The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  He gets to report that we are west of Wye River Can Three heading zero zero zero magnetic toward the Kent Narrows Bridge at five point five knots before his mother says That will do, Andrew. Are you an uncle yet? Chip says You’re supposed to say Over, Mom; over. Says Irma I am not about to say Over into a C and P Princess telephone standing here in my bedroom packing my suitcase. You say Over, honey; I’ll just chat. Did you remember to pack your you-know-what?

  Boyoboy, Mom; the whole Chesapeake Bay listens in on these conversations! How insensitive can a mother get? Over.

  Equable Irm coos I know that, sweetheart. That’s why I said “you-know-what” instead of you know what. Is your sister there?

  She happens to be on board.

  Agrees Katherine, taking the microphone, Low blow, Mom. Does Chipper remind you on the public airwaves to pack your Geritol? Anyhow, his zit’s under control; we’re monitoring it. Over.

  Groaning Andrew escapes to the cockpit, where Peter smiles sympathy. The lad had been going to be the first young North American since the invention of Clearasil to navigate from one end of adolescence to the other without a single facial blemish, but in the space between Days 9 and 10, after beans-and-franks night, his maiden pimple purply popped at the lower left lip-corner, and though he has never consciously touched the thing with unmedicated hand, he’s sure it’s going to leave a pock.

  Irma tells Katherine Your father and I are setting out, probably with Jack and Joan Bass. He says one o’clock latest, but it’ll be later. Where do you think you’ll park tonight?

  K looks up the companionway to Peter, who checks his wristwatch, says Swan Creek, and asks Chip please to reckon nautical mileage and estimated time of arrival. The boy has already done so, to assorted waypoints and likely destinations. Eight point five nautical miles from Kent Narrows at five point five knots puts our hook down in Swan Creek about fourteen forty-five, he is pleased to announce, if we make the one-o’clock bridge, which we should despite the adverse tide if we throttle up half a knot or so.

  Says Peter, twisting the throttle, You want half a knot, you got half a knot.

  Katherine tells her mother Swan Creek. Irma doubts Katydid will get that far today; she’s hardly started packing. Probably just Dun Cove, though she guesses Hank will push for Tilghman Creek at least, once they’re under way. Driving at night reminds him of his Annapolis-to-Bermuda days. Go with it, Mom, Kath recommends; it stays light till all hours now.

  Irma says she’s noticed that: Summertime, she believes it’s called. What do we think of Willy and Molly’s news?

  K says she thinks Molly Barnes Sherritt had better get herself to a gynecologist fast, but she doesn’t want to talk about it, okay? Get yourself packed; we’ll call on channel sixteen around happy hour. Story out.

  Chilled artichokes vinaigrette, salmon salad, Perrier. In the fickle air, we motor and sail and motorsail by turns, up through the tricky narrows, back into and up out of the Chester, past the Love Point Light—where Andrew scans the world in vain for Chessie the Shoal-Draft Sea Monster, and Peter wonders whether such an implausibility might be successfully surfaced in an otherwise realistic novel, not at the beginning (anybody’s credit is good at the beginning), but as late as the climax, and Katherine muses duly upon love’s point and is awfully pleased that we two are under way together again, motor or no motor, and that we’re we and not Molly and Willy or even Lee and Frank or her parents, and Toil and Trouble put their heads together on a revised version of that swan-prince story they’ve been gestating ever since Queenstown Creek—briefly into the Chesapeake itself, its western shore shrouded in this weather. Hello there, Chesapeake Bay, we say, you long-limbed, formidable, slightly poisoned beauty. On up the Eastern Shore to the funky old villages of Rock Hall and Gratitude and into Swan Creek, our shelter for the night: spoiled at the bottom end with moorings and marinas, unspoiled because shallow at the top; no particular gem, but properly snug.

  Got it, the kids agree: The Swan Prince of Queenstown Creek.

