Giles Goat Boy (8 page)

“No, now,” she mildly chid, “that’s just paper, you know. Poor thing, you never had bedtime stories, did you? Let’s sit down, I’ll read you something …”

I pretended to be listening; then as she seated herself I ripped a leaf from the book and sprang away to eat it.

“Oh dear!” she cried merrily. “So that’s how it is! Well you needn’t grab, young man, it’s not a bit mannerly. You march yourself back and say ‘Please,’ and you shall have all you like.” In earnest of her pledge she tore a page out herself and offered it me. “Now, that does for the title-page and end-papers, doesn’t it? We mustn’t eat the others till we’ve
read them.” She chattered on, and all I understood was the gentle good humor of her tone. We wept again, I do not know why—indeed, we wept repeatedly throughout that griefless day. In the end I laid my head in her lap as she read to me, and toyed with the silver watch she wore on a lanyard round her neck. Why was I not with the herd, and what would Max think?

Unlike much of what I heard that morning, the
story
was splendidly clear and gripping: it involved three excellent brothers who desired to cross a stream and feast upon cabbages, but were opposed in their innocent design by a typical human visitor called Troll. This Troll, understand, had no desire to eat the cabbages himself, nor from what I gathered was the
bridge
his private pen; even had it been, his intent was not the honorable one of guarding his privacy. Ah no: I was aghast to hear from my friend’s calm lips that the brute meant to kill those beautiful heroes and
eat their flesh
. My gorge rose at the thought; I could scarcely chew the page on which such evil was. The woman saw my agitation, patted my neck and insisted it was “just a story”—as if that excused Troll’s wickedness, or would save Wee Willie! Only her assurance that the brothers would triumph staunched my tears and dissuaded me from calling Max to their rescue—for though I could not see the Misters Gruff, they were there in the words that sounded off the page, as real and clear to me as Redfearn’s Tommy. What resourcefulness the youngest of them showed in turning Troll’s blood-lust to their advantage: the story named no breeds, but I was sure in my heart that this initial Gruff (to my mind, the real hero) was of the same species as myself. I hung on the tale’s unfolding, I wanted it never to end, and yet trembled with concern for the second brother, lest he not have caught the gambit of the first. “Tell him wait for der biggest brudder yet!” I counseled—yet durst I hope even Troll could be gulled thus again? At the appearance of Great William Gruff I forgot to eat, and when I saw justice done (albeit bloodily) and that worthiest of families cross to their reward, I embraced my newfound friend about her middle.

Never was such a wonder as this
story!
Its passion drained me, yet I was bleating for more when Max’s shophar hooted in the distance.

“What’s that? Must you go?” She returned the precious volume to her bag. There’d be another tale tomorrow; she knew a host of them. And more peanut-butter.

“Bye-bye, now,” she called. I scampered back to her, mistaking her meaning; the pull of the shophar against my movement brought tears to
my eyes. Ah, was that it?
Auf wiedersehen
, then, till tomorrow … the herd was almost to the barn already.

“Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” I galloped tearfully through the fields. At the first of the stud-pens I paused to say respectfully bye-bye to Brickett Ranunculus, an Anglo-Nubian who but that he was polled had been my image of Great William. Then I ran inside and threw my arms around Max, forking down hay.

“I love you, Max!”

“You gone crazy, boy?” Max put by his pitchfork. “Where you been again off from the herd, and don’t tell nobody?” His tone was stern, but not angry; my odd behavior, however upsetting, no longer surprised him. With all my heart I longed to tell Max of my adventure—especially the miracle called
story
, which couldn’t be shared with Redfearn’s Tom. Yet I fought down that urge, and in fact said not a word about the peanut-butter sandwich, the field of cabbages, or my appointment for the morrow, all which wonders were to pitch me sleepless through the night. Some intuition warned
verboten
; taking my cue from that soul of invention, Wee Willie Gruff, I said bye-bye to fourteen years of perfect candor—and dissembled with Max Spielman.

May and June rent my soul in two. “I hate that play-pound!” I declared.

“So go out with the herd.”

But the herd, I protested honestly enough, was a bore; who wanted to browse all day with old does? I pretended it was Redfearn’s Tommy’s absence that discontented me—but refused to stay behind with him in the buck-pens.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “Stop pestering me to stay with the herd.”

