Dagmar's Daughter

by Kim Echlin

  Moll reached across the flame, lifted the lid of Nyssa’s hurt eye, and with her thumb and forefinger plucked out the eye-stone.

  Moll said, Music comes from the shadows, and she looked into the injured eye. She said, Music is a kind of practice for death.

  I don’t know, said Nyssa.

  Nyssa! called Norea through the door.

  Wait! said Moll. The girl’s still healing.

  Nyssa listened to the flame. She could hear from far away the high-pitched cries of ocean birds and from deep below the earth the shifting and turning of mud-puppies. Nyssa asked, Can you hear all those sounds too?

  Don’t ask questions! She thrust a cup at Nyssa and said, Here’s medicine.

  The girl took a drink, coughed a little, and took another. She asked, What is it?

  Hurt wine, said Moll.

  Nyssa drank down all of it, the deep blue juice staining her chin.

  Moll poked her and said, Out of the way! Awake! You’re better and Nana’s waiting.

  Then she pulled her sweater over her head and said through the neck, Moll’s in a pitty-hole. Leave her bide!

  Nyssa slipped out the door, her head thick from the strong drink and she took Norea’s hand. She led Norea home and the old woman told her to slip in the back way so Dagmar wouldn’t see them. They went inside and up to Norea’s loft.

  Nyssa said, Nana, I don’t feel so good. I’m going to the porch.

  She took her queasy stomach out for air. Norea followed her, and when Nyssa felt her stomach heave, she leaned unsteadily across the railing and flipped over like a fledgling falling from the nest. Her tumble was broken by an apple tree, green fruit landing with soft thuds all around her limbs.

  She lay looking up through the branches, unable to move and tasted blood in her mouth. Dagmar heard the strange thump and ran over to see her daughter lying on the ground, eyes groggy, lips stained blue. She asked, Did you just fall off the balcony?

  Norea called down, Did she break her neck?

  Dagmar shouted back, No thanks to you! She’s been at Colin’s by the stink of her!

  Dagmar picked her up and carried her inside, laid her out on the kitchen table and went to work with flax poultices. In a cloud of raw bile and Moll’s wine Nyssa winced at her mother’s touch and threw up. Dagmar mopped her clean. She needed to keep her awake and bring those eyes round from the back of her head.

  Nyssa, she whispered urgent and firm, Nyssa, wake up.

  What?

  Dagmar helped her off the table and led her into the big bed and sat beside her. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head and Dagmar was afraid.

  Stay awake, she said. Open your eyes, Nyssa. Look at these seeds.

  Nyssa whispered with a weak, cheeky tilt to her chin, Did I just fall off the balcony?

  Looks like it, Dagmar said and lifted Nyssa’s head. It rolled off her mother’s open palm and her eyes sank back.

  Wake up, Nyssa! said Dagmar.

  The girl struggled to open her eyes, struggled to please her mother. She said, Tell me the flax story.

  Dagmar raised her head on a pillow and said, The flax is buried and rippled, retted and spun. You hide it in the dark earth. Nyssa, wake up.

  She had to keep the girl awake. She said, The blue flower opens to the midday heat and the lashing of rain. Then people pull it out root and all. They drown it, roast it, beat it, heckle and comb it. Nyssa! Open your eyes. You’ve got to stay awake! What did I just say?

  The girl asked groggily, Then what do they do with it?

  They spin it to thread, weave it into linen, cut it, sew it into shirts worn till they’re rags. Do you hear me, Nyssa? Can you talk? How old are you?

  The girl opened her eyes again and tried to talk. I’m thirteen, she said.

  Nyssa, what day is it?

  The day after the night before, she said and struggled to sit up.

  Seeing her eyes back firmly forward, Dagmar said annoyed, That father of yours won’t start you drinking already! I’m fed up with Colin leaving me the clobber to pick up. I won’t have you flying off balconies.

  Red hair tangled around her face, a seed fallen to the earth and dying to sprout again. Nyssa grinned her father’s infuriating smile. Dagmar brought her eight drops of spruce tea in a cube of sugar. Norea came into the room with soup. The two women perched like birds on the side of her bed.

