The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Sighs Katherine I guess it’s for real. The far horizon grumbles as if foiled. We decide not to drop sail just yet, but Peter unships the sculling oar, raises rudder and centerboard nearly full up, and with easy, gondolierlike sweeps begins moving us back toward Town Point. Behind it is a marina-girt creek into which we can duck if push comes to shove; once upstream of it we’ll hug the riverbank all the way home and—if things get nasty, as they probably won’t—either anchor in the lee of something or simply beach the boat. We do not feel threatened, only warned. It is coming on to four.

  Half an hour later, as we’d have predicted, the west is hazy-bright again. Now it’s the northern sky that’s gray and far-off rumbly: no threat at all. But the river is slick calm; the flag over the Tred Avon Yacht Club hangs unmoved. We see some skippers pack it in, furl sail, and chug back toward Town Creek or out to the Choptank and whatever their day’s destination. Most sit hopeful of new breeze, knowing that their auxiliary diesels can fetch them to shelter in minutes if things blow up.

  The sculling is sweaty exercise. Two sheepflies join our crew without invitation and sensibly go for Katherine’s breasts and thighs and calves, as would I if I were two sheepflies, Peter Sagamore remarks. Two or three sweat-bees fly out from town to bop around his sticky hair. I would fly out from town and bop around your sticky hair, says Katherine Sherritt, if I were two or three sweat-bees. Want a bucket of water on your head?

  Too heavy; you’ll bust a kid. He ships the oar briefly to fetch from a cockpit locker the collapsible canvas bucket with line attached that we use to dip seawater for scrubbing down, washing up, cooling off; flips it adroitly rim-edgewise overside; fetches up three-quarters of a bucketful of Tred Avon River, the most that can be swung handily up over the lifelines without springing a vertebra. He dumps it like a welcome Niagara over his head, then at K’s request does the same for her, where she sits, soaking her hair, her maternity shorts, the cockpit and its vinyl cushions. Another, please, she bids him, and is redoused. P gets his stomach and the pouch of his swimtrunks kissed; bends to kiss his friend’s wet head, then over her head to kiss upside down the smooth brown space between her shoulderblades; goes back to sculling upriver.

  The storm alert seems to have passed. On the other hand, Peter Sagamore sees in Katherine Sherritt’s face—as she stands up dripping now from the cockpit seat to have a skipperly look around, steadying herself with one hand on the lifeline and the other on his head—that our little talk is about to commence. Story sweeps slowly on toward the Goldsborough Creek day beacon; it is at least a nautical mile away, but another half-mile beyond it we can see off Nopoint Point the red white and blue sail of Andrew Sherritt’s Sunfish, stationary in mid-creek but aimed our way, while on the point itself—

  Says Kathy Jesus. Hand me the binocs, hon, would you?

  He does, from their holder just inside the companionway, and she verifies not only that the Main House is lined with the automobiles of ex-Denistonians, but that from the flagpole’s port arm—starboard from our perspective—hangs the Day-Glo green pennant that in the flag code of Nopoint Point says to any waterborne Sherritt within view Not Urgent, But Please Check In At Your Convenience.

  Fecal matter! Kate complains, but hauls herself dutifully down the companionway ladder all the same, to the radio. As has been seen, it is our pleasure to keep Story simple: The sternsweep is our auxiliary power, the centerboard our depth sounder; waves, trees, and flags are our anemometer, the look of our wake and the sound of our dinghy under tow our knotmeter. The only instruments we normally carry, besides wristwatch and binoculars, are a good compass and a portable radio with the government’s weather band for NOAA broadcasts and the FM band for music. But for Hank’s and Irma’s sakes—and Peter’s—Kathy has permitted us to accept her parents’ gift, a month ago, of VHF and CB radio transceivers, just in case, with accompanying twelve-volt deep-cycle battery, and Chip has duly familiarized us with their operation. Now, in our first non-demonstrational use of either, K raises Olive Treadway on the citizens band, asks what’s what with the green flag, and is told in mellifluous Bajan accents that Ms. Irma is not very happy about her daughter’s skipping out on the tea party, from which however Ms. Kathy’s condition excuses her. Also, that we have unannounced company standing by.

