Dagmar's Daughter

by Kim Echlin

  As she played Moll began to speak. Moll said that Nyssa’s grandmother talked to her sometimes through the weeds and knew darkness but that most people turned from her. Moll said that she heard Nyssa play at the pole house and that she played well but there were sounds in her fiddle that she did not yet know about. She said that they are in the earth and she did not know if Nyssa was capable of hearing them but perhaps. She said some people are just born to it. Nyssa said, Born to what? Moll kept on. She said that some people are compelled toward questions and a kind of living that have no answers and some can tolerate this and some cannot. She said to Nyssa that if she thought she had come to Moll to play the pot that this was only an excuse but it was as good an excuse as any. She said that no one can say why one person finds darkness in her own soul and another does not. No one can say why. But if a person is compelled, then not to look means that the soul goes stale and stunted and she will languish and consume everything around her and will not know that it is her own spirit within that is being devoured. She said there were many things that stopped people from looking at her but that the greatest was fear. She said that when they saw, they lost their former selves forever. She said it was not safe to look at her or to be in her presence. She said there were others like her and she did not know their origins or where they might be and she had not met any of them but that they must exist. She said this was a world that kept turning from its own darkness and did not embrace it or sing to it or talk to it but tried over and over to forget it. She said Nyssa’s grandmother Norea sang to her and she liked that. She said many things that the girl could not fully understand, but when she finally stopped, Nyssa laid down the stick and handed back the bowl and said, I am not afraid.

  Moll answered, You will be.

  The ashes of Moll’s cigarette were long cold on the ground.

  Hungry? she asked.

  Nyssa nodded.

  Moll pulled herself out of the hole and led Nyssa through the woods to a cache in the ground. She removed a pile of branches covering the hole and there were the remains of a newly skinned rabbit wrapped in leaves, head and tail hanging limp. She swept up some dry pine needles with her large hand and deftly placed some larger branches over them and lit a small fire. Nyssa watched Moll throw the carcass into a pan pulled from the cache and set it in the flame, reach her fingers into the fire and stand up bones from former meals that lay hidden in the ashes.

  Nature likes to hide itself, said Moll. It goes much further.

  Further than what? asked Nyssa.

  Further than as if it knew its aims. Do you think it knows its aims?

  I don’t know.

  It doesn’t.

  After cooking the rabbit for a long time she reached her hand into the pan and tore off the rabbit’s back leg with a wrenching and a twist. Nyssa heard the femur pop and took the meat extended to her. When she bit into it, she saw that a maggot had crawled to the inside rim of the pan, slipped down and was getting cooked alongside the rabbit.

  Why do you stay out here? asked Nyssa, wiping grease from her hand on the dirt.

  Out where?

  In the woods.

  Moll pushed the rabbit to one side of the pan as if offering it again.

  Nyssa shook her head. Moll picked up the rabbit and threw it into the woods. She put the pan back into the cache. Then she put out the flames with dirt.

  Not all questions are wise, she said. Too much knowing makes you old.

  I want to be old, said Nyssa.

  Not yet.

  Can I go inside your hut?

  They sat in silence and Moll said, You come back here sometime.

  In the winters the shores of Millstone Nether got iced in with great shifting ice floes. The young boys jumped from one ice pan to another, daring each other to float up the coast looking for seal holes, playing at being at sea. They leaped from one chunk of ice to another, laughing and wrestling, their backs cold against the ice on the open water. Briny air stung their cheeks and hidden currents taught their feet to submit to the whim of the sea. Nearly always someone fell in and had to race home to get dry, hair freezing, fingertips tingling. The other boys ran in a clump around the wet one and everyone scattered when the old woman or man at home caught the ice truant and scolded, I’ll give you your tea in a mug! Only once in the living memory of the island had a boy slipped and got caught under an iceberg and drowned dead.

  One snowy, bright dawn Nyssa jumped from Norea’s bed and ran out into the cold and down through the settlement to her father’s house. She pushed through the door into the front room where Danny slept and shook him awake. Let’s go jump clumpers, she said.

  Danny rolled away and pulled the quilt over his head, You’re too young!

