Marrow Island

by Alexis M. Smith

  “I’m Sister’s assistant,” she said.

  “What do you do for Sister, exactly?”

  She paused and looked out at the fields.

  “I keep track of the things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Physical things. What we buy, what we sell. Money. I communicate with the outside world.” She looked at me and shrugged. “It’s not very sexy, but someone has to do it. We’re not separatists, we’re still of this world, and I’m the one who deals with it.”

  The path forked and we took a mossy hill toward the fenced pasture and the barn, up against a stand of firs. It was still shady in places and mist lingered. Behind the trees I could see the smokestacks of the refinery, like dead old growth, ancient stobs from giant petrified trees. Katie followed my gaze.

  “Is it strange being here?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know. The smokestacks make me think of Stonehenge,” I said, “or Easter Island, you know? Places where manmade monuments outlived their time, their usefulness, their meaning. Hundreds of years from now, it’ll be mystical. If this place still exists, if humans are still here, they’ll think oil was our god.”

  Katie was quiet for a moment, then she squeezed my arm, trailed her hand down to mine, and took it in hers.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I wish you had come a long time ago.” There was a warmth in her voice I recognized. But something else, too. Something winnowing through her words, a charged current of feeling. Like she had a secret.

  She let go of my hand and we walked on.

  The towers disappeared from sight as we descended the path to the pasture. The damp chill clung to me, and I curled my fingers into my woolen palms in my pockets.

  There were two others in the barn already—an older woman with curly silver hair and a man no older than thirty—occupied with feeding and milking the goats, raking the dirt floor of droppings.

  “Usually, we don’t speak to each other during work prayer,” Katie said. “But we sometimes have visitors, so it’ll be okay. Just don’t be offended if no one talks to you.”

  Katie led one of the goats toward a stool near the doors.

  “This is Penelope,” Katie told me, dumping the contents of a cloth sack—some bread heels and apple cores—into a bucket hanging from the pen. Penelope sniffed out the food and shoved her nose in the bucket.

  “Have you ever milked a goat?” she asked.

  “No, but you know I’ll try anything.”

  “Here,” Katie said, gesturing to the stool. I sat.

  “Hold your hands like this,” she said, showing me the form, making a funnel of my right thumb and finger. “And squeeze like this, with your other fingers, careful to aim the milk at the pail.”

  Katie squatted behind me, an arm alongside mine, helping to aim, squeezing my hand in hers so that I could feel the pressure. Occasionally Penelope looked back at us, chewing, flicking her tail, scuffing the dirt with a hoof.

  “The idea of the work prayer,” Katie explained, her breath warm on my cheek and her curls bristling against my skin like wool, “is that we let our bodies move in the world before our minds get caught up in analyzing everything. I go from sleep to work easily now, but at first I had to stop thinking.”

  “You have to stop thinking?”

  “We don’t have to stop being intelligent or aware. I had to learn how to stop analyzing everything. We try to let thoughts come from our immediate actions. From being present and experiencing. So much of our thinking is involved with things we’ve already done and things we have yet to do. It’s almost impossible not to be thinking about some future moment or some past mistake or tragedy.”

  I looked up at her, but she kept her eye on the milking.

  At first I thought we’d never fill the metal pail. It seemed so big, and Penelope’s udder not especially large. It was strange, feeling the milk pass through, seeing it steam in the morning air. But the level rose steadily. Katie let me go and patted the goat with a gloved hand. I kept on, less sure of myself without her hands on me.

  “First thing in the morning, we try to be truly present in one thing, in one action, and consider it a prayer. It’s the practice of being in our bodies, our bodies in the world, our awareness on what is in our hands. Penelope has a work prayer, too. All the animals do. They endure a lot every day, to help sustain us. They give so much in their short lives.”

  She leaned down and whispered something to the goat, and I remembered again the woman who seemed to be talking to her hen earlier.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “What?”

