The Gilly Salt Sisters (13 page)

Dee blushed and avoided her gaze. “Actually, that’s kind of why I’m out here. Um, it turns out we won’t be needing as much salt as we thought. The diners aren’t really eating it. They prefer the store-bought kind. They say yours is… tainted.”

Instantly Jo pictured one of Claire’s bony hands plucking a salt bowl off the diner’s counter and then imagined her saying in the calmest way, almost as if she were sorry to have to do it,
If you only knew what was in this stuff, you’d never eat it again
. Jo sighed again. “Don’t tell me. My sister swanned into your father’s diner and made you think twice.”

Dee looked uncomfortable. “It wasn’t a big deal,” she said, keeping her face turned away from the three kittens. “But maybe it’s better if your salt’s not right out in the open.”

Jo let out a harsh bark of laughter. “With my sister, Claire, everything’s a big deal. You’ll see. But mark my words, if you stop serving the salt, the Lighthouse will fall right back into the ruin that you found it in. You best tell your customers that there’s no truth to Claire’s tales.”

“How do you know?” Dee asked.

Jo shrugged. “If I were in your shoes, I’d pick the side of the salt, that’s all.”

This advice didn’t seem to make Dee feel any better. She looked down at the row of inert kittens. “What do you do with them after?” she asked as Jo knelt again and reached into the bag. Dee turned her face away as Jo pulled out the last squealing kitten.

“Lime and a deep hole,” Jo said, and plunged her arm into the washtub.

Dee fled over the bank of dunes to Drake’s Beach without another word, the image of limp kitten corpses no doubt lingering in her mind. The afternoon was starting to bunch up on itself, and the light was dying. Cutt would probably be parading around in the diner’s kitchen, Jo thought, snapping a dish towel and wondering where the hell his daughter was, and soon folks would start trickling in for the dinner special, not as many as for lunch, but some, and in the middle of it all would be the spaces where the dishes of Jo’s salt should have been waiting to work their magic, the pale circles of them as blank and mysterious as so many little moons.

S
he really shouldn’t have tormented the girl like that, Jo conceded to herself after Dee left. After all, she knew better than anyone what it was to be taunted. For the entire year following her brother’s death, her mother had dressed her and Claire in scraps of black so they’d stood out wherever they’d gone, marked by their grief. Jo had been only nine years old. She was too young to understand the adult silence that fell when she and her mother and sister walked into the bank or the pharmacy in town, but at
the same time she was too sorrowful to fit into childhood anymore. Her clothes had rings and mud on them from her working in the marsh before she came to school, and her lunch smelled of boiled cabbage. The other children started giving her a wide berth, picking up and moving their lunches when she approached their tight little groups, making up rhymes about her that they’d sing in the coatroom.

She’d never been popular to begin with, but she had never really minded because she’d always had Henry to eat with, Henry to go on the swings with, and Henry to explain to her the words she couldn’t read for herself. When there’d been two of them, the town children left them alone, but now that Jo was singular, all her oddities were magnified, even to her.

For comfort she turned to Our Lady. Every Sunday she trailed her mother to church, Claire’s toddler hand folded in the pleat of her own, and stared at the Virgin throughout Mass, her missing face a blank riddle that Jo couldn’t solve, the cracks in the paint catching at the edges of her imagination, reminding her of her own small sins.

“There’s more to adoration than plain love,” Mama would tell Jo before bed, her flat voice echoing in the darkness. “Remember that. There’s a pain involved you can’t imagine.”

Jo started paying better attention to the particular kinds of things the townswomen left for Our Lady. The Gillys always deposited their salt, but Jo discovered an unspoken language of offerings. Girls aching for love left fresh flowers, and girls who’d been betrayed left dried. Women worried about their children left sugar and honey, and women with money problems slipped quarters under the bottoms of their votives. And when it was time for confession, everyone without exception would take two fingers and slowly trace the empty arc of the Virgin’s face, as if they preferred to confess their failings to her instead of to the Lord.

Father Flynn despaired of it all. “I’d like to remind everyone not to leave parcels of food or other items sitting out in the sanctuary,” he would sometimes be reduced to announcing before
his sermon. “It only attracts rats. If you’d like to engage in private worship, the votives are kept under the last pew, and a nickel donation is appreciated.” But the women of Prospect roundly ignored him, keeping their own counsel about how and to whom they should pray.

“Why?” Jo pressed her mother.

But Mama never answered. “Go to sleep,” was all Jo ever got.

When she got tired of staring at Our Lady and her plethora of offerings in church, she’d move her attention over to Whit Turner, who sat in the pew across from her and who, though two years younger, made her laugh with the faces he pulled behind his mother’s ramrod back.

Every week it was just Whit and his mother, Ida. His father, Hamish, wasn’t a man of religion and so didn’t attend services. Ida, on the other hand, had been born poor and Catholic, and though she was no longer poor, the Catholic part had stuck good and hard, the way it was supposed to.

Before she was Ida Turner, she was Ida May Dunn, a dirty-kneed girl squatting in her drunken father’s fishing shack with her half-witted sister, wholly dependent on the Catholic Temperance League for clothing, pantry staples, and basic morals. It was amusing for Jo’s mother to watch Ida mince into St. Agnes all buttoned down and proper, because as a girl, Mama claimed, Ida had run as wild as the crosshatch of tides along Drake’s Beach. Some of those currents, Jo knew, could suck a body under, and some of them would only roll a person’s bones around a little, and woe to the poor soul who didn’t know which was which.

