Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  “Pray for Edna and her blood pressure.”

  “Let’s pray for Edna,” Socks said. “Her blood pressure’s been fluctuating.”

  “Pray for Wendell,” someone else suggested. “Wendell took a fall yesterday.”

  “Yes,” Socks said. “Pray for Wendell. He took a fall to his crab house.” Hearing no further requests, he added: “Pray for each other. Pray for our country and the election coming up. Pray for Israel.” At which point Ooker, sitting in the front pew, hollered: “Pray for a heat wave!”

  That earned a laugh from the congregation but no intercession from upstairs. Henrietta Wheatley’s mourners pull up to the church in golf carts shrouded in waterproof tarps, and hurry in their coats for the shelter of Swain Memorial’s porch. Inside, the sanctuary rapidly fills, those arriving earliest securing the rearmost pews, a long-standing Tangier habit. We occupy a soothing, convivial space, its high ceiling and walls sheathed in stamped tin overpainted in ivory, its interior illuminated by several large pendant lamps and the daylight washing through stained glass. Left of the altar, above and behind a raised perch for the choir, a large, carved-wood sign implores PLEASE OBEY THE HOLY SPIRIT, a request so disarmingly polite that I was charmed on first entering the church seventeen years ago. Elsewhere hang a big, gold-framed photograph of a rainbow crossing the Tangier sky to land right on the church’s roof and a large black-and-white portrait of Charles P. Swain. Two lobes extend from the main sanctuary on its east and south sides—spaces used for smaller gatherings, such as the Sunday morning class meetings that precede regular worship, that can be sequestered from the rest of the room with heavy wooden shutters pulled from pockets in the ceiling. Today they’re open, and the side rooms fill even before the rest of the church.

  The casket is positioned before the altar and flanked by glass-shaded torchères and an array of memorial wreaths. The family files in—family in this case narrowly defined, for I’m one of the few people in the church who isn’t kin to the deceased. The bereaved fill the sanctuary’s front three pews as Nancy Creedle, Swain’s organist since 1992 and the widow of a long-serving former pastor, plays a melancholy processional that incorporates her instrument’s celestial special effects: a choir of angels, chords plucked on a harp, soft chimes.

  Richie Pruitt, married to one of Henrietta’s granddaughters, offers the eulogy. He opens with a short biography. Henrietta operated an island store for many years. She did not suffer fools well. She had two children, five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren.

  “Henrietta gave her life to Christ at the ’95 revival,” Richie tells us. “I don’t know how old she would have been in 1995. I’m sure someone will know it.”

  “Seventy,” comes from the pews.

  “Seventy,” he says. “To give your life to Christ at seventy, and to have him accept it, is pretty good.”

  Pastor Flood replaces Richie at the pulpit. “Family and friends,” he says, “what we have to understand this afternoon is that Heaven is a real place. It’s not something that someone dreamed up. It’s not a myth. And that’s where Miss Henrietta is today. She is in that perfect house today.

  “Heaven is also a place of reunion. Miss Henrietta is having the greatest reunion of all. She’s in Heaven with her loved ones. And I can only imagine the reunion that is continuing there and that will go on for eternity.”

  So ends the brief service. We shuffle back outside to a hopeful medley of hymns from Nancy Creedle and follow the casket north through Meat Soup, the rain having eased to a sprinkle. Some walk. Most climb into golf carts. The procession stops at a house near the road’s end where, in the yard around back, a platoon of graves stands, and we look on from under umbrellas and the eaves of the house as Henrietta Wheatley is put in the muddy ground—and Tangier’s buried population, already bigger than its living, grows by one.

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER we gather again at Swain Memorial for a different kind of farewell: the annual graduation ceremony of Tangier Combined School. Few island events are more eagerly anticipated, for all Tangiermen know all the graduates—as well as their parents, the circumstances of their births, private details of their home lives, their academic standing, their dating history, and whether they’re right with the Lord—to a degree that would horrify most mainland teenagers. Tangier kids aren’t allowed many secrets.

