Dagmars Daughter (10 page)

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 contentment of a girl much loved growing up on Millstone Nether.

N
ature 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.

W
e 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.

Moll reached across the flame, lifted the lid of Nyssa’s hurt eye, and with her thumb and forefinger plucked out the eye-stone.

Moll said, Music comes from the shadows, and she looked into the injured eye. She said, Music is a kind of practice for death.

I don’t know, said Nyssa.

Nyssa! called Norea through the door.

Wait! said Moll. The girl’s still healing.

Nyssa listened to the flame. She could hear from far away the high-pitched cries of ocean birds and from deep below the earth the shifting and turning of mud-puppies. Nyssa asked, Can you hear all those sounds too?

Don’t ask questions! She thrust a cup at Nyssa and said, Here’s medicine.

The girl took a drink, coughed a little, and took another. She asked, What is it?

Hurt wine, said Moll.

Nyssa drank down all of it, the deep blue juice staining her chin.

Moll poked her and said, Out of the way! Awake! You’re better and Nana’s waiting.

Then she pulled her sweater over her head and said through the neck, Moll’s in a pitty-hole. Leave her bide!

Nyssa slipped out the door, her head thick from the strong drink and she took Norea’s hand. She led Norea home and the old woman told her to slip in the back way so Dagmar wouldn’t see them. They went inside and up to Norea’s loft.