  Nyssa said, I feel awful.

  You’ll survive, grumbled Dagmar. Try to sleep. Morning is wiser than evening. She couldn’t think what she’d do if the girl broke her skull and disappeared out the cracks forever.

  Nyssa turned to her grandmother and said, Nana, I swear before you I will never do that again.

  Don’t you worry, smiled Norea, half the lies we tell aren’t true. Your hair’s like a birch broom in the fits, she said, running her hands over the girl’s head. Be capable of your own distress. Do what is required.

  Nyssa said, Nana, how does the eyestone work?

  Has she been with Moll? accused Dagmar.

  Norea and Nyssa fell silent.

  Mother! cried Dagmar.

  She’ll leave her alone, said Norea.

  Nyssa said, I don’t want her to.

  Dagmar asked, What would you mean by that?

  The girl said falsely, I don’t know.

  I don’t want you there again, said Dagmar. She already blinded one of us.

  Did she, Nana? asked Nyssa. How?

  There are two kinds of wisdom in the world. Judgement wisdom abides no blurred lines and no softening circumstance. Nature wisdom has black in its white and shifts with the day, the feeling and the temperament. Some say it is best to practise judgement wisdom on oneself and nature wisdom on others.

  Nyssa had witnessed in Moll’s hut what no one else knew, but she laid her hand on her mouth and neither judged nor spoke of it. And though her mother told her not to, all through the years when she was growing from a child into her own fierceness, she kept visiting Moll’s hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze. Sometimes Moll talked and sometimes she showed Nyssa the bones she found in the woods. Sometimes she played her pot and sometimes she threw stones. Sometimes she stared silently from the naked orb of her head, eyes blank, a source of little visible delight. Nyssa could not say why she went to the bony woman, only that she was drawn to her, as if Moll were some part of herself. Moll belonged not to the island but to its caves and holes, to a place that is dead to the world above. Hers were raw and devouring passions, and loveless. And yet, when Nyssa lay on the ground beside Moll and put her ear against the pine needles and listened to the thick echoes from the rocks beneath, she sensed with the uncanny instinct of a daughter of Dagmar that birth and death are of a single essence and that she knew little of either. These were things she did not have the words to say. In the low moaning of Moll’s pot she heard music beyond what she could play on her fiddle. Most people are, once or twice in a life, drawn to things that may harm them and that they cannot understand. Things that are necessary.

  She came home from her visits to Moll and stared without seeing, listening to all the sounds of the island until Dagmar chided her. But Nyssa was absent in the way that silence is absence from sound. She played drones in her fiddle tunes until the people complained that she ruined the danciness of the music. They said that no one had ever played in this way before and that it didn’t sound right.

  Nyssa said, It’s what I hear.

  She was not afraid and she played what she wanted. Fierce and dancing, she followed what she was drawn to. Her ear was open.

  One night, after they’d finished their snaking, Donal played an old tune while the birdwatcher laid out the bones of a bird, trying to figure out how the skeleton went together. What’s it called? he said.

  Donal thought a moment and thought again. I can’t remember.

  The other man shrugged, turned the little bones of the ribs around and said, It doesn’t really matter. They all sound alike.

  But they didn’t and Donal
couldn’t remember. He leaned his bass against the wall and seeing the pattern of the bird’s ribs quickly rearranged them in order, only the second one missing. Something in his ear was dying and he with it.

  Why do you stay so long out here? Donal asked.

  To see the end of the world. The birdwatcher admired Donal’s quick eye. He could catch a snake, drop it into a bag and tie it shut with his teeth before the snake flung itself up and attacked. He could look at scattered bones and see the living creature’s shape.

  Is this place the end?

  Could be here. Could be anywhere.

  Is that the only reason you stay?

  There was a woman but she left. She said she couldn’t breathe when I was there.

  Donal worked on the fine bones of a foot and shifted the small skull out of the way. He said, We say that we stay for love, run away for love, but a woman just goes firmly on in the same place being herself.

  You?

  I did not tell her that I loved her. She went with my friend. I didn’t try to change her course. This is the truest love.

  Where will you go next?

  Donal hesitated. Don’t know, he said.

