Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “He’s a darling, George!” she cried. “I love animals!”

  I smiled. But delightsome as was reunion with Triple-T and the does—who wandered up now in twos and threes, smelt of the hide, and bleated to me as to a keeper—I had come to do works of preparation. Hedda alone I lingered awhile in communion with: unbelievably agèd and infirm, her beauty flown, she tottered from the barn last of all, sniffed my amulet suspiciously, then nearly wept for joy upon realizing who I was. For some minutes we nuzzled wordlessly—shocking how sere and shrunk her once-peerless udder, whose freckled daint had fired my youthful dreams! When at length I introduced her to My Ladyship, the two appraised each other without expression; then Anastasia took my arm and leaned against me, whereupon dear Hedda, with a feeble snort, gimped back into the barn, nor stirred from her rank old straw again.

  I set about my work. First I fed the herd, forking hay down from the loft and refilling the stagnant water-troughs. Then, with Anastasia’s help, I drenched them all with copper sulphate to de-worm them, milked the few who needed that relief (the number of kids was heartbreakingly small), and trimmed everyone’s hooves. Next—what Stoker’s oath had suggested—I filled the dipping-tank with creosote solution, bathed the entire herd, and then (though neither I nor my wrapper was literally verminous, as were the others) cleansed myself in that potent bath, immersing even my head, until no trace of my term on Great Mall remained. Anastasia scrubbed my back; she would join me in the dip, cold as was the air and free of lice her fleecy parts; I knew why, was well pleased, but told her it was unnecessary. We did however wash her body with saddle-soap, and groomed each other when we had brushed and combed the herd. It being then noon, and she and I both roused by the brisk shampoo of our private parts, we repaired to a bed of fresh-forked straw. Warmed by the huddling does (all save Hedda), for two hours we drowsed and coupled—but knew better than to strive for last night’s wonders. She remained she, I I; in a campus of thats and thises we sweetly napped and played, and were content: not every day can be Commencement Day. Lunch, like breakfast, we forwent.

  At two (I could read a goat-crook’s shadow in any season quite as accurately as Ira Hector a man’s, and set Lady Creamhair’s watch with perfect confidence) I rose refreshed from My full-friggèd Ladyship, re-cleansed my organ in the dip, and donned my wrap. Fetching the spare horn from the gear-chest I nipped its point to mouthpiece-size with a docking-tool and fashioned for it a stout sling of binder-twine. Then to all the herd, save two, I bade farewell, pledging to return one day and to send a better keeper to them in the meanwhile. Hedda and Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom were the exceptions: the latter because I meant to take him with me; the former because when I bent into her lousy pen I found her passed away. I closed her glassèd eyes, touched my lips to those withered teats once prouder and more speckled than my dam’s, and left her, trusting that even Grandfather’s aide would not deny her a respectful grave. Triple-T we tethered behind the motorcycle; a handsome buckling he was now, dipped and groomed, with a proper lunch in him; he pranced and snorted and butted without fear the very fender! Anastasia (who not only declined the syringe of vinegar I offered to douche her with, but plugged her privity with sterile gauze to retain the insemination) put on her helmet and released the clutch, and we headed west.

  Our progress, however, with Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom in tow, proved poor. I was obliged at length to hogtie him—revolting term—with the tether and truss him behind me athwart the fender, much as I sympathized with his fright. By this arrangement, though his bleats would have moved to pity Ira Hector himself, we tripled our speed; once past the Gorge and crossroads, moreover, Anastasia displayed a skill at short-cuts equal to her husband’s, and a truly Stokerish capacity for the speed that had so alarmed her as his passenger. The sun hung still a fair half-hour from the horizon when we hove in sight of Founder’s Hill.

  7.

