Giles Goat Boy (22 page)

Though I was sensible of no waking or change of scene, I got up from my cot and stood in the dark barn at last entirely clear. Max was not in his stall, nor was G. Herrold. No matter! My old wrapper I shucked off for good, and fetched from its storing-place in the supply-room a new one G. Herrold had made against the day I should matriculate: a long and splendid cape it was, of white-bronze fleece, sewed from the hides of two most dear to me, Redfearn’s Tom and Mary V. Appenzeller. Even as I drew it round my shoulders (over a clean wool underwrap) and took pleasure in the proud hang of it, I heard the buckhorn call again, not far distant.

I did not tarry even to pack a sandwich; merely I wound the watch upon its lanyard around my neck, found out my necessary stick, and left the barn. In the east a faint light shone that would presently be dawn; in the west a fainter from the thronging halls of New Tammany College, immeasurably distant. I shivered a moment by the gate, until through the quiet came a different blasting call: a whistle of far-off power, urgent! Whereat I shook no more nor wondered, but sprang the latch, and guided by what tooted through the fading stars, set out a-tap down the hard highway.

A bend was in the road just down from the barn, the farthest I’d ever seen from the pasture gate. There (the strange whistle having ceased) I paused to review the cupolas and gambrels of my home. Lest I see more I pressed on. But just round the bend I found the road divided. I inclined to the right, being of that hand; then checked myself and bent left instead, it was so thin a reason. Yet this was no sensibler, after all, and I found myself quite stopped and suddenly discouraged.

How long I might have languished there who knows; the mere resolve that brooked no suggestion of retreat, before the issue of left or right availed me nothing. When I had commenced once more to shivering, however, I heard a rustle in the fork, and from a growth of sumac Max himself came forth, supported by G. Herrold.

“You walking in your sleep?” he asked me.

I might have demanded the same of him, under whose arm I spied now the horn that had waked me. But I saw a riddling seriousness in the question—it had the air more of a sentry’s challenge than a query—and at the same moment I understood that twice before in recent nights it was the sound of our actual shophar which had figured in my dreams.

“It’s time I matriculated,” I said.

“You know what you’re going to do, do you?”

“I’ll know once I get there.”

“So.” All this while Max stood before me, straining close to see my face in the dim light. “And you know the way? It’s not easy.”

“I’ll find it,” I declared.

“
Ja
, well. But come on back now, G. Herrold fixes you a box-lunch and packs some things. Wait till daylight, you can see your way better.”

But I declined, observing the the hour was already late, too late almost, and that as for food and extra clothing, I could not be burdened with them. Truly I was impatient to be off: if he would accept hasty, heartfelt thanks for all he’d done for me—and tell me please which fork led to New Tammany—I’d be all right, and forever in his debt.

“Which fork, Georgie? You mean you’re not sure?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said at once. “There’s bound to be a sign. Well, bye-bye, Max. Bye-bye, G. Herrold. I really must go.”

And I struck out as if I knew my way, hoping some impulse would turn me left or rightwards if I kept myself from thinking on the choice. But of course I could not not-think; no impulse came; and unwilling either to halt again or to betray my quandary (for I was conscious of their eyes upon me), I forged ahead into the sumac.

“I believe I’ll take a short-cut through here,” I called back.

“
Ach
, George! Wait once!” Max’s voice was joyous; but though I heard him call again for me and urge G. Herrold to help him overtake me, I crashed on through briars and foxgrape—only a bit more slowly, not to rip my fleece.

“Wait once, I got to tell you what we did!” As I would not stay, he bade G. Herrold fetch him up and run, and so in a moment was at my side, fending boughs off as we plunged.

“To the right, boy, not this way. Ay, George! I wouldn’t believe! Just an old Moishian!”

I said nothing, but turned to the right as he directed. Shortly we were on paved road again, all things more distinct now as the light came from behind us. I went on without hesitation and at such a determined clip (being free of brambles) that Max was obliged to remain in G. Herrold’s arms if he would keep pace.

“You know who you are, all right!” he said. “What you thought right along—but who could believe such a thing? Until we proved it!”

Without looking at him I inquired, “That’s why you blew the horn?”

