Salty Wives

“But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.” Genesis 19:26

It was early autumn when the first one appeared. She was planted in a south-facing flowerbed, wide-eyeing the pavement beyond so every passing eejit -out with the dog or en route to the Spar- got a vision of her pale face, frozen, and the wicked, lustful look on it.

Her name was Grace. Grace McDowell. Most of our mothers had been blessed with similarly godly names. They were Grace or Faith or Margaret. We, the next generation, laboured under the divine weight of double-barrelled Christian names. Hope-Rebecca. Miriam-Grace. Keziah-Faith. Sound it out, Kez-Eye-Ah. One of Job’s pious daughters. A name just asking for a slap.

Prior to the advent of Grace our fathers did not speak of their salty wives. Obviously, they weren’t ashamed. The Bishop had made it abundantly clear, no man should be held accountable for the actions of a wayward spouse. The Bishop had the final word on matters spiritual and temporal. Still, our fathers couldn’t help but feel, at least a little, culpable. Not every man’s wife had gone to salt.

And what, they debated, in holy huddles around the back of the minor hall, should be done with the remains? Spiritually speaking, had their wives passed or were they caught in limbo between this world and the eternal next? Dead was, of course, preferable for the latter state reeked of papism. Though, if in fact they were deceased, they could hardly be buried in the normal fashion, for a funeral was a sacrament. The salty wives were not deserving of such excessive, abundant grace.

Grinding was the obvious solution. Our fathers could see how a wife might be ground down. No special tools would be required, just a regular sander and some elbow grease. Still, our fathers weren’t cruel men. They balked at the process: the deliberate erasure of features and form, the awful rasping sound it’d make. Furthermore, they’d us to consider. No child should have to see their mother reduced to a pile of table salt.

There were nights when we stood beneath open windows and on the wrong side of closed doors, bearing witness to their earnest prayers. How long, Lord? Exactly how long must I suffer? Shall I always be shackled to this salty wife. We cocked our ears towards heaven, postured as per Sunday School, listening, listening, intently listening, like young Samuel at Eli’s house. God was far from garrulous. Not a word did he say to our anxious fathers. He seemed to have taken the head with them. We were not a bit surprised by this. When it came to strategic abandonment, the Almighty had previous form. Sure, hadn’t he let the Israelites wander, for quite a long time, in the wilderness? Then later, left poor Jesus to the Devil’s mercy, all by himself, in a lonely place. For a while, a good year or more, it looked as if our fathers were to be lumbered indefinitely.

They spoke of their wives as thorns in the flesh and kept them concealed in outdoor sheds. Shoved in all roads and directions. Stacked next to seldom-used barbeques. Sometimes shrouded beneath a tarp. Sometimes left to the creeping cobwebs. A roofspace would’ve been more dignified but it was considered a right palaver, hauling your wife up a rickety ladder, manhandling her through a hole in the roof. Our fathers weren’t what you’d called athletic men. They were more inclined to sit than stand; great lovers of sugar and home-baked stodge. And some of our mothers were stout to begin with, heavier still since they’d gone to salt. Salt, it transpired, was a mineral of some substance; heavier than flour and water, sugar, sand and the ties that bind. You’d sooner fit a camel through the eye of a sewing needle, than a salty wife through a roofspace hatch.

And so, our mothers were kept in sheds.

Then, one drizzly morning, on our way to Sunday School, we were confronted by Sister McDowell, rising out of the flowerbed like some kind of divine apparition. Obviously not Marian. (Our fathers had no time for the mother of God. They wouldn’t dare erase her completely. Her presence was a necessary evil – no Mary, no baby Jesus, no salvation of the world- but they were always saying too much fuss was made of the woman. It was never meant to be about Mary. She was just a glorified warm up act). Gone were the blousy loud begonias, the hardy perennials and nasturtiums. Brother McDowell had emptied his flowerbed to make ample room for his salty wife.

We stood before Grace in our Sunday-go-to-meeting frocks, hatted, Bible’d and sensibly shod. There was no one word for how we felt. Only a torrent of tight thought pellets, ricocheting round our little girl heads like the beads inside a shook maraca. Sad, being the first word which came to mind, also feared and something fizzy which might have been hope or lack thereof. We were not able to voice these feelings. We were still extremely young: ten and twelve and, a couple of nines. We’d not yet learned to speak like adults when the adults weren’t around. And so, we giggled. Ha ha ha. And wondered why Grace was wearing that giddy expression. Had she always had such a prominent nose?

We speculated about what exactly had happened here. We were given to speculation. Aside from church and Sunday School, we didn’t have much else to do.

These are some of the thoughts we entertained, arranged in order of likelihood.

Perhaps Brother McDowell had received a word from the Lord. Take out thy salty wife and make of her a holy show.

