by Kim Echlin
Norea nudged the old fishbones away from the path up to Moll’s door with her foot. She knocked and when no one answered she pushed it open.
Moll was crouched on the floor inside and said, What do you want?
Norea said, I need to get rid of something.
Moll looked up with blank black eyes. She said, Best babies are merry-begots.
I can’t bear this child. These island people.
Tuck it in a basket, leave it at da’s door. No one has a proper place but makes their own.
He’ll never claim it.
Won’t know breath your way.
Please.
Moll stood to her full height and said, Bring me boiling water.
Norea walked back to her house and put the kettle on. She took Dagmar to Meggie’s house and asked her to watch the child overnight. She went back for the water and talked aloud. Rory, she said into the steam from the kettle, if you’d stayed I wouldn’t be at this. She heard the kettle’s whistle and quickly, to prevent the churning of her own thought, she took the boiling water back to the little shack where Moll crouched, sifting through a basket of sweet-smelling blossoms on the floor. Moll poured out a cup of water, snapped off some of the tansy flowers, stems and leaves, and mixed them in. She waved Norea over to a heap of old rags in the corner and handed her the tea.
Bitter buttons for the path wanderer, Moll said. Do not sorrow when what you lose you’ll never have again.
Norea raised the cup to her lips and drank the hot sweet-smelling liquid. She swallowed and drank again and swallowed until it was all gone and then she waited. The poison spread warm and violent through her body, and terrified she put her fingers into her mouth and tried to get rid of what was not yet down. Her skin beaded in sweat and cramps roiled up from her stomach against her heart and down into her womb. She bent over herself as if she were going to die, then threw up to the side and fell back from the knotting pain that twisted from her insides out. She lay back panting and faint. Then the blood. She did not at first notice it. She was throwing up yellow froth, and desperately she turned on her hands and knees and sagged into a crawling creature. Her head dropped through the sweat and she saw blood between her legs and felt the wrenching at her womb and the cramps that seized her. Moll’s cold hand pulled off her underthings. She fell on her elbows, cheek flat against the foul rags and begged for mercy from sour dry lips, but still the cramps waved through her body and still her insides heaved and the blood poured out of her until she fell limp into the floor.
In her delirium she saw all that she had been and what she would become. She saw seals and snow. She saw her own mother balancing on bird feet and broken wings. She saw Rory’s lips singing and Dagmar’s lips latching on to her swollen nipple. She saw Moll’s bones.
Moll looked dispassionate at the colour of her skin and her swollen tongue and her lifeless closed eyelids. Moll listened to her moaning and mumbling, My belly, my back. She listened and then she went to her hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze for the night.
On the second afternoon Meggie Dob came by looking for Norea and Moll threw rocks at her to keep her away. Meggie pushed in and saw Norea lying in a filthy bloody heap on the rags.
What have you done to her? she demanded of Moll.
What have flowers done? What has dory’s darkness done? Do not ask why! hurled back the bony woman squatting in the shadows between Norea and the door. Throw her in the sea. She’s not needed here.
Stop! screamed Meggie. She pushed past Moll and sat by Norea’s head and wiped her brow and commanded, Bring me water.
Moll brought her a bucket of water and Meggie wiped the blood and vomit from the limp woman and moistened her lips. She held her head in her lap and stroked her face and said, Norea, you can’t die. Your Dagmar is crying. Where is her mother?
The young woman’s lips opened, her eyes still shut. For three days and nights Meggie and the other women in the settlement took turns sitting with Norea in Moll’s shack, opening her lips and feeding her milk and soup and molasses tea, cleaning her when she threw up again, dampening her tongue, rubbing her arms and legs, stroking her hair. Finally, the poison worked its way through her blood and sinews, and Norea mumbled, then moved a finger, a toe, asked for her daughter. Two things the poison changed. It took away the child. It rendered Norea fully and forever blind.
When she could finally stand to go home, she could not find her way alone but had to be led.
From that day Norea lived excluded from light, whether it was day’s noon or a full-moon night. She caressed Dagmar’s face with her searching fingers and was afraid to cry. She commissioned the child to lead her around the house, over and over, counting the steps, memorizing the corners. When she accomplished the house, they began on the bawn out back. They laid stones for her to tap her way along the edges of the gardens, to the greenhouse and back. Norea taught Dagmar to place everything where she could find it again. She arranged the bottles in the milk wagon and took Dagmar with her until she was sure the old horse would follow his route and bring her home. The women came out of their houses shyly in the early dawn to collect their bottles. At first they pitied her but Norea began her joking. Can’t see for looking, she said. You’re a pretty sight today, just out of bed! She teased them until the women forgot that she was blind. Norea memorized the shape of the island with the soles of her feet. She memorized the winds in their seasons and the smell of each household. She could soon walk anywhere with her little cane, laughing in her old way, disguising her blindness. She used her finger inside her teacup to pour tea for friends and got an accurate ear for their voices and a good nose for their odours like a creature who lives underground. People stopped thinking of her with either shyness or pity; there were other things to worry over. And though Norea never said a word against Moll, the people of Millstone Nether were once again wary of the bony woman and stopped taking their sick to her.
