Dagmar's Daughter

by Kim Echlin

  Dagmar finished putting out the fire and looked down at the restless shade in the bed. Her mother would burn the place down. She searched the room for embers, opened the window to blow out the smoke. The old woman’s face was wan on her pillow, cheeks sunken over her empty gums, hair fine as a baby’s. Dagmar tucked in the sides of her mother’s blankets. She stood over the bed, watching the eyes moving under translucent veined lids, listened to her dry lips mumble, Dagmar.

  Dagmar stroked her hair and her forehead and smoothed the deep creases between her eyebrows. She dabbed some water on a finger and dropped it on her mother’s parched mouth. The old lips opened and the tongue moved out and forward like a newborn’s trying to suck. Drop by drop, Dagmar helped Norea drink until the wandering tongue stopped its slow pulsing and the sleeping woman closed her mouth silent and still again, the skin around her temples gone slack. Dagmar leaned down tenderly and laid her cheek against Norea’s. The touch burned Dagmar’s skin like ice.

  What is the effect of prolonged anguish on the mind? Norea swung her bird legs over the edge of the bed and stood on shaking claws. She put her yellow sun hat on her head against the sun in the cairn. Hand over hand along the cold wall she made her way down the narrow staircase and into the kitchen and out through the half door into the ice. She stopped breathing at the slap of cold and marvelled. Where was the little seal dancing in from her snowy raft on a fiddle tune? She was maddened by her drifty mind and she straightened her night-gown. She tapped along the path into the frozen bawn, sifting through chunks of ice for her stone markers and found her cairn with a relief known only to the blind. She made her way along the cairn’s stones into the head and she sat down. The world was dying and Dagmar’s grief was just begun. Where was Nyssa? A little song now. Perhaps the “Hauling Home” song, to make him laugh. But she was so warm. She had to get these clothes off. Blind alone. The silver thaw shining. Beyond, the ragged harbour, buckly ice and storm breakers.

  From her hole in the gaze, Moll heard the voice that had long ago groaned through the bushes with her. The bony woman rose and left Nyssa’s bluing body and walked through the dread cold.

  Norea murmured without effect into the frozen air, Mow. Wretched dry sounds from cracked lips. She slipped into frozen delirium. She watched herself as if from outside, muttering, Open the door. She tried to move her toes, to lift her own parched and swollen tongue. She took off her slippers, her summer hat, nightgown, panties, bra and wedding ring. Six doors she passed through until finally she passed through the seventh door naked and bowed low. To her surprise, when she raised her eyes she could see again, but all she could see was Moll’s blank black eyes. And she could hear now all the vibrations of the island. She could hear the sounds and sweet airs in the caves and in the trees. A thousand twangling instruments hummed in her ears from the sea and the wind. These things she’d felt all her life and now she heard them distinctly, too many for naming, all those long years of living her preparation for this. She could hear Nyssa turning over in Moll’s hole, lined with blackberry earth, trying to rouse herself.

  She felt a tear drop from each eye and roll down her cheeks onto the ice. Her tears warmed the ground and two mauve hepaticas sprang up. Then Moll judged against her and she died and the huddled birds in the cracking dawn fell silent on their frozen branches.

  A frozen draft from the open half door woke Dagmar out of the still silence in the house. She wrapped herself up in her old green robe, toes shying from the floor. Her breath hung over the unlit Rayburn and the wooden countertops shone with an incongruous layer of frost. The powdered milk in the jug beside the sink was frozen; snow swirled around the table and chair legs through the open door. She stuck her cold feet into cold boots and stepped out-side to follow faint traces of Norea’s bare footprints toward the bawn. Unbidden tears froze on her cheeks. Through the layered darkness she traced the prints. Into the cairn. No lights anywhere in the black.

