Gordon Whitlock, the father of Bradford, came down the dock at a walk that was almost a run, a gray haired man in a blue blazer with a ring of keys in his hand. He stopped at the stern of the Ida Mae, breathing hard, and he looked up at me over the rail. “Mrs. Crockett, please forgive my son,” he said. “He was trying to keep a secret that is mine.” He held up the little brass key. “I put a padlock on that cabin this morning because I did not want anyone to see what is inside until the cake. I was going to give it to you at the toast.”
He climbed aboard, with my hand to steady him, and slid the key into the padlock. It was stiff, and he worked it with his thumb. The hasp fell away. I pulled the little door open myself, and the smell of old diesel and varnish rolled out, and I stood in the cabin of the boat of my husband. On the bench, on a folded quilt, sat a round brass compass the size of a dinner plate, polished to a glow. Beside it leaned a plaque of walnut and brass, engraved. Eldridge Crockett. Waterman. He brought them all home.
“Mrs. Crockett, in 1974, my father was a young man in a rented boat off Tangier when a squall came up,” Gordon said, in a rough voice. “The engine quit. The sea was so high that the Coast Guard would not come out. Your husband took a line to him in the dark, in a workboat no bigger than this, and towed him in for six hours.” He swallowed. “My father never forgot it. He told me the name all my life. When I learned that my son was marrying your granddaughter, I found that compass at an auction in Crisfield. It is from the first boat of Eldridge. I had it restored.”
A padlocked boat cabin on a wedding dock gave one grandmother the afternoon to bring her granddaughter home to the island of Tangier.
I stood in the little cabin with the compass in my two hands, and I could not speak for a long time. The brass was cool and heavy, and it had the faint scratches of fifty years of salt. When I could speak, I gave my terms in a voice that carried across the harbor, the way it always has. “Young man, I am not taking this boat out today,” I said. “I am going to take this compass up to the reception, and I am going to put it on the head table. And my picture is going to be taken with my granddaughter, in the front, where the family stands.” Gordon bowed his head.
Pamela came down the dock then, in her silk dress and heels, with her face pinched and the wind pulling at her hair. She had seen the plaque in my hands, and the compass, and her husband standing in the cabin. She understood at once, I think, how small she had made herself. “Ida Mae, this is a wedding,” she said, sharply, to cover it. “You are making a scene.” She reached out, and grabbed the edge of the compass, as if to take it from me. But Gordon stepped between us, a quiet, soft man who had never once raised his voice in thirty years of marriage. “Pamela,” he said. “Enough.”
She stood there with her hand still extended. Behind her, down the whole length of the dock, two hundred guests stood in the sun with their glasses, listening. I watched the stiffness go out of her shoulders, bit by bit, like air from a tire. She looked at the compass, and at the plaque, and at her own hand. “I told the photographer to keep you out,” she said, in a whisper I could hardly hear. “I said it because I was afraid you would make us look common.” She took a breath. “Ida Mae, you are the only person on this dock who is not. I am so ashamed.”
Courtney had been standing at the end of the dock in her wedding dress with her bouquet crushed in both hands. Now she picked up her skirts and came running down the boards, and threw her arms around my neck so hard that I nearly went over the rail. “Grandma, I am sorry,” she sobbed. “I looked at my shoes. I let her say it, and I looked at my shoes.” I held her. I told her I knew. I told her that a girl who has been taught two ways to behave sometimes chooses the wrong one in a hurry, and that the right one was still waiting for her.
The money consequences were quiet. Gordon insisted on paying half of the fifty two thousand dollars for the wedding, out of the car wash business, and he would not take no for an answer. Pamela wrote me a check for the other half and a letter of three pages, which I keep in a drawer. They endowed a scholarship at the school on Tangier in the name of Eldridge, for the child of a waterman who wants to study navigation or marine science. The compass went home with me in a quilt. I put it on the wall of my kitchen, above the table, where I can see it from the stove.
In the name of my husband, Eldridge, who passed in 2021 and who towed a stranger through a storm in a boat no bigger than a bathtub, I started the Peeler Pot Fund. It pays for medical care, legal help and counseling for retired watermen and their families in Accomack, Northampton and Northumberland counties, and for their wives. In the first year, we helped seventy two families. A waterman of eighty, in rubber boots, sat in the office with his cap in his hands and said, “My grandson says I am in the way.” I brought him a cup of coffee, and a chair beside the window.
In the family photograph, I am in the middle. The photographer, a pleasant young man from Richmond, set up the shot on the lawn above the dock at five in the afternoon. Courtney stood on my right and Bradford on my left. Gordon and Pamela stood behind us, with her hand lightly on my shoulder, and the brass compass sat in my lap, catching the light. Behind us the Ida Mae rocked at her mooring, and the whole bay lay silver and quiet. The man counted to three. I did not smile, as a waterman does not. But my eyes did, and everyone could see.
