The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Repeats Pete Pop. We thrill; we sail to westward. Pop.

  Well: Readers who haven’t done time with us don’t know what “DDF” has come to signify in our house; why it is that every time the Central Intelligence Agency floats through this narrative, we twinge separate but equal twinges. Unpolitical? Boyoboy, are we unpolitical: just your average, sappy, middle-class, high-minded liberals, Katherine and Peter, Pete especially: mildly patriotic but nowise chauvinistic, opposed to imperialist aggression all around. Get out of Southeast Asia; Hands Off South and Central America (Kate’s fierce on this one). Equal opportunity, justice for all, save the environment, no nuclear first strikes, no nuclear second or third strikes either, beware the military-industrial complex, make our government obey the law like the rest of us—that sort of thing. Otherwise, political skeptics, if not quite agnostics. Why, Peter Sagamore doesn’t even hate the National Security Agency, at least not in principle (Katherine Sherritt does); he doesn’t even despise the CIA (Katherine Sherritt does), not in principle, how about that, though he believes both agencies to be somewhat crazy, ill-regulated, and therefore—because rich and powerful and sophisticated—dangerous. In principle, Peter Sagamore agrees (Kath doesn’t) that because the U.S. government is not the only organization on earth somewhat crazy, ill-regulated, et cetera and dangerous, it is well for our leaders to have good information on our other-than-harmless adversaries, even in peacetime, when there’s any real consensus on who those adversaries are. He’s even willing to grant (not Kathy) that despite the overkill, ill regulation, self-serving, et cetera, our “intelligence community” actually provides our leaders from time to time with a certain amount of useful information and thus some justification for its expensive and otherwise unsavory existence. Sic Pete (not Kath).

  What we’re against, sentimental stock liberals that we are, is our government’s collusion in—not to say its systematic, well-funded direction of—assassination, torture, clandestine warfare, the clandestine undermining of other people’s elected governments, the clandestine harassment of and illegal general snooping upon our own citizens—things like that, you know, by anybody from our intelligence community down to our local cops. As also of course by other people’s intelligence communities and cops, but they’re outside our jurisdiction.

  We also object, the sentimental pair of us, to the contamination of our beloved Chesapeake by e.g. industrial discharges and toxic wastes; by agricultural run-offs of fertilizer, pesticides, and silt; by acid rain, oil spills, and the decomposing bodies of CIA spooks who have met their end in circumstances so ambiguous that the only unworrisome explanation is the sad and mildly implausible one of suicide by reason of domestic personal unhappiness, whereas the most worrisome ones are about as worrisome as worrisome gets. We happen to have met, once, one of these last contaminants. The whole story would overflow this book like Goldsborough Creek its banks on a major spring tide and still not be finished, because people and institutions sit yet upon secret parts of it, and other parts were doubtless known but to the victim. Here’s a short version of the long chapter involving us:

  Whatever else we are, Katherine Sherritt and Peter Sagamore are principally the principal characters in a work of fiction entitled The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. But the Chesapeake Bay is real; so are all the federal government operations on and around it, such as that partial list in our prologue chapter-head beginning “Well, We Do, Despite” et cetera; so are all the active and retired military and civilian government employees, thousands upon thousands, who use these ever more contaminated waters for their recreation, as do we; so was the corpse our Story ran into several cruises back, on Sunday, 1 October 1978.

  We were thirty-seven then, nine months married, three and a half pregnant for the first time in our coupled life. Andrew Sherritt, who was with us too, was then ten. Early fall’s a golden season on our Bay: The maples and sumac dazzle the river shores, the geese honk in from Canada, the water’s still warm (that’s important to this story), and there’s more breeze to sail by than there is in summer, though the air temp can be anything from tops-off to oiled-wool sweaters. We’d got a late start on a weekend cruise that we might even carry into Monday if the weather held: Back-to-school time had as usual preempted September’s weekends. All three of us were up for sailing, and Chip had an enthusiastic plan that Katherine agreed was interesting enough and Peter had consented, with misgivings, to pursue, as he was pursuing some other things in those days.

