The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Kath has as always been enjoying the sight, sound, and smell of her father; his invocation of Willy Sherritt darkens her expression. Powerful, porcine, sleek, unprincipled, her elder brother seems to her the incarnation of nearly everything deplorable about the world and worldview of which she finds her father the embodiment of nearly everything admirable. I know very well, she says now, why Willy’s sucking around John Trippe.

  She sees her father register that vulgarism with a tiny eye-twitch. Don’t judge your brother out of hand, he reproves her. Kath says spiritedly she doesn’t need the man in hand to judge him, this late in the day. Willy Sherritt is organizing a Reelect Baldwin Bull Roast in Poonie’s new district in the Maryland mountains and needs to recruit a few unimpeachable conservative famosos to put his impeachable infamoso in a redemptive light.

  Kate. Henry Sherritt frowns. Peebie’s trying to pick up the pieces again. He made himself a new life and a new constituency once before; now he’s got an even harder job ahead. Show some mercy.

  Katherine Sherritt will be damned if she will. Ex-Congressman Porter Baldwin, Jr., undeniably shifted his chief theater of political operations to southern Maryland after their divorce: no easy matter for an aspiring politician. He remarried—another innocent Denistonian, God help the poor woman, who has so far stood by him through the later scandal and his subsequent second base-change, from southern to far western Maryland. Until that scandal hit the fan two years ago, he moved in the odor of conservative sanctity, a darling of the Moral Majority. But in Kate’s opinion he learned nothing from the occasion and experience of their divorce except to be an even more careful hypocrite in the indulgence of his portfolio of vices, which we now know to have diversified from mere alcoholism and heterosexual sadism to include pederasty as well. He is the same double-dealing, opportunistic, unprincipled sonofabitch he has always been, declares Katherine, and Willy Sherritt is another: birds of a feather except in bed. Her brother’s motives in maintaining that old friendship (and certain business connections) despite Poonie’s crimes against her, and in organizing the bastard’s reelection campaign despite that later scandal, have nothing to do with the morality of redemption through penance; not even with the morality of friendship. All Willy wants is a crony in Congress—right-or left-wing, gay, straight, or crooked—and he’d sell his own sister to have one, were she for sale.

  Really now, Katydid. Henry Sherritt is visibly impressed by the depth of his daughter’s fury, so long after its chief occasion. You’ll bother Peter.

  Kath apologizes for having raised her voice, but makes clear to her father that Poonie Baldwin himself had better never set foot on Nopoint Point while she’s here, or she’ll go public at whatever cost to herself with the full story of their marital breakup and blow him and Willy both away: a story of which even her father knows only the gross outlines.

  Those outlines, Henry Sherritt says with a grimace, are gross enough. Touching her arm, he assures his daughter that, reformed or unreformed, her ex-husband remains non grata forever in his and Irma’s household. Henry too deplores Willy’s continuing association with the man, and his playing footsie with organized, self-appointed legislators of virtue, especially given Willy’s own moral shortcomings. But if Henry will not allow Porter Baldwin, Jr., on Nopoint Point, he will certainly not close the door on his own son, any more than he would on the unfortunate Porter Baldwin Seniors, for forgiving what he and Irma can never. Katherine might as well know that her brother is bidding to buy into Breadbasket Incorporated, and that he, Henry, at least, is not opposed to the idea. As for Peebie’s double life, Henry is confident that the revelation of all that (which cost Baldwin the ‘78 election) will oblige him at least to run for reelection less hypocritically: either genuinely repentant and reformed, or else openly as the first declared bisexual candidate for the U.S. Congress. Time for church now.

  Kate’s unconvinced: If old Poon really comes out of the closet, she believes, it will be because his managers decide he can draw more national attention and support by so doing. More likely they’ll advise him to go the repentant-sinner route, as he did after ‘63, when the only thing he repented was causing himself so much political inconvenience. It sure paid off then.

  Her father says with dignity That memory hurts my soul, Katydid, and Kathy sees it does. But she cannot help adding, as they kiss good-bye, It’s a pain in my ass, too.

  Henry says he’ll have another talk with Willy, but the man is his own man. Will Katherine and Peter join the clan for lunch?

