The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Okay, Sis, okay. Finish your story already.

  It’s not my story; I just work here. Molly’s got cancer, Peter; I know she has!

  Jesus, Kath . . .

  Why’d you ever have to know that Jean Heartstone person? I’m killing poor Molly, and I can’t help it!

  Peter Sagamore really wonders whether this is what a nervous breakdown looks and sounds like; he has never observed one. He puts an arm around our storyteller and explains to Andy that he once had a girlfriend a hundred years ago who believed et cet, and to Katherine that even if, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes guessed correctly of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1864, the shark has got its tooth into Molly Barnes Sherritt (a speculation based on no evidence whatever, that Peter has heard of), the big C is not as uppercase nowadays as it used to be: At the first real symptom, folks nowadays go over to Johns Hopkins or up to Sloan-Kettering and get themselves diagnosed and in a great many instances fixed, you know?

  K knows; she knows. Excuse her.

  As for Georgette, she shakes Darlene after their official short interview with Prince Bruce, who is even more gorgeous than she remembered his being and who exonerates them both of any culpability in the death of horny Claude the gamekeeper. Claude? I’m just reporting the news. She manages a private couple of minutes to discuss the question of getting her old job back and then asks the guy directly whether he remembers a certain lonely little Canada goose hen who used to swim around with seven whistling swans in Queenstown Creek last year, and six of the swans chased her off, but the seventh used to see to it she didn’t go hungry? Old Bruce fidgets like he’s got a loony on his hands and says he doesn’t get out to the royal blinds lately as much as he wishes he could; princing takes up all his free time. In fact, he’s behind in his appointments as it is, and he’s got to get back up the Amtrak to Princeton that same afternoon and study some more international studies. As to her job, no sweat; what with Claude gone, there’s room for her and Darlene both. Maybe she could draft him an official report on swan-goose interaction in the Eastern Neck Refuge and what if anything should be done about it.

  So by golly she does, crestfallen as she is. Between her regular gamekeeping chores she writes out this story we two have just told—We three, you little turkeys!—called “The Swan Prince of Queenstown Creek.” It ends with the Canadian goose-girl junior grade writing out her story and sending it Express Mail up to the prince in Princeton, wondering whether he’ll dispatch a car for her at once from Prince George’s County or rush down the flyway himself to Eastern Neck Island and marry her on the spot with Darlene as her maid of honor, or whether maybe the human pecking order is finally even stronger than the bird one, and tenderly as he remembers his petite Canadienne from Salthouse Cove, he’s engaged now to Heather Foulke-Stoughton of Wye Landing and Saint Croix and c’est la vie.

  But the truth (say Tried and True) is that just as Georgette in her goose days had no memory at all of ever having been human, while Bruce’s was total and exquisite, now that they’ve shucked their feathers and got back into their clothes the reverse is true, no matter what we might have said before: Bruce believes that he just lost a semester somewhere back there, OD’d on some Controlled Dangerous Substance. He writes Georgette a really nice rejection letter, telling her that while he’s no authority in literary matters, he thinks she definitely has a way with words and maybe ought to send the piece to Joyce Carol Oates for possible publication in The Ontario Review on account of the Canadian connection, and he really wishes Georgette good luck in her writing career, which she ought to be able to combine nicely with the job of chief gamekeeper, which he’s promoting her to in old Claude’s place, because no doubt there’s a lot of privacy and quiet time for writing down there in the refuge.

  Kate goes to bed. We all go to bed, after making sure by CB radio that there is indeed an ambulance and driver in Rock Hall. Peter tells our children pretty much what Bruce told Georgette, except that his judgment is at once a lot more professional and, in this instance, a lot less disinterested: It’s their first time up at the narrative plate. He kisses Kath’s forehead, chin, neck. She squeezes his hand. She’ll be all right tomorrow, she promises. It’s just she had this dreadful flash about Molly.

  Says Chip from his settee berth after lights-out I guess if Sherbald Enterprises Inc. were here in Swan Creek instead of over in Queenstown, and Poonie Baldwin, Junior, had some photographs taken of himself and his friends doing gay stuff around this anchorage, and the KGB got hold of those photographs and threatened to circulate them if Poonie didn’t play ball with them, some smart-ass political columnist could call those pictures ‘The Town Queen of Swan Creek’s Prints.”