  “What did you say to the goat just now?”

  “Oh.” She seemed startled. “I said, ‘I love you.’”

  “Do you tell all the animals that you love them?”

  She thought about this a moment, looked around the barn at the other goats. The silver-haired woman walked by with a pail of milk and smiled generously at me, my hands working awkwardly at Penelope’s teats. The tips of my fingers were warm again.

  “Yes. I do,” Katie said.

  We hauled our pails of milk out of the barnyard and up to the dairy house, Katie silent this time. I wanted to ask about her parents, about her husband, about what it was like being married, what other chores she did for work prayer, but wanting to observe the rituals, I was hesitant to break the silence for what amounted to chitchat. The dairy house was one of the newer cottages at the top of the hill. It was a squat, angular building with straw-bale walls and repurposed windows of varying shapes all along the south side. We walked round to the north side, where the roof slanted down and disappeared into the slope of a hill. The dairy was back there, cool, away from the sun. Katie helped me pour the milk into a stainless-steel vat inside the back door.

  We stepped inside to meet the silver-haired woman from the barn.

  “Good morning, Maggie,” Katie said, breaking the silence. “This is Lucie.”

  “Here’s our visitor,” she said, shaking my hand firmly. “Welcome. I saw there was someone else on the boat this morning? A friend of yours?”

  “A forest ranger,” I said. “We weren’t together; we just happened to be on the same boat.”

  “Ah.” She nodded and glanced at Katie. “People cruise by the island all the time, sometimes even stop on the shore, but it’s rare anyone wants to stay. People stayed away completely for a long time.” She paused, looked out the window toward the rise where the trees hid the smokestacks from view. “A long time,” she said again, and surveyed the work in front of her.

  “Is this where you make the cheese?” I asked.

  “The cheese?”

  “That they sell at the co-op on Orwell.”

  “Yes. We do it all here. Cheese, yogurt, kefir, butter . . .”

  The room looked like an ordinary kitchen, but there was a long worktable down the middle with a sink at one end that drained into a tub below.

  Katie saw me examining the sink and explained, “It’s for catching the whey. We use it for drinks and baking.”

  “We don’t waste anything, if we can help it,” Maggie said.

  She showed me around, pointing out an old metal suitcase with a few holes drilled in it, wires emerging from the holes. She opened the top of the suitcase to reveal jars of yogurt nestled in wool hats, with heating pads beneath.

  “We don’t actually use the refrigerator much, since most of our dairy is cultured and consumed quickly,” Maggie told me.

  “The electricity—it’s all solar?” I asked.

  “It is. We have to regulate temperature, for culturing, mostly in the winter months. When we first started out here, I was making yogurt near the wood stoves, the pellet stoves. We tried constructing a special cupboard above the cookstoves—which did not work, smoked yogurt, can you imagine?—consistency was much harder then.”

  She led me to the farthest corner of the north wall and opened a heavy wooden door revealing a long, low, cave-like sto
rage area for the cheese, dug directly into the hill. The shelves were full of cheeses in various stages of ripeness; the smell bloomed into the room, yeasty and acidic, with notes of hay and shit, like the barn. I whistled and Maggie smiled.

  “The magic of microbes. Where would the human race be without them?”

  “I know some food writers who would crawl all over each other to see this place. It’s very Old World, very European. You’ve never had anyone come out to write a profile?”

  Maggie chuckled. “I’m sure they don’t know we exist. Do they, Kate?”

  Katie joined us. “Food writers? No, not in my time.”

  “How long have you been selling at the co-ops and farmers’ markets?”

  “Only a few years now,” Maggie said. “We used to barter with it, but Kate convinced us to start selling, too.”

  “It’s useful to have cash” was all Katie said.

  “But”—I was thinking of the fields, the gardens we had passed, the bread and butter I had eaten earlier—“how are you able to raise food and animals here, without risk of contamination from the refinery site?”

