The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Cheers Katherine Yay!

  —and further that Kath’s parents and obstetrician and todo el mundo were casting off for the weekend, she told Mister Captain Donaldo about her vision of K’s going into labor up at Ordinary Point on Saturday or Sunday or Monday, most likely Sunday (a vision that involved, by the way, a lot more than just a brace of human babies, but never mind that). . . .

  Now this is one pregnant coincidence, D.Q. tells us he told Carla B Silver when she told him all that, yesterday: Ordinary Point is where my amigos are rafting up this weekend, before they hit the C and D. He winks at Katherine: And I don’t mean D and C.

  Says Carla B Silver Oy gevalt. Says unfazed Quicksoat So I propositioned my boss to take the weekend off and let’s poke on up and watch the show, and here we are, almost.

  Kath says Olé, but is pleased to hear our not entirely Gypsy friend say Almost says it, too. I looked him up and down the way I’m doing right now and double-entried him a bit: how he’d sure as hell bailed me out by taking Lascar’s place downstairs, but before he came upstairs we’d have to have it out about this cutesy-creepy Dee Kew business, you know? I told him I’d sleep on it.

  Grins Capn Don And I told her—

  Never mind, says Carla, smiling at Chip, who sighs I guess I’ll go write a play called SEX EDUCATION, but doesn’t.

  So I talked to Mims, Carla says, on the telephone, and found out that she and May Jump and Simple Simon are meeting Lee and Frank at Kent Narrows today at lunchtime for a weekend on their boat, so I said to my colleague here Okay, you’re on—but tomorrow morning, not tonight. So we had a nice whatyoucallum over here from Middle River—beam-reach?—and I didn’t get seasick after all. She shows us her copper-braceleted forearms. Shall I lift my curse on General Pinochet and Anaconda Copper?

  Says Kathy Nope, and Capn Don declares that what he thinks is, C.D.Q. and C.B S. have both singlehanded long enough. He wishes she’d declare a whole season’s holiday and cruise with him clear on up to the Maritimes.

  Not likely, says Carla B Silver. I’m a working girl. Anyhow, one step at a time, no? If people are going to live in sin, they have to be able to sin to each other’s satisfaction.

  Says Donald Quicksoat Sailors do it at an angle. Sailors do it with buoys and gulls. I’ll tell you the story of Singood the Sailor, that was told to me by Scheherazade herself.

  Wonders Peter aloud, who can’t quite get a handle on this odd duck: Scheherazade?

  In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, nods Capn Don, last Columbus Day weekend, at the ASPS wingding down there. He lifts his beer glass in salute to surprised Katherine. The one you weren’t at, so I’ve been told.

  Says Carla B Silver You tell that one, and I’ll tell another that that very same A-rab told our friend down in Annapolis. It’s called What in the World Am I Doing Here? and sometimes I wonder.

  Captain Donald tips his cap. You show me yours, and then et cetera.

  The crew of Story have followed this ping-pong conversation. Sorely wishing she hadn’t missed that Eleventh Annual ASPS Convention (but we had our reasons), Katherine holds Peter’s right hand in her left, Andrew’s left in her right, as if to steady her reception and assimilation. Her younger brother must be baffled, though he seems entertained enough; her husband watches for yet another orange Alert-and-Locate canister to fall from the sky or pop up from under, with Frank Talbott’s third act inside. Giving those hands a sudden squeeze, K says

  I’LL GO FIRST.

  Brow furrowed, eyes flashing, D.Q. nods. C.B S. smiles. Peter Sagamore wonders, proudly. Chip just wonders. Hers wakes His to hear Mom’s tale. To the skipper of Rocinante IV, Kate says I happened to have spent this whole a.m. reading Peter’s notes for Parts One and Two of a possible three-part Don Key-ho-tay story that he started when we first saw you in Annapolis last week. It takes you from the Cave of Montesinos in La Mancha in maybe Sixteen Hundred to Sagres, Portugal, in maybe Nineteen Sixty-three—where I gather you were?

  Right next door, young lady, says Capn Don. I crossed solo from Lagos to the Virginia Capes in this boat right here, seventeen summers ago. First time for me, third time for old Rosy. I bought this boat off a Cornishman in Albufeira who’d already singlehanded her across the Atlantic twice before he took sick and ran out of money. She needed refastening and repainting and a new set of sails and an engine overhaul, but what caught my eye was he’d already named her Rocinante and painted fisherman’s eyes on her bows. All I had to do, once I’d fixed her up, was add the numeral and change the hailport. Let’s hear that story.