  In order to shine her flashlight, of which we have one for each bunk, full into Andrew Sherritt’s blushing face, Katherine hauls all the way out of her V-berth and into Story’s main cabin. Her husband is breaking up in his quarterberth. Little Balls and Strikes don’t get Chip’s labored joke. In the morning, their mother promises, your Uncle Andrew will explain to you the principles and practice of human homosexuality. Right now he’s got to get out of bed and apply his you-know-what to his you know what.

  IN STORY’S LOGBOOK TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THIS NOVEL,

  WE DON’T EVEN AWARD SEPARATE-CHAPTER STATUS TO DAY 12,

  THOUGH BEFORE IT’S DONE WE HEAR AT LEAST TWO NOT-BAD

  TIDEWATER TALES

  It begins with physical exercise, does Friday, which we feel we’ve been neglecting lately. Kate does those Kegels and the other pregnant stuff. Waking to find themselves still unborn, Time and Again do submarine aerobics until Mom goes swimming to settle them down. Peter and Andrew do stretchies on the foredeck and then swim laps around the boat, whose waterline they also scrub—the dinghy’s, too—before coming in for breakfast. Chip agrees with us over coffee that humor at the expense of homosexuals is not as entertaining as it used to be and may in some instances reflect a degree of sexual insecurity in the would-be humorist; at the same time, he asserts his entitlement, as a twelve-year-old virgin, to some degree of sexual insecurity. The FM’s a.m. news is that as we slept, the French government revealed that it has already built and tested its own enhanced-radiation “neutron” bomb (Score one for Vug the Doomsday Factor, sighs Peter Sagamore), and a poll indicated that seventy percent of inadvertently pregnant Baltimore County teenagers get abortions. Complains Chip Pregnant teenagers? Abortions? I thought the stork took care of all that.

  You’re but a one-zit preteen, Kate consoles him. After you’re bar mitz-vah’d next year, we’ll let you read Franklin Key Talbott’s SEX EDUCATION: Play, Acts One and Two, and you’ll know two-thirds of the facts of life.

  Our daughter signals that she’d prefer we-all not talk about abortion and the Doomsday Factor, if we don’t mind; those subjects make her brother uneasy. Can’t we do the weather or something?

  It bids in fact to be a stinker, declares the VHF weather channel: We may thank Zeus we’re not in Texas, where the murderous heat-wave perks along, but hereabouts we’re in for a sunny, low-ninetyish and humid day, winds on the Bay southwest ten to twelve, waves one to two feet. Says Story’s skipper Sassafras River, here we come. He’ll catch the dishes while Chip gets the sails up and Katherine checks in with the grown-ups. We bid hasta la vista to Swan Creek, power out past the Rock Hall fish traps into the blue-gray Bay, and run wing and wing seventeen nautical miles on the steady, warm southwesterly, up past Fairlee and Worton Creeks to improbable Still Pond. In these upper-Chesapeake latitudes, in the long stretch between the Chester and the Sassafras, the Eastern Shore looks like the Western down where we come from: high wooded banks broken not by rivers but by a series of snug creeks with alarmingly narrow entrances, typically S-shaped and fortunately well markered, through which the tides boil in and out. The large-ship channel swings almost to the beach up here; we move out of it to let a Toyota-fraught Japanese freighter steam by like a metal cliff toward the C & D Canal, bound we guess for Philly. Large yachts pass us,
too, power and sail, headed north from Florida waters for Long Island Sound, Narragansett and Buzzards Bay, Marblehead, Maine, Nova Scotia. Katherine asks, as always, Can we go? Says Peter Sure, some day, and wonders whether we ever shall. There are also Greece, Grenada, Pago Pago, he forgets what else—all to be inspected.

  Chip takes lots of bearings and keeps a running plot of our course; never since he was last aboard has Story’s position been fixed with such exactitude. Katydid IV wonders what’s our hurry; their plan is to sail from Tilghman Creek as far as Fairlee or Worton and go ashore for dinner at the marina restaurant, of which there is at least one on each creek. Kate explains that that’s exactly why we’re not stopping there, even for lunch; we’ll push on up to Still Pond, which won’t be spoiled by marinas and moorings for another couple of years yet. As of Friday, 27 June ‘80, there’s a Coast Guard Search-and-Rescue station at the sigmoid entrance to that creek and almost nothing beyond it but woods and water; K bets the USCG could get her to Chestertown hospital even more quickly than the Rock Hall Volunteer Fire Company could have, should our lunch be interrupted by her labor. Should it not, we mean to go yet another dozen miles up and into the Sassafras for the night. There, she promises, we-all will rendezvous mañana.