“
Ja, ja
, that’s just why!” More excited than ever I’d seen him, Max described the “experiments” he’d mentioned the previous day. I had, he confirmed, met nearly all the prerequisites of herohood, as far as could be judged: the mystery of my parentage, about which it could be presumed
only that I was the offspring of someone high in the administration; the irregularity of my birth, which had so seemed a threat to someone that an attempt had been made on my life; the consequent injury to my legs; the circumstances of my rescue, and my being raised by a foster parent in a foster-home, disguised as an animal and bearing a name not my own—these and other details corresponded to what Max had found true of scores of hero-histories. On the other hand none seemed unambiguous or conclusive, at least not to one who all his life had been skeptical of heroship. Even if it could be verified that my mother and father were close blood-relatives; that I’d been conceived in a thunderstorm and born in a cave; that rumor had it I was not my father’s son; or that my would-be assassin was either my father or my mother’s father—still nothing followed necessarily. As Max put it: “Not every dumbhead with a scar is a bonafide hero.”

To settle his doubts in the matter (that is, to prove to himself that my claims were mere boyish ambition) he had instructed G. Herrold on a certain night to blow a certain call upon the horn: if I had waked and asked what was the matter, as Max anticipated, my claim for some reason would have been nullified. If on the other hand I had responded without a question or hesitation and set out in a certain way … But I had done neither, quite, only gone on with my troubled sleep. On a second night therefore had come a second call, which to have answered in any wise had been my refutation (Max did not say why): luckily, it too had not moved me, except to lustful dreams. This night had sounded the third and final; had I slept through it or merely inquired what was the matter, my future had been clear: Max would have enrolled me in the fall as a regular freshman at NTC, to pass or fail in some one of the usual curricula like any other undergraduate—quite what he wished for me, he confessed, in all his reasonable moods.

“But I couldn’t help thinking what you said, Georgie, about the WESCAC and its AIM. And crazy or not, I couldn’t help thinking how it was my hand pushed the EAT-button once, and the only way to save me from flunking forever was to lead a Grand Tutor down to West Campus with that same hand.”

From the corner of my eye I saw him stress the point with the finger next to his missing one. But my sharp attention to what he said did not retard me.

“So we blew and we blew; two times tonight we did; and just when
G. Herrold took his breath to blow the one last time—what did you hear, my boy?”

“There was a different sound,” I said. “It wasn’t our horn.”

“It was the EAT-whistle!” Max cried. “I never thought till then how it wouldn’t mean nothing you should answer to the buckhorn anyhow. But the EAT-whistle, that they blow it from the Power Plant for riotdrills—that’s what fetched you! It’s just right!”

Privately I wondered how Max accounted, since his change of mind, for the element of Dunce and Dean o’ Flunks in me, which themselves had been discovered by his experimenting. I chose not to ask, but felt compelled at least to observe that I had waked already and was prepared to set out before I’d heard the stranger sound.

“That’s okay!” Max insisted. “But what if it wasn’t okay? Suppose I said it proves you’re only George the Goat-Boy, let’s turn around home?”

As I could think of no reply, I walked on without comment.

“You see that, G. Herrold? He goes on anyhow, you shouldn’t ask!”

My dear dark comrade, need I say, saw neither more nor less than he ever could. But he was all hum-hum and smile.

“What you said yourself once, Georgie, it’s one or the other: if you’re not Grand Tutor, you’re crazy as G. Herrold, the WESCAC messed your mind up like it did his. If you’re not crazy, you got to be a Grand Tutor, nobody else could be in WESCAC’s Belly and not get himself EATen.”

“That’s right,” I agreed.

“So listen here,” Max said, “you got to hear this: how did the lost Professor in the
Campus Cantos
find his way through the South Exit and around to Commencement Gate?”

“He had the former director of the Poetry Workshop to show him,” I replied.

“So! And in the
Epic of Anchisides
, that this same director wrote himself, how does Anchisides know how to get through the Nether Campus? Wouldn’t he have ended up flunked like the rest if it wasn’t the Lady from Guidance went along with him?”

I saw his point: it was not a disgrace that I had no notion how to reach New Tammany and only the vaguest of what business was mine there. On the contrary, neither Laertides nor any other of the wandering researchers could have completed their field-projects without special counselling. I wanted an advisor, that was all; to
do
the hero-assignment was my function, not to choose it …

“Or even to understand it,” Max added when I made this point.
“Look at Dean Arthur and Excelsior, his magic quill: do you think he knew
why
it always wrote the right answers? He should care!”