  K consults its potential author, who says Go ahead; it isn’t written yet. And so she does, Katherine Shorter Sherritt Sagamore, fearlessly improvising upon her memory of Peter’s notes in Story’s log: tells us all the tale of the knight’s descent into that fateful cave; his vain search for a way back out, then in turn for Dulcinea, for Sancho Panza, and for the Moor his chronicler; his step-by-step transformation, abetted by the duke and duchess of “Barataria,” from landsman to seaman, and from enchantment by chivalric fantasy to enchantment by fantastic reality; his roundabout voyage from Montesinos’s palace to Sancho’s island to the outermost tip of Europe, and from the opening of the seventeenth century to the closing of the twentieth. It is by far Kath’s most extended venture in the way of oral narrative; when its hero finally bids farewell to his young American friend on the Sagres headland, she sits back winded and perspiring.

  Bravo! her audience applauds—all but Captain Donald Quicksoat, who nods his head, fingers his whiskers, but says nothing. Chip is wowed; likewise his unborn kin. Carla B Silver declares that just as Scheherazade’s stories saved their teller’s skin, Katherine’s story has saved at least one listener’s lunch; she was too entranced to remember to get seasick. Peter declares we’ll record that story postnatally in our Tidewater Tales just as Kath has told it, or as closely thereto as can be managed. He is even moved to wish aloud that May Jump were with us, to share his pride in her narrative protégée. Our woman’s pregnant heart glows.

  In a way, declares C.B S., May Jump is with us. I’ll let her know you’ve reached brown-belthood, Missus Sagamore.

  P’s prepared to second that promotion; also to ask in what way, other than the obvious and attenuated, Kath’s former coach may be said to be with us. But his wife says to him Unfortunately our story didn’t please its main character. I guess we got it all wrong.

  ¡NO NO NO!

  insists the grizzled skipper of Rocinante IV, reaching across the cockpit to reassure Katherine Sherritt’s left knee. You’ve more than pleased me—a whole sight more. Like Mister Cervantes before her, he declares (Englishing the name: Sir Van-Tease), Katherine has definitively told his story. More accurately, he supposes, Peter in the role of Miguel Cervantes and Katherine in the role of his narrator, Hamete Benengeli, have together told, about that particular part of Don Quixote’s career, so much more authoritative a story than the one he himself is in the habit of retailing, that just as the novel Don Quixote has become the story of his life up to the Montesinos episode, and just as the rest of Part Two of that novel came to seem to our Don Quixote rather more believable and even truer than his actual adventures aboard Rocinantes II and III, so our story of those adventures now strikes him as more believable and true than what he would have told us, if asked, about his life up to Sagres in 1963. Do we follow him?

  We do.

  Therefore, with our permission, he proposes to let that part of his story stand exactly as we’ve imagined it. By God, he further exclaims, from now on that is the story of those chapters of his life! All that remains is for him to brief us on

  PART OF PART THREE OF THAT POSSIBLE THREE-PART

  DON QUIXOTE STORY

  —that is, how he came from Iberia to Still Pond Creek on Chesapeake Bay in the Free State of Maryland. It is a story briefly and simply told, but, he warns us in advance, sans denouement, unless our combined powers of enchantment wind it up for him here and now.
r />   Says grinning Chip, not quite to himself, Here and Now, and is burbled at by his nepotes in the works.

  Donald Quicksoat’s final enchantment, Capn Don declares, directing his story mainly though not exclusively to Carla B Silver, was neither with chivalric romance nor with unchivalrous reality, but with the enchanted story of Don Quixote as written by the grand enchanter Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Just as poor Alonso Quijano, in middle age, was so bewitched by the novels of chivalry that he declared himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, the Knight of Doleful Aspect, so the skipper of Rocinante Cuatro, in his own middlescence, was led by his passion for Cervantes’s novel to identify himself with both its hero and, eventually, its author. Enough said, no?

  Sí.

  How I came by this boat, I’ve told you already. It came by me, I guess.

