Dagmars Daughter (22 page)

From the sharpened edge, Nyssa spoke her wrath against him: He stays in his house and dreams of playing great concerts. Let him stay!

The storm was over and there were things to do. An old woman in a yellow straw hat on the kitchen table waiting to be buried.

The people of the settlement gathered with their fiddles and guitars outside Dagmar’s house. They came through the door with a pine box and lifted Norea into it. They wrapped Nyssa in blankets and carried her outside where the earth was flooded with meltwater. A hundred fiddles and whistles and drums played the pine box out the door of the house where a young girl from Ireland had composed her life. The choir of fiddles drowned out the roar of the ocean. The whole island melted, running in long shining streams to the sea, the land damp, the air awash in water. The whine and scratch and tune of a hundred fiddles. They played “Barrel of Fiddles” and “Nana’s Boots.” They lowered the pine box into the ground, and Dagmar sang in the tongue she’d listened to her mother speak and had never spoken with her:

É ho `ro’s ‘na eheil air m’air.

And the other women joined with her singing,

’S mór an nockd a tha mi ‘caoidh

Madeleine stepped out of the company, bent down and picked up a handful of the thin earth and took Nyssa’s wounded frostbitten hand and held it and filled it. Then the young woman raised her arm high above her head as if she were brandishing a clay axe through the air and with one cocked eyebrow she let the earth fall on top of the pine box.

D
agmar dug with ardour into the thawing ground. She moved through the smashed greenhouse and cleaned and stacked up her broken pots. Trees were down everywhere. She wandered into the cairn and stroked two delicate hepaticas balanced on hairy stems, little patches of mauve in the cold.

She tended her daughter, split in two as if she were a chest-nut broken open and both halves her. She watched and waited and wanted to hold her close, wrap her arms around her shoulders, run her hands through her red hair, devour her eyes. But as soon as she was up, the girl defied touch. She wandered away and would not sleep in the house. She took a few things to live down by the sea in an old fisherman’s summer shack.

Dagmar, who could not yield to trouble, let her go. Now Dagmar was alone for the first time in all her long life.

As she piled branches and chopped trees for drying she looked around and thought, The understory will do very well in all this light and air. There will be plenty of sun coming through for new ferns and grasses. There are so many cavity trees now. The smaller, weaker creatures will flourish.

The old do not sleep soundly. She chopped harder and tried to wear herself out. In the evenings she wandered down to look at the sea. The ticklaces nested in the cliffs, small pearl-grey gulls soared in their great circles, rose off the water and whirled like gusts of snow driven by the wind. She remembered how she trailed after Norea as a child, learned to care for the strongest seedlings and kill the rest, how she made the clouds part and how she made things grow. Since the storm, the seedlings did not sprout roots under her fingers as they had once done and she wondered if a woman’s powers are used up or passed on. Standing outside the fisher-man’s hut, she listened to Nyssa’s chants and silence. She remembered the girl with all that kinked hair flying out of the apple tree at a summer bonfire and fiddling a reel for dancers. All that music.

One day Dagmar borrowed a fiddle for Nyssa and left it by the door of the fisherman’s hut. The next evening she heard plinks and ringing notes. She heard the windy scraping of the bow played far from the bridge. She heard one clear, plain note. She listened to music that sees through, music played with the open ear. In one note all notes, over-tones and harmonics ringing together, unperceived vibrations waiting to be heard. The mother listened and remained silent. Here in her daughter’s music were all the sounds of the island. Here was the power that could grow seedlings and part clouds.

And when Dagmar stretched out that night in her old bed, her ears still ringing with her daughter’s music, she thought about how much she had pared life down. To planting and sowing. To a lover and children and her mother. She had cut off anything that had asked her to be other than what she was. She had loved as best she could. Had it been enough? In her loneliness she still hoped for the tap, tap, tap, of a coin on the window. She admitted that if she heard it she would rise stiffer than before to walk outside in the dark to be with him. To be once again and once more with the watery one who lived not in her wisdom but in his own.

