Dagmars Daughter (5 page)

He agreed to allow Donal to play it just once. He watched the young man caress the neck of the bass and he listened to him play Bottesini’s “Allegretto Capriccio.” He apprehended with sorrow that his exquisite time-shaded instrument had found a worthy new guardian. Donal felt the bloom of low sound vibrate through his body like a resuscitating breath. He heard in the Maggini’s depths things that most ears do not discern. Its essence and beauty thrived in its unperceived lowest tones, like an elephant’s inaudible rumblings. The night the old man finally gave it to him, he took it to play with Colin and some young students in a smoky bar below a restaurant. He played for them a piece he improvised called “Narcissus.” At dawn a harried woman from the virtuoso’s building rushed down to the cellar and told the students that the old man was dead by his own hand. The police were looking for Donal and the Maggini.

Colin said to Donal, Is it really yours?

He gave it to me.

Then let’s go before someone decides he didn’t.

The cathedral chimes did not ring another hour before the two young men were on their way to the nearest port, looking for a ship heading west. It was reason enough to go back. When they were out on the ocean walking the deck at night their home thoughts began to take up space. Donal said to Colin, Do you remember that girl at the greenhouse? Do you think she’s married yet?

Colin answered, Can’t know. Wonder if anyone got froze on the clumpers this winter.

They were embraced after their wandering by the extraordinary musicians of Millstone Nether, who took all they liked from the travellers and tossed off what they did not fancy. They liked Colin’s recordings of music from mountains and bayou, isolated places like their own. He played them abbey and court music they admired but declined to play. They had little taste for his piano with bolts and erasers between the strings.

He’s got high-learned, joked one.

He’s jinking us, said another. That’s not music.

So Colin picked up his fiddle and scratched out “Sandy MacIntyre’s Trip to Boston” as if he’d never left. The fishermen joined him with their fiddles and guitars and spoons.

Donal had been harder stirred up by his learning and left the kitchen party early, troubled by the restlessness of a young man confined. He went to see Dagmar at blind Norea’s. They talked of the weather and the sea and planting, and he played for her what he could not speak. To his delight, Dagmar pulled out a fiddle and scratched along.

A
fter her mother died, Madeleine Dob agreed to marry Everett, a poor fisherman thirteen years older than she was and so miserly that no woman on the island would take him. The only thing he liked to do was smoke.

He came by and said to Madeleine, Yer alone. If I moved in, would you like to keep house for me?

Madeleine said, I’ll marry you if we spend equal parts on tobacco and paint.

There were some who said that Madeleine’s was a bleak life with the mean little man who wouldn’t haul in enough water, who hoarded the lamp oil and kept the fire so low there was frost on the insides of the windows all winter long.

If a poke-your-nose-in said anything about it, Madeleine answered, We get along.

On days when her hands were too stiff Everett did the milking. On days when he didn’t feel like fishing he stayed home and smoked. The insides of the once-neat house became a dark shambles of dirty dishes and clothes piled up and the mixed odours of tobacco and paint. And those few who ever got inside the dank rooms also saw Madeleine’s pictures of all the happiness of Millstone Nether tacked to every wall and stacked on sills and tables: the fishermen’s big catches, Norea’s milk wagon clopping through the settlement, the bright rush of a spring melt over the red cliffs, women holding children’s hands, ice floes on sunlit days, the yellow and white and red dories turned upside down on the shore, cows nibbling the bushes, puffins nesting along the shore, cats under bushes.

Everett watched his tiny webbed wife tying her paintbrush between her fingers with old rags when her stiffness was too great and never interfered with what he called her dabbing. She watched him smoke with a certain affection for what is familiar and did not protest the cold or dark or smoke inside. They did not prevent each other from becoming more completely who they were, and because of this their marriage worked better than many. It was a comfortably taciturn thing, an arrangement based on not-mentioning. In that inhabited silence Madeleine was free to carry on her painting and her conversation with herself.

N
orea taught Dagmar the jigs she knew from Ireland, hands hanging straight by the sides, all spirit in the nimble feet. But Dagmar didn’t like to keep her hands down and she got the other girls to perform intricate clapping patterns as they danced in circles, one inside the other, spinning and weaving and clapping as if they were a single silkworm spinning its own shroud. They went out to the pole house and stamped and clapped and showed off to each other and when their bodies’ rhythms floated down into the settlement the old people smiled. The boys’ sport was to watch them through the bushes without getting a kick from one of those hard shoes flashing by or an insult from the sharp-tongued laughing girls who wore them. Able neither to dance nor to clap, Madeleine did not join in. But she watched and painted. She painted hundreds of pictures, preserving all their steps and all the patterns of their clapping for anyone who might ever take the time to look. And though all the dances happened after nightfall, she painted the girls in sweeping swirls of yellow light.

