by Kim Echlin
After the funeral, when half the village men lay drunk in her kitchen and the other half sat drunk in the pub, Norea wandered down to watch the seals popping their heads out of the waves. Her brothers were huddled like puppies in two big beds at home, but there wasn’t a thing she could do. She reached under her skirt, pulled out her mother’s boots and walked away. She walked as far as Dublin, pressing herself behind stone fences like a sheep during the day and feeling for the edge of the road with her feet at night. She talked to her mother-the-bird on her shoulder as she walked. She said hurried rosaries when she passed the roadside Mary shrines. When she arrived weary in the city, she saw tall buildings for the first time and couldn’t imagine why people liked to live in such high rooms. She was afraid of being found and taken back, so she cut her hair and stole some trousers, called herself Pippin and got onto a ship as a scullery boy. She carried her mother across the sea farther than she’d ever imagined, and after she was discovered she spent the rest of her journey in the fearsome stench-filled hold, starving and filthy and thirsty and heartsick. Finally after twenty-eight days they sailed into the mouth of a great river that cuts half a continent in two.
The sea tosses up our losses, the torn seine, the broken oar. Norea saw the smoke of the settlement when they were anchored off Millstone Nether and jumped ship without a coin in her pocket, too afraid of what might happen to her if she stayed aboard. There was work trenching potatoes and minding children for a girl with strong arms, and for a while Norea slept in others’ huts, under others’ stairs. Still, she had no desire to live indentured, little better than what she’d left behind. Before four seasons passed she managed to save enough to buy a horse and cart, and each morning before dawn she milked the cows at Meggie Dob’s farm and bought the milk, and to the satisfaction of those hard-working island women, she delivered milk and eggs and gossip through the half doors of the settlement, driving her milk wagon along and playing a little pennywhistle.
Is the milk fresh today? one teased.
If it were any fresher, it’d be grass, laughed Norea, handing over the clinking bottles.
Norea, called another, Finn said he had eggs cheaper than yours.
Watch out for that one, she flung back. He’ll steal the skin off your bones.
Old Mrs. Murphy observed the cheeky red-haired, hard-working milk-girl and one morning sent her son Rory out to fetch the milk. He stood holding the empty bottles, tossing stones against a tree. He watched her drive her horse and admired how she swung down off the seat of her wagon, tied the reins and carried the heavy milk bottles, singing,
The gardener’s son being standing by,
Three gifts he gave to me, me—
The pink, the rue, the violet blue,
And the red, red rosy tree,
The red, red rosy tree.
Come all you maids, where’er you be,
That flourish in your prime, prime.
Be wise, beware, keep free from care,
Let no man steal your thyme, thyme,
Let no man steal your thyme.
When he stepped in front of her she said, What’s a young man doing standing about on a morning when the boats are already gone?
He laughed. I’ve been sent, he said.
And are you compelled?
Well, I don’t know about that. How much for the milk?
Norea scoffed, What would you know about paying for milk? Your mother does all that. Then she handed him the full bottles, took the empty ones and drove her horse away.
Each morning Rory Murphy stood waiting for Norea.
Don’t you ever work? she said.
Only after you’ve gone, he said. I could get to work earlier if you married me.
And what do you do in the evenings?
I sing with my mother.
Is that a fact?
I have my own house and a good bawn and a dory.
With his charming smile he sang, For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone, and as she drove off, the melody of “The Nutbrown Maid” got tangled into the clop of her horse’s hooves. All day and all night she thought and the next morning she agreed to marry Rory Murphy on the condition that she keep her own name and not give up her milk route. She hadn’t walked across Ireland at night eating nettles to hand herself over to the first tuneful boy who came along. They moved into his house and Norea set to the task of learning to salt fish, and though she had no gift for it she planted carrots and potatoes in rows in the field out behind and coaxed things to grow.
On long summer evenings Norea and Rory took their supper to eat under the single apple tree beside the house. She sang to him in her mother tongue to tease him.
