The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  But Dee had left all that behind her, the way she’d also left the smell of pine sap, her sense of direction, and her mother’s bones. As her father steered their car down the rutted, sandy lane toward St. Agnes, Dee cracked her window open and let the salty air brush her cheeks and forehead. The touch of it was gentle, almost moist, and she missed her mother’s fingers. She used to smooth Dee’s brow when she was sick. Now Dee wished she’d done the same once or twice in return, instead of spending all her time with boys who couldn’t even remember her name. She closed her eyes and squeezed back her tears, and when she opened them again, they’d arrived at the smallest church she’d ever seen.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” she said, getting out of the car and slamming the door. The sanctuary was so plain it practically looked condemned. Just a saltbox of bleached-out shingles and some arched windows with clear glass in them. No steeple, no crucifixes, nothing holy-looking at all, especially not the wild thicket of rosebushes that choked the bottom half of the building.

  But once they got inside, there was no question they’d found the right spot. There were ten rows of pews bolted to the wooden floor, a simple wooden altar with an even sterner crucifix, and along the far wall the oddest image of the Virgin Mary that Dee had ever seen.

  “What do you make of that?” she asked, already moving toward it, but her father reached out and grabbed her arm, shoving her into an empty pew at the back.

  “Just sit down for once in your life. Mass is about to start.”

  She took a seat on the hard wooden bench, still staring at the strange Virgin. Dee wasn’t an expert or anything, but she certainly wouldn’t have called the painting glorious. This Virgin was less a blessed mother, it seemed to Dee, and more a woman of the world. There looked to be a host of things wrong with her. For starters, a row of fishhooks and lures was painted along the hem of her gown. And a single open eye was painted on her right palm, which stretched downward as if trying to haul up the souls of the fallen.

  The painting’s most striking feature, however, was her lack of them, for this Virgin had no face—just a blank spot chiseled into the wall’s plaster. Her feet were dainty and painted in a pair of old-fashioned slippers, and in front of them a few votive candles flickered wistfully.

  “Please rise,” a wavering voice said, and an elderly priest started shuffling down the aisle, singing a slow and off-key hymn.

  “Turn around to the front,” Cutt snapped, but Dee was too stuck on the Virgin to pay attention to him. She was right in the middle of trying to imagine what kind of face an image like that would have, in fact, when the doors burst open and a woman arrived who was so extraordinary-looking she answered Dee’s question without saying a word.

  All throughout Mass, Dee couldn’t take her eyes off the woman. She was interesting from the back, but from the front Dee couldn’t tell if she was pretty or just plain spooky. She was green-eyed, pointy-chinned, and had the palest skin Dee had ever seen. But it was her hair that gave the woman away, not just the color, which was an unholy red, but the way she had it all coiled and knotted, every strand sprayed and pinned as if her life depended on it. Women with nothing to hide didn’t fasten their hair up like that, Dee knew.

  The woman was with her husband, and if she was striking, he was just plain handsome and obviously rich. He looked a little older than the woman (there was a single streak of faint silver running through his hair), but not so old that Dee couldn’t imagine him holding her arm instead of the woman’s. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he turned his cheek a little bit, his gaze raking Dee’s plump hips and the rest of her so hard that she turned about twelve shades of red and dropped her hymnal.

  “What in the devil’s name is wrong with you today?” her father said, giving her a pinch, and the handsome man across from her stifled a grin, making her blush harder. For the rest of the service, Dee took her father’s advice and kept her gaze forward, even if she had to pretend she was in a military lineup to do it.

  After the wheezy old priest gasped out his last amen, Cutt dragged Dee up to have a word with him. His name was Father Flynn. Up close, Dee saw, his face was droopy and kind, and all of a sudden she felt bad about the mean way she’d summed him up in her mind earlier.

  “Cutt Pitman,” her father said, sticking out his hand. “And this is my lamentable child, Deirdre.”

