The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  It is a fact about islands, Katherine Sherritt agrees, that they tend to be insular.

  Which is why Peter wonders how—when at age thirteen he heard the much-revered local Methodist minister explain to his Hoopersville congregation that when Jesus is called King of the Jews, the biblical Jews thus referred to are not to be confused with the sharp-trading moneygrubbers we all know today—he understood at once that the man was a bigot, though he hadn’t yet learned that word. The only Jews anyone on Hoopers Island had met firsthand were two or three families of Cambridge shopkeepers who everyone agreed were upstanding people; yet no one questioned the stereotype, which Peter, who’d never met even those families, knew at once to be unjust. What was more, at about the same moment he came to understand the more complex injustice of the condition of the Negroes, whom everyone did know more or less closely without that familiarity’s disturbing their stereotypes. It promptly appalled him that not only all his friends but his family as well shared these attitudes, about which—he discovered over midday dinner that same June Sunday—they were good-humoredly impervious to argument.

  After the chicken and the lima beans and the mashed potatoes, the boy went soft-crabbing to be alone with these revelations, and as he stalked the Shoal Point shallows, he decided among other things that all people are created equal before God and ought to be equal before the law, but aren’t; that he didn’t believe in God anyhow and therefore wouldn’t join church next Easter, as he was scheduled to; that though he liked his family, he was not truly a member of it and was not destined to pass his life on Hoopers Island; and that tomorrow, if the weather was right, he would try the drifting experiment he had been planning for some time, not simply to see whether it worked, but to clarify one final matter that the minister’s casual anti-Semitism had somehow brought into near-focus.

  All this, mind, in a single Sunday in the life of a mild, cheerful, nowise rebellious, and utterly unsophisticated boy. Hence Peter’s question: Where does a person come from? What on earth, for example, could that lad have been reading down there in Hoopersville to put such liberal, outlandish ideas into his head?

  The less bloodthirsty portions of the Holy Bible? Katherine suggests. The U.S. Declaration of Independence? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Listen: It impresses her that in the fancy circles she grew up in, bigotry was regarded as a vulgar no-no, and all hands were expensively schooled in critical thinking, cultural pluralism, and the rest, but when you came right down to it the prevailing attitudes weren’t a whole lot different from those on Hoopers Island. Everybody in her set knew very well by age thirteen that ethnic stereotypes are vicious, Jews obnoxious, and Negroes inferior. Such things went without saying. What Katherine Sherritt believes is that it is enough for the heart’s elect, even on a desert island, to hear one chorus of e.g. the old Protestant Sunday-school song Red or yellow black or white, they are precious in His sight; Jesus loves the little children of the world, or see one UNICEF card with its holiday greeting in half a dozen languages, to make that child a lifelong partisan of liberty and justice for all; whereas the spiritual-imaginative hoi polloi, no matter how privileged, never really question their assumptions, but wear their cultural blinders to the grave.

  Heart’s elect! marvels Peter. Spiritual-imaginative hoi polloi! What is this fount of eloquence I’m sharing an engineless small boat with? Who wants flashy-armed Nausicaa in all her heaven-sent beauty when he has Katherine Sherritt Sagamore?

  Laments K God, she was gorgeous. On with your story.

  In fact, Peter Sagamore at thirteen had begun reading Huckleberry Finn. He’d borrowed it from the Dorchester County Public Library in Cambridge fame de mieux, having used up the shelves of Tom Swifts and Tarzans that the librarian steered all boys to, and while he couldn’t have said then what’s clear to him now about the difference between Twain’s homely-artful truth-telling and the voiceless innocuosity of Victor Appleton and Edgar Rice Burroughs, surely Huck had had a hand in this drifting project; very likely in that Sunday’s insights as well. He pulled his anonymous skiff ashore on Bloodsworth Island, fiddled further with that locked sea-box—no, wait: The box was only in those dreams. All right, then: He can’t remember what he did while waiting for the tide to turn and the breeze to die out or not, besides wish that the Honga ran one way like the Mississippi, out to the world. Presently he dozed off again—he’d had a wakeful night and a very early start that morning—and dreamed that Huckleberry Finn was with him there on Bloodsworth Island.

