I got down on my knees to help her. Most of the graves had the small, wavy-capped brown mushrooms, but others, the older ones, had only a few shaggy-topped white and brown fruits. I gathered as many as I could hold, then crawled over to Katie and added them to her basket.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“Medicine,” she said, not looking up. “At the end of life, they help with pain.”
She stopped, sat on her butt, and stared at Sarah’s grave. I joined her.
“Sarah had cancer?”
“Yes.”
“Does Sister have cancer?”
She nodded.
“This is fucked up, Katie.”
“You have no right to judge,” she said, shaking her head calmly. “No one knows when or how they’ll die—no matter what choices they make. The Big One could wipe us out tomorrow, thousands of us at once. We’re killing ourselves slowly with carbon emissions, melting glaciers. At least we want to do something with the time we’ve got.”
“But you’ve been selling honey from your bees, milk from your goats, eggs from your chickens. Do the people buying these things know the risks they’re taking?”
“We only started doing that recently. The water and soil samples for the last few years have shown levels of heavy metal contamination better than soil in sample gardens off the island. Water from the wells has come up clean, again and again in the last two years. Cleaner than water you drink in Seattle. It’s working. It worked.”
“So you were crying because the experiment worked and you have no regrets?”
She picked up her basket and stood up.
“Just because I have no regrets doesn’t mean I can’t grieve what we’ve lost and what we’re losing.”
She was standing over me, crying again. I reached a hand out to hers, but she wouldn’t hold it. She shook it off, wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“Katie, I don’t know what to do with all this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I came here.” I stopped, my fingers digging into the dirt and grass. “I thought I could write about this place and find some way to be okay with it—with what happened here.”
“And what, Lucie? What? Now you can’t write your stirring memoir? Your redemption in the wilderness piece? Did we fuck that up for you?”
I saw in her eyes a Katie I had known before—one I didn’t like to remember. There was pity and disgust. And fear. This was the Katie who would say anything to hurt me, to see how much she could say to me before I walked away. This was the Katie who had looked me in the eye when we were eighteen and told me that she had never loved me the way I loved her, that she had only been practicing with me.
“I know something about Tuck,” I said.
She was silent for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“I know that his name is Alex James Tucker.”
She stared down at me, bleary-eyed.
“Okay,” she said. “What are you trying to say?”
I found it hard to believe that in a place with so many secrets, she wasn’t also in on this one.
“I’m saying I know who he is. And I think you knew I would find out, eventually.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know anything. He’s not the man they say he is. He didn’t hurt anyone. They were set up.”
“I get it, Katie. The government has it in for radical environmentalists—you don’t have to tell me.”
“You won’t say anything.”
“There are too many secrets here, Katie. The Colony has been operating under the radar for a long time. If you know what happened to Jacob Swenson, you need to tell me. They’re looking for him, and it won’t be long before they come asking you questions.”
“You’re sitting there by my child’s grave, accusing me of keeping secrets? Killing our landlord?”
I looked down at my hands. I was still holding one of the mushrooms, which had turned blue under the pressure of my fingers.
“Where is he? What happened to him?”
“We didn’t do anything, Lucie. We have no reason to hurt him.”
I stood up.
“I can’t unknow any of this, Katie. I don’t know how to help you or the Colony. I’m just worried about you—you can’t stay here.” I gestured to Sucia’s grave.
She turned abruptly and started walking between the graves back to the path. I followed.
“Katie, please,” I called after her.
She walked faster.
“I’m sorry.” I was crying. I would’ve said anything to stop hurting her. “I won’t say anything.” I knew I was lying when I said it.
She stopped in her tracks but didn’t face me. She let me catch up to her.
“I love you,” I said.
She had stopped crying. She took my hand and started walking.
“I love you, too.”
We were both lying.
Tuck was sitting on the steps of their cottage, waiting. When she saw him, Katie looked back at me, her face a calm veil. She dropped my hand and adjusted her basket. He waved as we came closer, stood up to hug Katie. He didn’t look angry, just grim. He didn’t seem like the violent type. I was willing to believe that he had been young and stupid, involved in a direct action campaign gone awry, and that he hadn’t intended for anyone to get hurt.
Katie would tell him, of course.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told him, holding out my hand. Katie pulled away from him.
“We appreciate that,” he said, and pulled me in for a hug. His affection—if that’s what this was—was disorienting.
“Sister wanted me to ask you to have tea with her,” he told me. “She’s waiting for you in her cottage.”
I wanted to be alone for a few minutes, to sort my thoughts. Part of my brain was trying to find a way out of knowing what I knew; the other wanted to try to get a cell signal and call Carey. But I didn’t know what I’d tell him. That there had been a funeral? That they had a burial ground? It was unnerving, yes, but I didn’t actually know if it was illegal. They were skirting the county coroner and avoiding the scrutiny that would no doubt come their way if a medical professional autopsied their dead. There were probably regulations on where cemeteries could be, and how bodies had to be prepared for interment. When I thought about it, their method made more sense to me than embalming or cremation: let the mushrooms do their work and turn the bodies into dirt.
