Dagmar's Daughter

by Kim Echlin

  For her part, Dagmar’s fields and greenhouse were known in the settlement for their dependable abundance. In the early years after Colin left, she suffered much bitterness, and storms tossed up many a ship and men died below the waves. But time wore it away. Her strong mind was absorbed in the cultivation of things that shouldn’t rightly have grown in that thin soil and for a long time there were fewer storms and no more droughts on Millstone Nether.

  Dagmar raised her son Danny like a plant, watering and feeding and pruning, until one day the boy asked to live with his father. The next two winters she brought on ice that blocked the harbours and kept Colin at home with his son.

  The people of Millstone Nether observed the little family with their strange way of living in two houses and joked, They’ve knit their net with holes in it. And though it was not what Norea would have wished for her daughter, she only shook her head and said, Well, at least they’re on the pig’s back and I’m grateful for that much.

  So it was that Dagmar Nolan and Colin Cane might have lived into old age, their love bewildering them until they died. But there’s no certainty in human life that can’t change from one moment to the next. Old patterns give way to new ones and something fierce begins unbidden. At the age of forty-five Dagmar Nolan got pregnant by Colin Cane once more and late one night in her greenhouse the birth pangs began. Dagmar resolved with hope that this child’s life would be different. Time and trouble can tame a young woman but an old woman is undaunted by any earthly force.

  Only Dagmar Nolan could labour like that. She swayed away from the house along the rough path through the greenhouse door to the seedlings at the back. With each pain she bent double, buried her face in rows of bulbs, straightened, paced, rested, tasted her own grit and sweat.

  Hard labour came fast to that wily aging body. She held on to a clay pot and squeezed until it burst and nicked her hands. Wiping the blood on her hips, she pushed her heels into the floor to find roots of their own. Blossoms opened and seed pods drooped all through the greenhouse as she dropped into her pain. The pores of the leaves breathed fast and deep, filling the damp air with heady oxygen. Dagmar groaned and sharpened her desire. Swallowing time she bent over, pushed like an earthquake and screamed a holy beatitude, Awwawwwa.

  Above the dirty glass panes over her head night clouds scattered and temperatures rose as Dagmar groaned in her flesh, tugged out the shoulders, then slipped the body and legs of this newborn daughter in a skid of muck up along the length of her collapsed torso to her breasts. She looked with not a little awe into the grave wide-open eyes of a baby born taut and potent. She held the child close inside her wide green robe. Then she snipped the cord with a pair of greenhouse shears, pushed out the placenta easily, light and flat and slippery as a bit of water weed. Stray dogs ate the mess of blood and afterbirth, stained the floor with their wet tongues.

  Dagmar wiped and wrapped her newborn daughter, listened to her breath, examined jubilant the colour in her cheeks and her tom-tiddler toes. She felt for her tiny heart-beat, counted her fingers. When it was clear that the child was whole and well, Dagmar sank back. She guided the baby’s tiny lips to her thickened nipple and right away the newborn pulled down milk, the light of her eyes twisted into her mother’s, two sets of stars fixed in the same constellation. The baby slept and dreamed her first dream in the world, of a pressing descent through darkness, of the taste of milk and the smell of air, of the feeling of weight. She heard in single chorus the sound of the sea, the rush of the wind and her mother’s breath. As her eyes moved under their closed lids Dagmar swaddled her daughter firmly and with her free hand gingerly dabbed between her own swollen legs.

  Outside, steps approached, tapping along the stones on the path, the door opened and Norea shuffled in on bedroom slippers. She croaked in her dry middle-of-the-night voice, Dagmar?

  By the seeds, back here. I’ve got her. She came.

  Woman-worthy! Norea cried out, scuffing toward the potting tables. How long have you been at this? Reaching out her hands to Dagmar’s, she touched the baby’s face, dropped her robe off her shoulders and wrapped up her daughter and her new granddaughter as best she could, then kneeled beside them, tracing the baby’s body with her stiff hands.

  Dagmar teased, She looks like you.

  Norea wrinkled up with a pursed-lip smile. Two squashed heads. Don’t be fooled, the black hen lays a white egg.