  We park in the upper middle. While Chip takes a swim in the chilly rain (to give us some privacy, we bet, on his mother’s orders), Peter hats up and talks to our log about Sex Education and Scheherazade, Katherine to her obstetrician’s wife about where everybody is. Reports Joan Bass, who has taken Kate’s call at Katydid IV’s navigation station, Off Calls off call with a sprained gizmo from last week’s race, so we’re all on Katydid, headed out the Choptank. Here’s your father. Hi ho, Story, calls Henry Sherritt; hello there, Katydid. Over. It takes a while to sort out this traffic, as Katherine’s father keeps using her nickname while Joan Bass uses his boat’s name. Presently, however, it is established that we are where we are—twenty minutes or less to the Rock Hall Volunteer Fire Company ambulance, with whose crew we promise to have a readiness chat before bedtime; another fifteen or twenty minutes to the Kent and Queen Anne’s County Hospital in Chestertown, should push come to shove, over—and that Katydid IV will be parking this evening in Tilghman Creek, at the mouth of Eastern Bay, whence by less convenient logistics Jack Bass could get to that same hospital in, oh, two hours or less. So you may fire when ready, young lady, says Doctor Jack, but don’t hurry through your labor when it starts. Relax and tell the kids a story.

  It is, however, their turn to tell us one, using their mother as their mouthpiece. Katydid out. Story out. After a dinner agreeably cooked and eaten indoors for a change as in early spring and late fall cruising (Those are sauteed softshell crabs, little Push tells Shove, and this is the feta cheese in their Greek salad. The wine is something Rhenish: a Piesporter, I’d guess. Our mother does well to go very easy on the wine, for our present and future sakes; at the same time, she does well to sip just a bit, for the education of our palates. Piesporter Goldtröpfchen Seventy-eight. This is pita bread. . . .), we stow the table and lounge about our cozy cabin, the five or so of us. With the aid of a flashlight—but listening carefully at the same time—Andrew Sherritt watches spiders spin their nightly snares here and there among our lifeline stanchions and standing rigging, and silently identifies most of the species. Peter Sagamore relaxes from invention, perches Frank Talbott’s boina on Kate’s belly, and rejoices that the world is at least temporarily reassembled. Katherine Sherritt wishes May Jump were with us to judge how much she’s speaking and how much being spoken through; May’s good at that.

  Queen Anne’s County and Queen Anne’s lace, she hears herself say, and Queenstown Creek and Queenstown town, home of Sherbald Enterprises, are all named after You Know Whom of England, late-seventeenth, early-eighteenth century, so that gets queens on the table, all right? Now, then: Any unborn child can tell you that when a boat named Story sails into a creek named Queenstown and sees seven white swans rafted up with one lonely Canada goose, either that goose or that child’s mother is Mother Goose. If that unborn child has a twin to discuss things with and a brain in their two heads, they’ll soon figure out that since Mother Goose is in Queenstown Creek, at least one of those swans has to be a handsome young prince in drag; therefore the goose must be a princess at least, and that leaves old Mom to do the dishes and tuck everybody in with a bedtime story.

  Except you guys already did the dishes, thanks, and Fish and Chips here are calling the narrative shots, not me. So this young prince, we guess, had been princing along very nicely on the family spread, which we’ll call Prince George’s County, Maryland, though his name was Bruce. Bruce? Bruce. Fourteen hundred-plus SATs and three varsity letters at Choate or Hotchkiss, plus he’s a decent chap, not to mention gorgeous and from old southern Maryland money, first tobacco and later real estate and banking but lately just dividend collecting and public service. Princing. The whole Ivy League’s after him, not to mention half the debs in the East, but he’s cool; he’s in no hurry. After a year’s backpacking around Europe on a Eurailpass like everybody else, he settles in at Princeton to study . . . international studies. Is that the way to say it?

  Our storyteller breaks un
expectedly into tears. Alarmed Peter assures her that “study international studies” is perfectly okay to say in first draft; we’ll maybe neat it up later. But it turns out K has got Molly Barnes Sherritt on her mind: not the herpes business; she doesn’t know what, exactly, and she doesn’t want to sit around in male company being simultaneously pregnant, intuitive, and weepy, but she knows poor Molly’s in deep deep trouble, and not from Operation BONAPARTE or Willy Sherritt’s penis. Excuse her.

