The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Eureka, exclaims laughing Peter Sagamore.

  Indeed, says Theodoros, they had found it. How long they went on repeating those lines it is strictly impossible to tell, for while their boat flashed forward under the climbing sun, time seemed to flash back.

  Before his wife’s eyes, says Diana, Odysseus lost ten years. He looked fortyish again, and handsomer than ever. Nausicaa hoped he wouldn’t get any younger than that. . . .

  As for her, Ted says now in a grave voice, and Diana looks away: She lost fewer years, for she had fewer to lose. But alas, in losing fewer she did not lose less. She became the radiant, white-limbed young beauty she had been before Odysseus stepped out of the olive-scrub onto the foreshore of her life. In that regress, the little swelling in her belly flattened out—

  Katherine Sherritt makes a pained small sound; Fear and Trembling clutch each other, wide-eyed.

  —and the grandchild Arete never would have seen, says quiet Ted, its parents have also yet to see. Sperm and egg returned to their launching places; father and mother became groom and virgin bride once more.

  For all their sadness, goes on brave Dee, they regarded each other with delight. It particularly gratified Nausicaa that she was virginal again, so that she could give her experienced friend the pleasure of her first experience.

  A pleasure he would have taken then and there, Ted declares, upon the whistling afterdeck, except that just then a bird streaked by, the first they’d seen since leaving port. And a few moments later, land hove into sight: white beaches, royal palms, an air more perfumed than the air of Calypso’s isle. The ship slowed to normal sailing speed, but the sun stayed fixed at the point to which they’d raised it: midway between its zenith and the western shore. They ran up easily onto the surfless beach; they stepped ashore near a clear and sparkling natural fountain in a grove of navel oranges. Her throat quite parched from singing those two Homeric lines for who knows how long, thirsty Nausicaa wondered—

  Do you think the water’s safe to drink? recites Diana.

  Ted responds Let’s take a chance, handing her wine goblet and raising his own in salute. They drink. They drank. And at the first swallow, Dee declares, they understood that they had arrived at their destination.

  With an air of finishment, our hosts take their seats. God knows how late the hour must be; we have lost track of time and don’t want to regain it. Dew-damp Katherine says Whew: What happened after that? Replies Diana, brushing something invisible off the front of her chiton, Nothing. They lived happily ever after.

  Ever after? musing Peter presses. For all practical purposes, Ted affirms. The sun resumed its normal course, but once having drunk from that spring, Odysseus and Nausicaa virtually ceased to age. Nature does not go in for absolutes: The technical fact is that from that time on, they have aged at the rate of about three months per century, or about ten years in three thousand, and their boat along with them. Its name is Mark One, by the way, as their child’s had been going to be; but even though they call it that, they’ve never had the heart to paint that dear name on the garboards or the stern. Another technical peculiarity of their situation rules out east-west travel of any length: They can neither recross the Atlantic nor go much farther west than the Eastern Time Zone. Nor for that matter below the Equator, for some reason that’s not altogether clear. No punishment involved, you understand: That sort of thing went out with the Olympians. They just can’t do it; their boat won’t go there.

  Within those limits, however, they’re free to move north and south at their pleasure, and that is what they’ve done ever since. Early on, they fell into the natural pattern of cruising north through the spring and summer toward Maine and the Canadian maritimes, then south through the fall and winter back to Florida, where they first landed, and on to the Bahamas or the Caribbean. Mostly they stay in the open ocean, like stormy petrels, and are seldom seen; they enjoy each other’s company more than other people’s. But since the Intracoastal Waterway was opened, for variety’s sake they sometimes take the inside passage instead. Once a century, on the average, they’ll manage to revisit any given anchorage among the thousands along their route, to see how it has changed since their last visit.

  For the first two and a half millennia, says Diana, there was scarcely any change at all, and never another sailboat. Talk about privacy! Nowadays, of course, it’s a different story.

  In which, says smiling Ted, once in a while a fellow sailor will anchor for the night in Nova Scotia or Tobago or Chesapeake Bay and discover himself moored next door to an honest-to-God Phaeacian Thirty-five, Mark One. My friends, your health!