  On the previous Monday morning, September 25, a thirty-four-foot Columbia sloop named Brillig and registered in Wilmington, North Carolina, had been found aground between Point Lookout and Point Look-in, just above the mouth of the Potomac on the western shore of the Bay. Mainsail and #1 genoa were set and trimmed. When a search-and-rescue vessel from the Coast Guard station at St. Inigoes Creek on the St. Marys River, off the Potomac, came around Point Lookout to investigate, the crew found no one aboard. The Coast Guardsmen pulled the sloop off and towed it back to the St. Inigoes station, where it was found to belong to one John Arthur Paisley, fifty-five, of Bethesda, Maryland.

  In the week that followed we learned from our morning newspaper, in addition to the above, that the missing Mr. Paisley was estranged from his wife of some twenty-five years, who lived with their two grown children across the Potomac in McLean, Virginia. That he was a former CIA officer who after thirty years with the Agency had upon his retirement in 1974 been deputy director of the Office of Strategic Research. That upon his retirement, which coincided approximately with his marital estrangement, he had been employed by the Washington office of a large accounting firm, Coopers & Lybrand, and maintained no connection with the Agency. That he had set out alone from Brillig’s mooring (above Solomons Island on the Patuxent, next river up from the Potomac) on the nearly airless mid-morning of Sunday, September 24; had chatted by radio with the owner of the mooring, a retired Air Force colonel named Norman Wilson (who subsequently returned Brillig to its mooring after officers of the Maryland State Police had routinely examined it at St. Inigoes), and with another friend sailing nearby: one Michael Yohn, of the Agency for International Development. That at about two in the afternoon this Mr. Yohn had radioed over to Brillig, still in sight, that for lack of a decent breeze he was packing it in to watch the afternoon football game on television: He thus became the last person known to have seen John Arthur Paisley alive. That Colonel Wilson, however, had had yet another radio chat with his friend later that afternoon—Some radio freaks, these guys, we remarked to each other—in the course of which Paisley reported that he was anchored off Hoopers Island Light, fifteen nautical miles across the Bay. He would be returning late that evening, he declared; Wilson wasn’t to wait up. Next morning the sloop was found as aforedescribed, about twelve miles southwest of Hoopers Island Light and twice that far from Colonel Wilson’s Patuxent River moorings.

  Singlehanders, Katherine Sherritt observed over breakfast on the Tuesday, should always wear a safety harness on deck, even in a calm.

  Said Peter Mm. After Kath left for work, he made a telephone call.

  Nopoint Point on Goldsborough Creek is locally so called because there’s no real point where the land humps into Sherritt Cove, just a shoal marked by a day beacon. You won’t find the name on your chart of the Choptank and Tred Avon Rivers. You will, however, find a Point Nopoint on the western shore of the Bay, named for the same reason: It is the merest kink in the shoreline, not far above where Brillig went aground. Indeed, an old mnemonic rhyme for mariners sailing north from the Potomac was

  Point Lookout and Point Look-in;

  Point Nopoint and point again—

  the last being Cedar Point at the mouth of the Patuxent. Chip Sherritt’s float plan for our first fall cruise of the 1978 season was to sail from Nopoint Point to Point Nopoint, a round trip of maybe eighty nautical miles plus upwind tacks and detours to overnight anchorages.

  Okay, said Kath by telephone from her library office, I’ll be
your straight man: What’s the point of spending a whole weekend sailing from Nopoint Point to Point Nopoint and back to Nopoint Point? And Chip, who all that summer had been riding high on Lewis Carroll, replied You’ve got it. Plus we can look for that Brillig fellow.

  Said his sister Don’t be morbid. Til talk to Peter.

  The man whom Peter tried to telephone on that Tuesday—and again on the Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday—was an elder friend of ours who, like the still-missing skipper of the sloop Brillig, lived in Bethesda and was not at home. P did not mention these uncompleted phone calls to his wife. It is the name of the game, K acknowledged, reporting Chip’s proposal: Destinations are just excuses for sailing. Yes, well, allowed Peter, we haven’t been down that way for a while. We might even slip over to Hoopersville and say hello.