  I’m not, you slowcome! She tugged at his covers and his arms, jumped on top of him and said, I’m going.

  Too dangerous, said Danny and pushed her off him.

  I’ll go alone then, said the girl.

  Danny hauled himself out of bed, dressed quickly and followed her down to the shore. Nyssa had already found a long stick and was testing it in the water full of small ice pans. She stretched her foot out to rock the thick ice, planted her pole and hopped on her long limbs loose in the cold.

  Swiftly Danny jumped on his little sister’s large pan humming with the swish of cracked ice. He squatted, and stared into the clear sky, letting strong-willed Nyssa test her arms and balance.

  Don’t go away from the shore, he said.

  Why not? she answered, swinging her stick out of the water and spraying cold drops on his face.

  Stop that!

  Nyssa edged to the side of the ice, held her stick across the front of her and jumped to a pan about a foot away. Danny scrambled up and jumped after, calling, Springlegs, you’ll have us both in the drink!

  But the girl had stopped and was listening gravely to something up the cliffs.

  Together they listened beyond the light clinking of the ice to the moan of cold settled over the earth and from far up on the gaze they made out the sound of Moll’s pot, tiny variations in a pitch that slid along the tones between the notes.

  Nyssa asked, Is it true men go to her at night?

  What would you know about that?

  She thrust her stick down her fingers, breaking the surface of the icy water and poled them farther out from shore.

  I heard them talking behind Da’s rooms, she said.

  Danny said, Men should mind who’s in the shadows. I wouldn’t know about it.

  He whooped, spread his legs and started to rock the ice. Hands outstretched toward the sky, her tousled hair aflame around her ruddy skin, Nyssa slid to the middle. Danny leapt to the next pan and the next, scrambling toward shore. Hard on his heels Nyssa jumped and slipped and rocked on the thick white rafts. Panting, she caught up with him as the off-shore winds stirred up. They were both stuck on a large floating pan and too far to jump to shore.

  Now we’re done, Danny teased, his quick eye searching for a way back. Stuck on the back of snake that won’t be charmed!

  The open water grew all around. Nyssa hurled herself toward the shore, slipped and fell. Her leap rocked the clumper and as she swam under the icy brine to the surface a thick blue and mottled iceberg blocked her passage. Down below the water, the clinking of the ice sounded like wooden bells and she did not struggle but was strangely drawn to these sounds she had never heard before. She hung below, still and listening.

  Danny was standing waist-deep in the water now and he pushed at the heavy ice pan. He saw her limp fingers poking out, grabbed them, pulled her out sideways from under the iceberg and stood her up in the water. One arm around her waist he half lifted her up to the shore. Moll stood there at her full height, watching silent. Danny pulled Nyssa right past her, wrapped her in his own damp jacket and walked her back up to their mother’s house.

  I almost lost you under that bellycater, he said, pulling her to him and soaked in saltwater, safe beside her brother, Nyssa felt all the plain c
ontentment of a girl much loved growing up on Millstone Nether.

  Nature abounds in what we call catastrophe. All it takes is a little pressure. Storms. Floods. Mudslides. All caused by pressure, the overturning of the old pattern into something new. Time passes and old patterns are forgotten. But they are not lost and can still exert pressure, remembered or not. Consumed by either fire or fire. While Donal had tried to prepare himself, Dagmar had walked away from him down the shore, held his best friend in her embrace and he hadn’t even guessed that he was losing what he thought he most wanted.

  The night Donal fled, Madeleine saw the freak hailstorm over the ocean. She was bent over a pot of boiling haywater for an orphaned goat. The warm scent of the hay clouded up around her face and she filled an old baby’s bottle with the fragrant liquid, took the bleating kid in her lap and urged it to suckle.

  Donal pushed through the half door and shed his wet clothes in a pile on the floor. He went into the back room and returned with his bass in one hand and a travelling bag in the other. He said, I’m going now. I won’t be back.

  You’re leaving before light? said Madeleine, shifting the kid in her arms.

  They’re marrying. It’s dawn soon anyway.