I just wanted to hear the sane, clear voice of someone who wasn’t drinking the Marrow Colony tea. I checked my phone. It was still charged, but I had no signal.
Sister’s cottage was nearest the chapel. It was easily the oldest structure still standing on the island. The front door was open so I stepped inside. I could hear rattling in the kitchen and found Sister loading a tray with three cups and a teapot. She was stronger than her frame suggested, but I offered to take it from her when she turned around, and she passed it to me with a gracious smile.
“That’s kind of you,” she said. She followed me into the living room, where I set the tray on a coffee table between a loveseat and two armchairs. “Thank you so much for coming to see us.” The authority of her voice, the undulating rhythm of the oratory, was gone. I sat on the loveseat.
“Us?”
“Maggie will be back from her walk soon.”
I nodded. I couldn’t remember if someone had told me they lived together or not.
“I’m so sorry for the loss of your friend, Sister.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. “She must have meant a lot to all of you.”
She watched me very carefully. “Some people come into your life at just the right moment, and without any awareness of it themselves, they bring something you never knew you needed. Sarah was one of those people.”
We sat in silence. Sister leaned forward to pour the tea just as Maggie walked through the door. She closed it behind her. She stomped off her boots and hung her field coat on a hook. She looked tired, but her cheeks were f
lushed from her walk in the island air. Her gray hair was pulled back into a messy bun, strands blown about around her face.
She reached out for my hand, took it in both of hers firmly, then sat in the other chair opposite me, next to Sister.
I repeated my condolences. Maggie smiled gratefully but seemed resolved to carry on with some sort of business.
“Your visit happened to coincide with our loss.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Sister said. “Lucie is here for a reason, like all of us.”
“I don’t know about that,” I demurred.
“You lost your father on the island.”
There was a familiar sinking in my chest, but I knew how not to react. I had many years of practice, hearing the pity in voices, the oblique references to my failings, my brokenness, as a result of my deep, untamed sadness. Everything I did, good or bad, for years after the quake was traced back to that loss, by everyone who knew.
“It was a long time ago.” I didn’t want them to use my father against me.
“And yet, here we all are,” Sister said. “Brought together in grief.”
I said nothing.
“How did Sarah die?” I asked, finally.
“Cancer,” Maggie said. “But you guessed that.” The ebullient woman I had met in the dairy was gone.
“Your tea is getting cold,” Sister said, to either or both of us.
Maggie and I looked at her. Sister picked up her own cup and drank it down. I watch the steam rise from our cups on the table. I could smell mint, other herbs, and an underlying bitterness—some root, maybe? I picked up my cup and took a sip. It was lukewarm, not pleasurably hot anymore. The mint was there and something lemony, but there was a dirty undertone, something gritty and fermented, like rotting apple.
Maggie saw the look on my face.
“Reishi mushrooms,” she said, flatly. “That’s what you’re tasting. We drink them, we eat them: they’re in everything. The Chinese have used them for thousands of years medicinally.”
“For cancer,” I said. I was aware of the reishi sold in supplement form and the health claims.
“And fertility, and the circulatory system, and the liver . . .” Maggie said.
“But Sarah’s cancer—the reishi didn’t save her?”
Maggie looked disgusted. “It’s not magic. Not everything works for everybody, for every illness. Sarah tried many different treatments. We did everything we could.”
“So everything here is part of the project? Even your bodies?”
“We have an opportunity to use the oldest of the earth’s medicines against the newest of the world’s diseases.”
“What happens when they don’t work?”
“We manage the pain,” Sister cut in. “Just like the doctors in hospitals do, after they’ve irradiated and poisoned all the cells in a body and the cancer returns.”
“But you knew that you would make yourselves sick. There are babies in that graveyard, burial ground, whatever you call it. Women lost their children. You lost another generation. You put yourselves in the way of certain suffering and death.” The cup was getting colder in my hands, the taste of the tea sour on the sides of my tongue.
“Lucie.” Sister’s voice was soft, pliant. She wasn’t the orator now; this was a plea. “We have nothing but this. We have one life each and one death. What comes between birth and death is up to us. You put yourself in the way of death every time you get in a car, every time you drink alcohol or eat hamburger. The entire population of the industrialized world is putting itself in the way of certain death and suffering. The only choice for us is to live in service to each other and to the planet itself. That’s how we put ourselves in the way of God’s love.”
“What am I supposed to do, Sister?” I searched her face, her expression. She searched mine. She was the kind of woman who would be ignored, written off, invisible to almost everyone outside this island: fertility gone, beauty gone, vanity—if she ever had any—gone. But her eyes shone; her heart and mind certain. She had no doubt, no fear. She would walk into the fire whether anyone followed her or not.
What did she see in me? Would I walk into the fire with her? Or would I turn and run?
“You can do whatever you want, obviously,” Sister said. “You could stay here with us awhile longer. Spend more time with us, with the project. If you wanted to write about this place, it would be unfair to do so in haste. We’ve been here almost twenty years. We’ve invested our lives. Give us the time to show you.”