  What was to follow? Donal’s hands were scarred with snakebite. He fished and climbed coconut trees for milk, wove fronds to replace worn thatch. But the hot winds never felt right against his skin. The sea is subtle—dread creatures glide under it, treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. An island, Melville said, is like a place in the soul, full of peace and joy, encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. Donal stared at the bones of the birds devoured by snakes and said, There’s an island up north where an old woman used to bury all the birds that broke their necks on her windows. That’s where I’m going next.

  He wanted to hear the old men at night. It was time to go back. Before everything disappeared. Colin would know the name of that tune.

  Nyssa put on Norea’s old honeymoon negligee and danced a one, two, three around the old woman.

  I’ve got on your lacy nightdress, Nana, she said. I like it.

  A nightdress like that is not meant for keeping on as much as for being taken off, said the old woman.

  Nyssa admired her own round breasts under the thin material and looked across at her grandmother’s sagging skin. She said without thinking, Will I turn like you?

  A woman must be as her nature is, said time-shrunken Norea to the heedless girl.

  Nyssa wandered out and up to the gaze in the nightdress. She smelled the smoke from Moll’s short pipe.

  Girl, called Moll, a woman only is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

  She held out the pipe to Nyssa and said, Have some dudeen.

  Nyssa took the pipe and drew and swirled the smoke inside her mouth. She watched Moll stick a piece of grass through a black hole in her tooth and pull it out the other side. When the pipe went cold, she handed it back, and with her long bony fingers the woman stuffed it with more crumbled leaves, held a match to it, sucked and said, Can’t stand a ring on a man’s little finger!

  Nyssa! called Dagmar from down the shore.

  The girl squatted lower in the hole and said, I’m not going.

  She was weary of the calling from home, drawn to Moll’s hole as a wanderer is to the morning ship.

  Nyssa! called Dagmar.

  Weather’s misky, said Moll. A man with a ring on his little finger thinks he’s the jinks. Seen one on a fishing man? On a sailor? Mainlanders have ’em.

  Moll reached between her legs, pulled out a small ring, and handed it over to Nyssa, who held it up in front of her, and asked, Is this a pinkie ring?

  Moll nodded and with a whoop Nyssa stood up in the hole and threw it as hard as she could over the edge of the gaze.

  Moll’s cracked lips twitched and she waved her naked hands in front of her face. All gone, all over, girl. I’m hungry.

  Nyssa handed her some biscuits from the nightgown’s pocket. Moll stuffed the whole package into her mouth, spitting out the paper as she chewed, crumbs spraying down her chin. A fine rain began to fall.

  Moll pulled a tattered rabbit pelt from under her heap of rags. She draped it over Nyssa’s head against the rain, pulled off her own thick and filthy sweater and buttoned it around Nyssa.

  In the drizzle Moll held up her hands to Nyssa as if they were a mirror and said, Where’s the girl?

  There is no more girl, said Nyssa. Only a hare.

  She made the sound of a hare by closing her lips and squeezing air between her tongue and her palate. I will write down this song and play it on my fiddle.

  Writing makes the spirit lazy, girl, said Moll, tapping her long fingers on her hairless head. A fixed word risks becoming a dead word. Hold it in your ear.

  Nyssa did not understand. She scrambled away and headed down to the shore and Moll called after her, The girl is as the girl does.

  By the time she was eighteen Nyssa had absorbed all the music Colin had to give her. He wanted something new for her birthday and chose Bach’s “Chaconne in D.” He handed it to her and said, A chaconne makes much out of little.

  Picking up her fiddle and nimbly playing at sight, adding her signature drone, she said, But, Daddy, I want to dance!

  Colin laughed. Bach is the essence of all that can be made in music. Will you get rid of that drone. It’s making us all mad.

  She shrugged. I like it. I want it to be like the sea always there. To speak of the sea is to refuse to speak of yourself.

  Colin shrugged. Can’t tell you anything. Like your mother. Here, I have something maybe you will like.