  In those days, says Peter, I had a best friend whom without quite noticing it I’d come to be half afraid of: a redneck neighbor-boy my age, Howard Something-or-Other, with papery skin and straw hair and a pointy face full of bad teeth. Also sour breath and red-rimmed eyes. Howard Something-or-Other smelled like stale crabfat and crushed saltines, and he picked his nose and ate his boogers and was a great gooser in the ass of his male friends and rapper of them smartly in the nuts, as we chaps called our testicles, besides having so large a craving to witness my little sister naked that he was forever offering me dollars filched from his mother’s purse to set him up to spy upon Sue-Ann Sagamore in her bath, which I didn’t. Howard Findley.

  Holy Jesus on the Cross of Calvary, says Katherine Sherritt: This was your best friend?

  Says Peter The available selection was not wide. In this dream of mine, old Howard Findley there gets conflated with Huck Finn: So much for the famous subtlety of dreams. He’s all for smashing the lock on my floating lockbox and getting at whatever’s inside, is Howard Findley. I realize I’ll have to sleep curled up around it even though Howard Findley will goose me in the ass; otherwise he’ll break into the thing before I can get it home and let it open by itself. Sorry to be so obvious.

  Katherine decides it’s okay. Your unconscious was only thirteen, and you were asleep.

  Says Peter Well: But in last night’s dream, there he was again, old Huckleberry Findley, age thirteen and forty at the same time—as Howard sort of was, in fact—and when I saw and smelled him, I understood a few truths that even Mark Twain wasn’t telling. I don’t know. Yes I do: stuff about hair lice and crab lice and circle-jerks and wino sodomy in empty boxcars. The fact is, I smelled Howard Findley’s fate on him back then, and couldn’t have said what I was smelling except that it was sad and squalid. Jail cells and drunk-vomit. Knife fights and phlegm and cracked black leather shoes. Baggy wool pants. Pecker tracks. You know? In the same way that I knew Huck Finn was realer than Tom Swift or Tarzan, I knew that even in my dream, Howard Findley was realer than Huck Finn. So in Nineteen Fifty-three I woke up and rowed home knowing that I didn’t have to reject, as they say, Howard Findley and that Methodist minister and my family and Shoal Point and the Dorchester marshes. On the contrary. What I had to do was get myself out of there and write about them respectfully and truthfully from somewhere else, maybe Portugal, the way Mark Twain wrote about Hannibal from Hartford, Connecticut. Huck Finn lit out for the Territory, but Sam Clemens lit out for civilization. Peter Sagamore lit out for college as soon as he was able.

  And that, children, says K.S.S., is how your father came to become a moderately celebrated writer of short and shorter fiction. We suspect he’s left a couple of things out.

  Responds Peter Leaving things out has been the name of the mothering game.

  Whereas in last night’s version of this dream, prompts Kate.

  Last night I woke up from the Huck Finn dream of Nineteen Fifty-three and was relieved to find Howard Findley gone. In fact, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, I believe, and is possibly now a tattooed habitué of the greater world’s waterfront bars, but just as likely he’s a well-groomed and competent deck officer with high school-age children in Philadelphia. All I had to do was load my unrifled box back into my trusty skiff Mark Twain, row us all back home, and hide the box in the steamer trunk in my bedroom closet till it steamed open by itself. Sure enough: nothing inside but a rusty iron key.

  Corrects Katherine Nop
e: a filigreed and jewel-bedizened key worth much more than its weight in gold because that’s what it was made of: gold fetched from the New World to the Old by Christopher Columbus himself, like the gold in the custodial in Arfe’s monstrance in the treasury of the Toledo cathedral. A key so precious that by comparison the box that held it was worthless.

  Okay. But the box that held it is not the box it opens.

  Of course not. The box it opens is the jewel-encrusted treasure chest given by Queen Arete to Nausicaa and Odysseus as a combination wedding and going-away present.

  Which, says Peter Sagamore, when opened with that jewel-bedizened key worth many times its considerable weight in gold, will be revealed to contain the rusting iron key to the box of my Huck-Finn-on-the-Honga dreams, Parts One and Two.

