The Gilly Salt Sisters (4 page)

T
he 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.

“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 of 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.