by Kim Echlin
If a poke-your-nose-in said anything about it, Madeleine answered, We get along.
On days when her hands were too stiff Everett did the milking. On days when he didn’t feel like fishing he stayed home and smoked. The insides of the once-neat house became a dark shambles of dirty dishes and clothes piled up and the mixed odours of tobacco and paint. And those few who ever got inside the dank rooms also saw Madeleine’s pictures of all the happiness of Millstone Nether tacked to every wall and stacked on sills and tables: the fishermen’s big catches, Norea’s milk wagon clopping through the settlement, the bright rush of a spring melt over the red cliffs, women holding children’s hands, ice floes on sunlit days, the yellow and white and red dories turned upside down on the shore, cows nibbling the bushes, puffins nesting along the shore, cats under bushes.
Everett watched his tiny webbed wife tying her paintbrush between her fingers with old rags when her stiffness was too great and never interfered with what he called her dabbing. She watched him smoke with a certain affection for what is familiar and did not protest the cold or dark or smoke inside. They did not prevent each other from becoming more completely who they were, and because of this their marriage worked better than many. It was a comfortably taciturn thing, an arrangement based on not-mentioning. In that inhabited silence Madeleine was free to carry on her painting and her conversation with herself.
Norea taught Dagmar the jigs she knew from Ireland, hands hanging straight by the sides, all spirit in the nimble feet. But Dagmar didn’t like to keep her hands down and she got the other girls to perform intricate clapping patterns as they danced in circles, one inside the other, spinning and weaving and clapping as if they were a single silkworm spinning its own shroud. They went out to the pole house and stamped and clapped and showed off to each other and when their bodies’ rhythms floated down into the settlement the old people smiled. The boys’ sport was to watch them through the bushes without getting a kick from one of those hard shoes flashing by or an insult from the sharp-tongued laughing girls who wore them. Able neither to dance nor to clap, Madeleine did not join in. But she watched and painted. She painted hundreds of pictures, preserving all their steps and all the patterns of their clapping for anyone who might ever take the time to look. And though all the dances happened after nightfall, she painted the girls in sweeping swirls of yellow light.
By the time Donal moved back in, Madeleine was making her new cheeses. She poured fourteen gallons of skim milk for each round and let it sour in the outhouse while Donal practised. He worked his way through his beloved Bottesini as she hoisted her large pot over the fire and warmed it up. She stirred in a little rennet to gather up the curds and Donal worked on Mozart’s “Per questa bella mano.” She hung her curds in a cloth and pressed out the whey. She listened to him as she shook fish salt through the soft curds, breaking them up very small. Then she carried her curds to a long wooden board beside the house. Donal put aside his bass and came out and watched her dump them into a round bottomless pot lined with a flour-bag cloth and set on a level stone. He saw her press the curds down evenly with her knuckles and gather the edges of the cloth up over the top.
The cheese is full of your music this year, she said as she placed a wooden top down over her mould, put two more heavy stones on it and sat down to rest.
It’s warm, said Donal. It’ll turn green.
He was in a mood. He was trying to shape and push his instrument, driven by something inside he did not understand. He heard what no one else did. His music made him mighty. His brow dark, Donal turned to Madeleine and said across the ripening cheese, I want to marry Dagmar Nolan.
Madeleine said, Have you talked to her?
Donal said, I haven’t. I sit with her and her mother. I play for them. Her eyes are bright when she hears my music. I want to give her a dress. Will you make a dress for me?
Madeleine smiled. A wedding dress?
Yes.
But she’s a high-spirited girl. She grows things better than anyone on the island. Some say she has powers.
I don’t know about her powers, said Donal. I like her hair. She says she likes my playing. But I can’t speak when she’s in the room.
Then go for a walk with her along the shore.
Donal got up and walked the length of the cheese board.
Will you make me a dress? he asked again. If she loves me she will hear my heart.
