Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  He went, if not to lunch at least into the barn, and I strode in frenzy to here, to there. A pounding was at my temple. Doelings sprang fence-wards not to be smitten by my stick, the fall of every thistle in my way. Soon I found G. Herrold squat on a rise, his eye on things. I cried, “Ho, G. Herrold! Ho!” He read the signs; with a black hee-hee he crouched to meet me. Knees bent and arms a-swing we circled warily, huffing incitements. His right hand came clap on my nape, I let go the stick to hook his left knee; we tumbled to it, scissored and hammerheld about the landscape until his old knowledge had the better of my young might, and I lay pinned. Our wrappers, shagged with weed-seed, were askew; our skins gave off sharp odor and mingled sweats.

  “Ain’t he grown to a big one!” G. Herrold marveled. His nelson unwound into a loose embrace, and he surveyed me frankly. I was not innocent of self-experiment, nor had my fancy been much cumbered with Rights and Wrongs (save in the matter of Redfearn’s Tommy’s death). A goat-boy, fenced those many years from studentdom, I’d learnt its morals in the spirit of its politics or costume: as an object of study, infinitely various, subject to fashion, and more or less interesting. I had read why the Founder once rained fire upon the Quadrangles of the Plain, and contrariwise in what manner the flower of classical antiquity, the splendid lads of Lykeion, had amused themselves at Maios’s feet: the difference impressed me in no other way than did the difference between the architectures of the two colleges, or their verse-styles. In sum, my mind was open as my vestment, and while I could imagine what a right-minded New Tammany freshman would have felt in my circumstances, I myself knew only curiosity when G. Herrold laid hands on me. Any misgivings were purely theoretical, and overbalanced by the fact that I owed the man my life, that he was anyhow insane and but dimly aware of his behavior. Besides, I couldn’t know for certain what he was up to.

  By way of precaution, however, I said to my friend, “I’d better tell you, G. Herrold: I’m a Grand Tutor, and a Grand Tutor is good. Is this good?”

  He grunted. “It just fine, white boy.” And as he had for all his handicaps and mine taught me something of gymnastics, now and in the days that followed he trained me somewhat in the arts of love—whereat I found myself a readier hand than at Max’s curriculum. In both sports the perfection of my skill was delayed for want of variety in my circumstance and partners some time was to pass before I grappled with a man in anger or a woman in love. But as husband and black-man, athlete and sweeper of the nighttime stacks, G. Herrold had known many sorts of love and combat; to his broad experience (half-remembered) was joined my reading (half-understood) and boundless fancy. We managed much.

  That evening I came home in the best of humors with the herd, my spirit clear and calmed as the mid-March twilight. I felt released from Max’s tutelage, yet somehow more ready than ever, just for that, to be counseled by him. G. Herrold and I came into the barn, singing one of his two songs, and straightway I asked Max’s pardon for my morning unpleasantness. He put down his violin and nodded from his seat in the pens.

  “Look at you two,” he marveled. There was straw in my hair and leaf-litter in the growth of new beard I was so proud of; we would never have done picking burrs and hooked seeds from our clothes. “What have you been up to?”

  I laughed. “Taking out my bad temper on somebody my size.” Stirred still, if tranquilly, I gave my dark friend a comrade’s short embrace, and, laughing again at Max’s frown, made haste to embrace him also and kiss his brow. “I was wicked and stupid with you this morning,” I said.

  “So. Ach, get on with you!” With a smile he fended off my gesture. “You admit you’re not beyond a little wickedness and stupidity?”

  “More than that: I enjoy them. But from now on I’ll be wise and good with you and be wicked and stupid with G. Herrold. Wait’ll I show you what he did this afternoon, once he got me pinned!”

  My dark companion grinned at the pen-side. Max glanced from one to the other of us. “I see.” His voice was concerned, but not quite scolding.

  “Are you angry?”