  Well, they guess they would prefer we wait for them in Still Pond; but as we’ll be there noonish, and they not till day’s end even should they forgo dinner ashore and push on, they guess they understand. Saturday at Breadbasket’s granary, then. But we will call at noon, yes? And again at five or six, when we’re anchored.

  Through the sultry morning’s run, with Peter’s all-but-unprecedented permission (he’s still feeling plenty guilty about Days 8 through 10), Katherine reviews his log-notes for Parts One and Two of that possible three-part Don Quixote story, asking decipherment as needed, but trying for imaginative exercise to ask as seldom as possible. The thing makes her itch for Iberia. Toledo! The Tajo/Tejo/Tagus! Dear Lisboa! Does Peter remember the cast-iron Eiffel-looking Santa Justa Elevador that you take to get up to or down from the Bairro Alto unless you ride the little funicular on the Calçada da Gloria instead? Peter does. And the Alfama! Turn this tub around and take us there!

  P sets her the task instead of following out the dramatic trajectory of the possible story into Part Three. Given the several escalated themes—D.Q.’s quest in turn for Dulcinea, for Sancho, and for the Cide Hamete Benengeli; the changing nature of his “enchantment”; his increasing nautical skill and ambition—how and why and to what end do we get him from Cape St. Vincent to Capes Charles and Henry? From the Sagres headland to Fawcett’s Marine Supply in Annapolis? Needless to say, we can’t use Odysseus and Nausicaa’s trick; Ted and Deeahnah already copyrighted that one in their Phaeacian 35 Mark I.

  Kate says she’ll work on it, and does as we surge along. Chip at the tiller thinks it’s a fairly cool story, so far. Should he read Don Quixote this summer or when he’s a little older? Says Peter Both, and reminds us, himself especially, that it’s a lot easier to toss chestnuts into the narrative fire than to fish them all out again, excuse the mixed metaphor. We have made an end-run around the mechanics of the voyage through time by soft-focusing the passage of centuries as Quixote lingers on the Sagres cliffs; we have yet to commission Rocinante IV and give its voyage a point, a climax, and a conclusion.

  Story’s crew agree, passing Fairlee and Worton, that the compounded interest on those two reales—which Andrew Sherritt considers a neat symbol but wishes he knew the approximate monetary value of in current dollars, so that he could calculate D.Q.’s gross income for 1980—will pay for the design, construction, and outfitting of Rocinante IV. We agree further, approaching Still Pond Creek (I don’t see any entrance at all, Chip marvels, who has never sailed into it before. Advises Peter from the helm, as he appears to steer us smack into the shoreline, Have faith), that Part Two sets the narrative stage for a voyage to America. But in search of whom or what? And does he find what he’s after, or does he go into gracefully decaying orbit like the handsome Dmitrikakises?

  I don’t believe this, Chip declares from the bow; it’s Crab Creek!

  Indeed, like Crab on the South River (and Fairlee just below us, and Turner up on the Sassafras, and Grove on the Chester, and half a dozen other jim-dandies here and there about the Chesapeake), Still Pond Creek must be entered to be believed. A few yards from the sheer and driftwood-littered bank, Pete hangs a hard left around a buoy into a sandspitted entrance channel that appears from nowhere; he powers through it against a two-knot current funneling between beaches we could almost touch with our boathook, hangs a hard right after the green day-beacon off the Coast Guard station, and here we are in six to eight feet in capacious Still Pond, rightly named, the Bay and the creek entrance already out of sight astern. What’s more, the only other boat inside, riding at anchor just ahead, is a hefty old ketch half again our length and more than twice our draft, by the look of her, which—

  I don’t believe this, says Kath, but the binocs confirm it: Rocinante IV, Montesinos. Capn Don Q.’s already waving us over with his Greek fisherman’s cap, unsurprised. ¡Hola, Story! Come raft up. Got a friend of yours aboard here!

  Wonders Andy What’s going on?

