The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  Without a word, Jo took the money he handed her, but she was thinking that if Chet Stone knew about the letter in her pocket, he just might say the same about her and decide to quit the sea, too, and then she’d be in a proper pickle with her most loyal customer gone. She cleared her throat and shoved the bills into her coat pocket. “Don’t worry,” she finally said, “I’m not going anywhere fast.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Chet answered, turning back to the bait he was chopping, “or we’re really going to hell in a handbasket.”

  As she drove back through town, Jo was thinking so hard about her exchange on the dock that she almost plowed right into a ladder planted in front of the old diner. She parked her truck and got out, approaching the dusty window.

  “Hey,” a square-jawed man whom Jo had never seen before snarled, “watch where you’re walking.” Startled, Jo looked up to the top of the ladder, where a pudgy teenage girl was perched on the highest rung, trying to hang a crooked sign. THE LIGHTHOUSE DINER, it read. Jo blinked. She hadn’t heard there was a new owner for the place. Her heart fluttered a little at that fact. New blood in town meant new customers. Hoping they hadn’t met her sister yet, Jo put her hands on her hips and readied herself for an impromptu sales pitch.

  She studied the man, then looked up to the girl again. The age spread was too big for them to be anything other than father and daughter, or maybe uncle and niece, Jo thought. The man had a half-gray crew cut and liver-spotted hands, and the girl was a rounded-off version of him. Plump cheeks, plump nose, and eyes just a little too close together for her to be really pretty. In Prospect, Jo knew, girls like this either ended up pummeled into ribbons by early marriages to rock-fisted men, or they survived and turned into fishwives with chiseled mouths and hearts to match, but there was still time for that in the girl’s future. Right now Jo had selling to do.

  Strangers never took easy to the salt—or to her, for that matter—so it didn’t surprise Jo when the man and the dough-faced girl frowned as they took in her scars. Almost thirteen years had passed since the fire that had burned her, but Jo still wasn’t used to some of the looks she got. She supposed her insides hadn’t yet caught up with the state of her exterior, but she also thought that was pretty much true of everyone. Most folks just didn’t show it. The man in front of Jo didn’t appear as if he had that issue, however. He looked like the kind of person who wanted those around him to fall in shoulder to shoulder and give a salute.

  “Tip it to the left!” he was shouting at the girl. “The left, damn it!” The girl sighed but then did as he said before climbing down from the ladder in an awkward, flat-footed way, as though she’d had all the opinions beaten out of her early on. Then Jo noticed the way the girl rolled her eyes when the man wasn’t looking and saw that she was wrong. The girl had opinions, all right. She just knew to keep them to herself. Jo waited for the girl to plant both her feet on the ground before she told her, “You should have tipped it to the right.”

  The man frowned harder, then stumped over and held out his palm. “Cutt Pitman,” he said. “And that’s my daughter, Dee.” He flicked his fingertips toward the girl. “Diner’s not open just yet.”

  Jo didn’t bother to shake his hand. “Joanna Gilly,” she replied. “I’m not here to eat. I brought you some salt.” She took a sample bag out of her pocket and put it in the man’s callused hand. “Call me when you’re about to open, and I can deliver you some more. We can talk about price. I’ll be in town next Tuesday.”

  She turned to walk away, but the man stopped her. “Why would I buy salt from you when I can get it by the pound in a box?” he asked.

  Jo folded her arms and licked the scars blistering the right side of her mouth. “If you don’t buy from me,” she said, “no one will eat here.”

  Cutt smirked. “Says who?”

  Jo fixed him with her good eye. “That’s the funny thing about this town,” she said. “No one will come out and say so. They just won’t show up. I’ll be back next Tuesday.” And she spun on her one good heel.

  “Pesky old bat,” she heard the man mutter as she trudged away, and then he waved a hand and ordered his daughter back up the ladder. “Tip it to the right. No, the right!” Jo heard him yelling.

  So they didn’t want her salt just now, but that fact didn’t surprise her. How were they to know any better? To them, Jo reflected, it was probably about as common as house dust, and maybe about as useful. But it didn’t worry her, their refusal. She just had to give them time—that was all. Patience was its own reward, she told herself, putting the ancient truck into gear and pulling into the street, and it was a good thing, too, because currently patience was about all she had.

  By 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.

  Before 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 sa
lt 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.

  The summer Henry drowned, he and Jo were eight years old, it was August 1950, and it seemed like what wasn’t wilted in the world was already halfway to fried. Going into Prospect with Mama for supplies and eyeing the town children in their pretty bathing suits and sandals was a special kind of torture for Jo that year. Not only because of the heat, but because it was the first time she could remember keeping a running tally of the difference between other lives and hers. It didn’t bother her, exactly, but she noticed it. Her peers were heading out with their mothers for a day at the beach, their hair nicely plaited, plastic pails in their hands, and Jo was heading back to a world of hot mud, flies, and sweat rags for garb.

  She had no time for toys. Instead of a sand bucket, she had a wooden bowl and a barrow to push from the ponds to the barn. She did have a dented metal pail, but it was for clams or catching snails in the garden. Standing in the cool aisle of the grocery store, she wondered what it would be like to have a mother with tender fingers, who wore flowery dresses instead of men’s trousers, whom all the other mothers smiled at when they saw her coming. But that never happened. When Mama stepped up to the counter, townswomen tucked their daughters closer to their sides and turned their faces. “Don’t mind them,” Mama would whisper, and then hustle Jo home to the very substance that caused all their problems in the first place.

  That August it was so hot and dry they were getting twice as much salt as usual. Jo’s mother scraped the evaporating basins clean every evening, but she simply couldn’t keep up with the labor—not even with Jo by her side. Jo’s father wasn’t any help. For one thing, he was a man and therefore barred from working in the ponds, but also lazy by nature and scarce around the place. It was only half his fault, though. The salt was for women’s hands alone. Jo’s father might rake the mud from the ditches at the beginning of the season or shore up the earthen levees that separated the collecting basins, but it was Mama and Jo who gathered the crystals from the ponds, especially the delicate and pure flakes that floated on the surface of the otherwise coarse sludge.