The Gilly Salt Sisters

by Tiffany Baker

  That’s why she didn’t see Whit right away. He was standing in the shadows in the back of the barn. At first she thought he was a ghost. She jumped and dropped the rake before she could hang it. Then she recognized the familiar cock of his head, and her heart settled back in her chest. He whistled the three-beat trill they’d come up with as one of their private signals the summer he was ten and she was twelve.

  “What on earth are you doing in here?” she said.

  His voice shook a little, as if he were fighting back tears, but that couldn’t be, Jo figured, because Whit Turner never cried. “I came to say good-bye to you. My mother just told me we’re leaving early for boarding school.”

  Jo bit her lip, refusing to be sorry. The people she loved always left: Henry, her father, and now Whit. The summer was ending, after all, and they were getting another year older. They never did see each other much in the winter anyway. As Jo was trying to gather her thoughts, Whit let go of her hands and fumbled in his pocket.

  “I brought you something.” He pulled out a small package wrapped in shiny paper and waited while Jo opened it. Underneath the wrapping was a small velvet box, and when she lifted the lid, Jo saw a heart-shaped locket threaded on a silver chain. Whit took the necklace from her hands and stepped behind her so he could fasten it around her neck.

  “It reminds me of you,” he said, tapping the locket with his fingernail. “Hard, but still pretty all the same.” That kind of sweet talk was new between them, and Jo wasn’t sure if she liked it. She reached up and grasped the necklace.

  “What’s this?” she asked, squinting.

  Whit blushed. “I had it engraved. I put a W on it so you’ll always remember me.”

  Jo caught her breath. Was Whit crazy? She couldn’t walk around town with his initial strung around her throat. Ida would kill her if she ever saw, not to mention her own mother. It was the kind of thing a girlfriend would wear, and Jo wasn’t Whit’s girlfriend. She reached up and unhooked the necklace as fast as she could, dropping it back into Whit’s palm. “I can’t keep it.”

  Whit’s fingers curled around hers like a question mark. “Why not?” His face was as open and soft as a baby’s, but his eyes were as clear as she’d ever seen them. Suddenly, without warning, his lips found hers, and his tongue pressed against the seal of her mouth until she felt herself leaning into him and opening her jaw just a little. “Relax,” Whit whispered. “It’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in love,” and Jo wanted to, but something seemed terribly wrong. She had always assumed that kissing Whit would be as natural as running down the beach with him barefoot, but it didn’t feel that way. It was a little like running barefoot, all right, but with sharp stones cutting her feet.

  She jerked her head away. “Love is for fools, Whit Turner,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything better. Then she took off.

  “Jo, please!” Whit’s voice rose up, but she was already running, obeying the urge to put as much distance between them as she could. She sprinted through the darkening marsh and brushed the back of her hand against her lips. The taste of Whit—a milky, wet flavor she couldn’t name—still filled her. She spit into the mud.

  She ended up at St. Agnes. Worried that Whit would come after her, she pushed open the sanctuary doors and slipped inside. Tonight only a single votive flickered at Our Lady’s painted feet, and so Jo lit a second candle and knelt. The loose floorboards gave a little under her knees. The familiar smell of dry plaster and dust tickled her nose, but this evening the comfort of the familiar did little to ease her.

  Up close, in the gathering dusk, the blank oval of the Virgin’s missing face was even more pronounced, a puddle with no bottom. Maybe that’s why the figure inspired confessions, Jo thought, but before she could follow that line of reasoning, Father Flynn’s voice rang through the sanctuary, as if she’d conjured him. “Hello, child. This is quite a surprise.” He stepped through the sacristy’s open door and squinted at her. “Is everything fine?”

  Jo blinked back her tears and bowed her head. “Not really.”

  Father Flynn took a seat in the pew behind her. He had a way of lurking that always made Jo want to spill her guts to him.

  “I just made a mess of things with Whit Turner. He tried to give me something I couldn’t take. And worse, he’s going off to boarding school early. Did you know that?”

  Father Flynn nodded. “What did he want to give you?” he finally asked.

  “A locket with his initial on it.”

