The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Ambulance from where? Kathy worries. It’s a tiny town.

  All those tiny towns have volunteer fire companies with good ambulance service.

  K suggests having him call one of the Georgetown marinas to set things up. Rumble rumble.

  Rumble rumble, agrees Peter Sagamore. It’s the gods laughing up their sleeves, ‘cause while the man’s deciding he’d better get on the horn all right, the woman says something like Omigod and hauls herself downstairs onto the foldout double.

  Really only a comfortable single.

  At best. What the gods don’t know—well, I guess they know it all right and have decided to put the screws to him on this point—is that back in undergraduate apprentice writer days, Whatsisname here took paramedical training and rode for a summer with the ambulance crew of the Hoopers Island Volunteer Fire Company. It is true that while he has administered CPR and the Heimlich maneuver, pried smashed teenagers out of wrecked Chevrolets, and grapneled drowned crabbers and tourists, he has never actually delivered a baby. Moreover, his training is chapters behind him now. All the same, he’s not as helpless as another in his deck moccasins might be. So he ships the oar and drops the Danforth right where they are, not far from the fleet behind Ordinary Point. And he scrubs up and gets out a clean sheet and towel—

  One of each is all they’ll have after two weeks of cruising, Kathy frets. If that.

  Says Peter What they have will have to do, ‘cause things are really popping, and on top of all, the sky’s piling up out over the Bay. Boyoboy do they ever feel childish for not coming in earlier, but what they’ve done is what they’ve done. He gives her a kiss—

  She needs it.

  So does he and tries to raise a fire company on the CB to raise a doctor to talk him through the delivery while they find another doctor or at least a real paramedic to come out by boat to help him. But the CB’s out of action, wouldn’t you know, so he VHFs one of those big marinas like you said to telephone a fire company et cetera and relay their instructions. He also puts out a general call to the boats anchored all around them, figuring at least a few of the big ones must belong to rich doctors from Wilmington or Philadelphia. For all he knows, Doctor Spock himself might have sailed his big ketch up from the Virgin Islands or the Bahamas is it and be parked for the night behind Ordinary Point, en route up the Intracoastal to Martha’s Vineyard.

  Good move, agrees Katherine Sherritt. There may be as much medical expertise at anchor behind Ordinary Point on an ordinary summer weekend as you’ll find in professional practice on the whole upper Shore, plus Walter Cronkite aboard his big ketch to narrate the action. I feel a ton better.

  So do these guys in our story, but while word’s going out, that action comes thick and fast, and they’re both too busy to be scared. If they thought that what they miscarried back in Seventy-eight was something!

  Says Kathy Let her deliver up front whatever you need for this story, but when the decks are clear she’s to have healthy normal kids. And I want her doctor to be there.

  Such matters, her husband insists, are in the hands of the gods. What’s in his hands, delivered intact as a sort of trial run and with only minimal discomfort to the deliverer, are first of all not a baby daughter or son but a bottle with a message in it. And a key.

  Surprise.

  The message . . . turns out to be a joke about a rabbi and a priest who et cetera. The key’s purpose they have no opportunity to investigate, because before our man can read our woman the joke, she delivers assorted bumper stickers and printed T-shirts.

  Read her just one of those bumper stickers.

  He unrolls one for her amusement, HEDONISTS HAVE MORE FUN.

  We’ll see. One T-shirt?

  More cryptic: WHAT YOU’VE DONE IS WHAT YOU’LL DO. Followed by a lovers’ quarrel, task, and knot—

  Intertwined.

  No doctor yet to untwine them. She gives a uterine squeeze, our woman, and comes out with the storyteller’s double. We nod but don’t speak.

  K sighs: That’s my husband.

  Hers too.

  They’re still in labor?

  Are they ever. But like a storm at sea, once the thing’s upon them they’re too busy coping to be afraid. The author’s double is scarcely delivered when the lady brings to light . . . your turn.

  Kath considers, remembers, smiles: A clutch of bookmarks as unlikely as a nursing bra, plus a mysterious library book to mark with those unlikely bookmarks.

  A Brandy rose, says P: her favorite kind. Aaand . . . Odysseus asleep on the beach at Ithaca.

  The woman gives birth to sleeping Odysseus?