  Max assured me that he was not: I was a vigorous young man, he said, with normal urgings, and in the absence of generally approved outlets he supposed it was better for me to have recourse temporarily to less generally approved ones than to none at all. So long as my circumstances were as they were, he said, and my motives remained free of perversion, he saw little to choose between auto- and homoerotic activity: masturbation, while more normal in the eyes of most New Tammanians and less liable to cause public embarrassment, carried its dangers in the same single-handedness that recommended it: loveless and reclusive, it fed the fantasies of the timid and could aggravate any tendencies to impotence or withdrawal from engagement with others—narcissism and schizophrenia, he asserted, were the masturbator’s inclinations in the realm of psychopathy. Pederasty, on the other hand, though regarded in New Tammany College as a semi-criminal perversion, had at least to be said for it that it involved a passionate, perhaps even a loving, engagement of the self with others. So long as it was practiced in a healthy frame of mind—a virtual impossibility in a college that held it to be vicious—Max saw no great danger of its becoming a substitute for normal relations with women, any more than my casual past connections with does would be. He cautioned me, however, to abandon the practice once I matriculated, lest it lead me into scandal, fistula, or logical realism—the philosophy of Maios and Scapulas, which Max declared to be as favored by pederasts as was solipsism by masturbators.

  “So it’s probably okay,” he concluded. “G. Herrold won’t do you any harm, and I been in proctoscopy long enough to be broad-minded.”

  “I knew it was supposed to be flunkèd,” I confessed, “but I enjoyed it anyhow.”

  “That don’t matter, Georgie. What flunkèdness is, it’s not doing what you’re not supposed to do; flunkèdness is to do it because you’re not supposed to, and perverseness is to like it because you know it’s flunkèd. ‘Even though’ is okay; ‘because’ is flunkèd.”

  “So I’m still a Grand Tutor,” I said happily. “I knew I was.”

  Max smiled and to my pleasure agreed at least that my disporting with G. Herrold, done as it was innocently and in good faith, didn’t refute my claim. “Take the goats, now, for instance,” he said: “how come you never humped yourself a doeling since you were a youngster? You were sweet on Hedda once, nicht wahr? And a nanny is not bad, you know, for a goat. But you got no taste for them since you learned you’re a human person, isn’t that so?”

  I acknowledged that it was.

  “So you’re not the least bit tempted. How about Hedda’s niece here, though?” He crooked to him a fine black-and-white doeling named Becky’s Pride Sue—still a kid, really—and cradled her in his lap to soothe her alarm. “Wouldn’t she be sweet?”

  Somewhat shocked—Max had never spoken so with me before—I reaffirmed my disinclination for the charms of she-goats. “Anyhow,” I added somewhat sternly, “it would hurt her, wouldn’t it? She’s just little.”

  Max nodded; evidently I’d said what he wanted to hear. “So even if you wanted to, you shouldn’t. Since you don’t want to and don’t need to, the only reason you’d have for doing it would be flunkèd. You’d have to enjoy it just because you know it’s wrong, which is flunkèd, or because it hurts her, which is even flunkèder. No good man could do such a thing, don’t you think? Especially not a Grand Tutor.”

  “You talk as if I’d done it!” I protested, and patted Sue’s head. “I’d never dream of such a thing!”

  “Ay, well, that’s good; I wouldn’t either. Anybody did, he’d have some Dean o’ Flunks in him all right. Let’s don’t talk any more about it.”

  I readily concurred, and the three of us ate our evening meal. Afterwards, though I went dutifully to my books, I found it impossible to attend them. Our discussion of flunkèdness remained on my mind: the legend of the first man and woman in the Founder’s Pomological Test-Grove now appalled me, which thitherto had seeme
d merely charming and a bit unreasonable. I understood for the first time evil, and was so impressed by the horror of it that though I couldn’t look at Becky’s Pride Sue without an inward shudder, my glance turned and returned to her. To rend that dainty girl—despite her cries, out of simple brutehood—it was a thought unthinkable! I could not get it out of my mind.

  That night I dreamed again. I was a goat, a splendid stud; I tossed my head and gloried in the weight of horn there, struck my sharp hooves on the ground. Season was upon me: my eyes rolled, I was fury at the balls. Against them what gate could prevail? I exploded from my stall into pastures of human girldom; Chickie was there, as once in the buckwheat, a score of pink and fleeceless Chickies, clamoring to Be. “Come, Billy!” they implored. A dashing, smashing goat I was, and tireless servicer; I found it light labor to give them joy, inasmuch as my powers were unremitting even when my lust was long since slaked. It amused me the more when Chickie had got her fill of Being and would flee. No matter that I had no hands to clutch with: down the hemlock-aisles I thundered in pursuit—hunh! hunh! my breath came—and her gauzy wrapper was briared off her up the way; I had only to stand rampant and impale her, over all that space, upon my lancing majesty. Instead I crooked her in with it, held her fast down. Somewhere distant the buckhorn blew—Tekiah! Shebarim! Teruah!—for me, and urgent. But I could do anything I wished, not as before because the girl was willing, but because she was altogether in my power, subject absolutely to my will.