  Kiss? A different female voice—dry, gruff, Yankee, familiar—speaks from the CB loudspeaker Kath’s schoolgirl nickname, made from her initials when she was Katherine Shorter Sherritt. Peter groans.

  Maze? Happy Katherine shushes him with a wave. How come you’re here? Over?

  I hear a husband groaning, May Jump replies. It carries. Don’t come in for my sake, Kiss; we’re on our way home from Ocean City and stopped by to see your children. Olive tells me they’ve grown. Over.

  They’re huge! cries Kate. There’s seventeen of them, and they’re never coming out. Over?

  That’s what you get.

  Who’s your friend, Maze? Who’s we?

  You don’t know her. Did you get my book, Kiss? Over.

  Yeah, we did. Kath smiles through the companionway at eye-rolling Peter. We thought all that rectal stuff was fairly disgusting. The Hershey Highway, for God’s sake. Over.

  Explains May Jump That’s the way they are. Women tend to leave each other’s prunes alone.

  P says from the sweep I remind you and your friend that the Federal Communications Commission has rules about obscene language on the airwaves.

  Kathy says Peter says the FCC says we mustn’t talk dirty on the citizens band. Over.

  Who the fuck’s talking dirty? May wants to know. ‘Scuse me, Olive. Okay, Kisses: Us lemmings got to get back from marching to the sea. Have a fun delivery.

  I’m not going to deliver, Kath declares. I’m going to pop like a puffball, over.

  You’ll deliver, May Jump assures her. You always did.

  May!

  Okay: You never did. I wish I could be there. Love to you, Kisses. In a raised but still friendly voice she adds To you too, Machissimo, and over and out. Wait: Black Olive has something else to lay on you. Bye, Kiss. Over.

  Bye, Maisie. Olive?

  In hibiscus-and-bougainvillea accents reproduced here at risk of racism, Olive says You daddy diss wonda you comin’ in now; dey talkin’ stawns all cross de Bay. Ova?

  We’re coming in, says Katherine wearily. Dad knows we keep an eye on the weather, for God’s sake.

  I diss tellin’ you, Olive says firmly. Ova.

  Thanks, Oil. Over and out, now.

  To hear this conversation, Peter has rested his oar. He goes back to sculling as irked Kath hauls up beside him. The flies resume their attentions. She bursts out I wish it would blow up!

  Honey?

  I don’t want to Please Check In At Our Convenience. I wish a breeze would blow us right up the Bay and out of everybody’s reach until the end of this story. I wish we could go with the wind and swim and play by ourselves, just the two and nine-ninths of us, till I finally unload. She swats at a sheepfly near her navel. Sheepflies, however, have evolved to unswattability: This one takes insultingly minimal evasive action and settles promptly two handswidths away, on her wet shorts.

  Peter frowns. Don’t abuse our children. And watch what you say about the wind.

  Fornicate the wind! Kathy swats again, again in vain—and again, as if it really does give her some satisfaction to spank the babies. I’m sick of everything.

  The-sky has darkened once more northwestward. We are without superstition, virtually, but it is a rare sailor whom such oaths as Katherine Sherritt’s will not make uneasy. The woman truly feels about to burst, not only uterinely. Tears build behind her eyes. The man wants to go forward and drop sail, but decides he’d better stay by her just now. Anyhow, he hopes for a bit of air yet to help us home before the weather comes. With a sweep of the oar, he says I’m sorry, Kath.

  Brimming Katherine cries What for? She draws a large breath to lay hold of her distresses.


  Her husband explains I set you the task of setting me a task, and you did, and I blew it.

  Says K The wind blew it. I wish the damn wind would blow us right out of here.

  The far sky rumbles back at her, as it did some pages past. A touch genuinely nervous at his wife’s recklessness, Peter Sagamore sizes up a little cove to starboard in case we have to duck in there. Four feet mean low water, if he remembers correctly: plenty for us. Set me another, he bids her, sculling. I’ll try to do better.

  TELL ME A STORY.

