by Kim Echlin
Tumbly sea, deep grey swells crashing against the cold rock. Colin spoke from the blasphemy of knowing, She’s not a child, Dag. She’s got a right to go.
Dagmar raged back at him, She was taken.
She wanted to claw ragged blood rivers through his face. She wanted to scar him with her trowel. She wanted to put seeds in his eyes and blind him. She would reason herself free of his law.
Colin answered into her chill eyes, The ocean’s made of mothers’ tears. The more suddenly a young girl goes, the more she doesn’t want to be found. There were portents.
What portents? said Dagmar.
Patterns, he said. She was poised for leaving. Didn’t you know? Mothers are sometimes the last.
Dagmar felt her hand stinging his cheek. What did he know about signs?
He grabbed her wrist hard and brought it down between them, startled as he had been for forty years by her strength. He said, It’s as it should be and always was.
Had he no fear?
I will not bend to ways that have no meaning for me, she thought. What divine order have I disobeyed?
She spat on the floor between them and left.
At home she said to Norea, not for the first time, The gods will make me kill him.
Norea answered, That is no god speaking. That is your heart. The truth of it is, she’s gone.
I refuse that truth.
It is the truth.
Wrong! That truth will kill me.
What good is this, Dagmar? She is already gone. It’s happened, she’s off.
Now they were two old women grieving each for her own daughter.
Norea paused and said quietly, When I used to deliver milk I found all sorts of things just because people told me they were looking. The side of my wagon was taped up with notices. Once I found a lost china teacup not even chipped. Come, we’ll send signs across to the north shore. That’s sure where he is. If you measure your sorrow by her worth, it will know no end. Come. A girl like Nyssa doesn’t disappear. I’ll help you bring her back.
Dagmar went into her room and returned mutely in her oldest flowered dress.
Ping.
The icestorm began with a single ice crystal falling on the humid glass of Dagmar’s greenhouse and melting. A drop dripping harmless. And then another.
Ping.
The people of Millstone Nether lay in their beds, listening to the beginning of the storm. Spring-winter, they thought sleepily and pulled up the covers against the temperatures strangely dropping. Late-March storms—they’d weathered plenty of these springs. Capricious crystals. Over the ocean strange ice-snow swirled onto the shore.
When the old people awoke next morning, rooms cold, snow falling with ice, they said, resigned to the weather, Well, the old lady’s picking her goose again. They called the snow dung mixen and watched the darkened world already lightly glazed with ice as if caught in the stare of a fevered eye. Transparent sleeves of ice covered young leaf buds and swish ice formed in the shallow water along the shore, tinkling like broken glass. Day deepened again and harder the ice rain fell, layer upon mottled layer, an effervescent icy cataract covering the island. One unique crystal at a time.
Ping.
Norea and Dagmar walked through the storm and gave pictures of Nyssa’s face with words scrawled below to sailors hurrying away from the rising storm. They asked the men from away to put them up on the north shore where a girl might see them. Moved by the two old women huddled under thick coats, the sailors took their signs and tacked them up on the other side of the great river. The winds ripped at them and bits of Nyssa fluttered over all the region. The girl with all that red hair smiling, her fiddle under her chin. Bits of Nyssa everywhere. Common as a fallen leaf.
Ping.
At first, people huddled together against the storm as they always did, defying pressures. The first to suffer were the very old. Papery skin and tired hearts, they huddled over kerosene lamps and camp stoves. Arms aching, women kept small babies in slings against their own skin, wrapped warm against the storm.
Ping.
At Dagmar’s the branches of the stiff old pine behind the greenhouse sagged with heavy glistening ice. A marvel. Each needle was wrapped in shining ice, each cone shining with frozen ice. It thickened in layers on branches that squeaked and cracked and finally crashed down under the weight. Branches fell away from the trunk in long reluctant tears until the whole tree cracked and broke and smashed the green-house with a spectacular crash in the freezing wind. Shattered glass mingled with ice in heaps of shards around crumpled green piles of plants and tomato seedlings. Glass sliced through rows of Dagmar’s indigo pansies freaked with jet, luminous for a few hours under the frozen leaves. Tumid ice branches fell and lay freezing on the earth. Dagmar’s radiant and difficult pink bougainvilleas, even her opuntia compressa with its yellow prickly pears could not withstand the rubble of ice and glass. She wrapped her apple trees with thick rags. She kept Norea’s outside loft heated with the wood fireplace and they cooked on the Rayburn in the kitchen. She stood with Norea on the porch, watching winter grasses creak and sway. They talked about Nyssa and bet matchsticks on which dangling leaf would next twist and crack and fall.