  “Oh, how you’d injure me!” my victim wept. “A goat upon a lady girl!”

  “I would that,” I agreed, and not to hear the buckhorn once more summoning (Tekiah! Shebarim! Teruah!), I loudly volunteered, “Don’t think I need to do anything flunked!”

  “How’s that?”

  “I say, don’t think—the truth is, it’s terribly important for me to wake up right now.”

  “I’m only a kid,” the girl pleaded. “Wait till my older sister comes along.”

  “I could if I cared to,” I said. “The passèd thing of course would be to let you go.”

  Her first cry was for joy: “Oh, thank you, sir!” Her second not, for as the horn called out penultimately, I did her upon each blast a grievous harm. Tekiah. Teruah. Tekiah.

  I woke—and jerked from a squealing creature at my chest! A kid (as sometimes happened) had curled against me while I slept; I’d rolled upon her accidentally and, I now realized, squeezed her in my arms as well. There was commotion in the stalls; it seemed her outcries had roused the herd. I sat up sweating and was dismayed to find myself not only ejaculated but observed: Max sat by the pen-gate, his head a-bob in reflected moonlight.

  “You were dreaming,” he said calmly. “Nothing to worry about. It wasn’t Becky’s Pride Sue.”

  I lay down dazed and soon reslept. When I woke in the morning the episode burst to mind at once: for an instant I imagined that Max at the pen-gate was a part of the dream; then the pinch of dried lust on my thigh told me, heart-sinking, he was not. I heard him now directing G. Herrold in the chores, and lay for some minutes awed by memory, by the spectacle of my soul laid out to view.

  That morning Max was solicitous, even one would have supposed half-afraid to speak; it went without saying that our normal program was dispensed with; no mention was made of the night’s events—indeed not of anything—until at the end of a wordless breakfast he ventured to touch my hand.

  “You haven’t really done any flunkèdness, you know. You were just a kid before, and now you’ve learned you got badness in you like we all do. It don’t have to come out.”

  “Cruelness and folly,” I said. “It’ll come out.”

  “So maybe a little here and there. Who’s perfect?”

  I looked him in the eye. “Enos Enoch was.”

  “Ja.” Max bobbed his head, as he had in the moonlight. “Then swallow once and be done, dear boy: are you another Enos Enoch?”

  I shook my head.

  My teacher could not contain his delight: he squeezed my hand in both of his and nodded furiously, frowning and smiling together.

  “Pass you, boy! Pass you for admitting that!” Tears sprang; his syntax faltered. “All that talk of Eierkopf’s about a GILES—just madness. I knew it! Every chance, Founder knows! I went right by the book, and not once but two and three times, knowing all along—ah, Georgie!” He came round and embraced me, put off not at all by my stiffness. “Say it again yet, to make an old man happy—what you said.”

  “I’m no Enos Enoch,” I repeated. “I’ve got as much billygoat in me as Graduate. And as much Dean o’ Flunks as anything else.”

  “And never mind that! Don’t be sorry you’re a plain human student, okay?”

  I assured him levelly that I was not disappointed by the revelation of my nature’s darker aspects, only sobered and intrigued; but that in view of those same aspects I most certainly no longer regarded myself, even potentially, as Wisdom and Goodness incarnate. Max all but hopped about the barn for pleasure.

  “I knew it from the first!” he cried. “But there was that tapelift thing, and crazy Eierkopf with his stories. GILES pfui! I bet he put you there himself!”

  Upon my pressing him to explain himself more clearly, Max confessed that he had for many years entertained a certain hypothesis about my parentage, which till now—by reason first of my tender years and latterly of my misguided ambition—he had kept to himself, not to injure my feelings.

