Marrow Island (10 page)

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.

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.

“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.