Madeleine shook her head. He was stubborn and cock-sure. His music grew more inward and melancholy each day. He demanded service to his own talent and would not acknowledge another’s. But she loved him and after her animals were settled she sat by the lamp each evening and stitched with her stiff hands. She made a strapless dress of black silk. It had a nipped-in waist and fell on the bias to the floor in soft folds with a hidden zipper up the side. After seven nights Madeleine finished it up, wrapped it in clean paper, folded it neatly into a box. She lined the bottom of the box with clean shelf paper. Then she tucked in a pair of antique dancing boots with small sculpted heels and long squared toes. Raised leaves of shiny gold and cranberry and royal blue swirled over the black brocade and eight round gold buttons arced down the outside shaft of each boot. They had travelled from across the sea packed in Meggie Dob’s mother’s trunk. They came with a long buttonhook, its ornate sterling silver handle boasting a tangle of tiny vines and roses. These things were from another time. Meggie Dob had sometimes danced in these playful boots, but Madeleine, with her rocker-bottom feet, was never able to put them on, though she loved their fanciful colours. She wrapped another piece of paper over the boots and tucked the buttonhook in beside them, closed the box and tied it with a bit of twine. Then she gave it to Donal, who took it and didn’t even look inside.
Love is expressed better in fine words than in silent sincerity, she said to Donal.
He answered from his hood of bone, What would you know about love, living with buddy and the cows and a herd of goats?
Donal’s bass did not ring perfectly with Dagmar’s fiddle no matter how carefully he tuned. It bothered him. One evening after they played together he said to her, Did that sound right to your ear?
She laughed and said lightly, Whenever you play, it sounds right to me. You’re a worrier and that’s sure. She waited for him to put aside his instrument but he clutched it and fiddled with his tuning. The truth was she was in love with him, and though she played what he wanted her to play, though she stayed back from dancing with the girls in the woods at night to open her door to him, though she grew him vegetables from her garden to take home, he never could bring himself to say that he noticed.
He said, There are wood owls that repeat songs to each other exactly an octave apart.
He adjusted his pegs and she came up close and playfully stroked the wood of his double bass. She said, Let me tune your instrument, and touched her fingers to his on the tuning screw at the bottom of the strings.
Don’t. I just got it right, said Donal. He smelled her thick earthy hair and he desired her. He wanted to touch his lips to hers but he clutched his bass and let his gaze fall.
She turned sharply then and said, It’s late, Donal. I’m off to bed.
Donal carried his double bass outside and through the darkness back to the gloom of Madeleine’s front room. Slowly he loosened all the pegs. The strings limp and silent he retuned, searching for the low C that bothered him most, and he dropped from the traditional tuning in fourths to a new tuning in fifths. With it he could play a clean octave below Dagmar’s fiddle. He delicately twisted the tuning pins at the bottom of the strings, ran his fingers up their long length and adjusted the pegs again, turning and squeezing them into the wood of the neck. Then he struggled to find the old notes at new places on the fingerboard. For the first time in his life his low strings did not sound flat to him and his open strings were resonant and round as a fiddle’s highest E. Tuned in his eccentric new way, the bass, he discovered, had the intonation he had always missed and he listened to his own play
ing with the awe of someone who has found a new species. He was excited by the sound and struggled to teach his fingers a new set of fingerings, which was as difficult as twisting the tongue around a new language.
The next morning first thing he took it to show Colin, who shook his head at his friend’s exertions. We’ve always tuned the old way. Why change now?
Why set the dead as my measure? said Donal. I’ve got something here.
But it’s the same music.
I make it sound better.
You hit sour notes because you can’t remember where your fingers should be! said Colin. It’s like shovelling smoke, no end to it.
Donal ignored him and wrote eccentric and appealing letters to the people at Thomastik Dominant strings. With the delight and excitement of a boy collecting, he received dozens of strings in the mail. He experimented and settled on an A and a G for his F-sharp string from the solo set, a D and a C string from the orchestra set. He wrote long letters pleading with the string makers to create a real G and a thinner C. He changed his bow hold and played harder into the strings, closer to the bridge, slower. He wrote to a bowmaker across the sea and asked for something different from pernambuco wood. Amused by the young letter writer’s passion, the bent old bowmaker fashioned a new bow from snake-wood, and sent it off and learned from a crumpled letter that the new bow tripped and moaned, strutted and sang.
