The Gilly Salt Sisters (39 page)

“How I ever thought I loved that son of a bitch is beyond me.” Claire sighed, her lips white, at which point Dee burst into tears, one of her arms cradling her belly. Dee couldn’t really imagine a whole baby sprouting in such an unfortunate environment, but if a weed could flourish in a sidewalk crack, she guessed a kid could survive this abuse.

“Dee’s pregnant?” Father Stone said as if he’d missed the whole scene they’d all just been through, and he sank into Whit’s empty chair.

Jo looked over at Claire, who was still a little pale around the chops, but Claire avoided her eyes and took up banging a spoon around a cup of her own. “You know this isn’t the end of it,” Jo said to Claire’s back. “You know he won’t stop with empty threats. And you’re not cut out for the salt. We both know that. You could still go back if you wanted. It’s not too late.” Dee was surprised to find herself hoping Claire wouldn’t. “You could be Claire Turner again, lady on the hill, and everything would go back to normal,” Jo said. “She could go away”—she jerked her chin at Dee—“and no one would be the wiser.”

Claire turned around, and though her skin was white, her eyes were full of flash. “That’s the whole problem.
I
haven’t been very wise, have I?”

If Dee had wanted to, she could have done the wrong thing yet again and taken advantage of Claire at that moment. She’d never seen her look so bad. Claire had circles smudged under her eyes, her hair was a mess, and her shirt hung off her shoulders. Dee could have asked her if the farmhouse seemed smaller after years of rattling under the Turners’ vast roof. Dee could have remarked how odd it must be to have to put rags back on after getting used to cashmere and silk. Or, she thought, she could just pick up a shovel the next time Claire did and find out for herself what salt did to a woman. She stepped over to Claire and stood before her with her head down. “I’m sorry for the trouble,” she said. “Please don’t make me leave.”

To her surprise, Claire reached out and gave the girl’s arm
a quick squeeze, and a little thread of tension between them snapped. Claire pulled away and swiped the skin underneath her eyes. “How pregnant
are
you anyway?” she asked, putting a hand on Dee’s belly. Before Dee could answer, Claire tucked back the stray pieces of her hair and cast a glance to the chair where Ethan was still sitting.

“Oh, goodness!” she cried. “Get a load of us. Weeping and trembling like Whit is the big bad wolf or something. Forgive us, Ethan.” He looked up at Claire so keenly that right then Dee knew he was hooked tight as a trout, man of God or no.
Well
, she thought. She guessed the world saw fit to deliver love when people needed it most, just maybe not in the manner they were expecting.

Right then the baby jabbed her in the bladder with some sharp part of its anatomy, as if to prod her back to the moment, and it dawned on her that all Jo had been trying to do with the dishes and the salt that morning was get her to pay attention to what was happening under her nose. Hearts were going to break or turn upside down out here—Dee wasn’t sure which, and she wasn’t sure whose—but she had a feeling that when everything was said and done, none of them would be sure anymore which piece belonged to whom.

W
ith the arrival of Dee and Claire, Jo’s life had jumped from being a peaceful and plain stretch of road to being so full of cracks and dips that she barely knew anymore how to navigate it. On the one hand, she couldn’t say she was unhappy about having extra bodies around the place—maybe the help would be just the thing to get the farm back in shape—but she never knew what to do in the mornings when she stepped across the hall and spied Claire sitting sideways on her bed, crying. Claire would look up when she heard Jo’s footsteps, wipe the tears off her cheeks, and scowl something terrible, and that at least made Jo feel a little better. At least some kernel of Claire had stayed the same.

Jo gave her sister a week to sulk, and in the space of that time they received three different letters from Whit threatening everything from divorce (Claire just shrugged and shoved the document in the top drawer of her bureau) to Salt Creek Farm’s imminent bankruptcy (Jo threw that note in the trash, then dumped coffee grounds on it) to an outrageous lawsuit stemming from the pain Claire had inflicted on him with the shovel (Claire and Jo buried that one together in the wilds of the kitchen’s junk drawer).

It occurred to Jo that now might be the time to swallow her pride and ask Claire for some help. Surely, in spite of what Claire said were Whit’s money problems, she’d have a little something
socked away. She owed Jo at least that much. Every morning Jo poured herself a stiff cup of coffee, steeled her spine and tried to find a way to mouth the words.

But before she could utter a single syllable, Claire got another letter from Whit, and this time the man went and crossed the line. Jo knew that it was bad, because Claire opened the envelope and didn’t say a word. Jo waited, expecting Claire’s usual flurry of huffs and spiked comments, but she just smoothed a hand down the length of her braid and pressed her lips together the way she did when she was really mad.

“What’s it say?” Jo asked. They were in the kitchen, and Dee was sitting at the table with them. Claire glanced at her, shook her head the tiniest fraction, and handed Jo the letter. Jo scanned it. Whit had jotted this particular note in his own hand, and he’d gone and brought up the marsh’s string of cursed sons.
“Get your sister to sell the land, and you can end this now,”
he’d written to Claire,
“unless you’re prepared for another dead child on your hands.”

“No fucking way,” said Claire, and Dee looked up from her bowl of cereal. Jo shook her head at Claire to tell her to keep quiet. She didn’t want the expectant Dee infected by such nonsense, even if Gilly history did bear it out as truth.

On the other hand, if Whit was going to bring up the past, Jo thought, then she had more than enough ammunition to fight him. She wadded up the letter and added it to the other correspondence in the trash, bank letters among them. “Don’t worry,” she reassured Claire. “When it comes down to this, I’ve got Whit Turner right where I want him.”