In the torment of absence Dagmar imagined Nyssa’s hair, her music, her wide grin, her green eyes. Gone. Habits of sound, of encounter, of love. Gone. With each ticking minute Dagmar was slowly broken, ribs cracked, gut cut open, heart slashed raw, lungs punctured. She awoke in the night, thinking what could she do more. Never are we closer to our own godliness than in loss. Reflecting backwards we apprehend unbearably how mortal and limited we are. If only we had thought like gods. The suffering of loss is infinite because we are sure things might have been different if only we could think in the way of eternity.
The people of Millstone Nether clung to their old radios and listened to the crackling voices of ships’ weather forecasters who said they’d never seen such strange build-ups of pressure in the early spring. All the buds on the ground bushes were dead and the small hard berries cracked off without getting green. Dagmar wandered her bawn and along the shore, looking across the great river and mourning Nyssa. The dusk drew on, loosing from striving every living thing in all the world save her.
Inside the house she shone for him. He pressed his neck close against hers. They could not get enough of each other. They made love before sleeping, in the night when one or the other was roused by a dream’s meander or the body’s restlessness, in the morning at first touch. They dragged their instruments from room to room to play together and dropped to the floor to make love. They cooked and ate together and did not know what day it was. When they grew tired of indoors, they bundled up to walk out and look at the relentless freezing ice. Nyssa tucked all of her hair up under an old toque of Donal’s and delighted him when she pulled it off in the winds, red kinks and curls tumbling around her face. Stretching, striding, pretending she didn’t know how much her hair, her eyes, her touch pleased him. Nyssa said, I never want to go back, and Donal said gravely, You don’t have to.
Playful Nyssa imagined new ways not to touch.
Be still, she commanded him one afternoon as they lay naked. He was proud of his well-tuned body and his insatiable fingers tapped his own skin absently. Between kisses Nyssa traced the irresistible curves of his linea semi-circularis and said, You’re very fit for your age.
Donal lifted his head from the pillow and contemplated his naked fiddler-lover, fingers stroking the soft and moist skin above her breasts firm as snap peas. Why must the body dry? he wondered.
Heedless, quick-tongued Nyssa lifted her lips from his skin, bounced off the bed and said, I’m going to draw you. You’re not allowed to move.
She padded into her practice room and brought back a sharp pencil and a stack of discarded staves. Strange how you have nothing to draw on in the house but music paper, she said.
Nyssa threw out her little critiques without thought. She knew no other way to talk. Dagmar and Norea had never cens
ured the girl’s stream of chatter. They abided her tactlessness in favour of her truth. Donal lay still by Nyssa’s royal command, her detached gaze upon him. She drew. Playfully he reached out to touch her toenails, white chips of moons.
Nyssa said, Stop. Don’t move or I’ll tear it up and start all over again. She was as absorbed as a child in her new game, tracing the shape of his body onto the page of musical staves.
He acquiesced and lay and watched the outside light diminish, only his eyes allowed to caress her body, the tilt of her neck, the punto d’arco of her pretty breasts. He composed in his head the new variations he would perform when at last released to touch his skin to hers.
She did not show him her artwork. She handed him the pad of paper and pencil and told him to draw her. He dashed off a sketch, tossed the paper aside and reached for her.
She said, Not good enough. I want detail. Pretend I’m one of your bird specimens.
He sat up and arranged her body in order to touch her and began to dissect her and draw her. He commenced with her bow hand and by the time he had completed its visible and invisible complexities—twenty-six fine bones in the fingers and wrist, loose joints, fingernails, palm lines boding—the room was completely dark. There was much left to do. Her soft forearm, her muscular upper arm, the crease of her underarm waited undrawn.