  She heard Father Flynn exhale sharply. “And why didn’t you accept it?”

  “I don’t exactly know…” She trailed off. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Whit, she realized. It was that she liked him far too deeply for a summer romance. “I don’t guess Gillys and Turners are the best match,” she said at last.

  Father Flynn leaned back in the pew and looked at her gravely. “The thing about you and Whit is that you’re a bit like mustard and vinegar. Good on your own, but a little overwhelming when paired up. And you’re in the sweetest part of your life, my child. Try to remember that.” He hesitated, his eyes growing filmy. “You can come to me, you know, with anything that’s in your heart. I know… well, I know you sometimes must miss your father.” Before Jo could respond, Father Flynn stood up and waved a hand at her. “You’d best be getting back to the marsh, my dear. It’s almost dark.”

  Jo headed home, suddenly regretting returning the locket to Whit. It would have been a perfect token for Our Lady, she realized. As she picked her way along the edge of the marsh, she weighed the heft of the silver locket again in her mind, turning it one way and then another, like a stone dragging along a river bottom. What would Ida do if she caught Jo wearing something like that? Jo wondered. It was hard to know. Ida was a woman who had everything—jewels, furs, not to mention a husband she held on to like he was the outgoing tide and a son she’d do anything to protect.

  But Ida had a few other things as well—namely, a past she’d never gotten rid of. And when a woman had too much, Jo mused, placing one careful foot in front of the other, what would she do? Why, she’d give some things away, that was what, whether they were last season’s clothes, a set of dishes she no longer cared for, or—dared Jo even say—the illegitimate child no one could ever prove she’d borne, but half the town whispered that she had. Jo stepped onto the farmhouse’s shambling front porch, glad for the single bulb’s weak glow.

  “Where the tarnation have you been?” her mother asked when Jo appeared in the kitchen. She nudged Jo’s supper across the table. “Here. Soup’s cold and the bread’s hard, but you need something for your stomach.”

  “I went to St. Agnes,” Jo said, sitting down. “Whit and I had an argument. I wondered if Father Flynn could help.”

  This elicited mere silence from her mother. She opened her mouth as if to tell Jo something, then changed her mind and clattered dishes into the sink. “And did he?” she finally asked, and Jo shook her head. Mama turned the tap on full force. “What does he know anyway?” she said eventually. “Father Flynn’s just a priest. And worse than that, he’s a man. He should keep his blasted nose out of women’s business if he doesn’t want it bitten clean off.”

  In the morning Jo woke groggy and tired, and she saw that the weather had grown chilly and dark. When she came downstairs for breakfast, her mother handed her a loaf of brown bread and told her to deliver it to Father Flynn. “And after that,” Mama said, “you can walk into town and stop at the post office for me. We’re fresh out of stamps.”

  When Jo arrived at St. Agnes, the sanctuary was empty. It was so early that no one would have come out that way yet, Jo knew, and she appreciated the solitude. But as she edged down the center aisle, she saw that she was wrong. Someone had been here already, and that person had left something, too.

  Despite the earliness of the hour, there was already a votive burning in front of the Virgin, and beneath it sat a cream-colored envelope with interlocked initials on the front. IM
T. Ida May Turner. Jo stepped closer, puzzled. Out of all the women in Prospect, Ida was the only one who didn’t openly adore Our Lady. “Pagan nonsense,” she always barked whenever some poor fool asked her about it. “I didn’t get where I am by groveling on my knees in front of some beat-up painting.” In Jo’s entire life, she’d never once seen Ida give the Virgin anything.

  Lying next to the envelope was a necklace that looked vaguely familiar to Jo. It was the single pearl on a silver chain that Ida sometimes wore, in marked contrast to her showier jewels. Jo dropped the bread and salt in front of the Virgin without even bothering to genuflect, and then she committed a sin so deep she never did confess it.

  There was an unwritten law that whatever was left out for the Virgin would remain undisturbed until after Mass on Sunday, when Father Flynn would collect all the items. The slips of prayers and written confessions he burned without reading. Words to the Virgin, whether scribbled or spoken, were for her alone, and no one—not even clergy—would have dared to violate that covenant. But that day Jo did. Looking around to see if anyone was coming, she reached out and stuffed first the letter and then the pearl into her pocket.

