in stylistics, allegorical values, or questions of form: all that mattered was the hero’s performance.
The fable of the Wolf and the Kid for example I could recite from start to finish (as I could a hundred others whose plots were as familiar as the paths of our pasture) and yet not remember the author’s name. Precisely and with real indignation I delivered the Kid’s immortal Rooftop Denunciation of the passing Wolf: but Wit
always hath an answer
seemed as apt a moral for the tale as
It’s easy to be brave from a distance
. Even where Memory served, Interpretation would fail me, especially when the point of a story had to do with human notions of right and wrong instead of practical experience. I could not agree with Max, for instance, that the Kid had behaved improperly: if it was true that bravery is easier at a distance, and one wished to display bravery, ought one not to maintain one’s distance as did that worthy youngster? Or granting, with the Fox Who Would Not Enter the Lion’s Den, that
It’s simpler to get into the enemy’s toils than out again
(which sentiment as Max explained it seemed quite to contradict the previous one), should the Fox not have sprung the more readily to do hero-work in the cave?

“Oh boy,” Max would sigh.

More seriously, inasmuch as the quads of New Tammany College, not to mention Remus and classical Lykeion, were remoter to my experience than the troll-bridge and cabbage-fields of the Messrs. Gruff, I was disposed to approach the events of history as critically as those of fiction. No use Max’s reminding me of “political necessities” or “historical contexts”: if a certain Chancellor had prudently done X where my favorite dean-errant would impetuously have done Y, I lost all regard for the man and was liable to see no
point
in studying his administration. It defied all narrative logic that a fearless geographer could survive every peril of storm and savage in his circumnavigation of the campus, only to succumb to a stupid illness during the last leg of the voyage; what mortal difference did it make that “That’s the way it
was
,” as Max insisted? It’s not the way it
should
have been, and since names and dates were as beside the point for me as the color of Willie Gruff’s eyes, I was inclined either to forget the whole business or amend it to suit my taste.

No firmer was my purchase on economics, physiology, or moral philosophy, and even my competence in theoretical physics, for example, was pejorated by my attitude. At best I found it moderately poetic that every action had an equal and opposite reaction, or that an embryo’s gestation repeated the evolution of its phylum; for the most part I regarded natural laws with the same provisional neutrality with
which one regards the ground-rules of a game or the exposition of a fable, and the reflection that one had no choice of games whatever (when so many others were readily imaginable) could bring me on occasion to severe melancholy. Indeed, if I never came truly to despair at the awful arbitrariness of Facts, it was because I never more than notionally accepted them.
The Encyclopedia Tammanica
I read from Aardvaark to Zymurgy in quite the same spirit as I read the
Old School Tales
, my fancy prefacing each entry “Once upon a time …”

Especially did I consider in this manner the Facts of my own existence and nature. There was no birthdate, birthplace, or ancestry to define me. I had seen generations of kids grow to goathood, reproduce themselves, and die, like successive casts of characters, while I seemed scarcely to age at all. I had lived in goatdom as Billy Bocksfuss the Kid, now I meant to live in studentdom as George the Undergraduate; surely there would be other roles in other realms, an endless succession of names and natures. Little wonder I looked upon my life and the lives of others as a kind of theatrical impromptu, self-knowledge as a matter of improvisation, and moral injunctions, such as those of the
Fables
, whether high-minded or wicked, as so many stage-directions. A fact, in short, even an autobiographical fact, was not something I perceived and acknowledged, but a detail of the general Conceit, to be accepted or rejected. Nothing for me was simply
the case
forever and aye, only “
this
case.” Spectator, critic, and occasional member of the troupe, I approached the script and Max’s glosses thereupon in a spirit of utter freedom. Which spirit, though there’s something to be said for its charm and effectiveness, is fraught with peril and makes a student hard to manage. I hold it as responsible as any other thing for the capriciousness of my behavior during this time.