  She wiped away a few tears but not before one fell and stained forever the top of the child’s forehead at her hairline with a mark shaped like a little crown. Knots of blue veins stood out like pebbles on Norea’s calves and the loose flesh from under her old woman’s arms cradled her daughter and this new baby. She rubbed Dagmar’s neck and stroked the child’s head, the three of them coiled around and through each other like spring-wakening garter snakes.

  Never perhaps ever have mother and daughter been closer than Dagmar was with the little girl she named Nyssa. Conjubilant. Roots of one below skin of other. Baby’s eyes fixed on the light of mater gloriosa too soon to be stabat mater. Dagmar measured the length of her newborn daughter’s foot with her index finger, wiped and dried and caressed that dimpling baby bottom and that oversized vulva. In the moment of birth she willingly became her daughter’s cradle, her sleep’s darkness, the comfort of her hunger and the first song in her ear.

  She was Nyssa Nolan, daughter of Dagmar Nolan who unwittingly turned weather fair or bitter, who was daughter of Norea Nolan who stole her dead mother’s boots and made life from tears, who was daughter of the first Dagmar who took her husband’s name and died young after bearing eight children.

  Luthiers say that the tautness of the strings ensures the potency of the instrument. If there were ever a child who leapt taut and potent from between her mother’s thighs, it was Nyssa Nolan. From birth her feet never stopped beating the air. By three and a half she played everything she heard, her first pint-sized fiddle tucked under her chin, and her feet tapping across the floor. How she played has never been equalled before or since. Let the singer weave it into song, let it flow from ear to mouth, let it pass from old to young. Long-limbed Nyssa and her fiddle came and changed the music of Millstone Nether forever.

  She never forgot a tune.

  She had perfect pitch.

  These two mysterious gifts alone gave Nyssa Nolan a whole and separate grasp on her world, a sureness of footing, a soaring of spirit, an inborn conviction that she commanded both heaven and earth. Only the realm of darkness was not hers from the beginning. Even as a child she never played anything exactly the way it was played to her. She put her little stamp on it with ornament and grace. She raised her arms straight up into the air, fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, a gesture at once of defiance and supplication. She understood that of all human expression music is most silent to meaning. She sought to wrest from it the line forward into full declamation.

  They might have guessed that Nyssa was different if they’d known the lost art of reading the lines on a baby’s feet, the curled-up toes and soft soles still more spirit-borne than earth-bound. The foot’s long line in the middle speaks of voyages—broken, wandering, dangerous, lonely. The line below the hug of the big toe speaks of will, determination and the willing disposition of the heart. The lines from the little toes predict talents and capriciousness, the creases near the insides of the ankles, adventures in the world. The shape of the heel foretells fortitude and happiness, the curve of the instep, tragedy and sorrow. Good foot-readers used to watch a baby’s kicking and predict long life or short, large spirit or small, read how the child would trudge or glide through life. Nyssa arced and danced when she nursed. Laid naked on the floor, she lifted her feet as if ready to fly toes first. She splashed her legs in the bath and thumped on Dagmar’s thighs. In her cradle her feet kicked the air as if she were already dancing.

  Dagmar marvelled at her baby’s strength and was dismayed by her bloody-mindedness. On days when the exhausted infant would not let herself sleep, Dagmar la
y beside her on the big bed, stroked the little crown on her forehead and lightly rested her own leg over the dancing feet. But the baby howled, blood rushing to her cheeks, her face drawn into a scowl of indignation until Dagmar gave way to her aerial dance.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Dagmar was dozing with Nyssa on the bed when Colin tapped on her window with a small coin. She looked through the glass into his eyes, still impish at forty-five. His lips were drawn back in a slight smile and he beckoned her out with that charming tilt to his head. Dagmar tucked four pillows around sleeping Nyssa and followed Colin away from the house over the rough stones into the greenhouse. The plants were already swaying to the sound of his fiddle playing “A’ Chuthag.” When the last note of the song fell silent, Colin set down his father’s fiddle and from behind a pile of pots picked up the mask of a stag adorned with real horns. In the silent flickering shadows he held up the mask to reveal one of Madeleine’s bright paintings strung between the antlers. The picture showed a girl weaving a white cloth and a row of women and men gathered along the edges of a long table waiting to mill it. Colin hummed the air to an old milling song as he handed Dagmar the picture in the basket.

