Dagmars Daughter (6 page)

Don’t. I just got it right, said Donal. He smelled her thick earthy hair and he desired her. He wanted to touch his lips to hers but he clutched his bass and let his gaze fall.

She turned sharply then and said, It’s late, Donal. I’m off to bed.

Donal carried his double bass outside and through the darkness back to the gloom of Madeleine’s front room. Slowly he loosened all the pegs. The strings limp and silent he retuned, searching for the low C that bothered him most, and he dropped from the traditional tuning in fourths to a new tuning in fifths. With it he could play a clean octave below Dagmar’s fiddle. He delicately twisted the tuning pins at the bottom of the strings, ran his fingers up their long length and adjusted the pegs again, turning and squeezing them into the wood of the neck. Then he struggled to find the old notes at new places on the fingerboard. For the first time in his life his low strings did not sound flat to him and his open strings were resonant and round as a fiddle’s highest E. Tuned in his eccentric new way, the bass, he discovered, had the intonation he had always missed and he listened to his own playing with the awe of someone who has found a new species. He was excited by the sound and struggled to teach his fingers a new set of fingerings, which was as difficult as twisting the tongue around a new language.

The next morning first thing he took it to show Colin, who shook his head at his friend’s exertions. We’ve always tuned the old way. Why change now?

Why set the dead as my measure? said Donal. I’ve got something here.

But it’s the same music.

I make it sound better.

You hit sour notes because you can’t remember where your fingers should be! said Colin. It’s like shovelling smoke, no end to it.

Donal ignored him and wrote eccentric and appealing letters to the people at Thomastik Dominant strings. With the delight and excitement of a boy collecting, he received dozens of strings in the mail. He experimented and settled on an A and a G for his F-sharp string from the solo set, a D and a C string from the orchestra set. He wrote long letters pleading with the string makers to create a real G and a thinner C. He changed his bow hold and played harder into the strings, closer to the bridge, slower. He wrote to a bowmaker across the sea and asked for something different from pernambuco wood. Amused by the young letter writer’s passion, the bent old bowmaker fashioned a new bow from snake-wood, and sent it off and learned from a crumpled letter that the new bow tripped and moaned, strutted and sang.

Donal was shaping his instrument into the perfect proto-type of the man he wished to become, full-bodied, nimble and witty, athletic and loving, commanding and tender. In his great and graceful old doghouse he now heard the rhythmic pulse of unexpected tendernesses, an inclination toward romance and a courage he did not yet know in himself. He became an ambitious creature both wandering and chained, striving to command the passion of his music and shackled to his lonely practice. Days and nights slid by when he spoke to no one and never left off his playing. The more exquisite his sound became, the more he believed that fate had decreed that all must give way to his music.

M
oll lived in ebon shade, isolated from the people of Millstone Nether. She kept herself company with a little fish hook and a knife. Alone at night she laid strips of rags out on the floor of her hut. She crouched down flat-footed and leaned forward, so loose at her hips that her knees pointed straight to the sky to embrace her ears. She stripped naked to the waist and her long breasts hung forward limply. She caressed them with her cupped palms, stroking their sand-coloured nipples stiff and attentive between her strong thumbs and forefingers. She observed them through the empty slots of her eyes as if they were not her own. Then she let them drop, reached forward and hesitated briefly in her ritual decision between knife and fish hook.

In the first instant after the knife’s cut there was no feeling at all, only a quick burst of blood beads along her expert lines. She was compelled by the fleeting dispassionate blade. The knife had traced a misshapen orb of white scars over her breasts, a history always incomplete, awaiting her next idea, a connecting thread here, a new cross vector there. Pitilessly she ground down all distinctions in her cuts. When she stretched her bony arms above her head or wrapped them around her back, she opened the wounds and could still feel an echo of night during the next day’s light. Most see no meaning in the close recess of darkness but Moll knew otherwise.

The hook required both will and submission like two lovers, one who locks the door because certain violations are to be enacted and the other who feigns ignorance that the door is being locked. When her breasts shied from the searing ripping and the mind retreated, she forced herself, tearing against the barbs. She pushed and pulled the shaft, and tugged at torn flesh, and pricked the skin with the tiny point. And when she was pain sated she slid the hook out shaft first. This last clouded her eyes dark with faint and she dropped back from her heels and lay on the floor, waiting for her vision to return. Now she had done worse to herself than any other could do. Now she could once again withstand that which was without, that which refused to see what needs to appear.

She leaned forward over the knife and the hook and that night decided on both, the knife for her left breast and the hook for her right. She enacted her ritual agon, witnessed by her thought’s dark clamour, and wrapped her bleeding breasts in bandages and crouched near the door, watching the moon’s pale course. When her strength returned, she took herself down to the edge of the sea and removed her skirts and bandages and waded naked into the salty waters, hands stretched high above her head, bony fingers reaching to hold the ungraspable sky, her callused long toes gripping the sharp pebbles. She waded deeper and deeper until the salt bit her breasts and stirred in them renewed dying. Then she hung weightless, the endless waters washing at her blood. No deep could hold her immortal vigour. She purged her stinging body awake from its meditation in the cold of the sea. She crouched and caressed the new traces on her skin, her art and travesty. Her presence demanded to be known by someone. This is the life in the darkness. What cannot be seen must be acknowledged. What cannot be honoured must await transmutation by uncreated night.

