Saltwater Cowboys by Dayle Furlong Page B

and had thrown salt over her shoulder, superstitious and silly, but the article also noted the importance of salt in religious rituals. Throwing it over your shoulder casted out evil, because salt was a symbol of incorruptible purity, the article had said.
    I should have rubbed Jack with salt before he went off to town for that interview, keep him incorruptible and pure. He would think I’m crazy, and I probably am, a married woman licking the salt from her hands, standing by the kitchen window. If Wanda were next door, it would be her turn to pity me and want to feed me, under the guise of asking me to help her pack or pull laundry from her line.
    Wanda had left a week ago with Peter at the wheel of a U-Haul truck, setting out for the long drive up to Alberta, due to work two weeks from the day they left. Her home looked animated now that they were gone, taking with them all the gloom and dolor of a family dealing with unemployment, leaving in its place, underneath the receding shroud of anxiety, what had always been there: a beautiful yellow clapboard with chocolate-brown shutters and window frames sitting primly around easy windows, flower boxes spilling an assortment of perennials, yellow tulips and daisies. It was a sweet little house, not quite as large and spacious as Angela’s, with her high, pointed, arched, vaulted ceilings, and the large front porch with a wood-burning stove, spacious kitchen, large living room, and two bedrooms with old-fashioned coiled radiators. Even Jack’s wooden shed was almost twice the size of Peter’s, but it was cozy, rustic. Angela wasn’t sure, but she figured Jack was smarter with money than Peter, who liked to play cards and spend a lot of money on the drink. Jack rarely did either. She was grateful that he was a simple family man, not the least bit tempted by things he had outgrown in high school, or so she told herself, and so she hoped, as she pictured her man in St. John’s by himself, surrounded by the beautiful women of the city and the women down by the wharf, waiting for the Portuguese sailors to dock.
    But this was her husband Jack she was thinking of. She needn’t worry about him; he was faithful and loyal. Unlike her own father, apparently. She remembered her mother telling her the story of how her father Tom stormed out of her grandmother’s house when Lillian had told him she was pregnant, how he had avoided her for the full nine months of pregnancy, how Lillian had watched him date, break hearts, go through almost every available girl in town, even when Angela’s oldest sister Cynthia had arrived. Lillian had wheeled her proudly around town in her four-wheel navy blue, silver-rimmed carriage, her curly blonde hair springing out from under her baby bonnet, agreed upon by the female old guard to be the cutest baby they ever saw born in Brighton.
    Lillian had resigned herself to Tom’s withdrawal and absence, gradually forgetting about marrying him, growing more content, alone in her routine with her newborn daughter, comfortable with just her mother’s help, until one day Tom Harrington passed her on the sidewalk, looked straight at the baby, stopped the stroller, and reached in for the baby, and when she grabbed at his nose and kicked at his chest, Tom told Lillian that he wanted to marry her and raise their child together.
    Lillian’s mother had protested, mumbled obscenities at the wedding reception, cursing that “stun-arse” of a man her youngest would marry and bear more children with. He was no good, not for her or anyone else. There was a distinct lack of female presence at the wedding; all of the young women in town were too hurt to watch Tom Harrington walk down the aisle.
    Lillian had loosened up somewhat over the years and for the most part was as well-behaved as could be expected for a feisty old woman who had raised three daughters, for the most part on her own after Tom died in an underground mine