by Kim Echlin
A sister and a brother lived together in darkness until one night a stranger lay beside the girl and made love to her. The sister fell asleep and when she awoke the stranger was gone. Next night, again he came, and again he lifted her up, and again, when she awoke, he was gone. Finally she blackened her hands with burned sticks from the fire and when he came in the darkness, she held his face between her palms. Eagerly she went out in the morning hoping to see some sign. But there squatting by the fire was her brother, long finger marks streaking his face. She screamed at him, It is you who had me in darkness. She tore off her breasts and hurled them at him, then picked up a large burning fire stick from the fire and ran away. He picked up a smaller fire stick and ran after her. They ran so fast that they rose up into the sky and caught fire. She became the sun and he the moon chasing over a world newly lit by the sorrow in the darkness.
Donal lifted her hips to his, his eyes closed and lips apart, breathing hard. She watched his face and waited, her mind turning over the story. Donal stroked her lovely linea alba and she looked away, her nana’s bodewords chilling: Forget the spirit and it dies.
When a cycle ends there is an emptying. The old pleasures go lacklustre. The old desires dry up. The cycle sometimes ends with a death, a loss. But sometimes it just ends. There is a call to be somewhere else. That is the truest explanation for the end of one thing and the urge toward another. One thing done, another ready to begin.
He could not stop her. Nyssa had plunged into the sea that silenced minor streams. She was out of sorts and restless, her music a practice for death. She wanted only to search out the unsounded experience. She wandered from wall to wall of her little room. The hours stretched endlessly around her. All sound flat against these wooden walls, webbed in by notes worn out, she baulked and began again the stripping-down. He said when she played that she could make ring all of heaven and earth. But she wanted still another realm. She wanted to reveal what lay hidden below. Nyssa Nolan had leapt fully formed. She wasn’t the sort to wither.
Donal brought his double bass into her room and said, Let’s play.
No.
Donal slammed his hand on the wall. Where had their sweet love gone? Was silence all? Their love extinct?
Play with me, he said.
Nyssa said, The face is yours. The spirit has fled.
What are you talking about? Listen to reason. The lifelovingest part of him would no longer lie beside him or play with him.
She looked at him and saw a stranger who would not listen to her. Gently she placed her beloved fiddle on the ground, and raising her brocade boot above it, she stomped down hard. The fine old wood cracked in useless splinters, the tailpiece popped off and the strings sprang tangled and slack. One of the pegs popped out and landed away from the smashed wood like a chopped-off finger. Chipped varnish and silent sheepgut lay murdered between them.
His eyes searched hers and he tried sotto voce, Let’s stop all this. I’ll get you another fiddle. If you love me I will always love you. It doesn’t matter what you do.
In an instant’s compass her heart closed to him.
She said, There is no if in love.
She walked past him and her dead fiddle toward the door.
Nyssa scrambled down the shore and untied the dory. The glow of ice-loom across open water. Swish-ice clinked like chains in thousands of little chunks along the shore. Farther out in the strait were deadly ice floes. She thought, He closes the door and my heart sneaks out the window. He closes the window and it sneaks out the chimney. My bearings and balance are not inside those rooms but out beyond.
She saw wrapped round a tree by the shore a scrap of her own face, the paper torn and blown. Across the chin scribbled in her mother’s hand was the word Missing. Her face torn in two, part of her fiddle tucked under her chin, the rest blown away. The storm was pitching up again in the north. She wanted to get across. She slipped into the middle seat and broke the ice frozen over the oarlocks. She lifted the heavy oars. The old wood was rubbed smooth with the pull of hands and covered in a sheaf of ice. She swung the two long blades against the chunks of ice in the water. The oars sounded like straw thrashed with a stick as they moved heavily through the ice. Facing the direction from which she came, the nose of her boat taking her blindly toward Millstone Nether, she rowed. She was afraid of the swells and of the banquese ice, broken floes drifting down from the north. She tried to make out the stars to keep straight. Night clouds curtained the sky and ocean winds swung her boat around. She pulled and pulled until her own torn face on the shore was a speck. For a long time she pulled, trying to keep the wind at the same angle on her cheek. By midstream, the stars invisible and winds whipping her bow around, she cried out, afraid of the fearsome frozen floes, but the sound reached no ear. She rowed now only to keep her boat from tossing over. I have small chance, she thought. Minutes hours and hours minutes, the time it takes to tend the dying, shrouded with freezing rains she kept pulling only because there was nothing else to do.
