The Gilly Salt Sisters (15 page)

A rush of tears blurred her eyes. Whit didn’t understand at all. It wasn’t that she wanted Henry back. She just never wanted him to be gone in the first place. But what would Whit, a privileged only son, the latest little Turner king, know about being half of a bigger whole? She wiped the back of her hand under her nose and sniffed.

“Thanks.” She tried to sound like she meant it. Whit’s chest puffed with pride. Jo watched him saunter down the lane, the cuffs of his pressed trousers rank with marsh mud, and then she bent to one of the evaporating basins and scooped a measure of the briny water into her palm, letting the liquid sting and purify. If she had to have a drop of Turner blood mixed into her, she figured, she might as well douse it, just to be on the safe side. She brushed the mud off her own clothes as best she could and then hurried back to the house before her mother began to miss her, feeling different but still the same. Probably she was just too plain for Whit’s mumbo jumbo to have any effect, she thought, and that idea pleased her. It meant she was where she was supposed to be. Right before she opened the porch screen, somewhere in the distance, she thought she heard the bullfrog croak.

F
or Whit, Jo believed she was like a cave—a dark place he could go to and be quiet. But for her, Whit was the opposite. He scooped her out of the hollow of the marsh and sped her up, making her take in the wider world, even if it was only Prospect.

“Did you know that Mr. Upton has a girlfriend in Hyannis?” he told her after he saw her in the market with her mother one afternoon. “A Chinese lady, supposedly. She works in a pharmacy there.”

He knew that the postmistress sometimes read people’s letters if she got bored, that the library had a book about sex hidden in the reference section, and that sometimes Fletcher’s Tavern held secret gambling nights for the fishermen when they pulled back into port. Through Whit, Jo learned that even a town as sleepy as Prospect had some fascinating things happening behind the scenes.

Over time they developed a secret language to use in church. Five fingers spread apart wide was a warning:
I can’t make it today. Can’t say more.
Two balled fists signified a go for meeting up later, and one hand cupped meant,
Have I got a surprise for you.
It took Ida a few summers to catch on to their communications, but when she did, she started stacking the deck against them. She’d catch Jo on her way into Mass, grab her arm, and gloat, “Whit has a tennis date
all day
with a pretty girl from the mainland, so you’ll be free to go back to your swamp after this. He’d tell you himself, but he’ll already be gone.”

Jo noticed that the older she and Whit got, the two of them hovering on and then crossing the threshold of adolescence, the more frequently Ida began to arrange female companionship for her son. She rounded up all the Annabels, Merediths, and every last Elizabeth on the Cape and paraded them in front of Whit at the country club and at parties at their house, but none of those girls knew how to whistle a hornpipe, and none of them ever laughed at Whit’s knock-knock jokes. Ida started sitting between Whit and the center aisle during Mass, blocking his view of Jo, but it didn’t matter how strict she got. By the time Jo was fifteen and Whit was thirteen, the thread between them had just pulled tauter.

Her own mother hated it as much as Ida did. “Don’t you let that Whit Turner set his little toe on this land again,” she warned
after she caught Jo and Whit loitering in the marsh. “His mother probably just sends him out here to spy. You tell him to tell Ida that she can have this place when hell grows roses and blooms.”

After that, Jo had to take Claire wherever she went. Eight-year-old Claire was worse than a parrot. She was her own walking secret police. If Jo snuck a piece of extra pie, if she skipped over scraping a single basin, Claire would broadcast her sins that night at dinner.

“Jo and Whit Eskimo-kissed,” she reported not long after the marsh incident, tossing her hair. “I told Jo I was going to tell, and then she did this.” She held up her arm, showing the place where Jo had given her a pinch. Jo sighed. Even Claire’s skin was transparent.

“Whit Eskimo-kissed you, too,” Jo said, and watched Claire turn a promising shade of red.

Their mother glowered and poured chipped-beef gravy over her peas. “If Ida finds out about that event, she’s like as not to eat the pair of you alive, and then where will you be?”

The threat of Ida was a good one. No one ever knew what she was capable of, because there was so much of her that was uncharted territory. People in Prospect knew Ida’s lowly background well enough, and of course no one was allowed to ignore her current social heights. Her life in between those two states was up for any-and everyone’s speculation.

By the time Ida was seventeen, the story went, she’d scared off the boozy mistress who lolled in her father’s shack, all the starched members of the Temperance League, the entire staff of teachers at Prospect High, and any girl in the town radius. The only two people she held any affection for were her sister and Father Patrick Flynn, who’d performed her First Communion, confirmed her, and confessed her every Saturday until Ida had developed the figure of Jezebel and then split from Prospect.

No one ever discovered where she went. Some folks whispered Boston or Concord, while others presumed that she somehow made it to Paris, where she learned to wear seamed stockings,
gold jewelry, and lipstick the insulting color of coral. There were alternate theories, however, that swirled through the town: that Ida had taken refuge with a band of musical Gypsies, that she’d secretly married a wealthy older man and inherited his fortune when he died, that she’d found work in a dance hall or worse. And then there were those who said that Ida Dunn had gone no farther than the Temperance League’s asylum for poor women and abandoned children, where she’d given birth to a child and learned the sorrowful arts of cross-stitching and lacework.

Ida never addressed the rumors, nor did she ever need to. A year and a half after she’d left town, she reappeared for her father’s funeral. At the graveside she wore supple calfskin pumps with three-inch heels that wounded the ground under her feet and a noisy charm bracelet with a miniature anchor, a beaded cross, and a tiny dented heart. She also had on a black knit dress that covered her from neck to wrist to knee but somehow left very little to the imagination.

