The Gilly Salt Sisters (56 page)

In the kitchen Claire was feeding Jordy his morning bottle and baking a loaf of cinnamon bread. In the past month, Jordy had started crawling and was everywhere now. After the fire Cutt had left town, and no one could find him (not that anyone had really wanted to), so Claire had gotten her wish and gained custody of Jordy. One day, Jo knew, they’d have to tell him what had really happened, but hopefully that was still years away, and by then maybe they’d be able to tell the story right.

Jo walked over and plucked Jordy out of Claire’s arms. After the fire Claire’s scarlet hair had started developing strings of gray in it, as if ash had settled permanently on her head, but Jo thought the look actually suited her sister. It softened her somehow and took away a little of her venom. Or maybe it was all the fish. After everything, Ethan had decided to stay in town and join his uncle Chet at the docks. At first, racked by guilt, shocked by the loss of Dee, Claire had wanted nothing to do with him, but every day over the past two months Ethan had brought her something to eat from the sea until, to his relief, she decided that salt and fish went together after all and accepted his proposal in the dunes with a solemn nod and a deep kiss.

Jo looked down at the silver locket hooked around Claire’s throat. Claire had gone and set it with Ida’s pearl. Pasted inside on the left was a picture of Claire and Jordy, covered in flour and laughing, and the right side contained a photograph of Dee cradling Jordy.

“Are you sure you don’t want this?” Claire had said when she’d asked Jo for the locket. “The pearl should really be yours by rights. Not to mention the locket.”

But Jo refused. “I didn’t want it the first time around,” she said, “and I don’t want it now.” The truth was, it pained her to be reminded of Dee. No matter what she did from now on, Jo knew, a part of her would always be lingering in front of the barn as it burned, as trapped as Whit and Dee. And how much worse it was for Claire, she suspected. Bad enough to wear that necklace like a penance, where it thumped and twisted on her chest, with every
movement reminding her of what she’d done. Jo reached down and stroked Jordy’s nose, so similar to his mother’s.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

Claire swallowed and bundled Jordy tighter. “Not really,” she admitted.

They said little as they trudged together toward St. Agnes and even less as they approached the faded and chipped painting of Our Lady.

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Claire asked as Jo opened the rucksack she’d brought and began uncapping pots of paint.

Jo held out a brush and waited for Claire to lay Jordy down. “You know it’s the right thing,” she said as Claire opened the locket to the photograph of Dee.

Claire took the brush in her shaking hand. “I know,” she said, and then added, “I once made a promise to the Virgin that I’d give her a face if I ever had a son.” She hung her head, tears forming in her eyes. “I only wish I weren’t doing it like this.”

“I know.” Jo put her hand around Claire’s and guided the brush to the wall, smearing fleshy paint on the Virgin’s cheek, first by dabs and then in bigger smears.

May God grant her grace
, Jo thought as the outline of Dee’s features began to take shape,
and keep her soul forever in salt.

It was only a small prayer—Jo was rusty after so many years of absence from St. Agnes—but it was heartfelt and it was the best she could do. In time, she hoped, it might even be heard.

O
n the face of it, Claire believed, Salt Creek Farm wasn’t the kind of place to inspire pilgrims. Marshy and windblown, choked in pickleweed, there were no haloed glories hiding in the barn, no gold-leafed idols to bow down to on the tipsy porch, no charms to be bought or blessings to reap. There were only acres of salt, miles of sand, and Jo, scarred up and down her right side but just fine in the places where it counted.

And yet, miracle of miracles, people chose to travel from as far away as Tokyo and Paris to find the place. Some of the visitors who arrived were culinary specialists. They owned starred restaurants or wrote award-winning food columns. Some of them worked in the food industry, running marketing for giant corporations, and some were taking time off to try to piece together the scraps of their souls again. Most recently a famous chef had arrived in despair because he had lost the sensation of taste. Pastis, bouillon, foie gras—it was all the same to him, he said. The world had turned to a pile of rubbish in his mouth. Jo and Claire spent three days with him at the end of August, the ripest time of year, the last push of the season, and when they were done, he’d not only regained his sense of taste, but also had an entire notebook of fresh recipes.

Not everyone got such fine results, though. Jo greeted each prospective visitor on the porch of the farmhouse with a silver
spoon of salt and a list of rules (no disturbing the collection basins, no drinking, no wandering unescorted through the marsh, and above all no mindless chitchat), and then she asked three simple questions:
What is your first memory? Who do you love? What do you think you’ll find here?

Some of the travelers took a quick taste from the spoon and fled, their gums blistering. Some flubbed their answers, and the ones who stayed got to trade in comfortable beds and conversation for lumpy mattresses and long afternoons with only their shadows for consolation.

