The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  “Men are too used to pushing and shoving their way through the world,” Mama told Jo as she folded her fingers around Jo’s on the handle of a wooden rake and then guided the instrument out over the evaporating pond, pulling the crystals toward them without wetting them. “Women know better how to get what they want without making ripples.”

  “Henry’s not pushy,” Jo said, squeezing the rake handle. If anything, she thought, her brother was the opposite of what boys were supposed to be. He was as soft and retiring as the inside of a mollusk. Even from birth they were nothing alike. For starters, Henry had the copper hair and freckles of their mother and Jo got the inky skin and eyes of their father.

  “It’s the Portagee in you coming out,” her mother always said, as if Jo and her father were the last survivors of some foreign tribe instead of decent Europeans. Mama’s family, the Gillys, whose last name she’d kept out of sheer stubbornness, were Irish through and through, all the way down to their freckled feet and their luck with cards and dice. Jo didn’t inherit those traits either. Her feet were nut brown, and she had the steady temperament of a train running down a track—unsuitable for games of chance but perfect for life in a salt marsh.

  Her brother, on the other hand, would have been better off in a library. Weak-kneed and nearsighted, he learned to read at the freakish age of three and would spend hours lolling on the front porch, his nose in the old books left over from the Gillys who’d gone before them. Jo would come up from a day in the flats, and Henry would start babbling about the life cycles of mice or describe the different categories of clouds in alphabetical order. Jo liked to picture the two of them crammed together in Mama’s belly, him floating in a haze of distraction, her already taking care of the particulars, dividing up the food that came sliding their way so he wouldn’t forget to eat.

  Her mother interrupted Jo’s daydreaming, scraping another load toward the little mud platform by the side of the basin and working it into a neat pile at her feet. “No,” she agreed. “Henry’s not pushy at all.” Her hands stilled a moment, and she got a faraway look in her eyes. “Maybe that’s going to be his saving grace.”

  “What’s mine?” Jo asked.

  Mama looked down at her, as if surprised to find a whole daughter sprung up on the land. “You don’t need one. It’s only boys the salt’s got a wicked taste for.”

  Jo wrinkled up her face. She didn’t like the sound of that. It sounded like another excuse for girls to do all the labor. “What do you mean?”

  Mama shook her head, as if scattering flies from her hair. “Nothing.” She took her hands off Jo’s on the rake. “Try it on your own now. Put a little more shoulder into it this time.”

  Jo took great pride in her new skill, showing off to Henry the small rake her mother gave her, but he just shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Why are you happy about having to do more work?”

  “It’s not work,” Jo corrected, straightening the strings of her new canvas apron. “Mama says it’s a craft, and you can’t do it. You’re a boy.”

  Henry shrugged again. “Then lucky me.” He had no idea of the ins and outs of the farm, and no interest either, so Jo took on the extra chore of scraping the basins without much more thought, the way she added an extra scoop of potatoes to her plate in the evening. The work filled her up, even if it wasn’t exciting. She thought about what her mother had said about the salt having a wicked taste for boys and wondered if Henry was less lucky than he knew, or if maybe the salt was just more powerful than either of them imagined. It never occurred to her that maybe it just had history on its side.

  Every dawn that August, Jo’s mother sent her down to the muddy channels to check on the water levels of the basins. If they were almost dry, Jo scraped off the grayish sludge lurking at the bottom of them and then reflooded the depressions, unwinding sluice ropes and lifting the gates on their pulleys, letting water rush in from the holding pool. She would think about her brother then, tucked like a snail in the comfort of his bed, and feel sorry for what he was missing: the gurgle of the rills at his feet, the line of pelicans hovering on the horizon, precise as a squadron of bombers. It seemed to Jo like the world was putting on a show just for her.

  As the heat intensified, Jo’s mother worried more about the water levels dropping, and she began to send Jo into the marsh two, sometimes even three times a day. It still wasn’t enough, though. The salt was coming so fast that none of them could keep up. Finally, on a day so hot that Jo would have sworn an egg yolk could have bubbled on her forehead, Jo’s mother pushed her hands through her hair and gave in, deciding to buck convention.