  She touched the blood blister on his lip with her tongue and wanted him, but her breasts leaked milk and she pulled away. Colin followed her back up the path and into the bed-room where the infant stirred with subtle hunger. Together they admired her tiny limbs and face in the dark as Dagmar lay down to nurse, wincing at the baby’s first strong latch and sighing with her milk’s easing. Nyssa sucked well and strongly and Dagmar examined lazy Colin stretched out in front of her, his laugh wrinkles, the faded scar on his cheek where twenty-seven years before she had scraped her wedding ring hard down his face in rage. The baby dozed and Colin nuzzled into Dagmar too, sucking some of her milk for himself until she pushed him off.

  Your hair’s all clitty, he said, affectionately stroking her tousled head.

  Yours would be too.

  You’ll be wanting me around more now, he said.

  Don’t get that in your head, you always caudle things up, she answered.

  A girl needs a father.

  I’ve been trying to figure a way around that.

  His love was gouged into her like initials carved into a hardwood tree. In her eyes he still saw the young man he once was. Dagmar had been thinking about resting before she got pregnant. Colin spoiled all men forever for her. She’d fallen in love with him and was never able to shake him. Over and over when she was young she vowed not to see him but he’d show up at her window, grin, crack a joke, and it would begin all over again.

  One night her mother stood on the balcony above them and dumped water on his head, but he only called up laughing, Norea, by what name are you baptizing us?

  I’m not baptizing you anything, called the old woman from up above. I’m trying to drown you.

  Warmed by Colin’s inconstant flame, Dagmar fell asleep with her new baby and wished she could hold on forever to the peace she felt with this birth. When she opened her eyes a folded paper was tucked between her fingers and Colin was gone again. She read his familiar hand, felt her aching vulva quicken, scorned herself for letting him charm her. No matter what he did she couldn’t help herself. Always and once again. And she read:

  Sing cuckoo now. Sing cuckoo.

  Sing cuckoo now. Sing cuckoo.

  Summer is a’coming.

  Sing loud cuckoo!

  Growing seed and blowing bawn,

  Sing to my new daughter.

  Through day’s eve and dawn,

  Sing cuckoo now. Sing cuckoo.

  With and against him all her life. Gods and mortals. Age and youth. The living and the dead. It all begins and ends forever and forever with a woman and a man, shadows of godlife, then comes passion. Dagmar stroked her new daughter’s forehead with a mother’s strong hope. This child would never suffer, not Nyssa.

  Nyssa grew uncommonly tall with long legs and arms. From the beginning she climbed and fell. With her baby strength she pulled herself up from a chair to the table and Dagmar swooped in to catch her when she stepped over the edge. Soon Nyssa shimmied up trees to hang from branches and balanced on the railing of Norea’s balcony. Her third spring she climbed into the apple blossoms, took off all her clothes and applauded herself. She would not fully inhabit her mother’s farmhouse, preferring to roam the shore and cliffs. She never slept in her own cot in Dagmar’s room. She wandered between her mother’s big bed and Nana Norea’s up in the outside loft above the kitchen, crawling in bed with one, disappearing in the middle of the night and awakening with the other. She liked to nestle beyond the back field near the sheep sorrel. She inherited her father’s natural pleasingness and her mother’s direct apprehension of the world. She enchanted everyone with her red curls, tart tongue, cocked eyebrow and buoyant step. Her mother and grandmother marvelled over her childish diaries, which they read secretly. The first thing she ever wrote was I dremd nanas har smelld lik mulch.

  When the girl was still tiny, Norea pulled a little fiddle case out of an old bulb sack and opened it. She tightened the bow and rubbed rosin on the yellowing hair. Feeling with her gnarled fingers, she pushed in the pegs, turned one, plucked, listened, loosened, played again. She reached for Nyssa’s small hands and arranged them on the frog and the neck.

