Dagmars Daughter (2 page)

Child, she whispered, tears falling from her eyes. Don’t cry.
Tá mé sásta le m’staid
. I’m a bird with a broken wing. Carry me away on your shoulder. You can do better than I did. Promise me. Take me away from here.

Drinking and telling stories, they kept the body in the front room three days and nights and Norea had plenty of time to think. Before they moved the coffin from the house to the churchyard to bury her mother, Norea had a fit in front of her brothers, her father and the priest, in front of the neighbour women who’d scrubbed and dressed the corpse and now took turns keening for the dead and tending the motherless new-born. Sinewy of spirit, Norea stood at the end of the coffin and screamed, Leave me alone with her, leave me alone!

She tossed her long red hair and wept so bitterly that the young priest took everyone away and closed the door, murmuring, Give her a moment, then. Her only mother, and her now left to cope.

It was the first time in her life Norea had been alone in a room. Quick as she could and wailing loud enough to cover up any noise, she reached into the coffin and took the boots right off her mother’s stiff still feet. She tied them under her skirt against her legs, closed down the lid and lay on top of the coffin, sobbing. Finally the priest pushed in, took the girl by the shoulders and nodded at the men to carry the coffin away without another look inside.

After the funeral, when half the village men lay drunk in her kitchen and the other half sat drunk in the pub, Norea wandered down to watch the seals popping their heads out of the waves. Her brothers were huddled like puppies in two big beds at home, but there wasn’t a thing she could do. She reached under her skirt, pulled out her mother’s boots and walked away. She walked as far as Dublin, pressing herself behind stone fences like a sheep during the day and feeling for the edge of the road with her feet at night. She talked to her mother-the-bird on her shoulder as she walked. She said hurried rosaries when she passed the roadside Mary shrines. When she arrived weary in the city, she saw tall buildings for the first time and couldn’t imagine why people liked to live in such high rooms. She was afraid of being found and taken back, so she cut her hair and stole some trousers, called herself Pippin and got onto a ship as a scullery boy. She carried her mother across the sea farther than she’d ever imagined, and after she was discovered she spent the rest of her journey in the fearsome stench-filled hold, starving and filthy and thirsty and heartsick. Finally after twenty-eight days they sailed into the mouth of a great river that cuts half a continent in two.

The sea tosses up our losses, the torn seine, the broken oar. Norea saw the smoke of the settlement when they were anchored off Millstone Nether and jumped ship without a coin in her pocket, too afraid of what might happen to her if she stayed aboard. There was work trenching potatoes and minding children for a girl with strong arms, and for a while Norea slept in others’ huts, under others’ stairs. Still, she had no desire to live indentured, little better than what she’d left behind. Before four seasons passed she managed to save enough to buy a horse and cart, and each morning before dawn she milked the cows at Meggie Dob’s farm and bought the milk, and to the satisfaction of those hard-working island women, she delivered milk and eggs and gossip through the half doors of the settlement, driving her milk wagon along and playing a little pennywhistle.

Is the milk fresh today? one teased.

If it were any fresher, it’d be grass, laughed Norea, handing over the clinking bottles.

Norea, called another, Finn said he had eggs cheaper than yours.

Watch out for that one, she flung back. He’ll steal the skin off your bones.

Old Mrs. Murphy observed the cheeky red-haired, hard-working milk-girl and one morning sent her son Rory out to fetch the milk. He stood holding the empty bottles, tossing stones against a tree. He watched her drive her horse and admired how she swung down off the seat of her wagon, tied the reins and carried the heavy milk bottles, singing,

The gardener’s son being standing by,
Three gifts he gave to me, me—
The pink, the rue, the violet blue,
And the red, red rosy tree,
The red, red rosy tree.

Come all you maids, where’er you be,
That flourish in your prime, prime.
Be wise, beware, keep free from care,
Let no man steal your thyme, thyme,
Let no man steal your thyme.

When he stepped in front of her she said, What’s a young man doing standing about on a morning when the boats are already gone?

He laughed. I’ve been sent, he said.

And are you compelled?

Well, I don’t know about that. How much for the milk?

Norea scoffed, What would you know about paying for milk? Your mother does all that. Then she handed him the full bottles, took the empty ones and drove her horse away.

Each morning Rory Murphy stood waiting for Norea.

Don’t you ever work? she said.

Only after you’ve gone, he said. I could get to work earlier if you married me.

And what do you do in the evenings?

I sing with my mother.

Is that a fact?

I have my own house and a good bawn and a dory.

With his charming smile he sang, For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone, and as she drove off, the melody of “The Nutbrown Maid” got tangled into the clop of her horse’s hooves. All day and all night she thought and the next morning she agreed to marry Rory Murphy on the condition that she keep her own name and not give up her milk route. She hadn’t walked across Ireland at night eating nettles to hand herself over to the first tuneful boy who came along. They moved into his house and Norea set to the task of learning to salt fish, and though she had no gift for it she planted carrots and potatoes in rows in the field out behind and coaxed things to grow.

On long summer evenings Norea and Rory took their supper to eat under the single apple tree beside the house. She sang to him in her mother tongue to tease him.

What’s that? asked Rory, who’d never been off the island and was pleased by his bride’s exotic stories from across the sea.