  She saw the birdlike figure huddled near the rocks. Norea lay naked under the falling ice, one hand still clutching unwanted fabric. Her head was turned toward the sky and the stiff old fingers of her other hand clutched at the flat skin of her chest. She was huddled in a curl of bones and skin. She’d thrown up sickfroth that still clung frozen to her blue lips. Her head lay on an ice-covered rock, her yellow hat fallen off to the side, her feet already swollen into bruised mitts. Dagmar saw pearly blue blotches on her hairless but-tocks all flattened under freezing ice. She tried to reach down and raise her up, to cover her up with her own old coat. Maybe she could be warmed. Dagmar lay down to press her own warmth against the cold body, but the old woman was stiff and frozen as Danny’s jeans when she used to hang them out to dry on the line in winter. She’d take the pegs off them and pile them up like so many boards, cracking them in two and in two again and bringing them inside to thaw out. Dagmar lifted her dead mother up and carried her back to the house, her chiding and strange stories all silent now. She dragged her over the threshold of the kitchen door and longed for her to nag just one more time, Dagmar, keep going. You have so much more than I did.

  She laid Norea on the kitchen table, went and found her mother’s gardening dress and pulled her Irish boots out from under the bed. She dressed the stiff body, combed out the wetness from her hair and arranged her yellow hat the way she liked to wear it with a little tilt. No one left who remembered her father. Dagmar let her mother’s hands fall to her sides and rest on the table, the way she’d stood all her life, plain and ready to move on. Then she stirred up a good fire and rested.

  She was nodding off, her head on her arm on the table when she heard Colin’s coin on the window, tap, tap, tap. Not tonight, she thought, forgetting the greenhouse was smashed. I won’t go out with him, not tonight.

  Dag, my love, said Colin, pushing into the kitchen.

  Close the door. She froze tonight.

  Who?

  My mother.

  He finally saw her in the gloom on the table. You can’t leave her there.

  I’m not having any coffin maker here tonight with his sorry-for-your-trouble-what’s-the-length-of-the-corpse, she said. It’ll wait till dawn. Have a drink.

  She poured them both a whisky, set the bottle on the table near her mother’s hand and drew up her chair.

  Colin said, Dag, do you remember when we were young, when I tapped on your window the first time after you left me, she dumped a bucket of water on my head?

  Colin was already beginning the tales and drinking that help the dead slip out of this world.

  Dagmar’s rage rekindled. The body was still thawing and him starting with his half-truths. She thought, I didn’t leave. He drove me out and alone with a baby at that.

  But she said, She was just nineteen years older than I am.

  Colin reached for the bottle and nodded. Vexed with his drinking, Dagmar said, I want her back, Colin.

  He leaned over her chair and tried to put his arms around her and said, The heart’s dead are never buried.

  But she pushed him away and said, Not her, Colin. Nyssa.

  Over Norea’s dead body, you’re still at it! said Colin. Day gives way to night, Dag. You too must give way.

  I won’t. Stop telling me that. I won’t! Norea dreamed Nyssa was back on the island. She said she saw it.

  The harbour is iced in, said Colin. How could she be? I can’t do a thing, Dag. How many times? It’s not up to me.

  Then who?

  Colin stared as if seeing her once again for the first time and said, Stop the storm.

  Dagmar took Norea’s frozen hand and absently stroked it, playing with the tips of her fingers.

  She said, I won’t leave off.

  Colin saw no point to meddling in the currents of this woman. His way was to abide, rise, fall, move around or sink under, like the sea. But Dagmar was a digger and a pruner. She grew plants no one else could dare in that resisting soil and she prodded her children in the same way. When all the other root cellars were empty, hers had potatoes
and carrots. She and Colin were different. It was not a difference of reason or passion but of different planes of being.

  He never knew what Dagmar would do next and for the first time in their long life together he considered what might come of her rage. He looked down at the dirt he had taken absently from under Norea’s hard nails and listened. He rubbed the tiny flecks between his thumb and forefinger.

  Dagmar stared at his closed face and howled in an ecstasy of violent sorrow, Get out. Don’t come back. Not tomorrow. Not ever.

  Things change from one moment to the next. Colin got up and left Dagmar alone beside the corpse of her mother lying in her yellow hat and old boots on the kitchen table.

  Dagmar wanted to stab him, strangle him, burn his sinews. She was judged for the crime of wanting her daughter. She breathed rage beyond breath, larynx, tongue, teeth, palate, lips. The old language was dead and her dead with it. She would stop the bend of time. She would not relent. The ice would fall.