  Half the island knew and the other half guessed, said Madeleine. Your friend’s no friend, Donal, but it doesn’t mean you have to go.

  I’d choke every time I saw them.

  He’s a jader, Donal. Time heals.

  With the bristling anger of a young man betrayed he answered, What odds is it to you?

  Donal took his double bass and sailed out into the ocean. He had no heart for the great cathedrals to the west and so he found his way south into the scattered dream-rounded islands of the Pacific. He made his living playing in smoky bars where no one knew that his bass was three centuries old and few noticed it was tuned in fifths. He played a perfect intonation few could hear, and was absorbed in the inexplicable mystery of his sound. For three and half decades he picked up with small bands and played in exchange for a bed, a meal, his next passage out, settling with the unsettled on the Pacific Ocean. He played whatever was popular with Japanese and Indonesian and American expatriates, filled his lonely impermanence with their bar-room stories. He sailed on coconut ships and outriggers and supply boats, and protected his bass from Pacific salt and humidity and damp. He played against the rushing of tides and his highest notes drew whales up to the surface. He sleepwalked through the years and only his night dreams reminded him where he had come from and what he had hoped for. They tormented him with the incorporeal cries of lost seamen but each morning he shook away those dream hollies as if they had not revealed themselves.

  He possessed nothing to keep him anywhere. One night Donal sailed with an itinerant birdwatcher who had a parrot that spoke fifty-three words of an extinct language acquired from its last living speaker. He was studying an island where everything was dying. Birds that had displayed themselves fearlessly had begun to dwindle in number and disappear. First to go was a flightless bird called a rail. The flycatcher, the bridled white-eye, the honeyeater became rare. Then the squawks and songs and coos of the kingfishers, crows and even the plentiful white-throated ground doves faded from the air. The birdwatcher puzzled over the disappearances.

  Donal was wandering in the island forest late at night when he heard an unearthly cry and frantic wings beating above his head. He shone his light toward the roof of the trees and spotted a hapless crow stuck in the wide jaws of a common brown tree snake, genus B. irregularis. The bird’s pinfeathers were disappearing into the snake’s jaws, swallowed alive inside the muscled coil, slowly poisoned with each chomp and chew. Soon only the desperate beak of the bird poked out, squeaking like a baby. Donal stood and watched the snake slowly close its jaws over the tip of the beak, then drop its head in postprandial fatigue. The snake’s eyes stared unconcerned into Donal’s. He swept his light across the canopy of the forest and saw what had been there all the time. The night treetops were inhabited by a writhing mass of snakes in a constant agitation to eat. Thousands of them wound deliberately through the canopy, hunting birds and eggs. They had already eaten all the ground life—rats, skinks and geckos. Their slender muscular bodies stretched great distances between branches, and the birds who had no inkling of danger continued to build nests on the sturdy thick branches their omnivorous neighbours preferred. The snakes ate anything—Hedmidactylus frenatus, Gehyra oceanica, Lepidodactylus lugubris, emoai slevine, emoia caeruleocauda and emoia atrocostate. They ate the last Micronesian kingfisher on earth. They even ate the birdwatcher’s pet parrot and those last fifty-three words.

  Night after night Donal watched the snakes gracefully stripping off the life of the island, live winding sheets coiled round living bodies. They had no predator. They worked the roof of the forest like foreign cod-fishers, hardy, fearless and cryptic. They succeeded at the expense of others.

  We cannot choose whom we are free to love.

  Together Nyssa and Norea, wearing her yellow hat, waded along the shore, the young girl describing to her grand-mother all she saw. Nyssa said, Nana! A huge spider nest hanging under the wharf, full of babies.

  Reading the girl’s tone Norea answered back, Let’s kill them! There’ll be hundreds of those nasty things.

  She handed Nyssa one of her shoes and said, Get the mother first! The girl struck the big spider in the middle, watched it fall over and said, Nana! Its legs are waving.

  Good, said the old woman. What are the babies doing?

  They’re all climbing up through the nest and out the top.

  Take hold of the nest at the opening, said Norea, and sink it under the water!

