Chesapeake Requiem

by Earl Swift

  “That’s when people started coming up,” recalled Marshall’s widow, Iris Pruitt. “And they kept coming up. People were just under conviction.”

  Dozens of people came forward to be saved, so the leaders of both churches elected to extend the revival by a day. The same thing happened, so they extended it again. The same thing happened, and the same again the following night. “Sometimes we wouldn’t have even started, and somebody would go forward,” said Jean Crockett, Dewey’s widow. “It was not orchestrated by men, you could tell.”

  In all, more than two hundred people were saved, in a town of fewer than 700 inhabitants. The islanders talk about it still—as I heard Duane Crockett do at New Testament one Sunday morning. “Anyone who was present will well remember,” he said from the pulpit. “People we’ve known our whole lives stood up, preached simple sermons, and at the conclusion of the sermon an invitation would be given, and thirty and forty people a night would respond to the Gospel. It was a sight that I will never forget for my whole life.

  “It was preached by ordinary men who believed the Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that Word and convicts the hearts and brings people to salvation. I’ve seen grown men sob to the Gospel before. I have seen people break out in sweats during invitations, and clench on to benches, and shaking, and won’t let go of that, like there’s a battle that’s going on within them. That’s the power of the Gospel.”

  All of which is to say that I left Tangier in the spring of 2000 and returned sixteen years later, confident that most all of the island was, as they say, right with the Lord.

  THE CLUES that such is not the case are nuanced and likely missed by tourists, but they pile up. For instance: One late-summer evening, I witness what appears to be a drug transaction in King Street, not far from the museum. I’m on my bike when I come upon a golf cart stopped in the middle of Main Ridge Road. It’s occupied by a thin man in his late thirties or early forties, whom I recognize but don’t know. Another islander, of roughly the same age, is standing beside the vehicle, and they perform a quick, furtive exchange: folded cash for a small packet.

  Another clue: One afternoon I’m riding up Hog Ridge, having spent an hour down at the spit, when I encounter Ernest Ed Parks working on his pickup truck outside the closed Sunset Inn—once the biggest and most comfortable of Tangier’s lodges, now abandoned and gone to seed. The stripped remains of a golf cart molder in waist-high weeds out front. Mildew stains the siding. While talking with Ern, I remark that it’s a shame that such a fine building has come on hard times. “Used to be a right nice place,” he tells me. “But they just let it go. Walked away from it.” After a pause he asks, “You ever been inside?”

  He leads the way up a broad set of wooden stairs to a deck that hugs the building’s south side. We push our way through the drooping branches of a magnolia that, untrimmed, has grown to block the deck. We try the front door, find it locked, and continue to the inn’s west side, which overlooks the south end of the runway and the bay beyond. A sliding glass door there has been kicked or blown inward, and we step over it into ruins: The large room’s wall-to-wall carpet is filthy, waterlogged, and wrinkled, and the Sheetrock walls bloom with mold. The smell of cat is overpowering. Trash is strewn across the floor, including an empty bottle of cinnamon schnapps.

  We venture from room to darkened room, each more ravaged than the last. Empty bottles of bottom-shelf gin and whiskey figure prominently. In two rooms lie soiled mattresses, sheetless but equipped with makeshift pillows, and both looking recently used. I’m eager to leave.

  A few nights later, my visiting fiancée and I ride our bikes past the Sunset Inn, and through a window we see the light of a smartphone’s screen moving in one of the rooms. Once I know to look for it, I detect evidence of transgression all about: skinny, ravaged-looking islanders meeting at the slab out past the dump; flotillas of empty beer cans lifted from the marsh by storm-driven tides; mournful shakes of the head among churchgoers at the mention of a neighbor’s name; references to a bend on West Ridge Road clustered with hardscrabble trailers as the Devil’s Elbow. It’s hard to miss one tiny home, measuring no more than eight hundred square feet, in which ten people live: Often when I pass, its yard is filled with children in almost medical need of a scrubbing, and when I ask about the place others call it “a sad situation.”