  “Child.” She half choked on her own breath and whipped her hand out of her pocket. Father Flynn had the quietest feet in Christendom. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him out of the sides of her eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice she’d done anything wrong. “You’re here awfully early,” he said, kneeling next to her.

  “Yes,” Jo replied, her heart hammering. “I brought you some bread.” She shoved the loaf at him.

  “Thank you.” He reached down and scooped it into his broad hands with no trace of suspicion. “You seem quiet this morning. Missing a certain young man, no doubt?”

  Jo frowned. “No. We just have a lot of work to do yet in the marsh, and the weather’s changing fast.”

  The father clapped a friendly palm on her shoulder. “Well, don’t let me keep you.” Jo waited until she was sure he was gone, and then she tiptoed out of the sanctuary, her hand anchored on the treasure in her pocket.

  She wandered down the lane, constantly checking over her shoulder, though who she thought would have followed her, she didn’t know. The bluff was about as deserted as a widow’s house in February. Nevertheless, heart in her mouth, Jo kept walking, all the way to the bottom of Plover Hill. She stopped when she got to the pear tree. It wasn’t a place she ever had the occasion to frequent, it being a spot for lovers’ trysts. The leaves had all turned brown and fallen off early, but Jo crunched through them anyway and sat under the canopy of bare branches, gazing up at the clapboard monstrosity that was Turner House. She put her hand on the letter again, thinking she had a good idea of what was inside it, but she had to be sure. Before she could change her mind, she ripped open the envelope, pulled out the pages, and read the words that would alter the rest of her life.

  It was a simple story about a late-season storm and a pair of babies born—a tale Jo thought she knew, but never quite like this. She scanned the words three times to make sure she understood them, and when she was finished, she was certain of two things, the first being that she wished she hadn’t stolen the letter, for she didn’t desire the terrible knowledge about herself that it held, and second that even though they involved her, the words Jo held so loosely under that tree weren’t hers to keep.

  She should have done the proper thing and returned both the pearl and the letter to the Virgin, of course, or, barring that, she should have either buried or burned the evidence. But she was young, and secrets can be a weighty burden to carry when you’re not used to them. She should have turned to Our Lady for solace, but the thought of her—faceless, faded, her skirts rubbed thin—made Jo’s blood go cold. And more than anything, Jo wanted to know that another living heart was as nicked as hers, and she knew exactly whose heart she wanted it to be.

  She slid the letter back into the envelope and added the necklace. And then, before she lost her nerve, she walked up Plover Hill to the iron gates of Turner House and the family’s elaborate brass mailbox. Probably one of the maids collected the letters every day, Jo thought, but Ida would get this message. Jo had no doubt about that. She just wouldn’t know who had sent it. Jo shut the little hinged door of the mailbox firmly and started her way back down the hill, glancing once over her shoulder to see if she could detect any movement in the house, but there was none. The family had all gone to take Whit to school.

  Jo pictured Ida opening the envelope when she returned, the pearl falling into her cupped palm like a slap. It would be a gift she thought she’d never get back but wouldn’t want to keep either, just like something else she’d once given away. Jo crunched home through the husks of the pear tree’s leaves, pleased with herself. Now she and Ida were tit for tat. When it came down to it, in fact, they were just like each other. It turned out that Jo had a talent for getting rid of things, too.

  Chapter Six

  Sorrows tend to collect like dust throughout a person’s life, but Claire had only one true sorrow to her name. She had not married the man she loved. The choice was never hers to make. She knew that truth, even as she resisted it. Some women were born to play the part of the good wife, while others were put on this earth to dabble with fire, and as soon as Claire was out of the womb, it became abundantly clear which path she’d been wound up and set on.

  For starters there was the fact of her hair: red as the day was long, wavy and thick. In Claire’s childhood her mother had kept it in a bob, but when Claire was a teenager, she grew it out, much to Mama’s dismay. “A waterfall of pure sin,” Mama used to call it when she brushed it before Mass, scraping the boar bristles along Claire’s scalp, making her head sting.