B
y the time Donal moved back in, Madeleine was making her new cheeses. She poured fourteen gallons of skim milk for each round and let it sour in the outhouse while Donal practised. He worked his way through his beloved Bottesini as she hoisted her large pot over the fire and warmed it up. She stirred in a little rennet to gather up the curds and Donal worked on Mozart’s “Per questa bella mano.” She hung her curds in a cloth and pressed out the whey. She listened to him as she shook fish salt through the soft curds, breaking them up very small. Then she carried her curds to a long wooden board beside the house. Donal put aside his bass and came out and watched her dump them into a round bottomless pot lined with a flour-bag cloth and set on a level stone. He saw her press the curds down evenly with her knuckles and gather the edges of the cloth up over the top.

The cheese is full of your music this year, she said as she placed a wooden top down over her mould, put two more heavy stones on it and sat down to rest.

It’s warm, said Donal. It’ll turn green.

He was in a mood. He was trying to shape and push his instrument, driven by something inside he did not understand. He heard what no one else did. His music made him mighty. His brow dark, Donal turned to Madeleine and said across the ripening cheese, I want to marry Dagmar Nolan.

Madeleine said, Have you talked to her?

Donal said, I haven’t. I sit with her and her mother. I play for them. Her eyes are bright when she hears my music. I want to give her a dress. Will you make a dress for me?

Madeleine smiled. A wedding dress?

Yes.

But she’s a high-spirited girl. She grows things better than anyone on the island. Some say she has powers.

I don’t know about her powers, said Donal. I like her hair. She says she likes my playing. But I can’t speak when she’s in the room.

Then go for a walk with her along the shore.

Donal got up and walked the length of the cheese board.

Will you make me a dress? he asked again. If she loves me she will hear my heart.

Madeleine shook her head. He was stubborn and cock-sure. His music grew more inward and melancholy each day. He demanded service to his own talent and would not acknowledge another’s. But she loved him and after her animals were settled she sat by the lamp each evening and stitched with her stiff hands. She made a strapless dress of black silk. It had a nipped-in waist and fell on the bias to the floor in soft folds with a hidden zipper up the side. After seven nights Madeleine finished it up, wrapped it in clean paper, folded it neatly into a box. She lined the bottom of the box with clean shelf paper. Then she tucked in a pair of antique dancing boots with small sculpted heels and long squared toes. Raised leaves of shiny gold and cranberry and royal blue swirled over the black brocade and eight round gold buttons arced down the outside shaft of each boot. They had travelled from across the sea packed in Meggie Dob’s mother’s trunk. They came with a long buttonhook, its ornate sterling silver handle boasting a tangle of tiny vines and roses. These things were from another time. Meggie Dob had sometimes danced in these playful boots, but Madeleine, with her rocker-bottom feet, was never able to put them on, though she loved their fanciful colours. She wrapped another piece of paper over the boots and tucked the buttonhook in beside them, closed the box and tied it with a bit of twine. Then she gave it to Donal, who took it and didn’t even look inside.

Love is expressed better in fine words than in silent sincerity, she said to Donal.

He answered from his hood of bone, What would you know about love, living with buddy and the cows and a herd of goats?

D
onal’s bass did not ring perfectly with Dagmar’s fiddle no matter how carefully he tuned. It bothered him. One evening after they played together he said to her, Did that sound right to your ear?

She laughed and said lightly, Whenever you play, it sounds right to me. You’re a worrier and that’s sure. She waited for him to put aside his instrument but he clutched it and fiddled with his tuning. The truth was she was in love with him, and though she played what he wanted her to play, though she stayed back from dancing with the girls in the woods at night to open her door to him, though she grew him vegetables from her garden to take home, he never could bring himself to say that he noticed.

He said, There are wood owls that repeat songs to each other exactly an octave apart.

He adjusted his pegs and she came up close and playfully stroked the wood of his double bass. She said, Let me tune your instrument, and touched her fingers to his on the tuning screw at the bottom of the strings.