  “That’s why you’re here, is it?” Katie asked, head cocked, half smiling. “To find out how we did all this?”

  She didn’t sound upset, but I felt accused of something.

  “You invited me. I came to see you and the island.” We looked at each other for a moment.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Of course.” She looked away.

  Maggie ducked into the cave, hunched slightly to avoid hitting her head, and returned with three small wheels of ripe cheese. She took them to the table and wrapped them in squares of striped cloth that looked like they had been cut from a men’s dress shirt. Katie pulled a basket from a wall hook.

  “It’ll be first meal soon,” she said. “The food is safe, don’t worry. And there’s solid science behind it. But it’s complicated. I want to show you.”

  She pulled four quart jars of yogurt from the fridge and put them in the basket, along with the cheese, and handed it to me.

  We walked a long path through the trees and along the bluff. I asked Maggie how long she had been on Marrow.

  “Since the beginning,” she said. “I met Janet—Sister J.—after the earthquake. I lost my house in West Seattle—slid right down the hill and into the house below. Two years later I was still living in temporary housing. I was working for the county at the time, as a public health nurse, working with mothers and babies. I’d met Janet at a community meeting and we’d become friends. She asked if I wanted to help with this project on an island in the San Juans. I thought I had seen it all, at that point. The city was noisy, dirty, traffic worse than ever, and people in need, everywhere you looked . . .” She stopped, breathing heavily (the hill was quite steep), looked around, took the basket on her other arm. “An abandoned island sounded like paradise.”

  “Weren’t you worried about being exposed? You’re a nurse—did you ask what you were exposing yourself to?” I was remembering the days after the quake when the fire just kept burning, its soot everywhere, the chemicals they dropped from planes over the trees, dumped into the water to disperse the oil slicks. Marrow was a smudge on the horizon that burned our eyes.

  “All the islands and the coastline, the waterways, everything was contaminated with something. Everything the water touched. You were probably scared; and your mom, too, after seeing it happen. She did the right thing, taking you away. But—” Maggie stopped short and squinted into the sun to look at me. She opened her mouth to answer but reconsidered, looking away. “No, I wasn’t scared. I could see what needed to be done,” she said, and walked on, a determined smile on her face.

  I let her go ahead a few paces and reached out for Katie’s arm.

  “How did she know about my mom?” I asked.

  “Nobody just shows up here. I knew you were coming. I told them you were coming.”

  “Told who? Everyone?”

  “There are only thirty-six of us; word gets around.”

  Most of these thirty-six souls were headed to the Gathering Place on the bluff north of the chapel. The sun was full in the sky now, midday bright, warming the higher elevations of the island. We filed past the whitewashed chapel, gleaming with sunlight, more lighthouse than church. Some walked together, chatting; others were solo. From all directions, in the clothes they had been working in, some of them looking weary, others bright-eyed. It reminded me of lunch hour on a college campus, how the bodies travel worn grooves, in rhythm. There’s an orchestration of movement when everyone follows the exact same clock, day after day.

  In decent weather, the first meal was usually served on the bluff. Up the slope I could see the roof of the outdoor kitchen. I asked Maggie more about the early days.

  “It was just like camping for a long time. There were about fifteen of us at first, with a few interns Janet picked up at Evergreen who came and went. We cooked everything over wood fires for a year or two, knowing it wasn’t sustainable in any way but not knowing what else to do—until we heard about a man in Oregon who was building solar ovens. This was before you could look up everything on the Internet—or at least, we couldn’t, you know, because we’d have to go to the library in Friday Harbor to do it—so a couple of the students we had then went down to Oregon to find out how to do it. They came back with the man himself. He wanted to see what we were doing here—wanted to see how we were managing . . .”

  She trailed off, out of breath, as we crested the hill and met the full view of the bluff and Bone Cove, named for the bleached logs the tide carried in and left scattered over the shore. I set my basket down and stepped closer to the rocky embankment that spilled down to the shore.

