Dagmars Daughter (20 page)

P
eering up through her own icy hair Nyssa heard the familiar voice.

Girl, awake! Keening time.

What is this? said Nyssa, trying to raise her head.

The bony woman stood above her where she had struggled her way to the hole lined with blackberry earth. Frost-bite ate her cheeks. Through the frozen glooming Nyssa saw Moll’s legs with her single good eye. Moll sat with filthy socks over her hands, her thumbs poked through holes once made by toes. There was no smell in that cold.

Moll tugged at Nyssa’s frozen feet and said, My feet are froze. Give us your boots.

Nyssa lay trying to move her fingers and Moll tore off her brocade boots.

What? moaned Nyssa.

Quiet, said Moll. Inside a woman is a wonder! She slapped her thigh.

Nyssa shifted, trying to get her other shoulder out of the ice. Looked for shelter for her naked feet. She could not tell whether she was looking into Moll’s blank black eyes or the starless storm sky. Things were flat and she could see nothing from her right eye.

Everything happens between a woman’s legs, Moll said. Out came my baby, nose curled forward in its little sack and couldn’t breathe. My little mousebaby and I turned it over and counted its tiny arms and legs, one two three four. I dropped it into the sea and went back to the grub house and stared at a picture of a Venus with broken-off arms.

Moll whooped then, pulled in her arms and swung the empty sleeves to both sides like a pinwheel.

Look, girl, she cried, no arms to hold no baby. She craned her head to stare at the ice still falling from the sky. She said, Weak skin’s my home. Your mother made this storm, and she won’t stop it.

She sucked in her cheeks, pinched her lips like a fish, stared at Nyssa, her nose frostbitten. She said, The cracker berries gone. No one brings me a groaning cake. All the universe is between a woman’s legs. Sure as worms.

She looked down on Nyssa’s feet, naked without her boots. She took off Nyssa’s sweater and pants and socks and hat. She squatted over the girl curled on her side, head tucked into her knees. She judged against her.

Nyssa heard Moll and did not move. She could not think what had made her set out as she had to come here. She was only sure that she might die if she could not rouse herself but each time she tried to rise she fell back. To venture to where there is no memory or conscience or any of the things by which human beings try to order what has no order is to go where life is forever altered by neither reason nor compassion. Nyssa was so frozen that she no longer knew if she was dying or dreaming or already hanging dead like a skinned rabbit from a meathook. She was divested of what she had been and did not yet know if she would become something other.

I
t is a condition of language to search for meaning in its most indistinct syllables. In the babble of the tiniest child. In the raving of the demented. Norea’s talk grew more unravelled with each frozen day. She slept little. Dagmar paced down below. Rage murdered sleep. Dagmar tried to ignore her mother’s talk. Yet perverse shards of truth escaped and sliced the air between them.

That last night Dagmar stoked the fire in Norea’s room against the barren air and tucked her mother in with layers of quilts. Pinned under the comforters Norea listened to the tedious ice pinging on the window.

You make the tea too strong, said Norea, stiffly straightening her bird legs. This bedding’s too heavy. And filthy. Did we spring clean? She looked at her daughter and was not sure who she was.

Outside, ice pelted the windows in a night beclamoured with noise.

Norea said, Shut the window. Don’t you hear all that howling?

I don’t hear anything.

When it stops you’ll know you’ve been hearing it your whole life.

Dagmar shut the slats in the windows.

Not that much! said Norea. The cold hurts my eyes. My hips are terrible today. She sipped the tea, and said, Too strong. She shook her head. She recognized Dagmar for a moment and was soothed. She said contentedly, Do you remember how your father used to walk down to the sea with us to watch the seals?

I never met my father, said Dagmar.

Of course you did, said Norea, agitated.

Dagmar bit the insides of her cheeks to check her tongue. Her mother was confused. Her father. The seals. The bawn before she was born. A girl named Pippin. I’ll get some more firewood, she said.

Don’t walk away from me, called Norea. Then suddenly remembering something, she said, I dreamed about Nyssa.

Dagmar turned. What did you dream, Mother?

She replied, She was kneeling on the ice, a seal-meadow below the gaze at the top of the island. She’d come from as far as the puffins. She pulled herself over pumly rocks. She stood up and scuffed. Danced right here back on the island.

There’s a dream, said Dagmar. Get a little rest, Mother. I’ll go make you something to eat.

Norea said in her thin voice, Bring your father a bite too. I’ll see you after I come back from the dory. Your tea’s too strong. Make it weak.