  Our children chorus You both have got it wrong. It is true that we lack experience of the world; on the other hand, we have an umbilical connection with transcendency, and it is our unanimous opinion that these keys together unlock the mystery of where a person comes from.

  I swear, we proudly agree: Those kids of ours are chips off the old blocks.

  ALL THIS WHILE WE’VE BEEN SAILING, SAILING,

  through a sweet June early morning of warming air, clearing sky, and light and variable mainly westerly breezes, out of Madison Bay and the Little Choptank River, vaguely down past Taylors Island toward Hoopers, thinking maybe we’ll touch base with P’s mother at her nursing home, though she won’t know who we are; say hello to Sue-Ann Sagamore Hooper and her husband, one of the originals; have a side-of-the-eye look at the old home place; take Story back to its Once Upon a Time, et cetera. But just about here, Peter having told with help from his friends the tale he’d have told Odysseus and Nausicaa in exchange for theirs, had they hung around to hear it, a fresher breeze moves in from the south. Ten knots and steady. Your choice, Skipper, says our happy woman, and our man says Let’s get out of here, turns our transom respectfully on his home waters, and runs us for the next several hours north, out of there.

  No more stories, he declares, about my youth. Let’s have some music to run free by. Between Vivaldi and Telemann, the D.C. FM apprises us that at least fifteen and maybe three times that many black South Africans have been killed in a new outbreak of racial violence in Cape Town. No whites. Katherine groans And pretty soon they’ll have the Bomb down there, and then Argentina and Pakistan will have it. God help us all. Peter Sagamore says nothing; but he reflects, to put it mildly, that the civilization that Huck Finn fled and that himself and Sam Clemens lit out for is what has him so by the throat—containing as it does not only domesticity and the bittersweet responsibilities of parenthood, but Doomsday and other Factors—that he is reduced to saying nothing.

  A dignified elderly gentleman in a three-piece summer seersucker sails by, necktie and all, apparently singlehanding a big skipjack impeccably converted for cruising: the second sight in two days, that get-up, we’ve never seen before on our Chesapeake Bay. We wave; he waves. We pass the leaning Sharps Island Light, cross the mouth of the Great Choptank, wiggle our fingers in the direction of K’s home waters, to which we’re not returning either, yet. Behind Poplar Island—Welcome back to our story, Poplar Island, where we first made shipboard love!—we anchor for a light late lunch and swim before deciding where we’ll go next. No nettles yet this far up, at least not on this tide, and so welcome is the silky water to our two skins, we resolve to stay above the slowly advancing nettle-line for the rest of this book or until Kate’s labor day, whichever comes first.

  Is this how Flaubert operated?

  But look here, says Pete: We really must make a serious pit stop today. We’re out of everything. By our constraints, says Kate, are we defined; but not only by our constraints. She makes a pacifying position-report to Nopoint Point—to young Andrew, as it happens—and then out of nearly nowhere observes to her husband that Tonio Kröger, in Thomas Mann’s 1903 story of that title, is born in the uptight north, flees to the libertine south, and settles into artistic maturity in the middle latitudes. Munich, as Katherine remembers. Peter Sagamore did it the other way around—with different voltages on the compass points.

  Yeah, well. Sort of.

  Old Chip there says he’s reading Mann’s stories in the Death in Venice collection. Long-winded, Chip reports, but a groove.

  For the second time in this book, Peter says Chekhov says What the aristocrats take for granted, we pay for with our youth. We ex-peasants, Chekhov means. What I like about your little brother is that he doesn’t take his privileges for granted: All the great things wow him. I’ll bet they did you, too.

  Did and do. But K. S. Sherritt’s delight in Life’s Finer Things is like the pleasure of touring the family estate, whereas P. Sagamore’s is the thrill of exploring country newly discovered, or newly won. Apropos of his question—Where does a person come from?—K is reminded by her chat with Chip that the newly fledged author Tonio Kröger, in Mann’s story, returns incognito to his hometown, finds that the house he grew up in has been turned into a public library, locates one of his own books on the shelves in what used to be his bedroom, is questioned politely by the local police for suspicious behavior, and has no other validation of his identity (in those innocent pre-passport days) than some proof-sheets of his fiction. In more than the usual sense, in short, he has become an author. Our woman is being teleological: Her point is that a person may come from where he’s going as well as go back to where he came from. As the sapling may be said to be the product as much of the oak tree it’s programmed to become as of the acorn it used to be, bemused Kroger at that moment in his and Mann’s story is the particular writer he is at least partly because of the wiser, mellower, greater writer that his life’s experiences—including this revisit to his origins—destine him to become. Okay?