  He went to his junk drawer in the kitchen, pulled out some old screws, a couple of erasers, some nails and a bottle cap. He dropped them into Nyssa’s cupped, waiting hands, led her back to the old piano and lifted the front off. She smelled the musty insides of dry wood and metal, saw for the first time the guts of the whale. Eighty-eight felt-covered hammers were lined up imperfectly, waiting to be plunked against the rows of strings. Inscribed on the coppery pin-block were pictures of nine prizes and the words of a craftsman’s pride: Above Medals of Merit Awarded to Us at Exhibitions Throughout the World. It was piano number 19407 stamped in black on the upper-left-hand side and inscribed along the curve of the back was Heintzman & Co. Toronto, Canada. Agraffe Bridge Patented March 10 1896. From the vantage of Nyssa’s four-stringed violin, the row of musty hidden strings was exotic. Colin lifted out the piano’s action and turned it over. The very first tuner had scratched his name into the wood: Bob 1900. Nyssa ran her fingers over the dead man’s mark and her father watched.

  It’s nothing but a big drum, he said, putting it back together. Here, hand me a screw.

  She watched him choose objects from her hands and squeeze them between the clean row of strings until it looked like a rag mat.

  Play, he said.

  She sat down and looked at the piano’s insides. She placed her fingers on the ivory keys. She played a simple C major triad. There was a clank and a thud, a note and a cluck. She sped it up, changed keys and syncopated the rhythm to hear the drumming clanks of screws and thuds of rubbers.

  We have to get this down! she said in delighted adoring, as if she were the first to hear it in the world.

  Why? said Colin, What are you going to do with it?

  Make a new tune! said his exuberant daughter. She shook loose her kinked hair, put her hands on the keyboard and played another rhythm.

  Colin listened and poured himself a drink. Danny wandered in to listen too, pulled a rack comb and tissue paper from his pocket and played along with his sister.

  Nyssa insisted on writing down her father’s music. They laid out long sheets, labelled the strings and noted where each eraser, screw and nail had been placed. Colin smelled the fresh salty scent of his daughter’s skin as they sat shoulder to shoulder. Nyssa imagined their writing to be an affair of posterity, caught in the fleeting moment.

  She came home to Dagmar that night alight with the pleasures of wri
ting something she thought completely new.

  Her mother saw the glow of a girl in love and asked, How was your birthday?

  Fine.

  Did he give you a present?

  Bach, said her daughter dismissively. But he’s showing me how to write down a song for a piano all stuffed up with nails and screws.

  Dagmar too had once been Colin’s private audience on that old piano. She had watched Nyssa thrive under his teaching, heard the girl’s fiddling grow stronger and wilder. He’d taught her everything he knew, played tapes of the old people and recordings from abroad. His musical range was now hers and she excelled effortlessly beyond any other musician on Millstone Nether. Everyone could hear Colin’s stamp on Nyssa’s playing, her easy shifting between styles, already a master of the tradition. Dagmar thought, He is a bridge to her own spirit. Heaven only knows if the bridge will hold when she plays all that’s inside her. He never could bear anyone else’s ferocity.

  Years are drops wrung from a rag. Still tethered to childhood, Nyssa was ready to leap, knowing little of flying. Music was her haunt. She played what she liked. In ancient times and distant places the people would have honoured her, a young woman alive to her own song. They would have beat drums and danced for her. They would have brought young men to her door and they would have sung, Like her lips, sweet is her vulva, sweet is her drink. But that song was lost long ago and Nyssa would have to find her own way. She was destined. To go, deeper, darker.

  One Saturday night Nyssa gathered four boys with their fiddles and guitars and made them arrange themselves like a thick tree trunk in front of her. She led them to the pole house stage and when everyone arrived for a time, she hid behind them while they sang a sweet air together, then out she jumped from behind, the boys spreading like branches to both sides of her. Nyssa, centre stage, was the root to which all eyes turned. She put bow to strings, her flesh all power and excitement, a young girl standing exposed as a blade of winter grass in front of the flickering lanterns. She whooped and pounced on the first piercing note of “Nana’s Boots,” a medley she’d made up herself. The old people shook their heads at her showing off and called her a regular philandy and laughed. She knew how to pump it out. She danced and fiddled, wore her longing and hope naked for all to see.