By Miles Layton
TANGIER, Va. – Long before Jackie McCready won Marlene’s heart, he was the boy next door on Main Ridge Road, the one who played his music through an open window while she played hers.
“We used to play music for each other. That’s how close we were,” Jackie said. “We put our windows up. She’d play her kind of music, and I’d play my kind of music, so she could listen.”
On Aug. 15, the two celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary. They kept it simple, the way people do on Tangier. They went to Lorraine’s for seafood.
“We went to Lorraine’s and had good seafood,” Marlene said. “That was what I asked for.”
Marlene is 74 and Jackie is 78. They sat down recently in the living room of the home they have shared since 1971, a short walk from where each of them grew up. They finished each other’s stories and teased each other gently. Both were quick to say the credit for their marriage belongs to God.
When Marlene gave my wife Nicole and me a ride home the other night, I felt as if God wanted me to talk to her, Jackie — write a story about them. Hearing their story was a blessing.
The boy next door
Marlene was born on the island in 1952 into a family of watermen. Her father crab potted all summer and oystered in the fall. Winters were lean, and he traveled to Colonial Beach for work while island grocers carried families on a weekly bill until spring.
“As soon as spring came and Dad got his pots into water and started making any kind of money at all, all those bills were paid off, all of them,” she said.
Her childhood revolved around family and church. Her grandmother, Esther Wheatley, took her to Sunday school and kept her beside her in the pew. At school, her first-grade teacher gathered the children around a potbellied coal stove for lessons. On Thanksgiving, the family ate lunch on a dikeen, a raised hump of marsh, before heading home to the turkey.
“We’d either have a bologna sandwich or a can of Vienna sausage with crackers and something to drink, and that would be our lunch,” she said.
Jackie lived just down the road. She admired him from a distance, but he was four years older, which at that age might as well have been a generation.
“Jackie always was a handsome guy to me, but I never considered him growing up because he was four years older than I was,” Marlene said. “But when I turned 17, he took a little interest in me.”
Jackie remembers it as something that crept up on him. The summer before Marlene graduated, she went to summer school in Richmond. He said he spent it miserable and could not work out why.
“I was the most miserable person on Tangier, and couldn’t figure out what it was until one day it just hit me that it was her,” he said. “She had my heart, and I wanted to get it back. So I was there to meet her when she got off of the boat that day.”
Their first walk was a simple one around the island, hand in hand. At her gate, he kissed her good night.
“That’s what started it all,” Marlene said. “I think what he did is the first time I went with him, he touched my heart.”
Crown and wedding band
By Christmas 1969, Jackie had given her an engagement ring. He picked out the set from a catalog, and she has worn it every day since.
“I don’t take it off unless I have to,” she said.
Marlene graduated from Tangier’s school in June 1970. She had been chosen the island’s Homecoming Queen the year before and, at homecoming that summer, passed her crown to the new queen. The couple married the following week, on Aug. 15, 1970.
The wedding took place on the mainland, where the Rev. Hudson T. Hornsby, then pastor on Tangier, had a friend at Drummondtown United Methodist Church. From there, the newlyweds boarded a bus to Richmond. They met family who were heading to Florida for the week and were invited along. They left on a Saturday afternoon at 3:30.
“At the time, Walt Disney World wasn’t even there,” Marlene said, laughing.
It was the first of many modest trips. Another anniversary took them to Ocean City. A third took them as far as Norfolk, and Marlene said it was the first time the couple had been off the island together in ages.
“Oh, that was such a good time,” she said. “We loved each other. I’ll tell you, very much.”
A house with a story
The couple lived with Jackie’s mother for the first year. In 1971, Marlene’s father approached an elderly neighbor, Ray Crockett, about renting them his late parents’ house, just down the road.
The house had seen better days.
“It was sitting on the ground,” Marlene said. “The bugs were in here. The mice and rats had come in. Some of the windows were busted.”
The kitchen measured eight feet by thirteen. The washer, the refrigerator, the stove and the sink all fit into it, with a table doing double duty as a countertop. The children slept in the big front room, where it was warm. They fixed up the house a little at a time. Jackie did most of the work himself, with a carpenter called in for the bigger jobs.
“We were so happy,” Marlene said.
When Crockett decided to sell, he came to them first.
“Right away we said yes,” she said. “So it’s been a making of 55 years what we have now, and has the Lord ever blessed us, one thing right after another.”
Today the house has been raised up from the ground. It has honey oak floors, fresh paint and shutters that Jackie rehung and painted. Photographs of their sons and grandchildren cover the wall — an absolutely beautiful, warm and inviting home.
Boys, boats and time apart
The McCreadys have two sons. Philip, born in 1973, is a veterinarian in the Seattle area and has three children, including a daughter named Sienna. Charles Eric, born in 1980, is a registered nurse in Georgia, with a master’s degree, and has two children, Reagan, 11, and Oliver, known as Ollie. Eric was born after a fierce snowstorm, and Marlene remembers leaving the island on a Sunday to deliver him.