  K doubts it: She truly cannot abide her older brother. She even wishes that her younger, whom she adores, didn’t have to be around him. Maybe she’ll have Chip to lunch with us here.

  That would hurt your mother’s feelings, Henry says. As for Peebie, you know, Kate, the pity of it is, he really loved you. Probably does still. He was a desperate and pathetic and sick young man.

  Says Kathy He still is, only middle-aged. Also despicable.

  Henry Sherritt sighs. Also despicable. He hugs her carefully. See you after church. Take care.

  THE NEXT HOUR OR SO

  A great virtue of the Christian faith, in our recent opinion, is the tranquility it brings to Nopoint Point between half past ten and half past twelve on Sunday mornings, when the senior Sherritts and most of their friends and help are in church in the village of Easton, a few miles away. Peter pops out at one point with a refilled coffee cup and stands a few moments beside Kath’s rocker, stretching his arms and legs, contemplating the cove, registering the steamy forenoon with his skin. K wonders what’s what with old “B♭” but keeps her worry to herself. The earlier mention of Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr., inclines her to embrace her husband’s left leg lightly and lean her head against his hip. We do not speak of the work in progress or the version of it Katherine has just read. She mentions the tennis. Peter hopes Willy will stand in for him. Hank’s crowd takes the game too seriously for his liking; he’ll be glad when his favorite partner is back in action.

  We think we hear the sound of Buck Travers testing the intercom: an amplified drawl in the stately distance. Kathy sighs: Mom wants you to check it out after lunch, or later if you play tennis. She made the man promise not to bother us this morning.

  It amuses Peter but annoys Katherine that all Sherritts assume all Sagamores to be “good with their hands.” But he is in fact handy, and unashamed of the bluecollar background that makes replacing a rotted dock-plank or troubleshooting a balky outboard no less agreeable an hour’s sport than playing tennis. He’ll get Chip to help.

  Back to the nursery, he says now. A dry sigh in his tone tells Kath that little has happened in there so far. She thinks the associations counterproductive, under the circumstances, but those circumstances are themselves so mattersome that she chooses not to bring up the associations. For the next three-quarters of an hour she rocks, musing, her Episcopal peace undisturbed but for that passel of thrashers under her turn. Beach swallows make low-level passes across the lawn and around the pedestaled bronze all-purpose-allegorical pair—naked neoclassic gent and lady, he frowning forward at Main House and Goldsborough Creek, she smiling serenely over-shoulder at First Guest Cottage and Sherritt Cove—whom Henry calls Business and Pleasure and Irma calls Eb and Flo and Chip calls Cathode and Anode and Kathy calls Vamos y Quedemos and Peter calls More and Less. Mockingbirds move from tree to tree, eloquently discussing territorial boundaries. Like interceptors buzzing bombers, purple martins harass crows that would raid their nests. There’s a snapping turtle at periscope depth out in Sherritt Cove. Near the red day-beacon where cove makes into creek, K’s knowledgeable eye espies in a waterswirl the wingtips of a feeding skate, like the warped dorsals of twin sharks.

  A FEW PAGES BACK,

  VIS-À-VIS HENRY SHERRITTS GRAINLAND SPECULATIONS

  UP IN KENT COUNTY,

  WE USED THE ADJECTIVE NOSTALGIC.

  Right. Here’s why. If you sail the upper Chesapeake, you know “Ornery Point,”
a handsome spit of sand and locust trees jutting more than halfway across the Sassafras from that river’s north shore: It is where this story ends and another begins. Though it can in fact be a stubborn obstruction for a sailor to fetch in a headwind, the point takes its name not from that circumstance but from a tavern, or “ordinary,” where pre-Revolutionary Hermanns, De Courseys, and Sherritts sipped rum or cider while waiting for the ferry that used to cross there between Kent and Cecil counties. Nothing remains of the ordinary: As of this telling, the point is pleasingly undeveloped and uninhabited by humans except for the odd picnicker or stroller of its beaches. Downstream from Ordinary Point, the Sassafras is an imposing estuary, a mile and more wide, between almost unbroken eighty-foot banks; upstream, it’s a secluded river winding peacefully mile after mile around lesser points, between lower tree-lined shores, up to the village of Georgetown and beyond.

