Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

“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 demurred, feeling I didn’t really need to. She seemed confident, proud. Not at all unsure that what they were doing was impressive.