Dagmars Daughter (3 page)

E
ach month Meggie Dob, who desired a child, cried at the coming of her blood. Norea, round with her own child, came to give Meggie back her mother’s locket and found her weeping in the barn near the old bull. At Meggie’s sadness, Norea couldn’t help letting a few of her own salt tears fall into the straw. She used the same comfort words her mother-the-bird had often spoken, Don’t you mind your troubles; something always comes of them. And she was careless how she let her tears fall.

The next day when Meggie went out to the barn she heard the cries of two babies from beside the old bull. She dug into the straw and found an infant boy tucked beside the coarse hair of the animal and an infant girl lying head to foot with him. She picked up the babies, swaddled them in her own soft sweater, and since no one knew where they were from, the people of the settlement agreed that Meggie Dob might keep them and raise them as her own. Meggie clasped Norea who came to visit and to bless the soles of the babies’ tiny feet. The boy’s eyes were fierce and his cry demanding. He was perfectly formed, already long limbed and strong. The girl was not. She had a slope to her shoulders and her tiny chin was stuck down on her chest. She had rocker-bottom feet, and a webbed neck and elbows. Her eyes were lit bright.

Meggie said to Norea, jostling the two of them at once, It’s as if you cried them right out for me!

Irritable with her own baby’s bumping inside against her ribs and bladder, Norea answered sharply, You must be hagged to say a thing like that!

But with a quick change of heart she hugged Meggie, arms full of those long-desired babies, and said, I don’t know how they got here, but it’s cruel wonderful for you. What will you name them?

Donal is the boy, Meggie said. Though he comes from tears, he will one day be world mighty. And this poor little fish will be Madeleine, after my own mother who drowned under the sea.

N
orea gave birth at home alone and watched over her stubborn-jawed newborn with fierce resignation and the clear conviction that she would lose this daughter as she’d lost everyone she loved. When the child lived past a year, Norea finally believed she might survive and named her Dagmar.

Dagmar grew sturdy and strong and Norea let her do as she liked. She dropped her from the milk wagon at the little school each morning but the child always ran home early to watch the planting and picking. One day Norea gave her three carrot tops to root in shallow dishes of water on the windowsill. The next day the child’s carrots had roots spilling in white tangles down to the floor. The little girl carried them outside and planted them near the house. That evening she solemnly dug up three well-formed carrots and gave them to Norea.

And where did you get these? said Norea.

I grew them from the tops you gave me, answered Dagmar.

Norea had no reason to disbelieve her. Instead she chopped off three more tops, handed them back to the child and watched with amazement as she repeated the miraculous growing of the day before. Then she gave her daughter apple seeds and watched a small orchard appear in twenty-eight days.

Norea studied her unnatural child and concluded that a bit of soil from this new country had got into her to make an unnatural species. Norea would have quietly contented herself with her daughter’s crops of carrots, tomatoes and apples, but little Dagmar couldn’t stop, and cleared larger sections of garden into the black spruce and tamarack, made a cold frame, and when she was older, she built the island’s first greenhouse. Roots she sowed overnight—onions, potatoes—and the above-ground squashes and cucumbers she let take a little longer. There was enough to give away during the thin springs. Only once Norea said, Do you know how you do it?

The girl looked at her. It is easy. Plants want to live.

Norea then knew that her daughter grasped her uncanny power. She tried to teach Dagmar to speak Irish. But she refused and kept to the language of Millstone Nether. Exchanging seeds and looks and words, the girl and the young woman created a life in their small rooms filled with mysteries neither understood. Each night they lay side by side in bed, Norea soothing her daughter with stories and fingers laced through the child’s.

Dagmar stuck her feet up in the air, grabbed her young mother’s muscular thigh and teased, I’ve got your leg.

Norea wrapped her hand around the child’s foot and said, I’ve got your toes.

The girl slipped away, scrambled down to the bottom of the bed and snatched at Norea’s toes saying, No you don’t, I’ve got yours.

Then she tipped off the bed and hid underneath, calling, Come find me! Before Norea could look, Dagmar appeared from under the other side, dragging out a pair of old boots, and asked, What’re these?

Those are my mother’s boots, said Norea as the girl put them on and shuffled along the floor. Hide them away again when you’re done. They’ll be yours when you’re old enough, though you’ll never need them. I’ll see to that, and that’s a promise.

Norea was only twenty, but she had travelled an ocean and married and buried a man and given birth to a daughter. There were still appetites. When her daughter was asleep at night, Norea sometimes stole out to meet a fisherman whose wife with five children was too tired for him in her bed. That was how, under an overturned dory, Norea got pregnant with a child she feared the island people would not abide. She decided she wouldn’t carry a child whose father did not want to be known.