  “Everyone calls me Dee,” she said, taking the priest’s papery hand, and he smiled at her. She watched the red-haired woman hesitate for a moment by the queer picture of the Virgin, as if she wanted to touch it, but then she sniffed and turned on her heel, joining her wolf-eyed husband across the church.

  “Who is that woman?” Dee asked as Mr. Weatherly stepped forward to join them.

  Father Flynn and Mr. Weatherly followed her gaze, both of them looking surprised. “Why, that’s Claire Gilly Turner,” Father Flynn said. “Haven’t you met her sister, Jo, yet? I would have thought she would have tried to bring you some salt by now.”

  At the mention of Jo, Cutt practically snarled, and he stuck his hands into his pockets.

  “I see you’ve been introduced,” the priest said mildly. “I know she looks frightening—she was in a terrible fire years ago—but she means no harm. Her family has worked the salt on the marsh just beyond here for generations.”

  “Doesn’t she come to Mass?” Dee asked.

  Father Flynn hesitated. “She is… somewhat of a recluse. She and her sister don’t get along.”

  Dee looked over at Claire. “Yeah, I can see why.”

  Mr. Weatherly sighed. “You’ve heard some of the story by now, I see. Claire and Joanna haven’t spoken in close to thirteen years. Claire was the one who caused the fire that injured her sister. Then, when she went and married Whit Turner afterward, it was the final break.”

  Dee leaned forward. This was getting good. “Why?”

  Father Flynn looked uncomfortable, but Mr. Weatherly answered her question readily enough. “Because a long time ago Whit Turner used to be in love with Jo.”

  Dee stepped back, trying not to smile like a cat after cream. If there was anything she was good at, Dee knew, it was sniffing out when someone was pretending to be something she wasn’t. It took one faker to know another. Her father grabbed her by the elbow, but Dee figured she should keep asking questions while she was on a roll. “And what’s with the Virgin over there? Why is she missing her face?”

  Mr. Weatherly’s mouth tightened. Suddenly he didn’t look so friendly anymore.

  Father Flynn took up the loose thread of conversation. “She’s part of the Gilly story, too,” he said. “The townspeople call her Our Lady of Perpetual Salt.” His face darkened, and he folded his hands. Dee wondered about the painted fishhooks and the eye, but Father Flynn looked so downhearted that she didn’t ask. She was tempted to reach out and hug the priest, or whatever you did to old people when they got mournful. He took a breath and shuffled his feet, impatient all of a sudden. “Lovely to meet you, my dear, but if you’ll excuse me, I have to discuss something quickly with the Turners.”

  Dee watched him approach Claire, studying the way she shook his hand with just the tips of her fingers, and she wondered again if maybe Our Lady had the wanton soul of a redhead. It wasn’t until Dee was outside the church that she realized that Father Flynn, the old goat, never did answer her most burning question, which was what had happened to Our Lady’s face, and it made her twice as curious about this new town all over again.

  It was late September, but mild enough that Dee didn’t need her jacket when she walked outside. She rolled up her blouse sleeves, appreciating the sun shining on her bare forearms. It was nice to have one thing touching her that wasn’t her own self. She didn’t miss the string of panting boys she’d broken off with, but every now and then it would have been agreeable to have a little company, if only someone to rub her shoulders at the end of a hellish day in the diner.

  The church was located out on a little spit of land,
farther along the bay from town. Dee could see the open ocean, and she could hear waves crashing. There were sand dunes right behind the church, and she longed to kick off her shoes, sink her toes in the grit, and see where her feet would take her. The other worshippers had all driven away, even Claire Gilly Turner and her handsome husband, and Father Flynn had shut the church doors and disappeared. The place was closed for business.

  Dee turned to her father. “Let’s take a walk,” she suggested. Cutt looked up, surprised. Generally he wasn’t a strolling kind of man. If Cutt was going someplace, he did it in the straightest manner possible, with no unscheduled breaks. He hesitated, and Dee held her breath.

  “No, you go,” he said. “I’m going to go over the inventory.”

