Dagmars Daughter (9 page)

When the girl was still tiny, Norea pulled a little fiddle case out of an old bulb sack and opened it. She tightened the bow and rubbed rosin on the yellowing hair. Feeling with her gnarled fingers, she pushed in the pegs, turned one, plucked, listened, loosened, played again. She reached for Nyssa’s small hands and arranged them on the frog and the neck.

She said, Child, here is a fiddle and bow. The ivory is chopped off screaming elephants, the strings are guts cut and pulled out of sheep still warm. The wood is hauled by slaves. This little fiddle is fashioned from the suffering of the world. Are you worthy of it?

Nyssa held on tight, put horsehair to sheepgut and played a single note. Then she picked out Norea’s favourite, “The Nutbrown Maid.” Music fell off the ends of her fingers. She fiddled and stepped with her brother and father at the summer bonfires in her mother’s back field. She climbed into the apple tree and hid until everyone came out at night. After Colin put a torch to the beard moss, and Dagmar settled away from the smoke, and Danny beat his drums and played his whistles, and Norea took the flask from under her shawl and all the others from the settlement gathered with their spoons and fiddles, Nyssa leapt with a wild whoop from the tree to the very edge of the fire, dancing and playing as she fell through the air. Her fiddling could seduce a seed from the ground. They laughed and bade her keep playing. She could play all the traditional tunes and she liked to add little bits of extra bowing and drones. Everyone drank and rocked on old chairs until the legs loosened and cracked.

Danny drumming wild crashed first into the earth and Norea said in a loud whisper to Nyssa, Your mother uses those baffed-out chairs to keep everyone off balance. Nyssa ran to her brother and tried to pull him up from the ground, lost her balance and fell toward the fire. Dagmar jumped up and pulled them both away. The old folks called for more music from Nyssa. When she finally sat down in the first grey streaks of dawn, Colin took out his spoons and improvised rhymes about his spring-haired daughter:

Be wary of Nyssa
the boys will come kiss ’er
And right or wrong
I give her song!

I take it! said Nyssa.

She dances hey diddle
and takes up her fiddle
By her we’re all smote
I give her notes!

I take it! said Nyssa.

Her fiddle’s so cheeky
Not mild or meeky
Such a sweet singing voice
I give her choice.

I take it! laughed Nyssa.

The two old women in the house guarded the girl’s world with fierce affection, tucking her words under their pillows at night, opening their own word hoards to her and telling what they had learned from plain long years of living. When Dagmar urged Nyssa to get some sleep, the young girl spun around to face her mother, one hand gripping the neck of her fiddle, the other in a fist with her bow on her hip and said, I like to be awake! The girl set her own ear, and fuss over her as Dagmar did, Nyssa always slipped away. All that she asked was that her will not be usurped.

T
he moon is no door. The future enters long before its orb is run. Nyssa wandered up to the woods, up to the gaze toward Moll.

There in a hole lined with blackberry earth squatted the bald-headed woman. She held balanced on one bony hand her bronze pot. With the other hand she ran a smoothed stick around the edge. The pot sent up a low echoing moan, mro ohoh. Moll stopped her hand’s circling and the sound died out and she looked up. Her eyes lacked all expression and Nyssa could not tell if she would speak or not.

Moll asked, Are you compelled?

Nyssa said, No. I’m just here.

Missed the path?

Nyssa looked at the pot gravely and said, Can I try that?

Moll spat a dark spit. She handed up the pot and Nyssa held the pot out on the open palm of one hand. She picked up the stick and rubbed it hard on the side and nothing happened.

Slower, lighter, said Moll.

Again Nyssa made a circling motion with her hand around the outside of the pot and again she heard nothing. She looked up at Moll, her eyebrows raised.

Moll rolled a cigarette and reached into her dress for a wooden match. She scraped it against a rock and the flame appeared and she lit the cigarette and blew smoke through a black hole in her right upper incisor. Nyssa bowed her head and torso over the bowl and tried again. She felt the metal vibrate against her palm and through her wrist. She felt the sound and then heard it, hers a higher-pitched hum than Moll’s low moan. She moved the stick on the rim of the pot around and around, playing with the sound, feeling the vibrations move up through her hand and arm and into her body. Slowly her ear was opening to the relationships shared between pitches. She began to move through her own darkness as if not tied with joint or limb or held in the air on the brittle strength of bones.

As she played Moll began to speak. Moll said that Nyssa’s grandmother talked to her sometimes through the weeds and knew darkness but that most people turned from her. Moll said that she heard Nyssa play at the pole house and that she played well but there were sounds in her fiddle that she did not yet know about. She said that they are in the earth and she did not know if Nyssa was capable of hearing them but perhaps. She said some people are just born to it. Nyssa said, Born to what? Moll kept on. She said that some people are compelled toward questions and a kind of living that have no answers and some can tolerate this and some cannot. She said to Nyssa that if she thought she had come to Moll to play the pot that this was only an excuse but it was as good an excuse as any. She said that no one can say why one person finds darkness in her own soul and another does not. No one can say why. But if a person is compelled, then not to look means that the soul goes stale and stunted and she will languish and consume everything around her and will not know that it is her own spirit within that is being devoured. She said there were many things that stopped people from looking at her but that the greatest was fear. She said that when they saw, they lost their former selves forever. She said it was not safe to look at her or to be in her presence. She said there were others like her and she did not know their origins or where they might be and she had not met any of them but that they must exist. She said this was a world that kept turning from its own darkness and did not embrace it or sing to it or talk to it but tried over and over to forget it. She said Nyssa’s grandmother Norea sang to her and she liked that. She said many things that the girl could not fully understand, but when she finally stopped, Nyssa laid down the stick and handed back the bowl and said, I am not afraid.