Donal was shaping his instrument into the perfect proto-type of the man he wished to become, full-bodied, nimble and witty, athletic and loving, commanding and tender. In his great and graceful old doghouse he now heard the rhythmic pulse of unexpected tendernesses, an inclination toward romance and a courage he did not yet know in himself. He became an ambitious creature both wandering and chained, striving to command the passion of his music and shackled to his lonely practice. Days and nights slid by when he spoke to no one and never left off his playing. The more exquisite his sound became, the more he believed that fate had decreed that all must give way to his music.
Moll lived in ebon shade, isolated from the people of Millstone Nether. She kept herself company with a little fish hook and a knife. Alone at night she laid strips of rags out on the floor of her hut. She crouched down flat-footed and leaned forward, so loose at her hips that her knees pointed straight to the sky to embrace her ears. She stripped naked to the waist and her long breasts hung forward limply. She caressed them with her cupped palms, stroking their sand-coloured nipples stiff and attentive between her strong thumbs and forefingers. She observed them through the empty slots of her eyes as if they were not her own. Then she let them drop, reached forward and hesitated briefly in her ritual decision between knife and fish hook.
In the first instant after the knife’s cut there was no feeling at all, only a quick burst of blood beads along her expert lines. She was compelled by the fleeting dispassionate blade. The knife had traced a misshapen orb of white scars over her breasts, a history always incomplete, awaiting her next idea, a connecting thread here, a new cross vector there. Pitilessly she ground down all distinctions in her cuts. When she stretched her bony arms above her head or wrapped them around her back, she opened the wounds and could still feel an echo of night during the next day’s light. Most see no meaning in the close recess of darkness but Moll knew otherwise.
The hook required both will and submission like two lovers, one who locks the door because certain violations are to be enacted and the other who feigns ignorance that the door is being locked. When her breasts shied from the searing ripping and the mind retreated, she forced herself, tearing against the barbs. She pushed and pulled the shaft, and tugged at torn flesh, and pricked the skin with the tiny point. And when she was pain sated she slid the hook out shaft first. This last clouded her eyes dark with faint and she dropped back from her heels and lay on the floor, waiting for her vision to return. Now she had done worse to herself than any other could do. Now she could once again withstand that which was without, that which refused to see what needs to appear.
She leaned forward over the knife and the hook and that night decided on both, the knife for her left breast and the hook for her right. She enacted her ritual agon, witnessed by her thought’s dark clamour, and wrapped her bleeding breasts in bandages and crouched near the door, watching the moon’s pale course. When her strength returned, she took herself down to the edge of the sea and removed her skirts and bandages and waded naked into the salty waters, hands stretched high above her head, bony fingers reaching to hold the ungraspable sky, her callused long toes gripping the sharp pebbles. She waded deeper and deeper until the salt bit her breasts and stirred in them renewed dying. Then she hung weightless, the endless waters washing at her blood. No deep could hold her immortal vigour. She purged her stinging body awake from its meditation in the cold of the sea. She crouched and caressed the new traces on her skin, her art and travesty. Her presence demanded to be known by someone. This is the life in the darkness. What cannot be seen must be acknowledged. What cannot be honoured must await transmutation by uncreated night.