After the dismal service, she had her half-wit sister picked up and checked in to a state institution, and then she made her way to Fletcher’s Tavern and bought herself a shot of the most expensive scotch available. She had just dipped the tip of her tongue into the glass when a masculine voice materialized in her left ear. “Ladies don’t indulge in spirits unless they’re out of them.”

As Jo had always imagined it, Ida looked behind her to see Hamish Turner leaning on the bar, his imported silk necktie undone just enough to look suggestive. Hamish was the richest and the best-looking man in Prospect. He drove like a bandit going broke down Bank Street, skipped out on his checks at the diner, and never once got charged. Ida fluttered her eyelashes.

“I’m out of everything,” she purred, stretching out her hand and thinking,
But not for long
. And just like that, for the price of a glass of whiskey on ice, Hamish Turner bought himself a wife.

As soon as the ink was dry on the marriage certificate and Ida had two pennies to rub together, she went on an acquisitions tear, growing paradoxically thinner and more pointed as she gained
more land up and down the Cape. She added a wing to the already hulking Turner House and redecorated the interior with brocades so elaborate they gave the maids who cared for them migraines. Jo and her mother used to hear them complaining in Mr. Upton’s grocery. Ida liked young, pretty Polish girls she brought up from Manhattan, or working-class girls with thick Irish roots that she pulled from the alleys of South Boston.

“The side table has so much silver it’s like King Solomon’s mines,” one housemaid would moan, reaching for a canister of silver polish. “Look how chapped my hands are.”

“Don’t get me started,” the other would answer in a Slavic accent, flicking her braids. “Last week I spent two days beating the carpets from the library
by hand
, only to have Mrs. Turner find a spider. My arms are so sore I can almost not swing them.”

Hearing these complaints, Jo’s mother would snort and hustle her to the register, muttering to herself, until one day she said too much. “Ida Turner could burn her initials on every door in Prospect,” Mama spit, slamming cans of evaporated milk onto Mr. Upton’s counter, “but it wouldn’t get her closer to Salt Creek Farm.”

Before Jo could help herself, she chimed in, “But Whit said his mother wouldn’t really do it—try to take the marsh.”

Jo’s mother paled and shot her a quick look. Then her eyes softened as she handed Jo one of the grocery sacks. Jo gathered it into her arms and quickened her steps to match her mother’s as she sped through the door back toward home. Mama did everything, Jo thought, with the fury of a woman chopping onions.

“Besides her trying to buy up all our land all the time, why do you and Ida hate each other so much?” Jo asked. She knew why she didn’t like Ida. Ida was meaner than a fanged viper, she confiscated all the candy Jo shared with Whit, and she ratted out the kids who talked in church to Father Flynn. But those were complaints specific to childhood. The shifting hatred between Jo’s mother and Ida was swift-running but also deeply submerged, Jo knew, like those currents under the ocean where creatures with
tentacles swam. A place few souls ever saw. But her mother didn’t take the bait.

“I don’t hate Ida,” she said, fixing her face into a smile Jo didn’t for one minute believe. “I know far too many things about her for that. But the two of us agree on one thing: You and Whit need to stay away from each other. I’m telling you as one woman to another, Jo, that if I catch a single hint that Whit’s put so much as a finger on you, I will make you so sorry you won’t want to blink at him again.”

Jo followed her mother’s blaze of red hair up onto the porch, stomping hard on the soft wood. It was the first time her mother had acknowledged that Jo was becoming a woman, too, and a wave of pride swelled in her chest.

But pride steps highest before a fall—that went without saying—and that moment turned out to be the very first chink in the armor that Jo and Whit had thrown up against the rest of the world, a hole so small that Jo didn’t even recognize it as a flaw. Instead she found herself gloating as she swung open the crooked screen door and floated past the ruined piano in the front hall, the paper grocery sack nestled on her hip, her head filled with the all-consuming business of becoming an adult. She wasn’t particularly pretty. She knew that. She had hair the color of marsh scum and eyes as brown as the tip of a cattail, and she walked about as gracefully as one of the long-liner fishermen down at the dock, but nevertheless, it seemed, there was some speck in her after all that was Gilly to the core, and that was good enough for her.

T
here was a heap Jo didn’t know about womanhood, however—namely, that it’s never the women you expect who cause you the most trouble in life, but rather the ones who lurk on the sidelines, quiet as pie. In Jo’s case it was the Virgin.

At the end of the summer of 1959, life was a song—perfect breezes, easy temperatures, skies the color of a robin’s egg. Bobby Fischer was a grandmaster of chess, Elvis was in the army, and
Jerry Lee Lewis was still in great balls of fire for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. On the last weekend of August, Whit didn’t meet Jo on the beach as usual, which upset her, for that week was his last one in town. This year he’d be going off to boarding school in Connecticut, as befitted a Turner son, and Jo knew enough to suspect that when he came home, they might have trouble picking up where they’d left off.

She waited on the sand until the afternoon turned blistering and the winds died to a flicker, and then it was time to go scrape the day’s crystals off the basins. Her family called them salt flowers, and in the hot shine of a late-summer afternoon the flakes really did look like a scattering of miniature petals, whiter than the grayish grains clumped underneath them, delicate as fairy wings. Jo took her flat wooden paddle and, holding her breath a little bit, extended it out over the surface of the basin, lowering it gently onto the other side of the crystals without disturbing them. People were willing to pay ten times as much for this salt. Her mother didn’t even use it the same way as the ordinary gray stuff. She pinched it onto food only on special occasions and only right before serving, so as not to dull the sparkle in the flavor.