What’s that? asked Rory, who’d never been off the island and was pleased by his bride’s exotic stories from across the sea.
Let’s get some sleep, said Norea.
You don’t want to sleep, said Rory, slipping his hand under her blouse. What’s that song?
Not out here, creatures can see, said Norea, pulling his hand away. Will you come straight to bed with me if I tell?
I’d come anyway.
It’s the “Hauling Home” song. A month after the wedding the village makes a procession to the groom’s house. The bride rides on a horse and there’s a piper at the front door playing hard. When the groom gets there he sings a song, Oro, ‘sé do bheatha a bhaile, is fearr liom tu ná, céad bo bainne. Then all the men get drunk.
And what does it mean?
It means, Welcome home, I’d rather have you than a hundred milch cows, she said, spitting out apple seeds.
He laughed. Do you miss home?
She looked back at him and lied, Not a bit. Then she added, I’d rather have you and a hundred cows.
They sat, hands touching in the easy contentment of lovers who have not yet quarrelled, enjoying evening as if it would never turn into night.
Eight months later cheerful Rory died in the great flu epidemic. Norea, with a child soon to be born, crawled into bed with him to warm his chills and sponge his feverish lips. He stirred one last time, reaching for her, and her tears fell over his cheeks and stained his face pink as if he were not dying.
The Millstone Nether women shook their heads, saying they’d never seen a corpse’s face keep its colour the way Rory’s did. After that Norea was careful where she let her tears fall. But not careful enough.
After the funeral, Norea trenched her potatoes. As she bent over the earth, a locket without a chain was tossed across the rows, and landed by her feet. She picked it up out of the caplin fertilizer and opened it and saw a picture of Meggie Dob’s mother inside. Through the bushes she glimpsed Moll’s naked, bony feet, dirt caked under her toenails. Norea approached her and looked into Moll’s blank black eyes.
It’s yours from the sea, said Norea, holding the tossed locket back toward her.
Sss eee! hissed Moll. She slapped her thigh and bit her lip.
Her eyes are open, Norea thought, but their sense is shut. Then she said to the bony woman, Naught’s anyone’s in the eyes of the sea.
Moll crouched back behind the bushes half-turned from the outstretched hand, but Norea stayed still and through the leaves she listened to Moll’s lips forming sounds from moans, Naaaw. Aye, sss eee.
After that Norea told little stories aloud to keep the rustle in the bushes company. About the seals at home. About village life across the ocean. When she couldn’t think of anything to say she’d sing in her ragged way. If Moll groaned unseen, Norea groaned softly to keep her company. She restored Moll’s eloquence. To Moll’s soul-alone solitude Norea offered words in the wind.
Scarce half Moll seemed to live, dead more than half. In the daylight she revealed herself in silent watching and hurling stones. Men who drank said they went to her at night. They bragged that her appetites were voracious and insatiable. They told tales to each other of being wrapped in her dire arms and of her legs twisted in a double knot around their backs. They whispered about going at her until they
were half-dead of exhaustion and still she wanted more. They admitted of their backs being rained on with stones when they left and they lifted their shirts to show each other the bruises.
She’ll devour you, they dared each other.
Moll sat on gaunt haunches, her strong hands sifting through fishbones and hoarded roots. She was never seen to sleep but seemed ever somnolent. Her blank black eyes were ringed and her sullen skin weather riddled. Norea told the women to leave a jug of milk or the heel of a loaf near Moll’s door. When there was no more hope for the sickest of the sick the women visited Moll with kettles of boiling water. Moll told strange tales and chanted as she rendered out the insides of a pig and made ointment for limbs that might fall off. She made tea of sheep manure or dogwood berries for vomiting, cut off the sap bubbles of fir balsam and squeezed it into festering wounds. These were common remedies in those days that all women knew, but when nothing worked they still came to Moll. Sometimes with her the sick got better.