  The flip side is that many island adults have played some role, large or small, in shaping the class of 2016’s six boys and one girl. So on a Thursday evening in early June, Nancy Creedle launches into a medley of “Wind Beneath My Wings” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” among other inspirational favorites, to a Swain Memorial sanctuary packed with about three hundred people, nearly two-thirds of the population. Summer has arrived, at long last, and the church air-conditioning rattles and gasps in its battle with the heat. I’m sitting beside JoAnne Daley, herself a member of the class of 1968 and now the matriarch of the family that owns the grocery. “They used to have graduation over at the school,” she tells me, while fanning herself with a program. “It was always hot. They’d have to leave the doors open, and the horseflies would get in.”

  The graduates march to the fore wearing dark blue gowns and mortarboards, and Nina Pruitt, the school’s island-born principal and the only resident to hold a doctoral degree, takes the lectern. She points out a vase of flowers on a table below, explaining that in addition to the seven graduates, tonight’s ceremony will honor Jordan Wesley Daley, who would have been a member of this class but died unborn in March 1998, when his mother suffered a fatal aneurysm. I see many in the audience dabbing their eyes. JoAnne, Jordan Wesley’s grandmother, sniffles beside me.

  We hear from the new superintendent of Accomack County Public Schools, who urges the graduates to “get as much education as you can” and “always give to the community. Give to the old people.” Next up: Jared Parks, a 1997 graduate, one of Tangier’s two marine policemen, and the son of my landlady. He’s a meaty fellow whose overpowering Tangier accent vanishes when he opens his mouth to sing Garth Brooks’s “The River” to the accompaniment of a karaoke track. The song has a suitably maritime theme, with talk of rough waters and rapids and such; it peaks near the end with the good Lord at the helm, steering Garth to safety.

  All of this is prelude. Nina Pruitt retakes the lectern to introduce the commencement speaker: the school’s math teacher, a 1982 graduate, who a few years ago fell victim to an incurable neurological disorder that gradually crippled her, then woke one morning to find herself healed. “Do you believe in miracles?” the principal asks the church. “I present to you our miracle, Mrs. Trenna Moore.”

  Trenna, who is married to Lonnie Moore’s younger brother, Tracy, strides easily to the mike. She is tall, slim, short-haired, no-nonsense. “You seven have heard your fair share of my two cents’ worth these past five years,” she tells the honorees. “I’m glad to be afforded one more chance to offer what I feel are important values as you begin the next phase of your life. But first, I would like to tell the audience assembled here a little about the seven of you.” With that, she spends a few minutes talking about each of the graduates, enumerating their fine qualities, downplaying their flaws. “Austin came into eighth grade so quiet that I really could not learn a lot about him,” she says of one student. “But in his eleventh grade year, along came Austin. It went from hardly knowing he was in your class to Austin having an opinion and discussing all subjects—home, school, and island gossip.”

  “Conner treated everyone equal during his high school years,” she says of another. “He never just picked on a few. His jokes and messing were to whoever was available. It was the same way with compliments. All have a chance to get a charming word from Conner, from the youngest student to the oldest person to enter the school’s doors.

  “I could always count on Conner to be truthful, even when it implicated him,” she says. “Being known as an honest person is an attribute I admire.”

  So her speech goes, through all seven, until
she shifts her tone. She quotes from the second book of Kings, about a leper, Naaman, who’s told by the prophet Elisha that he’ll be cured if he bathes seven times in the River Jordan. “It was the Word the Lord gave to me when I was told that I had an incurable disease,” she tells us. “The doctor told me he would try to make my life as comfortable as possible for me, but there was no cure.

  “This Word was comfort to me, because Naaman had an incurable disease and was not healed right away. God’s Word was true then: After Naaman washed seven times in the Jordan River, he was healed. And in October 2014, I was healed. God’s Word is true and trustworthy.” She chokes back a sob. “The seven of you were a part of that journey, helping me without being asked. The morning I was healed all seven of you came to my classroom and hugged me. I will never forget that day.

  “You see, jobs will come and go,” she says. “Bosses and professors can let you down. Material possessions will become outdated or break. Your good health will fade in time. And sometimes even the ones you love most can disappoint. But you can always count on Christ to remain true.”

