John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Yoo hoo, Billy? Come, Billy Billy?"

So, she would summon me by name to my torment. I raged into the pound; leaped at her with a howl I'd learned from the sheep-dog bitch across the Road. Kids sprang in all directions, tripping over their own legs; but though she dropped her grass and drew her hands back, the woman didn't fly. There was no fright in her expression, merely alarm and something else. I rose up on my knees, clutched the mesh, and growled.

"No, no," she said. She even squatted to my height, drew something from a bag, and offered it to me to eat. I backed off and charged again, too furious now to care what trick she played me. I crashed against the fence, was thrown back, and crashed against the fence again. I whinnied and stamped and bared my teeth, bleated and barked and brayed; I flung a board and clots of turd at her, and all the while she pleaded, "No, Billy! Please!" The ruckus brought Max hobbling from the barn, where the kids had run. He found me rolling in the dirt with rage.

"Git! Git!" he cried at the woman. "Shoo! Go home!"

She began then to make a strange sound indeed, such as I had never heard: a kind of catching, snorting whimper. And water dropped from behind her eyeglasses as she turned away. I made to spring a final time to speed her off.

" Stillstand! " Max snapped. What is more, he jabbed me in the thurl with the butt of his crook — the first rough use I'd ever had at his hands — and when instinctively I snorted and lowered my head at him like any stud-buck, he cracked me a sharp one across the chine and said, "Get on in, or I put a ring in your silly nose!"

So unexpected was the blow, and his speech so smarting, I ran a-yelp into the barn, more frightened than ever I'd been with my tower tumbled. The woman, just mounting her bike, let go another whoop of her curious noise; I heard Max shooing her off still. My face was wet. I wiped one arm across to see the blood from where he must have cut me — but found only water, that smeared my dusty wrist and was salt as our lick. My throat ached, my lip shook; now I too was wrenched with those bawling wows, which wracked the worse when Max clucked in to soothe me: then he hugged me, kissed my eyes, said " Ach, child, what's the tears now?" and the entire barnyard rang with my first grief.

It was his chore to explain this noise as he had the other. The task was light: we'd used words between us oftener in the fortnight past, for one thing, so that my supply of them had tripled and quadrupled. Besides, the matter itself was less mysterious. In the weeks thereafter as I mused fitfully in my stall (no stranger to insomnia now), I tried experiments with both: laughter, I discovered, was easy to simulate but difficult to bring oneself to genuinely, while the reverse was true of tears. The hilariousest memories I could summon, such as Redfearn's Tommy's mistaking me for Max, brought no more than a smile to my lips; but at any of half a dozen contrary recollections — Tommy springing from my touch, Max threatening to ring my nose, the cream-haired woman not retreating from my charge — I was moved to sniffles and wet cheeks. In fact, I came to weep at the least occasion. Instead of attacking my visitors I wept in a corner of the barn; the sight of other kids frisking or of moonshine whitening the buckwheat watered my eyes; I wept at Max's efforts to jolly me and at his impatience with my tears; I wept even at weeping so; I wept at nothing.

Also I made friends that spring with restlessness. When all goatdom and its keeper were asleep I prowled the pasture, spooking deer and flushing woodcocks from their rest; or I would hang my chin over the fence and stare down the Road that led to the Barns Where Humans Slept — and which Max told me it was death for goats to walk upon. In the daytime, when we all went out to browse, I took to slipping from the herd and wandering by myself through the great black willows along the creek, or up in the rise of nibbled hemlocks where the woods began.

From these latter, one bright April morning, a flash of light came. Looking more closely I spied a movement in the scrub perhaps two hundred meters from where we grazed. In all likelihood it was a deer, and the flash some tin or bit of glass he'd turned with his hoof; just possibly it was a human student, escaped into our pasture. In any case my curiosity was pricked; I teased Redfearn's Tommy into chasing me that way. Dear Tom was a strapping fellow then; it was his last month to run with us before being penned up for stud. But he still loved a romp, and while there was no way to tell him my intentions, I knew that once he saw the intruder we'd have great sport running it back into the bush.

"Ho, Tom!" I urged. Midway between herd and hemlocks I saw the flash again; so must have Tommy, for he drew up short, bobbed his head — and galloped back, pretending not to hear the gibes I sent after him. I looked around for Max; he had not come out with us that day. I went on alone. For prudence's sake I came up noisily, to give the creature warning. I rather expected to find nothing but dung and hoofprints by the time I got there: Instead, just behind the first tree, I found the cream-haired weeper. She stood uncertainly a dozen yards off, wearing green this time and clutching a leathern bag against her belly; it was her eyeglasses, I observed, that had flashed in the sun.

"Nice Billy?"

I pawed the brown needles and threatened with my forehead.

"Look here, I brought you something good." As before, she drew a square white handful from her bag. I felt no anger, but a grand discomfiture; I ought to have gone back with Tommy. I feigned a charge just to send her off to her own pasture, but she only waggled her offering at me.

"Come, dear, don't be, afraid. It's a peanut-butter sandwich."

I bounded at her with a snarl — but faltered just before her. Quite clearly she would suffer my attack if need be. Was she so fearless, or merely stupid? Now she dared to toss the white food at my feet and come up to me with hands extended. I ignored the bribe (which however had a most sharp fragrance): what arrested me was that her eyes already brimmed with that water so familiar lately to my own. She knelt and patted my curls; her human odors filled my nostrils; I forgot even to growl.

"There, he's a friendly Bill, he is." How different her voice was from dear Max's, and her manner of touching. I shivered under it; made nervous water when she stroked my barrel. "Sure he wouldn't hurt his friend," she went on. "Do you know how much I hoped you'd see me? And wasn't I afraid of that brute you play with! Good Billy, gentle Billy, that's a Billy. Here, you just try this, Dr. Spielman won't mind…"

She held the sandwich to my lips. I chewed a corner off it and drooled at its outlandish savor. The woman wiped my chin with a scented white cloth and clucked about the dirt on me. I gobbled up the rest of the sandwich.

"Wasn't that fine? Tomorrow I'll give you another one. And milk, if you want, and some more things you never had before. What do you say, Billy?"

It was a civil question, plainly put and plainly requiring a yes or no, but my new friend seemed astonished when I said " Ja ja , dot's OK."

"Oh, my gracious, you can talk , can't you!" She flung her arms about my neck; I thought myself threatened and wrenched back with a snort. But the woman was weeping, and unused though I was to such behavior, I understood that it was not in anger she hugged me to her woven coat. It was such a hug Max hugged me the day I had learned to cry — but rockinger, more croonish — and I wept in rhythm with her, a sweeter thing than doing it alone.

We tarried for the queerest forenoon of my life. Having discovered that I could speak, she plied me with questions: Did Max beat me? Wasn't I wretched in that stinking barn? Was I being taught to read and write? Had I no friends at all besides the goats? Half of what she said I couldn't grasp; even when the words were familiar I sometimes failed to understand the question. What did it signify, for example, to ask whether anything was being done for my legs? They had always been as they were — wiry and tough, with fine horny pads at the joints; not so supple as Tommy's, but far usefuller than Max's. Why ought anything to be done for my legs, any more than for hers? Again, to illustrate what reading was she took from her bag a white book, which mistaking for another sandwich, I tried to snatch from her.