Marrow Island

by Alexis M. Smith

  After so many years, I didn’t know what to expect from Marrow. The refinery fire had burned for days, and its smoking ruins were all we could see from our shores. The communities on all the islands had been affected by the quake, but the petroleum and the flame retardants and oil-dispersing chemicals had toxified Marrow’s groundwater, its soil. Everyone living on the island had come to Orwell or gone to one of the other islands. There had been efforts at cleanup, then settlements with property owners, but when we moved away the following winter, Marrow Island had been abandoned.

  Before Katie decided to join the Colony, the ruins and abandonment were how I thought of the whole island. I had nightmares for years in which I was there, searching for my dad, who was somehow still alive but lost, unable to find his way out. I was the only one who knew he was still there, but I was unable to save him—he was always just a few more feet away or under rubble I couldn’t lift. In my waking life, I pushed the islands out of my thoughts.

  Coombs cut the engine and threw a rope out to Katie on the dock. I watched her tie us fast. She seemed as worn as the pilings, patches of dirt and holes here and there in her clothes, weathered hands. When she stood up and looked at me, her eyes shone, her cheeks were rosy under her freckles. She had crow’s feet, deep lines in her forehead—it was obvious she worked outside—and strands of silver in her auburn curls, like her mom, who had also gone gray in her late thirties. Still beautiful, but more confident, stronger, as if she had filled into her potential self. She radiated joy.

  “And here’s the welcome party,” Coombs said. “Hallo, Miss Kate! I brought you the Orwell folks I promised you. They smelled fresh when they came aboard, but this one”—he gestured to me—“might need some airing out.”

  Katie laughed. “You could never hold your breakfast, could you?”

  “I didn’t eat breakfast,” I told her.

  “Never go to sea on an empty stomach, Lu. You know that.”

  I shrugged Carey’s coat from my shoulders and handed it back to him. He looked like he needed it. His cheeks were bright red, his nose running. I reached in my vest pocket for a tissue and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” I said to him.

  He took the tissue and nodded, wiped his nose.

  “You’ll come back on Monday morning to pick me up again?” I asked as Coombs helped me down to the dock.

  “I’ll be back for the both of you. Be down here at sunrise.” Then he turned to Katie. “I have mail for you, Kate.”

  Carey and I looked at each other. We would be going back together, too. How much of me could he handle? I’d probably puke on the way back. I couldn’t tell if he was picturing the same scenario.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to find another boat?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I dropped my bags on the dock as Katie took two large parcels from Coombs. She scanned the return addresses briefly, then set the boxes down next to my bag.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said, and hugged me tight.

  Her body was warm. I squeezed her back, feeling the strength in her limbs and the bones of her sternum and spine. The dock swayed; I squeezed harder, for ballast.

  When we pulled apart, she said, “You look like you.”

  “You look like a new woman,” I said.

  “Thank god,” she said. She looked askance at Carey, who had been pretending not to watch, shrugging his coat back over his shoulders, warming up. “Excuse us,” she said to him, “we haven’t seen each other in a long time.”

  “Carey McCoy.” He put out his hand. He seemed to shift into his uniform. His smile stiffened, became official. I compared it to the smile he almost gave me at the clerk’s office: his smile had been deputized. He seemed on his guard.

  “Kate,” she replied, taking his hand firmly.

  “Carey and I are new friends,” I said. He might have blushed. I cleared my throat. It was still raw from the vomit, my mouth full of saliva.

  “I see you’re from the Forest Service,” Katie said, trying to sound nonchalant, but with an energy that told me she might be on guard, too. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a ranger out here.”

  She looked back and forth between us, gauging our familiarity. Her smile never disappeared, but there was a wariness in her eyes. I knew that whatever her outward expression, she was scrutinizing every detail. Carey apologized and explained he was new to the post, but that he’d be out more often over the next few weeks and bringing colleagues from Fish and Wildlife eventually. Katie nodded.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll have a lot to do at the park. You’ll have to let me introduce you, first,” she said.