  Chip says Hey, Kate, and gets Kleenex. Kath blows her nose and kisses his cheek and readjusts the boina and says So, anyway, old Bruce’s mom there gets galloping cancer and good-bye, and the family’s floored ‘cause they all loved one another, but anon King Dad finds himself a new consort who certainly isn’t older or worse-looking than his dear departed. The kids agree that life has to go on, and they’re happy their father’s not alone, but one thing leads to another—maybe à la Hippolytus, maybe not—until one day in his sophomore year, blam: The prince finds himself turned into a whistling swan and stuck out with six others in the royal bird sanctuary, which happens to be the Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge just over yonder.

  Praises Peter (wondering what’s what there with his wife re Molly Barnes Sherritt) This story sure has profluence. It proflows. He and Chip split a National Premium beer. No, thanks, says Kate; Spit and Image say Thanks, Mom, and go on with their story: There’s Bruce out there with the migratory waterfowl, feeling mighty sorry for himself and for his father, who has no idea why the boy dropped out of Princeton or what happened to him. But once a prince always a prince, we guess, ‘cause when he sees this poor bedraggled female Canada goose being driven away from the park ranger’s corn by half a dozen whistling ganders, he lets them know who’s the boss swan in these parts and invites the young Cahnahdienne—she’s from Quebec—to help herself.

  Which she does, okay? And thereafter Bruce sees to it she gets her share of the action despite grumbles from the other swans. Their gripe is that he’s subverting the ancient and established Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge pecking order, probably of divine origin. Georgette—that’s the Quebecoise, and you’re saying it wrong, kids: It’s not Jor-Jet; it’s Zhor-zhet-tuh, okay? Let’s hear that tuh.

  Georgette feels in her gizzard that the swans are right, but dinner is dinner, and her benefactor keeps telling her Don’t be a goose; we’re all birds of a feather, under the skin. Fact is, Bruce knows zilch about waterfowl ethology, ‘cause his Princeton curriculum didn’t get to Whats-isname’s studies of the greylag goose until junior year—

  Konrad Lorenz’s, says Andy Sherritt. This guy went to Hotchkiss? I doubt it.

  Anyhow he’s pretty much in despair about what’s happened to him: Eastern Neck Island is not Princeton Station, and swansdown’s fine in an L. L. Bean vest but something else again when it’s what you have instead of hair and clothes. So when Georgette, not surprisingly, falls hard for him, he doesn’t give her a tumble, even though now that she’s eating regularly and preening herself a bit, she is one good-looking bird. Bruce grants her that; he even likes her, especially by comparison to those pushy swans. But when he thinks of the human girls back at Smith and Vassar and for that matter Saint Deniston’s just across the river, he can’t help choking up, even though his sobs come out like whistles. Remember to call the Rock Hall Volunteer Fire Company, honey, when this story’s done.

  So: If he’d been a natural-born bird, maybe he’d have returned poor Georgette’s feelings. Or maybe not: Those other swan types are ready enough to make it with her, now that she’s all fledged out, but it’s clear enough they’re just wolf-whistling till their own kind comes down the flyway. In any case, Bruce keeps things on a big-brother/kid-sister level, and Georgette sadly concludes that despite his protestations of ornithological egalitarianism, in his heart the guy’s a snob.

  What next? Well, the fall migration gets up steam, and all the sunbirds come down the Intracoastal, and Georgette there flirts with a couple of arriviste Canada-goose ganders to see whether that scores her any points, but all Bruce does is advise her in a kind way to look the singles scene over carefully before she makes her choice, since geese mate for life. If she weren’t in love with him, she’d wring his neck! Her only consolation is that he doesn’t pair up, either, with any of the lady swans that come along, the way the other whistlers do. To smooth her ruffled feathers, she wishes she could agree with those spiteful ganders that the guy is gay, but all her hormones tell her he’s anything but. So she thinks he must be even more of a snob than she thought, if his own kind aren’t good enough for him either.

  All right: I am now instructed to report that back at the palace at this point in our story. King Dad of Prince George’s County and his presumably wicked step-queen total their Bentley on the D.C. Beltway in a royal exit-ramp misunderstanding with a Mayflower moving van, and despite lap and shoulder restraints, the gentleman is paralyzed for life and the lady is skished. Who knows whether air bags might have saved them? The minute she kicks, Bruce and possibly other of her victims elsewhere find themselves restored to their prior estate. Fortunately for him, it’s only late September: The water’s still warm, and there aren’t too many sea nettles that season. Georgette sees the lonesome apple of her eye suddenly turn into a naked and very surprised young man splashing ashore in Salthouse Cove, Queenstown Creek, where the Eastern Neck flock has bivouacked for the evening. Don’t ask our children how he gets himself to the nearest telephone or explains himself to the constabulary; Georgette’s last sight of him is in a warm-up suit doing stretching exercises on the pier at Queenstown Landing. While waiting for a taxi, maybe? Yes: The narrative committee has decided that she sees a taxi drive up and hears this beautiful human young fellow tell the driver My name is Bruce; take me to Prince George’s County, please.