Nyssa said, Let me see.
She was surprised when he held up the sketch of her hand. She tossed the pages to the floor and wrapped herself into him in the pure pleasure of self-immolation à deux.
They returned over and over to their drawing game. Nyssa’s portraits grew more abstract. She worked more in sound than in shape. She rendered Donal’s body a thicket of notes on a musical staff, a new musical composition a cappriccio. She secretly took her sheets to her practice room to play. Donal dissected her, bit by bit by bit, and tacked his pages to the wall in joined pieces of her portrait, the proportions according to his preferences—a hand the same size as her head, her lovely toes larger than her breasts, the soles of her feet. Nyssa commanded him to make love only to the piece of her he had just drawn, rose and sank in the pleasures he could act upon each lovingly observed morsel of her body.
She favoured the loom of novelty and devised new ways to separate herself from Donal, persuaded that delayed touch was sweeter. Sometimes in the middle of making love she stopped, got out of bed and made him listen to her play her fiddle. Sometimes she commanded him to get up and play basso buffo with her. Then they’d start all over again.
On the island of brown tree snakes, only one type of gecko escaped extinction. When it got caught, it peeled itself free of its own skin and left the snake with nothing but a dry bag in its methodical jaws. Donal admired the gecko’s cunning. He watched Nyssa as the days passed and it seemed to him that she was peeling off her old skin but he could not say why.
No other animal suffers so much as a frail human fated and drawn by love to the infinite possibility of wisdom. Nyssa was enthralled by Donal’s fast devotion to the perils and transcendence of horsehair on sheepgut. He showed her gentle tricks to coax from her violin a sound more pure. He said, You can train your instrument, and he tried to stretch her talent. All notes planted themselves effortlessly in her mind. She looked at scores and discerned their patterns. She preened and stretched like a cat at Donal’s unmasked pleasure in her quick ear and nimble fingers. She found intonations that rang together with his, all other sound disappearing from heaven and earth.
But Nyssa grew bored with pitches so perfectly matched. She teased him by sliding up and down around the notes. When he couldn’t entice her back, he played harmonics. His long strings rang out in a way her shorter ones could not. He hit the note and ran his finger up the string from the nut without really dampening it. He made a deep, echoing bell tone that punctuated her cheeky dissonance. She listened and was strangely moved by hearing him strut and display what he could do. She watched his great hands seek sounds that might please her, listened to him venture uncomfortably beyond his beloved consonance and felt tender toward him. They played for themselves and for each other. They played and played as one, and sometimes when they finished and the music fell silent, they were astonished and even a little afraid.
They’ll be missing me, Nyssa ventured restlessly one twilight, lying on the carpet where they’d dropped head to foot, touching Donal’s inner forearm with her toe. How long have I been gone?
Donal traced his lover’s foot, ignoring what he feared most from her. He said, kissing the tip of her left baby toe, Let’s try the beginning of the “Très Vif” section of the Ravel. He watched her wade into and wend through the difficult piece, concentration alight on her clear forehead over arched eyebrows, admired her tenacity in its unfamiliar terrain.
Perhaps I should send word, she said, withdrawing her toe.
The river is full of ice, he said.
She pulled herself up to her elbows and said, They’re old. Nana needs me.
They’re fine, answered Donal. There were worse storms before you were born. Stay. I’m old too.
She said, I will scold you for being old before your time.
It is my time, he said.
Then do not be old before you are wise, she answered. Why do you try to stop me from doing what I like?
Don’t torment me, he said. Your music has made me complete.
And what of me?
Donal had unfurled in Nyssa a vast wilderness of touch. He left inevitable traces. For the first time she was divided from herself, awake to the frail melancholy of the flesh.
That night she stared out at the ice lace on the window, with a shivering fear of falling. She stamped her foot lightly to recapture herself, raised her hopeful fiddle and played the familiar reels in her “Nana’s Boots.”
