The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  The civil rights act is passed by Chapter Nine, and in the next three chapters the racial violence subsides. The new environmentalists come to the fore, their ranks swelled by the Come-Heres retired to the area on the fruits of their own exploitation of other resources elsewhere. In the Bay there are lean years and relatively bountiful ones of what harvestable species remain, but except for Canada geese and whitetail deer, who thrive near cultivated cornlands, the curve is unambiguously, inexorably down.

  The curve of moral complexity, on the other hand, goes up with the narrator’s understanding, perhaps in Chapter Twelve, that as an outsider he is working for causes whose consequences he himself does not have to live closely with. He makes uneasy peace with his family. An opportunity presents itself in Chapter Thirteen for him to return to live in the area he cares most about in the world: His father dies, the family business must be renovated or sold; a government agency, probably the CIA, expresses discreet interest in purchasing “Shoal Point Flats.” Literally to reconnoiter his native waters, the narrator decides to charter a sailboat out of Annapolis and spend a few days reviewing the area incognito, as a Come-Here. He finds and rents a sloop of his own father’s manufacture, a “Shoal Point 25”; he singlehands it across and down the Bay to Hoopers Island. Though he knows those waters as one knows one’s bedroom in the dark, he mis-gauges the tide in his own front yard, so to speak, and ignominiously runs hard aground on Shoal Point itself.

  No problem: The boat is a shallow-draft centerboarder. All he need do is winch up the board and drift free, or, if it has been driven up into its trunk and the hull aground on its shallow keel, get out and push. As he sets about the former, he sees a pair of crabbers pause at the end of their nearby trotline and chug over to see whether he needs assistance. He expects the familiar twangy sarcasm, teasing but not necessarily unfriendly. He smiles and waves them off—though the centerboard, he discovers, is indeed clear up in its trunk. He secures its slack pennant, kicks off his deck shoes, and prepares to go over the side and push, leaving his blue jeans rolled down against sea nettles.

  But the chaps come over anyhow and offer him a tow. The narrator observes that while their vessel has the lines of a typical local workboat—long waterline for stability, narrow beam for easy access to both sides, low freeboard for working trotlines or lifting crab pots and oyster tongs over the gunwales, a small wheelhouse for foul weather—it is improbably clean for this time of the season, as if it has just been launched and commissioned. So are the crabbers, their work clothes unsoiled, their hands and faces smooth. Moreover, their accent is neutral Network American, not local; their faces, their eyes, their manners are white-collar professional; and their offer to help, while cordial, is a touch insistent. Though the narrator knows little about the ways of undercover agents at that point in his and his author’s life, it occurs to him to wonder whether the crab trotline is a cover for the CIA’s scouting “Shoal Point Flats” over an extended period, perhaps assessing the degree of its privacy and penetrability from the water. . . .

  Here, however, the novel itself had run aground, even as its narrator declines the proffered towline, steps into the chill, hip-deep water, and manhandles the sloop stern-first off Shoal Point. It was a story that Peter Sagamore by sheer persistence could eventually get told, he realized; but it was not a Peter Sagamore story. As a grounded mariner without a centerboard may, in extremis, lighten ship by jettisoning everything expendable, so in the weeks just prior to this Boston weekend of which we speak, our author had thrown out of Shoal Point the entire CIA business—what did he know, really, of such matters?—the environmentalist theme, the whole civil rights imbroglio, and every sticky parallel between the narrator and the author in the “grown-up” sections of the story. Now on this present Monday he reviewed what he had amputated and with a bold coup de main struck out all the growing-up chapters as well, so evocative of a thousand other up-from-the-boondocks novels. By lunchtime he had reoutlined the project in what would be its finally published form: a quite short story whose realistic aspect was based on the one part of the action he had utterly invented. The narrator-protagonist by chance comes across a sailboat of his late father’s manufacture; he charters and sails it back to his home waters, even to his home, after long absence; and he runs aground in his own front yard upon the piece of marine geography he has known most intimately since birth.