After a long time, she felt an opening in the ice floes and the pull of a current as if there were a vessel ahead. She pulled in behind and waked it. She had to trust its pull through the invisible leads and channels. She could make out a dory and in it a figure long-limbed and bony like a shadow puppet moved by thin sticks behind a screen. It pulled her ahead through the darkness. She felt thick shore ice, and she looked over her shoulder and saw the cliffs of Millstone Nether and heard the cracking of tree limbs through the frozen stillness of an island out in the gulf of that great freezing river.
She looked around for the boat she had waked and saw nothing but ice and darkness. She drifted aporetic near the shore, unable to land her dory caught between two icebergs. She brought in her oars and leaned over them, her shoulders aching, and rested her forehead down against the frozen wood. She shed her heavy oilskin. She wanted to lie down and sleep yet roused herself. You can’t sleep in this cold, she thought, unless you want to sleep to death. Her strong mind grasped that and clung to it, benumbed in the frozen darkness.
Only one stilt house in the settlement did not suffer greatly in the storm. Madeleine and Everett were accustomed to cold and darkness and thin rations. They endured these things because they had their secure store of paint and tobacco. Madeleine’s rocker feet were useless against the ice and Everett took over the cows during the storm. This left her inside. In the first days she painted what she could see from her window: the ice-locked harbour, a branch wrapped in a sleeve of ice, Everett milking a purple cow. She painted the insides of their rooms as she thought of them: an empty chair beside a window, a cat curled up on a brightly squared counterpane, a pot hanging above a hot stove. She painted in the pot’s shiny reflection her own chin pulled down into her neck and her webbed elbows. She smiled. She turned to a fresh paper and painted the only self-portrait she ever made. In the middle she outlined a door like any other on Millstone Nether, but in bright reds and blues and without a doorknob. Outside she drew herself, half turned away, her crabbed hand reaching up, unable to open the door but ready to enter. It had to be opened from the other side.
Madeleine put down her paintbrush and blew on her cold hands. She spent the rest of the morning mixing the brightest golds and yellows she could make, and then on the other side of the door she painted Moll.
Nyssa collapsed, slumped and curled up in the bottom of the dory, pellets of ice tangled into her hair, eye-brows thick with ice, her skin beginning to swell grotesquely under the beating wind. Breath slow, heart stumbling, she was in the region of what some think of as death. But she heard her name being called, Nyssa, by the one who did not give up searching. From a remote core in her mind’s dark recess she heard, and still she hung between death and what is commonly called consciousness.
She thought she was in a dream. She thought she was lying in a bed and felt no cold, no pain. She rolled to her side and got her eyes open and distinguished with confusion the ribs of the boat. But it did not rock or sway or in any wa
y move or smell like a boat. She lay staring and saw nothing from her right eye and only the boat’s skeleton with her left. She roused herself up painfully on her elbows and fixed on a single idea, Do something.
She saw her coat frozen in the stern. She pulled at it and when it wouldn’t move, she struggled up again and grasped the gunwhale and rolled herself over the edge of the boat, hoping the ice would hold and it did, and on her hands and knees she grimped her way to shore. Winter wind northwest, she thought ponderously and faced her cheek into it to keep from getting lost, fingers without feeling, feet without feeling.
Inside the rooms all silence. Donal could not play. He looked out over the gulf and wondered why she ran off like that and when she’d come back. There were no lights along the shore. He was thinking, I’ll need to book a concert hall, get our pictures taken, print the programs. We’ll need to set a date. When the storm’s over. I believe it’s subsiding.
