The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  4

  The Poet Crosses Chesapeake Bay, but Not to His Intended Port of Call

  “ ’TIS GOSPEL TRUTH, I swear’t!” Bertrand insisted. “There is no better place for news than a St. Mary’s tavern, and I’ve had eyes and ears wide open these several months. ’Twas common knowledge amongst his hirelings that Tim Mitchell was John Coode in disguise, and now ye’ve told me your Master Burlingame was Tim Mitchell—b’m’faith, I should have guessed ere now! ’Tis in the very stamp and pattern of the man!”

  Ebenezer shook his head. “ ’Tis an assertion not lightly to be matched for implausibility.” Nevertheless, he showed no indignation, as he had on other occasions when the valet had aspersed his former tutor.

  “Nay, sir, believe me; ’tis as clear as a schoolboy’s sums! Only think: Where did ye first hear of this fiend John Coode?”

  “From Lord Baltimore, ere I left,” Ebenezer replied. “That is—”

  “And when did Coode commence his factions and rebellions in the Province? Was’t not the very year Burlingame came hither? And is’t not true that whene’er Master Burlingame is in England, he tells ye Coode is there too?”

  “But Heav’n forfend—”

  “D’ye think Master Burlingame could pass for two minutes as Coode with Slye and Scurry, much less make a three-month crossing in their company? ’Tis past belief!”

  “Yet he hath a wondrous talent for disguise,” the poet protested.

  “Aye and he doth, b’m’faith! From all I’ve heard from yourself and others, he hath posed as Baltimore, Coode, Colonel Sayer, Tim Mitchell, Bertrand Burton, and Eben Cooke, to mention no more, and hath ne’er been found out yet! But what’s the chiefest talent of John Coode, if not the same? Hath he not played priest, minister, general, and what have ye? Is’t not his wont to travel always incognito, so that his own lieutenants scarce know his natural face?”

  “But he was six years my tutor! I know the man!” Even as he made it, Ebenezer realized the vast untruth of this declaration. Although he continued to shake his head as in disbelief, at their ferryman’s suggestion he abandoned the idea of returning to the inn to leave a message, and the fishing sloop made way down the St. Mary’s River.

  “ ’Tis all shifting and confounded!” he complained shortly afterwards, when he and Bertrand had retreated from the weather to a tiny shelter-cabin behind the mast. He was thinking not only of Burlingame and the transvaluation of Lord Baltimore and Coode which his former tutor had argued so persuasively that morning (and which, after Bertrand’s announcement, seemed most self-incriminating), but for that matter Bertrand, John McEvoy, and virtually everyone else. “No man is what or whom I take him for!”

  “There’s much goes on.” the valet nodded darkly, “that folk like thee and me know naught of. Things are de’il the bit what they seem.”

  “Why, i’Christ—” Ebenezer gave himself over to exasperated conjecture. “How do I know ’tis Burlingame I’ve traveled with in the first place, when he alters everything from face to philosophy every time I re-encounter him? Haply Burlingame died six years ago, or is Baltimore’s prisoner, or Coode’s, and all these others are mere impostors!”

  “ ’Tis not impossible,” Bertrand admitted.

  “And this war to the death ’twixt Baltimore and Coode!” Ebenezer laughed sharply. “How do we know who’s right and who’s wrong, or whether ’tis a war at all? What’s to keep me from declaring they’re in collusion, and all this show of insurrection’s but a cloak to hide some dreadful partnership?”

  “ ’Twould not surprise me in the least, if ye want to know. I’ve never trusted that Jacobite Baltimore, any more than I’ve trusted Mr. Burlingame.”

  “Jacobite, you say? ’Sheart, what an innocent rustic thou’rt become! Think you King William’s not secretly as much in league with James as he is with Louis and the Pope o’ Rome? Is’t not a well-known fact that More history’s made by secret handshakes than by all the parliaments in the world?”

  “There’s much would surprise an honest man, if he just but knew’t,” the valet murmured, but he shifted uneasily and stared out at the lowering sky.

  “I’faith, thou’rt a greater sage than Socrates, fellow! These sayings of yours should be writ in gold leaf on the entablatures of public buildings, lest any wight forget! What is’t but childish innocence keeps the mass o’ men persuaded that the church is not supported by the brothel, or that God and Satan do not hold hands in the selfsame cookie-jar?”