Let’s get some sleep, said Norea.

You don’t want to sleep, said Rory, slipping his hand under her blouse. What’s that song?

Not out here, creatures can see, said Norea, pulling his hand away. Will you come straight to bed with me if I tell?

I’d come anyway.

It’s the “Hauling Home” song. A month after the wedding the village makes a procession to the groom’s house. The bride rides on a horse and there’s a piper at the front door playing hard. When the groom gets there he sings a song,
Oro, ‘sé do bheatha a bhaile, is fearr liom tu ná, céad bo bainne
. Then all the men get drunk.

And what does it mean?

It means, Welcome home, I’d rather have you than a hundred milch cows, she said, spitting out apple seeds.

He laughed. Do you miss home?

She looked back at him and lied, Not a bit. Then she added, I’d rather have you and a hundred cows.

They sat, hands touching in the easy contentment of lovers who have not yet quarrelled, enjoying evening as if it would never turn into night.

Eight months later cheerful Rory died in the great flu epidemic. Norea, with a child soon to be born, crawled into bed with him to warm his chills and sponge his feverish lips. He stirred one last time, reaching for her, and her tears fell over his cheeks and stained his face pink as if he were not dying.

The Millstone Nether women shook their heads, saying they’d never seen a corpse’s face keep its colour the way Rory’s did. After that Norea was careful where she let her tears fall. But not careful enough.

A
fter the funeral, Norea trenched her potatoes. As she bent over the earth, a locket without a chain was tossed across the rows, and landed by her feet. She picked it up out of the caplin fertilizer and opened it and saw a picture of Meggie Dob’s mother inside. Through the bushes she glimpsed Moll’s naked, bony feet, dirt caked under her toenails. Norea approached her and looked into Moll’s blank black eyes.

It’s yours from the sea, said Norea, holding the tossed locket back toward her.

Sss eee! hissed Moll. She slapped her thigh and bit her lip.

Her eyes are open, Norea thought, but their sense is shut. Then she said to the bony woman, Naught’s anyone’s in the eyes of the sea.

Moll crouched back behind the bushes half-turned from the outstretched hand, but Norea stayed still and through the leaves she listened to Moll’s lips forming sounds from moans, Naaaw. Aye, sss eee.

After that Norea told little stories aloud to keep the rustle in the bushes company. About the seals at home. About village life across the ocean. When she couldn’t think of anything to say she’d sing in her ragged way. If Moll groaned unseen, Norea groaned softly to keep her company. She restored Moll’s eloquence. To Moll’s soul-alone solitude Norea offered words in the wind.

Scarce half Moll seemed to live, dead more than half. In the daylight she revealed herself in silent watching and hurling stones. Men who drank said they went to her at night. They bragged that her appetites were voracious and insatiable. They told tales to each other of being wrapped in her dire arms and of her legs twisted in a double knot around their backs. They whispered about going at her until they were half-dead of exhaustion and still she wanted more. They admitted of their backs being rained on with stones when they left and they lifted their shirts to show each other the bruises.

She’ll devour you, they dared each other.

Moll sat on gaunt haunches, her strong hands sifting through fishbones and hoarded roots. She was never seen to sleep but seemed ever somnolent. Her blank black eyes were ringed and her sullen skin weather riddled. Norea told the women to leave a jug of milk or the heel of a loaf near Moll’s door. When there was no more hope for the sickest of the sick the women visited Moll with kettles of boiling water. Moll told strange tales and chanted as she rendered out the insides of a pig and made ointment for limbs that might fall off. She made tea of sheep manure or dogwood berries for vomiting, cut off the sap bubbles of fir balsam and squeezed it into festering wounds. These were common remedies in those days that all women knew, but when nothing worked they still came to Moll. Sometimes with her the sick got better.

They found out when a boy got a fish hook caught in his eye. Though they were able to ease the barbs out of the flesh, the eyeball wouldn’t heal and it seemed to the women a shard of metal was stuck in there. They took him to Moll. Her eye-stone was the size of a pea, the colour of flesh, with a black speck in the centre of its whorl. Some thought it was the cut-off tip of conch shell from deep in the ocean. It was a living thing and had to be fed. Moll kept it in a bowl of sugar and rinsed it in a weak solution of vinegar before she dropped it into the eye of the frightened boy. It ate whatever was in there and saved his sight.

Moll had her uses and the people of Millstone Nether abided her much as they abided the sea that fed them and destroyed them with equal indifference. There is a certain darkness that bids us turn away. Moll’s was this. It is the shadow in which the snake swallows a crying frog alive, the wolf eats the wing off a living duck frozen into the ice, the caribou drags a cancerous growth, falling and struggling up and falling again. These are the incomprehensible things that we encounter with a hand over the mouth and the eyes averted. Moll walked the inroad of old darkness, appeared and disappeared in an unpredictable way. And though the people did not attempt anything against her, they taught their children to fear her. They turned their eyes from her because what she was they feared to contemplate. They never spoke of her or when they did it was in fearful or ignorant ways. In the lower deep she had been divested of compassion and of all human desire save her own endless suffering. There would always be those drawn to her. Some would survive and some would not. One day a girl would be drawn to her dark music, a girl who did not fear to open her ear to the great below, a girl who did not fear the silence from which all music comes.