  We applaud. We toast their health, too, which clearly needs no toasting. We drink to Poseidon and Aeolus, to Ithaca, Phaeacia, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Then Peter Sagamore declares that it seems to him the story’s not quite done: Whether or not Homer returned to Ithaca, we still don’t know what Penelope wove into that last corner of her web.

  Theodoros Dmitrikakis nods and says, not quite to Peter’s point, You have been first-rate listeners, both of you. . . .

  All of us, murmurs Katherine, patting her belly—and wondering too late whether she’s being tactless.

  But it is late, goes on Ted, even for people who have all the time in the world. Tomorrow evening, if you like, we’ll tell you

  THE END OF THAT STORY.

  Or the next time we find ourselves in the same anchorage.

  Agreed. And you must let us return the favor. Eye for an eye. Tit for a tat. Tale for a tale.

  What a brace of smiles! Quel cool couple!

  Agreed.

  DAY 3:

  MADISON BAY TO

  RHODE RIVER

  Wrecked in the head from retsina, groggy still at eight next morning from so late a bedtime, Peter Sagamore awakes feeling anyhow like making love to Katherine Sherritt and so, well hung as well as well hung-over, navigates through Story’s cabin to her snug berth. Planting his face between her sleepy breasts, he advises Don’t breathe my breath. One whiff will embalm those children and their mother too.

  Says stirring Katherine You’ve been dreaming about Dee-ah-nah Dmitrikakis.

  No.

  You’re allowed. Kate yawns and stretches as best she can. Tell those children last night’s bedtime story while you’re there.

  No.

  She holds his head: A story a night. She fingers his hair. Odysseus and Nausicaa got you off the hook, but a rule’s a rule.

  Rules shmules, Peter mumbles: Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

  Replies K Today’s Wednesday, and yawns again. That Dee is gorgeous!

  Mm.

  Presently Katherine wants to know So are they or aren’t they what we think they are but know they can’t be? Peter thinks we should discuss that question fully at breakfast and not at all now, but Kath’s wide awake and racing her motor. Still holding his head she says That Ted’s a sexy thing, too. I sure dreamed: dreams dreams dreams, this whole cruise. Do it. Do you wish we were supercool like them instead of plain old us? Ah. Ah.

  Presently in turn Peter says It’s me that’s plain old us. You’re supercool.

  Bids kinky Kate Now set me a task. It used to bother May Jump that it excited Katherine Sherritt to be given sexual work-orders by her lovers.

  That has got to be a sign of hang-up, May would say, but had to acknowledge that when it came to carnal pleasures, Kiss was about as un-hung-up as a body can be.

  Enough sex: Let’s check the world. It is a hazy calm morning in Madison Bay, still cool—and we have the anchorage to ourselves.

  They did it. Over tired doughnuts from that restaurant and coffee, we agree we half thought they might: slip out quietly at dawn; leave the big questions as unresolved as that final corner of Penelope’s web. We know very well we’ll never see “Ted” and “Diana” again; that the end of that story really was

  THE END OF THAT STORY.

  We’re not even goi
ng to think about it, Peter declares, aware that for some while we shall of course be able to think of little else, and that from time to time for the rest of our lives we’ll be asking ourselves whether the obviously preposterous circumstance might just possibly be the case and, since it can’t be, it being so obviously preposterous, what then is the truth about that handsome, supercool couple and their spooky boat, Mark I? Us, we like a story with a proper ending to it: no loose ends, no red herrings, no fade-outs; all mysteries resolved, virtue rewarded, wickedness brought low, true lovers at the altar and presently pregnant.

  Katherine Sherritt suddenly says Mark Twain. Says unsurprised Peter Yup.

  You know what I mean? Sure he knows what she means: That was going to be his story if, as we might have known wouldn’t be the case, Mark I had still been there this morning and we and the Dmitrikakises had gotten together again and old flashy-limbed Nausicaa there and her bandy-legged, thigh-scarred friend had told us the end of that story of Penelope’s web and our turn had come to tell them one. Kate’s not the only one aboard this vessel that all they do is dream dream dream. And has she noticed—pretty far out for us no-nonsense types—how what we’re dreaming and what we’re sailing into on this cruise of ours so play off each other lately that a body can’t sort out cause from effect? Take that SEX EDUCATION: Play play, for example, Act I of which floated in just when we needed it and caused or colored the dreams, both his and hers, that led to Odysseus and Nausicaa and Penelope’s unfinished web and N’s three brothers’ first boat and their second, also unfinished like Peter’s dream of two nights back, which he now sees retrospectively to have been entitled Huck Finn on the Honga, Part One, inasmuch as he wound it up last night with

  HUCK FINN ON THE HONGA, PART TWO, OR, THE MARK TWAIN.