Claire eyed her steadily. “And he’s got us in the same spot.”

Jo wondered if the rumors she’d heard about Claire’s being barren were really true, but even she had the delicacy not to ask. Not now at least. She put her hands on her hips. “Well, okay, then,” she said. “At least we know none of us are going anywhere. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

A
fter they disposed of the letter from Whit, Jo marched Claire straight out to a row of evaporating pools, deposited an assemblage of rusted tools next to her, and then thought better of it and climbed in the ditch, too, indicating with her chin which half of the territory was Claire’s.

Jo could see that Claire’s body had forgotten how to do hard labor in spite of all her riding. Every time Claire bit into the ground with the edge of her hoe, she winced. The pain seemed to loosen her tongue. With every strike at the soil, she unearthed a few more unsavory details about her marriage.

“I should have known it,” she said, slapping her hoe into the earth. “I should have known when he was out all those times.” She switched to a shovel and began scooping out mud.

“Do you know that one time he compared me to a Roman courtesan at a dinner party?” she added. “I was so dumb I thought it was a compliment. Or the time”—she stabbed the dirt—“he stripped the room I had set up as a nursery. He had Timothy Weatherly come in, take all the furniture, and put it in storage because he said I was barren.” Jo didn’t say anything to that. The idea of Claire grieving the loss of a child was still startling to her.

“Hey,” she finally said, pulling Claire out of her thoughts, “this basin isn’t going to clean itself.” She stepped closer to Claire’s side of the ditch.

Claire dug her blade back into the clay. “Sorry.”

No, I’m sorry
, Jo wanted to say but didn’t. She started a rhythm again with her rake, and Claire joined it. They worked in silence for a moment, and then Jo asked, “Anyone in particular?”

“Huh?” Claire winced and inspected a blister that was rising on her thumb. But Jo knew why her tongue was stuck in her mouth like a broken bell clapper. The more you wanted something you knew was forbidden, the less you wanted to say about it.

“The person you’re thinking about. Does he maybe wear black and conduct Mass?”

Claire’s cheeks flamed, and she caught her breath. She opened her lips to explain, but when it came to Father Ethan Stone, Jo
knew very well, Claire couldn’t half articulate her feelings to herself, let alone to anyone else. Once upon a time, the same thing had happened to Jo with Whit, who’d been just as taboo, but for different reasons.

Let your speech… be seasoned with salt
, the Bible said, meaning speak with grace. Before Claire returned to Salt Creek Farm, Jo would have interpreted that as a prescription for telling people what they wanted to hear. Now that Claire was home, however, Jo had changed her mind. The word of God wasn’t a plumb line dropped straight into the heart, Jo decided. It was more like a tangled web, spread to catch whatever it could.

“Are you going to services tomorrow?” she asked. “You’ll see Ethan there.”

Claire shook her head and then sneezed. She was still allergic to pollen. “I want to stay out here and cook.”

Claire was making a big Sunday meal for the three of them, Jo knew, as a kind of peace offering to her and Dee: ham, scalloped potatoes, and the first of the season’s pickleweed, pickled just days ago. Jo preserved jars of it on the kitchen counter, and she liked to gaze through the glass to see the plant’s tender shoots floating like strands of memory. She frowned at her sister. Some recollections were maybe best left bottled up.

Jo put down her shovel. Her side of the evaporating basin was scraped as clean as she could get it. Earlier in the day, she’d primed the sluices, suspecting that it might be time to let the water back into the marsh. It wasn’t a decision she took lightly, and though it was still only early April, she was sensing that the moment had arrived to let the floodgates open and bring what they would. She nodded to herself. “I’m going to do the spring flood,” she announced.

Claire looked up. She never had understood how Jo and her mother had decided on a time to deluge the marsh and begin the season of salt production. “Now? So soon?”

Jo shrugged. “Why not?”

“How do you know?”

“There isn’t a trick to it, Claire, just practice.” And repetition, Jo knew, the patience to witness the season’s change and do what it told her, even if she didn’t always like what that was. She looked at her sister. Her hair was as red as Henry’s salt, but Claire had never made that connection. The day she did, Jo thought, was the moment she’d understand she already possessed all the knowledge she needed to ken the weather of this place.

In reality there really
was
a trick to predicting the time to start a season. Before any flood, Jo simply consulted Henry’s salt. The best time to open the gates was when the crystals were just beginning to glimmer pink in the mud. Any sooner and the wind would still be too cold. Any later and the ground would be too thirsty. If Jo waited until the salt became a real red, the clay and silt walls of the channels and ponds would start crumbling, threatening to collapse completely. If she flooded the marsh then, she’d just end up with a muddy mess on her hands. Today, however, the color was right—the faint blush of a rose before it opened. She walked down the main channel, avoiding the weir, as she usually did, even though she was grown now and her twin was long in the ground. She’d timed it perfectly, she saw. The tide was at its highest, throwing waves onto the beach. She twisted the iron clamps holding the main channel’s sluice, lifted the gate, and stepped aside as frigid seawater chugged past her boots.

Always the omens that would forecast how the rest of the season would go were hidden somewhere in this moment. It was never just one thing, and it was never the same from year to year. Jo thought back to the white moths they had suffered the spring after Henry had died and the tiny blue butterflies that had swarmed the day Claire had left with Whit. Both of those salt seasons had been cloudy and wet and had produced mostly gray, silt-laden brine. But Jo had a better feeling about this spring. The wild irises had stuck their noses up early, and flocks of geese were already returning, flying overhead in their military V’s. The ground was drying up nicely. All in all, Jo thought, they could be in for a banner year.