T
hat droughty spring dry weather threatened all the meagre crops. Small forest birds, foxy-Toms and striped-heads and mopes and purple finches, kept flying against the settlement’s windows. Norea and Dagmar got up at dawn and found them lying, necks broken on the ground, and gathered them up. Together they examined the coloured feathers, the staring eyes, the stiff, still feet. Norea delighted in watching the sun come up behind her daughter’s curly dark hair falling over the dead birds. Dagmar examined the airiness of each wing, touched through the feathers into the birds’ fine bones across their breasts. Mother and daughter dug little graves at the back of their farm, a row of bird-filled mounds to remind them of this hard dry spring of strange winds. Together they tore bright strips of rags and hung them against the windows of the houses to warn the birds away from their own reflections. When the work was done, Norea held young Dagmar’s face between her large palms and tried to memorize the brightness of her eyes. She wrapped her gaze around this beloved one and worried about what to do about the baby she did not want.

As she pondered, she walked out in the field with Dagmar’s hand in hers, looked at the parched apple trees and said distractedly, If we don’t get some rain soon there’ll be no apples this year. Dagmar stared gravely into the sky. Smurry clouds moved in from the horizon and a great rainstorm soaked the island with fresh water for two days and a night. When it was over they watched the fragrant apple blossoms open before their eyes.

Later in that month of odd weather, Norea remarked, It’s hot for the wild strawberries this year, and the child said, Don’t worry. Something will come of it.

By evening the temperatures had dropped and the low plants on their farm were thick with delicate fruit. After that, Norea tempered what she said about the weather in front of the girl. It was one thing to have a green thumb and another to reshape the sky. Norea watched her free-hearted daughter as if she were a foreign creature and she said to her, You won’t have to run away as I did. All this place is yours when I turn into honey. She marvelled at the girl’s strong mind and averted her eyes when Dagmar planted. It was better not to look, for she sometimes thought she saw new shoots and leaves growing right out of the girl’s fingers.

N
orea nudged the old fishbones away from the path up to Moll’s door with her foot. She knocked and when no one answered she pushed it open.

Moll was crouched on the floor inside and said, What do you want?

Norea said, I need to get rid of something.

Moll looked up with blank black eyes. She said, Best babies are merry-begots.

I can’t bear this child. These island people.

Tuck it in a basket, leave it at da’s door. No one has a proper place but makes their own.

He’ll never claim it.

Won’t know breath your way.

Please.

Moll stood to her full height and said, Bring me boiling water.

Norea walked back to her house and put the kettle on. She took Dagmar to Meggie’s house and asked her to watch the child overnight. She went back for the water and talked aloud. Rory, she said into the steam from the kettle, if you’d stayed I wouldn’t be at this. She heard the kettle’s whistle and quickly, to prevent the churning of her own thought, she took the boiling water back to the little shack where Moll crouched, sifting through a basket of sweet-smelling blossoms on the floor. Moll poured out a cup of water, snapped off some of the tansy flowers, stems and leaves, and mixed them in. She waved Norea over to a heap of old rags in the corner and handed her the tea.

Bitter buttons for the path wanderer, Moll said. Do not sorrow when what you lose you’ll never have again.

Norea raised the cup to her lips and drank the hot sweet-smelling liquid. She swallowed and drank again and swallowed until it was all gone and then she waited. The poison spread warm and violent through her body, and terrified she put her fingers into her mouth and tried to get rid of what was not yet down. Her skin beaded in sweat and cramps roiled up from her stomach against her heart and down into her womb. She bent over herself as if she were going to die, then threw up to the side and fell back from the knotting pain that twisted from her insides out. She lay back panting and faint. Then the blood. She did not at first notice it. She was throwing up yellow froth, and desperately she turned on her hands and knees and sagged into a crawling creature. Her head dropped through the sweat and she saw blood between her legs and felt the wrenching at her womb and the cramps that seized her. Moll’s cold hand pulled off her underthings. She fell on her elbows, cheek flat against the foul rags and begged for mercy from sour dry lips, but still the cramps waved through her body and still her insides heaved and the blood poured out of her until she fell limp into the floor.

In her delirium she saw all that she had been and what she would become. She saw seals and snow. She saw her own mother balancing on bird feet and broken wings. She saw Rory’s lips singing and Dagmar’s lips latching on to her swollen nipple. She saw Moll’s bones.

Moll looked dispassionate at the colour of her skin and her swollen tongue and her lifeless closed eyelids. Moll listened to her moaning and mumbling, My belly, my back. She listened and then she went to her hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze for the night.

On the second afternoon Meggie Dob came by looking for Norea and Moll threw rocks at her to keep her away. Meggie pushed in and saw Norea lying in a filthy bloody heap on the rags.

What have you done to her? she demanded of Moll.

What have flowers done? What has dory’s darkness done? Do not ask why! hurled back the bony woman squatting in the shadows between Norea and the door. Throw her in the sea. She’s not needed here.