  “Fetch your brother off the porch before you check the water levels,” she said. “That way if you need to open the gates, there’ll be two of you. Get the work done twice as fast, and then come help me bag salt.” Jo scowled at this idea. Henry, she was certain, would be no help at all. She was the only one who knew how to unwind the ropes and lift the gates on their pulleys, and the only one who knew just how much water was enough.

  “Are you sure?” Jo asked, biting the side of her lip for her insolence. “Can’t Daddy help instead?”

  Jo’s mother cast a weary glance back at the house, where Jo’s one-year-old sister, Claire, was napping and Jo’s father was tinkering with the shell of an old car tipped in the weeds, occasionally pausing to take a long swig out of the bottle at his feet. “I don’t think so,” she said, her mouth tight. “Go release more water into that first pool, but stay away from the weir.”

  Jo did as her mother asked and fetched her brother, then led him through the marsh. Henry trailed her over the levees, kicking at the dried mud, hands shoved in his pockets, sullen at being pulled away from his book. He watched while Jo knelt in the mud by the main channel. She untied the sluice’s ropes and tried to crank the rack and pinion, but the gate’s cogs wouldn’t turn. Something had gone wrong with the mechanism.

  “Help me,” she said. “See if something’s caught in the gear.” Her hands were slippery with sweat and seawater. She couldn’t get a tight-enough grasp on the sluice’s handle. Water rushed and pushed on the opposite side of the partition like a crowd of prisoners intent on freedom.

  Jo looked up, but her brother was gone. He’d wandered farther down the channel to the weir, which formed a barrier between raw sea and the beginning of the marsh. Time and time again, Jo’s mother had warned them not to play near it, for though the water looked calm on the surface, it was mean as a dragon beneath, capable of sucking little children like them into the underworld without even a breath left behind.

  “Henry!” Jo called, but he wasn’t listening. “Don’t step in the water,” she cried, but it was almost like he’d been told to go straight in. It was hot, and he wanted to cool off. She watched him bend down, his hair dipped toward the surface, and then, just as her mother had warned would happen, he jerked suddenly—Jo couldn’t tell why from her vantage point—and toppled under the water. She charged over to him and was about to dive in herself when fear and total panic froze her muscles, sticking her to the spot like a rabbit under floodlights. “Henry!” she cried again and again, but there was nothing. She willed herself to wade into the frothing water, to make a rescue, but dreaded the idea of being sucked under like Henry. Who would save them then? She waited for ten breaths, but Henry didn’t come up. The dragon had swallowed him whole. Jo quit breathing herself, unsure what to do, before she finally came to her senses and ran to find her mother.

  Jo would never forget the look on Mama’s face when she ran into the kitchen alone and told her what had happened. She was expecting a blaze of terror, or anger, maybe, but when she choked out the story, her mother just put her hands over her face and breathed into her palms, as if she’d been waiting her whole life for news this bad to hit her, and now that it had, she could finally exhale and let it all out.

  By the time Jo’s parents pulled Henry’s body out of the water, he had started to bloat and turn a strange chalky white—already more a creature o
f water than land. Jo stared while her parents hauled him onto dry ground, appalled at the sight of what salt water did when it bit down to a person’s bones, horrified at what she had done by not going in after him. Her mother saw Jo looking but didn’t move to comfort her in any way, and so Jo hugged her infant sister for comfort instead, understanding that the first chapter of her childhood had just slammed to a close. Claire squirmed and fretted, but Jo held her tight, terrified that she might run toward the water as Henry had, and knowing that if she did, it would be Jo’s fault all over again.

  The days after Henry’s death turned even warmer, with air so still that it was almost evil, the salt piling up in little hillocks on the surface of the evaporation basins. One by one, the pools dried up completely, and when the wind returned and began to blow the salt away, Jo and her mother saw that the mud in the pond closest to the graveyard where they had buried Henry had stained itself the color of blood.