T
here is a time for the chatter of ice and a time for the passing of flesh. There is a time to test the mettle and a time for agon. There is a time to rest.

Nyssa was whirled and spun below and divested of what she had once been. Ice filled her veins and she was in the lowest deep, a lower deep. There she achieved the silence that portends a new tongue. She grew stronger and she walked the shore and the gaze. She picked up the little fiddle Dagmar had left by the door and found in it strange new sounds. When she tried to write the sounds, they did not seem to belong on a musical staff at all. And then one day two full seasons after the storm she wrote down a new tune and she heard inside and unbidden, fingertips brushing against her skin and the rhythm of a ground bass. That day she mourned fitfully, Gone is my love, my sweet love.

She walked along the shore to find Donal’s sister. She called outside her door, Madeleine!

Madeleine was working on a large piece of plywood. She cut the board in half with two horizontal lines, one green and one blue. Above the green line, spaced evenly across the width of the board, were four trees. Under each tree was a different creature, a cow, a rabbit, a puffin and a deer. Below the blue line was a sea full of life, a whale and dolphins and seals and cod. She was painting a tiny border all around the picture woven through with creatures, birds at the top, animals on the sides, and fish along the bottom. She called her painting
The World
and wrote those words crudely in the border through the fish.

Nyssa knocked and she opened the door, her crabbed hands covered with paint.

Where is Donal? Nyssa asked.

Madeleine paused and said, I promised never to tell.

You know?

The woman nodded her head. Of course.

Will you help me find him? asked Nyssa.

The older woman stepped outside and said, He did not ask for what he found with you. He is much changed.

But he got it, answered Nyssa. Why does he think he can hide? All is the price of all.

He is afraid, said Madeleine.

His lips touched mine, said Nyssa. Our strings played together as one.

The older woman said, Would you like to see my picture?

She led Nyssa in to look at the large piece of plywood. Nyssa looked at Madeleine’s familiar bright colours and light touch, flying things and swimming things. She asked, Why is he afraid?

Her eyes full of tears Madeleine answered, I cannot say. One can never know for another. I know only that I love him. I would do anything to end his suffering. I would give my life for him and share his fate.

Here was compassion.

Nyssa gazed at Madeleine’s sea, the whale rising out of the water as if to kiss with its great tongue the cow. Against the sister’s compassion the brittle bone of her judgement broke.

Find him, said Nyssa. Tell him his fate is not to run away.

A
nd so it was that Donal, who now walked on a wooden leg, arrived back on the shore of Millstone Nether carrying his double bass.

The people of the island joked when they saw him heading for Nyssa’s little house by the sea, It’s in the blood of those Nolans. They knit their twine with holes in it. There’ll be a party tonight.

They gathered at the pole house to see the girl with all that kinked hair and the man with the wooden leg touch horsehair to sheepgut. Together they played their “Passacaglia” and after, other things. Many times that night Donal’s bull fiddle fell silent while Nyssa played her new sounds and new rhythms, unformed things that pleased no one but herself. When she was finished, Colin rose and said, Here’s one I’m calling “The Ice Storm Reel.” The young girls got up and danced.

The Millstone Nether people called for more and played together the old reels and jigs and strathspeys. They were happy to hear again the playing of Nyssa, who went her own way and Donal, who went with her, to hear the sounds those two alone could wring from fiddle and double bass. They did not care what would come of it. They were happy to play their old songs. They accepted it all in the same way as the sea caresses or destroys whatever falls upon its waves.

Near dawn when everyone was gone and Donal asleep, his wooden leg leaned against the wall, Nyssa heard Moll’s kettle in the woods. She rose and followed the low moan up to the hole lined with blackberry earth.

She approached Moll warily. She listened to the bowl and to the dark one groaning her chant. When Moll fell silent and she laid down the bowl and bone, Nyssa asked, What bone is that?

