Giles Goat Boy Read online

  I was, in other words, the Ag-Hill Goat-Boy. Who misbegot me, and on whom, who knew, or in what corner of the University I drew first breath? It was my fate to call no man Daddy, no woman Mom. Herr Doktor Professor Spielman was my keeper: Maximilian Spielman, the great Mathematical Psycho-Proctologist and former Minority Leader in the College Senate; the same splendid Max who gave his name to the Law of Cyclology, and in his prime led his department’s fight for some sort of examination to supplement the Orals. Alas, his crusading ardor burned many a finger; so far from being awarded an emeritus professorship to comfort his old age, he was drummed off the quad a year before retirement on a trumped-up charge of intellectual turpitude—though his only crime, he avowed to the end, was to suggest in a public lecture that his science alone could plumb the bottom of man’s nature. Disgraced and penniless, he was obliged to take whatever employment he could find to keep body and soul together; and thus it came about that he spent his last years as Senior Goatherd on the New Tammany College Farms. Ignominy—yet who can say Max didn’t make the most of it? His masterwork, The Riddle of the Sphincters, twenty years in the writing and done but for the index, he fed to the goats a chapter at a time: I myself, so he told me years later over Mont d’Or cheese and bock beer, had lunched on the Second Appendix, a poem-in-numbers meant to demonstrate mathematically his belief in the fundamental rectitude of student nature. Embittered, but too great-hearted for despair, he removed himself entirely from society and devoted all his genius to the herd. Year-round he lived among us: made his home in a stall through the winter and pastured with us when the weather warmed. Call it if you will the occupational affliction of the field-researcher, he soon came to feel for the objects of his study more love than he had ever felt for his peers in the Senate. He became a vegetarian, grew a little beard, exchanged cap and gown for a wrapper of mohair, and lamented only that his years would not let him go on all fours. Though he never deigned to publish again in his life, his researches were at no time more bold and meticulous than during the first few years of this period. The goats, after all (to quote an entry from his diaries) “do not conceal in shame that aspect of their beauty I crave to fathom; serenely aware, after their fashion, that a perfect whole is the sum of perfect parts, they fly their flags high …” His one enemy among the bucks was an old brown Toggenburger called Freddie, tyrant of the herd, who, when he spied Max bent over to inspect any doe, would butt him, taking him for a rival. Max in turn was thus driven head-first against the subject of his examination, who thinking herself assaulted seldom felt again the same trust in her keeper. Such subversion of rapport between subject and investigator could not be permitted; just as vexing was the coincidence that the Chairman of New Tammany’s Speech Department, whose filibuster in the Senate had blocked passage of the Qualifying Anals bill and contributed to Spielman’s downfall, was named Fred. Max saw in this a sign, and took his vengeance. He dared not approach the Toggenburg openly, and so one October night when the bucks were bleating their lust as usual (none more loudly than treacherous Freddie), he arranged for a spry young nan to find her way into his enemy’s stall: some moments later, Max crept up behind with a patent docker. Zut, the old rogue was clipped in mid-service, no joy in his windfall then! And all his fierceness withered; he grew fat and docile, never said a word when his keeper dehorned him a few weeks later. Of his trophies Max made the earlier into an amulet, of which more anon, the latter into a kind of shophars wherewith thenceforward he summoned the flock—and his studies proceeded without further trouble. Indeed, whether because they understood “after their fashion” that Freddie was undone and were grateful to his undoer, or because in goatdom the horn and testicle, irrespective of their bearer, command obeisance, the bucks gave place to Max ever after, and the does they capered to his tootle. The months that followed were perhaps his blissfullest: he founded the sciences of analogical proctoscopy and psychosymbolistic cosmography, developed the Rectimetric Index for “distinguishing, arithmetically and forever, the sheep from the goats,” and explored the faint initial insights of what was to become Spielman’s Law, his last and farthest-reaching contribution to man’s understanding of the University. That capstone on the temple of his genius, climax of his epic quest for Answers: how commonplace it sounds already, very nearly banal; and yet what dash, what vaulting insight! In three words Max Spielman synthesized all the fields which thitherto he’d browsed in brilliantly one by one—showed the “sphincter’s riddle” and the mystery of the University to be the same. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny—what is it but to say that proctoscopy repeats hagiography? That our Founder on Founder’s Hill and the rawest freshman on his first mons veneris are father and son? That my day, my year, my life, and the history of West Campus are wheels within wheels? “Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny”—I cannot hear those words but in the gentle Moishian accents of my keeper. Well he knew, old Max, the fate of grand hypotheses, but hard experience had brought him unfairly to mistrust his colleagues’ wisdom, and his isolation kept him from final appreciation of WESCAC. For fifty years, he said, his theory of Cyclic Correspondence would be anathema on West Campus: not twenty had gone by before it was dogmatized by the Chancellor, taped by the Chief Programmer, and devoured by WESCAC.