When the spring was over with its sudden storms that drowned men who could read the shifting skies and men who could not, everyone pulled out instruments to play at bonfires behind Norea’s house. Colin built up the fire and beat on a seed-shaped drum held squeezed between his thighs. Donal came with his retuned bass, his fingerings finally stamped on his mind and hands like a new mother tongue. Together Donal and Colin hammed it up for the winter-weary people as if they were busking on faraway cobblestone. Colin licked two fingers and drew them firmly across the drum’s skin, pulling an eerie moan out of the drum’s hollow centre. As each wail faded he pattered his long fingers across the tight surface. Donal watched with an ironic cocked eyebrow, as if to say, Bogger on you, and pushed his childhood friend into more complex rhythms. The others in the settlement laughed at their boyish competition and joined them with a choir of fiddles. Dagmar watched Donal upstage saucy Colin. Donal rested one arm on the purfling, a lit cigarette stuck between the strings and the top peg, and shrugged. He nuzzled his cheek against his old instrument as if he were listening through the wood and beat out a simple bass line. He let his bow fall to pluck out a pizzicato rhythm, using his thick thumb for the fat low thump that marked each shift. Projecting into the open air was difficult. He took up his bow again and worked with his whole arm and his strong back, bending and curving himself around his double bass. Up and down the forty-two-inch strings, Donal beat and caressed his instrument, his powerful fingers working deep vibratos from the strings. The flames shone on his forehead and he dropped his face in an attitude of penitence. Sweat beads fell on the dark varnish and deepened the tonality beyond the range of even the most appreciative ear in Millstone Nether. The crowd admired his playing, but when they wanted to dance, they called back Colin.
Colin set aside his drum, pulled his spoons out of his pocket, started up a textured patter and tried to catch the eye of pretty Dagmar from the greenhouse. He watched her examining his spoons flashing on his thighs and willed her gaze up to his face. Finally his eye caught hers and he grinned and winked only for her. Then he called lightly across the crowd, Lovely Dagmar of the green thumb, sing for us! Encouraged by her blush, he got up and pulled her to stand beside them. With her strong, sure voice she sang,
The gardener’s son being standing by,
Three gifts he gave to me, me—
The pink, the rue, the violet blue,
And the red, red rosy tree,
The red, red rosy tree.
Donal played a light bass to keep her company and Colin left off his rattling spoons and sat near her feet. When she came to the last verse she raised her eyebrows at the crowd and made them laugh:
Come all you maids, where’er you be,
That flourish in your prime, prime.
Be wise, beware, keep free from care,
Let no man steal your thyme, thyme,
Let no man steal your thyme.
Norea heard a new and passiona
te colour in Dagmar’s voice. But Colin grasped the young woman’s hand and pulled her to sit beside him and after the fire burned down Dagmar followed Colin to the cliffs above the sea. Hand in hand, standing in the wind, Colin brought the young woman to him and kissed her and touched her breasts. But she heard a movement in the trees and she pulled away.
Listen, she said.
Moll stood in a hole in the shadow near a small grove of gnarled spruce, as if she were buried from the waist down. Her hands were wrapped around her front and clasped behind her. Her eyes were fixed on them.
Colin shouted, Go away, Moll. What do you want here?
Moll opened her mouth into a great gape, spat out some fishbones, and said, Refrain from the kiss at a kiss-in-the-ring. Refrain forever or you’re sure to be rinded.
Shut up your nonsense, Moll! said Colin, and he pulled Dagmar away and led her to the edge of the cliff. He sat and hung his legs over and said, Slide down with me.
Dagmar nodded, eager to leave Moll behind, and Colin gave her a good tug over the side. Together they slid down over the red earth, rolling faster until Colin took Dagmar in his arms and rolled log-style, shielding her with his own strong back and forearms. At the bottom they were covered with dirt and scraped and Colin pulled his shirt over his head and jumped into the sea. The sun was well down and in the darkness beckoned her to follow. In the cold water he held her again and whispered, She is all states and all princes I. He’d used this plenty of times with women when he travelled. Charm and love were all one to Colin Cane, a youthful confusion he enjoyed.
But his were the first such words to stir Dagmar’s body, his the first fingers to brush her breasts, his the first tongue to touch her throat. She believed his words were spoken to her alone. She liked his light-heartedness and his loose-limbed body. She’d known him her whole life but he’d never until this night turned his eye on her. She made love with him and Colin pulled her up from the shore into the sea again to swim beside him. The cold saltwater washed her scent from his skin but not his seed from deep inside her. Puffins flew along the cliffs before heading out over the ocean. The new lovers swam back to shore, shivering and laughing and made love again, and Dagmar worried and Colin whispered, The first time is free, in the ecstatic moment before their son, Danny, was conceived. That night Dagmar’s girl-life was over. Daring love’s briefest flush, she’d been snared like a young rabbit on the straitened path.