Free Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith Page B

cement of the remaining walls and smokestacks looked like a monument to something—a terrible war, maybe, something violent and manmade—not an earthquake. There were plants growing out of them now, taking root in the cracks, in the dust. I looked back to Carey.
    “I know a lot about the disaster itself,” he said, “but not about what’s happened to the island in the last twenty years. That’s the reason I’m here.”
    “Me, too,” I said. We looked at each other. I felt calmer. It felt uncomplicated, admitting it to him.
     
    The boat had ripped past the ruins of the refinery at the southeast edge of the island, pulled north-northwest around a forested ridge where the Colony’s dock in the rocky harbor finally came into view. Coombs hollered back that he had radioed ahead to the Colony. He brought them mail and supplies when he was coming their way. There would be someone there to meet us.
    We were seniors in college the last time we saw each other, but I knew the woman standing on the dock was Katie. I wiped my eyes and blinked into the wind to watch her getting closer, becoming real to me again. She was tall, taller than I was by two inches, slender, but with broad shoulders and long arms, a narrow neck, like a goose. She had never been graceful but had always seemed at ease with her body, confident and deliberate in her movements. She stood at the end of the dock, hands in her pockets, perfectly still, watching our approach. Or at least she looked serenely in our direction; maybe she was looking past us, over the water, to the islands, to the mainland. Her dark curly hair squiggled out from under a knit cap. She wore knee-high rubber boots with jeans tucked into them and a thick canvas jacket over a long wool sweater.
    Behind her, small wooden houses were tucked into the hillside above the harbor, the occasional rounded roof of a yurt in the trees, almost camouflaged, and closer, at the pinnacle of the first rise above the dock, the pale weathered chapel with its steeple rising like a treetop. Against the landscape, Katie looked like an icon, a modern saint: she was beautiful and austere; she owned the landscape. I was almost terrified of her.
    Carey and I looked to the shore silently as the boat neared the dock. He would disembark there and hike up to Fort Union and the old guard station. The park and the Colony were so close, the only signs of human intervention on the north side of Marrow, separated by a single paved road that ran down the center of the island.
    There had once been a few residents—homesteaders, fishermen—and summer inhabitants of the rustic, roughing-it variety. Unmarked gravel and dirt roads passed between houses here and there. Some had private docks; others used the harbor near the chapel as moorage. The chapel dated back to the 1840s, to the Catholic missions. A village and trading post had sprung up near the chapel, for the white settlers, with a one-room schoolhouse for the settlers’ children and baptized children of the nearby Coast Salish tribes. My grandmother’s parents met at the school: a Lummi girl and an Irish boy who married when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. The schoolhouse was long gone, along with most of the other original buildings, in ruins or torn down by the 1920s and ’30s, replaced gradually by vacation cottages and rustic cabins. There had been a house or two on the western slope of the island, south of Fort Union, northwest of the refinery, but they were destroyed by a landslide after the quake. What was left of the makeshift village near the chapel to the northeast was now Marrow Colony.
    After so many years, I didn’t know what to expect from Marrow. The refinery fire had burned for days, and its smoking ruins were all we could see from our shores. The communities on all the islands had been affected by the quake, but the petroleum and the flame retardants and oil-dispersing chemicals had toxified Marrow’s groundwater, its soil. Everyone living