by Earl Swift
Ooker was just starting high school when he and his oldest brother, Ira, built this shanty, on the site of an earlier crab house their father had used. It is a sturdy but unassuming structure, framed in two-by-fours, clad in plywood, all of its bones exposed and aged to a deep red brown. The center of the floor is occupied by the cooler, an enormous stainless steel model seven feet tall and six wide. Large freezer chests line three walls. A door is cut into one corner, and just inside it is the worktable at which Ooker does his packing. Piled on practically every horizontal surface are the tools and supplies necessary to life on the water: motor oil, caulk, paint and varnish, thousand-foot spools of nylon cord, wrenches and hammers and jars of screws. Old foam crab pot buoys. Cat food.
Ooker finishes a tray. He’s assembled two of whales, five of jumbos, one of primes. He quickly puts together a ninth and final tray, split between jumbos and primes, then stacks the trays inside the shipping boxes, and onto each box pushes a snug-fitting lid emblazoned with the likeness of a blue crab and the words LIVE SOFT SHELL CRABS. He writes “JMS” in permanent marker in a corner of each lid—for the JMS Seasonal Seafood Corporation, the shipment’s destination within the New Fulton Fish Market—and in another prints “J. Eskridge, Tangier, VA.” He draws a Jesus fish under his name.
The farm report has given way to country music. The lyrics “You had a Corona, and I was drinking Bud Light” thump on a gush of static from the radio’s overpowered speaker as Ooker binds the boxes in black string, then carries them out to the boat. JMS is paying him an average of $230 a box for his crabs these days, so the morning’s chores will gross just shy of $700. It’s already a good day, and he hasn’t yet pulled up a pot.
AT 7:40 A.M. we cross the harbor to the mailboat dock, where a crewman from the Courtney Thomas tells us the big boat’s port engine won’t start, so the afternoon ferry—Mark Haynie’s Sharon Kay III—will make the morning run to Crisfield. Ed Parks, maternal grandfather of mailboat skipper Brett Thomas, has pulled up to the dock in a skiff. Beside him are two boxes of swelling toads, as Tangiermen call the spiked and self-inflating northern puffers. Ugly though the fish are, they’re undeniably delicious. Skinned and deep-fried, they enjoy growing popularity as “sugar toads,” a restaurant appetizer. Even so, the eighty-year-old Ed is one of a few Tangier crabbers who fish for them.
“Brisk wind out there today,” he says as we come alongside.
“Yeah,” Ooker replies, and sighs. “It ain’t gonna be blowin’ none this summer.”
We sit, rocking in our respective boats, and wait for Mark Haynie to arrive. Ed is one of two Ed Parkses on the island—a not uncommon situation with so few surnames spread among so many people. There are also two Denny Crocketts, two Jackie McCreadys, two Michael Parkses, and quite a few fathers, like Ooker, who share names with their sons. In days of old, when the island’s population was bigger and the duplications were more numerous, islanders might distinguish two same-named neighbors with genealogy, by appending a father’s name to one or both (so it is that my landlady, Cindy Parks, has an ancestor who was known as “Elisha of Zacharia Crockett”). Today, they do it with references to occupations, physical characteristics, or middle names. The two McCreadys, for instance, are referred to as Jackie Haskins or Jackie Burton, if the context doesn’t pinpoint one or the other; Jackie H. is sometimes referred to simply as “Haskins.”
Denny Crockett, the retired Tangier School principal, is “Principal Denny,” versus Denny Crockett the electrical co-op worker, who—being twin to his brother, Donnie—is “Twin Denny.” And the Ed Parks talking with us this morning is “Short Ed,” as opposed to “Colonel” Ed Parks, a former mayor who now runs the town museum. Short Ed dislikes that label, and everyone on the island knows better than to use it in his presence; he’s only rarely called to answer to it. Some Tangiermen with alternate forms of address, on the other hand, are rarely called by their given names. Ooker is always Ooker. Christine Charnock, who became the oldest woman on the island with Henrietta Wheatley’s death, is always Teany. Carol Moore’s brother, David Charles Pruitt, is always Tweet, and her father was Flapper to everyone but his family. George Pruitt is always Hoot, for reasons unclear, except among those Tangiermen who know him better as Monk, short for “monkey” and a reference to his childhood talent for climbing trees. Many of his neighbors, asked his real name, will tell you it’s Frankie, though that’s actually his middle name. Meanwhile, Frankie Crockett—that is his name—is always Tabby. Ed Charnock is Eddie Jacks, after a character on the old Peyton Place TV drama. The island’s dead include Chowder and Sea Biscuit, Popcorn and Spaniard, Ponk and Spurge, Puge and Miff. Puff Cheeks. Kisses.