  “Introduce me?” Carey asked. He looked at me.

  Coombs was setting off again and gave a shout and a wave. We watched him and waited for the sound of his motor to fade.

  “This way.” Katie set off up the dock onto the shore and we followed.

  Climbing up the bank behind Katie, I tried to get my bearings. I could feel the torpor from my lack of sleep, the early boat ride. I was desperate for a cup of coffee and some toast. Carey asked how I was feeling.

  “Better,” I said, and tried to believe it.

  We tramped up a gravel path, winding through boulders weedy with vetch and bird-scattered mussel shells, the rocks slick with last night’s mist. The sun broke through the clouds and lit up the tree line behind the chapel. Gulls wove in and out of the long early morning shadows.

  At the top of the embankment, I looked out over the water we had just crossed. Orwell wasn’t visible from here, only Haro Strait, and the distant mainland. Inland, beyond the chapel, a rooster crowed, sparrows called, and the tide flowed symphonically. Otherwise, it was quiet; no sounds of people, machinery, industry. Inland, the landscape was serene, prosaic. After all the nightmares, all the years evading thoughts of Marrow, it might as well have been the island I knew before the quake. I wanted to feel relief, but I couldn’t, quite. I knew better. I knew that beneath the surface, tremendous changes had taken place.

  Carey made small talk with Katie, and I listened to her responses, to her voice, the same voice I had always known.

  “Nineteen ninety-six,” she was saying, to the question of when Marrow Colony started.

  “And how long have you been here?” Carey asked her.

  “Since 2005,” she said. She looked back at me. “I dropped out of Evergreen without telling anyone. Lucie went all the way to Olympia on the train to surprise me for my birthday, and I wasn’t there. My roommates gave her all the stuff I left behind.”

  Carey glanced back at me.

  “Do you still have any of that stuff, Luce?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I burned it all.”

  “She’s kidding,” Katie told Carey. She could always tell when I was lying.

  “We don’t have coffee around,” Katie told me. “Not unless someone trades for it at the farmers’ market or something.”

  I stared into the cup she had handed me. The steaming brew looked like coffee; it smelled smoky and bittersweet. I had poured goat milk and honey into it immediately. But it wasn’t past my lips before I knew it was not coffee. Carey and I sat at a round wooden table in the kitchen of the larger cottages, which was a sort of communal space for meetings and record keeping. Through an archway in the living room was a small office with a very old computer and dented filing cabinets.

  “It’s roasted chicory and dandelion root,” Katie said. “Like the Civil War soldiers used to drink. It’s nutritionally dense: magnesium, potassium, phosphorus. You won’t miss the caffeine.”

  I told her I doubted that but drank anyway.

  She laughed, her back to me, cutting bread from a dense little loaf on the counter. Carey had already swallowed half his cup. He seemed anxious to get on with his work.

  “Sister J. will be here any minute,” Katie said. She put a plate of bread and a crock of soft, pale butter on the table. I h
elped myself, spreading the butter thickly over the bread. It was toothsome and sour, like a Danish rogbrød, dark and moist and flecked with seeds, and the butter was briny and tart. I ate the small piece in three bites and washed it down with the chicory brew. Carey watched me, sidelong, and I pretended not to notice.

  I looked out the small window next to us. People passed on the worn path between this house and the fields, the woods. They carried tools of various sorts, buckets. One woman carried a chicken under her arm, stroking its head. At one point she leaned down to whisper something to it. The room was barely lit; no one noticed us peering at them from behind the dark glass.

  “You seem worn out. The boat did you in, huh?” Katie asked me.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not that. I just didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “No?”

  I hesitated. I was still uneasy about what I had found at Rookwood.

  “I guess I’m just too used to the city now.”

  Katie narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing me, like she knew there was more. But she smiled.

  “You’ll get used to it before you know it. Then you’ll go back to Seattle and have to put in earplugs.”