Mornings and afternoons were devoted to my tuition. Indeed the entire day was, and in a sense the night, as shall be shown; not a minute but Max turned to pedagogical account. We rose as always just before daybreak with the herd, and for exercise I forked down hay or did push-ups in the peat. At the same time, while memory was still fresh, I would recount my nightsworth of dreams—of which there were a great many compared to the old days—and we would discuss them with reference both to general human nature and to the character of my particular mind, which was revealed to be a guileful, impious rascal. One night in my twenty-second year, for example, I dreamt of a terrible misfortune: at the sound of the shophar old Freddie stormed into the barn (that troublesome Toggenburger of days gone by, whom I had
known only after his castration); he butted Max square in the chest and caused him to fall upon the patent docker, so injuring himself that he could never rise again. Then, fleeced oddly in angora, the brute set out to mount Mary V. Appenzeller, restored to ripe matronage by the dream. In vain her attempt to flee over the pasture fence; in vain my best efforts to defend her with a stick; the brute climbed her unmercifully, and I woke in terror at her short sharp cries. For all the villain Freddie had died eight years since and been gelded long before that, I hurried to embrace my sleeping keeper and assure myself he was not harmed.

Imagine my disgust next morning when, having heard my tearful report of this dream, Max said calmly as I forked: “What that means, you were actually wishing what I did to that Freddie was done once to me. Then I couldn’t take Mary to my stall like you used to see me do. That’s all that part means, Georgie.” Worse, he declared the Freddie of my dream to be no other buck than myself, who had indeed once felled my keeper with a blow to the chest, where no ordinary goat could reach. As for my apparent defense of Mary, it was but the reaction of my new human conscience to my former goatishness—which latter still secretly envied Redfearn’s Tom the circle of does (including Mary) that lustily had crowded round him on the day of his death. It was sufficient to observe that my crook-work in the dream was a vain defense, which in fact had been a deadly successful attack: my final wish, as revealed by this and other details, was that Max be castrated and rendered helpless and my human scruples forcibly put aside, so that buck-like I could mount the doe who’d mothered me!

“That’s an awful thing to say!” I protested. “It’s not so at all!”

“Then something worse is,” Max said. He hastened to add that there was nothing unusual or necessarily
wrong
about such a wish, nor did the fact of it imply that I hated my keeper and approved of what amounted to incest; the wish might not even be a current one—but its authenticity was as beyond doubt as my disapproval of it. To my question, Why couldn’t the dream just as well mean something admirable, such as that I fervently wished no injury to befall my keeper, and would lay down my life for my dam’s sake if only she could be restored to us? Max replied, “Every man’s part goat and part Grand Tutor; it’s the goat-part does the dreaming, and never mind how he carries on at night, just so we keep him penned up in the daytime! If you didn’t kill me in your dream, someday you might do it for real.”

Clear-seeing keeper in your tomb: forgive me that I disputed your
grave wisdom. When I had been most nearly a goat in truth, I argued, I had used to dream straightforwardly, as it seemed to me, of eating willowpeel, butting my rivals, and humping all the nannies in the barn; from these fancied mating-feasts my “mother” was no more excluded (nor on the other hand singled out) than she would have been in fact had I come to proper buckhood during her lifetime, for among the liberal goats one sort of love never precludes another. I no longer dreamed overtly of such pleasures; why could it not be merely that my tastes had changed since the confirmation of my humanness? So far as I could see, I had no more desire for any doe, not even for Hedda of the Speckled Teats, who once had roused me to a deadly human passion. Further, I was mystified by the feeling of terror that I had awakened with: it seemed the effect equally of both actions in the dream, the smiting and the ravishment, yet upon waking it was only Max I’d feared for, not Mary, even in those instants before I realized she was past harming. Which was altogether fit, for that whole latter business made no sense! A buck didn’t “attack” a doe, anymore than a male undergraduate “seduced” a prostitute: he simply availed himself of her. And where attack is meaningless, defense is also; had a rutty buck ever truly got loose in the barn I’d have been quite as anxious on Max’s behalf as I was in the dream, but any concern in the other matter would have been for the proper order of our breeding-schedules, not for so preposterous a notion as a milch-goat’s honor! No, I insisted (rapping my points out firmly with the butt of my hay-fork on the floor), the dream must have some other meaning, and an innocent one, perforce. I had no wish to mate with Mary V. Appenzeller; for one thing, she was dead; anyhow she was not my real mother; even if she were, there would be no evil from goatdom’s point of view in mounting her, unless it lay in singling her out exclusively. It came to this, that I was not wicked: I was good. Undeniably I had struck my keeper once, and had slain my best friend—but those were tragic mistakes, one might almost say accidents; it was unkind even to recall them, proceeding as they had not from a flunkèd heart but merely from suffering ignorance, the same that had assaulted Lady Creamhair in the hemlocks …