by Kim Echlin
Dagmar delivered the placenta and dropped it from her bloody aching hands. The others clamoured, Let us see it, and half carried the young woman and her baby and stiff old Norea back toward the house, already singing again.
Make her juniper tea, Norea said.
He looks like Danny, said one.
Do you think he’ll marry now? laughed another, and they sang and joked about groaning cakes and admired the baby and the mother.
Dagmar sank exhausted to the ground, wiping her aching fingers on her coat. Colin loitered behind the others and sat behind her and put his arms around her shoulders until she pushed him off.
Get away, Colin. You’re drunk, she said.
So?
Something was bothering her, a double bass and a fiddle gone silent. Where was Nyssa?
She said, Did Nyssa go up to the house?
Colin didn’t care. He said, Come here for a minute.
She whirled around and pushed him away. She hated the way he pawed her, his lips all thick and wet when he was drunk.
Donal heard in Nyssa’s playing by the fire his own devotion to the sound that hands can wring from strings. She was like an ice-loom at sea, reflecting light along a dark horizon, wind springing up, no sign of real icebergs, only their glow in the distance. Old men knew how to navigate by the moan of the sea and an ice-loom in the air. Ears full of Nyssa, Donal could not distinguish her notes from his. Now no other fiddle would do. No one but Nyssa. Her song or nothing.
When everyone headed across the field toward the scream, Donal hit the first rhythmic notes of “Narcissus” for her. She stared at the shrouded figure. Why was he not going with the others?
Donal said from behind his mask, There’s enough of them. We’ll be in the way. Stay here.
She listened and played back at him, glad to have him to herself, echoing his tunes until finally Donal wrapped his bass into its old case and leaned it like a weary friend against a tree. He stretched out on his quilt to listen to Nyssa fiddle. The field was little changed, Dagmar’s greenhouse full. The cool island air shot through him. He breathed in the scent of lichen on the rocky shore. He saw ancient and stunted pines growing out over the breakers.
Nyssa played him some Tartini to show off, and when she was done she loosened her bow and laid her violin aside. She untied her hair and let it fall in a red tumble over her neck and sat near him.
You can play, he said, and then he propped himself up and ran his finger lightly down her forearm.
What are you doing? she said and she didn’t draw away.
Strong. Your hands. Your arms. Has anyone told you how soft the skin is here?
She looked down, seeing her own body for the first time. She let him stroke the skin on the inside of her wrist and traced the scars on his hands with her forefinger.
Heave up! she said suddenly, his taut scar tissue under her curious touch. Take off your mask. I want to see your face.
You are original and not timid, he said. She spoke with more self-anointed authority than he remembered in these island women. Used to getting her way. He took her left hand, guided it under the hood toward his lips, kissed the tips of each finger. She closed her eyes and he moved her other hand through the opening at the front of his shirt, brushing her palm against the hair on his chest. He felt her strong fingers break free from his hand to follow their own trails. He slowed himself, lay back and waited until she slid toward him, lifted the edge of his hood. He paused for breath, and buried himself in her strong shoulder and the scent of her skin. She pulled up his hood to glimpse a face darkened by years in the sun, his straw hair and tremulous eyes. She was interested and she opened her own shirt for his surprised lips to kiss her breasts. He eased his arm under her shoulders to shield her back from earth’s dampness, his bow hand and lips caressing her. In the tumid darkness he ran his finger along her forehead and saw the little crown-shaped mark at her hairline. He filled her ear with the roar of his breath. From her firm muscles, willingly she took the lead from him due corde. She wondered at this strange feeling of wanting him as she wanted herself.
Dagmar stood covered in blood and dirt, thin hair hanging lank around her face, dark-smudged eyes judging and condemning. Nyssa looked into those eyes familiar as her own and rose with lingering lithesome grace, pulled closed her shirt and forgot her fiddle on the ground. She ran across the field toward home.