They found out when a boy got a fish hook caught in his eye. Though they were able to ease the barbs out of the flesh, the eyeball wouldn’t heal and it seemed to the women a shard of metal was stuck in there. They took him to Moll. Her eye-stone was the size of a pea, the colour of flesh, with a black speck in the centre of its whorl. Some thought it was the cut-off tip of conch shell from deep in the ocean. It was a living thing and had to be fed. Moll kept it in a bowl of sugar and rinsed it in a weak solution of vinegar before she dropped it into the eye of the frightened boy. It ate whatever was in there and saved his sight.
Moll had her uses and the people of Millstone Nether abided her much as they abided the sea that fed them and destroyed them with equal indifference. There is a certain darkness that bids us turn away. Moll’s was this. It is the shadow in which the snake swallows a crying frog alive, the wolf eats the wing off a living duck frozen into the ice, the caribou drags a cancerous growth, falling and struggling up and falling again. These are the incomprehensible things that we encounter with a hand over the mouth and the eyes averted. Moll walked the inroad of old darkness, appeared and disappeared in an unpredictable way. And though the people did not attempt anything against her, they taught their children to fear her. They turned their eyes from her because what she was they feared to contemplate. They never spoke of her or when they did it was in fearful or ignorant ways. In the lower deep she had been divested of compassion and of all human desire save her own endless suffering. There would always be those drawn to her. Some would survive and some would not. One day a girl would be drawn to her dark music, a girl who did not fear to open her ear to the great below, a girl who did not fear the silence from which all music comes.
Each month Meggie Dob, who desired a child, cried at the coming of her blood. Norea, round with her own child, came to give Meggie back her mother’s locket and found her weeping in the barn near the old bull. At Meggie’s sadness, Norea couldn’t help letting a few of her own salt tears fall into the straw. She used the same comfort words her mother-the-bird had often spoken, Don’t you mind your troubles; something always comes of them. And she was careless how she let her tears fall.
The next day when Meggie went out to the barn she heard the cries of two babies from beside the old bull. She dug into the straw and found an infant boy tucked beside the coarse hair of the animal and an infant girl lying head to foot with him. She picked up the babies, swaddled them in her own soft sweater, and since no one knew where they were from, the people of the settlement agreed that Meggie Dob might keep them and raise them as her own. Meggie clasped Norea who came to visit and to bless the soles of the babies’ tiny feet. The boy’s eyes were fierce and his cry demanding. He was perfectly formed, already long limbed and strong. The girl was not. She had a slope to her shoulders and her tiny chin was stuck down on her chest. She had rocker-bottom feet, and a webbed neck and elbows. Her eyes were lit bright.
Meggie said to Norea, jostling the two of them at once, It’s as if you cried them right out for me!
Irritable with her own baby’s bumping inside against her ribs and bladder, Norea answered sharply, You must be hagged to say a thing like that!
But with a quick change of heart she hugged Meggie, arms full of those long-desired babies, and said, I don’t know how they got here, but it’s cruel wonderful for you. What will you name them?
Donal is the boy, Meggie said. Though he comes from tears, he will one day be world mighty. And this poor little fish will be Madeleine, after my own mother who drowned under the sea.
Norea gave birth at home alone and watched over her stubborn-jawed newborn with fierce resignation and the clear conviction that she would lose this daughter as she’d lost everyone she loved. When the child lived past a year, Norea finally believed she might survive and named her Dagmar.
Dagmar grew sturdy and strong and Norea let her do as she liked. She dropped her from the milk wagon at the little school each morning but the child always ran home early to watch the planting and picking. One day Norea gave her three carrot tops to root in shallow dishes of water on the windowsill. The next day the child’s carrots had roots spilling in white tangles down to the floor. The little girl carried them outside and planted them near the house. That evening she solemnly dug up three well-formed carrots and gave them to Norea.
And where did you get these? said Norea.
I grew them from the tops you gave me, answered Dagmar.
Norea had no reason to disbelieve her. Instead she chopped off three more tops, handed them back to the child and watched with amazement as she repeated the miraculous growing of the day before. Then she gave her daughter apple seeds and watched a small orchard appear in twenty-eight days.