  There were loud stomps at the side door—boots shaken of soil or sand—and a deep, laborious cough and clearing of throat. In the morning quiet, the sounds amplified, reverberated through the wood of the door and the plaster walls; the table shook lightly on its uneven legs. I had the uncanny feeling of a child who has woken a sleeping grandfather, a surly, unappeasable patriarch. As the door opened, I was looking at the top of the door frame, waiting for someone tall and burly to enter—like a lumberjack. But Sister J. was short—maybe five feet two inches—and solid, but gaunt, swallowed by an enormous gray hoodie.

  She closed the door and stood with her hands clasped behind her, gazing brightly at us, looking intently at Carey, then me. Then she closed her eyes and took a long breath, seeming to breathe us in, her nostrils flaring a bit and her chest rising to meet her oversize clothing. When she opened her eyes, she looked to Katie and nodded firmly.

  “It’s a good day,” she said, her voice deep, marled by time. She might be mistaken for a man over the phone or on the radio.

  Sister J. sat and reached for one of my hands and one of Carey’s. Her hand was warm just up to the tips, then icy cold at the fingernails; she squeezed. It was a sort of handshake. Neither Carey nor I looked away from her or spoke at all. I didn’t know how to speak or what to say. Katie introduced us, but the usual greetings and niceties seemed unnecessary. Sister J. looked at us intently, this small, compact woman, with alert blue eyes and large, stained, crooked teeth offered in a narrow smile. She didn’t seem surprised to see a park ranger sitting at the table. Coombs had said on the dock that he and Katie had spoken last night. He must have told them we were both coming.

  “I’ve invited Ranger McCoy to Sunday dinner, Sister,” Katie indicated Carey with a nod and wiped her hands on a towel. “He’ll be on the island through the weekend.”

  She gave Sister J. a cup of chicory coffee and sat down in the fourth seat at the table. But then her face went still, and she stared out the window, like she was suddenly somewhere else in her mind—past or future? Possibly someplace present but not here.

  “Call me Carey; I’m not sure I’ll answer to Ranger McCoy.” Carey shuffled his feet under the table, pulled his long legs in under him. He was gathering himself to go.

  “Carey, do please come share a meal with us anytime, and let us know if you need anything. The state of things at the park isn’t . . .” Sister J. trailed off, looked upward like the words she needed might be somewhere near the ceiling. “Marrow’s still a ragged place. We’ve been the only ones here for so long. It is a daily practice, an hourly practice, in loving. Marrow must be loved to be known.”

  This last word, spoken with some consideration, seemed to wake Katie, whose eyes focused on the room again, looked to Sister J.

  “You’ll see,” she said, speaking to Carey and me, but still looking at Katie. The two of them locked eyes and Katie smiled, but faintly. She clearly wanted to say something but held her tongue, either for us or Sister J.

  “You picked the perfect time to come. We have our harvest supper on Sunday,” Sister J. said, looking at us again. “After all your work in the park, you’ll need a good hot meal and some company. And we’ll keep you busy, too, Lucinda.”

  “Lucie—” I said.

  “Lucie.” She nodded.

  Carey said of course he would come on Sunday and thanked Katie and Sister J. Then he pulled on his pack and picked up his sleeping roll and took Katie’s directions out to the road and on to the park. I watched him hike the distance and disappear into the trees.

  A migraine was circling my right eye.

  Every morning at Marrow Colony began with work prayer. They prayed not on their knees in the chapel, not beside their beds or before breakfast with head bowed, but working at the chores of the farm, with their hands and bodies. Everyone had different tasks that rotated day by day, so everyone was intimately involved in the various labors of the Colony. Today was Katie’s day to milk the goats. She was taking me with her, though she was already an hour late.

  “Everyone rises at dawn or before,” she told me. “Unless they’re sick. We don’t really follow clocks; we follow the circadian rhythm of the island. When the birds wake up, we do too. It takes some getting used to, but after a while, you just wake up at the right time.”

