Marrow Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

waterfront hotels and cafés on one side, houses set into an increasingly wooded and rocky hillside on the other. All the old buildings in downtown that had survived the quake were still there—many of them with structural improvements and seismic retrofits. There was a cooperative grocery in the place of the general store that had been condemned after the quake, and next to it a gravel parking lot edged by flowerpots and signs advertising the local farmers’ market, every other Saturday, JUNE THRU OCTOBER . I walked up the street. Tourism had rebounded. Most of the storefronts were occupied, and there were two shops selling the kind of knickknacks that islanders call “bait.”
    “How’s things?” you’d hear islanders asking.
    “Oh, you know. Selling lots of bait,” they would say. Or maybe, “Not biting. Need better bait, I guess.”
    Bait was always at the front of the store and by the register. If the store had a public toilet (most didn’t; unreliable plumbing), there might be some toward the back too, for the people waiting to use it.
    I peered into the bookstore, at the same storefront it had occupied when we left, though its name had changed to Sound Books & News, and it had been painted, reorganized, with racks of postcards and orca magnets and crab key chains by the door. It was Filgate’s Books before, named for the old salt who owned it. My dad and Danny Filgate had been good friends, though Danny was a generation older. He, like my dad, was an autodidact who read everything from the Wall Street Journal to Toni Morrison to pulpy airport paperbacks. He had refused to sell bait. He catered to the islanders. You might wander into the shop and find a gathering of fisher-poets: fishermen and -women who spent long hours on the water composing verses—often ballads and other old forms—in their heads. They weren’t readings, these gatherings; they were dramatic performances, sometimes with musical interludes on banjo or harmonica or fiddle. The gatherings took place in the off-season, so tourists didn’t often run into them. But if one happened to wander into the shop when the fisher-poets were there, it was another of those things that make people fall in love with the islands. The locals set the scene and the mood, like the cast of characters in a Melville novel.
    I assumed Danny must be dead. He couldn’t have lived to see his business like this: it looked orderly, sanitized; a display of T-shirts with famous novel covers printed on them on the wall behind the cash register.
     
    I sat on the steps outside City Hall, a newer building that looked like a lot of government buildings—squat and gray and featureless—easily the ugliest building in town. The old City Hall had burned down after the quake. The new one housed a small public library, a state police precinct, and various other municipal entities. It opened in fifteen minutes. Something else that hadn’t changed about Orwell was the pace. Nearly ten o’clock and shops up and down the street were just starting to show signs of life.
    The sun had burned through the clouds; it was getting warm—dew had started to form between my breasts and under my arms. I pulled my sweater off over my head and thought about taking it back to the car, or putting off the visit to the clerk’s office, going up to the cemetery first. A few late-season tourists milled about, looking relaxed. A couple walked by me and said, “Good morning,” as they passed. They wore small bemused smiles, their cheeks flushed; they weren’t holding hands, but they bumped into each other as they walked, arms brushing intentionally. They had clearly been having sex all night to the sounds of the sea.
    I hated them a little bit, for having sex on my island, though I knew that was what people did on seaside vacations. When my mom was a teenager, she spent summers housekeeping at lodges and motels all over the islands. I thought of her stripping one dirty sheet after another. I