The Gilly Salt Sisters (3 page)

B
y the time Jo returned home, the sun had started to set, but the afternoon was still pleasant, quite so. Instead of gray shellac, the sky above hung more like burnished wood, the air swirling all golden and mellow. Jo was a great believer in the sky. For one thing, it was about her only companion, and for another, it never lied. When trouble was galloping in her direction, the wind and clouds let Jo know it right quick, maybe because she’d been born in a storm. Weather had brought her into this world, and when the time came, Jo expected it would carry her back out. She just hoped she would get a fair warning first. She scanned the marsh, running her eye over the swirling order of it: the main channel that cut from the beach, the inundation pools, the smaller ditches, and, finally, the evaporating basins themselves, tucked in rows in the middle of the whole operation, the marsh’s eternally shrinking and expanding heart.

This time of year, the mud was so alkaline it grew vivid with microorganisms: bright purple, copper green, and the single basin that was bloodred. That was Henry’s basin—Jo’s twin brother, who’d drowned at the age of eight. Every year Jo ended up heaping the crimson salt onto his grave. She didn’t know what else to do with it. She couldn’t sell it like that, she knew, and she didn’t want to use it herself. It would have been like eating the flesh of her family.

Past Henry’s pool was the salt barn, and next to that was a grassy clearing where the Gilly family graves lay. Only boys were buried
in the marsh’s cemetery, which long ago had been specially consecrated to receive them.
Because death circles life
, was the way Jo’s mother had explained it to her, but surely, Jo liked to think, life circled death. Otherwise what was the point of enjoying a good Sunday roast, or the sound of birdsong on a summer’s evening, or Christmas carols, or any of it? But maybe, Jo mused, she could say that by virtue of coming through the fire the way she had. For her, everything had grown sharper after her accident: the burn of air on her wrinkled skin, the shift of the seasons. The colors of budding spring flowers could just about knock her socks off, and the autumn… well, the autumn always got her so forlorn and chilly she just about wanted to weep when the wind swept down and claimed the leaves for its own. When Jo felt like that, she would come out to the graves and sit her bones down for a while. It sounded backward, she knew, but she found the spot to be the perfect pick-me-up when melancholy grabbed her by the throat. It cheered her to remember that there was something even colder and harder in the world than a Cape sky turning to winter.

Claire, of course, didn’t have concerns like these. She was a Turner now, and for the Turners things were always a sight better. All you had to do was look at their monstrosity of a house, squatting on Plover Hill with all its crooked porches and bowed windows, to know that. Over the generations the Turners had built themselves the Cape version of a castle. The damn place had so many rooms in it that Jo couldn’t imagine what Whit and her sister did in them. But that was the Turners for you, always grabbing up more than they could wrap their arms around. Lately things hadn’t been exactly smooth for Whit and Claire, Jo happened to know, but she figured they were a mite better off than she was. They still owned the rocky hill their house sat on, for one thing, and they owned the sand dunes that edged along the lane. They owned a portion of Drake’s Beach, and they owned the pier in town, not to mention much of the town itself. About the only thing they didn’t own in the general vicinity, in fact, was Salt Creek Farm, though it wasn’t for an honest lack of trying.

You may believe in curses or not as you will—and Jo would—but there was no denying that bad blood and worse luck ran between the two families, a string of ill will that went all the way back to the first Turners and Gillys. It was a spat of flesh and soul, for if the Turners were the mercenary heart beating in the center of the town, pulsing money through the place, the Gillys were its spirit—untouchable, unknowable, and above the worldly smut of Turner dollars. And just as the heart sometimes wars with the body even as it relies upon it, so, too, did the Turners and Gillys resent one another’s presence in Prospect, for while the Turners needed the magic of the Gilly salt for the town to prosper, the Gillys needed the Turner businesses to keep them solvent. The only thing the families really had in common was that the townspeople resented them both equally.

That being said, Jo had never blamed Claire for her poor choice in marrying Whit. When Whit learned he couldn’t have Jo, he’d simply turned around and done what Turners do. He’d stolen in kind from Jo the one thing he knew she loved the most, the way he’d pilfered gumdrops from the five-and-dime when they were children and then eaten them, one by one right in front of the store, not caring a fig who might be looking and certainly not bothering to share, not even with Jo.

B
efore she lost a sister, Jo lost a brother. She and Henry were born during a wicked nor’easter in March of 1942. According to Jo’s mother, the world had stopped for three days. No phones worked. The electricity was knocked out up and down the Cape, and the roads were as closed as the churches and shops. The hospital doors in Hyannis even froze shut, but since no one could get out there anyway, it didn’t much matter.

In the little church of St. Agnes, the storm also famously stripped the face off the west wall’s painting of the Virgin. “Oh, it was a terrible thing, child,” Father Flynn told Jo when she asked him about the incident. He squatted down and gazed evenly into
her eyes. “I was away during the storm, conducting parish business in town, and when I returned, I found the windows smashed to the ends of the earth, the front doors blasted open, and Our Lady touched by the hand of God. I keep her this way as a reminder of the Lord’s power.” He paused and frowned. “Well, that and we’ve never had the funds to fix her, but one day soon, perhaps. One day soon.” He bent down and cupped Jo’s head, smiling a little. “Let’s start with your catechism, shall we?” He paused again, and Jo thought he was going to say something more, but he did not, and she hung her head with disappointment. Apparently, for Father Flynn, the specifics of her origins began and ended with Our Lady.