  He never could have prophesied his present fame, clear-seer as he was in his latter years—nor would it much have assuaged his misanthropy to foresee it. Yet though he refused, and justly, the trustees’ belated offer of emeritus benefits, there is some evidence of mellowing in his last semesters, perhaps even of loneliness for his own kind. Of the scores who have quoted the famous Maxim, “Der goats is humaner than der men, und der men is goatisher than der goats,” how many understand its deep ambivalence? It’s true he kept a seraglio of nannies (though his appetites in this line have been much exaggerated, as has his prowess) and named them after leading members of the Faculty Women’s Club—but there was no malice in the voice that summoned Helen to his stall, or Maude, or Shirley; and the respect he showed Mary V. Appenzeller, my own dear dam, any boy might wish for his lady mother. But the most revealing evidence that Max still bore some love for men is the thing most often scored to his discredit: I mean my own appearance in the goat-barn and my rearing with the other kids of the West Campus herd.

  I know now that I am not Max and Mary’s kid: that much he told me on the day I learned I was a man. Let those who pity my childhood mark this well: I wept as much to know the one as to know the other. What a fair and sprightly thing my kidship was! Sweet Mary Appenzeller neglected the rest of her family to nurse me; thanks be to her splendid udder, whose twin founts flowed at my least beck, I grew from strapping infancy into a boyhood such as human males may dream of. Fatigue was my only curfew, sufficient rest my one alarm. I ate what, when, and where I pleased—furze and gorse and fescues; oil-cake, willow-peels, and pollard. Acorns bound me when I was loose; mangolds scoured me when I was bound. As there were no rules to break, Max never birched me; since he forked my hay and patted my head, I loved him beyond measure. Like my stallmates I feared fire, loud noise, and the bigger bucks, but only in the presence of those terrors, never between times, and so anxiety was foreign to me as soap. When I was gay I gamboled where I would, banged heads with my brothers and bleated in the clover; angry I kicked my stall, my pals, or Mary Appenzeller, whichever was behind me, and was either ignored or re-kicked at once. I learned neither sums nor speech until I was ten, but at five years my crouching lope outstripped any human child of twelve; I could spring like a chamois from rock to rock, break a fencerail with my head, distinguish six hundred ninety sorts of plants and eat all but eighty-three of them. My moral training required no preachment (not the least respect in which it differed absolutely from that of humans): Who neglects his appetites suffers their pangs; Who presumes incautiously may well be butted; Who fouls his stall must sleep in filth. Cleave to him, I learned, who does you kindness; Avoid him who does you hurt; Stay inside the fence; Take of what’s offered as much as you can for as long
as you may; Don’t exchange the certain for the possible; Boss when you’re able, be bossed when you aren’t, but don’t forsake the herd. Simple lessons, instinct with wisdom, that grant to him who heeds them afternoons of browsy bliss and dreamless nights. Thirteen years they fenced my soul’s pasture; I romped without a care. In the fourteenth I slipped their gate—as I have since many another—looked over my shoulder, and saw that what I’d said bye-bye to was my happiness.

  2.

  They flatter themselves who hold that I was unaware of people all those terms; that had I ever seen normal men I’d have yearned most miserably to leave the herd. The truth is, Max made no particular secret of my existence; people knew of me long before those articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Indeed, the New Tammany S.P.C.A., interpreting their jurisdiction widely, moved more than once in my “behalf,” and only the direct intervention of the Chancellor (who, let us say, felt guilty about Max’s dismissal) prevented their plucking me from my family. Every weekend there were students and faculty along the fence. I was as pleased to see them as were all my friends; we frisked for their amusement. If in time Max forbade me to approach them, it was not out of fear that I might defect: he knew I’d not swap my liberty for the pitiful estate of folk who teetered on two legs, reeked of unnatural scents, bound themselves in layer after layer of cloth, and were never allowed the run of the pastures. What he feared—alas and rightly—was that if they didn’t poison me, as they did with tobacco a Schwarzhals doeling I once knew, they’d corrupt me with bad examples. A day came when I chafed at this restriction: Max thought me more innocent than I knew I was, and hence like every youngster I underestimated my susceptibility.