Some nicknames are easily traced to specific traits or incidents. Shithouse Al, for instance, “led a gang who thought they’d go around knocking over toilets,” according to Jerry Frank Pruitt. And Half-Ass Buck was a come-here who “lost a piece of a cheek in an accident or something,” as Ooker put it at the Situation Room one afternoon.
“Sawmill,” Leon chimed in.
“Yeah,” Ooker said, “a sawmill.”
“He came here and married Elmer’s daughter,” Leon recalled, referring to the late Elmer Crockett. “He saved Elmer’s life, too.”
“How did that happen?” I asked.
“Elmer hit a wire with his head,” Leon said. “I don’t know how it didn’t kill him. Half-Ass Buck throwed him away from the wire, and that’s how he got him away.”
“What, like an electric wire?”
Jerry Frank nodded. “Burned a hole,” he said, forming a circle with his hands the size of an orange. “It put a big hole in his head. I sat behind him in church, and he always had a bandage over it. They’d have to go in and drain it now and then.”
That was Half-Ass Buck. The origins of many island nicknames aren’t as well remembered, by accident or design. Both Allen Ray Crockett and his son Mark are known as “Mooney,” after an ancestor who had the same handle, though neither can explain the name’s genesis. Kim Parks prefers Socks to his given name, but he won’t share how he earned the moniker. “I ain’t going to discuss it,” he told me. “It ain’t Christian.” Homer Williams, who owned a grocery and the island’s first TV, was known as Dobbins. “I don’t know why they called him that,” Leon told me in the Situation Room. “He had one leg shorter than the other one.”
“He had no neck,” Bruce Gordy added.
Leon: “Think he was in a car accident or something.”
“Did he get the name after his accident?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Leon replied. “Think he was always Dobbins.”
During another Situation Room gathering, I asked Richard Pruitt why his father, the late Carlton Pruitt, was called Chiney. “I couldn’t tell you to save my life,” he said, chuckling.
Jerry Frank spoke up. “Miss Maggie Walter gave him that name. He and John Lewis Parks were coming down the lane, and she called out, ‘Here they come, the Spaniard and the Chinaman!’”
“Did John Lewis Parks look Hispanic or something?” I asked.
“No, not really,” Jerry Frank replied.
“Did your dad look Asian?” I asked Richard. He shook his head.
Don’t expect it to make sense, Leon told me. The late Miss Maggie was pretty crazy. “There was a streetlight on the corner outside her place,” he said, “and people couldn’t walk past there without her saying something. People would walk all the way around to avoid it.”
One evening at Swain I asked Marlene McCready, wife of Jackie Haskins, how Tangier old-timer George “Hambone” Thomas came by his nickname. She was stumped. “How did Hambone get his nickname?” she mused, turning to Principal Denny’s wife. “Glenna, do you know?” Glenna did not, so Marlene buttonholed Hoot Pruitt, who was passing by.
“I don’t have any idea,” he answered. “Ask some of these old people.”
She turned to the much younger Principal Denny. “Do you know how Hambone got his nickname?”
&nbs
p; Denny, settling into the pew behind us, shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Marlene resorted to theory. “I’m sure it goes back to when he was little and something his mom was cooking. And a hambone got put in front of him or something.”
“It doesn’t seem to take much,” I commented. I nodded across the sanctuary to tugboater Bill “Shoot” Parks. “How did Bill Shoot get his?”
Marlene called across the church to him. “Bill Shoot? How did you get to be Bill Shoot? How’d you get your nickname?”
“I don’t know,” the ruddy-faced, crew-cutted Shoot replied. “Something that happened early. It’s hard to shake it.”
“Yeah,” Denny agreed, “once you have it, you can’t get rid of it.”