  Set free but for a leash wrapped thrice about my wrist, Triple-T opened us a walkway through the crowd. On every slope they’d gathered through the day—students, professors, administrators, trustees, groundskeepers, clerks, all wearing holiday best. Despite the gravity of the occasion (Shafting had only recently been made public again—by Rexfordian liberals, interestingly enough, who hoped thereby to shock the student body into abolishing capital punishment) there was excitement in the air, even a certain festivity. As the execution happened to coincide with other ceremonies and observances traditionally scheduled for that day of week and time of year, Founder’s Hill had been a busy place since morning. A kind of intermission seemed now in progress: martial music could be heard from loudspeakers, and strolling vendors offered food, drink, pennants, and large white flowers to the crowd. Newspaper extras were being hawked around; the one I fed to T.T.T. bore headlines about Bray’s promised wonders, the full restoration of WESCAC’s strength under Dr. Eierkopf’s supervision from the Powerhouse Control Room, the apparent disappearance of Classmate X, the expected resumption of the Boundary Dispute on last term’s terms. On all the front pages were photographs of Lucius Rexford embracing his wife in the Chancellory sidecar and winking, so it seemed, at the camera, as if to indicate that all was in hand at home as well as abroad. Indeed, despite the seriousness of the varsity situation and the great disruptions of normalcy that still prevailed in New Tammany, the captions were optimistic: LUCKY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN; “LIGHT LIGHTS,” LAUGHS LUCKY. Roving photojournalism-majors prowled with cameras and Telerama-packs, interviewing the student-in-the-path and campus celebrities on such topics as capital punishment, Grand-Tutorial impostors, and what they called the “new look” of the Rexford administration. Me too they would approach for a statement, and Anastasia, when we left the motorcycle and started up: they trotted about, asking what I thought of Bray’s mid-day “miracles” on the Hilltop, and whether I intended to “top his performance” or “have it out” with him. But thanks to the plunging horns and knife-edged hooves of Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom, they kept their distance, as did hecklers, applauders, and the hosts of the indifferent, through whose ranks we made our way.

  Towards the summit, where the rocky hill flattened into a kind of park around the Shaft, the crowd was thinner; Stoker’s guards had erected a great circle of barriers, several hundred meters across, past which none but high officials and their guests were permitted. Stoker himself stalked the far perimeter all ascowl, threatening would-be gate-crashers with his billy and passing upon credentials: some he admitted whose ID-cards showed them to be nobodies; others he refused whose eminence entitled them to pass. At the consequent uproar he laughed—a harsh echo of his old hilarity. Anastasia was admitted at once by the guard at our barrier, who recognized her with a lick of his lips, and at her coax he reholstered his pistol instead of shooting Triple-T. Espying us from several meters off, Stoker shouted an obscenity and ordered the guard to refuse me admittance. People in the dignitaries’ stands near the Shaft turned to look.

  “Go to him now,” I bade My Ladyship. I might have added certain further directions, thanking her too for having fetched me where I had to go; but she agreed this time so readily, and with so knowing a smile, I said no more. Triple-T, once out of the crowd, browsed placidly; I handed his leash to Anastasia and stepped past the guard.

  “Achtung, Stinkkäfer!” he cried. He referred of course to the goat-dip on me, mighty indeed the perfume whereof; but his epithet was so exactly inapposite, I laughed aloud. He swung his billy; I parried with my stick and hoofed him a clean one in the balls. Before he could let go of himself to shoot, a pair of white helmets came over from the dignitaries’ stand. One intervened in the names of the Chancellor and Harold Bray, both of whom he declared had authorized my admission—murmurs went through the near bystanders at this news, and the fallen guard put by his pistol with a curse.

  “You call that Grand-Tutoring?” Stoker shouted. He had started for My Ladyship, but paused when T.’s T.’s Tom bucked at him. Anastasia too seemed shocked by my deed. “Violence!” Stoker appealed to the cro
wd. “No respect for law and order!” People stirred; even White-helmet, though he’d come between us in my behalf, bent to assist his sooted comrade and grumbled that the man had after all been simply doing his duty.

  “Tomorrow the Revised New Syllabus,” I said to My Ladyship. “Today the stick.”