  How it would have alarmed him to know my sophistication at fourteen. From simple observation I’d learned to tell men from women, even when the latter wore trousers and sheared their fleece. To be sure, I had yet to guess the measure of human frailty: one whose brothers become fathers before their first birthday, and who has himself in play been humping does since he could crawl, can scarcely feature a beast that may not mate until its thirteenth year. But I well understood why their keepers never scrupled to let human bucks and does run together, and why they all were so ashamed of their bodies that they mated in darkness. More than one night (unknown to Max) pairs of people stole into our buckwheat meadow: if I heard them crashing through the straw—as often I did, their attempts at silence were that clumsy—I’d slip from the pound to watch their performance from some near hiding-place. When I learned how night-blind they were and how poor of smell and hearing, I made bold to come almost upon them, not to miss a word of their curious bleating—and never was found out. By this means I discovered that the brutes were hairiest in the few places where goats were bald, and bald almost everywhere else, where fleece is most needed (my own angora wrapper I regarded as a part of myself, it was so seldom removed). I had assumed that all the men I saw were geldings, since they ran with the women and never smelled lustful: now I learned that neither sex rutted that strongly. Small wonder. Who could mount, for example, a monster with two heads instead of one—which heads moreover sprout from its backside? Just that enormous seemed the first female human I saw unclothed, with her queer small udders at the wrong end of her trunk. Yet praise be to Nature, that finds every dragoness a dragon, all praise to Instinct for making worms love other worms—she managed a feeble coupling after all with her hairless buck, and my education took a great step forward.

  But see me stray from the point, quite as I came to stray from the herd and leave behind my good judgment. These espials bear on what’s to come—let them show in any case that I was less naïve than gentle Max supposed. For I also understood by the age of fourteen that he was some sort of human himself, despite his long white curls and splendid odor; and further that, for all the herd accepted me as a brother, I was no Rock Alpine, Murciana, or Schwartzenberg-Guggisberger, but a breed unto myself. It was I the people came to see, I think I always knew that. My pals grew faster and were nimbler on their feet; after a year they joined the grownups and were replaced by new kids, while I remained season after season in the play-pound. They were stronger, more handsome, and (pass them) more predictable. I was merely clever—yet dull enough to think myself their better on that account. I alone could climb a tree as well as gnaw its bark, pick my own lice, imitate any sound I heard, and transform a herdsman’s crook into a weapon. We all loved tricks and stunts, but they hadn’t by half my invention, and in the whole of goatdom no kid save Billy Bocksfuss ever tricked himself.

  In our play-yard were a number of barrels and boards that we used for Dean of the Hill. To entertain my admirers I would set two planks against opposite sides of a barrel-top; Redfearn’s Tommy, my special friend, would scramble up from one side and I from the other, and we’d wrestle for possession of the summit. One weekend morning, encouraged by applause, I raised the Hill to a height of two barrels, and thence to two barrels and a box, which I climbed with great difficulty from the side. The plankway was too steep then for the others; they could only adore me from below as I teetered on my perch; presently they feigned indifference, butted one another on the ground as if they didn’t hear my crowing, or the crowd’s approval. But I knew their hearts were filled with envy. Redfearn’s Tom, especially, craved to join me: “Come, Tom!” I called, and he would pick his way up the steep board until he lost his footing. The humans took up my taunt: “Come, Tom! Come, Tom!” My poor brown buddy hurled himself up the barrel-side, fell back in the mud, hurled himself again. I mocked his bleating; he redoubled his efforts; my tower shook. “Come, Tom!” I cried. And I found myself making the peculiar roaring noise I’d heard humans make: “Ha ha ha! Come, Tommy! Ha ha ha!” The word laughter was not yet in my vocabulary; I’d often mimicked its sound, but now I understood its cause and use. Inspired, I made water upon my friend. “Ha ha ha!” we all laughed as he sprang away.