Max shrugged. “Who’s pestering? All I want, you don’t make yourself unhappy.” I saw him raise his shaggy eyebrows: I had not got such notions from Redfearn’s Tom or Mary V. Appenzeller. But I was past caring whose feelings I hurt or what anyone suspected. Lady Creamhair found me scarcely less unpleasant. I saw her every day now except when bad weather or bad temper kept me from the hemlock grove. I lived for our interviews, but spoiled them for the slightest reasons. She wouldn’t tell me her real name, lest I repeat it to Max; nor would she say why Max shouldn’t know of our friendship. I quite understood that there would be unpleasantness of some sort if he did—I would be penned for good and all with my brother bucks, and Lady Creamhair’s keepers would see to it she was kept thenceforward in her barn. Only in blackest moods was I inclined to make a clean breast of things, but I pouted to Lady C. as if our secret were a burden of her imposing that I bore unwillingly. She read me no end of stories, and began to teach me to read for myself.
My
accent
, which till then I’d not known I had, commenced to fade—rather, to be replaced by a manner of speaking no less unusual, as I have learned since. Her grandfather, she told me, had once been a professor of Antique Narrative somewhere on West Campus; inasmuch as the books I devoured were all from his collection, my speech came to be flavored with the seasons of older time. I learnt to say “Alas” where once I’d cried
“Ach”
; I no longer said “Nein,” but might well lament
“Nay.”

Nor was it my locutions only that were thus marked. My fancy, theretofore ignorant of its hunger, I glutted on such heady fare as
Tales of the Trustees, The Founder-Saga
, and the exploits of legendary scholars who had wandered through the wilds of the ancient campus. Rich stuff. And like a starved man rendered ill by too-sudden feasting, my imagination that spring was sore blown. One day I would see myself as Great William Gruff, and Max and Lady C. as Trolls bent on keeping me, each in his fashion, from the Cabbage of a glorious destiny. Was it not that I was meant to be a splendider buck even than Brickett Ranunculus, and Lady C. had been sent by jealous powers to witch me into rude humanity? Or was it (alack) that I was of noble human birth, the stuff of chairmen and chancellors, but had—like many another student prince—been wizarded into beasthood by Max Spielman? Worse than either of these, another day I felt me no hero at all, not prince nor black-shagged Pyrenean, but a troll myself: a miserable freak resolved in the spite of monstership to destroy whatever decent thing came near my bridge. Thus no matter what my weather I behaved badly with one whose pardon I wretchedly craved when that weather changed; or else having injured them I despised them, out of the surplus of my loathing for myself. Painful season.

But since Creamhair was a friend of less long standing, and the hemlock grove less beloved of me than the barn, it was Max and Mary who bore the burthen of my contempt. I had used to sleep, often as not, nestled into Mary’s brisket; now, though she cried for me as for an unweaned kid, when I came home at all I slept with Redfearn’s Tommy. Max surely understood that my excursions were not innocent: I spoke to him in brusque one-syllables, not to have to feign the accent I’d come to hate the sound of; filled with
petits fours
and tossed salads I turned up my nose at his honest lespedeza; out of tone from afternoons of languid talk, I refused to wrestle with Redfearn’s Tom for my keeper’s amusement. But he only tisked his tongue, and not to provoke me to worse unkindness, stayed out of my presence as much as he could. When I slipped through his pen at night en route to prowl the fields, he would
pretend to be asleep; but if I stole back to look five minutes later, I’d find him sitting up in the straw, gesturing at no one and mumbling into his whiskers, or sawing upon his ancient fiddle.

Lady Creamhair I barraged with questions, blunt in themselves and sneeringly put. She told me she had once been Queen-of-the-May; I asked her now about those fairy co-eds whom the old dons-errant had been wont to rescue from the clutch of wicked scientists: Were they younger than she, and comelier? How was it the hero’s costume was given in detail, but never his stud-record? Could a Chancellor’s flaxen-haired daughter, freshened by a strapping young Doctor of Philosophy like those in the
Tales
, surpass Mary Appenzeller’s output of seventy-three pounds of butterfat in her first year’s milking? If not, what
was
the ratio of milk-yield to body-weight, say, required to qualify a milch-lady for Advanced Registry? Seven to one? Five? Why did she, Lady Creamhair, not relieve herself every little while as did I and everyone I knew, including Max? If it was, as I suspected, that her exotic diet left nothing to void, why did it not affect me similarly? This
boss
of hers, whom she compared to a keeper: when had he last arranged to have her serviced; and did he mount her as a rule himself or keep studs for the purpose?