  Plus the beach, plus Penelope’s unfinished web, which depicts this birth scene all but the end. After those come a container and a thing contained, a wise old owl, tales within a tale, a whole new ball game, and a cry for help.

  Says Katherine No wonder. Where are all the obstetricians in that anchorage?

  A few boats move in closer and stand by to assist, but their crews are computer software people and corporation lawyers. The men wear socks and Sperry Topsiders or Nike running shoes and Izod shirts and shorts and visor caps and digital watches with many functions, though the air temperature’s ninety F and the humidity’s eighty percent. The women either are dressed likewise, except for the socks, or else wear long-sleeved linen beach tops by Pierre Cardin over their swimsuits. Since our man is as usual wearing only swimtrunks, and our woman just now nothing, he asks them please to stand by and keep radioing for medical assistance, but does not invite them aboard. His wife’s cry for help, however—I mean the one she gives birth to—is fortunately answered by her very next contraction, which produces a middle-aged, semiassimilated Italian-American midwife named Ma Nontroppo, who pins back her hair, washes her hands, and says Lento, lento; I’ll take-a charge-a from here on.

  Thank heaven.

  And just in time, ‘cause in rapid succession now our woman gives birth to the facts of life, to an adjustable latch for keeping options open, to a python with three Plymouth Rock hens perched upon its scaly back, to half a peck of Chincoteague oysters, some with cabalistical engravings on their long narrow shells, and to a Crisfield oyster knife. Also to the emperor’s new clothes and a series of seafarers as unlooked-for on Chesapeake Bay as old Odysseus there: a series limited to but not necessarily including the Flying Dutchman, Arthur Gordon Pym, Huckleberry Finn, Sindbad and his friend Scheherazade, the Old Man of the Sea, Francis Scott Key, Queequeg, and assorted Vietnamese and Haitian boat people. All these are no sooner delivered along with their craft than they disperse through the astonished anchorage in pursuit of their several destinations, while cameras click and Walter Cronkite, though retired, radios his old network for a helicopter minicam crew. Mother and midwife rest from their labors for a welcome minute.

  But even resting, presses Katherine, she delivers the punch line of that joke about that rabbi and that priest who both survive that airplane crash. Also two locked caskets, one barnacled, the other bejeweled, and a brace of fortune cookies. Would you open one for me?

  One of the cookies. It says uh. It says um. It says To finish this poem I’m too modest.

  Peter!

  Your exercise book was lying open in the portside crib.

  Stay out of it. What was the other one?

  The other cookie. Uh, the other cookie goes unopened on the starboard settee, because just then Ma Nontroppo exclaims in amazed Neapolitan and displays four bases to be touched . . . and seven several dwarves.

  Seven several sounds familiar to Katherine Sherritt. Their names, please?

  Names. Uh Vug.

  Vug?

  Vug for short. Uh Vug and Crump? Crump, yeah. Fougasse and Dingle. Words I like to say. Coomb. Cubby? Coign.

  Says Kate These seven several came not from nowhere. You’d better tell us more about these dwarves.

  These seven several dwarves came from the inexhaustibly fertile womb of the woman of this couple of ou
rs, engendered there by the union of her plenteous ova and her fellow’s copious sperm, and delivered at just the right pace by the vastly experienced gentle Eyetalian hands of Ma Nontroppo. I don’t know what they are yet; just who.

  Who’s Vug?

  Uh Vug: No neck. Speaks in grunts? Squat, powerful, hirsute, surly. But dependable all the same, right? You may not like Vug, but you can count on him.

  Crump.

  Crump’s ah bark is worse than his bite. Crump’s . . . bite exceeds his chew. Crump’s chew . . . surpasses his swallow. But what Crump swallows, Crump digests. Try Fougasse?

  Warns Kath A slippery trickster. Watch out for that Fougasse.

  Ably done. Do Dingle.

  Dear dark dopey Dingle’s done. Who’s left?

  The inseparable trio Coomb Cubby and Coign. Coomb I see as a quiet one: deep, circuitous, phlegmatic, unpredictable. Cubby of course is cute and cuddlesome; you want to hug Cubby, and you may.

  I might. Coign?

  The leader who goes last, says Peter Sagamore, directing his six companions from three paces behind. Except when he rides upon Vug’s shoulders, shading his eyes with his left hand and pointing the way with his right. More about these guys later, we bet.