Sister looked to Maggie, who stared out the window, across the boundary waters, miles away.
“Whatever you do,” Sister said, “I would ask you to think of the harm it might do to our work here, all the work we’ve done to honor your father’s resting place.”
The tide was out, the muddy flats stretched away from the shore around the island, seaweed and driftwood and shells. The sun was trying to burn through the clouds, but the wind was blowing in more, bringing in darker clouds from the northwest. I had pulled on a sweater, but the wind blew right through the wool weave. I had packed so quickly, in the darkness before dawn. My windbreaker was hanging in the closet at the cottage, next to my dad’s field coat.
Everyone took the afternoon off from their work. Meals were makeshift—leftovers and bread and cheese and shellfish cooked over the fires they were making on the beach. They would stay as long as they could, on the shore, into the evening and night, Katie said, so they could send off paper lanterns and driftwood boats. If anyone boating saw us on the shore, we looked like late-season vacationers having a clambake.
I wandered the shoreline, looking for agates, moving my body to keep warm between sun breaks. There was a wet chill in the air; a portent of winter. Voices carried occasionally, a word here and there of conversation. Everything felt fractured. Where I had felt part of the gathering before, now I felt outside of it, outside of myself.
Katie came up behind me and took my arm. She didn’t say anything but walked with me for a while. I had seen her talking to Tuck, to Maggie. They seemed to agree to something—to leave me to Katie. I didn’t know how to talk to her. Something between us had gone astray—unapproachable but watchful, scavenging our scraps of conversation, feeding on our feelings. We sat on a log and watched the boats pass, the gulls pecking at the bull kelp and crab carapaces. I shivered and she put her arms around me, squeezed me tight. I tried to relax into her, but I felt a tug in my gut, like this was the end of us.
She released me and pulled out a flask.
“Thirsty?”
“What is it?” I asked. I realized I hadn’t eaten much that day. I hadn’t had anything but Maggie’s reishi tea in hours.
“Birch liquor. It’s like gin.”
I took the flask and drank. It was sharp and herbaceous, astringent. “It’s good.”
“Have it,” she said. “I have another one.” She patted her pocket.
I took another sip and felt it burn its way into my stomach.
I needed to eat something, I told her. So we made our way back to the others and found mussels in broth and chunks of sourdough. We sat there quietly, dunking our bread into a cast-iron pot of broth. I had been sure the lack of conversation was about my presence—they didn’t trust me now, they didn’t want to say anything in front of me—but now I thought it was just another of their silent observances, like the work prayer.
I drank from the flask and gradually felt warmed, inside and out. Others passed around a bottle of dandelion wine, then a bottle of elderberry. When the alcohol had sunk in, there was more talk. When I caught the voices, I heard only words that soothed me. The sounds of words like anemone and caldera and parish—or maybe it was perish? There was a languorousness to everyone’s movements. Hymns begun in mid-verse then ended, minor chords suspended in the air around us then swept away by the outgoing waves. Jen looked at me, her eyes both dark and shiny, like stars. She took my hand in both of hers, looking at it, feeling the weight of it, then she p
laced it tenderly back in my lap. I looked to Katie, who was stretched out at my feet. Katie smiled warmly at me, but we didn’t speak.
My stomach started to ache.
“I think I’ve had too much,” I told Katie. I felt the sudden need to shit. I started quickly up the beach to the Colony. It seemed miles away. I felt lightheaded. I didn’t notice Katie following me, but when I reached the closest toilet, behind the chapel, she was there behind me.
“I’ll get you some water,” she said, and I heard her feet trod off up the path.
I emptied my bowels but the cramping in my stomach continued. I tried to take deep breaths, but every inhale caused a stabbing pain.
I left the toilet and started walking. The fresh air and movement seemed to help. Katie caught me halfway up the hill to the bluff. She handed me a canteen, like the kind we carried as Girl Scouts. I stopped and looked at the pattern on the side for a moment—chevron, I thought—and Katie nudged me and told me to drink. The water was so cold going down my throat, but it didn’t help the pain and nausea rising. I kept walking, but slower.
“Katie, I feel really strange.”
“It’s okay. Keep walking. It’ll feel better in the woods. It always feels better in the woods.”
She took my arm and led me up the path, away from the Colony. I knew I had been on this path before, but I couldn’t place it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I want to show you something,” she said.
“I don’t feel right, Katie.” All the plants looked like they were lighting up at the tips, flickering with green flames. Long fronds of fern vibrated, giving off waves.
“Do the trees seem taller to you?” I stepped off the trail and walked up to a cedar; its bark was warm to the touch and responsive like human skin.
“Katie! Come here!” She came and I reached for her, pulled her to the tree. “Feel this.”
And she did, stroking the bark like it was fur. She was wearing a sweater so I reached a hand under her shirt at her hip to feel her skin. She looked down at my hand curiously. With one hand on her body and the other on the tree, I felt a humming run through me. I pulled away.
Marrow Island Page 17
