Dagmars Daughter (15 page)

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.

D
onal 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.

D
onal 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.

She 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.

Nyssa said, A traveller! And in your travels you gave up love.

But from sad experience I gained you.

Experience makes you sad, she mocked. I’d rather be with someone who makes me dance than have your experience make me sad.

Donal smiled then, but only to please her, as if he were a hibernating bear rousing itself from his winter grave. He had to persuade her.

Come away with me, he said.

And what would I do?

Live with me. I’m only a row across the water. Come, play with me something more nearly perfect.

Thoughtfully she tugged her shirt over her head. Why away? And what was this perfection?

She could not imagine what was across the water, for she had never been off the island. She wanted to go.

All right, she said with a light kiss on his lips, her fingers caressing the insides of his elbows. We’ll go tonight. But first I’m playing at the pole house. We’ll go after.

M
oll walked through the people of the settlement gathered at the pole house and stood before a ship’s lantern. Its light sparked off her bones like a hammer hitting the anvil.

What song have you got for us, then, Moll? said Colin to break the wary and fearful silence.

Moll looked up. She raised her arms to the sky like a bird lifting its wings, wrapped them to the back of her and touched their palms facing upward.

Bring my kettle, said Moll to a young boy standing at the back.

He pushed forward with the pot and placed it at Moll’s feet. She unwrapped her hands from behind her back. Her blank black eyes hung there. She took a long bone out from under her dress and began to run it around the rim of the pot. A low echoing moan rose from the pot. She changed the weight and speed of her turning, and the unearthly pitch slid along the one long unbroken note.

Dolente
and
dolce
, something inside fulfilling fate. Nyssa stood at the front and listened and doubted and did not find doubt strange. Fingers on the strings. She thought, I have heard what you hear and glimpsed what lies under your dress and the things you do to yourself in darkness. Why do I stand silent with these people full of fear?

She picked up her fiddle and laid her strong first finger across the strings. She grazed her third finger above the second string and played a soft harmonic along with Moll’s kettle. The bony woman did not look up but increased her tempo, the sound becoming higher and rounder, and Nyssa followed her, grazing her fingers along the short strings, making little bell tones. Her tones were a fleeting thing over the long drone of the pot. Moll slowed and the pitch dropped. Her eyes stared into its vibrating centre and then she spoke to all gathered there at the pole house.

Below the sea, she said, her hand tracing the pot’s compass, is the fathomless one. It sees from the front and back and has twin mouths. It blows with both mouths and spins whoever it encounters so hard that they disappear if they are too afraid to look it in the face. But if they do, its twin mouths turn toward each other and it looks into its other half and goes away. Whoever sees the other half of themselves perishes, or rises out of the dark, peeled naked and new.

She lowered her blank gaze to watch her own hands on the pot.

Listen, she continued, and do not speak. Hear the song of what was lost and washed up on your shores.

And then her words trailed off and the moaning of the pot filled those people like the sound of a storm gathering over the sea. They waited and watched her hand slow and heard the sound fade away. They watched her rise, drop her pot down to her side and disappear toward the sea, which misuses nothing because it values nothing.

The Millstone Nether people hung back, afraid of her as they would be afraid of an injured wild creature that might rise up without warning and inflict on them unheard suffering. All remained silent against the night noises, waiting for her to be far away until finally Nyssa lifted her fiddle again, raised her bow, stamped her foot and broke into the first reel of “Nana’s Boots.” Slowly the others picked up their fiddles and guitars and joined her. By the time Donal arrived late with Colin’s old double bass, Nyssa was centre stage, the others laughing and drinking and calling out for more.

He stood at the back and watched. He wanted to peel the jeans from her thighs and unwrap the shirt from her breasts. He wanted to pull her lips to his with the roots of her hair. He thought, How charged she is. But she is still home and far from me.

Shoulders bare, she fiddled, her taut muscles lit by ship’s lanterns and white birch skin at night. The Millstone Nether people leaned listening against the sharp air of a hard spring. Music distracted their ears away from the sea, winnowed through the forest, across the bawns and into the open windows of their houses on stilts.