  We decided we’d see what was what, windwise, when the time came. So after work that Friday we hauled across the Bay Bridge and down Route 50 with a hundred thousand fellow Baltimoreans and Washingtonians headed for the ocean beaches. We checked in for the night at Nopoint Point, and on September’s last morning made Hank and Irma wonder once again why the three of us would rather crowd into engineless little Story than luxuriate aboard Katydid IV—especially with Katydid Five (Chip’s name for our then-baby-in-the-works) in the works. The forecast was fair, the breeze westerly and usable; once we’d beaten out of the Choptank in two or three extended tacks, it made the best recreational sense to spend the afternoon on a long beam-reach down and across the Bay to the Patuxent.

  The least spoiled anchorages on that river are up past Solomons Island, in St. Leonards Creek. According to the Baltimore Sun, Colonel Wilson’s mooring was “near Solomons Island”; according to the Wilmington, Delaware, News-Journal, to which the Sherritts subscribed, it was at Lusby, a little settlement on a cove off St. Leonards Creek. En route downBay, Chip Sherritt teased his sister by pretending to look for the missing Mr. Paisley; when she told him to for pity’s sake knock it off before he gave K Five a conniption, he pretended not to keep an eye out for drowned bodies. But Lewis Carroll was often in his talk, and once he asked, apropos of nothing, why anybody except maybe a fisherman would drop anchor off Hoopers Island Light, exposed from all sides in the open Bay, as Brillig’s skipper had reportedly done. Now he voted we park for the night up by this Lusby place, which he had located on our chart of Patuxent River. Sort of check it out?

  A singlehanded sailor, Peter Sagamore declared, in any waters less open than mid-ocean, does well to drop anchor if he needs to go below for more than two minutes. There’s not enough sea-room out here for heaving to or sailing with nobody on watch.

  I’ll bet Paisley was a spy for the Borogoves, the boy said surprisingly, and the Slithy Toves got him.

  Upset Katherine said That’s enough of that, Chipperino. The military roar and clatter around Patuxent Naval Air Station made the two of us edgy, as always. She reminded her brother that the glamorization of espionage and counterespionage is not approved of on our boat. Like police work, she declared, national intelligence-servicing is ninety percent routine monitoring, cataloguing, and analysis, of a plodding, painstaking character; the other ten percent is more sordid than not. We deplore the mystique, the aura of names like Central Intelligence Agency, and we would have our young crew member learn to do likewise. The missing skipper of the sloop Brillig was one of hundreds—nay, thousands—of early-retired intelligence-service employees in the Washington area who take another job for a few years to augment their already comfortable pensions, amortize home mortgages and sailboat loans, make alimony payments, and build up their investment income for genuine retirement. He had no continuing connection with the CIA, we have been told by the CIA, where anyhow his job seems to have been of an administrative character. He was apparently between lives; he went sailing by himself, evidently not an unusual event; he parked for a while in the calm air off Hoopers Island Light at the afternoon’s end, doubtless to make and eat his dinner; he radioed his friend not to worry; presently he weighed anchor and made sail for a lazy evening ride home, as we have many times done ourselves. Then he inadvisedly left the wheel and went forward sans safety harness or flotation vest to check or adjust something or have a look around behind the big genoa—Peter Sagamore confesses to having inadvisedly done the same himself more than once, while sailing alone—and against all odds he tripped or slipped and fell not only down but under the lifelines and overboard. Perhaps he struck his head along the way and drowned without ever knowing he was in the water; more likely he was less lucky and saw his boat glide away from him just a bit faster than he could swim. Unless Brillig had a permanently mounted boarding ladder on her transom, he might even have overtaken the boat—if it rounded up and luffed before bearing away again, as Story would do in that circumstance, in a series of retreating arcs like a deer checking its trail—and found to his dismay that there was nothing whatever on the hull for him to hold onto, and so good night. For that very reason, as Chip Sherritt doubtless had read, many singlehanders trail a light bouyed line astern, or at least tow a dinghy on a long painter when weather permits: one last chance. Accidental drowning is terrible in any circumstances, horrible in some. Let us not add to and cheapen its horror by melodramatic invocation of the magic letters C-I-A. Okay?