  Duane Crockett hinted that all islanders do not adhere to the straight and narrow in his sermon about the ’95 revival. “Search your hearts, church,” he told us. “Think of a place on Tangier that you wouldn’t be caught coming out of. Or a person on Tangier it would tarnish your reputation for being seen with. I can guarantee you: That may be the very person or place that the Lord will have you to go to, to share the Gospel with them.

  “Iris has been in [many such] homes on Tangier to witness to people about their soul’s salvation,” he said, referring to New Testament’s senior member. “And I mean some homes where, if I were to be going in the door, I might turn around and look to see who’s going by and would see me going in. That’s the kind of home I mean.”

  IN THE CLUTTERED OFFICE of Swain Memorial I talked to John Flood about the island’s unsaved. Next to the mainland, Tangier is a godly place, he told me. But before he came to the island, he thought it was godlier than it is.

  “That was the big shocker for me,” he said, “because my impression of Tangier was that on Sunday morning everybody was in church, and if you weren’t in church you stayed in your house with the door closed. That may have been the case eighty to one hundred years ago, but it’s certainly not the case today.”

  By Pastor Flood’s reckoning, about half the island attends one church or the other. Of the other half, the great majority are living solidly moral lives.

  But not all. For evidence, we need not look beyond the room in which we sat—the site of the July theft, which remains high in the island’s collective mind two months after the fact. At Swain’s August board meeting, members worried that the church’s custom of publishing the income generated by each week’s offerings might have invited the crime. The numbers, often impressive, appeared on the third page of the bulletin handed out on Sunday mornings, sandwiched between a list of approaching island birthdays and a schedule of Swain’s upcoming prayer and choir sessions. That week’s bulletin had noted that the previous Sunday, offerings had totaled $4,273. The board decided to suspend publication of the collections for “two or three months,” to see whether anyone objected or even noticed.

  At the September board meeting, it’s obvious that they have. Denny Crockett, the board chairman, reports that he’s been approached by one of the church’s biggest givers. “He wanted to know why we’d done that, and he wanted to know whether something was being hidden,” Denny says. Several in the room express shock. Why would anyone think that? What would they be hiding? Denny holds up a hand. “There’s paranoia both ways,” he says. “I’ve always believed, in any organization I’ve ever been in, in transparency. We have all the best intentions in the world—but this is a good person who asked this.”

  “People need to feel comfortable that what we do is open,” a board member suggests. “That what we do is led by the Holy Spirit.” It doesn’t help that no one has been arrested for the theft. Accomack County sent an investigator over who is said to be planning another visit. But if there’s a strong suspect in the case, word hasn’t leaked out. On rumor-rich Tangier, this has bred talk that Swain’s leadership has a good idea of who’s responsible and is sitting on the information.

  “Surely nobody thinks it was an inside job,” a board member says.

  “That they do,” says another.

  Pastor Flood stands. “Gossip is something you’re going to have,” he counsels. On a recent trip to Crisfield, he was approached by someone who thought the money had been returned. A mainland cop told the pastor he’d heard a similar story—that the thief had turned himself in to church leaders and apologized, and all had been forgiven.

  Hoot P
ruitt is troubled that a decision aimed at protecting the congregation is, instead, creating doubt and division. “If it’s going to upset people,” he says, “we need to go back.” With that, he moves that the congregation resume publishing the collections. Grace Pruitt, Carol Moore’s mother, seconds the motion. It passes in a unanimous voice vote.

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, any surviving notion I might harbor that Tangier has escaped the evils of mainland life is dashed for good. The monthly Tangier Town Council meeting is gaveled to order in the town hall, an asbestos-clad hut that once housed Asbury Pruitt’s navy spotters. Principal item of business: Sylvia Bonniwell, who drives a tour buggy and lives at the southern end of the West Ridge, appears before the panel to complain of widespread lawlessness. Speeders on the island are brazen and “need a little course on how to drive a golf cart,” she says, adding, “They’ve come close to killing five people this summer.” Drug transactions have become flagrant. “They don’t even try to hide it,” she says. Also, littering’s pretty bad.