Nyssa spun, bore down to centre stage, augered flight, pumped out jigs and reels, the muscles of her back alive. Young people danced and disappeared into the woods in pairs to make love and drink and smoke. When they returned she was still up there, naked under her clothes, stepping and strutting and flirting with the home folk, playing her music fiercely as someone who would not be in this beloved place again.

When the other musicians sat down to rest, she pulled a high stool to centre stage, a black reed in thin light, and opened her ear to the life of her horsehair and sheepgut. She played Tartini’s “Devil’s Sonata,” unravelling its weft as if the notes were a song at a milling frolic. She took up the lightning bowing of its “Siciliano,” unable to keep from stamping her foot, her attention so deep inside that the people left listening feared for her return.

All her thought was lost in the music when she was tugged back by Donal climbing uninvited up on stage. With one arched eyebrow she watched him set his bass, its scroll curved over his head, his arm wrapped round its body. She hit the first note of the
moto perpetuo
and he took a deep breath and lifted his bow and played a first note with her. His intonation was so perfectly matched to her own that she felt it through the wooden floor before she heard it. He created harmonies that Tartini did not write. She swung sideways on her stool to face him, closed her eyes, her kinked hair falling forward and hiding her bare shoulders from the people as she began the final and difficult trill. Tenderly Donal faded his deep harmonics while her strings soared and sang, and though he still played, his sound was lost to all but her, as if his bass were being slowly swallowed to death by her little fiddle. And when her last plucked note was gone the people sighed and wanted more.

She cannot bear for long her baroque, he thought correctly, watching her.

Not to disappoint, Nyssa whooped, tossed back her hair and jumped off her stool, knocking it over, stamped and hit the first bars of “Sandy McIntyre.” A half smile twisted Donal’s lips as he and Nyssa took up again the traditional tunes.

One of the boys pulled her stool to the side and she danced, whirled and spun, away from Donal, back to Donal, so close he could smell the varnish on her fiddle. She dipped its neck down, grazed the air around his fingers, and stepped back, beckoning him with her eyes, knowing he was held fast by his bass like an old dory tossing at anchor. He joined her rhythm and slowed it down, insisting now on his own time. He knew waiting. His eyes locked into hers. He leaned toward her as far as he could without losing his bass in a crash on the stage. He soothed himself, caressed its warm wood with his cheek, the smell of her rosin hanging in the air. Strands of horsehair were snapping and flying loose and slow, casualties fallen into the insignificance of silence.

Colin heard their music echo down from the pole house into the windows of his little place where he’d gone for more spruce beer. He heard the familiar throb of Donal’s bass, his daughter’s fiddle, playing “Òran do Ghille a Chaidh a Bhàthadh,” “Réel Béatrice” and “Close to the Floor.” Tempo, key and melody; they changed as one. Nyssa and Donal played and listened only to each other.

The people of the settlement heard the gulf between musician and listener undone. Music vibrated through the sinews and pulsed through the bowels, in the bones, in the blood.

Donal sucked deep the pine air, searched for something she would not know, slid into the first swaying notes of a dancey beguine from “Sonatina Tropicale,” teasing her, hamming up the high notes, thrumming a hip-swaying rhythm. He wanted her to listen, but she was never silent. After a few bars she tucked her fiddle under her chin, plucked out the melody and sashayed moonily toward him. The settlement people laughed, and not to upstage the beloved daughter, he gave her the solo. She took it. She stamped the heel of her black boot, stepped beyond his reach. She slowed it down as if she had been given a new power and was sailing away with it. She winked at the people as if to say, Just watch me! She danced across the stage, turned her back and let a lantern’s light glance off her red curls. Donal lifted his double bass, walked three steps toward the light beside her, picked up her tune again, in another key, at the very bottom of his register, the only place she couldn’t compete with him. He too knew the home crowd. Everyone laughed. Nyssa smiled broadly at his cunning. He was outperforming her but only for her. One last time she lifted her fiddle and echoed back his notes two octaves above until, his head bowed and her neck damp, they touched together the cadenza’s last note.