  “I been all my life a bachelor,” he said. “All work! No time for ladies! But in New Tammany once, when Eblis Eierkopf and I were working on the WESCAC, I got to know the Chancellor’s daughter, that was the tape-librarian in Tower Hall. Miss Hector was her name—Virginia R. Hector, what it said on her nameplate. And Eblis and I, we were fighting then about Wescacus malinoctis and the Cum Laude Project; we were fighting about everything … but we both admired very much Miss Hector. She was a Shiksa, don’t you know, with light hair and all wrong politics; in Siegfrieder College she’d have been a Bonifacist like those co-eds in the Reichskanzler’s stud-farms, I knew that; it’s what Eblis loved about her, she was such a plump and blond one. ‘A perfect Frigga!’ he used to say—and how he said it made your heart sink, Georgie. Because Eblis, all he had on his mind was the Cum Laude Project! He didn’t care about her, but only what sperms should go with what eggs to make a Hero …”

  Max pronounced the word as though it tasted foul. He himself, he went on to say, though still nominally Eierkopf’s superior, was by that time already out of favor with Chancellor Hector, and found himself denied full access to the Cum Laude planning. But he undertook a private research into the fields of eugenics and comparative mythology in hopes of anticipating Eierkopf’s maneuvers, and at the same time (as I gathered) courted Miss Hector’s society. His avowed motive was to protect her from his colleague’s designs; unfriendly gossip had it he was out to improve his position with the father through the daughter; in any case, from what Max said I understood that Miss Hector came to reciprocate his own esteem for her—indeed, that it was Max’s reluctance more than hers that kept their relation merely Scapular, as it were: “A fifty-years-old Moishian radical and a twenty-five-years-old Shiksa reactionary, that used to be the Spring-Queen of New Tammany College! Some heroes our kids would’ve been!”

  What exactly passed between them he would not say, but it appeared there was an argument following which, perhaps to spite him, Miss Hector began spending much time with Dr. Eierkopf. She even exchanged her post as tape-librarian to work as some sort of technician on the Cum Laude Project, for which she professed great admiration now that (as she implied to Max) she was privy to its secret details. All Max ever saw her do was steer his colleague’s wheelchair along the corridors and campus paths; despite his own frailness, he declared to me, and his contempt for the Siegfrieder ideal of blue-eyed athleticism, the contrast between Virginia Hector’s proud form and the feeble bloat of Eierkopf sickened his spirit.

  “A pretty Moishian girl, you know, Geor
gie, you think of a dark hall and heavy wine, and myrrh and frankincense; but this Shiksa, she reminded you of bright day-times—almost you could smell sunshine on her! I didn’t want her for myself, not even if I wasn’t old and bony; I wanted she should marry some buck of a northern forester, you know? Or a strapping young iceberg-research man with gold hair on his chest yet. It wasn’t she was a goy; it was she was so pretty in the goy way, instead of some other way.”

  This new feature of my keeper’s life interested me considerably. I asked him whether the woman had married Eblis Eierkopf then. Max’s face darkened; he shook his head. “You heard the reasons why I was fired from New Tammany—all but this one, that happened at the end. One day just after I made my last speech in the Senate, comes a message from Chancellor Hector himself, he wants to see me right away. The Security people take me up in a private elevator to his offices, and next thing before I can tell him hello, this Virginia runs in, all crying tears, and throws her arms around me; and she says, ‘It don’t matter! It don’t matter!’ So I ask her daddy, that’s biting on his cigar by the window, ‘What don’t matter?’ And he spits the end out and never once looks at me. But ‘All right, Spielman,’ he says: “I know when I been out-generaled.’ He was the big general in the Second Riot, you know, before he ran for Chancellor.”

  The occasion of the summons, it developed, was that Miss Hector had found herself with child and declared Max responsible! Even there in the barn, almost two decades later, my keeper’s voice grew incredulous as he spoke of it: horror enough that she had submitted to the repulsive, to the despicable Eierkopf (by what clever means the cripple had managed seduction and mating, Max shuddered to wonder)—more bitter yet to hang her shame on the man who’d tried in vain to shield her! Heartsick, he challenged her to confess that Eierkopf, not himself, had been her undoer—or else some third party with whom she had secretly consorted. Miss Hector, never once looking him in the eye, only repeated her accusation; it was true, she said, that Professor Eierkopf’s passion for his work had led him past propriety’s bounds to the suggestion that she put by modesty for science’s sake and lend herself to certain experimental possibilities of the Cum Laude Project (“I knew! I knew!” Max had shouted at the Chancellor. “Oh boy, won’t I wring his pig’s neck once!”); but she had never acquiesced. As for intimacies with the crippled scientist himself, she was prepared to swear on a stack of Old Syllabi that there had been none, nor had any been proposed; she professed to be nauseated at the thought. Max then had declared, almost a-swoon, it was not the thought she paled at but recollection of the deed, and appall at what thing it had got in her.