  The other white helmet now escorted to me Hedwig Sear—at her request, it turned out, who had observed from the viewing-stand my entry. She was gowned in black, her face veiled; Anastasia hurried to her, and they wept together as Three-T grazed. The shock of Croaker’s assault, it seemed, had cleared Hedwig’s mind; she spoke lucidly and quietly, impeded only by her grief at the critical condition of her husband. Dr. Sear lay in the infirmary, she told me, at the point of death. Her one wish was to join him, but she’d come to Founder’s Hill at his request in order to honor Max and give me a message. The circumstances of her attack she recounted with extraordinary calm—despite the fact that Croaker, with Dr. Eierkopf aboard, was present in the visitors’ stand. She could even smile, mournfully enough, at the irony of her rape: that when she’d tried to provoke him to it once before, in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, he had rejected her in favor of an automatic soft-drink dispenser. There had followed her return to childishness, of which I’d heard, and when Croaker’s path and hers had crossed again, following their separate releases in yesterday’s amnesty, she had fled him with the fright of a five-year-old girl.

  “Which is just what turned him on,” she said ruefully. “He couldn’t help it; he was just being Croaker. But poor Kennard—” She chuckled and wept. “In the old days he’d have taken pictures, and I’d have been showing Croaker naughty tricks. But Kennard’s changed, too, since last spring—the different things you’ve told him, and his cancer and all …” She blew her nose. Perhaps it was no more than a metastasis of the cancer to his brain, she said; in any case, he’d been escorting her from the Asylum to Great Mall (so he told her afterwards) to get a taxi to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, not this time to mount her in Position One as the consummate perversion, but to come to her in simple love, in hope (her voice grew awed even now at the notion; she doubted I would believe her) that he could leave a child behind him upon his death! The rest I had witnessed from my noose: how, seeing her attacked, Dr. Sear had leaped—spontaneously, instantly, one could only say heroically—to her defense, and been felled by Croaker with a backhand smite. The blow had struck his bandaged tumor; though entirely blind now and basically, mercifully unconscious, he still had moments of lucidity, during which, in the night just past, she’d told him of her own astonishing recovery, begged his forgiveness for her part in their sorry past, professed her devotion to him, and announced her intention to undergo surgical curettage, against the unlikely chance that Croaker had accomplished what her husband had aspired to.

  “But Kennard said I mustn’t,” she declared. “He says we have to be grateful to Croaker for bringing us together after all these years, and that we ought to hope I’m pregnant! No matter what the baby looks like, he says, it’s our child—Kennard’s and mine—because of what Kennard did without stopping to think.”

  “Oh, Heddy!” Anastasia wept with delight and embraced her again, clearly as convinced of the fact and nature of Mrs. Sear’s pregnancy as of her own—though neither was two dozen hours past! Time was getting on; I asked Mrs. Sear directly whether her husband was pleased to be dying.

  She shook her head at once. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell you, George. He says he doesn’t regret for a minute doing what he did. He says that what he’d never seen till Croaker hit him, even though he thought he’d seen everything, was that a certain kind of spiritedness was absolutely good, no matter what a person’s other Answers are. It doesn’t have anything to do with education, he said to tell you, and it’s the most valuable thing in the University. Something about Dean Taliped’s energy, even at the end … He wants to know whether he’s right.”

  “Oh, George!” Anastasia cried. “Pass him now, so Heddy can tell him!”

  Stoker huffed. “He’s out of his head.”

  I smiled at tearful Hedwig. “Please tell Dr. Sear that in my opinion his attitude is certainly sentimental, and that his cancer may very well have damaged his mind as well as his eyesight. But tell him also that he’s a Candidate for Graduation, and congratulate him for me on being a father.”

  “Only a Candidate?” Stoker jeered.

  I nodded. “Like yourself.”

  This retort so infuriated Stoker that Anastasia, still holding Triple-T, was obliged to step between us and command him to behave himself. Taking Mrs. Sear’s arm I slipped away to the viewing stand, and added en route: “Of course, some Candidates are much closer to Commencement than others. Give your husband my love, Mrs. Sear.”