Dagmar walked to the other side of the fire, picked up the water bucket and dumped it over Danny, who still lay passed out beside the dying embers. She touched her foot to his thigh and said, Fine thing. You’ve just made me a grand-mother. You’d better get up!
He stirred in the dirt. Uncertainly he looked around and said, Wha’?
Your son was just born. They’re all at the house. And she pushed him again and said, Get up there and help.
The words slowly penetrated his soggy mind and his long legs loped over the field, carrying him upright out of sheer will, the Nolan in him propelling him toward new life.
Donal stood and for the first time in all those years Dagmar looked into his eyes. He broke her silence.
She looks a lot like you did, Dagmar.
A white-throated sparrow trilled four notes. Grey light. Dagmar raised her chin and said, Leave her alone—you’re too old for her. She studied his eyes. He was thicker and more powerful than he had been as a boy. He inhabited his own skin as he had not before.
She said, You can’t come back here like this. You can’t do this. I won’t let you.
He got up from the ground and said, How much longer should I have waited, Dagmar, before I came home?
You took to your scrapers and left. It is too late.
Not too late. I am back.
Words like open husks.
She said fiercely, It’s not. Go away. With my bare hands I’ll hurt you if you go near her again. Leave her be. She’s young.
From his thick height he smiled. Nothing waits. You didn’t. I left and you went on. Isn’t that how it goes? I’m young still too. I like the way she plays.
A brutal grief seized her heart. She lashed out against him. I tried to play with you. I sat with you. You didn’t say a word. You turned away. How was I to know you cared?
I thought you knew. But you didn’t play like she does.
He kicked the pant-leg mask into the ashes of the fire, turned his back on her, left Colin’s double bass and walked away past the farmhouse toward his sister’s house. Lights flickered in every window of Dagmar’s rooms. Young people clattered early morning breakfast things, sang songs for the new mother and baby, bickered together comfortably.
In the morning Norea nudged a sooty shearwater lying dead outside the door to her balcony. She crouched over it and spread out and stroked the delicate and powerful wings that could drop into the trough of a wave and slide over its crest without wetting a feather’s tip. Broken neck.
Nana, said Nyssa, coming through the door, what happened to that hagdown? I’m in love.
He’s dead, said Norea.
How? said Nyssa.
Harbingers of bad weather, said Norea. But that’s when they’re alive. Does it have a graceful eye?
I guess, said Nyssa. It’s only a seabird.
Norea said, Forget the spirit and it dies.
She felt a tear slip down her bevelled skin and was careful to wipe it away.
Norea turned the bird over in her stiff hands. Patiently Nyssa watched her stroke the feathers, and finally Norea raised her head. You’re in love, then? I’ll have to bury this poor thing.
Yes, said the girl. His eyes are light in darkness, his hands strong and scarred, his music fills me as if it were my own.
You’ve fallen hard, said the old woman. Don’t break your neck!
Nyssa laughed and said, You know, don’t you? I think I’d die for him.
I know you wouldn’t. We die and are worm food but not for love.
Norea ran her fingers over the spine of the little bird, tried to remember how they look
ed soaring and dipping down hard on the dories to steal bait from trawls. She sang,
One evening last week I walked down by yon
bush,
I heard two birds singing—a blackbird and
thrush;
I asked them the reason they sang in such glee,
And the answer they gave, they were single and
free.
Come with me, Nyssa, she said. Help me bury this little soul. It’s a dread woman who wouldn’t dignify a bird with a proper burial.
Norea chose a place, in the middle of a freshly cleared field, far from her row of bird graves. Nyssa dug the hole while Norea chanted over the open earth. Then she instructed Nyssa to roll large stones to the spot to make a cairn to mark the grave.
Dagmar hurried out from the house, hair still uncombed from the night before. What are you doing? she asked.
Burying my bird, and I’m making a cairn over him.
You can’t build a cairn here. I’m using this field next year!
I guess you won’t be planting here because I am building a cairn.