  She was talking as she looked me over in the mudroom and, grabbing a pair of rubber boots, squatted down to fold the tops down for me, shoving the leg of my jeans in. I felt like a child, like the mornings when my parents layered and outfitted me at the kitchen door before school, back before global warming had set in, when we still had harsh winters on the islands, when every day was a different kind of wet. It wasn’t like that in the Northwest anymore; rainy seasons came and went in weeks, not months. Warmer temperatures reigned. It had rained hard last week, dropping an inch of rain all over Puget Sound, but only for about twenty-four hours. Just enough to saturate the soil and send up the petrichor for a day, remind us of the earthy musk we used to take for granted. I looked outside: the day would be pleasant by 11 a.m. Katie handed me a hat and a pair of fingerless wool gloves and led me out to the goats. I left the rest of my things in the meetinghouse. We would collect them after breakfast and she would walk me to the cottage, where I would sleep for the next two nights.

  From the house we walked away from the shore and the chapel, up a worn footpath in the grass. Katie pointed out the Colony’s different buildings and features.

  “That house over there, the plot it’s on belonged to a woman whose husband died in the Civil War. She came all the way across the country, then got on a boat to the islands and staked a claim on Marrow while Britain and the U.S. were still fighting over who owned the San Juans. If any man—British or American—crossed the fence line, she’d come out of her hut with her dead husband’s musket and shoot his hat off.”

  We looked over the cottage, which was clearly more sophisticated than a homesteader’s hut.

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Martha Glover,” she said, looking at me. “She eventually remarried, had several children who took over the farm.”

  We kept on. To the left behind the chapel on the broad sunny hill was the orchard—apple and pear, mostly, but a few oddities like quince, mulberry, and persimmon—and among them, the beehives. Katie explained that the beehives were one of the most important parts of the farm.

  “Establishing a healthy bee population was a struggle for years. Now we finally have the colonies going strong, pollinating the crops and the native plants, producing enough honey that we sell it at co-ops around the islands. In the summer I go to a couple of the farmers’ markets. I’ll show you what we do—I’m sure it’ll be a really modest operation, compared to things you’ve reported on.”

  “I’m sure it’s more than that,” I dem
urred, feeling I didn’t really need to. She seemed confident, proud. Not at all unsure that what they were doing was impressive.

  There were more hives near the largest of the vegetable gardens—where they grew squashes, beans, corn, amaranth, and hay. Beyond those, closer to the trees, were three cottages like the one we’d just left, separated by quarter-acre plots, weathered but tidy, with foxglove and echinacea still in full bloom, herb gardens between, along with large driftwood and flotsam sculptures—most taller than me—in the shapes of animals and people.

  “My husband is the artist. His name is Tuck.”

  “Your husband?” I felt my cheeks burn. It had never occurred to me that she would be married.

  “Not legally. We had a ceremony here. My parents didn’t even come. I tried to write you, to tell you, but the letter came back to me.”

  “When was this?”

  “Four years ago.” She looked at me with concern. “I’m sorry.”

  I tried to imagine the man she would marry—she had always said she didn’t believe in monogamy, let alone being someone’s wife. “I’ve missed a lot,” I said.

  “You’ll meet him soon. I think you’ll like him—he’s a lot like some of the people you’ve written about. The activists.” She smiled, forgetting that I had never appreciated her taste in men.

  Other colonists, men and women of varying ages, were here and there, silently working, backs bent, arms laden, pushing wheelbarrows, using hoes, baskets in hand, some of them bundled up against the morning air, others in shirtsleeves. No one spoke, but anyone we passed looked me in the eye and smiled.

  “Tuck and I share a house with Elle and Jen. Elle is our herbalist. She runs the apothecary and assists Maggie, the midwife. Jen’s our compost and soil expert.”

  “Everyone has a specialty?”

  “Everyone has an assigned job, yes, but we all take part in the various jobs around the farm with our morning work prayer.”

  “What’s your job?” I asked.