  Said subdued Andrew Sherritt Okay. We anchored, as it happened, in the mouth of the fifth cove to starboard up St. Leonards Creek, the one that goes in toward the village of Lusby, because that’s where we happened to be when anchoring time came; not to park there would have been a kind of negative attention to what we now wished to deemphasize. It is an ordinary, unremarkable little Chesapeake cove. By sundown, Pete had a headache: the red wine, we supposed, from dinner, on top of the afternoon’s sea glare.

  Next morning the westerly resumed: just right for reaching on down to Point Nopoint and then either running over to Hooper Strait and up the Honga to touch base with surviving Sagamores or, more likely, reaching back toward Nopoint Point and home. Our night’s dreams had not been the best, but Chip Sherritt’s mind, at least, seemed clear as the weather. He stood the first trick at the helm and amused himself, as was already at ten his wont, by doing time/speed/distance calculations in his head for every leg of our course, with corrections buoy by buoy and landmark by landmark, as if we were skirting a reef-girt coast instead of poking out of placid St. Leonards Creek. Now and then we grazed bottom with our centerboard because the helmsman was busier plotting our course than steering it, but no matter: Like his dad, Andy will grow up to be a first-class yacht navigator, among his other accomplishments. We were pleased to leave the sailing mainly to him; to stretch out on our “porch,” as we call Story’s little foredeck, and enjoy being healthy, pregnant, thirty-seven-year-old Americans on a blue October Sunday morning, the sun warming us already through our jeans and sweaters as we ran wing and wing under the Solomons Island bridge and out of the Patuxent into the Bay.

  Was there more helicopter and jet-trainer action than usual for a Sunday at PAX, the air station? Who knew? After so many years of Vietnam footage, the sight of even two military choppers in formation is enough to give us doves the heeb-jeebs. As we cleared Cedar Point and turned down the Bay, we could just make out lowlying Hoopers Island across the water, six miles eastward. Despite himself, Peter Sagamore began reflecting upon that Shoal Point story of his, which had wound up being called “Part of a Shorter Work” and had turned his literary career around a questionable corner. Because he happened to know that for many years the Central Intelligence Agency had operated a safe house on Solomons Island and another on Ferry Neck in the mouth of the Choptank, as well as their new one over there in Sagamore Flats, he was moved to the further reflection that our projected weekend cruise described a sort of Safe House Triangle: a reflection that made him feel no safer. Indeed, a CIA sailor (Peter knew of at least two such; no doubt there were hundreds) who sailed from Solomons to Hoopers Island might simply be going from office to office.

 
To himself he swore God damn it, the germ is contagious. Had he infected Chip, or Chip him? He was about to advise his kid-brother-in-law to ease the genoa a bit (its leeward telltale was stalling) when Katherine, sitting up to ward off a touch of morning sickness instead of lying down beside him, squeezed his right hand with her left and started out calmly to declare I see the biggest dead fish over yonder that I ever did see in thirty-seven tidewater years, but ended up saying Oh Jesus Peter look!

  She was pointing off to starboard, shoreward, almost abeam. As Pete sat up, Chip saw the humpy white thing too and rounded Story up for a closer look. A beamy shoal-draft hull like ours does not shoot far into the wind, but the dead man was no more than three boatslengths off; Chip at the helm was so overwhelmed to realize what it was, instead of the former carp or drumfish he’d supposed it to be, that he simply let go the tiller and sheets. The sails luffed; we lost way quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid a soft collision. The corpse slid partway along our starboard waterline, then forward and away as Story stalled and gathered sternway. P got only a glimpse from his position, of a fat naked face-down dead white human body; he scrambled aft through flopping sheets and sails to take the helm. Andrew Sherritt saw further that his first dead person was a man neither young nor freshly deceased: Fish, crabs, warm water, and time had been at him. The boy went white-faced, dizzy; his gorge rose; he swallowed sourly and broke into a sweat. K’s view was best of all, so to speak: The face-down rotting heavy bald white man was naked from the waist up, but wore blue jeans and, above the exposed elastic band of his jockey shorts, some kind of bulky belting that quietly bumped our bow and shuffled along our bootstripe before we drifted back. Her gorge, primed already by the morning sickness, rose past the swallowing point; she flattened herself belly-down under the swishing headsail and threw up blindly overside.