The next morning he slipped along the shore and saw that the dory was gone. He put his head down against the pelting. Ice balls formed across his thick eyebrows. Drops fell along the hairs in his nose and froze, caked his chin and hair. He pulled up the collar on his coat and tried to turn his face from the battering wind but whatever direction he turned he could not escape it. Stinging ice crystals gashed at his cheeks like tiny pickaxes. A storm accepts no offerings. He tried to go over the repertoire in his mind. He walked back along the trail behind the house to take in some more firewood. He fell, cracking his wrist hard, and without a stick of kindling he turned and struggled toward home. He thought, If I wait she’ll come back to me. I have to take care of things here. I don’t smash fiddles and run out into storms. I can’t just throw it all up like that. She’ll come back—we always come back. We’ll play.
When the small boys scavenging the shore after the ice storm found him, he was still alive, but they couldn’t budge the tree that had cracked under the weight of its icy limbs and fallen and crushed his right leg. They put their ears to his lips and felt his breath. Some call it destiny, some call it fate. Donal lay trapped under that tree two nights and two days and thought about certain things. He knew that one act leads to another and that he could only act on what had happened before. In the judgement of others he had many choices, but he did not. He could only choose as he did, the web wrapped more and more tightly around him. Since the first time he heard her play there was no choice. And then she wouldn’t play with him any more. And she left him. But all his meaning was now tied up with her and with playing with her. He believed that she had delivered him to himself and he was responsible to his own music. The difference was that his music was now their music, and yet he could not bring himself to go looking for her. And because of this, he might die or he might live, but if he lived it would only be by leaving his right leg pinned under a tree fallen randomly in an ice storm.
Peering up through her own icy hair Nyssa heard the familiar voice.
Girl, awake! Keening time.
What is this? said Nyssa, trying to raise her head.
The bony woman stood above her where she had struggled her way to the hole lined with blackberry earth. Frost-bite ate her cheeks. Through the frozen glooming Nyssa saw Moll’s legs with her single good eye. Moll sat with filthy socks over her hands, her thumbs poked through holes once made by toes. There was no smell in that cold.
Moll tugged at Nyssa’s frozen feet and said, My feet are froze. Give us your boots.
Nyssa lay trying to move her fingers and Moll tore off her brocade boots.
What? moaned Nyssa.
Quiet, said Moll. Inside a woman is a wonder! She slapped her thigh.
Nyssa shifted, trying to get her other shoulder out of the ice. Looked for shelter for her naked feet. She could not tell whether she was looking into Moll’s blank black eyes or the starless storm sky. Things were flat and she could see nothing from her right eye.
Everything happens between a woman’s legs, Moll said. Out came my baby, nose curled forward in its little sack and couldn’t breathe. My little mousebaby and I turned it over and counted its tiny arms and legs, one two three four. I dropped it into the sea and went back to the grub house and stared at a picture of a Venus with broken-off arms.
Moll whooped then, pulled in her arms and swung the empty sleeves to both sides like a pinwheel.
Look, girl, she cried, no arms to hold no baby. She craned her head to stare at the ice still falling from the sky. She said, Weak skin’s my home. Your mother made this storm, and she won’t stop it.
She sucked in her cheeks, pinched her lips like a fish, stared at Nyssa, her nose frostbitten. She said, The cracker berries gone. No one brings me a groaning cake. All the universe is between a woman’s legs. Sure as worms.
She looked down on Nyssa’s feet, naked without her boots. She took off Nyssa’s sweater and pants and socks and hat. She squatted over the girl curled on her side, head tucked into her knees. She judged against her.
Nyssa heard Moll and did not move. She could not think what had made her set out as she had to come here. She was only sure that she might die if she could not rouse herself but each time she tried to rise she fell back. To venture to where there is no memory or conscience or any of the things by which human beings try to order what has no order is to go where life is forever altered by neither reason nor compassion. Nyssa was so frozen that she no longer knew if she was dying or dreaming or already hanging dead like a skinned rabbit from a meathook. She was divested of what she had been and did not yet know if she would become something other.