Now, as we sit in Ooker’s boat, Mark Haynie pulls up in the Sharon Kay III. He’s known as “Poopdeck.” Years ago he wore a slouchy yachtsman’s cap, which reminded some of the hat favored by Popeye’s father, Poopdeck Pappy, in the old comic strips and cartoons. He hasn’t worn the cap in decades, but he’s Poopdeck forever.
WE FISH UP OOKER’S POTS on the island’s bay side under a low titanium sky. A breeze comes steady out of the northeast at twenty miles an hour, but we’re in the island’s lee, and this close to shore we’re shielded from its effects. Just a little farther west, the protection dissipates: Out in the open bay a big sailboat is bucking the wind through seas turned olive green and frothy, and having a time of it.
Ooker pays little mind to the morning’s ominous cast, however, because the pots are coming up loaded with peelers and number ones. On the first row of twenty-seven pots, he harvests forty-two peelers. “If you do one peeler to the pot, you’re doing good,” he tells me, swinging the boat around to start the second row. The first pot clatters aboard carrying a peeler, a number two, and a couple of undersized jimmies that he tosses overboard. A half-dozen crabs wait in the next. He studies one recently molted sook, decides it’s a buckram—a soft crab that has started to harden up, worthless to both peeler and hard crabbers—and throws it back, along with two little juveniles. He keeps a peeler and a number two. In the third pot he finds a buster, a number one, a number two, and a lemon.
“Man,” Ooker says, “I wish I had all my pots over on this side today.” As it is, he has 110 arrayed in four rows here and the remaining 100 on the island’s far side, most of them just off the spit. They’re borrowed pots, Ooker having beached most of his own to let the sun burn away the red moss that choked their mesh, and they’re ancient. Leon bought these back before he switched to scraping and eventually sold them to Woodpecker, who used them until he quit chasing peelers, which was two or three years ago. And as Ooker has experienced in past years, the old pots have become clogged with moss in very little time. It hasn’t put off the crabs, however. The second row yields thirty-four peelers, and the third, thirty-eight. Ooker is both pleased and puzzled. “I’m sure they see it,” he says of the algae. “A little of it don’t seem to bother them, but a lot of it usually will.”
He takes five minutes to wolf down half of a PB&J and a cellophane-wrapped snack cake, and is encouraging the last few drops from a bottle of Yoo-hoo when a clump of seagrass floats by. “People talk about the crabs being down,” Ooker says. “We had a slow start because of the cold weather, but I don’t think the crabs are down at all. Some people, they make conclusions without any backing for them.
“Some guy saw all the grass that you get at this time of year floating on the surface, and he said the scrapers were doing it—they were pulling the grass up from the bottom. Well, you go to places along the bay side, like back in Shanks Creek, and you see the same thing there. And nobody scrapes there.” He snorts. “These are the healthiest grass beds in the bay, around here. If scraping was doing it, they’d be long gone.”
We start the fourth row. A buster comes up, half out of its shell. Soft crabs, all whales, turn up in three straight pots. One comes up with a peeler crouched on top, outside of the trap. Ooker snares it with a deft stab of his hand. “A lot of peelers here this morning,” he says. “I guess they’re in the stumps.” I peer overboard into the water, which here runs about eight feet deep, but can’t see the remnants of any drowned trees.
The next pot comes up empty—a surprise, given the day’s bountiful haul. “Sometimes a crab pot will come up with nothing in it, and what’s happened is that you’ve thrown it down on a stump, and it’s tilted,” Ooker explains. He turns to eye the island’s western shore, about one hundred yards away. “Hard to believe this was a wooded area.”
Indeed, the next pot is loaded with crabs, and after pulling the fourth row’s last pot, Ooker does a quick tally: sixty-seven peelers on that row. “That’s as good as you get,” he tells me. “Real good. I wish I had some more pots here.” He pauses before adding: “You got to be careful, though. You put too many pots out, they’ll catch on.”
He guns the outboard and we swing into the boat channel. Beyond the harbor we come into the wind, which is blowing hard now, and into three-foot waves that seem to be headed every direction at once. The boat bucks and thumps through the chop as we approach the southeast corner of Uppards, where Ooker has set a few pots. When he cuts the motor to snag the first buoy, the boat starts to rock aggressively. I grab the steering console and hang on. “Breezy,” Ooker observes.