  Dee exhaled a little. To be honest, it wouldn’t have been that relaxing to have to march with her father down the beach to a fixed destination. She wanted to linger in the dunes and let the icy ocean water numb her feet. She wanted to get to know the sea with all her senses—her skin, her tongue—the way a real girl would and not like some miniature soldier on a battalion exercise.

  She watched Cutt get into the car and slowly pull away from the church, feeling her chest grow lighter with every yard he put between them. Dee walked down to the shoreline and saw a beach after the Pilgrims’ own hearts: colorless, flecked with stones, the waves a series of punishing blows to the land. She sighed, disappointed. In winter it would no doubt look even worse. What faint color there was—in the blobs of kelp, in the taupe sand—would be erased under a wet blanket of fog and sleet.

  Near her at this end of the beach, there was a terrific pile of rocks tumbled one on top of the other, as if giants had played a game of dice and then gotten bored, and the land stretched out to a point. The church sat up there. Then, in the opposite direction, the beach scooped inward and laid itself out long and lazy to another point in the distance. It ended in another bank of dunes. Dee was curious about what was on the other side of them, so she put her jacket back on and started moseying down to see, her shoes in one hand, socks in the other, the dunes rising in a rolling bank to the left of her.

  The beach was bigger than she thought. Her sense of direction had always been a little screwy, but in Prospect she was really hopeless at judging how far one thing was from another. Finally she reached the other end of the beach and climbed up the far set of dunes. Her feet kept sinking in the sand, making every one step feel like six, and her thighs cramped and stung from the exercise, but the ache of that felt good. At least it was a distraction from the stabbings she still got in her chest whenever she thought about her mother lying so skinny and white in her bed.

  She didn’t know what she was expecting to see from the top of the dunes. More beach, perhaps, or maybe another big pile of rocks or a road, but that’s not what she found. Instead she saw that she was standing at the mouth of Jo Gilly’s salt marsh. A wide channel of seawater separated her from the dunes on the other side. It flowed into what looked like a big pond, and from there the channel got narrower and fed into smaller pools, and then it spread out into a confusing series of ditches and squarish basins separated by earthen levees. Dee thought it was the strangest landscape she’d ever seen—busy but desolate, orderly but messy at the same time. It didn’t look like a human kind of spot at all, but rather something that devious fairies might have built.

  There were only two buildings in the distance. The closest one looked like some kind of storage shed or barn. It didn’t look too old. But the second structure, all the way on the other side of the marsh, was ancient. It was clearly a house—not very big, with a generous porch and covered in shingles like everything else in Prospect. It had more windows than the barn but was just as plain in the end. Joanna’s beat-up red truck was parked there, but there were no signs of life, and for that Dee was half glad. Joanna’s scars had been scary enough in the middle of town. Dee didn’t want to have to confront them in the middle of nowhere all by herself.

  She hiked along the top of the dunes, taking in the watery spread of the marsh below her. The pools, which were really just shallow scoops with mud at the bottom of them, were the craziest colors: violet, rust, an iron green, and in one of the ponds the salt was bloodred. She’d never seen anything like it.

  It was a little warmer once she got down level with the marsh. The dunes blocked the wind, and the air just felt odd down there, like it was heavier. Judging from the decades’ worth of junk heaped around the place, the farm didn’t seem like a place that change ever came to. She circled the barn, making sure no one was around the place first, and tried the double doors. They opened easily, but she didn’t have the guts to slip inside. She just got a glimpse of shadows and some equipment, then a blast of air that was surprisingly dry. She breathed in, and the back of her throat tingled and burned. She shut the doors quickly.

  On the other side of the barn, the side that had been hidden from her up in the dunes, she saw that there was a little graveyard—nothing like the formal gated cemetery where they’d buried her mother, but a few raggedy headstones of different materials and sizes, half hidden by the marsh reeds and grasses. Curious, she wandered toward them.