  “Ah. now, sir, ye go too far!” Bertrand’s tone was hushed. “Some things ye know as clear as ye know your name.”

  Ebenezer laughed again, in the manner of one possessed by fever. “Then you really believe ’tis Eben Cooke thou’rt speaking to? How is’t you never guessed I was John Coode?”

  “Nay, sir, go to!” the servant pleaded. “Thou’rt undone by thy misfortunes and know not what ye speak! Prithee go to!”

  But the poet only leered the more menacingly. “You may fool others by playing some looby of a servingman, but not John Coode! I know thou’rt Ebenezer Cooke, and you’ll not escape murthering this time!”

  “I’ll tell the captain to fetch us back to St. Mary’s City at once, sir.” Bertrand whined, “and summon a good physician to bleed ye. ’Tis late in the day for a crossing anyhow, and marry, look yonder at the whitecaps on the Bay! Rest and sleep—rest and sleep’ll make ye a new man by tomorrow, take my word for’t. Only look astern, sir: there’s a proper hurricane blowing up! I’ll speak to the captain—”

  “Nay, man, come back; I’ll tease no more.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them with thumb and forefinger. “ ’Twas just—Ah well, I had a picture in my mind, that I’d forgot till now, and I thought—” He paused to pinch himself unmercifully on the forearm, grunted at the pain of it, and sighed.

  “Please, sir, ’tis a frightful storm coming yonder! This wretched toy will go down like stone!”

  “And you think we’re really here, then, and can drown? This thing I spoke of, that had just jumped to mind—’twas back in Pudding Lane last March—marry, it seems five years ago! I had been offered a sort of wager with Ben Oliver, an obscene business, and had flee to my room for very mortification—”

  “ ’Sheart, feel how she rolls and pitches, sir, now we’re clear o’ land!”

  The poet ignored his man’s terror. “When I was alone again in my room, I had a perfect fit of shame; I longed to go back and play the man with Joan Toast in the winehouse, but I’d not the courage for’t, and in the midst of my brooding I fell asleep there at my writing table.”

  The roll of the boat threw Bertrand to his knees; his face went white.

  “ ’Tis all very well, sir, all very well indeed: but I must shout to the captain to turn back! We can fetch Miss Anna another time, when the weather’s clear!”

  Ebenezer declared they would fetch her now, and went on with his reminiscence. “The thing I just recalled,” he said, “was how Joan Toast waked me by knocking on my door, and how I was so amazed to see her, and still so full of sleep, I could not tell to save my life whether ’twas a dream or not. And I remember reasoning clearly ’twas doubtless a cruel dream, for naught so wondrous e’er occurred in natural life. All my joys and tribulations commenced with that knock on the door, and so fantastical are they, I wonder if I am not still in Pudding Lane, still wrapped in sleep, and all this parlous history but a dream.”

  “Would Heav’n it were, sir!” cried the valet. “Hear that wind, i’Christ, and the sky already dark!”

  “I have had dreams that seemed more real,” Ebenezer said, “and so hath Anna, many’s the time. There was a trick we knew as children: when the lions of Numidia were upon us or we’d fallen from some Carpathian cliff, we’d say, ’Tis but a dream, and now I’ll wake: ’tis but a dream, and now I’ll wake—and sure enough, we’d wake in our beds in St. Giles in the Fields! Why, we were even wont to wonder, when we talked at night betwixt our two bedchambers, whether all of life and the world were not jus
t such a dream; many and many’s the time we came nigh to trying our magical chant upon’t, and thought we’d wake to a world where no people were, nor Earth and Sun, but only disembodied spirits in the void.” He sighed. “But we ne’er durst try—”

  “Try’t now, sir,” Bertrand pleaded, “ere we’re drowned past saying charms! I’God, sir, try’t now!”

  The poet laughed, no longer feverishly. “ ’Twould do you no good in any case, Bertrand. The reason we never tried it was that we knew only one of us could be The Dreamer of the World—that was our name for’t—and we feared that if it worked, and one of us awoke to a strange new cosmos, he’d discover he had no twin save in his dream… What would it profit you if I saved myself and left you here to drown?”

  But Bertrand fell to pinching himself ferociously and bawling “ ’Tis but a dream, and now I’ll wake! ’Tis but a dream, and now I’ll wake!”