Perhaps he’d wished to make a statement. I will not be shamed for my salty wife.

Perhaps he’d simply wanted to make some room in his garden shed. Brother McDowell had recently purchased a sit-on lawnmower; a great green beast with a seat and horn. Undoubtedly, it would’ve rusted if left outside in the autumn rain.

We never found out what the man was thinking. Suffice to say, the notion caught on. Within a month all our fathers had hauled their wives out of storage and made a cute display of them. Up they popped in yards and flower beds, peaking over garden walls. Flowers were planted about their feet in a range of feminine shades: lilac, lavender, baby pink. Our fathers hot tailed it over to Homebase, where they purchased plinths and outdoor lights, carefully angling the beams this way and that so the salty wives were uplit, downlit and artfully contoured. Signs were affixed to the lawn; beautifully rendered ornamental plaques which listed both our mothers’ names and the various reasons they’d turned to salt.

Our fathers lost their reticence. They took every opportunity available to speak of our mothers and how they’d failed. We were not party to the reasonings behind this rapid change of heart. Our fathers didn’t confide in us. Daughters were for talking at, rather than talking with. We were meant to be blank canvases, empty vessels awaiting a fill.

The word spread quickly. The salty wives were a novelty. Though the Bishop claimed the phenomena a common occurrence in other countries, he could not cite a single concrete example apart, of course, from the obvious. We wondered why our mothers had been singled out. Surely, they were not the first women to be tempted. Other women must’ve looked back. We asked our fathers, why our mothers? Our fathers pretended not to hear.

People came from neighbouring areas to take pictures of the salty wives. They posted these pictures on social media, turning our mothers into funny memes. They took selfies and videos so strange and static they were little more than long-running photographs. They added filters so our mothers didn’t look so pale. This, we concluded, was kind of them.

Others found the situation troubling. Some were very concerned indeed. They contacted the police and various local representatives. They thought Social Services should get involved. They loitered outside our doors, trying to catch us on our way to school. “You poor girls,” they said. “It’s not ok what’s happening here. You do understand, it’s a form of abuse?” They asked if we were traumatised. Suffice to say they weren’t believers. They did not understand the ways of the Lord. “It’s not for us to question why,” we parroted. We made a point of giggling as we ran away so they’d know we weren’t traumatised. We ran like the clappers all the way to school. We were careful, very careful, not to look back, though the urge was strong, exceedingly strong.

On the day before Halloween, the most wicked and wanton day of the year, our fathers woke us crazy early. “Get dressed,” they said. “Wear something warm and sensible shoes. You might want to bring a notebook with you.” Our fathers had planned an educational trip.

“It hurts us to do this,” they said, as we stood in front of the first salty wife. “But, as the Bible says, spare the rod and things go awry. We believe it is vital that you young women know exactly how your mothers were tempted and the precise ways in which they succumbed.”

“So, you might be strong in the flesh,” said the Bishop, who was loitering at the back of the crowd, in a black puffa jacket and sunglasses, like one of the rock stars we weren’t allowed to listen to. The Bishop had not brought his own daughters with him. They were older. They lived elsewhere. They’d lost their mother in a regular way.

We shuffled after our fathers taking notes on the salty wives. By mid-morning a clear pattern was beginning to emerge. Our mothers had not gone out of their way to be sinful. They’d stumbled into compromising situations and, instead of fleeing with all due haste -like Joseph dodging the advances of Potiphar’s sluttish wife- lingered in the presence of sin. They’d had the audacity to look back. “With something akin to longing,” our fathers insisted and we could hardly argue with them. The evidence was etched on our mother’s faces in permanent, unforgiving salt. We could see they were not repentant. It was clear they were hankering after the world.

Take, for example, Sister Allen who’d accompanied her husband to his work’s Christmas do and, when offered a glass of mulled wine had not immediately countered with the party line. I’m afraid I don’t drink alcohol. Instead, she’d said, “I’m grand for now, maybe later,” and while she’d probably never intended to accept a glass of alcohol, had spent the evening, eyeballing the punch bowl and as a result turned to salt. You could see the longing in her face. She was savouring that mulled wine in her head.

Or take, the case of Sister McWhirter, one of the younger wives, who’d gone with a cousin -not a believer- to watch Titanic in the cinema. She’d assumed it would be fine because it was historical. Granted, Sister McWhirter was already on thin ice, setting foot in a cinema, but she might have emerged intact if she’d upped and left the second naked flesh appeared on screen, if she hadn’t paused in the doorway to stare at Jack and Rose fornicating in the back of that Renault Coupe de Ville.

Or take Sister Lawrence, and here our fathers came into their own, leaning back on their pious heels, making plenty room for the wickedness. Margaret Lawrence had attended a colleague’s wedding and lingered late into the evening when everyone knew it was more circumspect to leave as soon as the meal was over, before the after party began.