  This same narrator, Peter decided over lunch and after talking by phone with exasperated Marcie Blitz, would himself be a disaffected young CIA officer at work upon a book-length expose of his fellow ex-officers’ sale of their expertise to sundry nefarious or at least questionable interests. (It would be seen in retrospect that with remarkable intuition—since Peter Sagamore had in fact at the time no special knowledge of such matters—“Part of a Shorter Work” anticipated in some detail the Watergate break-ins and such enormous, sinister international operations as those of the rogue agents Edwin Wilson and Frank Terpil.) But the sailor-author’s manuscript, merely summarized in the story “Part of a Shorter Work,” is fated never to reach completion—hence the story’s title—for the reason that, even as he raises the centerboard of his rented sailboat and waves away the crabbers chugging over from a nearby trotline, apparently to assist him off Shoal Point—

  So when Ms. Blitzstein came home from work that evening (Peter Sagamore in effect now tells his unborn children in Dun Cove), and I told her I’d scrapped the whole Shoal Point novel except for the running-aground business, which I hadn’t mentioned to her before, and she learned about the similarity between what had just happened to us in Marion Harbor and what happens to that narrator of mine in Annapolis, she said For pity’s sake buy the damn boat and take that Maryland job and let’s sail that boat from up here to down there, and then we’ll just see what’s what with us. We’d had a fine two years, she said, that she’d never forget; it was probably time we each went on to our next thing. And she was right, as Marcie usually was about such matters. In fact, she was telling me what I’d already decided to do, and making the decision easier by promising to take off that summer and sail Story down to Chesapeake Bay with me.

  So I bought this boat—and immediately hung a secondhand six-horse outboard on the transom, for convenience as well as for emergencies. I said no to Boston and yes to Maryland; I took a few weekend shakedown cruises to check out the systems and get the feel of her; I packed my Boston stuff to be picked up later (Marcie didn’t pack hers) and then bought charts and provisions for our long coastwise cruise. Nearly five hundred miles: two to four weeks, depending on the weather and how much poking around we did along the way. I placed “Part of a Shorter Work” and began doing even shorter pieces: Less became More.

  But as sailing time approached, Marcie Blitzstein changed her tune. There was a new assistant producer at GBH who would jump at the chance to replace her while she was away, even if she were off filming a documentary for the station. In fact, her rival aside, she didn’t see how she could justify to the production crew or to herself so long an absence—unless Peter was maybe willing to let her do the trip as a documentary: maybe as a pilot for some kind of Writer in America series for PBS? Now that idea struck her as not half bad, what with the boat’s name and P’s going back to his roots, et cet! In two weeks she could work out a format and get a crew together to follow Story with a chopper and a chase boat; Peter could do excerpts voice-over from his fiction and talk about Regionalism versus Internationalism, or the Sense of Place in American Lit, blah blah blah, while they sail on camera from Melville and Hawthorne country down past Whitman’s Long Island and right by Manhattan, work in a little Thomas Wolfe You Can’t Go Home Again, Hart Crane and the Brooklyn Bridge et cet, then down through Whitmanville again, Camden and Philly—Do we sail through Philly, or is that just the train?—on down to Baltimore, Poe Mencken Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key, and end up in the nation’s capital. Dynamite! That is the way dear Marcie talked, sort of, and that is how her busy mind worked.
r />   P told her her heart wasn’t in that project. She said she knew that, but her heart wasn’t in their splitting either, any more than in their staying together, and neither was his. Right, as usual. He told her he didn’t dig using their connection as grist for the mill: If she wouldn’t dishonor it by televising it, he wouldn’t dishonor it by writing about it, okay? Now just hold on there, said Ms. Blitz, and then made a truly eloquent pitch, right from the ventricles, the burden of which was that they were artists, for Christ sake, both of them; that their love affair and every other thing good bad or indifferent that they’d ever experienced or imagined separately or together was grist for the mill; and that to grind that grist in that particular mill was to honor it, not dishonor it—as long as they ground it honorably.

  Says Katherine Sherritt Sagamore You miss that Marcie Blitzstein. You wish I was an artist. Were.

