Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

Everyone seemed to have a part, every note memorized. Occasionally I could hear a particular voice, distinct from the rest, a higher harmony, a vibrato. At other times, certain phrases and notes— prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love— then every voice seemed combined into one. Once or twice I suppressed a shiver — all of our bodies connected, the rhythm flowing through us, rising and falling in waves. I felt something move in me. It felt like joy and also like surrender.

When the song ended, the reverberation through the room remained and no one moved until it had passed, until we could plainly hear the waves again, the wind picking up outside. We held hands a moment longer, then released and sat. That sound of the congregation sitting, the shushing of all the clothing folding into limbs, the shuffling of feet.

We passed tureens of the mushroom stew around the table, and chunks of the bread, still warm, soft goat cheese with herbs, a salad of berries and greens, the rabbit stew, and bottles of wine. There was little conversation at first, just here you go and thank you, but the faces and bodies around were warm and glad. After we had taken our first bites, our first tastes of the briny stew, the bitter greens, the quiet lifted and there was conversation, laughter. The lines around Carey’s eyes had not softened, but he held my gaze and smiled.

I listened to the wind, watched it blow clouds past the moon through a break in the trees. I tried to convince myself I didn’t have to pee, that I could wait until morning. I had to be up early again, to meet Coombs at the dock. I had drunk too much elderberry wine and my head was heavy. I threw the blankets off and grabbed my sweater and slipped on my sandals.

The moon was bright, but there were more shadows than I anticipated. Even with a flashlight, it was easy to become disoriented. I walked nervously down the path to the little vault toilet between my cabin and the next two. It was still warm in the loo, even with the breeze coming in an open window, flowered muslin curtain billowing. Frantic wind chimes. I heard voices, too, but coming from the woods behind me. As I walked back, ears tuned to the murmur of the voices, sometimes carried, sometimes obscured by the wind, I saw lights, deep in the trees. I turned off the flashlight and I crept back to the cottage door, watching them. Many lights, but not beams, more like the flames of candles. Oil lamps?

On the walk back from the supper, Katie had told me they had a ritual for the dying, that they gave them a tea of herbs and mushrooms to help them on their way.

“On their way?” I had asked.

“To the lights,” she had said.

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe you’ll see, someday,” she had said.

“Have you seen them?”

“We all have.”

“How?”

“We open our minds to them.” She had sighed, like she was tired of my questions.

I watched the lights move between the trees, listened to the occasional strand of voice. Were they performing a ritual out there? I didn’t want to let them out of my sight, but they flickered and vanished.

In the morning Katie woke me at dawn. She handed me a cup of tea and a cloth napkin with some bread and butter wrapped in it. She didn’t speak but indicated with a silly pantomime that I should eat before the boat so I wouldn’t get sick. The water was always worse on an empty stomach.

We made it to the dock as Coombs was pulling in, Carey already waiting. He was unshaven, clothes more rumpled after his second night at Fort Union. Neither of us had showered in two days. I was looking forward to a hot shower and flushing toilet. Katie handed me a note on the dock and kissed my cheek. We pulled away and I watched her walk up the dock, getting smaller.

The note said, I’ll call you soon. xo, K.

SPOKANE, WASHINGTON

MAY 7, 2016

THE SISTERS KNOW I’m coming, but when I get to the Provincial House and tell them who I am, whom I have come to see, they tell me Janet needs to rest for the night. She’s been given a sedative. I turn to leave — to find a motel closer to town. Maybe a bar. And the sister puts a hand on my arm.

“You are welcome to stay here.” She’s already leading me through the entry — polished brick floors that I think must be very dangerous for elderly nuns with canes and walkers. “We know you’ve traveled a long way, and Sister will be so glad to see you in the morning,” she says, patting my arm, not letting go, so that I wonder who is supporting whom.

She’s afraid of these floors, too, I think.

Though she looks younger than some of the others. They walk alone through the halls. All gray and silver and white-headed. Some mostly bald. A couple wear short blue wimples with rough cotton smocks. Old school, pre — Vatican II attire. Maybe they just like not having to brush their hair or choose from their three dowdy flowered dresses or blouse/elasticized poly skirt outfits for the day. They shuffle along to the chapel from all directions for evening prayers. There’s a black box — like a giant mailbox — at the start of the drive to the Provincial House, where people can leave their sorrows, their problems, for the sisters to pray on their behalf. But this is where the retired Sisters of the Holy Family go, when they can’t physically be out living the Gospel in the world much anymore. Put out to pasture here, in this building on the Palouse above Spokane. Part convent, part senior center. Staffed entirely by other, slightly younger sisters.

I might get a little thrill out of those notes, if I were the sisters. Glimpses of life’s dramas outside these walls.

We turn down a hallway, through swinging wooden doors, the polished brick giving way to linoleum, also polished to a gleam. The lights are low here, like in some high-end grocery stores, and I wonder if this is another trap, like the shiny floors, intended to steal a few minutes here and there from life by slowing a body down.

“What’s your name?” I ask my guide.

“Oh, I’m Sister Rosemarie,” she says, and then, face turned up to my ear, as if it’s a secret, “But you can call me Sister Rosie.”

“Okay,” I say, and she nods and laughs like she knows something I don’t know.

She leads me out a door and across a walkway lined with roses and a courtyard with a tall marble statue of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by flowers — and I realize that they would have celebrated May Day recently, crowning the Mary with flowers. I crowned Mary in the May Day Procession in high school, no longer a virgin myself (not that anyone knew). Down the path we come to a ranch-style house, set back in the trees, and Sister Rose releases my arm. I follow her inside, and she leads me down some stairs into a carpeted lower level that smells exactly like a church basement: dustless, vacuous.

“You can sleep here,” Sister says, showing me a small furnished bedroom off a sitting room with windows that look out onto the forested hillside. There are crosses everywhere, made of straw and wood and brass and macramé. On every wall.

“Usually the visiting priests stay here,” she tells me, “but there aren’t any right now. Father Thomas comes up from the university for services these days.” I look at the twin bed, made up neatly in a patchwork denim quilt like a little boy’s room.

She shows me to a bathroom nearby, and there is a cross above the toilet. She opens a cabinet to show me a clutch of generic toothbrushes in cellophane wrappers and a tube of Aim.