Without another word the old woman dropped the stone she was holding, turned and tapped her way across the field for another.
There’s hardly earth enough for potatoes on this forsaken island and you’re making a bird graveyard! said Dagmar.
Norea kept on walking.
The ragged harbour was unmoved by Norea’s labour with stones. She shaped an oval enclosure over the grave. Inside she formed a round circle like a head, a long oval for a body and two stone legs with a little passage between them. Seen from above, the cairn looked like a woman’s body stretched out on the ground, measured about ten feet long and five feet across. She sang,
Lù ò ra hiù ò
o hì o hì ò
Lù ò ra hiù ò.
Norea was so thin now that she seemed to disappear between the cracks in the rocks. Nyssa pushed stones until her arms ached and she absorbed the words of her grandmother’s chanting, which she did not understand, and the tunes, which she did. All day as she heaved the stones, she thought of the touch of the stranger’s tongue between her fingers, the shine of his eyes behind the mask.
Nana, asked Nyssa, have you ever felt as if you were falling with your feet still planted on the ground?
The old woman stepped out from between two rocks and said, I’ll soon fall into the honey pot.
What honey pot, Nana?
Death, grave Nyssa, and I’ll thank you to bury me here beside my bird and see that your mother doesn’t turn this into a planting field.
You can’t die for a hagdown Nana, said Nyssa alarmed. There’ve been plenty of birds die.
And what would be a better reason? Is there a finer life than a seabird’s?
Norea got up, walked into the deepest part of the cairn and knelt stiff as an old doll. She said, There is no more leaping for me on these old legs.
Her papery hands were cut to bleeding by the sharp rocks, the earth under her fingernails black. Nyssa came close to help but Norea pushed her aside. No. It is not yet your turn.
So Nyssa squatted and watched Norea reach under her skirt and pull out a small clay axe shaped into the form of a flattened hourglass. Etched on each side of the double head of the axe was the tiny face of an owl, with birds’ claws reaching down from the eyes. Norea laid it on her right hand and held it out to Nyssa.
This is for you.
What is it, Nana?
An axe.
What for?
The old woman smiled, her face a ploughed bawn of wrinkles, her yellow hat framing light eyes, the invisible revealed in the visible.
Nyssa frowned. She ran the side of the little axe on her face and looked at the owl’s expressionless face, the two ribbons of graven tears streaming down from the eyes.
What does a clay axe do? she asked again.
Cuts, Nyssa. You cut off one life to begin another.
The girl swung the clay axe through the air, fighting an imaginary battle. She ran around the cairn, her axe high above her head, and made Norea laugh. Then she came back to the old woman and she scraped out a hole in the head of the cairn. She placed the little axe in the hole, threw earth over it and stamped the ground down hard. Now I’ll always know where it is, she said.
It was clear to Nyssa that her nana was disappearing. Her tear ducts were loose and dripping salt oceans, her hair was falling out limp as mulch straw, her fingernails were yellowing like old leaves, and dark patches of bruise spread under her skin at a touch.
Norea said into her silence, What’s the matter?
You look as if you’re turning into dirt, said Nyssa.
She rubbed her eyes and took up the girl’s hands in her old bony claw. She said, No. Honey. Do you see the bird on my shoulder?
Nyssa looked but she could no longer see. Nana had always said to her when they played, There’s plenty of time. But there wasn’t. Childhood is fleeting as the blue flax flower. And stains forever.
Donal tucked a note into Nyssa’s violin case beside the fire pit.
Dear Nyssa,
Don’t ask for reason. You are more eternal than death. I have nothing to wait for but you. Meet me at the stone man tonight.
With singing eyes Nyssa found the note and swallowed his script’s umbels and twists. She picked open a seam of the velvet lining at the bottom of her case and hid the note. At dusk she left Norea’s cairn and took the path through the woods toward the shore.
Girl, called Moll.