Yet one doubt remained to me: I could not recall that Sakhyan or Maios or Enos Enoch had needed the service of a guidance counselor. Did what applied to wandering researchers apply as well to Grand Tutors? But to my query Max replied at once, “It depends! Take in the New Syllabus where Enos Enoch cures the crazies; you know why He did it?”

“Well, He wanted the poor undergraduates to get on with their studies, and I don’t suppose there was any Psych Clinic in those days.”

“Not just that! What it says, He did it
That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the Advisor, saying, Himself took our infirmities
 … Now, then! Suppose Enos Enoch hadn’t read the Old Syllabus, like you haven’t?” The fact was, he declared, Enos Enoch like other Grand Tutors had had His advising as it were in advance, and did what He did in many cases precisely because He knew it to be prescribed that “A Grand Tutor shall do such-and-so.” It was not the fulfillment of predictions that made Enos Enoch Grand Tutor; it was the prior condition of Grand Tutorhood that led Him to search out the predictions and see to it they were fulfilled.

I felt free now to halt in the road and embrace my old keeper, whom G. Herrold set down to that end. And I simply asked, “Will you advise me, Max?”

He could scarcely answer, so delighted was he—and I no less—that we were after all to be together yet awhile. Rubbing his eye, he managed presently to say, “What you think I been doing? Oh boy. Oh boy. You don’t know what it means, Georgie, a Moishian to believe the Grand Tutor’s on campus!”

I reminded him that we were not yet on the main campus of New Tammany College, and that he had better get on with his job, and we three with my journey, unless there was work to be done in the woodland where we were.

“Just one business, right here,” he replied. And clutching my arm with one thin hand to steady himself, with the other he removed from his waist the token of herdsmanship he’d so long worn there: the withered testicles of Freddie, his old foe, and the leather cord they hung on. “Tie these round your wrapper,” he advised me. “It’s you that’s the Good Goatsman now, with a bigger herd than I ever looked after.” I did what he bade me, and he said very seriously, “What these mean, George, if you ever had any faun in you before—any stud-buck in your blood sometimes, you know?
Well, you got to cut it off from now on, or you’re not the Grand Tutor. No more Heddas, and no more Lady Creamhairs, whatever went on out there.”

I blushed and agreed, relieved enough to think that my past misadventures in deed and dream (of which my advisor had only partial knowledge) need burden my conscience no longer. Firmly I decreed
non grata
in my memory the images of Hedda and Lady Creamhair; also those of Chickie with the dimpling buttocks who more lately had frisked there, and Becky’s Pride Sue; not to mention G. Herrold from whom I had learnt more than half-nelsons, and who watched these goings-on with his grave amusement. No more hot grapples in the asphodel; bye-bye to hemlock pursuits and the studly matter of my dreams. No more to aspire to Being was my firm resolve: right gladly I belted the amulet before me, and believe that I would on Max’s advisement have added my own twin troublers to dreadful Fred’s.

“I’ll show you the way to New Tammany,” he pledged, “and how to get past Main Gate and the Entrance Exam. Then we got to sneak you down to WESCAC’s Belly, you should change its AIM. Peace on Campus!”

This last burst from him, an impassioned cry. Never had I seen such exaltation in my keeper; it stirred and hushed my own spirit, and at the same time made me a bit uncomfortable.

“Well,” I said, “let’s go on.”

The stock-barns of my youth, I now discovered, were situate on a high plateau, much farther from New Tammany proper than I’d supposed—unless for some reason the route Max chose was not the most direct. All day we wandered down a twisting hill-road, through stands of oak and rocky fields, resting often for Max’s sake. G. Herrold had brought with him a great piece of Manchego, which at midday we washed down with spring water. Using the length of my former pasture as a measure, I guessed we had gone a dozen kilometers, no more, by late afternoon, when abruptly we came upon a gorge or strait defile between two mountains. “The backdoor to West Campus,” Max described it; a river debouched from the canyon’s throat into a valley west of us, where I saw a considerable lake. We tarried some while on the cliff-edge to watch the play of late light on the rocks, the more impressive as the sun descended quite into the chasm’s mouth. Then we made our way down, resolving to cross before dark and find shelter on the far shore.