The old people knew that what they heard portended nothing easy but still they willed her back to him. They clapped and called out. Nyssa grinned and rocked on her heels beside Donal.

Eyebrow cocked she said to him between unparted teeth, What makes you think you can barge in?

That set was
basso obbligato
, he answered. They want more.

They always do. How do you know our music?

Do you give them more? he said.

I don’t owe them, she said.

They owe you, he answered.

The people clapped and Donal whispered, I’ll be by my skiff on the shore.

Nyssa dangled her fiddle loosely by its scroll over one shoulder, her face open as a piece of bare rock and she answered without moving her lips, Maybe.

And then she handed her fiddle across to one of the boys on the stage and gestured another to take away Donal’s bass. She stamped, one, two. Again she stamped, one, two, three. She slapped her hands on her thighs, danced over to him, took his hands, placed them palms up and outstretched toward her and used them for her drum. Feet moving, hands clapping, she beat out one of those old dances that the young girls did alone in the woods. Her shadows glanced off Donal’s still form and she gestured the girls to come join her and they did, rising and dancing and clapping in a great web around Donal. A few fiddlers joined in to accompany the wild dance until it was all so fast that even those extraordinary musicians of Millstone Nether could not keep up and everyone fell back panting and laughing. The old people were tired and began to drift away home and the young people left in twos, and more than one young couple tried out love for the first time that night, alight with the music of Donal and Nyssa. While they heaved in the forest, the musicians tidied up.

Donal loosened his bow. Nyssa tucked her fiddle into her case, slung it over her shoulder across her breasts. She twisted her wild hair into a knot, baring her long neck. Then she ran lightly on her toes down the path. He knew the path she was taking. She’d walk through the woods and then turn either back to the settlement or along the shore and northward. Donal watched her turn to see if he would follow.

Dagmar lay awake waiting for Nyssa. She listened for her to come through the door, take off her boots and pour a drink of her nana’s whisky. She waited for her to shed her clothes by the bed. She waited for her to climb in and slip one leg over her mother’s as she’d done since she was a baby, waiting for her old lullaby.

Loola loola loola loola bye bye
In your momma’s arms a creepin’
soon you’ll be a sleepin’
loola loola loola loola bye.

Dagmar waited and waited.

D
onal had built his rooms on stilts on a bit of shore an hour’s row on a civil sea north off the coast of Millstone Nether. The water rose and fell. It was a studded house, stogged with dry mosses, shingled and clapboarded, dry and safe from winds. He had made two small rooms and a third larger room that served for his living, cooking and eating. He moved his double bass into one of the small rooms. His hands had stiffened with snake-bite. He had bathed them in seaweed and wrapped them with spruce and brown paper.

He had hesitated to go back to Millstone Nether, which he could see on a clear day. He had explored his rough deserted shore through two seasons. He had watched the sooty fog-birds skimming the surface of the ocean and listened for the tiny striped-heads in the trees of the forest behind with their trilling oo-ee-ee-ee-eeee. Most days his horizon was all water. Close enough, he thought, and far enough. A line to be followed.

Now the willing young woman carrying nothing but her fiddle met him at his dory moored and waiting. He jumped in and reached up for her fiddle, tucked it up in the bow safe from the salt damp. She slid into the skiff and headed for the bow seat by her fiddle. But Donal reached for her and settled her between his legs on the middle seat. Reaching around her reed body he placed his hands on the oars and she put her hands on his, leaning back against his chest when he rowed, opening her arms and leaning forward when he lifted the oars out to skim the surface of the waters. He tucked his head into her hair, her hands slipping down to his thighs. He said, Watch the sky for me and keep us straight. Stars hung above them as they steadily covered the expanse of water, Millstone Nether shrinking before their eyes.