Nyssa looked around and couldn’t see her. The voice seemed to come from both up on the gaze and down on the shore. She pretended she didn’t hear. She had no taste for Moll today.
You’re on whelping ice drifting out to sea, said Moll.
Nyssa said into the air, I’ll come tomorrow.
Moll’s too stark, she thought. She walked a few more steps and there on the path was the hulked form of a dying deer. Moll squatted over it. The animal’s eyes rolled back and it wheezed for breath. On the side of its long neck was a huge growth that was slowly, inevitably, cutting off its breath. Moll stroked it.
Nyssa caught her breath at the animal’s suffering. What can we do? she said.
Nothing, said Moll.
Agony has gradations. But it is no more possible to contemplate the horrible dying of this creature than it is to rest the mind on the hacking off of the limbs of a despised tribe or to see the twisting of a man’s body under a beam fallen in a sudden earthquake. All is in the same region of sorrow. The cruelty we bathe in and ignore each day is a part of wisdom that we dare not contemplate for fear of becoming monstrous. It is human to turn away, to cover the eyes, the mouth. But to risk becoming monstrous is to risk wisdom.
I’m not staying, said Nyssa.
Moll did not answer. She would wait. She wanted the deer’s bone to skin and dry and use to play her kettle.
Donal waited on the eastern shore behind the pile of rocks, then stepped out in front of her. Nyssa crossed her arms and said to him coolly as if she were performing on stage, I like your playing.
I just scratch, he answered.
Not bad scratching, she said.
Will you come with me?
You think you can just ...? She laughed and nodded at his hands. Where’d the scars come from?
She was neither so skinny nor so dewy as he had thought in the darkness. She clambered along the rough shore like any island child. A force and directness was at work in her.
Snakes, he said.
She thought he looked different. He was larger and much older. Without the muffle of his mask she could make out in his speech a remnant echo of the island lilt. The notes of his bass still rang deep in her ears.
Where from?
Have you ever heard a perfect echo? he answered.
He led her to a fissure in the rocks and swung himself up and disappeared into a little cave inside. His hand reached down for her.
Grab hold of that starrigan there, he said.
S
he grasped the trunk of the gnarled fir tree growing out of the rock, tested it, swung sideways, taking his hand for the final scramble up. She crouched into the gloom beside him and listened to the hush, hush of waves below. He purled a note from deep in his throat.
Nyssa could shiver and scrape and squeak notes. She could hit their singular vibrating centres. She said, The perfect note is when the bow lifts off the string. I have heard sound that makes my eardrums ring.
Donal sang into the cave’s mossy darkness, ah and ah and ah on different tones, each echo ringing over the one before. Then he stroked the soft skin on her forearm and said, You are the condition of music.
Nyssa experienced for the first time (for there is only one first time) the vertigo of passion, the first desire of a girl’s stirred-up mind and thighs. The scent of him threw her off and his touch threw her off and his snake-eaten hand reaching to her face threw her off and his tongue against her tongue threw her off. This was the short life of first desire. She marvelled and reached out both hands. The earth with its wide ways yawned and firm rock cracked in two. Donal was amazed by her hunger.
Afterwards they crawled out of the cave and lay under the open sky, listening to the water. She stroked the scars on his hands and said, How long will you have me, now that you have had me?
Forever and a day, said Donal, voice clear against dusk’s melancholy. He thought, She’s got Norea’s voice and Dagmar’s face.
Say a day, said Nyssa, without the ever.
Donal looked into the sky and said, You don’t know waiting or what it is not to speak.
I never not speak, she laughed.
Donal said, Sometimes it is good to be still and say nothing.
Then it is good to be a stump. Why are you sad?
Donal smiled ruefully. I am hungry as the sea for you and could swallow as much. Sometimes experience makes a man sad.
And what is your experience that it makes you so sad?
I have travelled far from home, wandered away from everything I loved. But that is all gone now. Between home and you, it is all a blank.
