Dagmars Daughter (12 page)

Writing makes the spirit lazy, girl, said Moll, tapping her long fingers on her hairless head. A fixed word risks becoming a dead word. Hold it in your ear.

Nyssa did not understand. She scrambled away and headed down to the shore and Moll called after her, The girl is as the girl does.

B
y the time she was eighteen Nyssa had absorbed all the music Colin had to give her. He wanted something new for her birthday and chose Bach’s “Chaconne in D.” He handed it to her and said, A chaconne makes much out of little.

Picking up her fiddle and nimbly playing at sight, adding her signature drone, she said, But, Daddy, I want to dance!

Colin laughed. Bach is the essence of all that can be made in music. Will you get rid of that drone. It’s making us all mad.

She shrugged. I like it. I want it to be like the sea always there. To speak of the sea is to refuse to speak of yourself.

Colin shrugged. Can’t tell you anything. Like your mother. Here, I have something maybe you will like.

He went to his junk drawer in the kitchen, pulled out some old screws, a couple of erasers, some nails and a bottle cap. He dropped them into Nyssa’s cupped, waiting hands, led her back to the old piano and lifted the front off. She smelled the musty insides of dry wood and metal, saw for the first time the guts of the whale. Eighty-eight felt-covered hammers were lined up imperfectly, waiting to be plunked against the rows of strings. Inscribed on the coppery pin-block were pictures of nine prizes and the words of a craftsman’s pride:
Above Medals of Merit Awarded to Us at Exhibitions Throughout the World.
It was piano number 19407 stamped in black on the upper-left-hand side and inscribed along the curve of the back was
Heintzman & Co. Toronto, Canada. Agraffe Bridge Patented March 10 1896.
From the vantage of Nyssa’s four-stringed violin, the row of musty hidden strings was exotic. Colin lifted out the piano’s action and turned it over. The very first tuner had scratched his name into the wood:
Bob 1900
. Nyssa ran her fingers over the dead man’s mark and her father watched.

It’s nothing but a big drum, he said, putting it back together. Here, hand me a screw.

She watched him choose objects from her hands and squeeze them between the clean row of strings until it looked like a rag mat.

Play, he said.

She sat down and looked at the piano’s insides. She placed her fingers on the ivory keys. She played a simple C major triad. There was a clank and a thud, a note and a cluck. She sped it up, changed keys and syncopated the rhythm to hear the drumming clanks of screws and thuds of rubbers.

We have to get this down! she said in delighted adoring, as if she were the first to hear it in the world.

Why? said Colin, What are you going to do with it?

Make a new tune! said his exuberant daughter. She shook loose her kinked hair, put her hands on the keyboard and played another rhythm.

Colin listened and poured himself a drink. Danny wandered in to listen too, pulled a rack comb and tissue paper from his pocket and played along with his sister.

Nyssa insisted on writing down her father’s music. They laid out long sheets, labelled the strings and noted where each eraser, screw and nail had been placed. Colin smelled the fresh salty scent of his daughter’s skin as they sat shoulder to shoulder. Nyssa imagined their writing to be an affair of posterity, caught in the fleeting moment.

She came home to Dagmar that night alight with the pleasures of writing something she thought completely new.

Her mother saw the glow of a girl in love and asked, How was your birthday?

Fine.

Did he give you a present?

Bach, said her daughter dismissively. But he’s showing me how to write down a song for a piano all stuffed up with nails and screws.

Dagmar too had once been Colin’s private audience on that old piano. She had watched Nyssa thrive under his teaching, heard the girl’s fiddling grow stronger and wilder. He’d taught her everything he knew, played tapes of the old people and recordings from abroad. His musical range was now hers and she excelled effortlessly beyond any other musician on Millstone Nether. Everyone could hear Colin’s stamp on Nyssa’s playing, her easy shifting between styles, already a master of the tradition. Dagmar thought, He is a bridge to her own spirit. Heaven only knows if the bridge will hold when she plays all that’s inside her. He never could bear anyone else’s ferocity.

Years are drops wrung from a rag. Still tethered to childhood, Nyssa was ready to leap, knowing little of flying. Music was her haunt. She played what she liked. In ancient times and distant places the people would have honoured her, a young woman alive to her own song. They would have beat drums and danced for her. They would have brought young men to her door and they would have sung, Like her lips, sweet is her vulva, sweet is her drink. But that song was lost long ago and Nyssa would have to find her own way. She was destined. To go, deeper, darker.

One Saturday night Nyssa gathered four boys with their fiddles and guitars and made them arrange themselves like a thick tree trunk in front of her. She led them to the pole house stage and when everyone arrived for a time, she hid behind them while they sang a sweet air together, then out she jumped from behind, the boys spreading like branches to both sides of her. Nyssa, centre stage, was the root to which all eyes turned. She put bow to strings, her flesh all power and excitement, a young girl standing exposed as a blade of winter grass in front of the flickering lanterns. She whooped and pounced on the first piercing note of “Nana’s Boots,” a medley she’d made up herself. The old people shook their heads at her showing off and called her a regular philandy and laughed. She knew how to pump it out. She danced and fiddled, wore her longing and hope naked for all to see.