“Do you know what she did?” our fathers asked.

“No,” we said, imagining some dreadful transgression, a dalliance with the groom, or something to do with class A drugs.

“We’ll tell you what she did,” said our fathers. “When the dancing began, Sister Lawrence made no attempt to leave. In fact, she stood on the edge of the dancefloor for several songs, listening and making small dance-like movements with her foot. Then, when a certain song came on she actually turned towards the dancers. She looked upon that writhing mass and considered joining them.”

“What song?” we asked, desperate to know.

“A Britney Spears one,” said our fathers.

Though the name Britney Spears meant nothing to us, we liked the taste of it in our ears. We looked at Sister Lawrence’s salty face, which was grinning in the most demonic fashion, and could almost imagine what a Britney Spears sounded like, the lusty itch of it tugging at our legs and arms.

“So,” said our fathers, “in conclusion, I think it’s clear that no good thing can come of yielding to temptation. Dear daughters, you must flee from sin. You must run as fast as your little feet can carry you. Run, run, run and never look back. Now tell us, what you’ve learnt today.”

We told our fathers what they wanted to hear. Resist temptation. Run from sin. Do not, for the love of God, look back. But the damage was done. Up close and paying tight attention to their eager faces and their twinkling eyes, we’d heard our mothers call to us. “Listen,” they’d whispered seductively, “there’s more to this story than they’re telling you.”

When our fathers tried to herd us home, we did not go like little lambs. We loitered. We lingered. We toed the shadowy parts of the pavement where the streetlights did not reach. We looked back at the salty wives. We looked back and had a good eyeful.

That night we climbed out bedroom windows. We shimmied down drainpipes and across garage roofs. We crept through the dark to meet our mothers where we’d left them a few hours ago. We stood on tiptoes in various flowerbeds, slippered toes sinking into the mulch. We found our mothers’ ears and emptied our sins into them. I read the horoscope pages in the newspaper. When Dad was out of the house, I watched an episode of Stranger Things. I went into Claire’s Accessories and asked how much ear-piercing cost. A song with bad words came on the radio, and I did not turn it off. “I was wicked,” we whispered. “I looked at the world with lustful eyes and I liked it. To be honest, I’d probably do it again.”

Our mothers said nothing. Their mouths were far too full of salt, but they smiled at us, and with their eyes, beckoned us to come closer still. In the dark, we fumbled and found the place where their hearts should be and pressed our ears up against our mothers and waited and listened and waited some more. In the end, the salt cried out -salt being a substance of some emotion, the stuff of oceans, of tears and smarting wounds- and we heard our mothers as they’d once been, long before they were salty wives.

“Daughters dear,” our mothers cried, “we were once young like you. We had high hopes and the widest eyes. We knew the world and how it could sing. We should not have settled for such small men. Do not settle for a small man. A small man will try to small you with lines and limits and sniping rules until one day you look back, and catch a glimpse of what you once were, what you might have been, and the revelation will be too much for you to bear. You’ll catch in yourself. You’ll calcify. Daughters dear, stick together. Do not look to the men for how to be.”

“Yes,” we told our salty mothers. “Yes and Amen.” This, we could see, pleased them no end.

That night, while our fathers were abed, we moved our mothers. Every single one of them. We carried our mothers on our shoulders. We wibble wobbled them foot to foot to salty foot, as if we were couples waltzing, slowly waltzing down the street. We paraded our mothers across town in wheelbarrows, prams and shopping trolleys, liberated from the Spar. Nobody tried to stop us. Neither did they offer assistance. They were our mothers. We were their daughters. The burden and blessing sat with us. We were proud as pedestals.

We worked through the dark, until at dawn, all the salty wives were united, standing tall on the edge of the park’s duck pond. In the half light, you couldn’t tell that they were salty. They were just a gaggle of women, looking out at the horizon, contemplating whether to risk a cold morning dip or stride out across the water’s surface like loose-limbed pond skaters or Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. We understood them more than capable of the striding and other bigger miracles. They were strong together, strong and imposing. A solid force to be reckoned with. You’d be feared of looking into their eyes for they’d see right through to the meat of your soul. You’d never call our mothers passive. You wouldn’t dare make a meme of them.

We were home before our fathers missed us, tucked up in bed like little lambs. Beneath the covers, we licked our fingers. Our fingers were salty and the salt was full and flavoursome. It was the sort of taste that could not be sated. It left us thirsty for something more. In the coming days and years this thirst would grow too loud to ignore. Then, we’d hear our mothers calling. On you go girls. Don’t be scared. You were not made to live small lives. Then, we’d leave our homes and we’d leave our churches. We’d leave our fathers far behind. We’d lock eyes with the whole wide world and we’d hold its gaze and we would not look back.

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