by John Barth
“Every day I looked at the human school-kids that visited the barns,” he said; “they were good children, pretty children, full of passions and curiosity: I’d ask one who he was, and he’d say ‘I’m Johnny So-and-so, and my daddy’s a gunner in the NTC Navy, and when I grow up I’m going to be a famous scientist and EAT the Nikolayans.’ Then I’d ask Brickett Ranunculus, that was just a young buck then, ‘Who are you?’ and he’d twitch one ear and go on eating his hay. There it all was, Bill. On one side, the Nine Symphonies and the Twelve-Term Riot; Enos Enoch and the Bonifacists! On the other side, Brickett Ranunculus eating his mash and not even knowing there’s such a thing as knowledge. I’d watch you frisking with Mary’s kids, that never were going to hear what true and false is, and then I’d look at the wretchedest man on campus, that wrote The Theory of the University and loves every student in it, but killed ten thousand with a single Brainwave! So! Well! I decided my Bill had better be a goat, for his own good, he should never have to wonder who he is!”
Max’s long speech closed with such abruptness, was itself the end of so mattersome a history, I did not at first understand that he was done. But he set his mouth resolutely, closed his eyes, and stroked their brows with his thumb and index-finger. The hall was silent and still duskish—though outside the solstice midday must have been blazing. I could hear again the fountain chortling near the door. Poor Redfearn’s Tommy, he was not forgotten, his corpse lay as large in my thoughts as in his pen—but it was bestrid gladiatorlike by a vaster fact, which wanted just this gurgled quiet fully to see. I raised myself up as far as I could without waking my legs.
“Then I’m not a goat? My sire and dam were both human people?”
As at the outset, Max replied only, “Forgive, forgive, Billy!”
“All this time I’ve been a human student, and didn’t know it!”
“Ja ja.” Max was down on his knees now, so that all I could see of him was his old forehead pressed against the table-edge. “I should’ve seen what it would come to. But forgive, Billy!”
Alas, his revelations so possessed me, it was some moments until I noticed his misery. Then I leaned quickly to shower benedictions upon his hair. Still I couldn’t share his tears; half a score of inferences and conjectures importuned me. Distinguished human parents! Dark intrigues in the highest places to destroy and save me! Rescued to Pass All Fail All!
As if summoned by these astonishments my rescuer himself now hove into view, sweeper in hand. “Y’all go ’long now,” he ordered us with a grin. “I got to sweep this here table off.”
That frizzled head, those great eyes, yellow-white, that had on first behold so frightened me—quite kindly they seemed now. And his gentle madness, it plucked at my heart.
“Five minutes yet,” Max pled, rising. “I call for a wheelchair and fetch this boy to the Infirmary.”
But I insisted I could manage. “I’m going to stand up and walk.”
“Nah, Bill!” He made to stay me, but I gestured him off and swung half-around to sit on the table-edge, my legs hanging over. They pained sharply—not from their first deforming nor yet from Redfearn’s Tommy’s charge, but from the course of fresh blood that began to wake them. When I slipped myself off they buckled, and I was obliged to grasp the table for support.
“Too much at once,” Max protested. “A little time yet!”
But I could not bear resorting to my old lope. For all the shocks that ran from hip to toe, I could flex the muscles once again, and was determined they must bear my weight from that hour on.
“Give me a hand, George.”
“Yes, sir.” George Herrold readily put down his sweeper and supported me under one arm. “Y’all want to lay down,” he scolded cheerfully, “you do it in the dormitory where you s’posed to, not in my stacks.”
“I will from now on,” I said.
His face still anxious, Max braced me from the other side, and I stood off from the table. The most difficult thing was to straighten my knees, which fourteen years of my former gait had crooked. But it was they, and my inner thighs, that Tom had struck, and I choose still to believe his blow was like a hammer’s on a rusted hinge, to free the action. In any case I got them straight.
“You can let go now.”
George Herrold did at once, with a chuckle, and stepped back. Max hesitated, stayed it may be by the sweat of excitement on my face; yet I had only to glance at him, and he too released me. As I had twice with Lady Creamhair and once alas before Redfearn’s Tommy, I stood erect—but this time I didn’t fall. A very paroxysm of unsteadiness shook me, surely I must keel; Max stood ready to spring to my aid. I so far compromised my aim as to rest one hand on George Herrold’s shoulder. But I didn’t fall.
“He good as new,” my rescuer scoffed. “Ain’t nothing wrong with this chile.”
Max clapped his hands together. “Billy Bocksfuss! Look at you once now!”
It was a gleesome thrill, this standing; my heart ran fast as when I’d teetered on those barrels in the play-pound. But at my name I felt displeasure, like a pinch. Breathlessly I said, “I don’t want to be a Billy now, or a Bocksfuss, either one! I’m going to be a human student.”
“Ja ja, you got to have a new name! What we do, we find a good name for you. Ay, Bill!” In the access of his joy Max embraced me around my chest and came near to upsetting me—but I did not fall. It surprised me to observe how short a man he was, now I was standing straight: I was a whole head taller! Many things, indeed, that I had until then necessarily looked up to I found myself regarding now as from an eminence; the perspective put me once more in mind of my short reign as Dean of the Hill.
“I’m going to learn everything!” I cried. “I want you to teach me all I have to know, and then I’m going to be a student in New Tammany College! And you know what I’m going to do, Max? I’m going to find out where WESCAC’s den is, and I’ll say, ‘Where’s my mother and father? What have you done with them?’ And he’d better give me the right answer, or by George I’ll eat him up!”