  “Goat-Boy!” It was Dr. Eierkopf calling, from the dignitaries’ bleachers. There also I saw Chancellor and Mrs. Rexford, holding hands; the brothers Hector, amply coated; and Leonid Alexandrov, fidgeting as usual and looking restlessly to westward (though he could not see), where the sun fast sank upon the distant reaches of East Campus. Peter Greene was on the right, similarly bandaged, and flanked, to my surprise, by Stoker’s secretary Georgina and a pretty young white girl whom I concluded must be Greene’s daughter. But she was the very image of Chickie, that co-ed girl I’d watched disporting years ago with the Beist-in-the-buckwheat! The same uncombèd locks; the taunty eyes! And if anything younger, though I her witness had aged seven years in body, thrice that in spirit, since the night I’d heard her beg to Be. She could not be the original Chickie, then; wry speculations came to mind once again about Miss Sally Ann—but I put them aside as immaterial to Greene’s Candidacy and Assignment; also to attend Dr. Eierkopf, who, despite the bandage around his forehead and his general want of robustness, was fairly bouncing on Croaker’s shoulders. Round about them, come to retrieve their errant colleague, sat the delegation of visiting scholars from Frumentius, in the colorful garb of their alma maters. Outfitted with cameras and clipboards, they appeared to be making a careful record of the proceedings.

  “I’m Übertrittig, Goat-Boy!” he cried. “My eyes have been opened!” While Croaker croaked croaks of greeting and the Frumentian scholars sniffed my air, felt of my fleece, and made pictogrammatic notes, he reported shrilly that he was a skeptic no more in the matter of Grand-Tutoriality. For he had seen with his own two eyes (abetted, to be sure, by corrective lenses) wonders unexplainable by natural law and student reason: Harold Bray, not two hours past, had appeared on the Hill as it seemed from nowhere; he had changed color and physiognomy before their eyes, leaped over the reflecting pool—a distance of some dozen meters—in a single bound, walked up the vertical face of the Founder’s Shaft as if it were a sidewalk, to rig ropes and pulleys for the main event, and then vanished, declaring from nowhere over the loudspeakers that he’d reappear at sunset.

  “Wunderbar, Goat-Boy!” he exclaimed. “No tricks! No mirrors! Excuse you: that Bray, He’s a real Grand Tutor!”

  I smiled. “You believe you’ve seen a miracle, Dr. Eierkopf?”

  “Ja wohl, boy! I believe because I saw one! Five-and-twenty, yet!”

  From behind me, where I’d not observed his approach, Stoker scoffed. “You haven’t seen anything, Doc. If it’s miracles you want, George here can do better.” He clapped my shoulder in feigned affection.

  “Dean o’ Flunks!” cried Eierkopf. “Heraus!”

  “He’s going to rescue Spielman off the tip of the Shaft at the crucial moment,” Stoker announced to the stand at large, pointing at me with his index finger. “That’ll prove he’s the real Grand Tutor! He might even save the whole University in one whiz-bang, and Pass us all! Why not?”

  With the exception of some of my Tutees, whose admission Bray seemed to have arranged for reasons of his own, the privileged spectators in the stands were people of position and influence, many of whom had sniffed disapprovingly at my aroma when I came near; they made it plain now that Stoker’s rowdiness offended them on
the sober occasion at hand, and called upon the Chancellor to have us both removed from the Hill. Rexford looked with some concern in our direction; his wife whispered something in his ear that made him frown. He let go her hand and consulted a forelock behind him, who glanced at us and nodded.

  “Come on!” Stoker taunted me at the top of his voice. “Do some tricks! Show us you’re the real G.T.!”

  “Down in front!” someone called. At the same moment drums rolled, and I saw that the sun’s lower limb had touched the horizon. A marching-band struck up a grave processional; way was made at the barricades for a vee of three black motorcycles, behind the foremost of which walked Max. Bent under the weight of a block-and-tackle rig, he moved with difficulty, but his face was alight. A gasp came from the stands: not at that pitiful spectacle, but at a sudden apparition at the base of the Shaft. One would have sworn its marble lines had been unbroken except for ominous ropes and pulleys; there were certainly no doors or other apertures in the masonry, or hiding-places on the little ledge around its base, and the whole monument was ringed by a moat or reflecting-pool said to be a meter deep and twelve wide—yet in an instant on that empty ledge stood Harold Bray, black-cloaked, his arms held out to the approaching victim!