Dagmars Daughter (11 page)

Nyssa said, Nana, I don’t feel so good. I’m going to the porch.

She took her queasy stomach out for air. Norea followed her, and when Nyssa felt her stomach heave, she leaned unsteadily across the railing and flipped over like a fledgling falling from the nest. Her tumble was broken by an apple tree, green fruit landing with soft thuds all around her limbs.

She lay looking up through the branches, unable to move and tasted blood in her mouth. Dagmar heard the strange thump and ran over to see her daughter lying on the ground, eyes groggy, lips stained blue. She asked, Did you just fall off the balcony?

Norea called down, Did she break her neck?

Dagmar shouted back, No thanks to you! She’s been at Colin’s by the stink of her!

Dagmar picked her up and carried her inside, laid her out on the kitchen table and went to work with flax poultices. In a cloud of raw bile and Moll’s wine Nyssa winced at her mother’s touch and threw up. Dagmar mopped her clean. She needed to keep her awake and bring those eyes round from the back of her head.

Nyssa, she whispered urgent and firm, Nyssa, wake up.

What?

Dagmar helped her off the table and led her into the big bed and sat beside her. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head and Dagmar was afraid.

Stay awake, she said. Open your eyes, Nyssa. Look at these seeds.

Nyssa whispered with a weak, cheeky tilt to her chin, Did I just fall off the balcony?

Looks like it, Dagmar said and lifted Nyssa’s head. It rolled off her mother’s open palm and her eyes sank back.

Wake up, Nyssa! said Dagmar.

The girl struggled to open her eyes, struggled to please her mother. She said, Tell me the flax story.

Dagmar raised her head on a pillow and said, The flax is buried and rippled, retted and spun. You hide it in the dark earth. Nyssa, wake up.

She had to keep the girl awake. She said, The blue flower opens to the midday heat and the lashing of rain. Then people pull it out root and all. They drown it, roast it, beat it, heckle and comb it. Nyssa! Open your eyes. You’ve got to stay awake! What did I just say?

The girl asked groggily, Then what do they do with it?

They spin it to thread, weave it into linen, cut it, sew it into shirts worn till they’re rags. Do you hear me, Nyssa? Can you talk? How old are you?

The girl opened her eyes again and tried to talk. I’m thirteen, she said.

Nyssa, what day is it?

The day after the night before, she said and struggled to sit up.

Seeing her eyes back firmly forward, Dagmar said annoyed, That father of yours won’t start you drinking already! I’m fed up with Colin leaving me the clobber to pick up. I won’t have you flying off balconies.

Red hair tangled around her face, a seed fallen to the earth and dying to sprout again. Nyssa grinned her father’s infuriating smile. Dagmar brought her eight drops of spruce tea in a cube of sugar. Norea came into the room with soup. The two women perched like birds on the side of her bed.

Nyssa said, I feel awful.

You’ll survive, grumbled Dagmar. Try to sleep. Morning is wiser than evening. She couldn’t think what she’d do if the girl broke her skull and disappeared out the cracks forever.

Nyssa turned to her grandmother and said, Nana, I swear before you I will never do that again.

Don’t you worry, smiled Norea, half the lies we tell aren’t true. Your hair’s like a birch broom in the fits, she said, running her hands over the girl’s head. Be capable of your own distress. Do what is required.

Nyssa said, Nana, how does the eyestone work?

Has she been with Moll? accused Dagmar.

Norea and Nyssa fell silent.

Mother! cried Dagmar.

She’ll leave her alone, said Norea.

Nyssa said, I don’t want her to.

Dagmar asked, What would you mean by that?

The girl said falsely, I don’t know.

I don’t want you there again, said Dagmar. She already blinded one of us.

Did she, Nana? asked Nyssa. How?

T
here are two kinds of wisdom in the world. Judgement wisdom abides no blurred lines and no softening circumstance. Nature wisdom has black in its white and shifts with the day, the feeling and the temperament. Some say it is best to practise judgement wisdom on oneself and nature wisdom on others.

Nyssa had witnessed in Moll’s hut what no one else knew, but she laid her hand on her mouth and neither judged nor spoke of it. And though her mother told her not to, all through the years when she was growing from a child into her own fierceness, she kept visiting Moll’s hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze. Sometimes Moll talked and sometimes she showed Nyssa the bones she found in the woods. Sometimes she played her pot and sometimes she threw stones. Sometimes she stared silently from the naked orb of her head, eyes blank, a source of little visible delight. Nyssa could not say why she went to the bony woman, only that she was drawn to her, as if Moll were some part of herself. Moll belonged not to the island but to its caves and holes, to a place that is dead to the world above. Hers were raw and devouring passions, and loveless. And yet, when Nyssa lay on the ground beside Moll and put her ear against the pine needles and listened to the thick echoes from the rocks beneath, she sensed with the uncanny instinct of a daughter of Dagmar that birth and death are of a single essence and that she knew little of either. These were things she did not have the words to say. In the low moaning of Moll’s pot she heard music beyond what she could play on her fiddle. Most people are, once or twice in a life, drawn to things that may harm them and that they cannot understand. Things that are necessary.

