by Kim Echlin
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.
Moll 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.
Donal 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.
When the skiff rocked against the first shallows of the mainland, Donal pulled in the oars, jumped out and pulled the wooden boat up the shore. No wharf to protect it. He tied the dory firmly on an old pine tree, then he held out his hand to help Nyssa who stood, fiddle across her back, ready to leap. She waved him away and flew through the air, toes slipping on the shore stones and falling lightly forward.
Donal led the way through the darkness along the short narrow path, birch trees luminous against the black sea. At the end stood his ramshackle house, stilts stained by the water’s ebb and flow. By the door, Nyssa turned him around to kiss her and they pressed together in the stitched light and darkness of their journey.
Donal pushed open the outside door into the larger room with windows overlooking the coast, nothing on the roughly hewn chinked walls. He led Nyssa through another door into a plain room where his bass sat in front of a music stand. He waited silently as she fingered his piles of scores. She opened a notebook full of drawings of birds, anatomies of snakes and reptiles. Neat sketches of dying things. She flipped through it curiously, left it out and open and looked at the music on his stand black with his own notations.
He said, There is another room.
She followed him back into the front room into a small room furnished with a table. The window looked into the cliffs and a thick stand of trees.
He said, This could be your room. Put your fiddle here.
She turned to him and said gravely, Thank you. I have never been given such a gift.
He wanted to take her to the bed in the big room but felt closed in under his own roof.
He said formally, Would you like to look at the sky?
Together they retreated outside again, up into the woods where he’d worn a path to a place silent and still and higher than any other spot on that ragged edge of glacial rock. In the grey dawn she turned to him willingly and slipped off his clothes and pulled him to the ground to make love under a sky growing smurry.
They might have dozed outside all through the morning, but the air grew sharply cold and a strange freezing rain woke them as they dozed in the roots of the gnarled firs. Lovers care little for weather. They rose and gathered up their clothes helter-skelter. Her hand taking his, they flew down the path into the shelter of the house. Laughing they dried themselves and warmed themselves against each other’s skin, covered for the first time by the strangeness of sheets, and finally fell asleep.
Dagmar opened her eyes after the restless night and saw a white flower plucked low on the stem, wake robins they’d called the
m when she was a girl. She looked at the graceful whorl of stalkless greenery, the solitary white bloom. Nyssa had put it in a glass on her night table before she left for the pole house. Dagmar reached to her side of the bed to poke her daughter awake but felt nothing.
She got up and pulled on her gardening pants and shirt. She put on the kettle to boil and dropped tea in the teapot. She opened the door to look at the sky and saw Norea already on her balcony above the apple tree.
What time did Nyssa come in? she called up.
Good morning, Dag.
When she wakes up, tell her I’m in the greenhouse. You want tea up there?
I heard souls slipping under the sea at dawn, croaked Norea.
No, Dagmar thought, and then a chill breeze. Isn’t she in your bed?
Norea shook her head.
Didn’t Nyssa come home last night?
We didn’t bury her shoes.
The kettle screamed.
Time slowed. Dagmar searched the house and Norea’s outside loft. The whole house empty. She ran through the greenhouse and shivered with the outside temperature dropping. She headed for the field.
Flax is a clean-up crop. Dagmar sowed hers in rotations. The Millstone Nether soil wasn’t suited to it but she liked the seeds and its brief lake of blue blooms, so she nurtured it with all her force. She walked into her unsuitable garden. The flax green was just through, ungrown sepals and anthers still hiding their hint of blue. She plunged into the rows. No dry brown bolls for these—she’d murder them.
Nyssa was gone.
Her little flax field was strewn with old chopped chaff. She pulled and trampled down one row, then another. She stripped away the delicate leaves until her hands bled. She dug out the precious roots. She flung them away and tramped into the next row. She ripped stems and spat into the ground. She would raze it all and leave a swallowing field of stone. She thrashed along until she was exhausted, then she walked down to Colin’s to tell him that Nyssa was gone.