  She said, Child, here is a fiddle and bow. The ivory is chopped off screaming elephants, the strings are guts cut and pulled out of sheep still warm. The wood is hauled by slaves. This little fiddle is fashioned from the suffering of the world. Are you worthy of it?

  Nyssa held on tight, put horsehair to sheepgut and played a single note. Then she picked out Norea’s favourite, “The Nutbrown Maid.” Music fell off the ends of her fingers. She fiddled and stepped with her brother and father at the summer bonfires in her mother’s back field. She climbed into the apple tree and hid until everyone came out at night. After Colin put a torch to the beard moss, and Dagmar settled away from the smoke, and Danny beat his drums and played his whistles, and Norea took the flask from under her shawl and all the others from the settlement gathered with their spoons and fiddles, Nyssa leapt with a wild whoop from the tree to the very edge of the fire, dancing and playing as she fell through the air. Her fiddling could seduce a seed from the ground. They laughed and bade her keep playing. She could play all the traditional tunes and she liked to add little bits of extra bowing and drones. Everyone drank and rocked on old chairs until the legs loosened and cracked.

  Danny drumming wild crashed first into the earth and Norea said in a loud whisper to Nyssa, Your mother uses those baffed-out chairs to keep everyone off balance. Nyssa ran to her brother and tried to pull him up from the ground, lost her balance and fell toward the fire. Dagmar jumped up and pulled them both away. The old folks called for more music from Nyssa. When she finally sat down in the first grey streaks of dawn, Colin took out his spoons and improvised rhymes about his spring-haired daughter:

  Be wary of Nyssa

  the boys will come kiss ’er

  And right or wrong

  I give her song!

  I take it! said Nyssa.

  She dances hey diddle

  and takes up her fiddle

  By her we’re all smote

  I give her notes!

  I take it! said Nyssa.

  Her fiddle’s so cheeky

  Not mild or meeky

  Such a sweet singing voice

  I give her choice.

  I take it! laughed Nyssa.

  The two old women in the house guarded the girl’s world with fierce affection, tucking her words under their pillows at night, opening their own word hoards to her and telling what they had learned from plain long years of living. When Dagmar urged Nyssa to get some sleep, the young girl spun around to face her mother, one hand gripping the neck of her fiddle, the other in a fist with her bow on her hip and said, I like to be awake! The girl set her own ear, and fuss over her as Dagmar did, Nyssa always slipped away. All t
hat she asked was that her will not be usurped.

  The moon is no door. The future enters long before its orb is run. Nyssa wandered up to the woods, up to the gaze toward Moll.

  There in a hole lined with blackberry earth squatted the bald-headed woman. She held balanced on one bony hand her bronze pot. With the other hand she ran a smoothed stick around the edge. The pot sent up a low echoing moan, mro ohoh. Moll stopped her hand’s circling and the sound died out and she looked up. Her eyes lacked all expression and Nyssa could not tell if she would speak or not.

  Moll asked, Are you compelled?

  Nyssa said, No. I’m just here.

  Missed the path?

  Nyssa looked at the pot gravely and said, Can I try that?

  Moll spat a dark spit. She handed up the pot and Nyssa held the pot out on the open palm of one hand. She picked up the stick and rubbed it hard on the side and nothing happened.

  Slower, lighter, said Moll.

  Again Nyssa made a circling motion with her hand around the outside of the pot and again she heard nothing. She looked up at Moll, her eyebrows raised.

  Moll rolled a cigarette and reached into her dress for a wooden match. She scraped it against a rock and the flame appeared and she lit the cigarette and blew smoke through a black hole in her right upper incisor. Nyssa bowed her head and torso over the bowl and tried again. She felt the metal vibrate against her palm and through her wrist. She felt the sound and then heard it, hers a higher-pitched hum than Moll’s low moan. She moved the stick on the rim of the pot around and around, playing with the sound, feeling the vibrations move up through her hand and arm and into her body. Slowly her ear was opening to the relationships shared between pitches. She began to move through her own darkness as if not tied with joint or limb or held in the air on the brittle strength of bones.