The same caution applied to Ida herself. Halfway through church she’d sense Whit squirming and turn to catch him mid-grimace, two fingers stuck in the corners of his mouth, waggling his eyebrows at Jo. “Whittington Turner,” she’d hiss audibly, pinching his earlobe in between her varnished fingernails, “if you look to that Gilly girl one more time, I’ll blind you.” That would sober Whit up. Jo would watch him straighten his back as tight
as Ida’s and fold his hands on his lap, and she’d marvel at how he could slip those stiff Turner airs on and off like a pair of socks.

After Mass, when the weather was fine, Mama would set Jo free on Drake’s Beach with instructions to come home with something for the dinner pot. The Depression and war years were well over, but life for locals was still lean-toothed. For the most part, people in Prospect took their sustenance from the sea: fish, snapping lobsters, kelp, clams dug from the shore. But things were slowly changing. The new Mid-Cape Highway was finished (sometimes Jo liked to fantasize that her father had run off to work on it), and every year more people were trickling into their little village. Near Hyannis the wealthy frolicked in their family compounds, even added onto them, and every summer pastel cars adorned with fancy grilles and fins clogged the roads. Stuck behind them in traffic, Jo would squint and be reminded of the box of petits fours she’d once seen Ida pass around after Easter Mass that her mother had refused to let her eat from.

“We don’t take from Ida Turner,” she’d snapped, slapping Jo’s hand back down to her side. “We’re scant, but we’re better than all that.”

Thanks to Ida, lots of people in town were scant.

“I’m out of chops,” Mr. Upton would sadly tell them from May to August. “I’m out of fillet, chuck, and hamburger, too.” So it was liver, shanks, and oxtail for Jo and her family. They listened as the strains of big-band records and the rattle of cocktail shakers floated down Plover Hill and watched as the Turners had the clapboards up and down Bank Street painted a pearly gray, trimmed back all the hedges in town, mended the pickets around Mr. Upton’s market, and instituted a fine for any shopkeeper who didn’t keep his windows clean.

“Pretty soon the Turners are going to have us all in uniforms,” Mr. Upton grumbled to Jo’s mother when she delivered salt to him. “Lately you can’t spit without hitting something new they’ve bought. I hear they’re even eyeing properties over on the
mainland now.” Jo’s mother’s eyes would darken at these revelations, but she wouldn’t say anything, just hand over Mr. Upton’s salt with a frown. They had their own worries, Jo knew. Each summer they were selling less and less salt. The summer people, it turned out, preferred their salt fine and white. They didn’t see the point of the Gillys’ lumpish stuff.

Given that their bread was buttered on opposite sides, Whit and Jo should never have become friends—there were better than a hundred and one reasons against it. Ida hated Mama, for starters, and Mama hated Ida back with a passion she reserved for the marsh’s feral cats.

“Sluts, every one of them,” she’d sniff, toting another sack of kittens to its demise. “Loose as a boatload of drunken sailors. Leaving poor innocents to starve. Strutting around with her tail stuck up in the air.” (Sometimes it was hard for Jo to tell if her mother was cursing Ida or the cats.)

Maybe the enmity between their mothers should have fueled similar high feelings between Whit and Jo, but it turned out they both had the same ornery streak painted down their spines in red. His was more obvious, but Jo possessed it, too, and so instead of repelling each other, they clicked together like magnet and metal, each the material the other needed. And for a while—for many years, in fact—nothing managed to pull them apart, not their mothers, not the fact that he was a wealthy Turner and she was a dirt-scraping Gilly, not the two-year difference in their ages.

But it couldn’t have lasted forever, and not for all the usual reasons people in town flapped their gums about—not because of the fire, or because of Jo’s and Whit’s reverse stations in life, or because Jo’s sister was always the prettier Gilly. In fact, as with most small-town scandals, the real reason for the split between Jo and Whit was far simpler and bigger than most folks thought to consider: Death came between them. And even though she would never like to admit it, and despite all appearances to the contrary, in her heart of hearts Jo had some very good reasons for thanking the lucky stars that it did.

T
he first time she made the proper acquaintance of Whit, Jo was seven and up to her elbows in wet sand on Drake’s Beach. If she had enough time and if the weather permitted, she liked to forage a little after church, running a line out into the surf to catch fryers or gathering a cluster of kelp, but mostly she dug buckets of clams: gristly and small, but rich enough when her mother stewed them. For the Gilly women, a bucket of clams meant that another day’s grocery money got to stay put in the jar in the kitchen. Jo had her head tucked down and was concentrating, and so she was startled when she heard a boy’s voice ask a question.

“Where do they come from anyway?”

She stopped digging and turned. Usually she had the beach to herself, but there stood Whit Turner, immaculate in his church pants and a pressed oxford shirt.

“What?” she said, confused. She’d never seen Whit out by himself before that afternoon. His mother usually whisked him off to lunch at their country club.

Behind Whit the panicked shadow of his governess appeared like a hovering insect, but Whit ignored her. “I mean, they don’t have mothers and fathers, and clams don’t lay eggs—or do they?”

Jo had never thought about it before. To her, clams were free food. That was it. She dug them up and her mother steamed them, end of story. But then, Whit didn’t have the personal relationship with hunger that she did. Only people with full bellies questioned where their food came from, Jo knew. The rest of humanity just bowed their heads and thanked the Lord for his bounty. She shrugged and shoved her spade back into the sand. “Not everything’s got a mother.”