  Her family was used to the basins changing colors. At the end of every summer, when the ooze in the bottom of the ponds was at its mineral thickest, algae would bloom into purples, greens, and russets, making the marsh into a patchwork quilt. But none of them had ever seen anything like this. “Good God in heaven,” Mama said, crossing herself at the basin’s edge and shifting Claire on her hip. “It’s never going to end.”

  “What isn’t?” Jo asked. They were the first words she’d spoken in three days, and her voice sounded like cat claws scratching wood.

  Her mother put an arm around her and drew her tight to her side. Ever since the accident and her initial coldness, Jo’s mother had been finding any excuse to touch Jo, which was both a comfort and an agony for her. She knew she could never take Henry’s place. “Never mind,” Mama said.

  In the distance Jo heard the porch door slam. The hunched shadow of her father stepped out the door. He was choosing to mourn the old way, wearing proper black, refusing meat, and speaking only under duress. He’d given up music, poker, and Wednesday-night drinking at Fletcher’s, but he couldn’t forgo gin. In fact, he wasn’t even bothering to hide his bottle inside the hall piano’s broken guts anymore. He just left it sitting on top of the instrument, and Jo’s mother let him.

  “Where’s Papa going?” Jo asked, for she noticed he was holding a case in his hand. He started down the sandy lane toward town, his silhouette growing smaller and smaller. Jo’s mother smoothed a hand over her hair. She and Jo and Claire were dressed in black, too, but Mama’s grief was subtler than Jo’s father’s. She didn’t need all the formalities of mourning. It was as if the currents sucking along the weir were trying to tug her soul out to the violence of the sea, where she could roil and seethe, if she could only get there.

  “It’s going to be just us girls now,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought it could ever be different.” She watched Jo’s father disappear down the lane, and then she stepped over to the red pond and scooped up some of the salt. “Open your mouth,” she told Jo, putting a pinch of the bitter stuff on her tongue. “Now swallow.”

  Jo did as she said, surprised that the salt didn’t taste any different in spite of its color. Life, it seemed, would go on, the same as it always had. But that wasn’t her mother’s intended lesson. Mama knelt down and looked in Jo’s eyes. She put another pinch of salt into Jo’s mouth. “You have to root your feet to the earth and become one with the land,” she said. “You’re a true Gilly. You and Claire will have to carry our name now. Remember that, Jo. They’d have to turn you inside out to get the salt out of you.”

  Jo licked the last fleck of brine from her bottom lip and curled her fist around the smooth pebble she’d been carrying in her pocket since Henry’s death. She and Henry had always played rock, paper, scissors before bed, and she had always won.

  “Paper covers rock!” she’d yell, smothering his fist with her open palm, and Henry would fight back tears. Now it seemed Jo had won again, for here she was with her pebble, and her brother was dead. Stone was stronger than salt, salt was stronger than flesh, and flesh sank like iron underwater. It felt awful. Jo flung her pebble into the pond and watched it disappear.

  “What was that?” her mother asked.

  “Nothing,” Jo answered. Jo’s mother scowled at her and then turned to go back to the house, empty now of both Jo’s brother and her father.

  “Don’t go putting things in the salt that don’t belong there,” she said, “unless you’re prepared for the worst to happen.”

  “What could be worse than Henry dying?” Jo asked, and dabbed her eyes.

  “Plenty,” Mama said. “You just aren’t old enough to guess that yet.”

  Jo waited until she was sure Mama was back in the house, and then she tossed another pebble into the pond, watching as it sank into the red sludge, where it might linger and stay down in the earth with her brother’s bloated remains, a token of her sorrow, the only one she had to give.

  On the day of Henry’s funeral, the townswomen of Prospect crammed the pews of St. Agnes, filling the church with the competing scents of lavender water and gardenia perfume, not to mention plenty of rustling whispers.

  “Sit up straight, now,” Mama instructed Jo before the service began, adjusting Claire on her lap. “Others are watching.” And talking, Jo wanted to add but didn’t.