  To Peter Sagamore’s surprise, Kathy Sherritt puts a hand on each side of his rowing hand, stopping the action. Kisses the hand she has thus framed. Says, as if she’d been waiting to be asked, Tell me a story.

  What?

  Story.

  Can’t.

  STORY,

  she insists to her friend’s brown hand. Tell me a story of women and men like us: in love for ten years, the way we’ve been; married for two, two and a half. What I want to hear about in particular is their house’s increase.

  Their what?

  House’s increase. Kathy pushes hair back off her forehead. House’s increase. Like there they’ve been: healthy, happy, more or less successful, well enough off, in love and faithfully loved. The favored of the fucking earth, like us. And yet in early middle age, with perfect freedom of choice and the world going to hell in a handbasket all around them—I mean stuff like nuclear proliferation, the U.S. economy rusting out, the natural environment clogging up, the national infrastructure crumbling away and no money to rebuild it, that sort of thing—in the midst of this they break their behinds and disrupt their lives to bring an innocent kid onstage, maybe just in time to see the curtain fall. Two or three innocent kids! What are they, sentimental? Hubristic? Oblivious? Nuts?

  She rests her chin upon her frowning husband’s hand and speaks now to his belly. I mean don’t they care that their kids could be atomized, or caught up in the worst convulsions this country has ever experienced? Do they finally not believe what everybody says is almost certain to happen, since nobody’s doing much to prevent it and probably couldn’t do much even if they wanted to? Or do they think their genes are such hot stuff that any kid of theirs will ride the apocalypse like a hobby horse?

  Says wondering Peter, who has seldom heard his friend at once so calmly and so impassionedly eloquent, Tell me more.

  No, says Katherine to his chest now: You tell me. Did they consider all these things, just as we did, and go ahead anyhow, figuring they’ll pay the bill but not count the cost?

  Pay the bill but not count the cost, Peter marvels. That’s very well put, Kath.

  So use it in the story. Tell me all about it. Tell me their story as if it weren’t our story, but enough like our story so that the gods of storytelling will take the helm and man the sheets and blow us and it to a harbor we never could have predicted.

  Boyoboy. Peter’s look is pained indeed. Don’t I wish I could.

  Kath assures his neck and chin You can. Start at the very beginning, if you want to: ab ovo. The sperms and eggs that got us into this mess, or the ones that hatched the Sherritts and Sagamores that hatched the ones that hatched us. You can start with the thawing of the last ice age, for all I care, when the Set Designer came up with Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. What’s ten-K years, between friends? Go clear back to the Big Bang.

  Peter Sagamore straightens the smooth brown back that Katherine Sherritt likes to move her left palm around on. Can’t do it, Kate.

  Unfazed K says Start near the end, then, like Homer. Instead of the ninth year of the war or the wandering, start in the ninth month of their pregnancy, and tell their story the way the tide comes in at Ocean City.

  How does the tide come in at Ocean City?

  The tide comes in at Ocean City by chasing the moon of inspiration and washing a little farther up the beach of Where We’re Going with each wave and then rolling back to pick up Where We’ve Been. At the tale’s high-water mark, the past overtakes the present and sweeps us to a finale rich and strange. Sweeps them.

  Oh, dear Katherine: How I wish.

  Directly to his eyes she says Wish harder. This is a real task, not a play one. I’ll help you every way I can.

  Like how?

  Like maybe here’s a better idea, since it’s the present and recent past that have strung us out: Start at the ending, or near it, and take it from there. The story of every pregnancy, she declares, sitting back now and folding her arms across Eenie, Meenie, and their siblings, begins with death and ends with birth.

  Amazed Peter Sagamore wants to know what in the world Katherine Sherritt means by Pregnancy begins with death. I wasn’t sure myself when I said it, K says: That’s what I mean by stories chasing the moon and telling themselves. It just popped out and sounded right. But now that you ask, I see that I meant not only our miscarriage the first time up, but the death of your sperm and my egg and you and me as what we were before, which leads to the birth of what we’re going to give birth to and become.

  Aha.