  “On the drug situation,” Councilman “Colonel” Ed Parks says, “you are empowered to make a citizen’s arrest.”

  Sylvia blinks at him. “I’m afraid they’d blow my head off.”

  “Well,” says Colonel Ed, “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.”

  Looking on is Rob Baechtel, a Metro D.C. reserve cop who’s moved into a big house on the West Ridge with his wife, Barb. “There’s a meth problem on this island,” he announces. “I’ve seen meth being smoked on this island. One of the problems we have is that John [Charnock, the town cop] doesn’t have the experience to be able to testify in court.” Rob suggests an undercover officer with a track record in drug arrests be assigned to the island and partnered with John. Said officer, on witnessing a drug transaction, would have the probable cause to intercede. “John doesn’t have the probable cause,” he says, “because he doesn’t have the experience.”

  Ooker points out that an undercover cop won’t stay undercover for long. “If we have a guy over here you know how he stands out. It’s not like it is on the mainland.”

  “Having another cop work with John will give John the experience to do such work on his own,” Rob says.

  Ooker turns to Sylvia. “Your concern is ours as well,” he tells her. “Those who’ve been caught have just got a slap on the wrist and get back before the police boat.”

  The meeting reveals a host of other challenges the town faces: leaking water pipes, disintegrating roads, and a sewage treatment plant frequently overtaxed and always expensive. Failing wells, too—the island has ten tapped into an aquifer a thousand feet down, but only three are functioning; of those, one was taken offline in 2016 because it was fouled with bacteria, and the water from the others is so loaded with barium, sodium, and fluoride that a past doctor and dentist both advised their patients not to drink it. Bottled water sells well at Daley & Son.

  But no difficulty is equal to the island’s struggle with drugs, and it’s waged this fight for a while: An entry in the town council’s minutes of October 4, 2001, reported that “a large number of pills were sold this past Sunday by one individual. This person has a history of this.” Another entry, from a meeting in December 2006, read: “Several people have asked if the Town would be willing to put a light by Bill’s dock because there is a lot of dealing going on, and a light might be a deterrent.”

  When I raised the subject with Inez Pruitt, the physician’s assistant who runs the health center, she told me that most Tangier drug users “are in their forties. We had a guy who got hooked on heroin. That’s not something that just pops up on Tangier Island.” One first-rate, well-regarded waterman died of an apparent overdose.

  “At least once a month I say to myself, ‘Inez, you ought to go off and get training for drug addictions,’” she said. “I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it seems, but we know everybody, and this has affected just about every family on the island.”

  I also broached the topic with Nina Pruitt during a visit to the school. “We have a big prescription drug problem,” the principal said. “A big alcohol problem. I think it’s gotten worse.

  “Tangier and alcohol has always been a strange combination, because it’s always taken one of two forms: you either drink to get stone-blind drunk or you don’t drink at all. There’s never been any social drinking.”

  THE MAN WITH THE MOST DIFFICULT, thankless job on Tangier is rolling at a glacial pace through King Street in a subcompact Chevy Aveo hatchback. John Wesley Charnock calmly scans the houses and yards on both sides of Main Ridge Road, offering a wave or nod to the playing kids he passes. He has been town sergeant since 2009. It’s up to him to keep the peace among his neighbors. It’s an almost impossible balancing act.

  Not because Tangier is any sort of Dodge City—its drug and alcohol issues usually play out behind closed doors and only rarely spill into the streets or involve violence. Rather, what makes his task so demanding is that his every act of law enforcement puts him at odds with a relative or an in-law. “Every time that phone rings, I know it’s going to be a family member or a close friend,” he says. “It’s not like I’m never going to see these people again. I have to live here with them.”

