Free Giles Goat Boy by John Barth Page B

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.

4
.
    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