  Just like the wind has died now from the Choptank maybe all the way up to the Sassafras, Kathy goes on, still eyes to eyes, but actually it’s just taking a deep breath, the way I’m going to. You take one too, and tell me this story. Inspire.

  But Pete protests Tell ourselves a story we know already by heart? I don’t get it. Even if I weren’t et cetera.

  Kath interrupts him one beat late to declare These children haven’t heard it. That part’s for them, old Stamen and Pistil. Tell them where they’re coming from and what they’re getting into. Tell them to be brave and patient and not to rush and get here too early or on the other hand hang on longer than they should. Also to take turns and love each other and quiet down in there. But what none of us knows is the ending: the thing that’s going to happen any day now and be news to both of us, sound scan or not, and change our lives and start a different story altogether. Let’s start with that.

  Through the latter part of this apostrophe, Peter Sagamore has been stroking with his free left hand the back of Katherine Sherritt’s head. He believes he understands now what she’s asking him to try and why. She sees that he understands. Fish make circlets in the glass-calm water all about us, gray now in the woozy air: gray as but less bright than the level eyes of Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore. Our foreheads touch.

  Mutters Peter Can’t. Seven dwarves, et cet.

  The whole dark north mutters back at him as does his wife, to mind what he says. The tide sets us gently astern, downstream. Peter rests his forehead now upon his oar-hand, where Kathy’s chin had rested for a paragraph. He says You aren’t the only one in this boat about to burst. That asinine “B-Flat.”

  Lies K It was an okay B-flat.

  It was an asinine B-flat. Now it’s not even that.

  It is her hand moving in his hair now. She considers. Thirty-nine.

  Hm?

  Katherine Sherritt Sagamore repeats ‘Thirty-nine.” It’s a story I made up this morning after I read your next-to-last version of “B-Flat.” The title’s in numerals, but I have to say it in words:

  39.

  Asks Peter Sagamore What do you mean thirty-nine? What’s thirty-nine?

  Kath settles back in the cockpit. Did I ask you what “B-Flat” meant? Or “Olive”?

  You knew already, from earlier drafts.

  “Cellardoor” didn’t have any earlier drafts. Neither did “Summer Afternoon” or “Theophany.”

  They’re just words I happen to like a lot. Give me Anna Karenina.

  Give me early Peter Sagamore. But here we are. What does “Thirty-nine” say to you?

  He sees she’s sort of serious and ventures Our age, for a few months yet.

  Nope.

  My jacket size.

  That’s thirty-nine long. This is just Thirty-nine.

  The year our parents conceived us.

  Good try, but you’re n
ot even warm. Try harder.

  A new way to make love.

  I don’t get it.

  Try harder.

  Katherine does. As in soixante-neuf?

  That wouldn’t make sense. A Sherritt-Sagamore story makes sense, even when it seems not to.

  Now we’re talking. What’s the new way to make love?

  Beats me. But if there is one, it’s number thirty-nine. The Kama Sutra gives thirty-eight.

  Kathy sits up, we’re both enjoying ourselves now, kisses Peter’s forearms, and says You’re on the track, actually. But “Thirty-nine” is a story. None of the above is a story.

  Peter bets our conceptions in 1939 are a story. The first atom split; Franco winning the Spanish Civil War and Hitler and Mussolini starting World War II; Hank and Irma and Fritz and Nora wondering what kind of world they were bringing children into.

  Katherine asks seriously does he think they thought a lot about that. Peter answers does she think they didn’t. The sky grumbles, maybe not directly at us this time. We feel on the trail of something. Says Kathy Did you know that May Jump can recite the thirty-eight positions in Sanskrit and accompany herself on left-handed guitar? She learned them because Kama Sutra and I have the same initials.

  Peter says May Jump can probably do the thirty-eight positions with her guitar, in her bathtub. But May’s another story.

  You’re getting warm! Kath cheers. It was May that told me the story that “Thirty-nine” is based on. It’s an old prison joke—I mean a joke about people in a prison, not a joke that actual prisoners tell, though for all I know they might. It’s an old joke about prisoners telling one another old jokes. That’s the only clue you get.

  Disappointed Peter says Everybody knows that joke.