  There were four of them laid out in a loose semicircle, and they all seemed to be boys or men. HERE LIES LYFORD GILLY, ETERNAL HUSBAND OF HEPHZIBAH, 1839, the first one read in severe letters on unpolished granite. SILAS GILLY, BELOVED SON, BELOVED CHILD, ANGEL NOW, read the second, but there was no date on it. The third stone was just a plain square of white marble, but the script carved on it was so full of flourishes that Dee had trouble reading it in the flat sunlight. SIMMS MASON GILLY DIED IN BRAVE BATTLE, 1918, it said. HERE LIE HIS REMAINS. MAY THE WOUNDED FIND ETERNAL PEACE. The last gravestone—another chunk of granite, but polished and thinner than the first one—was the most recent. HENRY SILAS GILLY, it said. 1942–1950. EARTH TO EARTH, DUST TO DUST, GIVEN TO THE SALT FOREVER. Dee shivered. On top of that grave, there was a small pile of the bloodred salt she’d seen earlier.

  Suddenly she heard a bang in the distance. She jumped and looked over her shoulder at the farmhouse. Joanna Gilly was limping down the porch steps, and she didn’t look happy. Dee stood up and started heading back toward the dunes, but then she saw a break in the grasses where the sandy lane scraggled to an uncertain end. She hadn’t been able to spot it from the beach, but she figured it must be the same path that led from town and passed the church. It probably ran parallel with Drake’s Beach on the other side of the dunes. At least she hoped it did as she sprang from the cluster of reeds and set off at a run back toward what now seemed like the lesser evils of her father, the diner, and the gray windows of Prospect.

  The next morning a strange and urgent kind of sound woke her before dawn. It was a pounding or drumming she couldn’t place in her half slumber. She sat up in her bed under the dormer and pulled back the curtain just in time to see a huge white horse pass with a red-haired woman clinging to its back. Dee let out a little cry and started away from the glass, though she couldn’t say why. Claire wouldn’t have been able to see her even if she’d cared to look, Dee knew, which she clearly didn’t. She was crouched low over the horse’s neck, her hair caught in a loose braid, dressed in nothing but a pair of breeches and a thin blouse. There was a light mist falling, and almost as soon as they appeared, Claire and her horse disappeared again into it and the street once again fell silent. Dee shivered and let the curtain drop.

  She didn’t say anything to her father about what she’d seen as they set up service that morning in the diner, but the memory of the vision distracted her, and she broke two coffee mugs before they even opened the doors. The second time a shard of glass caught her thumb, and she ended up bleeding in fat drops all over her apron. The color reminded her of the weird red salt she’d seen in Jo’s marsh, and she almost swooned, but her father put an end to that. He slammed a fistful of napkins down on the counter and nodded at her to take them. “Damn it, Dee, that’s a dollar fifty you just wasted before I’ve even unlocke
d the register.” He sighed. “Go upstairs and see if Timothy Weatherly needs any help fixing the toilet up there, why don’t you. You’re just a menace down here.”

  She untied her apron and left it on the counter, stepping around her father the way she’d avoid a bear with a thorn in its paw. To be honest, she didn’t really mind being banished to the leaky water closet with Mr. Weatherly. At least he wouldn’t call her a stupid waste of a girl. In fact, getting him to say anything at all was like trying to pedal a rusty bicycle through gravel. He’d answer questions civilly enough, Dee noticed, but even then he used the least amount of words to do it.

  He looked up at Dee when she entered the small bathroom and then down to his open toolbox. “Hand me that wrench,” he said, jutting his chin toward the tools. “No, not that one. The big one.”

  She handed it over and watched him tinker with the pipes. “I saw something weird this morning,” she finally said. Mr. Weatherly gave a savage twist to the plumbing but didn’t respond, so she continued. “I saw Claire Turner riding her horse right down the middle of the street. It was almost like a dream. She just came out of nowhere and then disappeared again. Does she always do that?”

  Mr. Weatherly held out the wrench, and Dee took it from him. He picked up a rag lying next to him and wiped his palms, but he didn’t answer her question. “Now the pliers,” he said. Dee rummaged in the toolbox, found them, and then squatted down on her heels and wrapped her arms around her knees. Talking to Mr. Weatherly was about as satisfying as talking to herself, she thought, which was to say not very.