You ask too many questions.

Is it the femur of a man?

Too much knowledge makes you old.

What man?

The one once called world mighty.

Nyssa said, Who were you before you came here?

Moll rose then to her full bony height, taller than any man on the island. The eyestone was tied in a pouch at her waist. Her blank black eyes reflected the light of Nyssa’s gaze. Her fingers stretched toward the sky in an act of supplication and then she wrapped her long arms around her breasts to her back in solitary embrace. Her naked feet clenched the low browed rocks and she turned toward the seine-gallows by the sea. She said that she could not remember her former life, that she had been put in a state of perpetual mourning but did not know how or why. She said it was lost in the hold of a ship or perhaps beneath the sea. She said that what is lost must be found again because it mourns always under the surface but that she could find nothing and so she lived insatiable in the woods. She said that there was still more music to be played and that Nyssa might play it. She said that in former times a woman who went into the darkness was revered when she returned. She told how the people made processions and the women adorned their right sides with men’s clothing and the men adorned their left sides with women’s clothing and they poured dark and light beer for her. They played music for her. She said once again that music is a kind of practice for death. Then she was silent and she walked down toward the shore and disappeared into the dawn. Nyssa watched her go. There was more of her. Always more. There.

a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

O
ne of the oldest accounts of a woman’s descent to the underworld is the Sumerian story of the goddess Inanna. The best translation of this that I know is
Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth
by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer (Harper & Row, 1983). The story of Inanna’s marriage to Dumuzi and her heroic encounter with Ereshkigal in the underworld was recorded in cuneiform by means of reed stylus on clay tablets that date to early in the second millennium. I have been much impressed by Inanna’s vitality and daring. The first line of her descent story is
From the Great Above, she opened her ear to the Great Below
. In Sumerian the word for “ear” and the word for “wisdom” is the same.

Later, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story of Persephone, not striding freely into the underworld like her Sumerian predecessor, but abducted by Hades, and of her grieving mother, Demeter, searching for her. My favourite translation of this story is
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter
, edited by Helene P. Foley (Princeton University Press, 1994).

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English
, edited by G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin and J.D.A. Widdowson (University of Toronto Press, 1982) has been invaluable. I have found traditional music and lyrics in Carmel O Boyle,
The Irish Woman’s Songbook
(The Mercier Press, Cork and Dublin, 1986),
Traditional Folk Songs from Galway and Mayo
, collected and edited by Mrs. Costello, (The Talbot Press, Dublin, 1923) and
Old Irish Folk Music and Songs: A Collection of 842 Irish Airs and Songs Hitherto Unpublished
, by P.W Joyce (Longmans, Green, and Co., Dublin, 1909). I have listened to many contemporary artists working with traditional material. I am grateful to the Trinity Dance Company for their inspiring choreography and performances.

I am much indebted to Ann Southam for her discussions about composition with me, and to Joel Quarrington for his knowledgeable, sensitive and witty answers to questions about the double bass and the string repertoire. Thank you especially for the “Passacaglia.” To Barbara Moon and to D.D. in New York, my thanks for incisive reading. Thanks to Alice Van Wart and to Cheryl Carter, Brian Mackey and Sandra Campbell for their insights through successive drafts. To Bruce Westwood and Hilary Stanley, many thanks for huge literary enthusiasm.

A special thank-you to my publisher and editor, Cynthia Good, and to Mary Adachi, for editing and discussions that have been transformative. There were moments radiant with synchronicity.

To Madeleine Echlin, Cynthia Lee, Adam and Ann Winterton, Leslie and Alan Nickell, I thank you each for your separate gifts of the love that “seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease. . .” To my husband, Ross, and to Olivia and Sara, I am daily grateful to you who live in the dailiness of it. I think Blake wrote, “Gratitude is heaven itself.” Let this be so.