  Peter Sagamore assures her he does not.

  Wish or miss?

  I’ll always miss old Marcie now and then: a spirit swift and free and brave. But that machts nicht.

  Says K glumly I’m a nothing. A little librarian, potentially rich.

  A big librarian and plenty besides. Queen of my heart. Light of my soul. Mother of our posterity. More.

  Not queen of your whole heart, though, the way you’re king of my whole heart. Do I go around missing Poonie Baldwin now and then, or Saul Fish or Jaime Aiquina? Maybe Jaime a little. So on with your story: Do it.

  Our story, soon. He sailed down here alone, little ones (Peter Sagamore would say if he were literally putting all this into words): a terrific experience, here and there hairy. Sagamore Twenty-fives weren’t designed for ocean work, but Capn Fritz knew what he was doing, and old Charlie Bunting knew even more: the yard’s chief carpenter, who’d really designed the Twenty-five. Story sailed down from Buzzards Bay through Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound, through Hell Gate and down the East River to Sandy Hook, then down the Jersey coast and inland waterway and through the Cape May Canal, up Delaware Bay and River, through the C and D Canal, and into our Chesapeake, and those three weeks brought its skipper to complex terms indeed with his departed father and, by extension, with his origins. P. Sagamore is not a romantic: neither about origins nor about wooden sailboats nor about writing fiction. Story leaked a little on the way down and had a few spots of dry rot in unimportant places; once he’d moved his stuff down from Boston and settled in Annapolis, Pete laid on the epoxy and the fiberglass without a qualm, and modernized the rig a little here and there for more speed and easier handling. Charlie Bunting and John Basel would have been offended—but it wasn’t their boat any longer.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t bring himself to use that engine—not even at Hell Gate, where the current is a bona fide bitch, or in the Jersey waterway, where the channels are too tight for tacking. He practiced patience and waited for the right wind and tide, sometimes for days, damned if he knew why. One is not allowed to transit those two canals under sail alone: In the Cape May he turned the engine on for the first time, but left it in neutral and ran the three miles through on a slack tide and a following breeze. In the Chesapeake and Delaware the traffic is monitored by TV, and the rules are enforced; he did the same trick for fifteen miles. If there’d been a moment’s danger to anyone else or any real threat to himself or the boat, he’d have said Screw this and shifted into gear; but it much gratified him that there wasn’t.

  For a while, once he’d berthed Story in Annapolis and himself in College Park, he kept the O.B. in a cockpit locker. The very day before the evening of that Katherine Anne Porter party, he sold it to a chap down the line at his marina on Whitehall Creek. Then he went home, looked over some student papers, made notes toward a certain new story even shorter than “Part of a Shorter Work.” He shaved, he dressed, and he went to do his duty by K. A. Porter. There. Over?

  Says Katherine Sherritt, almost literally, Not quite over. The name of that story, kiddies—the one shorter than Shoal Point, shorter than “The Point,” shorter even than “Part of a Shorter Work,” was, in your daddy’s own fewer and fewer words . . . Over.

  SHORTER POINT

  Grist, grist, grist for the mill: Marcie Blitz was right about that. As long as one grinds it honorably. Who’s to say who jumped whom that night at the 92nd Street Poetry Center? But after it developed that these children’s da was billeted in the Gramercy Park, and that their ma’s overpriced closet of a flat was not a whole lot farther down in the Village, on West Eleventh, and we shared a cab to carry on the conversation we’d started over autographs, it became fairly clear by say Fifty-ninth and Fifth that we two Eastern Shore folk had a lot to say to each other besides bookchat and good night. Old Poon was out of Katie Sherritt’s twenty-four-year-old picture, and Yussuf al-Din wasn’t quite in it yet, though he was rapping darkly at her sexual door. Marcie Blitzstein was but a befreckled freshman Swarthmorean, four years yet into Pete’s libidinal future, and while there were several items of note in his libidinal past, there was none quite in his present. All this we gathered from each other not in any detail but by tactful general inference as the Checker cab banged south—the year was after all Nineteen Sixty-four, when U.S. sexual promiscuity had not yet really got into overdrive, and well-raised types like us still thought of sex as something special. How on earth do you suppose it will be, Peter, Katherine says now, when these innocents are twenty-four? In, let’s see. . . . Oh, Jesus: Two Thousand and Four?