  Nyssa reached into the nest hanging from its strong sticky threads. She pushed her fingers under the cracks and she swiped the nest away from the wood. Norea stood in the water listening. Nyssa plunged the nest under the water and a cloud of baby spiders crawled through the opening at the top, swarming up her arms.

  Nana! she cried. They’re all over my arms!

  Norea spread her wide old hands around Nyssa’s thin arms and brushed them down, shaking them over the water, whisking the spiders from her own arms and hands and plunging them down under the water. Then she pulled the sticky web off Nyssa’s fingers and put that under the water too.

  Nana! screamed Nyssa. They’re still on me.

  Norea bent down and scooped great handfuls of sand up from the bottom. She slapped it on Nyssa’s arms and a tiny shard of shell flew into Nyssa’s eye. The girl brushed the sand and the last of the spiders off her arms then clapped her wet, salty hand over her face.

  There’s something in my eye, she said.

  Norea walked behind her back to the shore and sat down beside her. She said, Take your eyelid and pull it down over your eye. Your tears will wash it out.

  But the shard was lodged there and stuck. Nyssa said, I can’t get it out. I need the eyestone.

  Norea said, No you don’t. Give it some time. Let your own tears do their work.

  But the shell stayed lodged. Nyssa begged to go to Moll’s hut and Norea, who never refused the girl anything, followed her through the back of the settlement to Moll’s path of spat-out bones.

  Norea called through the closed door between the skull of the whale and the spine of the seal, The girl’s got something in her eye.

  It’ll go away.

  Norea pushed the door open and Nyssa walked into the glooming toward the taste of earth. Moll was crouched down in the corner.

  Moll said to Norea, Wait outside.

  She looked into Nyssa’s eye, then walked to the northwest corner of the hut and brushed away some earth and lifted out of a depression in the floor a little clay pot. She removed the lid of the pot and pulled out an oilskin pouch. She dabbed her filthy finger on her tongue, reached into the pouch and took the eyestone from its vial of sugar. While Nyssa watched, she rinsed it in weak vinegar water and three bubbles pushed out of the black spot in the middle and rose to the surface.

>   Moll said, Lie there, girl. She pointed her dirt-stained finger at a pile of rags in a darkened corner partly blocked by the stove. Nyssa lay down on the rags and she breathed in the sour odour of rancid rags and did not move.

  Moll said, The girl’s in the dark night. She lifted Nyssa’s eyelid, dropped the eyestone into the far corner of the eye, pulled the lid out and held it down by its lashes on top of Nyssa’s cheek. Moll said to the eyestone, Eat it up.

  She took Nyssa’s hands, pulled her long arms straight and laid them firmly by her sides. Nyssa dared neither open her eyes nor move. She listened to Moll walk across the room. For a long time she lay still, feeling a scratching along her eyeball. She let her good eye flutter open, followed by her injured one and saw Moll naked to the waist. She saw Moll putting a poultice on a sore festering red on her right breast. Both breasts were horribly webbed with cuts. Nyssa stared at the disfigured orbs. She shifted her head to the side to see more. Moll sensed the movement. She turned away, pulled her dress closed around her and turned on Nyssa who closed her eyes and lay rigid.

  Girl, what did you see?

  Nothing, said Nyssa.

  What did you see?

  Nothing, repeated Nyssa.

  You saw something. Open your eyes. Sit up.

  The girl sat up. Moll stood and moved across the room and squatted beside Nyssa with an unlit lamp. She reached under her skirt and handed Nyssa a long glass tube, then lit the lamp’s tiny fire.

  Put the tube over the flame, she said.

  Nyssa lowered the tube over the flame, watched it stretch its blue centre, pushing through white and yellow. She heard it begin to sing a pure single tone inside the tube.

  She felt the note against her eardrum diminish all other sound. Moll reached her great hand out and covered the top of the glass and extinguished not the flame but the tone. Nyssa sat back on her heels.

  Moll stared through her blank black eyes and formed her lips into a grotesque circle over her decayed teeth and began to sing the same note the flame sang, hrhrhr. She slid on the pitch and settled and when she hit the note’s centre suddenly the flame sang again with her, the same note, hrhrhr.