Max shook his head happily. “Such talk!”
Perhaps thinking I’d referred to him, George Herrold struck up his favorite warning: “It’s WESCAC’ll EAT you if you don’t watch out …”
“You’ll see!” I gaily promised.
Max let go me and furrowed his brow. “Say now, Billy! I just thought something!”
He was struck with wonder that a certain question had not occurred to him until that instant—one which well might have long since to any auditor of this history. But as it had required him fourteen years to think of it, so seven more were to pass before ever it got asked—and I fear it has not been answered to this day. I cut him off at the mention of my name.
“Not Billy any more! Billy Bocksfuss is dead in the goat-pens.” The latter words, an inspiration of the moment, it gave me an unexpected stir of pleasure to pronounce.
Max laughed. “So what should I call you?” He reminded me that none of us knew what my proper family-name was, but he saw no reason why I shouldn’t get by without one for the present. If in the meanwhile I desired a new given-name, he’d be glad to help me choose one. The goats, I knew, were named by a strict genealogical procedure, but I had no idea how humans went about their own nomination.
“Well, the Moishians anyhow,” Max said, “they call their sons by the last man that died in the family, so his name don’t die too.” He said this lightly, but it turned our thoughts together to my dead friend, inasmuch as in goatdom we all had been brothers.
“You want to be a Tommy, boy?”
I shook my head: the burden were too painful—and besides, noble Tom had been after all … a goat. For similar cause I rejected Max III, after my keeper’s father: however dignified, even dynastic, the air of such numerals in studentdom, to my mind they still suggested prize livestock.
George Herrold the booksweep here lost interest both in our discussion and in my swaying stance; he returned to his machine, humming some tune for his own ent
ertainment. I followed him with my eyes. After a moment Max said from behind, “Ja, I raised you; but that George Herrold, what you might say, he brought you into this campus.”
I turned to him with a smile. “George is a good name, isn’t it?”
“A fine name,” Max agreed. “There’s been famous Georges.” Presently he added, “His wife left him since he was EATen. I don’t think he ever had any kids.”
“If nobody minds,” I said, “I want to be called George from now on.”
Max nodded. “That’s good as you could do.”
I found myself then unspeakably fatigued, and proposed we go home. Standing was one thing, walking another; Max fetched George Herrold to help, but even with their joint support I got no farther than the drinking-fountain before I was exhausted. Still I refused to go on all fours.
“So let your namesake carry you,” Max suggested. And when I was fetched up in the black man’s arms he said, “Now wait: I do something important.” He wet his fingers at the running fountain. “When the Enochists name a child,” he said soberly, “they take it to a Founder’s hall and spritz some special water on its head; and they say a thing like Dear Founder please drive out the old goat from this kid, and keep the Dean o’ Flunks off him, and help him pass the Finals and sit with you and Enos Enoch on Founder’s Hill for ever and ever. Well, so, this is just good drinking-water here, and instead of a Founder’s hall we got a library. With a crazy Schwarzer for your Founder-father and a tired old Moishian for your chaplain. So this won’t be a regular Enochizing; what you might say, I’m going to Maximize you.”
So saying he declared to the empty stacks: “This kid he’s not a goat any more, but a human student. Let suffering make him smart, that’s all I care.” His voice rose: “By all the Grand Tutors, true ones and fakes, that ever made students miserable; by everything that suffers—Moishians and Schwarzers and billygoats and the whole flunking student body—I dub you once George, you should Pass All Fail All.”
The clock in far-off Tower Hall happening just at this point to strike the hour of one (but we were on Daylight Saving Time), he touched waterdrops to my brow. We three then stepped into shadowless midday, my namesake singing as he bore me:
“ ‘One more river,’ say the Founder-Man Boss:
‘Y’all gone Graduate soon’s y’all cross.’ ”
Second Reel
1.
Seven years I spent a-prepping—where did they fly? It is an interval in my history far from clear. As those unlettered hordes of old swept down on the halls of Remus College and were civilized by what they sacked, so vandal youth must bring forever the temple of its heritage to rubble, and turning then the marble shatters in its hand, commence to wonder and grow wise, regret its ignorance, and call at last for mortarbox and trowel. Just such a reconstruction was that account of my earliest years, whose cracks and plaster-fills will not have escaped the critical; and such another must I render now of my education, like an archaeologist his lost seminaries of antiquity, from its intellectual residue. Certain events unquestionably took place at certain times: Mary V. Appenzeller, for instance, empty of udder and full of years, Commenced to greener pastures not a month after Redfearn’s Tommy—peace of mind be eternally hers, who gave me the only and lovingest mothering I knew. These are my bench-marks, the footers and standing columns of past time’s ruin. The rest I reimagine from the shards of Max’s teaching that remain to me—altered, I do not doubt, by passage of time, by imperfect excavation, and by my own notions of how things should have been. Even so are the sayings of Maios known to us only through the dialogues of his pupil Scapulas, and the deeds of Enos Enoch through the reminiscences (by no means indiscrepant) of his protégés. What I may want in fidelity of reproduction, let good faith and earnestness atone for, accepting too this special extenuation: that for reasons presently to be made manifest there is fitness, even significance, in the obscurity of this period and the consequent vagueness of my accounting.
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 fi
rst 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.