  I heard Max call from the barn-door: “Na, you Bill.” His voice was stern; “Come down off,” he ordered, and I conceived a queer new notion: he was jealous. The onlookers hooted: though I had not heard that sound before, I grasped its import at once and found it no chore to echo. What’s more, it suggested my last and grandest stunt: rising up on my knees I cupped hands to mouth and did a perfect imitation of Max’s shophar.

  “Verboten!” he shouted, clutching at his beard, shaking his crook at me.

  It was the peril-word. At once every goat round about raised head from browsing; years of training made me feel seized by that word as by a hand; my senses rang. But where was the danger? The humans were with me; they recommenced their laughter, and so again and again I sent the buckhorn’s call across the fields.

  “Te-roo-ah! Te-roooo-ah!”

  Alarm and summons together drove the goats wild: they leaped and cried and crashed against their fences. The does all called for their kids, the kids for their dams—I heard Mary bleat for me from her stall. The big bucks stamped in their pens and plunged about; Redfearn’s Tom tore between Max and the barrels. There stood our keeper shouting, “Verboten!” but the summons came from Billy Bocksfuss, Dean of the Hill!

  My next “Te-roo-ah!” resolved Tom’s doubts: I that had been his playmate was now his keeper and must be obeyed. As before he threw himself up against the barrels, frantic to reach me, and now the others followed his example. Hadn’t I gulled them, “Ha ha ha.” And then my tower came a-topple.

  I had built it near the fence, which, when the Hill fell, I tumbled over, to the feet of my audience. No bones broke, but the wind was knocked out of me, and I was terrified to have fallen, as I thought, into the people’s pen. They sprang back; their women shrieked—no fiercelier than I, when I had got my breath. It is a mercy I didn’t know then what I learned by and by, that men have sated their bloody hunger with jambon de chèvre and billygoat-tawny. Even so I guessed they’d set upon me, as would our bucks on any of them who fell within reach. I scrambled up, my only thought to escape back into the play-pound; but trou
sered legs were all around me, and still rattled by my fall I sprang the wrong way. More shouts went up; I was struck a cruel one athwart the muzzle with a stick. I stumbled into the fence, but my eyes had watered, I couldn’t see to climb. Max hopped about the pound, crying at them to stop; I bleated my pain to him and scrabbled up and down in search of the gate. The pens were in an uproar. “Ha ha ha!” the people snarled, and kicked me with their leathern hooves.

  Hours later, when Max had calmed the herd at last and laid cold pads on my contusions, he did his best to explain that my attackers had been frightened as I, and had struck me thinking I meant to harm them. This I could understand readily enough. What stung more sharp than bruises was a thing he found less easy to make clear in our simple tongue: Why had they cheered my stunt and then ha-ha’d all the while they kicked me? To attack—that was perfectly normal for bucks of any species, however unequal the contest. But what manner of beast was it that laughed at his victim’s plight?

  Even as I strove to find words for this question I felt a nudging at my back; Redfearn’s Tommy had overcome his fright enough to cross the kid-pen and snuggle down beside me in Max’s lap, which we often shared. He still smelt of my urine, and when I made to pick his lice by way of reparation, he bounded off a-trembling.

  “So,” Max said, and was kind enough to say no more.

  3.

  This sweet forbearance—which had also spared me any punishment for my misdeeds—I myself was not graced with. The more I reflected on my ill use of Redfearn’s Tom, the wrathfuller I grew at my own tormentors. Indeed, I tasted for the first time hatred, and turning its dark flavor on my tongue, lost my first night’s sleep. Tom by next morning bore no grudge, he was ready to play again; but when the iron cycles drove up to our pound and the afternoon’s humans were discharged to admire me—their numbers increased by news of the past day’s sport—I attacked the fence viciously, and was pleased to see them scatter. That became my custom: I would wait in my stall until the visitors gathered, charge at them once, and then withdraw to brood away the balance of the day. When their first alarm passed they begged and taunted me to have at them again—“Here, Billy!” “Come, Bill!”—and made ready sticks to poke me through the mesh. But the first charge they were always unprepared for: to a man they sprang back; the females squealed, the males made oaths. I never gave them the pleasure of a second.