“Young man,” she replied, “those are naughty questions.”

“I’m a goat,” I said.

“Indeed you are, when you ask things just to be unpleasant. I’ve told you already all a boy of fourteen needs to know about marriage and that. As far as the rest—it’s simply not nice to go to the bathroom where people can see.”

This latter wanted some explaining; the ancient narratives had not taught me what
bathroom
meant, and given its definition I could still not grasp how one “went to the bathroom” out-of-doors, where no bathroom was. When all was finally made clear I ridiculed the queerness of it; danced round her on my knees with my wrapper drawn up to make public my “privates,” as she called them, and gave demonstration of my contempt for human
niceness
.

“Now look here!” she cried. I mistook her words and left off at once, expecting her to show herself in turn. I was in fact suddenly possessed with curiosity about something that had not occurred to me until that moment. But she made no move to lift her garments. “You can’t expect me to put up with
that
,” she, said. I flattened myself on the ground to see under her dress; pressed my cheek into the hemlock needles. She was obliged to clutch her skirt about her and move away.

“Very well, Billy, I’m going home.” I saw tears in her eyes, and was instantly contrite.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

But she was more bothered than I’d imagined. “No, I’m going. I know you’re sorry, but all the same—I think maybe we shan’t see each other again.”

At this I rolled on the ground and wailed so piteously that she could say no more.

“See if I don’t kill myself!” I declared. “I’ll eat privet-berries and die, like Cinnamon Daphie!” In token of my vow I commenced to bang my head on a hemlock root, until she came to my side and begged me to stop.

I paused between bangs. “Will you come again?”

“You don’t understand what the trouble is.” She wiped my eyes and her own. “I’ll have to think what’s right.”

But I could not abide uncertainty. I loved her, I declared: more than I loved Redfearn’s Tommy or Mary Appenzeller; more even than I loved Max. She must promise to see me every day; she must never threaten not to see me.

“Ah Billy!” She hugged me to her chest, and for a time we wept together. “If you knew what you’re saying! Don’t I die when Dr. Spielman calls you home? My own Billikins!
Pass All Fail All
, don’t I love you?”

Finally it was agreed our tête-a-têtes would be continued—but on a different basis. She’d been on a long
vacation
, she explained, which being now at end, she must return to work. She would still meet me in the grove on weekend afternoons, and occasionally on weekday evenings while the weather was warm and the days long. The nature of our meetings, too, must be somewhat altered.

“It’s not fair to any of us,” she said. “I want you to be a human being and Dr. Spielman wants you to be a goat, and you’re caught in between. All this secrecy’s not right either. Here’s what I think: you’ve got to be one or the other, and Dr. Spielman and I must go along with your decision.”

It was sweet to roll my head against her chest.

“Why can’t I be both?”

“You just can’t, my dear: if you try to be both, you’ll end up being neither.”

“Then I want to be a man,” I declared—more readily than sincerely, for in truth neither option seemed endurable. The goats still struck me as far superior in almost every respect to the humans I’d seen and heard
of: stronger, calmer, nobler; more handsome, more loving, more reliable. But the humans, for better or worse, were vastly more interesting; and what was more, there were no goats in sight.

“No,” she said, “you mustn’t decide so fast. Think hard about it till next Saturday. If you still feel then that you want to be a man, you ought to be raised in a proper house and dress and go to school with the other children. And we’ll have it out with Dr. Spielman; if he disagrees I’ll—I’ll write a letter to the Chancellor about it. But think hard before you make up your mind, Billy. It won’t be easy to catch up; the other boys may laugh at you sometimes, until you learn not to act like a goat—”

My face warmed. “I’ll butt them dead! I’ll kick them with my hooves and tear them into bits and drown them in the creek.”

Creamhair tugged one of my curls. “That’s what I mean.”