She fell then into the relief of sleep. She dreamed words she had never heard.
Bamblys, piluinas, colinovis, kamovis
. She saw seals sea-silent, gazing unblinking from the brine at a poor barefooted creature. With ragged unpredictability her memory revealed and hid things again. Norea trembled as if on an open sea with no shore and no season, alive to the continuous torture of one question: who am I? Sometimes she knew where she came from and sometimes she did not. She sometimes knew Dagmar’s tread coming in her room but sometimes she did not. She rarely knew if it was day or night, yet the habit of fierceness was alive in her still.

That night her feet twitched her out of bed and inched her across the floor. She felt for an old and ripped silk stocking in her drawer and took it to her worktable. She ran her hands over the surface, touching the things Nyssa had scavenged along the shore, pebbles and shells, dried seaweed and the sea’s bones. She ripped open the foot of the stocking and tied the other end closed. She stuffed the driftwood and sea-weed inside. With her stiff fingers she packed all of the things on the table into her stocking. She tied off the toe with her teeth and laid it down in front of the fireplace. She felt for the heavy iron tongs, picked them up, swung them over her head and down hard. Up arced the stocking into the air. It spilled out its guts of dried wood and weed like blood and caught fire on the rag mat on the floor. Shells and bones and pebbles clattered. Words chanted themselves through Norea’s mouth. I don’t touch the queen, or the queen touch me.

Then the old woman struggled back to bed through the chill room, pulled the heavy blankets over her and groaned old sounds to her aching joints and slept again until the smoke burned her throat. Who was that now in her room beating the floor with an old rug? She was thirsty and the smoke stung her eyes. She wanted to lift her heavy limbs but couldn’t.

Dagmar finished putting out the fire and looked down at the restless shade in the bed. Her mother would burn the place down. She searched the room for embers, opened the window to blow out the smoke. The old woman’s face was wan on her pillow, cheeks sunken over her empty gums, hair fine as a baby’s. Dagmar tucked in the sides of her mother’s blankets. She stood over the bed, watching the eyes moving under translucent veined lids, listened to her dry lips mumble, Dagmar.

Dagmar stroked her hair and her forehead and smoothed the deep creases between her eyebrows. She dabbed some water on a finger and dropped it on her mother’s parched mouth. The old lips opened and the tongue moved out and forward like a newborn’s trying to suck. Drop by drop, Dagmar helped Norea drink until the wandering tongue stopped its slow pulsing and the sleeping woman closed her mouth silent and still again, the skin around her temples gone slack. Dagmar leaned down tenderly and laid her cheek against Norea’s. The touch burned Dagmar’s skin like ice.

W
hat is the effect of prolonged anguish on the mind? Norea swung her bird legs over the edge of the bed and stood on shaking claws. She put her yellow sun hat on her head against the sun in the cairn. Hand over hand along the cold wall she made her way down the narrow staircase and into the kitchen and out through the half door into the ice. She stopped breathing at the slap of cold and marvelled. Where was the little seal dancing in from her snowy raft on a fiddle tune? She was maddened by her drifty mind and she straightened her night-gown. She tapped along the path into the frozen bawn, sifting through chunks of ice for her stone markers and found her cairn with a relief known only to the blind. She made her way along the cairn’s stones into the head and she sat down. The world was dying and Dagmar’s grief was just begun. Where was Nyssa? A little song now. Perhaps the “Hauling Home” song, to make him laugh. But she was so warm. She had to get these clothes off. Blind alone. The silver thaw shining. Beyond, the ragged harbour, buckly ice and storm breakers.

F
rom her hole in the gaze, Moll heard the voice that had long ago groaned through the bushes with her. The bony woman rose and left Nyssa’s bluing body and walked through the dread cold.

Norea murmured without effect into the frozen air, Mow. Wretched dry sounds from cracked lips. She slipped into frozen delirium. She watched herself as if from outside, muttering, Open the door. She tried to move her toes, to lift her own parched and swollen tongue. She took off her slippers, her summer hat, nightgown, panties, bra and wedding ring. Six doors she passed through until finally she passed through the seventh door naked and bowed low. To her surprise, when she raised her eyes she could see again, but all she could see was Moll’s blank black eyes. And she could hear now all the vibrations of the island. She could hear the sounds and sweet airs in the caves and in the trees. A thousand twangling instruments hummed in her ears from the sea and the wind. These things she’d felt all her life and now she heard them distinctly, too many for naming, all those long years of living her preparation for this. She could hear Nyssa turning over in Moll’s hole, lined with blackberry earth, trying to rouse herself.

She felt a tear drop from each eye and roll down her cheeks onto the ice. Her tears warmed the ground and two mauve hepaticas sprang up. Then Moll judged against her and she died and the huddled birds in the cracking dawn fell silent on their frozen branches.