  This always angered Claire. “It’s just like yours,” she’d point out, but Mama never answered to that. She only combed harder, tweaking Claire’s ears and yanking in all the tender spots. “Best to keep it up,” she’d mutter through a mouthful of hairpins, “away from the devil’s temptation.”

  Claire couldn’t argue with that logic. Even before she hit adolescence, she knew that the devil seemed to have one eye cocked for the Gilly ladies, who, the Good Lord help them, tended to love him right back. It was why everyone in town said matrimony never took with any of them. Because how could you wed a woman whose fingers were already ringed with brimstone?

  “Marriage isn’t for Gilly women,” Mama always muttered whenever Claire asked about her father.

  “That might be true for Jo, but it doesn’t have to be true for me,” Claire mused the day her mother got her ready for her Confirmation. She handed her mother a length of white ribbon to braid through her hair. She’d just started growing it, and it barely brushed the tops of her shoulders. Jo was seven years older than Claire, twenty to Claire’s thirteen, but she was so square she might have been thirty or forty as far as Claire was concerned. She was Claire’s own sister, but even Claire thought of her as an old maid.

  But then Jo always had been priggish, even when she’d been a teenager. Claire remembered the summers when Jo and Whit had still been tight as two hoops on a barrel. They were almost even boyfriend and girlfriend, but never quite, maybe because they simply knew each other too well. The way Claire saw it, there were no mysteries left between them, and that was Jo’s mistake, for a man needed to be curious in order to want to hold on to a woman. Even at thirteen Claire knew that much.

  Mama snorted at her suggestion. “Gilly women and Turner men are the worst combination of all,” she said, yanking a frail strand of hair down near Claire’s neck. You can’t trust a Turner,” she added, patting her own hair. “They’d sell their own souls if they thought they could get two nickels for them.”

  Claire shook her mother’s hands off her. “I don’t believe those old stories.”

  Mama sighed. “Suit yourself,” she said. Then she frowned and looked almost sorry. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  Claire turned on her heel and went to collect her sweater for c
hurch, but her mother’s opinion stuck like glue. In fact, even though Claire didn’t know it then, her mother was both right and wrong about the Turners. They would sell anything—even, perhaps, their own souls—but never for anything as paltry as a dime.

  Unlike Jo, Claire loathed everything about Mass—the fusty smoke from the incense pot, the smothered coughs and shuffling feet, the waxy press of the wafer against her tongue. Week after week she bowed her head and traced the Virgin’s empty face with two fingers, whispering a running, more truthful catalog of her sins before she revised them for the ears of Father Flynn.

  “You have anger twisted in your heart,” he’d say with a sigh through the wooden partition of the confessional. “You must learn that God’s will doesn’t always coincide with your own. Say three Hail Marys.”

  “I feel like I’m in a time warp,” Claire complained to Jo as they traveled down the lane to St. Agnes for weekly confession. “We do the same thing over and over. Dig salt and pray, and that’s it.”

  But in this matter, as in most others, Jo was firmly rooted on her mother’s side. She took Claire’s arm. “Come on.” The mosquitoes were feeding as they walked along the edge of the marsh and then down the lane to St. Agnes.

  “I’m getting bitten alive,” Claire moaned, swatting at the whining insects but never getting any of them. Jo, in contrast, seemed oblivious to the pests. Probably, Claire thought, they’re swarming me because she’s too dry to drink from.

  Inside the little church, they made their way to the Virgin and lit two votives. As usual, Claire’s match flared too quickly, singeing her skin, and she cursed and dropped the candle, cracking the votive glass a little. “Shit,” she muttered.

  “Claire,” Jo admonished. “You mustn’t use that kind of language here. Have some manners, for heaven’s sake.”

  Claire rolled her eyes and struck another match. This one behaved better. She stuck her charred fingers in her mouth. Jo shook her dark hair. Unlike Claire, she wore hers loose, straight down to her shoulders. She never did anything with it, but it was pretty all the same. “You better get over your clumsiness around fire,” she sniffed. “Remember, it’s your turn to step up to this year’s December’s Eve bonfire.”