John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"You can't eat that!" a scholar shouted, clawing at the strips that hung like pasta from my jaws.

"He can shove it!" my grandfather snapped. "Independence, he calls it!" He grabbed at his wrapper. "Where's my aides?" he demanded of his former receptionist. "Get this flunkèd hair-shirt off me!"

"Weren't they with you at the barns, sir?" she said.

"Oh, the Dunce, I forgot I sent 'em out there." Suddenly defensive, he glared at me and asked how the flunk a man could mix a batch of goat-dip by himself and keep his eye on a young buck like Triple-T at the same time. At mention of that name tears sprang to my eyes; I swallowed a great cud of Scroll; the rest fell to the floor and was scrabbled up by scholars. For a moment my despair gave place to a sweeter if no less painful emotion.

"Tommy's Tommy's Tom? Have you been with the herd, Grandpa?"

"Don't Grandpa me, Dunce flunk you! If that buck hadn't banged up my arm — "

He would crook me a harder one despite his infirmity; I lowered my head to take the blow and die like Redfearn's Tom, grandsire of the buck he spoke of. There were cries from receptionist and bystanders, quite a number of whom had been attracted by the disturbance.

"Stop." It was a voice I knew that pierced the clamor, and my heart: hard, clickèd, like a thumbnailed flea, a hoof-cracked tick. Asafoetida, the very smell of my impotent vision some moments before, was faint now in the literal air. Like Bray's voice, it came from the Circulation Desk, whither all eyes turned. He stood upon the desktop, as if flushed forth by the CACAFILE: a taller, leaner-jawed Bray than the last I'd seen, less hirsute, more commanding, stronger of voice and odor. His skin shone as if varnished, and even as I had dreamed, he now affected over his white tunic a stiff black cloak, as of hard-shined gabardine. Everyone fell silent. My grandfather humphed, but lowered the crook. Mother made a baleful sound and whipped a knitting-needle from her bag, undoing all her purlings in one stroke; but she permitted me to disarm her. I patted her hand.

"Thank you, George." Bray stepped from the desk and came hubwards.

"Look at this, sir!" an old scholar cried, wetting with his tears a handful of vellum tatters. "It's destroyed!"

Everyone spoke at once then: it was my fault more than the CACAFILE's, they said, whose original breakdown I'd also caused with my spring-term program; rather, it was Lucky Rexford's fault, for they assumed that my freedom, and Mother's, was owing to the flunkèd general amnesty. The ex-Chancellor's former receptionist was especially vociferous: she had mistrusted me the minute she'd first set eyes on me, she declared to Bray (forgetting, I presume, that I'd been at that time disguised as him), and her suspicions had been borne out catastrophically: not only had I, in addition to my more famous crimes, driven my mother mad, ruined the CACAFILE, and caused the Founder's Scroll to be first lost and then destroyed; I was also responsible for the undoing of New Tammany's most beloved alma-matriot, chancellor emeritus, and professor-general (retired). Not content to destroy the Philophilosophical Fund and thus move the College another step closer to Student-Unionism (of which Founderless ideology she had no doubt I was an agent), I had by some sinister means arranged for the transfer of its former director, the greatest of p.-g.'s and most considerate of employers, out of Great Mall and all posts of honor, to the managership of a bunch of stinking goats — probably in reprisal for the well-deserved punishment of the "pink pedagogue" and traitor Max Spielman.

"There, there," the P.-G. muttered, blushing gratefully and patting with his good hand first her corseted, indignant rump and then, catching himself up, her back, in a classmately way.

"A-plus," my mother said, impressed I think by the righteously wrathful tone of the woman's accusations, and glaring at Bray as if they were directed at him. The bystanders murmured; cameras clicked, and their wielders cursed the flashbulb shortage — for which too my denouncer called me to blame. Only the scholars paid us no heed; possessing themselves of what shards and tatters had been fetched into the Catalogue Room, they withdrew to the Circulation Desk to salvage the rest, curiosity supplanting their dismay. Bray himself heard the charges patiently, without expression, as nothing new, and I indifferently, bristling only at her insult to the herd. Then he raised his hand to silence her and the assemblage.

"Professor-General Hector's retirement to the goat-barns was his own decision," he said. "He wished to be 'beholden to no man,' I believe he told me. Isn't that true, sir?"

Gruffly my grandfather admitted it was — not to be obliged, I suppose, for advice either, even bad advice. It was a poor professor-general, he declared, who didn't know when he was licked, and he would not deny that his objectives — utter independence and complete self-reliance — which thitherto he'd thought of as synonymous, had turned out to be contradictory. Managing the herd without the help of his aides, he'd found himself dependent absolutely on himself — a dependence so oppressively time-consuming, he'd had no opportunity to "be himself" at all. Isolated from classmates and staff, absorbed from morning till night with the tending of goats, the preparation of his food, the maintenance of the barns, even the manufacture and repair of his clothing, he'd scarcely had time to roll himself a cigarette, much less assert his independence and enjoy his individualism.

"And that was when I had two hands," he said.

"You poor thing, sir!" the receptionist exclaimed, touching the injured arm. "Let me tie it up for you."

But he refused permission, declaring he'd bind the wound himself, as he'd done more than once in time of riot, as soon as he located his goldbricking aides — on whom obviously it was folly to depend; he pitied the goats, now he remembered he'd dispatched his aides to tend them in his stead. But no: Dunce flunk those stinking brutes!

"Then you weren't beholden to the Goat-Boy for that idea," Bray asked again. "Is that correct?"

"I make my own decisions," the ex-Chancellor grumbled. "I don't pass the buck. I'm my own man. An officer's responsible for the mistakes of his subordinates."

Touched by his sense of honor, however confused it was, I apologized for the counsel he now denied I'd given him, and agreed that it had been mistaken, though for other reasons than his.

"Every man for himself," he snapped,

"Hear hear!" his loyal former receptionist applauded, taking his good arm and flashing her glasses at me defiantly, as if I'd been put in my place. I turned to Bray and explained, with a mixture of new respect and old resentment, the fault I'd found with his Certification of Reginald Hector: reading the citation "No class shall pass" to mean that his famous self-reliance was my grandfather's key to Commencement Gate, I had bid him cast off his lifelong unacknowledged dependency upon his brother, the Old Man of the Mall, and single-handed herd the goats. But I saw now, not merely that he was more dependent than ever, only upon himself instead of upon Ira and the aides, but also that my counsel was self-contradictory: I'd held Passage (Reginald's at least) to depend on independence, whereas to be consistent with itself it ought to be independent of independence.

"Balls!" said Grandfather.

"May we quote you, sir?" inquired a reporter, but retreated before the former receptionist, who had commandeered her former employer's crook and brandished it menacingly.

Bray may have smiled. "I believe Mr. Ira Hector intends to restore the original endowment of the P.P.F. He's doubling it, in fact…" This announcement caused much stir among the bystanders and the reporters who had found their way to the scene, or perhaps arrived in Bray's company. "Do you suggest," he asked me politely, "that Chancellor Hector apply to his brother for reappointment to the directorship?"