  Peter promises we’ll explain, when we know. Let’s put out fenders and lines portside. Rocinante’s port bow now winks our way. Binoculared Katherine’s giggling; looking smart if not quite at ease in white ducks, scarlet halter-top and bandanna with plenty of necklaces between, brown shades, bare feet, and cigarillo, Carla B Silver accepts the coil of sternline Kath hands her and grumbles Muchath grathiath, theñora; now tell me what to do with the mothering thing.

  WHAT IS CARLA B SILVER DOING IN STILL POND CREEK?

  She’s tying this damn rope to this thingumabob and making such a job of it you’ll never get loose. Who’s your young friend there, skipper?

  Introductions and handshakes all around. Andrew Sherritt. Carla B Silver, a new old friend of ours. Donald Quicksoat, an old old friend of hers; just call me Capn Don, sir. Like Peter, the man is wearing only cutoff jeans; he looks fit and brown and wiry, more like a seasoned desert prophet than an errant knight, with his short white beard and craggy brows, bright eyes and eagle beak, and more like the ancient mariner than either. So here we are in Still Pond Creek, some of us.

  And the rest to follow, we expect, growls cordial Carla, her cleat work done. Either here or up the road. How’s that?

  Kath says It’ll hold. Hey, you look great!

  You look great. The women embrace across two gunwales. Damn boats make me nervous, declares Carla B, especially since Fred. What’m I doing here? Want a beer, Mister Sagamore?

  And a swim, says sweatsy Peter. Hold your story for a minute, okay?

  Kate says she’ll just split a Perrier with her brother. The three men take a short dip in Still Pond Creek. Carla B Silver says Gypsies don’t swim, and Kath’s not in a ladder-climbing mode; all she wants, please, is an entire bucket of water poured over her from head to foot on Rocinante’s ample, bulwarked foredeck. Capn Don admiringly does the honors before going over the side.

  What they’re doing together in Still Pond Creek, C.B S. and C.D.Q., and why they’re not all that surprised to see us, comes to this, told over a long and light but dark-beered lunch under Rocinante’s mizzen-boom cockpit awning: After crossing her path and ours a week ago in Annapolis, her old acquaintance Capn Don sailed straightway up to Baltimore and sought her out in Carla’s Cavern, a favorite haunt of his, which he hadn’t happened to visit in his past couple of runs up and down the Intracoastal. There he learned for the first time of Frederick Mansfield Talbott’s presumable demise and of Lascar Lupescu’s abrupt dismissal. That latter chap he’d never met, but he got the idea if not the whole story, and being himself a knight-of-all-trades in no particular hurry, he volunteered to take Lascar’s place as barkeep and kitchen helper till Carla found a replacement.

  That was only last Saturday or Sunday, she declares. By Tuesd
ay he’s already upping the ante.

  With a wink at Chip, Donald Quicksoat cheerfully acknowledges Singlehanders get horny. And just look at her, lad, would you now?

  But she wasn’t yet ready for anything further in that line, was Carla B Silver, we gathered; the Lascar lapse was too fresh, and she was still assimilating daughter Marian’s alliance with May Jump—which, by the way, seems hunky-dory, but she’ll come back to that. A little sailing weekend, then, C.D.Q. was proposing by, say, Wednesday. Some sunbird pals of his were to rendezvous this weekend before they mosey on north for the summer—where he expects to mosey himself, sooner or later, as usual. But he’s in no hurry.

  Sailors do it at hull speed, cracks Capn Don: one point three five times the square root of their waterline length. Chip murmurs One point three four.

  No thanks, said I, says C. B Silver. Sailboats give her the heeb-jeebs. But in her daily chats with daughter Leah, whether by C & P or by ESP, she’d followed the story of our meeting Reprise in Queenstown Creek, our remarkable chancing upon the text of Franklin Key Talbott’s play, our visit to Key Farm, our separation and reconciliation—

  Complains Peter Jesus, it’s as if we’ve been living on channel twenty-six.

  When it comes to omniscience, Donald Quicksoat says proudly, this lady has got your NSA beat all to hell.

  Carla says no, it’s just she and Lee are on the same frequency. When she heard the good news that we were back together and bound for the Sassafras to have our babies, she advised Frank to take the weekend off and go sailing too and get her daughter pregnant again, please, before settling down for the summer. What had happened had happened, water under the bridge. Hearing then yesterday from Lee that they might just do what Mama suggested—