A couple of crabbers pass us, headed into port. One, a scraper, holds out a fist, thumb pointed down. The other, a hard-potter, draws a finger across his throat. Ooker waves and hollers: “That’s all I needed to see!” Just the same, we pull up five pots, looping around each to keep the boat’s nose into the wind as Ooker hooks the floats. All are empty. The wind gusts to thirty miles per hour. Standing in the boat now requires knee bends straight out of an aerobics class. “Kyowking!” Ooker yells.
“Excuse me?”
“Wind like this,” he says. “Kyowking. Which isn’t worth it, if the pots are empty. I’m calling it a day.”
“BAD,” LEON DECLARES of such days. “Rough.” He makes the observation to a crowded Situation Room. Cook, Jerry Frank, Richard Pruitt, Allen Ray Crockett, and Bruce Gordy are here, as well as John Wesley Charnock, the town cop. All are drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups that someone bought by the thousands on a trip to a bulk warehouse; they’re stacked neck-high next to the room’s trash can, which remains under siege from a spiral of fruit flies.
I’m sitting beside Allen Ray and notice a tattoo on his left forearm. It looks to be a split-tailed bird, but Allen Ray’s skin is roughened and cracked and tanned the color of tobacco, and the tattoo is impossible to make out. I ask him: “What is that—a barn swallow?”
Allen Ray looks down at the image as if he’s forgotten it was there. “Woodpecker, I think,” he says. “It’s been on there so long I don’t even remember. Can barely see it.”
“It’s had time to fade,” Leon notes. He adds, since the subject has turned to the effects of old age, “Walking don’t agree with me. Once you stop walking and start riding, walking gets hard.” This from a man who just spent eight hours on his feet, hauling a loaded scrape onto a rocking boat.
Aging is a topic Leon frequently puts on the table. He may do so with an anecdote, as he did when discussing his recliner on another afternoon: “You set that chair back, and it ain’t long before you nod off. And you wake up and think, ‘Is I supposed to be leaving for work?’ You wake up that sudden, and you wonder, ‘Has I been out already, or is I gettin’ ready to go out?’
“I do wake up from a nod and I get to thinking,” he told us, grimacing. “That’s a sign of failing, if you’re an old man.”
More often, he introduces the subject with a mild complaint. “The years get different, the older you get,” he announced on another day.
“They’re shorter?” someone guessed.
“There’s more trouble in ’em,” Leon said. “More aches and pains.”
“Reminds me,” Jerry Frank now says, “of Ray Crockett years ago,” Ray being Leon’s father-in-law. “He
went to see Dr. Smoot, the ear, nose, and throat specialist.” The story’s a long one and ends with Ray telling the doctor: “Look, I’m eighty. Everything is down 50 percent.”
Ooker strides in, and as he’s mixing powdered creamer into his coffee he announces he’s mad, which he pronounces my-yid. Seems he had an exchange with an islander who thinks it unfair that the town charges twenty-five dollars for golf cart registration tags. Tangier is the only Virginia locality where it’s legal to drive without state license plates; instead, the island’s 285 motorized vehicles, all but a few of them golf carts, are required to display town stickers. This citizen told the mayor he didn’t believe he’d be paying the fee.
“I said, ‘Well, give it a try. See what happens,’” Ooker says. “‘But I’ll tell you what I think will happen: You’ll put your cart up for the year.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s the principle of the thing.’ I said, ‘You’re right. It is the principle of the thing. You’ll buy a tag or you’ll park your cart.’ But he just wouldn’t let it go. Just kept at it. I said, ‘Well, go ahead. Give it a try.’”
Leon evidently knows who this citizen is. “I’ll bet when he walks to Canton and back he’ll come up with that twenty-five dollars,” he says. “Walking is hard.”
Ooker busters up his peelers in the shedding tanks out back of his crab shanty. (EARL SWIFT)
Nine
MARY STUART PARKS, A RED BANDANNA KNOTTED AROUND her head, surveys the kitchen at Fisherman’s Corner. It is nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. The dining room opens in two hours, and Stuart, as she prefers to be called, faces a tumble of chores to ready the restaurant for the weekend’s anticipated spike in tourists. She consults a list of the most pressing tasks to complete first: “5 lbs crab cakes. Thaw. Slaw. Squash casserole. Green beans. Bisque. Heat soup. Toast points. Hush pups.”