  His concern for the safety of the boat was justified. The sudden half-gale that had blown up from the southwest was piling seas in the open water of the Chesapeake as formidable as any the poet had seen, except during the storm off Corvo in the Azores, and instead of the Poseidon’s two hundred tons and two dozen crewmen, his life was riding this time in a gaff-rigged sloop not forty feet long, manned by one white man and a pair of husky Negroes. Already the light was failing, though it could be no later than five in the afternoon; the prospect of sailing through some fifty miles of those seas in total darkness seemed truly suicidal, and at length, despite the urgency of his desire to find Anna, he asked the Captain—a grizzled gentleman by the name of Cairn—whether they had not better return to St. Mary’s.

  “ ’Tis what I’ve been trying to do this past half hour,” the Captain replied sourly, and explained that even with his jib and topsail struck and his mainsail triple-reefed, he had been unable to sail close-hauled back into the Potomac, which lay to windward; so strong were the frequent gusts that the minimum sail required for tacking was enough to dismast or capsize the sloop. The only alternative had been to drop anchor, and even this, according to the Captain, was but a temporary expedient: had the bottom been good holding ground, the anchor pendant would have parted at the first gust; as it was they were dragging to leeward at a great rate and would soon be beyond the depth of the pendant entirely.

  “Yonder’s Point Lookout,” he said, indicating an obscure and retreating point of land in the very eye of the wind. “ ’Tis the last land ye’ll see this day, if not forever.”

  Ebenezer felt cold fear. “ ’Sbody! D’you mean ’tis over and done with us?”

  Captain Cairn cocked his head. “We’ll heave to and rig a sea anchor: after that ’tis God’s affair.”

  Thus delivered of his sentiments, he and the Negroes bent a little trysail onto the mainmast to keep the bow to windward and replaced the useless iron grapple with a canvas sea anchor, which, so long as the tide was ebbing towards the ocean, would retard the vessel’s northeastern leeway. There was nothing else to be done: when the work was finished the Captain lashed the tiller and took shelter with his passengers in the cabin, which, unfortunately for the crew, had room enough for just three people. Point Lookout very soon vanished, and as if its disappearance had been a signal, darkness closed in immediately, and the wind and rain seemed to increase. The sloop was flung high by each black sea and fell with a slap into the trough behind; the sea anchor, though of value in preventing the boat from broaching to, caused her to nose rather deeply and ship a quantity of water at the bow, which the Negroes were obliged to bail out with a crude wooden bilge pump.

  “Poor devils!” Ebenezer sympathized. “Should we not spell them at the pumps and give them some respite in the cabin?”

  “No need,” the Captain replied. “Three hours shall see the end of’t, one way or another, and ’twill keep ’em from freezing in the meantime.” What he meant, the poet learned on further interrogating him, was that if the storm did not blow itself out, change direction, or sink them, the present rate and course of their leeway would carry them across the Bay in three hours or so and bring them stern-foremost to the Eastern Shore.

  “Then marry come up, we’ve hope after all, have we not?” Even Bertrand, who had been chattering with cold and fright, displayed some cheer at this announcement.

  “Ye’ve hope o’ drowning near shore, at least,” the Captain said. “The surf will swamp her in a trice and haply break her up as well.”

  The valet moaned afresh, and Ebenezer’s cheeks and forehead tingled. Yet though the prospect of drowning horrified him no less now than it had when he walked the pirates’ plank off Cedar Point, about a dozen miles northwest of their present position, the prospect of death itself, he noted with some awe, held no more terrors. On the contrary: while he would not have chosen to die, especially when Anna’s welfare was so uncertain, the thought of no longer having to deal with the lost estate, his father’s wrath, and the sundry revelations and characters of Henry Burlingame, for example, was sweet. Delicious Death! Not in broodiest night hours of his growth, when in anguish or fascination he would cease to breathe, hold still his brain, and hear the blood rumble in his ears while he strove dizzily and in vain to suspend the beating of his heart—not even then had cool Oblivion seemed more balmy.