As Jo grew older, her mother told her the fuller version of the story, sparing her nothing—or so Jo thought. By the time she discovered what a skilled storyteller her mother had been, however, Jo, too, would be an expert in the art of lying. Each night, as Jo settled down to sleep, her mother would perch on her bed and break her off another piece of family history as she deemed Jo ready to hear it. It took Jo until she was a teenager to digest the whole unpretty account.

On Salt Creek Farm, Mama said, the storm had done what it could with the little bit the landscape offered. Clumps of pickleweed had transformed into veins of ice. The salt basins, drained for their spring clean, had filled with snow, and waves lashed so far up on Drake’s Beach that ten years later people were still finding odd nubs of driftwood buried in the dunes.

Jo’s mother had given birth by herself, but considering Jo’s father’s habits, she explained, it was better that way. He was trapped in town, sheltering with friends, downing beers and telling filthy jokes while Jo’s mother filled the biggest pot of water she could find, boiled it over the fire in the hearth, and ripped a perfectly good bedsheet into strips. She fetched twine and a pair of scissors, threw as much wood onto the fire as she dared, stacked more nearby, and then squatted by the flames to wait.

When Jo’s father finally made his way back after the storm,
he didn’t go straight inside. Instead he hesitated on the front porch, surveying the damage from the gale. Jo could just picture it. Maybe a scrub pine or two had uprooted and blown into the lane like tumbleweeds. For certain, shingles would have lain like broken birds, and broken birds themselves must have been sunk in the drifts like stones dropped from heaven.

There would have been no trace of the underlying salt. For once their land would have been indistinguishable from any other in Prospect. Maybe it was because of that, or because the cold walk home had sobered him, but Jo always believed that the clouds that normally filled her father’s mind parted at that moment and he was able for the first time in a long time to imagine a life beyond Salt Creek Farm. Jo suspected he would have taken off running right then had the farmhouse door not squeaked open, letting out a blast of heat. There stood Mama in her dressing gown, clutching two babies instead of one: her brother, as ginger and freckled as all the Gillys, and Jo, as sooty as the mountain of ash piled in the grate.

The clouds in her father’s soul clapped together again. “Tell me at least one of them is a boy,” he’d said, and Jo’s mother had nodded and held out Jo’s red-haired brother.

“Praise the saints for that,” Jo’s father had answered, and pushed past Mama to the bottle of gin he kept stashed in the broken hall piano. Two deep swallows for two babies. As long as she ever knew him, Jo’s father had seen double on a permanent basis.

Yet if her father hadn’t been a souse, her mother never would have gotten married. She informed Jo of this with a veneer of calm regret.

“Why?” Jo had asked.

“It’s the salt.” Jo’s mother had sighed. “People are spooked by it. No sober man in any direction is going to marry you or Claire without a shotgun pointed at his head—and maybe not even then.”

According to Mama, Jo’s father didn’t start off on the wrong path. He was an able mechanic who’d managed to eke out a living
fixing up decrepit autos and turning them into something that would run. When World War II broke out, he’d tried to enlist in the army, figuring he could work wonders on jeeps and tanks, but the military wouldn’t take him.

“Bad heart,” the fish-eyed recruiting doctor had informed him during his physical, the man’s mouth stretching wide on the vowels. “Very bad. You’ll be lucky to hit thirty, much less forty.”

Jo had always guessed that that’s when things had gotten muddy for her father. That’s when he’d started drinking, figuring if he was going to croak, he might as well do it nicely oiled. When he’d ended up married to Jo’s mother, his life had turned to mud for real, fulfilling his worst prophecies. Mud out the front door as soon as he put a foot down. Mud roiled in the bottom of the drainage channels, mud in the salt itself, coloring it an alien gray. All of it he blamed on Jo’s mother and the brine she reaped.

“Are her feet cloven?” his friends used to taunt him as they fell out of Fletcher’s Tavern on their regular night, tripping over their bootlaces in an alcoholic tangle. “Does she drink the blood of spring lambs?” Jo knew perfectly well what her father’s gang thought of the women of her family. They were the stones strewn in their roads, the scary shadows combing their walls when they couldn’t sleep. The Gilly women knew their futures. Spying Jo’s mother waiting outside the tavern with the truck, one of his pals would yowl, “Why’d you do it, Tommy? Why’d you go and marry that witch?”

“It was the salt,” Jo’s father would answer, and that would shut everybody up good, for if the men in Prospect were silenced by anything, it was the threat of Gilly salt, which flashed every year on December’s Eve and whipped plain butter to cream and could heal a wound on contact or open it wider, and no one ever knew which.

“Yes,” Jo’s mother said, snapping off Jo’s bedroom light. “It was the salt. That’s true. The thing is, I never know what it will do either.”

Jo snuggled under the quilt and tried to fall asleep. As always,
Mama was right. The Gillys never really could figure what the salt had in store. Otherwise, Jo thought, her existence surely would have been very different. If nothing else, she would have made sure her brother had lived.