  Pay attention to your father now, Mason and Dixon, their mother orders: This is your last-night’s bedtime story. Me, I remember now I dreamed I was in bed again with Poonie Baldwin, Junior. Yech! Yech!

  Asks Pete Did Ted and Diana mention or show us the jeweled box that Arete gave Odysseus and Nausicaa as a wedding-plus-going-away present, or did I dream that?

  Katherine opines from the cockpit, where in white underpants and gray sweatshirt she’s curled up now around her decaf, You dreamed that. Unless we dreamed the whole shebang. Hey, yeah, she muses: Maybe we’re not really on this boat here in Madison Bay, okay? Maybe we’re back in the First Guest Cottage at Nopoint Point, you checking out Mom’s intercom and me kvetching about invasion of privacy. Peter muses with her: I asked you to set me a task, and you were just about to do it when one of us dozed off and dreamed all this. Katherine declares We’re back in the Gramercy Park Hotel in Nineteen Sixty-four, still making love and falling asleep and waking up and making love, and one of us has upped and dreamed a flashforward about how we split after that and then got back together again at the Katherine Anne Porter party in College Park and got married and pregnant and antsy and here we are. Want to wake up or go with it?

  Go with it, says Peter Sagamore, and maybe he’s still thirteen years old and never left old Dorchester County. Maybe he’s still stuck on Bloodsworth Island there, waiting for the tide to turn and fetch him home in the Mark Twain, aha.

  In the?

  You’ll notice, the man of us tells our children, once you’re born, that your working Chesapeake watermen do not characteristically name their workboats Windsong, for example, or Sundance or Moonraker or Dawn Treader, not to mention Tiltin’ Hilton, Yom Clipper, Ahoy Veh, Daddy’s Playtoy, or Buy, Baby. Your working Chesapeake watermen call their boats Captain Earl P. Batchelder or Rosie M. Conway, and sometimes Edna Mae. Your father’s right, says Katherine: Bobby Henry calls his john-boat Ruth Marie Ann, which is his wife and daughters. Further, announces Peter, if your working Chesapeake waterman’s workboat is accompanied by a dinghy, skiff, or tender—as it will not normally be except in the case of the motorized yawl-boats used to push oyster-dredging skipjacks in windless weather—then that dinghy, skiff, or tender will decidedly not bear an amusing name played off the name of the mother ship: Night Watch followed by Watch Out; Allegro followed by Allegretto; Sloop du Jour followed by Crouton; Shapely Lady followed by Tender Behind, et cetera. Your working waterman’s dinghy, skiff, or tender will have no name at all, unless perhaps A F Four Four Six Five M D.

  Now, then: We boatwright Sagamores down on Shoal Point, Hoopers Island, were not working Chesapeake watermen and waterwomen, but we worked with working waterfolk, we lived like working waterfolk, and we named our boats like working waterfolk. The elderly skiff, therefore, in which on an airless June a.m. in Nineteen Fifty-three your sire set out to discover whether the tide would fetch him six hours twenty-two minutes-worth down the Honga River and then six hours twenty-two minutesworth back to his home dock, with no assistance or interference from himself—that skiff had no name when I set out, neither in fact nor in my dream of night before last. And it was still anonymous, that skiff was, when in both cases a northerly breeze sprang up that promised to carry your pa out into the Bay if he didn’t go ashore on Bloodsworth Island, which he did. Not by swimming the skiff in through sea nettles, as I was about to do two nights ago when I woke up from dreaming this, but by steering myself aground and then walking the skiff up through the muck, hoping I wouldn’t step on an unexploded souvenir from the Patuxent Naval Air Test Center. I did not and therefore survived to grow up and leave Dorchester County and become a strange sort of story writer and meet, make love to, lose, remeet, and marry Katherine Shorter Sherritt and beget you guys upon her as they say and dream this dream and tell this story.

