Dagmars Daughter (14 page)

Praise the end of it, said Norea and she pulled her sweater back around her and stroked the exhausted mother’s hair and struggled to straighten out her own stiff old legs. The fiddle and double bass from across the field had fallen silent.

Dagmar delivered the placenta and dropped it from her bloody aching hands. The others clamoured, Let us see it, and half carried the young woman and her baby and stiff old Norea back toward the house, already singing again.

Make her juniper tea, Norea said.

He looks like Danny, said one.

Do you think he’ll marry now? laughed another, and they sang and joked about groaning cakes and admired the baby and the mother.

Dagmar sank exhausted to the ground, wiping her aching fingers on her coat. Colin loitered behind the others and sat behind her and put his arms around her shoulders until she pushed him off.

Get away, Colin. You’re drunk, she said.

So?

Something was bothering her, a double bass and a fiddle gone silent. Where was Nyssa?

She said, Did Nyssa go up to the house?

Colin didn’t care. He said, Come here for a minute.

She whirled around and pushed him away. She hated the way he pawed her, his lips all thick and wet when he was drunk.

D
onal heard in Nyssa’s playing by the fire his own devotion to the sound that hands can wring from strings. She was like an ice-loom at sea, reflecting light along a dark horizon, wind springing up, no sign of real icebergs, only their glow in the distance. Old men knew how to navigate by the moan of the sea and an ice-loom in the air. Ears full of Nyssa, Donal could not distinguish her notes from his. Now no other fiddle would do. No one but Nyssa. Her song or nothing.

When everyone headed across the field toward the scream, Donal hit the first rhythmic notes of “Narcissus” for her. She stared at the shrouded figure. Why was he not going with the others?

Donal said from behind his mask, There’s enough of them. We’ll be in the way. Stay here.

She listened and played back at him, glad to have him to herself, echoing his tunes until finally Donal wrapped his bass into its old case and leaned it like a weary friend against a tree. He stretched out on his quilt to listen to Nyssa fiddle. The field was little changed, Dagmar’s greenhouse full. The cool island air shot through him. He breathed in the scent of lichen on the rocky shore. He saw ancient and stunted pines growing out over the breakers.

Nyssa played him some Tartini to show off, and when she was done she loosened her bow and laid her violin aside. She untied her hair and let it fall in a red tumble over her neck and sat near him.

You can play, he said, and then he propped himself up and ran his finger lightly down her forearm.

What are you doing? she said and she didn’t draw away.

Strong. Your hands. Your arms. Has anyone told you how soft the skin is here?

She looked down, seeing her own body for the first time. She let him stroke the skin on the inside of her wrist and traced the scars on his hands with her forefinger.

Heave up! she said suddenly, his taut scar tissue under her curious touch. Take off your mask. I want to see your face.

You are original and not timid, he said. She spoke with more self-anointed authority than he remembered in these island women. Used to getting her way. He took her left hand, guided it under the hood toward his lips, kissed the tips of each finger. She closed her eyes and he moved her other hand through the opening at the front of his shirt, brushing her palm against the hair on his chest. He felt her strong fingers break free from his hand to follow their own trails. He slowed himself, lay back and waited until she slid toward him, lifted the edge of his hood. He paused for breath, and buried himself in her strong shoulder and the scent of her skin. She pulled up his hood to glimpse a face darkened by years in the sun, his straw hair and tremulous eyes. She was interested and she opened her own shirt for his surprised lips to kiss her breasts. He eased his arm under her shoulders to shield her back from earth’s dampness, his bow hand and lips caressing her. In the tumid darkness he ran his finger along her forehead and saw the little crown-shaped mark at her hairline. He filled her ear with the roar of his breath. From her firm muscles, willingly she took the lead from him
due corde
. She wondered at this strange feeling of wanting him as she wanted herself.

D
agmar stood covered in blood and dirt, thin hair hanging lank around her face, dark-smudged eyes judging and condemning. Nyssa looked into those eyes familiar as her own and rose with lingering lithesome grace, pulled closed her shirt and forgot her fiddle on the ground. She ran across the field toward home.

Dagmar walked to the other side of the fire, picked up the water bucket and dumped it over Danny, who still lay passed out beside the dying embers. She touched her foot to his thigh and said, Fine thing. You’ve just made me a grand-mother. You’d better get up!

He stirred in the dirt. Uncertainly he looked around and said, Wha’?

Your son was just born. They’re all at the house. And she pushed him again and said, Get up there and help.