She had a knack for the stage. She made nothing so appealing as her own fearless energy. She called at the crowd with a cheeky swing in her tight black jeans and when they called back to stop her showing off, she sidled up slow and unpredictable to the edge of the stage, paused, leaned in and whispered, suddenly girlish and sweet, Oh no, not yet. Everyone laughed and someone called out to do her medley again and she feigned breathlessness and said, I can’t do that one twice, then winked before hitting its first note once more, anointing them with all they desired. She played the Millstone Nether people as well as she played her fiddle and they loved her. She sensed their moods through her skin and mirrored everything back. She filled their ears with lovers’ ballads. She played each person’s secret cravings. She stamped and spun across the stage, seducing, daring them to join her. Her face was the shape of a flax seed, nose straight as a clean punch, body nipped in at her waist, eyebrows set in a quizzical arch. She lived in the upper and lower registers.

Dagmar stood at the back of the crowd, listening.

Her daughter was alive with something a mother couldn’t prune. There wasn’t a boy on the island who knew which key she’d play in next. She played at all the weddings and parties and had plenty of tunes left over. There wasn’t enough space for her to fill. Those last nights before she disappeared, she played out in the woods, down the road from her father’s house. Under stars and moon, lips red, hair red, skin wrapped in black, disappearing into shadows as she step-danced, broken horsehair flying loose and catching the light like fireflies, her sheepgut sang a young woman’s reckless wonder at the world. Her toughened fingers pressed and slid, tapped and plucked, her green eyes fixed on things beyond, and still faster she stepped until she disappeared into notes in the night. Nyssa of Millstone Nether.

D
onal appeared in front of Colin’s old house, a set of bass notes playing in his head.

He smoked a cigarette in front of the half door and didn’t ring the bell. He loitered, tempted to turn and leave. Then the door opened and there was Colin, unshaven and just waking up.

Haven’t had tea yet, come in! he said without looking as he rubbed his hands through his hair.

Donal silently pulled out another cigarette, stuck it between his lips and lit it with one hand the way the two boys used to practise together. Colin looked through the smoke to finally see who was there. The eyes do not change when everything else is altered.

Donal?

He stepped back, took the cigarette out of his mouth and cupped it by his side.

Colin pulled the door open to embrace his old friend and Donal stepped backwards to avoid the threatening arms. Few had touched him all those years. Colin dropped his arms and stepped back too. Unabashed, he said, Got a smoke?

Donal tossed him a cigarette and damp Pacific matches.

Colin tried to light it with one hand but he was out of practice. Soothing, sharpening nicotine seeped through. Where did you go? he said.

Nowhere. Away.

Donal examined the feeling of being recognized. He watched Colin step back inside and wave him in.

Where’s Dagmar?

She doesn’t live here. We split up. A long time ago, a few years after you left.

You left?

She left.

Still on the island?

We raised our children together, more or less.

Children?

Two. A son and a daughter much younger.

Colin stared curiously at the scars on Donal’s hands. Donal followed him into the kitchen and nodded when he held up the whisky bottle.

What did you do?

Collect dead birds.

Colin handed him a glass.

Still play?

Donal didn’t answer.

Seen Madeleine?

Yes.

Why dead birds? asked Colin.

Snakes.

Snake-eating birds?

Bird-eating snakes. Anything-eating snakes. It’s all dying out there. They talk about half-lives. It is a place full of snakes. Back-fanged. He held out his hands.

Colin nodded. Here for a while?

Maybe. I built a place across the strait. Donal hummed out loud the tune that was in his head. What’s that called?

“Ships Are Sailing,” said Colin absently.

The name came back soft and sure as a fog-bird on the wing. Donal thought, Now I can leave again.

Bung your eye! said Colin lifting his glass. Feels like I’m waking from a dwall seeing you here. I’m going to Dagmar’s tonight for a bonfire. My little girl, Nyssa, fiddles like the wind. You should hear her. She can fiddle anyone into the ground. Still play?

Donal nodded.

Colin stood, his fingers loose on his glass, and studied the familiar stranger. Then he reached across the space between them into Donal’s shirt pocket and helped himself to a cigarette.

N
yssa dreamed smells. She dreamed she was wandering in a place lit by fireflies. The dusk gardens were scented with purpurea and sweet peas, overrun by unruly pink performance her mother had planted. Sweet alyssum warmed the air. The day had been suddenly hot and then just as suddenly it had rained and the perfume from damp cedar and sweet grass filled the night air. Partyish bursts of laughter came from bowers in the trees and a voice said, She’s coming into ear. From behind the gardens in the dark shadows Nyssa saw Moll in a cage. She said to the cage dream-rudely, What are you doing here?