  Unless, K reminds him, you’re still asleep and dreaming down there on Bloodsworth Island.

  Right. Now, Katie: Where do you suppose a person comes from?

  A person comes, says Katherine promptly, from the felicitous encounter of sperm and egg in fallopian tube. I refer you to SEX EDUCATION: Play, Act One. She sees that Peter’s serious, leaning on his arms on the companionway sill. She touches his hair. But that’s not what you have in mind.

  Nope. What he has in mind is this. A person from K. S. Sherritt’s background would scarcely be able to imagine—if it weren’t that her ethnic-folklore field work and her long affair with Peter Sagamore have led her many and many a time to see and shake her head at it—how homogeneous, how variety-and idea-poor, though no doubt rich in other ways, was life in an isolated fishing-and-farming village like Hoopersville, Maryland, especially before the advent of television. The biweekly expedition to Cambridge, with its occasional movie, was in the 1950s still a big event. Almost nobody read any books ever, except the Bible. All hands were Methodist or lapsed Lutheran except a few descendants of Lord Baltimore’s original Catholic colonists. Everybody was of English or Scotch-Irish extraction but for the odd turn-of-the-century German immigrant. Everybody was white but for the blacks—proportionately far fewer in the salt-marsh communities, which had little use for slaves, than in the agricultural areas and the towns. Racial segregation was absolute. Visitors of any sort were few. The nearest bookstore was in Talbot County; it had as well been on the moon. A trip to Baltimore was an excursion to Babylon. Whatever positive might be said for such a growing-up place—in the way of physical independence and self-reliance among its people, the virtual absence of crime, a strong community spirit, and (except for the blacks) a classless society in which wealth was as rare as indigence—the fact is that until he left for college, Peter Sagamore had never met anyone who’d been to college, other than his schoolteachers and the family doctor. Nor had he ever met e.g. an Italian-American (not to mention an Italian Italian), an Asiatic, a Jew. In those Dixiecrat days he had scarcely known even a Republican, and had never to his knowledge encountered an atheist, a political radical either left-or right-wing, or anyone who could speak a tongue other than down-country English except his high school Spanish teacher and a couple of Holy Rollers. No doubt things are different now. More?

  No. It is possible that when she
was thirteen, Katherine Sherritt knew no one except the help whose parents weren’t five-generation professional and business people. While Peter was dozing down the Honga in that nameless skiff, she was as at ease on the Paris métro, a London bus, a Cunard liner, or a Boeing 707 as she was on her three-speed bike or her father’s ocean-racing Katydids. She could distinguish Pombaline from Manueline in Portugal, plateresque from pavo in Spain, not to mention Romanesque from Gothic all over the rest of Europe, more from casually accumulated firsthand experience than from study. . . .

  Enough. Phenomena like Katherine Shorter Sherritt, who remember which side their ancestors were on in the War of the Roses, do not wonder where a person comes from, until they come to know phenomena like Peter Sagamore. But we digress. Mark Twain? Dream?

  If Hannibal, Missouri, had been in central Tennessee, Peter wonders, would there have been a Mark Twain? The river that carried Huck Finn away from Hannibal carried Sam Clemens into the world and around it. The Chattahoochee or Monongahela wouldn’t have done, not to mention the Honga; the point is that anything in the USA could come down that Mississippi, so to speak. It only doesn’t come back, any more than Mark Twain went back to being Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Okay? Whereas—P’s tidewater fantasies notwithstanding—nothing he ever saw went down the Honga that didn’t start there, and it all came back on the tide, no different but for a few barnacles. It’s just us Hoopers Island waterfolk going out to work and coming home again, generation after generation. Except for the odd war veteran or nineteenth-century skipper in the Indies trade, the last brush Hoopers Island folk had with the wider world was the arrival of the British invasion fleet of 1813 and 1814, which foraged around there while burning Washington and attacking Baltimore. When Peter Sagamore was a boy, folks still talked about those raiding parties as if they had happened in their lifetimes. Them Redcoats, now, they were sumpn: Give ‘em what they wanted, they’d pay you in pound sterling; didn’t, they’d take and burn you to the ground.