John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

As best I could fathom it, he had permitted the Frumentian girl to share his sleeping bag, cook and wash for him, and mate with certain redskins. It was possible even to infer that his life had been preserved by those same aboriginals at her behest, but the story was vague. In any case, despite her inclination, if not positive passion, he had seldom actually serviced her, he vowed — perhaps never at all — for the reason that it "weren't decent." In the meanwhile, other adventurers had followed Greene's lead until at length a small quadrangle was established in the wilds; New Tammany College annexed the territory, and Tower Hall dispatched ROTC units to subdue the redskins, and schoolteachers to educate the settlers. Greene himself, from established habit, had declined formal schooling; but he taught himself reading, writing, and arithmetic — with no other light than the fire on his hearth, no other texts than the Old and New Syllabi, no other materials than a clean pine board and a stick of charcoal. And if his manners and speech were untutored, his courage, high spirits, and intelligence must have made up for them, for he wooed and won the pretty schoolmistress herself — Miss Sally Ann from back in the East Quads, whose mother was the boarding-school directress mentioned before.

"You can talk about your Grand Tutors," he sighed, and set his jaw; "Miss Sally Ann was Enos Enoch and His Twelve Trustees as far as I was concerned, and her word was the pure and simple Answer. Wasn't for her, I'd of been a beast of the woods: the way she prettied up the cabin and the schoolhouse was a wonder! And talk about your Finals: when Sally Ann got done with me I could recite you the Founder's Scroll backwards or forwards."

"Is that how to pass the Finals!" I exclaimed with a frown.

"Pfui," Max said. "It's how to flunk a whole college."

But Greene insisted that Miss Sally Ann was Founder and Chancellor and Examiners too, to his mind, and had besides the prettiest face and figure in the entire territory, durned if she didn't. She herself was the Answer: she had rescued him from the clutches of the Dean o' Flunks, from the way to failure, and he would let no vileness near her. It was chiefly for her sake, to provide her with every comfort known to studentdom, that when not yet twenty he claimed squatter's rights to vast tracts of virgin timber, formed his own Sub-Department of Lumbering and Paper Manufacture, built sawmills and factories, laid waste the wilderness, dammed the watersheds, spoiled the streams, and became a power in the School of Business and an influence in Tower Hall. For her sake too (though it wasn't clear whether she demanded these things or he volunteered them) he eschewed liquor and tobacco, and forbade them to others; left off cursing, gambling, and fist-fighting, of which he'd been fond; and had Old Black George's daughter committed to Main Detention as a common prostitute. By discharging in his office the energies previously wasted on idle pursuits, he grew at an early age more affluent than his neighbors. Yet though he swore by his union and career as by Commencement itself, he showed signs of restlessness: he began playing truant from his office, as formerly from the classroom; spent more time on the golf-links than at the mills; became a collector of famous paintings, expensive books, antique motorcycles, pornography, and big-game trophies. And he welcomed the chance to fight for New Tammany as an officer of infantry in Campus Riot II.

"I don't deny you fought like a hero," Max said. "He won the Trustees' Medal of Honor, George, for killing so many Bonifacists. A fine thing."

I was surprised to see that he spoke not at all sarcastically. "I thank you, sir," Greene said, in an accent much brisker and clearer than he'd used thitherto: a modest but military tone. I asked him whether it was in combat with the enemy that he'd lost his eye.

"I wish to Sam Hill it was," he said, and cocked his head ruefully. "Weren't, though." He then declared, for reasons not at once apparent, that the opinion commonly held of him outside NTC was a cruel untruth — namely, that he was henpecked; that his wife "wore the pants in the family" and was unhappy with the fit, as it were; that too much complaisance on his part had led her at first to discontentment, thence to shrewishness, and at last to the Faculty Women's Rest House, and everything kerflooey.

"Fact is," he said, as if talking about the same thing, "my eyes never were very good, but I didn't realize it till I was grown up. I used to press against my eyeball to see things when I was a kid, and then like as not I'd see two redskins where there was one, or my eyes would fill up and blur." Then one day during his courtship of Miss Sally Ann, he said, he'd brought her all the way to Great Mall for the annual Spring Carnival, and it was during their tour of the midway amusements that he'd lost his eye, in the following manner — which he confided in frank detail in order, he asserted, to correct the misrepresentations of malicious gossip. The courtship had been proceeding satisfactorily: pledges of love had been exchanged and intent declared to marry as soon as his position was more securely established, he being then scarcely past adolescence and only begun on his various enterprises. They had learned something of each other's history: on his part, that he was a rebellious orphan with an undistinguished past but great hope for the future, of small resource but large resoucefulness, short on tutoring but long on ambition, with a craving to Commence and make his mark on the campus, and eager to be married though with little experience of women — he confessed to her solemnly his youthful connection with Old Black George's daughter, whereof he was so contrite that, going it may be beyond the facts, he declared he was no virgin, the more severely to chastize himself. She had wept but forgiven him, and admitted sorrowfully that she too had something to confess, though not of a guilty nature: she was beset by a Peeping Tom and secret masher, who, though she had provoked him in no wise but by her general beauty, which no amount of modesty could veil, for some time had plagued her by night — peering in her windows, hissing obscenities from bushes, exposing his member to her moonlight view. She would have spoken of it earlier, she declared, but for her fear that Greene might think the man a beau of hers, present or past, and break their engagement.

Beside this disclosure (the more alarming because young Greene, after incarcerating O.B.G.'s daughter, had taken secretly to patrolling the area of Miss Sally Ann's cabin by night, to prevent exactly such molestation in the rough backwoods, and had seen nothing more sinister than deer and raccoons though his view of her windows was unobstructed) the other details of his financee's background were of no importance to him. Outraged at the mysterious interloper's effrontery — Miss Sally Ann had not seen his face, but was convinced of his reality and motive — Greene vowed to marry her at once, despite the insecurity of their position, the better to insure her maiden honor against mischance, and to thrash the masher if he caught him. He would have wed her that same day, but for one nagging detail…

"It's the simple Enochist Truth," he said; "I'm a shy one where the girls are concerned. Always have been! Always will be!" He blinked and winked. "That don't mean I ain't got an ace or two once the chips are down! But I'm slow to make my play, and the reason is, there weren't no girls around when I was growing up. O.B.G's daughter don't count; not just she's a darky, but she come on so fast and teased so much she'd scare the starch right out o' me, despite I'd love to shown the hussy a thing or two… I used to tell her she was lucky I was saving up for marriage, but the fact of the matter was, I'd get me in a state quick enough just a-thinking how she carried on, but once she was right there face to face — no spunk at all! Know what I mean?"