But Moll would not be set aside. She appeared on the shore, waiting for fish when the boats came in. She crouched in the shadows of the pole house listening when the people gathered for music. She pressed her smudged face up against the panes of the greenhouse when young Dagmar worked alone. But if Norea heard her rustling in the bushes as she worked the gardens with her daughter, she said, Don’t worry, Dagmar. She doesn’t want you, only what you may become.
The fabled music of Millstone Nether had a well-defined centre but no clear circumference. The best of the island’s musicians had a capacity like the sea’s to find the single note in the vastness and to give it birth, shaping it into a life of scenes and inflections, pauses and climaxes, and finally allowing it to sink back into the currents whence it came, music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.
Donal Dob and his best friend, Colin Cane, were like any of the island boys, jigging in the summer and hopping icebergs in the winter. They heard Millstone Nether’s music in their cradles and picked up their first instruments young. Donal clambered up on a stool at a kitchen party, wrapped one small hand around the long neck of a double bass, grasped a bow in his fist and sawed out his first sounds. He begged Meggie to find a bass for him and she did. The boy was fascinated by the instrument’s low sounds—especially the C string—as he had never been equally engaged by a human voice. He played its highs and lows, searched its range and potency. Up on the three-legged stool in the kitchen at home, hands stretched, bow held firmly, he played his double bass for his mother and sister. His instrument made him feel he could fill up a room. He strengthened and stretched his hands to caress and thrum out single notes and thick chords. More and more he recognized himself in the striding glissandos of his bass’s majesty, the darting dark notes of its lover’s dance, the athletic shapes of its light-footed, pleasure-loving young man.
Colin Cane’s parents had died young, when their boat was tossed against the rocks in a sudden storm. There were no photographs of them. His relatives cleared out their rooms and gave young Colin his family’s old fiddle, a guitar and
the broken-down piano. Colin could get a tune out of any instrument that was lying around and always carried a pair of spoons in his pocket. He played to be part of whatever house in the settlement he was staying at until he was finally old enough to return to his parents’ house alone. He scratched away on the fiddle because he was sure he could hear his mother’s sweet voice in it, and he thumped on the old piano, listening for his father’s beat and caress. His disposition was like a wave’s, by turns calm and turbulent, still and still moving. Resigned young to all change, he had a natural pliability that let him move around the rocks and shoals that were too great to shape differently. When he played the music of Millstone Nether as the old people did, he was soothed against adversity and he took the traditional tunes for his own and strung them together in medleys. There wasn’t a musician on the island who couldn’t play along with Colin, so familiar were his songs.
But his friend Donal Dob was more like the red rock cliffs rising over the north end of the island, carved by wind and waves into craggy shapes that pleased the eye with their changing shadows and reflected light. He was rarely at ease in the traditional music. He worked harder than Colin did at playing the exact sounds and rhythms he heard and he was much admired by other musicians for his youthful mastery. He never felt satisfied, but he too always returned to the traditional notes, yearning to believe that somewhere at their unconquerable core—if he only searched hard enough—was the key to his restlessness. He did not understand that he was searching not for music but for virtuosity. As he grew older he believed that his fate did not lie in the reels and strathspeys of Millstone Nether but in music that came from away.
Madeleine Dob, with her little tucked chin and her sloped shoulders and her webbed elbows, did not grow tall. She collected blueberries and squashed them and painted pictures of blue cows with a frayed stick on the stalls of her mother’s barn. When blueberry season was over she visited Norea and asked for beets to make a deep red. She wouldn’t stop painting red and blue pictures.
Well, said Meggie Dob to the child, you’ve found your two ardours.
What does that mean?
I mean red for fire and blue for love—it all comes back to that.
But I want different colours.
That winter Meggie bought colour for the girl and soon she covered every surface of her mother’s small house on stilts with her flat pictures. She recast the sights of Millstone Nether: skating parties and summer bonfires and trenching potatoes and men dragging nets off boats. She gave each drawing a strange title and painted the words into her borders. On her picture of a man being blown off a ship she wove into the border Happy-Go-Lucky and on a scene of a bawn filled with goats she wrote Purple Cow Lost.
If there were ever a conflict between instinct and consciousness in her choices of what to paint and how, instinct won out. Her dogs flew and her winter trees were laden with fruit. There were fish in the clouds and babies under the sea. She couldn’t say why. Once, when asked why she drew a two-faced head, she said, I didn’t have two pieces of paper.
Though Madeleine was not pretty, Meggie always said to her, Your eyes are lit with a full moon’s light; that’s beauty enough for anyone. She kept finding paints and paper for her foundling daughter and gave her empty tins for her brushes and set up a table by the window of their tiny house and let her fill her lonely girlhood with those eerily bright flat pictures.