  NOSTALGIA

  Captain John Smith of Virginia was the first cruising sailor to poke into the Sassafras, in 1608. To his English ears, the name of the resident Indians sounded like “Tockwogh.” Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn wound a small British task force up the channel in May of 1813 to harass the locals. From the point of Ordinary Point, you have a fair view eastward, upriver, and a fine one westward: those tall cliffs stepping out of sight into the open Chesapeake, where the weather comes from. No land visible on the far horizon, though the rest of the United States is over there somewhere. Oceangoing freighters and container ships slide by to and from the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal like targets in a shooting gallery. Georgetown, at the highway bridge some miles upriver, is a yachting center: Wall-to-wall marinas up there harbor thousands of pleasure boats owned mostly by Delawarians and Pennsylvanians, for whom the Sassafras is the first convenient access to Chesapeake Bay. It is an altogether lovely freshwater river with, however, few good overnight anchorages along its shores except the commodious lee of Ordinary Point. For that reason, on any summer weekend evening you can count a couple hundred cruising sailboats and motorboats anchored there, individually and in rafts of two to twelve. Their owners, crew, and guests will be swimming, partying, barbecuing beefsteaks off their taffrails; the youngsters will zip sailboards through the fleet, hop from boat to boat to make or visit friends, play guitars and radios on foredecks, fly kites off transoms, parachute up and out on untacked spinnakers to drop twenty feet into the water; they’ll dinghy ashore to stroll the beach of Ordinary Point, picnic, skinny-dip off the far side, chug beer, make out, and wonder how it came to pass that a certain young locust there, six to eight inches thick at the trunk and ten to twelve feet through its spread of branches, is neatly collared at its base by an old Atlas automobile tire, intact.

  NOSTALGIA

  This is nostalgia, or will be, soon enough. On such weekends, the anchorage at Ordinary Point is short on privacy and serenity. But it is secure in most weathers, while open enough for a welcome breeze on muggy nights. The air there is normally bugless; the holding ground is good sand; all that high-spirited activity can be enjoyable, occasionally, as a change of pace from the secluded coves farther down the Shore.

  Our Story is no stranger to the Sassafras. We sail up there ordinarily, Peter and Katherine, once a summer, usually in August, a little second vacation to escape the sea nettles of Sherritt Cove and environs. In any breeze at all, three days of leisurely sailing, two of pushing, or one of standing watches will carry us the seventy-five nautical miles from Nopoint to Ordinary Point. With our centerboard raised we draw two feet of water, and thus have access to certain fine creeks off the Sassafras that the yachts-folk from Wilmington and Philadelphia can’t negotiate in their bigger boats. We’ll spend a few lazy, steamy dog days there, shaded by Story’s cockpit awning or the canopy of maples atop a certain high-banked islet. We’ll swim and read and write and bask, sip and cook and eat, tell stories and make love in ninety-degree air, eighty-degree water. We’ll go naked from the Tuesday through the Friday, the place is that private, while a quarter-mile off so much pleasure-traffic plies the river that its channel looks like a nautical expressway.

  Then on the Saturday we’ll slip into swimsuits and sail down to join the action at Ordinary Point. However crowded the anchorage, with our shallow draft we’ll find ample swinging room, mooring almost on the beach if necessary. As we thread under sail through the anchored fleet or poke about later in the dinghy, we’ll inevitably find or be found by friends of Hank’s and Irma’s, enjoying in their fifty-footers what we’re enjoying in our twenty-five; or friends of Kathy’s from her college days who’ve since become doctors or MBAs from the Wharton School of Business, or who’ve married them: They live out on Philadelphia’s Main Line now but come down weekends to sail their gleaming thirty-eight-footers and talk about the market (The Wall Street Journal is delivered daily in season to Georgetown marinas). Less often we’ll run into a couple or two we’ve come to know through Katherine’s job or Peter’s: fellow academics, library scientists or museum people, whose two-salary households can budget a secondhand thirty-two-footer until it’s time to pay the kids’ college expenses, or now they’re paid. Sometimes we’ll even meet an old high school chum of Pete’s from lower Dorchester, who has scraped together from his wetlands realty business enough for a twenty-seven-footer and is taking his annual low-budget vacation thereupon with wife and two kids and another couple, all speaking the pristine down-county twang and all somehow sleeping, eating, sweating, and defecating in those tight quarters, their shrouds and lifelines festooned stem to stern with laundry. We’ll board or be boarded by various of these for drinks and talk; later, all hands might row ashore to join the youngsters dancing on the strand of Ordinary Point to disco music broadcast from across the Bay. We’ll end the evening by piling overboard from Story’s gunwales or some other’s for a midnight swim in the tepid, harmless water, by ourselves or with our friends, trying not to remember that we swim in a floating village of two hundred families with no sewage treatment facilities. It is healthy U.S. poo; no one takes sick. If any air moves through Story’s cabin from the windscoop rigged to the forward hatch, we’ll make late drowsy love upon the “double” settee berth, where there’s just room, before Peter crawls into the quarterberth aft and Kath into the V-berth forward, where there isn’t. We’ll fall asleep to the cry of night owls real and figurative, whippoorwills, and the clink of halyards left unsecured by the inexperienced or oblivious to slap against extruded aluminum masts.