  It was muggy in the sanctuary, and Jo was tired. Somewhere behind her a fly buzzed, and then the double doors banged open and Ida Turner, of all souls, the undisputed first lady of Prospect, marched up the center of the tiny church, the beady eyes on her fox stole the perfect counterpart to her own. Her presence gave Jo a bitter sort of comfort. If anyone was more unpopular than they were in Prospect, she knew, it was Ida. It was just that everyone was too scared of Ida to say it to her face. She was pulling her six-year-old son, Whit, by the wrist, and seeing him reminded Jo all over again of her brother, even though Whit’s hair was the color of a chestnut and his eyes were as brown as hers. She tried to catch them, but he stared down at his polished shoes, as if shamed by his mother’s entrance. Something just came over Ida Turner whenever she walked into church. She got like a fire someone had stoked too high. Even Father Flynn, with his watery blue eyes and shaky fingers, avoided looking straight at her.

  People in the church gasped now, however. In Prospect it was in the worst taste to approach an aggrieved family until after Mass was over and they’d had a chance to lay a bunch of wild herbs at the feet of the painted Virgin. Only then, after the family members had risen and made their way down the little aisle, would the mourning line form on the way out the door. Even Ida should have known better.

  She didn’t seem to care. She tugged off her calfskin glove, reached into her pocket, and stuck her bare hand out to Jo’s mother just as Father Flynn opened the door from the sacristy. He saw Ida and froze. When she had the floor, even God paused. In the dull light of the church, her hair was shining like an evil queen’s, and Jo could see that underneath all her powder Ida was as dusky as a Gypsy. Against her breastbone a single pearl dangled from a silver chain, clashing with a ruby brooch, her diamond wedding band, and knotted gold earrings the size of small doorknockers.

  Jo took her fussing sister out of her mother’s lap. Without Henry next to her to distract her, she was seeing things she’d never noticed before: the way her mother’s chin jutted forward when Ida came near her, the crocodile set of Ida’s lips, the way the air almost crackled between the pair of women.

  Jo thought maybe Ida wanted to shake hands with Mama, but Ida reached over to her instead and grabbed the point of her chin with her red-varnished nails, tipping Jo’s face up so she could see it better. Startled, Jo let her arms fall open, and Claire scuttled out of her lap and over to her mother’s, where she stuck a finger into her mouth and whimpered.

  Ida leaned down so close that Jo could see the individual spikes of her false eyelashes quiver. She watched Ida lick her lips, as if she were savoring something delicious at a cocktail party. She looked like a woman on whom everything was polished
, but when she spoke, her voice rattled like a stew bone on the boil. “It should have been you in that ditch,” she said, low and hard.

  Jo flinched, scratching her cheek on one of Ida’s nails as her mother lunged forward, unwilling to let Ida have any word, never mind the last. “Remember, Ida,” she spat, “salt is the essence of heaven and the measure of the soul. Even yours.” She looked like she was considering which one of Ida’s veins to tear open first.

  Jo wondered what her mother meant by that, but she didn’t dare ask. And anyway, Mama was full of platitudes. They were as worn and familiar to Jo as the breeches she donned to work.

  Ida turned a shade paler under her makeup. “If I wanted to, I could take everything you call yours, Sarah Gilly, and make it mine today. You and I both know that.” Her lips hung open for a moment more, as if she weren’t quite finished, but then she clamped her jaw shut anyway, spun on one heel, and pushed Whit back down the aisle toward the church’s double doors. He turned miserably to glance at Jo, his eyes meeting hers in silent apology.

  She shivered and reached for her mother’s cracked hand. “Could she really do that?” she whispered. “Could she really take away everything that’s ours?”

  Her mother’s black scarf had slipped back, revealing her red hair, a bonfire roaring across her skull. She pursed her lips. “Don’t be silly. I’d give both my arms away before I’d give an inch of anything to Ida Turner. Now, stand up. Mass is about to begin.” Just then, mercifully, Father Flynn began moving toward the altar, cassock sleeves fluttering, his hands folded as though nothing unusual had just happened.