  After he slipped away Dagmar sat up and keened “The Mother’s Grief,” a song she’d learned from Norea:

  By the time Colin came back in, Dagmar was gone. Not even a candle in the chill room. He looked at Norea’s face, waxy and still, and said softly, There’s no moon at all. I’ll sit with you. I’ll see you out of the world. I wonder what you hear there where you are. I wonder if you can see?

  He held her hand, cold-bitten and old, in his thick fingers, then set it down and looked at his own hands. Dirt under his nails.

  That night the people in the settlement could have wandered outside their rooms and felt the chill falling out of the air. They could have heard the ice cracking and beginning to melt. They could have looked up and watched the clouds disappearing across the sky. But they did not know the storm was over. They slept on, waiting and enduring.

  One truth and the world split open.

  Philosophers posit modes and means, construct a world of all things subject to limits beyond which they cannot rightly exist. For centuries men have grasped at such truths. But those Nolans of Millstone Nether subsisted heedless of such laws in the frolic wind, their souls spilling outside mode and mean, making babies from tears and ice from rage and melody from the monochord.

  Dagmar found Nyssa crawling away from Moll’s hole back toward the old farmhouse and she cried out and wrapped her daughter’s arms around her neck and carried her on her back through the subsiding ice and took her through the half door, past her mother on the table, and into her own big bed. Her feet were naked and frozen. Her clothes had disappeared. Her body was bruised. But her lips still moved with a bit of breath. Dagmar called the women of the settlement and they wrapped Nyssa in warm blankets and bathed her fingers and toes in cool water. They fed her warm broth and untangled her hair. They restored her. Nyssa slept on and on without dreams. She opened her eyes and felt the movement around her and could still see only from her left eye. She sank back into sleep and the women put poultices on her right eye and willed her back whole and complete to them. On the morning of the third day she awoke wrapped in thick quilts, her feet and hands bundled in fishermen’s mitts, a warm hat pulled down over her hair and ears. She shook her body out like an old net under the heavy blankets. Dagmar wiped her with clean cloths, pressed fresh warm poultices on her nose and fingers and toes and on the strange bruises over her body.

  What has happened to her? thought Dagmar. She sat beside Nyssa, drinking in her face, imagining her green eyes moving behind their lids, rubbing over and over each toe and finger, examining her body as a newborn’s for all signs of life. When she was tired, she let the others take over. She paced around the shivering, awakening bawn. She shook the apple trees. She rapped on the beehives, disturbing their dormant life. She wandered into the warming sheep sorrel, plucked up a dead leaf that lay cracked on the ground and ran her tongue on the lingering frost along its veins. The cold sun waned and she walked through the greenhouse rubble, lined up pots, picked up glass, returned to Nyssa.

  Slowly Nyssa warmed and wakened. She was peeled naked and new. She stirred, took tiny spoonfuls of molasses tea and slept again. Dagmar stroked the crown on her daughter’s forehead. The girl’s eyes opened. She could see from both.

  Nyssa looked at her mother, who had shrunk smaller while she was gone, and she raised her arms up to her and received as much aching love as she could stand. She knew that it was bottomless and forever and in the end passing as a fallen leaf.

  What day is it? she asked.

  The day after the night before, said Dagmar.

  I almost froze, said Nyssa. I saw your writing on my picture tacked to a tree. Winds rocked the boat and I was afraid of crashing into the ice and sinking. There was a strange wake and I was drawn by it to the shore. I took shelter in Moll’s hole when I could go no farther, but she tore off my boots. She left me for dead. I thought I was dead. I heard your voice calling me back.

  Dagmar waited.

  Nyssa said, Did he come after me?

  Dagmar was silent and Nyssa judged Donal. She said, He would have let me die.

  I could not sleep, said Dagmar. I imagined the most awful things. I tried to keep us from freezing and burning the house to the ground. Tell me what happened.

  Where is Nana? said Nyssa.

  Dagmar stroked her forehead and said, She didn’t know where she was or who she was. She forgot that you were born and dreamed you were back. She said my father was in the house. She wandered out back and froze in her cairn.

  Nyssa closed her eyes.

  Dagmar said, When you went missing she helped me as if she were my own two hands. She carried pictures of you, asking the sailors, Will you help find this girl?