  So did ours us, puts in Peter, relieved as ever to have it known that Story’s name is not directly our doing. Captain Donald winks his port eye our way and asks Carla What was I doing stranded and alone in Sagres, Portugal, at Alonso Quijano’s age? These two have really explained that to me for the first time: I was looking for some way out of a cave I’d got myself lost in chapters before. When I saw this boat up for sale in Lagos and read the name on her transom, I decided like Dante in the Dark Wood that the long way around might be the only way out. In the course of getting to where I was, I’d logged many a mile with one mate or another; now I figured I’d singlehand it to the end of the story, like Cervantes himself.

  Says Carla B Silver I’m with you, and adds quickly You know what I mean.

  You know what you mean, beams C.D.Q. Now, if our friends here were telling this part, they’d have me set out in search of Cervantes himself this time, to square my biggest debt of all. ¿No? Maybe look for him in Jean Lafitte’s Barataria, down by New Orleans?

  Peter Sagamore shrugs his hand to allow that possibility.

  But even in Sagres, says Capn Don, I reckoned that Cervantes owed me as much as I owed him. Anyhow, we characters sometimes get loose of our authors.

  C. B Silver meaningly clears her throat. Pardon the professor-talk, says our host. Let me just say that before we were three days out to sea, me and Rosy here, barreling westward straight across the thirty-seventh parallel, I understood that I was my own goshdarn Cervantes. The passenger who is also the skipper, he says directly to Peter Sagamore—who nods and at once replies, also in italics: The skipper who is also the passenger.

  You’ve got it, says Capn Don.

  Murmurs Chip Gosh darn.

  Now, then: Self-steering rigs have come a long way since Nineteen Sixty-three, but I’d learned a trick or two about steering myself: I gave Rocinante her head—as long as she went more or less where I wanted her to, which was true west.

  To Carla B Silver he declares I’ve heard this and that said about me, and some of it’s true, and most of it’s not. I’m well enough off. The initial investment, you might say, was Mister Cervantes’s, and the interest is paid by readers of Don Quixote—but that’s more professor-talk. I’ve been sketching up a Rocinante Five, to maybe sail back to wherever I decide I came from. How ‘bout up the Guadalquivir to Seville’s cathedral, where Cris Colón dropped his final hook? If you asked me what I’m looking for these days, I’d say Nada whatsoever, thank you—except maybe, out of the side of my eye (he winks), a certain hundred-fathom line, hey? Let down by Sancho P into the Cave of Montesinos, where you tell me I still am. When I find that line, compadres, I’ll give ‘er a tug and be hauled up in a bosun’s chair back into Part Two of Don Quixote. They’ll tell me I’ve been away ‘bout half an hour, and we’ll go on with Sir Van Tease’s story. I know for a fact I won’t try to tell them what I saw and did in the here and now, ‘cause if I did, it would say so in the book. Which it don’t.

  So I ask you: Is that the end of my story? You bet it is. But we ain’t there yet, ‘cause I haven’t found that final line. Closest I ever came to it was in another cavern, just across this Bay just a few days back—but I guess it’s me that’s paying out that line, hoping this lady here will take the fall of it.

  ¿PREGUNTAS?

  Good show, says Peter Sagamore.

  Agrees Carla B Silver Not bad. Don’t mix me up with Whatsername, though: that Dulcinea. If I grab hold of this line of yours, you’ll as likely get roped into Carta’s Cavern as me get shanghaied aboard this boat. But neither of us hog-ties the other, comprende?

  Donald Quicksoat nods Fair enough.

  Kath has a question: Did he really meet a certain aspiring young American writer in Sagres, Portugal, in the winter of 1962/63? Laughs Capn Don Did I meet one? Honey, I was one—only not so young by then. And on that particular solo voyage, unlike your friend here, I sank without a trace.

  Next wonders straight-faced Peter: In your travels up and down the ICW, have you happened to cross paths with a couple that could pass for Odysseus and Nausicaa? They sail a thirty-five-foot Phaeacian with a squaresail.

  Ten point six six eight meters, murmurs Chip. His sister hugs him and says Murmur murmur.

  Know ‘em well, grins Capn Don. Likewise Huck Finn and Lemuel Gulliver . . . aaand Aeneas and Candide and Robby Crusoe and Roddy Random and the other old salts, including Sinwell the Sailor there and his old lady Scheherazade. He smacks both his knees. Hell, boy, you can set by the window this time of year up in Schaefer’s Canal House Restaurant and watch ‘em all go through the C and D! Wouldn’t s’prise me to find half the gang up back of Ornery Point this evening!

  Now he smacks Carta B’s knee and stands. Which it’s time we struck our tents and aimed our camels at, nessy pah?