The words slowly penetrated his soggy mind and his long legs loped over the field, carrying him upright out of sheer will, the Nolan in him propelling him toward new life.

Donal stood and for the first time in all those years Dagmar looked into his eyes. He broke her silence.

She looks a lot like you did, Dagmar.

A white-throated sparrow trilled four notes. Grey light. Dagmar raised her chin and said, Leave her alone—you’re too old for her. She studied his eyes. He was thicker and more powerful than he had been as a boy. He inhabited his own skin as he had not before.

She said, You can’t come back here like this. You can’t do this. I won’t let you.

He got up from the ground and said, How much longer should I have waited, Dagmar, before I came home?

You took to your scrapers and left. It is too late.

Not too late. I am back.

Words like open husks.

She said fiercely, It’s not. Go away. With my bare hands I’ll hurt you if you go near her again. Leave her be. She’s young.

From his thick height he smiled. Nothing waits. You didn’t. I left and you went on. Isn’t that how it goes? I’m young still too. I like the way she plays.

A brutal grief seized her heart. She lashed out against him. I tried to play with you. I sat with you. You didn’t say a word. You turned away. How was I to know you cared?

I thought you knew. But you didn’t play like she does.

He kicked the pant-leg mask into the ashes of the fire, turned his back on her, left Colin’s double bass and walked away past the farmhouse toward his sister’s house. Lights flickered in every window of Dagmar’s rooms. Young people clattered early morning breakfast things, sang songs for the new mother and baby, bickered together comfortably.

I
n the morning Norea nudged a sooty shearwater lying dead outside the door to her balcony. She crouched over it and spread out and stroked the delicate and powerful wings that could drop into the trough of a wave and slide over its crest without wetting a feather’s tip. Broken neck.

Nana, said Nyssa, coming through the door, what happened to that hagdown? I’m in love.

He’s dead, said Norea.

How? said Nyssa.

Harbingers of bad weather, said Norea. But that’s when they’re alive. Does it have a graceful eye?

I guess, said Nyssa. It’s only a seabird.

Norea said, Forget the spirit and it dies.

She felt a tear slip down her bevelled skin and was careful to wipe it away.

Norea turned the bird over in her stiff hands. Patiently Nyssa watched her stroke the feathers, and finally Norea raised her head. You’re in love, then? I’ll have to bury this poor thing.

Yes, said the girl. His eyes are light in darkness, his hands strong and scarred, his music fills me as if it were my own.

You’ve fallen hard, said the old woman. Don’t break your neck!

Nyssa laughed and said, You know, don’t you? I think I’d die for him.

I know you wouldn’t. We die and are worm food but not for love.

Norea ran her fingers over the spine of the little bird, tried to remember how they looked soaring and dipping down hard on the dories to steal bait from trawls. She sang,

One evening last week I walked down by yon
bush,
I heard two birds singing—a blackbird and
thrush;
I asked them the reason they sang in such glee,
And the answer they gave, they were single and
free.

Come with me, Nyssa, she said. Help me bury this little soul. It’s a dread woman who wouldn’t dignify a bird with a proper burial.

Norea chose a place, in the middle of a freshly cleared field, far from her row of bird graves. Nyssa dug the hole while Norea chanted over the open earth. Then she instructed Nyssa to roll large stones to the spot to make a cairn to mark the grave.

Dagmar hurried out from the house, hair still uncombed from the night before. What are you doing? she asked.

Burying my bird, and I’m making a cairn over him.

You can’t build a cairn here. I’m using this field next year!

I guess you won’t be planting here because I am building a cairn.

Without another word the old woman dropped the stone she was holding, turned and tapped her way across the field for another.

There’s hardly earth enough for potatoes on this forsaken island and you’re making a bird graveyard! said Dagmar.

Norea kept on walking.

T
he ragged harbour was unmoved by Norea’s labour with stones. She shaped an oval enclosure over the grave. Inside she formed a round circle like a head, a long oval for a body and two stone legs with a little passage between them. Seen from above, the cairn looked like a woman’s body stretched out on the ground, measured about ten feet long and five feet across. She sang,

Lù ò ra hiù ò
o hì o hì ò
Lù ò ra hiù ò.

Norea was so thin now that she seemed to disappear between the cracks in the rocks. Nyssa pushed stones until her arms ached and she absorbed the words of her grandmother’s chanting, which she did not understand, and the tunes, which she did. All day as she heaved the stones, she thought of the touch of the stranger’s tongue between her fingers, the shine of his eyes behind the mask.