She came home from her visits to Moll and stared without seeing, listening to all the sounds of the island until Dagmar chided her. But Nyssa was absent in the way that silence is absence from sound. She played drones in her fiddle tunes until the people complained that she ruined the danciness of the music. They said that no one had ever played in this way before and that it didn’t sound right.

Nyssa said, It’s what I hear.

She was not afraid and she played what she wanted. Fierce and dancing, she followed what she was drawn to. Her ear was open.

O
ne night, after they’d finished their snaking, Donal played an old tune while the birdwatcher laid out the bones of a bird, trying to figure out how the skeleton went together. What’s it called? he said.

Donal thought a moment and thought again. I can’t remember.

The other man shrugged, turned the little bones of the ribs around and said, It doesn’t really matter. They all sound alike.

But they didn’t and Donal couldn’t remember. He leaned his bass against the wall and seeing the pattern of the bird’s ribs quickly rearranged them in order, only the second one missing. Something in his ear was dying and he with it.

Why do you stay so long out here? Donal asked.

To see the end of the world. The birdwatcher admired Donal’s quick eye. He could catch a snake, drop it into a bag and tie it shut with his teeth before the snake flung itself up and attacked. He could look at scattered bones and see the living creature’s shape.

Is this place the end?

Could be here. Could be anywhere.

Is that the only reason you stay?

There was a woman but she left. She said she couldn’t breathe when I was there.

Donal worked on the fine bones of a foot and shifted the small skull out of the way. He said, We say that we stay for love, run away for love, but a woman just goes firmly on in the same place being herself.

You?

I did not tell her that I loved her. She went with my friend. I didn’t try to change her course. This is the truest love.

Where will you go next?

Donal hesitated. Don’t know, he said.

What was to follow? Donal’s hands were scarred with snakebite. He fished and climbed coconut trees for milk, wove fronds to replace worn thatch. But the hot winds never felt right against his skin. The sea is subtle—dread creatures glide under it, treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. An island, Melville said, is like a place in the soul, full of peace and joy, encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. Donal stared at the bones of the birds devoured by snakes and said, There’s an island up north where an old woman used to bury all the birds that broke their necks on her windows. That’s where I’m going next.

He wanted to hear the old men at night. It was time to go back. Before everything disappeared. Colin would know the name of that tune.

N
yssa put on Norea’s old honeymoon negligee and danced a one, two, three around the old woman.

I’ve got on your lacy nightdress, Nana, she said. I like it.

A nightdress like that is not meant for keeping on as much as for being taken off, said the old woman.

Nyssa admired her own round breasts under the thin material and looked across at her grandmother’s sagging skin. She said without thinking, Will I turn like you?

A woman must be as her nature is, said time-shrunken Norea to the heedless girl.

Nyssa wandered out and up to the gaze in the nightdress. She smelled the smoke from Moll’s short pipe.

Girl, called Moll, a woman only is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

She held out the pipe to Nyssa and said, Have some dudeen.

Nyssa took the pipe and drew and swirled the smoke inside her mouth. She watched Moll stick a piece of grass through a black hole in her tooth and pull it out the other side. When the pipe went cold, she handed it back, and with her long bony fingers the woman stuffed it with more crumbled leaves, held a match to it, sucked and said, Can’t stand a ring on a man’s little finger!

Nyssa! called Dagmar from down the shore.

The girl squatted lower in the hole and said, I’m not going.

She was weary of the calling from home, drawn to Moll’s hole as a wanderer is to the morning ship.

Nyssa! called Dagmar.

Weather’s misky, said Moll. A man with a ring on his little finger thinks he’s the jinks. Seen one on a fishing man? On a sailor? Mainlanders have ’em.

Moll reached between her legs, pulled out a small ring, and handed it over to Nyssa, who held it up in front of her, and asked, Is this a pinkie ring?

Moll nodded and with a whoop Nyssa stood up in the hole and threw it as hard as she could over the edge of the gaze.

Moll’s cracked lips twitched and she waved her naked hands in front of her face. All gone, all over, girl. I’m hungry.

Nyssa handed her some biscuits from the nightgown’s pocket. Moll stuffed the whole package into her mouth, spitting out the paper as she chewed, crumbs spraying down her chin. A fine rain began to fall.

Moll pulled a tattered rabbit pelt from under her heap of rags. She draped it over Nyssa’s head against the rain, pulled off her own thick and filthy sweater and buttoned it around Nyssa.

In the drizzle Moll held up her hands to Nyssa as if they were a mirror and said, Where’s the girl?

There is no more girl, said Nyssa. Only a hare.

She made the sound of a hare by closing her lips and squeezing air between her tongue and her palate. I will write down this song and play it on my fiddle.