  Growls wincing Carta Nessy pah? Get me out of here.

  CARLA B SILVER STANDS HER TRICK AT THE NARRATIVE HELM.

  But he must be doing something right, we guess, old Donald Quicksoat there, for when he and his pal dinghy over some three hours later to bid buenas noches to the crew of Story in Back Creek on the Sassafras, C. B Silver is so at ease with her weekend that she neglects to kvetch about sailboats and seasickness; just says to Peter Hand me up out of this dingbat, would you, and I’ll tell you guys a bedtime story.

  Punch and Judy clap each other’s hands. Says Katherine Ouch.

  Chip had asked us, as we threaded out of pretty Still Pond after lunch, Who’s Roddy Random, and Is this how Chesapeake cruising always is? No wonder we went out from Nopoint Point and didn’t come back. Poker-faced Peter assured him that that narrative lunch had been just another meal, and Katherine wondered how come Captain Donald there didn’t mention Edgar Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym along with Smollett’s Roderick Random; also Jason the Argonaut and Chessie the sea monster and Ahab and the Flying Dutchman, whom-all she certainly expects to say hi to before we hang up our Tidewater Tales.

  Peter then remarked that C.B S. had been done out of her narrative turn and that that was a pity, as she’d said something more or less cryptic about his second favorite woman and storyteller in the universal world. But even Andrew Christopher Sherritt could see that the way this cruise is cruising, Ms. Silver’s tale—and Scheherazade’s—will not likely go untold. There followed a slow run up to the last good sailing-river on the Bay and then an even slower broad reach into it, Story moving with the hot wind in apparent airlessness. Some miles up, where Ordinary Point all but crosses the Sassafras from its north shore, the breeze gave out, and P consulted sweating K as to whether we should park and have our babies.

  Not yet.

  So we kicked in the outboard, scouted the anchorage—two dozen yachts riding there already and more moving down from the Georgetown marinas to begin their weekend, but no sign of Odysseus and Nausicaa Dmitrikakis or other literary-nautical luminaries—and decided to poke on two miles farther, to Back Creek: roomy but uncrowded because very easy to run aground in. Hello to the Breadbasket of the Revolution; hello to Breadbasket Inc.’s new old granary, handsomely preserved, on the creek’s north shore. We made our way past it, Chip in the bow feeling out the s
hoals with our telescoping boathook, and anchored in five feet of water not far from shore in the pretty wooded bight to starboard. The occasional water-skier zipped by from a public landing farther upcreek, rocking us with his/her wake; couple of fishermen in aluminum skiffs worked a waterlily patch across the way. Otherwise the place was ours.

  Two-thirds of our already-born crew members shucked their clothes pronto and skinny-dipped in the creek’s sweet water; Chip joined us in his Jantzen and brown-bead necklace after radioing our position to the folks, themselves at cocktails in Fairlee Creek before going ashore to dinner. We Sagamores found ourselves embracing: Here we were, by golly, where we’d sort of set out to go, so unexpectedly many chapters since we’d set out to go there. Chip offered to swim the other way, but no, no: We embraced him, too, and despite our nudity he allowed our hug. This isn’t sex, Andrew; it’s the being here together at last—where we’d no more than half-seriously wished the wind would fetch us—full of stories and babies and the knowledge that our time is all but upon us.

  Reader: May the world not soon end, for this life is sweet, here and there, and Back Creek is beautiful. God’s curse upon the Doomsday and the Sot-Weed Factors; upon all who leach and taint and subdivide, coerce and bully and kill. But upon the peacemakers and the conservators, thy blessing and ours, amen.

  Said Chipper then On with the story: Here comes Rocinante Four.

  We doubted it, though there she stood, just off the granary, sails furled and engine all but idling: Boats that size, with ocean-crossing keels, seldom venture into these unmarked shallows. We had followed Rocinante’s following us out of Still Pond Creek and had waved good-bye to her out on the Bay, where with her larger sailplan and longer waterline she soon left us behind. Not seeing her at anchor behind Ordinary Point, we assumed she’d gone on up to Georgetown, maybe dinner ashore and a marina slip for landlubberly Carla’s sake. Turns out they drove up there, just for the scenic ride, but that Carla wants to try a night at anchor: something she never did even with Frederick Mansfield Talbott, former Prince of Darkness. Give her first class on the QE2 any time, but if she’s going to do this sailboat thing, she’ll do it right.