  Except to grunt at occasional extraordinary crashes of water or lurches of the boat, no one was much inclined during the period that followed to speak aloud to anyone else. The storm, though uneven in its violence, showed no signs of abating, and could at any moment have swamped or capsized them without warning in a sea too cold and rough for the ablest swimmer to survive more than twenty minutes. Yet thanks to the sea anchor, the indefatigable Negroes at the pump, and an apparent general seaworthiness about the hull, not to mention blind Providence, the vessel remained hove to and afloat through gust after gust, sea after sea—and slipped steadily, if not apparently, to leeward all the while. After a time—which to Ebenezer could as reasonably have been twenty as two hours—the Captain left off stroking his beard and raised his head attentively.

  “Hark!” He raised a hand for silence. “D’ye hear that, now?” He threw open the door, stepped onto the deck, and, at the risk of swamping, ordered the Negroes to suspend for a moment both their pumping and the rhythmical chantey with which they paced and lightened their labor. Ebenezer strained his ears, but though the open door amplified the noises of the storm and admitted no small quantity of rain and cold air into the bargain, he could detect no novel sound, nor could he see anything at all.

  The Captain bade the crew resume their pumping, without musical accompaniment, and thrust his dripping head into the cabin.

  “There’s land not far to leeward,” he announced. “Ye can hear the surf astern.” And upon repeating his cheerless prophecy of some hours before, that one way or another their ordeal would soon be over, he disappeared into the darkness forward.

  Then, despite Bertrand’s protests that he would rather drown where he sat than outside in the cold and wet, Ebenezer insisted that they too leave the cabin, the better to swim for their lives when the boat went down or broke up in the surf. The rainfall, they found, had considerably diminished, so that the entire length of the boat was visible; but the wind howled as fiercely as ever, blowing the tops from the huge black seas that crashed and shuddered about the hull. And now their new peril was identified, Ebenezer could hear it too—the more profound and rhythmical thundering of invisible breakers to leeward.

  Up forward the Captain cut loose the sea anchor, whose efficacy had waned with the run of the tide, and cast the grapple in its place—not with any serious hope of its holding fast on the reckless bottom of the marsh country, but merely to hold his vessel’s bow into the wind and delay as long as possible her reaching the breakers. Then he joined his passengers aft and, stroking his beard afresh, listened with them to the ominous rumble astern.

  “Why can’t we let go the anchor and ride the waves ashore?” the poet inquired. “It seems to me I’ve read of such a practice.�
��

  The Captain shook his head. “Your square stern yaws in a following sea, don’t ye know, and wants the proper lift as well: the first good sea would either broach ye to or poop ye.” He did not trouble himself to define the latter catastrophe, but advised all hands to divest themselves of boots, coats, wigs, and waistcoats, and to take positions more or less amidships.

  “Not I,” the valet objected. “ ’Tis ten yards the less to swim if I jump here astern.”

  The Captain shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Stay there, then, and be damned t’ye: we can use your weight to keep her trim. But I’ll not answer for’t if the whole ship breaks on your idle skull!”

  Seeing the flaw in his reasoning, Bertrand grew so ready in the Captain’s service that, not content to stop amidships, he moved on the extreme bow of the sloop and might even have attempted the sprit had not one of the Negroes added the complementary caution, perhaps as a tease, that too much weight forward would put the vessel down at the head, already hampered by the drag of the grapple and pendant, and jeopardize her rising to the sea.

  “Stay, listen!” the Captain interrupted. “D’ye hear?”

  Again they strained their ears. “Naught but the storm and yonder surf, as before,” Ebenezer said.

  “Aye, but not astern now; ’tis off the larboard quarter!”

  Facing aft, he pointed about forty-five degrees to the right, to which invisible location, sure enough, the sound of breakers had moved, although they were apparently much nearer than before.

  “What doth it mean?” Ebenezer demanded. “Hath the wind shifted?”

  “Not a point,” said the Captain. “ ’Tis sou’-sou’west, and should have brought us to Hooper’s Island square astern. Haply ’tis just some cove or bend o’ the shoreline—” He broke off his musing to send one of the Negroes aft, to listen for surf to starboard or astern. But only to eastwards could they hear it, and then east-southeastwards, and then dead south-eastwards, as it moved from the quarter to the larboard beam; and though at first its apparent proximity had increased at a fearful rate, now that the sound was abreast of them it grew no louder, while astern the storm raged on as it had in the middle of the Bay. Clearly, whatever land that surf broke on they were leaving to larboard.