It was a young island where art and life went hand in hand. Women wove mats for their floors with the things ready at hand, men carved a bit of an idea into a branch for a walking stick. On the island it was thought that life could not be beautiful without art, nor art flourish without life, and so, whenever there was extra time or material around, something prettying was made. But Madeleine didn’t decorate tools or make mats or carved sticks. Her art ran the risk of looking at life in her own way. She moved without thought outside of tradition. She kept her work at home, only occasionally giving a small picture away, or tucking one in with a jug of goat cheese for someone sick or an old person who didn’t get out.
Meggie died of a fever the same harsh spring that Donal decided to leave Millstone Nether. Madeleine painted a picture of the cemetery where she last saw her mother’s pine box, and though it had been a drear day of thick fog and cold rain her picture was coloured in the bright yellows and greens of late spring. Along the side of the grave was a row of red tulips and over the unmarked mound of freshly turned earth a hardy crabapple tree showered pink blossoms over the earth. There were no mourners or minister, only a little woman wearing bright brocade boots sitting on a branch at the top of the tree. Madeleine called it My Mother’s Funeral and tacked it up beside the picture she made of her brother playing double bass with two fishermen fiddlers at the wake in their kitchen after the pine box disappeared into the ground.
Donal persuaded Colin to travel with him across the sea. They worked as ship’s hands and after many months, when they managed to get into land-locked places, they discovered they could make a living in the soot and filth and crowds of old cities by playing their instruments on rough cobblestone corners. Their jigs and airs and sea skin and great muscled arms made a sight and a sound in those places where men no longer used their bodies to make a living.
Resourceful and plucky, the two Millstone Nether boys traded on the novelty of their music and worked their way deeper into a Europe where court life and church life had forged a music too intricate for invention after hard days at sea. They took up with music students whose languages they didn’t speak but who liked their dancey tunes and their quaint bowing. They traded music for music.
Colin spent fleeting nights in warehouses and small theatres where young musicians experimented with any sound they could record for dancers who moved their bodies in angular ways. He soaked in an idea of the world in which bhavas and blues and tonalities of twelve all came from the same source. He listened with an ear well stocked and weaned on rhythm and ballads. He collected hundreds of recordings, though he had little desire to master the playing of any of this music himself.
Donal began to train his fingers to the rigours and discipline of prelude and fugue. He thought he had found what he was looking for in strict counterpoint of the old music of Europe. He wanted a new bull fiddle and found a magnificent seventeenth-century Maggini bass. The aged virtuoso who owned it demurred that the bass was surely beyond the means and talents of such a young man. Human beings, he said, are granted only a single life. My instrument is stained with a length of experience beyond any mortal’s.
He agreed to allow Donal to play it just once. He watched the young man caress the neck of the bass and he listened to him play Bottesini’s “Allegretto Capriccio.” He apprehended with sorrow that his exquisite time-shaded instrument had found a worthy new guardian. Donal felt the bloom of low sound vibrate through his body like a resuscitating breath. He heard in the Maggini’s depths things that most ears do not discern. Its essence and beauty thrived in its unperceived lowest tones, like an elephant’s inaudible rumblings. The night the old man finally gave it to him, he took it to play with Colin and some young students in a smoky bar below a restaurant. He played for them a piece he improvised called “Narcissus.” At dawn a harried woman from the virtuoso’s building rushed down to the cellar and told the students that the old man was dead by his own hand. The police were looking for Donal and the Maggini.
Colin said to Donal, Is it really yours?
He gave it to me.
Then let’s go before someone decides he didn’t.
The cathedral chimes did not ring another hour before the two young men were on their way to the nearest port, looking for a ship heading west. It was reason enough to go back. When they were out on the ocean walking the deck at night their home thoughts began to take up space. Donal said to Colin, Do you remember that girl at the greenhouse? Do you think she’s married yet?
Colin answered, Can’t know. Wonder if anyone got froze on the clumpers this winter.
They were embraced after their wandering by the extraordinary musicians of Millstone Nether, who took all they liked from the travellers and tossed off what they did not fancy. They liked Colin’s recordings of music from mountains and bayou, isolated places like their own. He played them abbey and court music they admired but declined to play. They had little taste for his piano with bolts and erasers between the strings.
He’s got high-learned, joked one.
He’s jinking us, said another. That’s not music.
So Colin picked up his fiddle and scratched out “Sandy MacIntyre’s Trip to Boston” as if he’d never left. The fishermen joined him with their fiddles and guitars and spoons.
Donal had been harder stirred up by his learning and left the kitchen party early, troubled by the restlessness of a young man confined. He went to see Dagmar at blind Norea’s. They talked of the weather and the sea and planting, and he played for her what he could not speak. To his delight, Dagmar pulled out a fiddle and scratched along.
After her mother died, Madeleine Dob agreed to marry Everett, a poor fisherman thirteen years older than she was and so miserly that no woman on the island would take him. The only thing he liked to do was smoke.
He came by and said to Madeleine, Yer alone. If I moved in, would you like to keep house for me?
Madeleine said, I’ll marry you if we spend equal parts on tobacco and paint.
There were some who said that Madeleine’s was a bleak life with the mean little man who wouldn’t haul in enough water, who hoarded the lamp oil and kept the fire so low there was frost on the insides of the windows all winter long.