  Katherine Sherritt points with her left, worried again about that sky over there.

  Acknowledges P We should have kept sculling, but we didn’t. Chances are et cetera, and anyhow et cetera. The same case obtains at Ordinary Point at cocktail time two weeks from now, where after Ma Nontroppo takes charge our man ups anchor and sculls into snugger shelter in the lee of the point, almost on the beach, all the while keeping a weather eye upon his wife. I forgot to say that Whatsername is in no pain throughout this remarkable episode, which entertains and astonishes her as much as it does him and even Ma Nontroppo, who in her long experience of midwifery has never presided over so abundant and various a delivery. The other eye he keeps upon the weather, which has piled up to west-southwest of them as dark as that mess off to west-northwest there. At this point—

  Uh-oh, Peter: There’s lightning.

  Saw it. Followed by the first sharp thunder: fanfare for our woman’s delivering a complete inventory of both the items she miscarried two years ago and the items presently delivered, including the inventory itself. A fortunate circumstance, that, without which we could never have logged this catalogue later, inasmuch as not a few items in both categories were forgotten, mislaid, resorbed, or pilfered, and others lit out for the Territory like those boat people before we’d even counted heads. The woman of our couple says I have a feeling we’re getting to the end: Check over that list, would you, honey, and see whether anything’s left to come besides the main thing. Ma Nontroppo wipes her brow with a red-and-white-check-ered tablecloth and says I can tell you before you look that that list won’t have the main thing on it. They never do.

  Kath says That’s as it should be. I don’t want to know in advance.

  Anyhow, says Peter Sagamore, no bad news on here that I can see. Or that he can see, either, the father of all this stuff. But he does notice that after the inventory item that reads Complete Inventory of Items Delivered by Whatsername Aboard Sloop Whatsitsname Behind Ordinary Point, Sassafras River, Maryland, Six Twenty-nine Eighty, there’s one final entry, which his friend gives birth to even as he reads it: a book.

  A book! What book?

  This book is what the inventory says, in italics: T-H-I-S B-double-okay. But what actually proceeds from the mother of us all is a letter addressed To the Mother of This Book. Ma Nontroppo delivers it; the addressee reads the message inside, which says Pick one oyster from that half-peck of Chincoteagues. Any oyster.

  Says Kath She picks one of the ones that have cabalistical inscriptions.

  Open it, the letter says, Peter says. She shucks it open expertly with the Crisfield oyster knife and finds it to contain neither oyster nor pearl nor grain of sand, but—

  A little clam! cries Katherine. Like those Japanese trick ones I got when I was a girl! A real baby clam that you drop into a glass of water and it sinks to the bottom and you watch it and watch it till it opens.

  Says Peter Sagamore They watch it and watch it, the way we’re watching and watching it with our mind’s eye now, at the same time watching that black stuff getting closer over yonder while they’re watching their black stuff getting closer and flashing and rumbling, just as her uterus gets its breath again and starts rumbling a bit too as if clearing its throat for the finale.

  I’m scared, hon. Hurry.

  This is Story’s only speed.

  At last the clamshell opens. . . .

  At last the clamshell opens, and there unfolds from inside it a miniature paper castle with a little American flag flying from its battlements, and above the flag—

  Even as the first cool cat’s-paws of the approaching storm dart from the northwest shore—

  Both here and there, and both couples swallow hard and cross their fingers, as in your poem—

  Fingers crossed.

  Fingers crossed, they see unfurl above the little flag a poem in tetrameter couplets aabbc ddeec et cet beginning Tell me a story of women and men like us like us in love for ten et cet and asking how come they decided this late in the afternoon to have a child when the world’s about done with. ...

  Boyoboy, says Kath, it looks about done with, over there. It’s not going to miss us, Peter.

  Nope. But we can handle it; hold tight while I get the sails down. We understand now what I meant before by two storms striking at once, two weeks apart, one up at Ordinary Point on the Twenty-ninth and one right here right now, just as the poem’s last stanza unfolds to read Tell me their story as if it weren’t ours but like ours enough so that the powers that drive and steer good stories might fetch them beyond our present plight and—

  Blam!