  Marvels Peter My my my. Okay indeed.

  His wife’s not done (We’re sailing, sailing, west now across the Bay from Poplar Island toward Rhode River, on the Maryland mainland, an attractive anchorage with nearby marinas to reprovision us. Our choice of this destination has been influenced, if not determined, by three factors: We don’t want to go back yet to anywhere we’ve been already on this voyage; we hope to stay above sea-nettle territory so that we can swim; and we’ve done enough lazy downwind sailing for today and would rather beam-reach briskly now across the south-southwesterly. These add up to a course anywhere from west to northwest. Subtracting from the anchorages in that quarter—that eighth, really—those we deem insecure, aesthetically unappealing, inconvenient to supplies and obstetrical assistance if needed, or beyond the estimated radius of our remaining sailing time gives us Rhode River: specifically, the snug attractive lee of an uninhabited tiny island over there called Big Island because nearby there’s one even tinier): It has occurred to her to imagine her husband in Tonio Kröger’s position, changes changed. Moderately acclaimed spinner of ever-dwindling yarns and for better or worse the least political of storytellers, he sails back incognito to Hoopers Island, Hoopersville, Shoal Point, Sagamore Flats; he penetrates to the very bedroom where as a lad he read Huckleberry Finn and dreamed of drifting out on the tide and then back to his starting place—and he is detained for interrogation by the house’s new owners.

  Glum Peter thinks he sees her point: What proof-sheets could he show these days? Not even that “B♭.” He would have only Katherine, Katherine, he declares to her: more than ever his best proof to himself of his existence and identity. We wish we had Ted and Dee’s autopilot so that we could simultaneously make love and headway.

  And one other thing, his stirred friend reminds him: Story’s new log, with its list of these tales we’re telling. Did you add Huck Finn on the Honga, Part Two?

  Peter did, and another after that, and though he can’t know it just now, there’ll be two more before Day 3 is done: that much-foreshadowed one about the culmination of Kath’s troubled marriage to Porter “Poonie” Baldwin, Jr., and a less foreshadowed one calle
d something like

  THINGS WE NOT ONLY NEVER SAW BEFORE

  IN OUR PEACEFUL CHESAPEAKE,

  BUT HOPE NEVER TO SEE AGAIN EVER ANYWHERE.

  This second gets told first, or would so get if not that between ourselves it wants no retelling, only a reminding of: a grim sort of “39.” What’s more, we’re reluctant to apprise little Stars and Stripes so early of this aspect of the world they’re about to enter. What’s more yet, this one is a mixture not of fiction and truth, but of facts and lies. Finally, the thing has no more ending than Penelope’s web, at least not yet that we know of, and on our boat an open-ended story is no story at all. But after Kate’s conjuring of the CIA “safe house” that Pete’s birthplace has become—her imagining his being interrogated by counterintelligence people in the very room in which he began his own interrogation of life and language and the world—it is enough now, as we sail innocently across the afternoon, for Peter to sigh to her The old DDF too, I suppose?

  Kath nods: I know what you mean. Her tone is as sober as what those initials put us in mind of. Then she adds, surprisingly and cheerily, But the reader doesn’t—as if it’s understood between us that her favorite writer’s next is going to be no narrative vanishing point, but something beyond that vanishing point: a regular story, a by-Godly book, maybe even a sizable one, of a sort very different from what he’s been down to lately. He finds himself declaring with an edgy grin that he wishes we were home in Baltimore right now with our new babies, Rock and Hard Place, so that between diapers and feedings he could get to his writing table. Kath’s eyes shine, but she firmly says Nope: We’re going to stay on the narrative pill and sail and tell stories stories stories till you’re ready to pop.