Through the wall Donal searched for ever more intriguing pieces to play together. He showed her Bottesini’s “Grand Duo Concertante” as well as the “Passione Amorosa.” She felt that Bottesini favoured the bass parts. He gave her Bach’s “Chaconne in D” and improvised an accompaniment.
Lying on her back, balancing her fiddle upright on the tips of her fingers, Nyssa said, But it should challenge you as well.
Willingly Donal acquiesced. He looked for a piece that would please them both and pulled out Handel’s “Passacaglia.” Yes, he thought, its plucking, its romantic interludes, its hard, quick bowing and nimble finger work, yes, it will please her no end. He wandered into her practice room where she lay on the floor listening to “L’arte del arc.” She said, I’m busy. You just left.
That’s not what I came for. I have found a piece for you and me, and I have a dress for you to perform it in.
She rolled to her side and said, What colour is it?
A surprise, if you’ll wait for me.
How long will you be?
All time away from you is an eternity. It is in my room. I’ll go now. Will you wait for me?
Home was not home any more. Houses in Millstone Nether burned to the ground in the freezing rain as people tried to warm themselves with lanterns and candles. Some locked their doors for the first time in all the years, afraid. Old people fingered the edges of their blankets. Children cried with cold and no boy challenged another to jump the icebergs.
Norea was confused by the uncanny cold. She could not remember the days of the week or what she ate. She sometimes did not know where she was. She began to talk to Dagmar as if she were still a child. She talked to her own dead mother, forgot that Nyssa was born. She begged her daughter to make the ice stop and Dagmar said, Not until I find Nyssa.
Norea sat in her deep-fetched darkness, wrapped in quilts. When the frozen rain tapped the window she heard the clatter of milk bottles and the cry of her young mother dying. She trenched potatoes until her young arms ached, she shivered frightened across Ireland and lay wretched in the stench of a ship’s hold. She slipped eggs in worn grey paper cartons through little doors into the houses of the settlement, and gathered up and buried dead bird
s. There lay a baby beside a bull. She walked into her first house, holding hands with Rory, and heard three old sheep-faced women chanting to her the old hauling home song:
Oro, sé do bheatha a bhaile, is fearr liom tu ná
céad bo bainne:
Oro, sé do bheatha a bhaile, thá tu maith le
rátha.
A chill of light hunger distracted her from the bright stream of sound and touch. When she woke up she was disappointed to be in her outside loft, caught in the tedium of aching hips and throbbing hands. She shook memory away from her like a dusting rag and reached reluctantly into the cold from under her blankets, felt for a plain cracker in the dish lying beside her teeth on the bedside table and broke it between her gums. She sucked the cracker until she could wind her old tongue around and gum it into throat-sized gulps. Her water glass was frosted and she wanted hot tea. She thought, Too creak cold to get up. I’ll just tuck my head in under here and rest. Oh, but my throat is dry. She pulled her wool hat down over her thin hair and drifted back to her imageless sleep.
For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone. She heard Rory singing “The Nut Brown Maid.” Rory, dust to ghost transpeciated. Then she saw him. He stood before her in the frozen room with his disarming grin, hand half raised toward her. She knew she was half aslumber and he dead, yet there he stood. And his voice. She stopped herself from moving for fear of losing him. She watched him raise his other arm toward her, come forward to her. Be still, Norea warned herself, keeping her eyes closed. Don’t frighten him away. All his life-lost sadness reached across into a world no longer his. He stepped nearer again, eyes abrim with longing for the young woman throbbing with desire for him and then Norea had to breathe and he was gone. She lay still, trying to bring him back but he was gone and tears rolled unhindered down her old cheeks, burning holes through the cold sheets.
She struggled to sit up in bed. Where was Dagmar? She watched new ballycatter ice freeze in lacy patterns on her windows. She feared the dusk, hours of cold chafe and loneliness. Where was Dagmar? Wasting with desire for her daughter. She struggled to pull her old bird legs out from under the heavy covers to go downstairs in the dark. She had to walk out now. Try to fix things. Hadn’t she done it many a time, left her home, hitched up the milk wagon or walked off a worry?