  Alas and alack . . . right: Alas and Alack now divide their narrative perspective in order to declare that while Bruce takes his rightful place as the prince of Prince George’s County in his father’s incapacity, poor Zhor-zhet-tuh languishes in Queenstown Creek and would no doubt starve that winter, were it not that the six remaining swans are too preoccupied with their new girlfriends to enforce the pecking order, and the arriviste geese are as always decimated by the hunters, whereas she knows all the local blinds like the back of her webbed feet. So she survives, but she is one lonesome cohunk, believe you us, and more hopelessly in love than ever, now that she can tell herself it wasn’t snobbery that made Bruce so standoffish but rather the circumstance that he wasn’t a bird at all. He was holding off for her sake, right?

  On with the story: Along about Groundhog Day, a certain lecherous old gamekeeper on Bruce’s family payroll goes out hunting with a young female assistant gamekeeper on whom he intends to put the moves before the morning’s over. To keep himself warm and to soften her up, he puts away more Jim Beam than he should, and because at his insistence and to the girl’s dismay they’re shooting illegally over corn right smack in the middle of the Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge, even Georgette is lured into range, and that will be the end of our female lead if the old rake doesn’t stumble in his cups as he rises to shoot, and trip and fall and experience fatal cardiac arrest when his Remington lets go about one foot from his ear. Happily, however, all that happens, et voilà: Georgette finds herself standing bare-ass naked in a Kent County cornfield, metamorphosed back into the sharp-looking young assistant park ranger with a master’s in wildlife management that it now turns out she herself had been before her immediate superior turned her into a clipped-wing Canada goose for threatening to charge him with sexual harassment in the workplace plus shooting over corn, of which offenses he was as guilty as was the dead man now cooling off before her, being in fact the identical same sumbitch.

  Well! The two women size up each other and the situation, and while the authors of this story try to figure out why Bruce the swan knew all along he was a prince, but Georgette the goose didn’t know till just now that she’d been a r
oyal goose-girl junior grade, her successor in that post helps her strip enough warmies off their mutual harasser to keep her from freezing and explains that she herself had every intention of reporting the rascal too, once she was out of his goosing range, if only to get a private audience with that hunk of a prince whose private bird-sanctuary this is. Yeah, right, says Georgette.

  So back they go to Prince Bruce’s palazzo in Prince George’s County, after ringing in the Maryland Natural Resources Police to tidy up the scene and take the appropriate depositions. Georgette leaves out the metamorphosis part in her account, because the officers are suspicious enough as it is of one woman smelling to heaven of Jim Beam and the other half-dressed in the dead trick’s camouflage suit. Darlene herself, the Jim Beam one, can already hardly believe she saw what she saw, and Georgette now encourages her to imagine that she didn’t; that it was the booze, or something in the booze, and that what she’s just made up for the cops is the truth: i.e., that she, Georgette, just happened to be strolling by when the old guy was about to put the moves on Darlene, and that as he was forcing them both to strip at gunpoint, his ticker gave out from overexcitement. Yeah, yeah, says Darlene; I guess that’s how it was. Yeah.

  Our goose-girl doesn’t even mention to Darlene that she knows Prince Bruce already, much less what she knows about him. The prince himself has cooled that story, for a couple of reasons that we’ll soon come up with, like, um, to spare his father’s feelings about the late step-queen, maybe, whom the old king really had had a passion for and is still mourning the skishment of; also, we guess, because the whole whistling-swan episode sounded so dopey on the face of it that he came almost to believe what the rest of the family suspected: that like some other overprivileged kids he’d dropped out of the Ivy into Cokesville for a while. Junior year in outer space kind of thing. Don’t you dare get mixed up with that stuff, Chip Sherritt! Chipper?