It is a condition of language to search for meaning in its most indistinct syllables. In the babble of the tiniest child. In the raving of the demented. Norea’s talk grew more unravelled with each frozen day. She slept little. Dagmar paced down below. Rage murdered sleep. Dagmar tried to ignore her mother’s talk. Yet perverse shards of truth escaped and sliced the air between them.
That last night Dagmar stoked the fire in Norea’s room against the barren air and tucked her mother in with layers of quilts. Pinned under the comforters Norea listened to the tedious ice pinging on the window.
You make the tea too strong, said Norea, stiffly straightening her bird legs. This bedding’s too heavy. And filthy. Did we spring clean? She looked at her daughter and was not sure who she was.
Outside, ice pelted the windows in a night beclamoured with noise.
Norea said, Shut the window. Don’t you hear all that howling?
I don’t hear anything.
When it stops you’ll know you’ve been hearing it your whole life.
Dagmar shut the slats in the windows.
Not that much! said Norea. The cold hurts my eyes. My hips are terrible today. She sipped the tea, and said, Too strong. She shook her head. She recognized Dagmar for a moment and was soothed. She said contentedly, Do you remember how your father used to walk down to the sea with us to watch the seals?
I never met my father, said Dagmar.
Of course you did, said Norea, agitated.
Dagmar bit the insides of her cheeks to check her tongue. Her mother was confused. Her father. The seals. The bawn before she was born. A girl named Pippin. I’ll get some more firewood, she said.
Don’t walk away from me, called Norea. Then suddenly remembering something, she said, I dreamed about Nyssa.
Dagmar turned. What did you dream, Mother?
She replied, She was kneeling on the ice, a seal-meadow below the gaze at the top of the island. She’d come from as far as the puffins. She pulled herself over pumly rocks. She stood up and scuffed. Danced right here back on the island.
There’s a dream, said Dagmar. Get a little rest, Mother. I’ll go make you something to eat.
Norea said in her thin voice, Bring your father a bite too. I’ll see you after I come back from the dory. Your tea’s too strong. Make it weak.
She fell then into the relief of sleep. She dreamed words she had never heard. Bamblys, piluinas, colinovis, kamovis. She saw seals se
a-silent, gazing unblinking from the brine at a poor barefooted creature. With ragged unpredictability her memory revealed and hid things again. Norea trembled as if on an open sea with no shore and no season, alive to the continuous torture of one question: who am I? Sometimes she knew where she came from and sometimes she did not. She sometimes knew Dagmar’s tread coming in her room but sometimes she did not. She rarely knew if it was day or night, yet the habit of fierceness was alive in her still.
That night her feet twitched her out of bed and inched her across the floor. She felt for an old and ripped silk stocking in her drawer and took it to her worktable. She ran her hands over the surface, touching the things Nyssa had scavenged along the shore, pebbles and shells, dried seaweed and the sea’s bones. She ripped open the foot of the stocking and tied the other end closed. She stuffed the driftwood and sea-weed inside. With her stiff fingers she packed all of the things on the table into her stocking. She tied off the toe with her teeth and laid it down in front of the fireplace. She felt for the heavy iron tongs, picked them up, swung them over her head and down hard. Up arced the stocking into the air. It spilled out its guts of dried wood and weed like blood and caught fire on the rag mat on the floor. Shells and bones and pebbles clattered. Words chanted themselves through Norea’s mouth. I don’t touch the queen, or the queen touch me.
Then the old woman struggled back to bed through the chill room, pulled the heavy blankets over her and groaned old sounds to her aching joints and slept again until the smoke burned her throat. Who was that now in her room beating the floor with an old rug? She was thirsty and the smoke stung her eyes. She wanted to lift her heavy limbs but couldn’t.