Jackie has worked the water all his life. He was an independent waterman, worked at the town’s sewer treatment plant, spent 15 years with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation taking schoolchildren out to learn about the environment, and later captained tugboats. The work often took him away for a week or more at a time. Marlene said she sometimes felt she was raising the boys alone, but she said the time apart did not hurt the marriage.
“Sometimes I wonder if it makes a marriage stronger, if you can have a little time from each other,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do it now because of our age and everything.”
When Jackie came home, he gave the family all of himself.
“When he’d come home on the weekend, he wanted to be right here with us all,” she said. “He was a good teacher. He taught them what was right, what was wrong, and you don’t hurt people’s feelings, and you don’t take their stuff.”
Her own rule for the boys was short. “I used to say as my boys were going out for the evening, ‘Don’t mess with anything that’s not yours.’ That stuck in their hearts and in their minds.”
Asked the secret to raising good children, Jackie did not hesitate. “Raise them up in the way of the Lord, and they will remember that path,” he said.
Not all peaches and cream
In 56 years, the couple has had their share of hard days. In August 2006, after months of pain that doctors could not explain, Jackie learned he had a tumor on his spine. The neurologist was leaving on vacation, but a cancellation opened a surgery slot for the morning of Aug. 15, their anniversary.
“That was an anniversary gift for us,” Marlene said. “For him to get out of this kind of pain.”
Coming out of anesthesia, Jackie asked how many years they had been married.
“I laughed,” she said. “He was almost yelling it.”
They have also lost Jackie’s brother and two sisters, along with Marlene’s father and grandparents. When asked what keeps a marriage going through such times, Marlene did not give a quick answer.
“Everything has not been peaches and cream. It never is in a marriage,” she said. “You have to take as well as give, and you also have to forgive. That’s number one. Forgiveness comes from the heart, and forgiveness comes from our Lord.”
Jackie said he agrees, and that love has deepened along the way.
“It has its ups and downs, but to be together 56 years is wonderful,” he said. “The longer we go, the more we love each other.”
Marlene said the two have grown to think alike. “If one doesn’t say it, I’m thinking it,” she said. “It’s funny how you almost become to think alike.”
Faith at the center
Both describe their faith as the foundation of the marriage, and both can tell you exactly when it began.
Marlene said she became a Christian as a nine-year-old girl. At Swain Memorial United Methodist Church, she stood by the flower pots at the front and sang her first solo, “Stepping in the Light.” She has been singing ever since.
“I don’t do it for entertainment,” she said. “I do it for Him.”
Jackie’s moment came after 35 years of marriage, in a hospital in Salisbury, Md. His sister and brother were patients there at the same time, and he was alone and worried. Then the elevator doors opened. A former Tangier girl, Bev Thorn, who is now a pastor’s wife, stepped off.
“I couldn’t even see her. All I could see was light,” Jackie said. “She must have seen the look on my face of how I was distraught.”
She told him he could not face it alone and urged him to ask God for help. Before he did anything else, she told him, he was going to call his wife.
“He said, ‘Are you sitting down?'” Marlene recalled. “And then he said, ‘I’ve been saved.’ Well, I bawled right out crying. I was clapping and thanking the Lord.”
Their days now begin with the Bible. Each morning, the two read Scripture together and pray for friends, for the day ahead and for their boys. When news of a death on the island reaches them, they stop what they are doing, turn off the television and pray.
“We are very, very dependent on our Lord to see us through,” Marlene said. “Without prayer, without hope, we would have nothing.”
Jackie speaks of his faith with humility.
“I know the Lord is still working on me, because I still see some of those things in me where I’m not doing exactly right,” he said.
A place that notices
Swain Memorial, built in 1897, remains the center of their island life. Marlene sings in the choir, which practices Wednesday evenings at six before the midweek service. She said the church is not as full as it was when she was a girl, and she misses seeing children go to the altar to pray. But she says the island still understands faith the old way.
“If you’re a Christian on Tangier, they know it by our works that we do, whether in church or out of church, by our attitude,” she said. “Everybody is watching.”
When a hurricane threatens, the McCreadys lock up the house and leave on the big boats, trusting the Lord to look after the rest.
“I feel like we’re sitting right in the palm of Jesus’s hands, of God’s hands,” Marlene said.
Jackie has sometimes wondered about moving to Georgia to be closer to their younger son and grandchildren. Marlene is not going, and neither of them seems to think he will either.
“I feel we’re very blessed,” she said.
Still the one
Asked whether they would do it all over again, neither needed to think.
“Definitely,” Jackie said.
“I’d marry him all over again,” Marlene said.
Jackie said marriage rescued him from the pull of the crowd. He was more follower than leader, he said, and when he married Marlene, he found something worth working for.
“If I hadn’t married her, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” he said.
On the wall behind them, photographs hang in frames: two sons, five grandchildren and, here and there, a young couple on a wedding day in 1970. The ring he chose from a catalog all those years ago is still on her finger.