On the first day of instruction, Claire would spread her different blends of salt on the table in a hodgepodge of bowls and ask her pupils to choose. “Pick the one you like,” she would say, for the first hurdle that anyone had to undertake with the salt was an exercise in letting go. When a person stumbled over his tongue or took too long answering, Claire made him pick again until the salt loosened his lips and his words slipped out easily.

“You have to use everything when you work with salt,” Claire reminded the students. “You can’t pick and choose. If the silt is full of iron and turns the color of rust, you have to learn to work around it.”

They didn’t know yet that the price of happiness was loss, but Claire had learned that lesson by heart, and she was going to pass it on. Her students couldn’t imagine ever being forced to trade their newfound fluidity for a condition of painful solidity, but if they wanted to make salt, they would figure it out. Or rather some of them would. The ones with hearts up to the task. The ones who accepted that breaking their backs and blistering their hands for a scoop of salt, only to watch Claire dissolve it in a bowl for the next newcomer, wasn’t cruelty but a kind of poetic progress.

Her second lesson was to take her students out to the graves at the edge of the marsh. Luckily, their curse against boys seemed to have broken when it came to Jordy. Maybe because he was Gilly in soul but not blood, or maybe the curse had run its course. What
ever the cause, Claire was grateful. Here she simply observed. The pupils who cataloged and ordered the graves by date would do fine but never produce anything startling. The ones who wandered and ran their fingers over the stones showed promise, but Claire wasn’t so interested in them either. She was looking for the one or two students who stopped, put their hands in their pockets, and bowed their heads, struck by the fact that in a salt marsh time meant nothing. Those were the students Claire sent out to scrape the first of the season’s salt crystals, for they were the ones she didn’t have to teach a blessed thing to.

When the visitors left, most of them drove straight out of town with chapped lips, aching shoulders, and hands wrinkled from the brine. They motored past the Lighthouse Diner, sped by the leafy canopy of the pear tree (which still produced the same gnarled fruit), and totally ignored Plover Hill and Turner House, which Claire could understand but which stuck in her craw nonetheless.

She knew that the pursuit of history wasn’t the reason people came all the way out to this little spit of coastline, but she still wished they would take a look around. If they did, they might learn a story about salt they didn’t know. But then, Claire had chosen to spend her life with the stuff clinging to her lips and tongue. It had become the only tale she could tell, the single thing she was certain she would leave behind when her time eventually came.

E
than liked to claim that the quickest way to check a person’s heart was to look in his eyes, but Claire begged to disagree. “Don’t listen to your stepfather. Just feed a person a pinch of salt,” she’d whisper to Jordy, “and his lips will tell you what you need to hear.”

Jo and Claire had always tried to do that for Jordy. They schooled him well in the history of Prospect, telling him most especially about Turner House and the last man who’d ever lived in it. Just as she and Jo had to prepare the ground before they
flooded the marsh, Claire knew, they also had to take care of the foundations of their own line. Jo and Claire had finally gotten around to tidying up the detritus of Salt Creek Farm, and some of the old letters and diaries they’d found were telling. They’d gathered them up, tied ribbons around them, and put them aside for Jordy’s eighteenth birthday, which at the time had seemed an eon away. First Jordy crawled, then he walked, and then he learned to talk, but with each new leap in his development Claire’s heart would lurch a little as she considered the confession she’d have to make one day.

“You don’t have to tell him everything,” Ethan pointed out, which shocked Claire, for although he was her rightful husband, she still sometimes thought of him as a servant of the Lord. When he gave earthbound advice, it always surprised her.

Claire shook her head. “No,” she said. “I do. He deserves to know. Besides, he’ll never really be mine otherwise.”

Ethan kissed her cheek. “Nothing is ours in the end,” he said, and shuffled off to finish the knitting his uncle had convinced him to take up, leaving Claire rooted on the spot, wondering if the bonds of love were really as frail as all that or if they were perhaps woven for sterner depths than a single strand could reach.

“A
re you ready?” Jo asked, squeezing Claire’s hand in the entry of the cottage she and Ethan shared in town.

“One minute,” Claire muttered, smoothing out her hair in the hall’s mirror.
Where does the time go?
she muttered to herself as she surveyed the ruins of middle age in her reflection. Her torso was thickening, her cheeks were no longer quite so taut, and her red hair, once her glory, was almost all gray now. Some days she almost didn’t recognize herself. She turned to Jo, who handed her a thick bundle of papers, and together, being as quiet as they could, they tiptoed into Jordy’s room and woke him.

“What’s this?” he muttered as Claire and Jo presented him with the documents—some of them so antique their ink was
almost vanished, some crinkled and torn, and some in handwriting Claire recognized very well, even if it wasn’t totally authentic and was signed with a little heart. And then there was the letter penned in her own hand.

“Happy birthday, Jordy,” Claire said, brushing the hair out of his eyes the way she used to when he was a young boy. “These are for you. When you were a baby, your aunt and I decided that this is the day you should have them.”