  “An orca washed up down there that first summer,” Maggie said.

  “Washed up—dead?”

  “Nearly dead. We couldn’t do anything for it. I got used to dead birds washing up, the fish, the crabs, the sea stars, even seals. But that whale, she did us all in. We had a goddamn funeral for her.”

  “That seems reasonable to me. Did you send her back out with the tide or . . . ?”

  “Oh, we sent her home.” She patted my back and picked up the baskets. “We hauled her up to the field with a tractor and let her rot. She’s still fertilizing our crops, that one.”

  I must have looked dubious, but Maggie just smiled. “Her bones are still up there.”

  “Did you ever find any human remains?” I asked. They both stopped short. “Washed ashore or on the island?”

  Maggie looked at Katie, then back to me.

  “No, we never did,” she said, her smile gone. “I’ll take these on up to the tables.” She hobbled a little as she walked, and I called after her.

  “Do you want some help?”

  “No thank you. You girls take your time.”

  I looked at Katie.

  “She never tells me those stories,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Not often. Must be your gift for getting the scoop.” She raised an eyebrow at me and smiled.

  “I don’t know about that.” I leaned into her. “I got fired.”

  “What?”

  “Laid off, technically, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t do it anymore. Or, I’m not working right now. I’m sort of—adrift, at the moment.”

  She didn’t say anything, just watched me sidelong while I stared out at the sea. The sunlight off the water made it look like it was on fire. Pain angled through my eye, and I could feel myself tightening around it. A gust of wind hit me, and I took in a lungful of it, closed my eyes. Arrows of light burned inside my eyelids. I felt Kate taking my hand. My body relaxed, a conditioned response to her that should have been lost years ago. The memory of a younger Katie next to me. The way our sweaty hair stuck together as we huddled under a blanket, the peaked tent it made stretched between our heads and our drawn-up knees. The way I could feel both of our hearts beat through the aftershocks. The way we listened to the waves reaching up and out of the sea. We
had heard them all, the cold fists of water pounding the shore. We had counted them under our breaths.

  We stood like this for a few silent minutes, and I was sure Katie was there with me—not there on the bluff, but there, under the blanket on our classroom floor.

  “Kate.” A man’s voice came from behind us, and she dropped my hand as she turned to answer. Maggie had moved on up the path, and a tall man stood in her place. He was our age, with a patchy red beard and dirty blond hair, face scuffed with dirt from work. Katie met him and they spoke softly, his head bowed to hers. She looked into his eyes and kissed him, then took his arm, leading him my way.

  We ate at a long picnic table under the open-air lodge-pole structure that served as both dining hall and outdoor kitchen. There was one straw-bale wall that buffered the prevailing southwesterly winds and protected the cooking and prepping areas. A rain barrel full of potable water, a stainless-steel worktable that looked like it had been lifted from a morgue, with two women working away at peeling potatoes for dinner. The solar ovens, three cubic feet of Mylar and wood that looked like little satellites, were out from under the trees against a whitewashed straw-bale wall that reflected more light back into them. Under cover in the kitchen were three rocket stoves made from repurposed beer kegs. Tucker told me these were fairly new—the kegs donated by a brewery in Friday Harbor—inspired by the prototype of a Scottish guy who had been living off the grid for several years and blogging about it.

  “So he’s not completely off the grid,” I said. “If he’s blogging, he must plug in sometimes.”

  Tuck and I were sitting across from each other at a long picnic table, bowls of a thick amaranth porridge steaming between us. He was thoughtful, well-spoken, with a sadness in his eyes and a smile that was disarming, like he hadn’t always been handsome or smart or well-spoken but had earned it over time, after years of not giving a damn. He had taken my hand like a vise when Katie introduced us, and I found myself wondering what she had told him about me. The way they all looked at me—curious, not unkind, but not exactly warm—I had the unsettled certainty of someone who knows less about everyone than they know about her.