  Nyssa waited.

  Perhaps she was still searching for you or perhaps she was walking toward what she wanted. That was what she always did, soothed Dagmar. All things are possible.

  Tears slipped from Nyssa’s eyes.

  Dagmar spoke from the place of wounding. I can see you now and touch you now, but you are lost to me forever.

  Nyssa wanted to say, I will never leave you, but she could not.

  All day, their minds at one, they tried to soothe each other.

  Dagmar watched her mourning daughter and said with all the tenderness of an old woman for a young woman, There is always something left behind. That is the law. You have seen more than ever have I. You have so much more than I did. Make yourself better now. Make your decision.

  From the sharpened edge, Nyssa spoke her wrath against him: He stays in his house and dreams of playing great concerts. Let him stay!

  The storm was over and there were things to do. An old woman in a yellow straw hat on the kitchen table waiting to be buried.

  The people of the settlement gathered with their fiddles and guitars outside Dagmar’s house. They came through the door with a pine box and lifted Norea into it. They wrapped Nyssa in blankets and carried her outside where the earth was flooded with meltwater. A hundred fiddles and whistles and drums played the pine box out the door of the house where a young girl from Ireland had composed her life. The choir of fiddles drowned out the roar of the ocean. The whole island melted, running in long shining streams to the sea, the land damp, the air awash in water. The whine and scratch and tune of a hundred fiddles. They played “Barrel of Fiddles” and “Nana’s Boots.” They lowered the pine box into the ground, and Dagmar sang in the tongue she’d listened to her mother speak and had never spoken with her:

  É ho `ro’s ‘na eheil air m’air.

  And the other women joined with her singing,

  ’S mór an nockd a tha mi ‘caoidh

  Madeleine stepped out of the company, bent down and picked up a handful of the thin earth and took Nyssa’s wounded frostbitten hand and held it and filled it. Then the young woman raised her arm high above her head as if she were brandishing a clay axe through the air and with one cocked eyebrow she let the earth fall on top of the pine box.

  Dagmar dug with ardour into the thawing ground. She mo
ved through the smashed greenhouse and cleaned and stacked up her broken pots. Trees were down everywhere. She wandered into the cairn and stroked two delicate hepaticas balanced on hairy stems, little patches of mauve in the cold.

  She tended her daughter, split in two as if she were a chest-nut broken open and both halves her. She watched and waited and wanted to hold her close, wrap her arms around her shoulders, run her hands through her red hair, devour her eyes. But as soon as she was up, the girl defied touch. She wandered away and would not sleep in the house. She took a few things to live down by the sea in an old fisherman’s summer shack.

  Dagmar, who could not yield to trouble, let her go. Now Dagmar was alone for the first time in all her long life.

  As she piled branches and chopped trees for drying she looked around and thought, The understory will do very well in all this light and air. There will be plenty of sun coming through for new ferns and grasses. There are so many cavity trees now. The smaller, weaker creatures will flourish.

  The old do not sleep soundly. She chopped harder and tried to wear herself out. In the evenings she wandered down to look at the sea. The ticklaces nested in the cliffs, small pearl-grey gulls soared in their great circles, rose off the water and whirled like gusts of snow driven by the wind. She remembered how she trailed after Norea as a child, learned to care for the strongest seedlings and kill the rest, how she made the clouds part and how she made things grow. Since the storm, the seedlings did not sprout roots under her fingers as they had once done and she wondered if a woman’s powers are used up or passed on. Standing outside the fisher-man’s hut, she listened to Nyssa’s chants and silence. She remembered the girl with all that kinked hair flying out of the apple tree at a summer bonfire and fiddling a reel for dancers. All that music.

  One day Dagmar borrowed a fiddle for Nyssa and left it by the door of the fisherman’s hut. The next evening she heard plinks and ringing notes. She heard the windy scraping of the bow played far from the bridge. She heard one clear, plain note. She listened to music that sees through, music played with the open ear. In one note all notes, over-tones and harmonics ringing together, unperceived vibrations waiting to be heard. The mother listened and remained silent. Here in her daughter’s music were all the sounds of the island. Here was the power that could grow seedlings and part clouds.