  Go the twin storms exactly then, their force doubled by their combination. They slam together into the Eastern Shore of Maryland just as above the clamshell castle with its flag and its poem (with the last line still unglossed) there unfolds—

  Blooey!

  This book:

  THE

  TIDEWATER

  TALES,

  OR,

  WHITHER THE WIND LISTETH,

  OR,

  OUR HOUSE’S INCREASE:

  A NOVEL

  OUR STORIES:

  THE NEW CLOTHES

  HAVE NO EMPEROR.

  DAY 0:

  NOPOINT POINT TO

  DUN COVE

  The wind’s fists pound down from north instead of northwest, slick calm to twenty knots in a double knockdown, laying Story’s lee rail under while the water’s no more than ruffling up, almost pitching Katherine Sherritt and family across the cockpit. But our woman’s center of gravity is low; her nautical reflexes are quick: She cries Hey! but grabs a lifeline stanchion and the tiller, braces her feet against the seat opposite, and stays put. Peter Sagamore, on the low side, springs with a great grunt to the high, dropping our oar into the cockpit as he springs, and scrambles on forward to shorten sail as our combined weight rights the boat. Herself a seasoned sailor, Kath quickly bears us off downwind for stability and so that the mainsail will blanket the jib and make it easier to hand in. By when Peter achieves the mast and uncleats the jib halyard, we are roaring downriver, planing and surfing over brand-new gray-green waves. The breeze settles in—fifteen, eighteen, puffs of twenty-plus—but the wave-fetch here is not long. What’s more, the sky to westward, which we seem about to take off and fly into, is bluer by the moment: The heavy action is to the north, on the next river-system up, the Miles and the Wye, which are in fact being briefly blasted flat.

  Peter wrestles down the headsail but does not try to bag it, merely lashes it fast, then lowers the centerboard and moves carefully around the mast to reef the main, keeping a low profile and a secure grip. Already we’ve passed Town Point and are coming up on Oxford. There’s another thunderclap, but i
t’s north-northeast; the sky’s lighter and lighter where it matters. All the same, P’s feeling mighty reckless, mighty unskipperly, in fact damn foolish, to have brought us out in K’s condition, task or no task, when there was any chance at all of weather. But as he goes to jiffy-reef the main before we come about and beat homeward, Kath cries No! Looking back, he sees her jubilant. A sunburst lights her up, the boat, the scene; it has been a while since he has seen his friend exhilarated.

  We tear past Oxford. Calls Katherine Let’s go with it! She has lowered the rudder to reduce Story’s roll in the quartering seas; she is turning the corner where the river widens, where we ran out of air in our prologue; she is aiming us south, toward the open Choptank. We are a pair of adults, mindful of each other’s needs, respectful of each other’s judgment: If he insists we go back, she’ll yield; if she insists we go on, he’ll go. Call home first, she orders, and then let’s set a smaller jib. This is just what we need.

  He regards the sky, the waves, her face, our course and speed; goes below and turns on both CB and weather radio.

  Henry Sherritt is calling already, as we’d have guessed; the paid hand, Bobby Henry, is coming in the family runabout to tow us home. Peter reports politely that we need no rescuing; that having run downwind to shorten sail, we are off Oxford and will sail ourselves home presently. The squall line has passed, he points out as NOAA reports that news to him. More thundershowers are predicted, but not until later in the evening. Hold on, Hank: Kath wants to talk to you.

  Indeed, she has been signaling from the tiller for the mike. Now she sweetly apologizes to her father for our not having radioed in at the first sign of weather and for her missing the Deniston tea. But we are out here, she tells him firmly, at her insistence; she needs to get away for a bit. Henry Sherritt sounds mollified, but relays to us the truly remarkable storm-damage reports coming in on local radio from the upper Tred Avon and the Miles as well as from Baltimore. He knows we’re good and responsible sailors, but still. Katherine then, to Peter’s surprise, announces that we’re going to spend the night aboard, probably in Dun Cove, off Harris Creek, some ten miles down the Choptank from the mouth of the Tred Avon. We are? We are. We have no ice aboard, but we keep Story’s water tank topped up, a small supply of canned food and drinks in the lockers, a duffel of fresh towels and bed linens. We’ll radio when we’re anchored in the cove, only forty minutes away by runabout. And we’ll be home tomorrow, maybe the day after.