W
hen the spring was over with its sudden storms that drowned men who could read the shifting skies and men who could not, everyone pulled out instruments to play at bonfires behind Norea’s house. Colin built up the fire and beat on a seed-shaped drum held squeezed between his thighs. Donal came with his retuned bass, his fingerings finally stamped on his mind and hands like a new mother tongue. Together Donal and Colin hammed it up for the winter-weary people as if they were busking on faraway cobblestone. Colin licked two fingers and drew them firmly across the drum’s skin, pulling an eerie moan out of the drum’s hollow centre. As each wail faded he pattered his long fingers across the tight surface. Donal watched with an ironic cocked eyebrow, as if to say, Bogger on you, and pushed his childhood friend into more complex rhythms. The others in the settlement laughed at their boyish competition and joined them with a choir of fiddles. Dagmar watched Donal upstage saucy Colin. Donal rested one arm on the purfling, a lit cigarette stuck between the strings and the top peg, and shrugged. He nuzzled his cheek against his old instrument as if he were listening through the wood and beat out a simple bass line. He let his bow fall to pluck out a pizzicato rhythm, using his thick thumb for the fat low thump that marked each shift. Projecting into the open air was difficult. He took up his bow again and worked with his whole arm and his strong back, bending and curving himself around his double bass. Up and down the forty-two-inch strings, Donal beat and caressed his instrument, his powerful fingers working deep vibratos from the strings. The flames shone on his forehead and he dropped his face in an attitude of penitence. Sweat beads fell on the dark varnish and deepened the tonality beyond the range of even the most appreciative ear in Millstone Nether. The crowd admired his playing, but when they wanted to dance, they called back Colin.

Colin set aside his drum, pulled his spoons out of his pocket, started up a textured patter and tried to catch the eye of pretty Dagmar from the greenhouse. He watched her examining his spoons flashing on his thighs and willed her gaze up to his face. Finally his eye caught hers and he grinned and winked only for her. Then he called lightly across the crowd, Lovely Dagmar of the green thumb, sing for us! Encouraged by her blush, he got up and pulled her to stand beside them. With her strong, sure voice she sang,

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.

Donal played a light bass to keep her company and Colin left off his rattling spoons and sat near her feet. When she came to the last verse she raised her eyebrows at the crowd and made them laugh:

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.

Norea heard a new and passionate colour in Dagmar’s voice. But Colin grasped the young woman’s hand and pulled her to sit beside him and after the fire burned down Dagmar followed Colin to the cliffs above the sea. Hand in hand, standing in the wind, Colin brought the young woman to him and kissed her and touched her breasts. But she heard a movement in the trees and she pulled away.

Listen, she said.

Moll stood in a hole in the shadow near a small grove of gnarled spruce, as if she were buried from the waist down. Her hands were wrapped around her front and clasped behind her. Her eyes were fixed on them.

Colin shouted, Go away, Moll. What do you want here?

Moll opened her mouth into a great gape, spat out some fishbones, and said, Refrain from the kiss at a kiss-in-the-ring. Refrain forever or you’re sure to be rinded.

Shut up your nonsense, Moll! said Colin, and he pulled Dagmar away and led her to the edge of the cliff. He sat and hung his legs over and said, Slide down with me.

Dagmar nodded, eager to leave Moll behind, and Colin gave her a good tug over the side. Together they slid down over the red earth, rolling faster until Colin took Dagmar in his arms and rolled log-style, shielding her with his own strong back and forearms. At the bottom they were covered with dirt and scraped and Colin pulled his shirt over his head and jumped into the sea. The sun was well down and in the darkness beckoned her to follow. In the cold water he held her again and whispered, She is all states and all princes I. He’d used this plenty of times with women when he travelled. Charm and love were all one to Colin Cane, a youthful confusion he enjoyed.

But his were the first such words to stir Dagmar’s body, his the first fingers to brush her breasts, his the first tongue to touch her throat. She believed his words were spoken to her alone. She liked his light-heartedness and his loose-limbed body. She’d known him her whole life but he’d never until this night turned his eye on her. She made love with him and Colin pulled her up from the shore into the sea again to swim beside him. The cold saltwater washed her scent from his skin but not his seed from deep inside her. Puffins flew along the cliffs before heading out over the ocean. The new lovers swam back to shore, shivering and laughing and made love again, and Dagmar worried and Colin whispered, The first time is free, in the ecstatic moment before their son, Danny, was conceived. That night Dagmar’s girl-life was over. Daring love’s briefest flush, she’d been snared like a young rabbit on the straitened path.