Moll answered, You will be.

The ashes of Moll’s cigarette were long cold on the ground.

Hungry? she asked.

Nyssa nodded.

Moll pulled herself out of the hole and led Nyssa through the woods to a cache in the ground. She removed a pile of branches covering the hole and there were the remains of a newly skinned rabbit wrapped in leaves, head and tail hanging limp. She swept up some dry pine needles with her large hand and deftly placed some larger branches over them and lit a small fire. Nyssa watched Moll throw the carcass into a pan pulled from the cache and set it in the flame, reach her fingers into the fire and stand up bones from former meals that lay hidden in the ashes.

Nature likes to hide itself, said Moll. It goes much further.

Further than what? asked Nyssa.

Further than as if it knew its aims. Do you think it knows its aims?

I don’t know.

It doesn’t.

After cooking the rabbit for a long time she reached her hand into the pan and tore off the rabbit’s back leg with a wrenching and a twist. Nyssa heard the femur pop and took the meat extended to her. When she bit into it, she saw that a maggot had crawled to the inside rim of the pan, slipped down and was getting cooked alongside the rabbit.

Why do you stay out here? asked Nyssa, wiping grease from her hand on the dirt.

Out where?

In the woods.

Moll pushed the rabbit to one side of the pan as if offering it again.

Nyssa shook her head. Moll picked up the rabbit and threw it into the woods. She put the pan back into the cache. Then she put out the flames with dirt.

Not all questions are wise, she said. Too much knowing makes you old.

I want to be old, said Nyssa.

Not yet.

Can I go inside your hut?

They sat in silence and Moll said, You come back here sometime.

I
n the winters the shores of Millstone Nether got iced in with great shifting ice floes. The young boys jumped from one ice pan to another, daring each other to float up the coast looking for seal holes, playing at being at sea. They leaped from one chunk of ice to another, laughing and wrestling, their backs cold against the ice on the open water. Briny air stung their cheeks and hidden currents taught their feet to submit to the whim of the sea. Nearly always someone fell in and had to race home to get dry, hair freezing, fingertips tingling. The other boys ran in a clump around the wet one and everyone scattered when the old woman or man at home caught the ice truant and scolded, I’ll give you your tea in a mug! Only once in the living memory of the island had a boy slipped and got caught under an iceberg and drowned dead.

One snowy, bright dawn Nyssa jumped from Norea’s bed and ran out into the cold and down through the settlement to her father’s house. She pushed through the door into the front room where Danny slept and shook him awake. Let’s go jump clumpers, she said.

Danny rolled away and pulled the quilt over his head, You’re too young!

I’m not, you slowcome! She tugged at his covers and his arms, jumped on top of him and said, I’m going.

Too dangerous, said Danny and pushed her off him.

I’ll go alone then, said the girl.

Danny hauled himself out of bed, dressed quickly and followed her down to the shore. Nyssa had already found a long stick and was testing it in the water full of small ice pans. She stretched her foot out to rock the thick ice, planted her pole and hopped on her long limbs loose in the cold.

Swiftly Danny jumped on his little sister’s large pan humming with the swish of cracked ice. He squatted, and stared into the clear sky, letting strong-willed Nyssa test her arms and balance.

Don’t go away from the shore, he said.

Why not? she answered, swinging her stick out of the water and spraying cold drops on his face.

Stop that!

Nyssa edged to the side of the ice, held her stick across the front of her and jumped to a pan about a foot away. Danny scrambled up and jumped after, calling, Springlegs, you’ll have us both in the drink!

But the girl had stopped and was listening gravely to something up the cliffs.

Together they listened beyond the light clinking of the ice to the moan of cold settled over the earth and from far up on the gaze they made out the sound of Moll’s pot, tiny variations in a pitch that slid along the tones between the notes.

Nyssa asked, Is it true men go to her at night?

What would you know about that?

She thrust her stick down her fingers, breaking the surface of the icy water and poled them farther out from shore.

I heard them talking behind Da’s rooms, she said.

Danny said, Men should mind who’s in the shadows. I wouldn’t know about it.

He whooped, spread his legs and started to rock the ice. Hands outstretched toward the sky, her tousled hair aflame around her ruddy skin, Nyssa slid to the middle. Danny leapt to the next pan and the next, scrambling toward shore. Hard on his heels Nyssa jumped and slipped and rocked on the thick white rafts. Panting, she caught up with him as the off-shore winds stirred up. They were both stuck on a large floating pan and too far to jump to shore.

Now we’re done, Danny teased, his quick eye searching for a way back. Stuck on the back of snake that won’t be charmed!

The open water grew all around. Nyssa hurled herself toward the shore, slipped and fell. Her leap rocked the clumper and as she swam under the icy brine to the surface a thick blue and mottled iceberg blocked her passage. Down below the water, the clinking of the ice sounded like wooden bells and she did not struggle but was strangely drawn to these sounds she had never heard before. She hung below, still and listening.