  I’ve never heard a public school commencement address quite like it. But then, this is a town with a cross on its municipal water tower.

  Moving though Trenna Moore’s remarks have been, the main event is still to come, for this is a graduation at which not just the valedictorian speaks, but every member of the class. One, the aforementioned Austin, thanks his parents, adding: “Without them, I literally would not be here.” Another boy thanks both his birth father, who died when he was young, and his adoptive dad. A third, the “prophet of the class,” offers predictions about each of his classmates: One will become a fighter pilot, and one will advance quickly in his work aboard tugboats, “in record time becoming a port captain.” A third will master his computer classes in college, and another will become producer to pop singer Miley Cyrus. Hannah Crockett, at the top of her class, will become a “celebrity psychologist.”

  Laughter abounds, and tears as well, for the subtext to the ceremony is that Tangier, having raised these youngsters as a village, will soon say good-bye to all but one of them. Two of the graduates are bound for college and one for the military. Three will go to work for Vane Brothers, a Baltimore-based company that runs tugboats and barges up and down the East Coast. Most of them won’t be back—or in any case, not for long. Tangier offers no opportunity to put a college degree to use; it used to be that a teaching job would open up once in a while, but with the school’s falling enrollment, that isn’t likely to happen again. Tugboaters might set up house here, but they tend to weary of the extra time that getting to and from the island adds to their two-week shifts. Those in uniform grow accustomed to the bigger, wider world and having a car, beer, and even privacy—which, scarce though it is in the military, might exceed that on Tangier. Besides, what is there for boys to do on the island but the work of their fathers, which they know to be hard, uncertain, and dangerous?

  Nina Pruitt returns to the lectern. “As you leave us tonight,” she tells the graduates, in what sounds like a bon voyage, “I ask one last thing of you. Take pride in your Tangier heritage. Be proud to be called a Tangierman.

  “As a teenager you think of the place as too confining, like living under a microscope,” she says. “But soon you will come to realize what a special place home really is. Take with you the strong traditions of hard work and devotion to family that are so evident on our island. These will take you far in life.”

  The graduates file out to Nancy Creedle’s rendition of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and form a receiving line on the church porch. We well-wishers slowly squeeze out of the sanctuary. As I near the doors I find myself beside Annette Charnock, a native who left for college and stayed away for decades, until she found love in her hometown and moved back nine years ago, and whose stepson is married to Carol Moore’s daughter. Hair cropped in a no-fuss boyish style, Annette is bright-eyed, quick to laugh, and just a touch louder than most of her fellow islanders. “Oh, that was a tearjerker of a ceremony, weren’t it?” she says, to no one and everyone around her. “Just when I stopped crying over one story, along came another.”

  Crab shanties line the main channel into Tangier harbor. (EARL SWIFT)

  Five

  IT WAS ANNETTE CHARNOCK’S FUTURE HUSBAND WHOM I SOUGHT out one afternoon during my 2000 stay for insight into the blue crab. By that spring Edward Vaughn Charnock had been working the water for nearly forty years and was reputed to be one of the most capable crabbers on the island—an expert seaman, an aggressive potter who ranged far from the island in pursuit of hard crabs, and an honest businessman who overfilled his bushel baskets until the lids bulged, a practice islanders call “giving good measure.”

  I found him outside his house in Meat Soup, preparing his pots for the coming season. He clipped bars of zinc to their mesh to slow its corrosion in the bay’s salt water, freshened the paint on his buoys, and replaced the frayed line that connected them to his traps, soaking each length in a muddy puddle before cinching its knots closed, for better grip. He looked like a character out of Coleridge, square-jawed and sun-chapped and gristly, a man who’d come to understand the sea and his quarry and who doubtless had much to share.

  But no. Ed claimed ignorance. In all the time Tangiermen had devoted themselves to hunting the blue crab—and collectively, that amounted to thousands of years—what they’d learned about the creature, he told me, wouldn’t fill a coffee cup. “Only two things known for sure,” he said. “She’ll run from you, and she’ll bite.”