  Today, as is his habit, John presents a smile to those he passes in his four-cylinder squad car, which has power enough to outrun a golf cart but not the four-wheelers and motorcycles some islanders gun around at night. I’m riding shotgun, having climbed in outside the parsonage for the sort of pairing that big-city reporters routinely make with big-city policemen. The car’s cockpit is snug. The back seat is far too small to carry any but the most petite and docile prisoners.

  Now on our second loop of the island’s road circuit, we creep past the new health center and bend around Swain’s churchyard, headed into Meat Soup. “I’ve made probably forty arrests the entire time, and a lot of them has been the same people,” he says. “That’s physical arrests—I’ve made a lot more with summons, of course. Out of that forty arrests, I think only eight or ten people have been involved.”

  John keeps a small office in the old health center, just up the darkened hallway from the Situation Room. On its wall is a video camera and a flat-screen monitor that link him to a magistrate in Accomack County, who decides whether an arrestee requires jailing on the mainland. The technology has simplified the job immensely from the days when every arrest required a boat trip.

  “I have very little trouble with the younger people. The problem is with people in their thirties and forties,” John says as we patrol. “It all stems from drugs or alcohol, all the crime around here, pretty much.” Any mischief the island’s teenagers get into is likely to be vehicular—underage golf-cart driving, running without lights, dragging down the airport runway—and the product of boredom.

  “When I was a teenager coming up, there were five or six places we could go to hang out,” he says. “There were places we could shoot pool. We had places with jukeboxes, and we could go dancing. The rec was open for us to play basketball two or three nights a week. We played volleyball. We played baseball.”

  We pass a golf cart headed the other way, two teen girls looping the circuit. Night after night, you’ll see kids circling the island’s road system—up one ridge, over the marsh, down another ridge, over the marsh—over and over. Sometimes they do it for hours straight. “As far as things for the teenagers to do,” John says, “the island has really gone backward.”

  We slow even further outside Daley & Son and swing left past Fisherman’s Corner, then through the narrows between Carol’s house and Jerry Frank’s place. John lives a few doors beyond. Across from his bungalow, Kim “Socks” Parks is flying the Israeli flag from a pole in his yard. Ahead, a navy Seahawk helicopter is sitting on the airport’s apron, rotor spinning. “Probably ordered lunch,” John guesses. “They do that right often. Lorraine’s will run it over to them.” We cross the Long Bridge and turn down the West Ridge. Halfway to the Heistin’, we pass another Israeli flag
flying outside Ooker’s place.

  Most of the crime he encounters is against property, John tells me, and really, there’s not much of that. “It’s like I’ve told the town council time and time again: We’re fortunate around here, because the guys who have their addictions, they all make good money,” he says. Many work on the water. “If that weren’t the case, you’d have a lot more break-ins.”

  John handles a domestic assault now and then, almost all involving alcohol or drugs. “By the time you leave, everybody—the victim and the suspect—is mad at you,” he says. “The worst thing about the job, the thing that hurts, is that there’s people I’ve known all my life, that I grew up with, and they’ll turn their head away when I come near.”

  Wearied by the job’s pressures, his predecessors have quit well short of John Wesley’s seven-plus years in the post. Ooker served as Tangier’s part-time cop in the early oughts, and he told me he didn’t enjoy it. “Somebody would call you about somebody else, and both of them your friends,” he said. “That wasn’t a good job, knowing everybody.” A later officer complained to the town council in 2006 that he was “swamped with phone calls” about “people drinking and causing trouble,” and from “people wanting to press charges against someone else,” then failing to follow through with their complaints. The island needed a second officer, he said, “because one person can’t do this job.”

  We rumble across the Heistin’ and turn north on Main Ridge Road. Like most of the islanders who’ve held the job, John took up police work after working the water. For fifteen years he worked with his older brother, Ed “Eddie Jacks” Charnock, then got his own boat, a thirty-eight-foot box-stern deadrise that he named the Valerie Faith, after his wife. “She’s helped me through some tough times,” he tells me. “If it weren’t for her, I don’t know how I’d have made it. It weren’t problems of habit or anything like that, but financial, mostly, trying to make a living on the water.