  WHY ARE WE TELLING US ALL THIS?

  Because before such demons as Less Is More possessed him, P. Sagamore prided himself upon the knowledgeable rendition of the natural and human history against which his characters played out their moral-psychological dramas. A Sagamore story from that period might have been about a loving, middle-class, early-middle-aged couple’s coming to terms with childlessness, for example; Peter agrees with Aristotle that the subject of literature is the passions of the human heart, the happiness and misery of human life, not geographical places and historical events. But if that make-believe couple happened to be represented as Marylanders of such-and-such diverse background, and the action took place aboard a small cruising sailboat on the Sassafras River, say, he’d want to get it said that that boat is a hard-chined, wide-beamed, tiller-steered, engineless wooden centerboard sloop of traditional local design; that those eighty-foot sedimentary cliffs below Ordinary Point, like the whole Eastern Shore of Maryland, were dumped there as a giant shoal by the Susquehanna River when the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, just ten thousand years ago—the same river whose Pennsylvania waters now erode those cliffs and keep the general salinity of the Sassafras above Ordinary Point too low—under five parts per thousand—for Chrysaora quinquecirrha. That, finally (here’s Hank’s nostalgia, to fetch which we’ve tacked through these other nostalgias as toward an upwind mark), when an earlier Henry Sherritt came up from Talbot County in the late 1770s and sipped cider in the ordinary at Ordinary Point, he was laying the foundations of the f
amily fortune by wartime speculation in wheat and corn from the upper Eastern Shore, “the Breadbasket of the Revolution”: His leased vessels moved his brokered grain to feed General Washington’s troops, at such profit to himself in both money and favor with our future first president that he rose above his Loyalist inclinations and accepted a colonel’s commission in the Maryland Line in the last months of the war. Of the three granaries on the Sassafras still preserved from that time, two were once leased to Colonel Henry Sherritt; the third has been converted into a restaurant more popular than excellent, serving the marina crowd. The present Henry is dickering with the Kent and Cecil county commissioners, and others, to buy one of the two, a historical monument now, and restore it as a working mill and granary, the centerpiece of his nostalgic and potentially very profitable feed-grain enterprise, Breadbasket Incorporated.

  In Peter Sagamore’s previous opinion, even in his present opinion, such contextual circumstances as these—or as that those clouds that will build west of Baltimore late Sunday afternoon, 29 June ‘80, are cumulonimbi packing both thermal-and pressure-gradient winds that will blow the bejesus out of parts of that city and then tear across the Bay to blooey the upper Shore at cocktail time and drag half the anchors behind Ordinary Point, Story’s not included, almost within sight of that same granary, while Katherine Shorter Sherritt commences giving birth—such contextual circumstances are as crucial to the flavor of re-created experience as the fact that K has never borne a child before, though she’s had one induced and one spontaneous abortion. Peter Sagamore used to wish that he could know and render them all, despite his understanding that if he did, no story would get told. Leaving them incompletely said still feels to him like describing a fine champagne as merely alcohol, water, and carbonic acid in solution. Better sip in silence than thus falsify! Not to mention . . .