Dagmars Daughter (16 page)

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.

D
agmar opened her eyes after the restless night and saw a white flower plucked low on the stem, wake robins they’d called them 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.

T
umbly sea, deep grey swells crashing against the cold rock. Colin spoke from the blasphemy of knowing, She’s not a child, Dag. She’s got a right to go.

Dagmar raged back at him, She was taken.

She wanted to claw ragged blood rivers through his face. She wanted to scar him with her trowel. She wanted to put seeds in his eyes and blind him. She would reason herself free of his law.

Colin answered into her chill eyes, The ocean’s made of mothers’ tears. The more suddenly a young girl goes, the more she doesn’t want to be found. There were portents.

What portents? said Dagmar.

Patterns, he said. She was poised for leaving. Didn’t you know? Mothers are sometimes the last.

Dagmar felt her hand stinging his cheek. What did he know about signs?

He grabbed her wrist hard and brought it down between them, startled as he had been for forty years by her strength. He said, It’s as it should be and always was.

Had he no fear?

I will not bend to ways that have no meaning for me, she thought. What divine order have I disobeyed?

She spat on the floor between them and left.

At home she said to Norea, not for the first time, The gods will make me kill him.

Norea answered, That is no god speaking. That is your heart. The truth of it is, she’s gone.

I refuse that truth.

It is the truth.

Wrong!
That
truth will kill me.

What good is this, Dagmar? She is already gone. It’s happened, she’s off.

Now they were two old women grieving each for her own daughter.

Norea paused and said quietly, When I used to deliver milk I found all sorts of things just because people told me they were looking. The side of my wagon was taped up with notices. Once I found a lost china teacup not even chipped. Come, we’ll send signs across to the north shore. That’s sure where he is. If you measure your sorrow by her worth, it will know no end. Come. A girl like Nyssa doesn’t disappear. I’ll help you bring her back.

Dagmar went into her room and returned mutely in her oldest flowered dress.

P
ing.

The icestorm began with a single ice crystal falling on the humid glass of Dagmar’s greenhouse and melting. A drop dripping harmless. And then another.

Ping.

The people of Millstone Nether lay in their beds, listening to the beginning of the storm. Spring-winter, they thought sleepily and pulled up the covers against the temperatures strangely dropping. Late-March storms—they’d weathered plenty of these springs. Capricious crystals. Over the ocean strange ice-snow swirled onto the shore.

When the old people awoke next morning, rooms cold, snow falling with ice, they said, resigned to the weather, Well, the old lady’s picking her goose again. They called the snow dung mixen and watched the darkened world already lightly glazed with ice as if caught in the stare of a fevered eye. Transparent sleeves of ice covered young leaf buds and swish ice formed in the shallow water along the shore, tinkling like broken glass. Day deepened again and harder the ice rain fell, layer upon mottled layer, an effervescent icy cataract covering the island. One unique crystal at a time.

Ping.

Norea and Dagmar walked through the storm and gave pictures of Nyssa’s face with words scrawled below to sailors hurrying away from the rising storm. They asked the men from away to put them up on the north shore where a girl might see them. Moved by the two old women huddled under thick coats, the sailors took their signs and tacked them up on the other side of the great river. The winds ripped at them and bits of Nyssa fluttered over all the region. The girl with all that red hair smiling, her fiddle under her chin. Bits of Nyssa everywhere. Common as a fallen leaf.

Ping.

At first, people huddled together against the storm as they always did, defying pressures. The first to suffer were the very old. Papery skin and tired hearts, they huddled over kerosene lamps and camp stoves. Arms aching, women kept small babies in slings against their own skin, wrapped warm against the storm.

Ping.

At Dagmar’s the branches of the stiff old pine behind the greenhouse sagged with heavy glistening ice. A marvel. Each needle was wrapped in shining ice, each cone shining with frozen ice. It thickened in layers on branches that squeaked and cracked and finally crashed down under the weight. Branches fell away from the trunk in long reluctant tears until the whole tree cracked and broke and smashed the green-house with a spectacular crash in the freezing wind. Shattered glass mingled with ice in heaps of shards around crumpled green piles of plants and tomato seedlings. Glass sliced through rows of Dagmar’s indigo pansies freaked with jet, luminous for a few hours under the frozen leaves. Tumid ice branches fell and lay freezing on the earth. Dagmar’s radiant and difficult pink bougainvilleas, even her
opuntia compressa
with its yellow prickly pears could not withstand the rubble of ice and glass. She wrapped her apple trees with thick rags. She kept Norea’s outside loft heated with the wood fireplace and they cooked on the Rayburn in the kitchen. She stood with Norea on the porch, watching winter grasses creak and sway. They talked about Nyssa and bet matchsticks on which dangling leaf would next twist and crack and fall.

In the torment of absence Dagmar imagined Nyssa’s hair, her music, her wide grin, her green eyes. Gone. Habits of sound, of encounter, of love. Gone. With each ticking minute Dagmar was slowly broken, ribs cracked, gut cut open, heart slashed raw, lungs punctured. She awoke in the night, thinking what could she do more. Never are we closer to our own godliness than in loss. Reflecting backwards we apprehend unbearably how mortal and limited we are. If only we had thought like gods. The suffering of loss is infinite because we are sure things might have been different if only we could think in the way of eternity.

The people of Millstone Nether clung to their old radios and listened to the crackling voices of ships’ weather forecasters who said they’d never seen such strange build-ups of pressure in the early spring. All the buds on the ground bushes were dead and the small hard berries cracked off without getting green. Dagmar wandered her bawn and along the shore, looking across the great river and mourning Nyssa. The dusk drew on, loosing from striving every living thing in all the world save her.