  P.S. says soberly that he has little confidence of anything’s being anything in Twenty Aught Four; but that’s another story. The Checker banged south.

  The Checker banged south—

  Stavros Petrakis at the wheel! I just flashed on the license by the meter with his picture and his name on it: Stavros Petrakis. Mustachios and all.

  Living with your father, says K. Sherritt to our children, is mighty spooky sometimes. And to Peter What am I wearing, that you’ll soon take off me?

  Hum. One-piece pullover light knit jersey sleeveless dress. Scoop neck scoop back blue and white fine horizontal stripe bra no stockings some kind of sandals. Shell necklace gold loop earrings some kind of pin some kind of hair-clasp barrette whatever. No rings no bracelets Omega sport wristwatch I forget what color underpants small navy ditty-bag purse containing wallet keys Kleenex aspirin and diaphragm. And some unobtrusive scent . . .

  Children! Your father has forgotten your mother’s perfume!

  No he hasn’t: Le De, par Givenchy. And you took your own clothes off.

  But there in the cab, pleased K continues, Stavros Petrakis’s south-banging Checker . . .

  We touched fingers to forearms (our story goes on) and traded Did-you-knows about growing up separately together down on the Shore. It is clear that we find each other’s young persons mighty attractive there in that cab in that big town. Somewhere in the high Twenties we drop the Checker, it’s such a fine night to walk. We stroll on down Fifth and pop in someplace for a drink, but it’s better outside, where every time we come to a Did-you-happen-to-know-Whatsisname, we can take the other’s arm. On a bench in Union Square, halfway between your place and mine, we decide but do not say that we will not be saying good night this night. Feeling very bold and liberated, K.S.S. stands up and takes the writer’s writing-hand and says Let’s have our nightcap at your hotel.

  First time P’s ever been directly propositioned, except by professionals. He springs up, kisses her, and grabs a left-handful of her perfect buns, which along with the rest of her he’s been admiring all the way down from Ninety-second, but which he has scarcely hoped to lay actual hands upon—K happening to be, by a factor of several, the classiest young woman in his moderate experience. Fancy his delight, children, when your mother responds by putting her left hand on his tush, and her right over his left on hers, and pressing us together from knees to bellies while running her tongue around his. Hoo boy.

  It had been a while, Katherine Sherritt would have our listeners know; it had been
a while. And what it had been, when last it was, was Poonie Baldwin, Junior, and to keep her head clear she’d kept her legs together right through the divorce. She had even half thought she might be done with men altogether after what Poon did, but the fact is that our children’s father is this handsome hunk, wait till you see, kids, and all through his fiction reading at the Poetry Center she’d been thinking Why not? and deciding to introduce herself and thinking maybe she’s ready to get back into dating, quote unquote, but not really expecting him to say Come on, let’s tell some more tidewater tales, I’m at the Gramercy Park, where are you? And the whole time, banging south in that Checker, she’s wetting her pants—

  Robin’s-egg blue!

  —her robin’s-egg undies and thinking If he doesn’t, she will.

  While he’s been thinking Do you suppose? Probably she’s just being friendly, for Christ sake, a smashing high-class bird like this: don’t get your hopes up, Webfoot. Remember the immortal words of Jasper Johns: that we artists are the elite of the servant class.

  Reverse snobbery. But kiss we do, there in the Square, and go for the old buns, whereupon comes a groan from a nearby bench, and there’s some freako with his shlong out, watching us and whacking away. Good old New York.

  We run to the hotel, so amused and excited that we forget about the nightcap till we’re in the elevator, by when we’re too busy getting it on to bother with room service till ninety minutes later. When in fact we do order up a bottle of Taittinger brut with which to toast a number of things. Some obvious ones, of course: your perfectly splendid face and body . . .