by John Barth
At half past six, though thunder could still be heard from the black mass to eastward, the wind and waves quieted; the sky brightened over Pooles Island; Rocinante settled down. After calling his name from the cabin many times without response, battered Marian gathered courage enough to climb partway up into the cockpit and look for her companion. The stuck sail was down, she saw, though not furled; it spilled wetly from the boom over one side of the cabin top and deck, billowing now and then in the breeze. She saw a long rope (the unfouled halyard) blowing loose from the masthead. No sign of Captain Donald Quicksoat or, for that matter, his ad-lib bosun’s sling. On the whole expanse of the Bay, only one other boat was in sight, too far away to see or hear her: a queer-looking, black-hulled, white-topped thing, sailboat she guessed, but moving as fast through the showery, rainbowed distance as a racing speedboat, and soon gone. Though Marian was neither calm nor knowledgeable enough to notice the fact, Rocinante’s dinghy was missing, too. Its yellow polypropylene tether trailed off astern, either chafed or cut through (poly line unravels in either case). The dinghy will turn up tomorrow, blown ashore near Fairlee Creek, clear across the Bay. Its owner will not.
Mim Silver knows little about sailboats except that in warm weather they’re neat for nude sunbathing. In a near panic, she retreated below, turned on what she took to be the ship’s radio, and went right around its dial, shouting tearfully into the little microphone for help. She heard only static and, on one channel, weather reports. Had she known to push down the Transmit button under her thumb as she hollered, someone might have heard her and asked the boat’s name and situation; she could not in any case have said where she was.
Before long, she went hysterical: The crotch of her underpants still moist with Donald Quicksoat’s lunchtime semen, she was alone on an anchored sailboat near an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere. Helpless, sore, too frightened to eat or drink, and eventually spent by her paroxysms, she shuddered and whimpered all through last night in the very settee berth from which, only the night before, while leaking the same señor’s infusion, her mother had reached out in the darkness to May Jump.
She’s still there tonight, is Mims, still occasionally praying her already-fulfilled prayer; and there we’ll leave her, in no danger but frightened almost catatonic. When May and C.B S. reached a Kent Island telephone this morning and heard no answer from Fells Point, and then found no one at Carta’s Cavern this afternoon, they notified the Coast Guard, though for all they know, the pair simply crossed wakes with some of Capn Don’s cronies, changed course and plans, and are larking up the ICW toward New England waters. Tomorrow morning she’ll be found. Her mother and May and her sister and brother-in-law and others will once more pick up the pieces; Allah himself could not restore them.
On with the story, then, Shahryar agrees, but happily nods off before he can exasperate our narrator by asking So where is that Captain Whatsisname?
THAT’S IT?
Just about. Not quite. Once over the first great shock of Willy’s death, Henry and Irma Sherritt will thrive upon grandparenthood. Given Katherine and Peter’s involvement with their professions (rather less on K’s part these days, for she takes to mothering like duck to water; lots more on P’s, whose muse’s gates have swung wide open), they’ll have ample opportunity so to thrive. They tell their wide-eyed little heirs the tale of Shorter Point Restored, and other tidewater stories. Peter’s brother, Jacob Sagamore, retires early to Fort Myers, Florida, and never revisits Hoopers Island for the rest of his life except once, briefly, for his mother’s funeral. Their sister, Sue-Ann Sagamore Hooper, grows ever more estranged from them, not without reason, as her menopause exacerbates the nagging responsibility of their senile mother’s care, or vice versa. Nora Sagamore, healthy, cheerful, and oblivious, lives to age ninety-two, much depleting though not quite exhausting the financial resources of her children, none of whom will likely live so long, and whom she is unable even to recognize for the final seven of those ninety-two years. Not poor Nora’s fault, to be sure, but boyoboy.
Moving right along, we see no need to reprise Jean Heartstone, whose Magic Language Theory has all but done its job. Ditto Marcie Blitzstein, Yussuf al-Din, Saul Fish, Jaime Aiquina, Ex-Interior Secretary and Mrs. John Trippe, Black Olive Treadway, Florence Halsey, Shirley Ovenshine, Shirl the barmaid of the Madison Bay restaurant off the Little Choptank, the Alice Roosevelt Longworth lady, Buck Travers the intercom installer, Charlene (Charlie) Smart, Judge and Mrs. Somebody Barnes of Chester-town, Frank Talbott’s father Judge George and his housekeepers Lew and Cecilia Skinner, Howard the Knapps Narrows bridge-tender, Debbie the moon-faced waitress from St. Johns College in the Treaty of Paris Restaurant in Annapolis on lay day, or Vug, Crump, Fougasse, Dingle, Coomb, Cubby, and Coign. Stavros Petrakis, who drove our Checker taxicab from the 92nd Street Poetry Center down to the Gramercy Park Hotel on the night of 29 June 1964, returned ten years later to his hometown (Heraklion, Crete), where he presently operates a tour-bus service with his brother and two first cousins and suffers from a bladder complaint. Let’s see: Dr. and Mrs. Jack Bass’s Ericson 39 sloop, Off Call, places second overall in this summer’s Tred Avon Yacht Club around-the-buoys series, thanks in part to a new suit of Mylar racing sails and in part to the skipper’s new high-tech tactician, A. C. Sherritt. Ronald Reagan is reelected to the U.S. presidency in 1984. The world as such does not end before the century, though sundry subworlds do.
Shahryar snoozes. Our tutelary genius, Scheherazade, in her highest-resolution omniscopic mode, serenely orbits the PTOR of these tidewater tales and finds them now all but free of smoldering chestnuts.
All but?
Right. Seems to our projected narrator that this wrap-up inventory, like the one Whatsername delivered to Ma Nontroppo back in Our Story, omits the main thing. What she means is:
ON WITH THE POEM!
Oh, that,
tuts Katherine Sherritt with mild surprise—
Kith at her starboard nipple, Kin at her port,
Doubly draining, twice-delighting her;
Burning our coupled candle at both ends:
At once Exhaustion and Replenishment.
(Drink up, bids Kath: There’s more where that came from.)
It’s true she spoke in verse in our prologue,
Improbable as such a thing may seem.
And she left that doggerel green-belt poem undone
Like Penelope’s web; like Scheherazade’s last yarn;
Like The Tidewater Tales: A Novel, finished now
But for some wrap-up word, some curtain line. . . .
Or did she? Comrade reader, look again
Through the keyless hole or holeless key of Form.
We thought we lacked a closing rhyme for cost
To end our poem with: one less bleak than lost,
Remember? But we were in formal fact
Not at the end at all.
Au contraire.
We’d launched a new stanzaic pair: a Jack
Implying and preceding some new Jill,
As in Ma Goose (though in our Genesis,
As C.B S. predicted, it was Eve
Who foreran Adam). Weren’t we a brace
Of wiser birds than we supposed? A whole
New ball game! Maybe a whole new tale in verse . . .
or prose: Our House’s Increase, by P.S. out of Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, its Once Upon a Time the Ever After of:
THE
TIDEWATER
TALES
A NOVEL
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