Norea studied her unnatural child and concluded that a bit of soil from this new country had got into her to make an unnatural species. Norea would have quietly contented herself with her daughter’s crops of carrots, tomatoes and apples, but little Dagmar couldn’t stop, and cleared larger sections of garden into the black spruce and tamarack, made a cold frame, and when she was older, she built the island’s first greenhouse. Roots she sowed overnight—onions, potatoes—and the above-ground squashes and cucumbers she let take a little longer. There was enough to give away during the thin springs. Only once Norea said, Do you know how you do it?
The girl looked at her. It is easy. Plants want to live.
Norea then knew that her daughter grasped her uncanny power. She tried to teach Dagmar to speak Irish. But she refused and kept to the language of Millstone Nether. Exchanging seeds and looks and words, the girl and the young woman created a life in their small rooms filled with mysteries neither understood. Each night they lay side by side in bed, Norea soothing her daughter with stories and fingers laced through the child’s.
Dagmar stuck her feet up in the air, grabbed her young mother’s muscular thigh and teased, I’ve got your leg.
Norea wrapped her hand around the child’s foot and said, I’ve got your toes.
The girl slipped away, scrambled down to the bottom of the bed and snatched at Norea’s toes saying, No you don’t, I’ve got yours.
Then she tipped off the bed and hid underneath, calling, Come find me! Before Norea could look, Dagmar appeared from under the other side, dragging out a pair of old boots, and asked, What’re these?
Those are my mother’s boots, said Norea as the girl put them on and shuffled along the floor. Hide them away again when you’re done. They’ll be yours when you’re old enough, though you’ll never need them. I’ll see to that, and that’s a promise.
Norea was only twenty, but she had travelled an ocean and married and buried a man and given birth to a daughter. There were still appetites. When her daughter was asleep at night, Norea sometimes stole out to meet a fisherman whose wife with five children was too tired for him in her bed. That was how, under an overturned dory, Norea got pregnant with a child she feared the island people would not abide. She decided she wouldn’t carry a child whose father did not want t
o be known.
That droughty spring dry weather threatened all the meagre crops. Small forest birds, foxy-Toms and striped-heads and mopes and purple finches, kept flying against the settlement’s windows. Norea and Dagmar got up at dawn and found them lying, necks broken on the ground, and gathered them up. Together they examined the coloured feathers, the staring eyes, the stiff, still feet. Norea delighted in watching the sun come up behind her daughter’s curly dark hair falling over the dead birds. Dagmar examined the airiness of each wing, touched through the feathers into the birds’ fine bones across their breasts. Mother and daughter dug little graves at the back of their farm, a row of bird-filled mounds to remind them of this hard dry spring of strange winds. Together they tore bright strips of rags and hung them against the windows of the houses to warn the birds away from their own reflections. When the work was done, Norea held young Dagmar’s face between her large palms and tried to memorize the brightness of her eyes. She wrapped her gaze around this beloved one and worried about what to do about the baby she did not want.
As she pondered, she walked out in the field with Dagmar’s hand in hers, looked at the parched apple trees and said distractedly, If we don’t get some rain soon there’ll be no apples this year. Dagmar stared gravely into the sky. Smurry clouds moved in from the horizon and a great rainstorm soaked the island with fresh water for two days and a night. When it was over they watched the fragrant apple blossoms open before their eyes.
Later in that month of odd weather, Norea remarked, It’s hot for the wild strawberries this year, and the child said, Don’t worry. Something will come of it.
By evening the temperatures had dropped and the low plants on their farm were thick with delicate fruit. After that, Norea tempered what she said about the weather in front of the girl. It was one thing to have a green thumb and another to reshape the sky. Norea watched her free-hearted daughter as if she were a foreign creature and she said to her, You won’t have to run away as I did. All this place is yours when I turn into honey. She marvelled at the girl’s strong mind and averted her eyes when Dagmar planted. It was better not to look, for she sometimes thought she saw new shoots and leaves growing right out of the girl’s fingers.
