Marrow Island (22 page)

There were plots all over, hidden in the weeds, but marked by small wooden carvings and driftwood sculptures. I counted nine, in various stages of heap and sink, the soil settled over some of the plots completely. And everywhere, mushrooms. Small, black caps like umbrellas beaten in the wind, similar to the
Psilocybe
Tuck had shown me before. Some sprouted at the edges of the graves, others in clusters over the heart.

Sister stood at the head of the grave. I kept to the back but crept around to the other side so that I could see better. The body was still covered with the shroud. They lowered it gently into an oblong hole no more than three feet deep, on a bed of sawdust. Sister nodded, and Elle and Maggie pulled the shroud from the body. She was completely naked, the woman, gaunt and pale, skin dull like putty, eyes bulging under the lids, hands resting over her heart. Her white hair had been braided with flowers. She looked ancient, holy. We gazed at her silently for several minutes. Then, one or two at a time, people approached the grave, closed their eyes, and released bundles of flowers and shells and lichen over her. I felt my throat tighten. There were baskets of offerings. They tossed them over the body until she was covered almost completely. No one spoke, not even Sister. Only the tokens placed lovingly around her, the prayer was the act itself. Then each bowed a head to the dead woman. There was no song, no prayer. Then Elle and Tuck and the other bearers shoveled bark and soil into the grave, and after that laid branches and stones around the edges. The rest stood quietly, heads bowed or eyes closed, hands on hearts, until they had finished. Eventually, one by one, the colonists peeled off and began the walk back.

I tried to shrink into the trees, but Katie saw me. Tuck looked up and followed her gaze. He looked weary, the hollows of his eyes almost bruised; he had been crying. He kissed Katie on the temple and followed the others back. I felt a pang of remorse for imagining the things I had about him, or for knowing what I knew about him. I watched them go and approached the grave. Katie and I stood on opposite sides.

When the last person had disappeared into the trees, I spoke. “Will you talk to me here?”

“Yes,” she said.

She stared at the grave. “You should have waited for me to call.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

I walked over to her, to see her face. I wanted her to see that I meant it—that I hadn’t come to intrude.

“This is Sarah?” I asked.

“She died night before last.”

“That was the night of the harvest supper,” I said.

Katie nodded.

“You’ve done this before.” I looked around at the other graves. “Others have died here?”

“You know people have died here, Luce,” she scoffed. She turned away from Sarah’s grave and wandered the plots.

“Of course I do.” I said it softly, baffled by her tone, by the viciousness. “I meant at the Colony. This is—it’s shocking, Katie, to come across a funeral procession like this. And a burial ground; this is like a pioneer cemetery—is this even legal? Is this part of Sister’s mission?” I followed her across the plots, careful not to walk over any of the graves.

“People die everywhere, all the time,” she said. “Death isn’t part of the mission; it’s part of life. We found a way to deal with it—a safe, humane, natural way. It may not be legal, but it’s what they wanted—to return to the earth, to continue to be part of the island, not pumped full of chemicals and artificially preserved.”

She stared at her feet. We were standing at what would have been the back of the house, in the west corner.

A bedroom, I thought. We’re standing in the bedroom. This is where the window would have been, looking out at the sea.

I stood there and watched the clouds darken behind Waldron Island, until I noticed that Katie was still staring at our feet. I looked down. At first I saw nothing but milkweed and Queen Anne’s lace, then I made out the indentation in the earth, the small black mushrooms pushing up at the edges, the tiny cairn, nearly swallowed by the grasses. But this one was so much smaller than the rest; it was the length of a shoebox. There was another to my left, only slightly longer. I searched the grass to the right, turned around to look behind us. This entire corner of the plot was marked with small graves. Some of them looked very old; only their cairns stood out.

“Oh my god, Katie.”

She wept and said nothing.

“Are these graves?” I started to count them but stopped myself. “Katie, what the hell? Are these animals? Tell me they’re animals.”

Nothing. Silence. She held her breath and wouldn’t look at me.

“If they’re not animals . . . ?” I was shaking.

“They’re babies.”

I let this thought settle, the jaded journalist in me sorting through all the plausible reasons why they might have so many dead babies on Marrow.

“How many are there?”

“Six. This is Sucia. She was the last one. Her heart stopped beating at six months’ gestation. Her mother carried her for three months after that and delivered her dead.”

“Who’s her mother?”

“Me. She was mine.” She wasn’t crying anymore, but there was a distance in her eyes, her body and her mind were on different islands.

“Jesus, Katie, why didn’t you tell me? When did this happen?”

“In the spring, right before I wrote you.”

I looked at her baggy overalls and sweater. The way she had grown into a woman’s body since I’d seen her last.

“We were hopeful; conditions had improved so much. But all the early exposure must have built up. Ten years here, plus living on Orwell for the years after the quake—all the dispersants that washed ashore, you remember?” She looked at me again and I nodded. Her voice was low, firm. “The early exposure was the worst, before the remediation. Maggie was really careful about charting cycles. After a year or so, periods were irregular among almost all the women. Skipping months or bleeding every other week a little bit. Everyone was supposed to be practicing birth control, but accidents happened. Miscarriages are common everywhere, so it didn’t alarm anyone for some time. Maggie has herbal recipes for abortions, too. Some chose to go that route. But when the babies started dying in the womb or coming too soon—there weren’t that many, but enough—they knew. They knew.” She squatted and plucked the mushrooms from the grave. Put them in a small basket she’d carried shells in, for Sarah’s grave. She crawled around on her knees, plucking the mature mushrooms from all the graves.

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 flushed from her walk in the island air. Her gray hair was pulled back into a messy bun, strands blown about around her face.