  I’ve since heard slight variations on this thought from other watermen, who lament how mysterious the animal remains despite generations of careful observation. And indeed, the island’s crabbers will disagree about aspects of the crab’s life and habits and trade in some pretty serious misinformation about them, too. That said, Tangiermen know a great deal about the animal, starting with that bite: If circumstances require that you be pinched by a crab, see that it’s the left claw that gets you. At first glance the crab might appear symmetrical, but its claws differ slightly. Both are lined with what resemble nubby teeth, but those on the left claw are smaller and finer, and the claw itself is slimmer and comes to a sharper point. That’s because the left claw is designed for cutting, while the right claw—stouter, with teeth more reminiscent of molars—is built for crushing, and is far more powerful.

  A Tangier crabber knows this from childhood, though he won’t likely pay much mind to the claws on a crab bound for a bushel basket. He won’t devote much thought to the tender nuances of crab courtship, either, though he uses his knowledge of the ritual to snare female peelers. Flip a crab onto its back, and it presents a second clue to its sex, in addition to the color of its claws. In the center of its belly is a hinged flap, called an apron, under which its reproductive tackle is located. On jimmies, it’s a long, narrow panel that’s often likened to the Washington Monument, and on immature females, or she-crabs, it’s roughly triangular. Twelve to eighteen months after hatching, when a she-crab is nearing the molt at which she’ll achieve sexual maturity, her apron acquires a pink or bluish hue.

  In Tangier parlance, this female peeler is a “doubler,” and of great interest to jimmies in the vicinity. She’s attracted to them, too, for a female mates only once, and only while a softshell. Because most don’t molt again after this key transition from she-crab to sook, the coming days will provide her only shot at reproducing.

  As invertebrate romances go, a crab’s is rather touching. A jimmy performs a dance for the doubler. If she deems him a worthy mate, she backs beneath him, and he pulls her close to his belly with his walking legs. For the next several days, he cradle-carries her wherever he goes.* When she’s ready to molt, he forms a protective cage around her with his legs, and stands guard for the hours it takes her to work free of her old shell and fill out the wrinkled new one. Externally, the chief clue that she’s reached adulthood can be found, again, on her belly: Her apron has changed
shape, from a triangle to the Capitol dome. Once she’s plumped up to her new, larger size, the jimmy flips her onto her back. His apron opens to expose a pair of long, wispy tubes called gonopods. Her new apron opens to expose a pair of receptacles called gonopores. They mate belly to belly for five to twelve hours. Afterward, the jimmy flips her back over and again cradles her for a couple of days, until her new shell has hardened. Then they part.

  Crabbers know that as a general rule, peelers won’t enter a pot where hard crabs are present. They’re seeking refuge, and know that to molt in the presence of hard crabs is an invitation to death by cannibalism. If a pot contains both hard crabs and peelers, one can safely assume that the peelers entered it first. But peeler potters know, too, that a doubler feels a heightened sense of urgency to mate. So while the waters around Tangier are crowded with the prospective brides, it’s common practice to toss a jimmy into a pot before setting it; a female peeler might sense his presence, the thinking goes, and head into the pot to get acquainted, her urges having overtaken her fears.

  Most years, eligible females engage in one or more early-season runs past the island, and at such times the peeler catch can be almost ridiculously good—stories abound of Tangiermen finding dozens of doublers in a single pot or catching hundreds in a day of dipnetting. But the runs didn’t happen last spring, and they haven’t happened this year, either, and no one seems to know why.

  That’ll get a waterman talking about how much he doesn’t know.

  AFTER MATING, THE sook begins a long migration to spawn. It often takes her until the following year, after a winter’s hibernation, to complete the journey. As she nears the salty water near the Chesapeake’s mouth, she fertilizes her eggs with the sperm she’s carrying. An orange sponge billows from her belly.

  If there’s an aspect of crab life about which some Tangiermen know as little as they claim, it would be that sponge. When I’ve wondered in conversation whether crabbers are hurting themselves by catching lemons—which are, after all, carrying the next generation of crabs—I’ve had crabbers insist that I need not worry, as those orange sponges are unfertilized eggs that will never hatch. This is untrue: The sponges cannot form without fertilization. A lemon in a crabber’s basket will never see her eggs hatch, true enough, but that’s because she’s in the basket.