Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,1
even a double bass. The Millstone Nether people pulled up the barrels and dried everything out and tuned the instruments and taught themselves to play. They played in each other’s kitchens and then they raised a simple pole house with a rind roof and a platform out in the woods beyond the settlement. On summer nights they lit ships’ lanterns along the front of the platform and everyone came to play. There was laughter through those nights as they wove each other’s riffs into their songs and pushed the music hard toward the silence that separates the rising from the falling measure.
One dry spring, everything brittle with thirst, the people of the settlement were having a time at the pole house. They drank plenty of beer and blueberry wine and played jigs and reels and sang. As night wearied on most of them left and those who stayed were too drunk to want to move. One small boy fell asleep by a lantern, left by his mother for his father to carry home. Hidden in the woods Moll bent over the bronze pot she had salvaged from the sea. She tapped its side and ran a heavy smoothed stick around its rim until the metal vibrated with moans and echoes. The musicians set down their fiddles and pocketed their spoons. Here was a sound they did not know. They had seen the traces her skeletal fingers and toes left along the shore and the waves washed away. She scavenged the woods and shore for things to eat. With nothing but her bony fingers she hollowed out holes where she hid stolen potatoes and spines of fish. She was indifferent to the people, her own bones and flesh more prima materia than woman. She was remote even to herself.
She set down her singing bowl and walked into the pole house among those who were left that night, all blind with drink. She stood over the beloved child sleeping on a pile of fragrant, dry pine needles, curled up beside a lantern, his eyes darting back and forth under fallen lids. Transparent as a sudden gale whipped up out on the sea, Moll kicked the lantern over. The child’s sweater caught fire, then his trousers. The pine needles blazed skyward in a single wheeze and engulfed him in a little coffin of flame. Before he could awaken, his skin bubbled and his eyes melted back into his blackening skull.
No one saw her. No one at the pole house remembered anything. They had drunkenly beat out the fire and no one noticed the child was missing until dawn when they returned and pulled his bones out of the ashes.
Freak accident, they said, heads thick with remorse.
Sad-cruel, they answered, looking for elusive solace in their sighs. And they grew yet more hardened against ways that may not be questioned on an island in the sea.
Moll found the body of Meggie Dob’s mother on the shore during the late fall storms, flesh bloated with saltwater, a strange open-mouthed fish caught between her legs. She ran her hands in consecration over the stretched and stinking purple skin, untwisted the flotsam from her hair and broke the chain of a locket from around her neck where the swelling skin had cut itself around the links. She dragged the heavy corpse far enough away from the sea’s edge that the tide could not snatch it back. Then she walked down to the wharves. She loitered behind a spruce tree, and when a fisherman came ashore with his catch she stepped out and for the first time revealed herself. The man stared at the skeletal figure drawn to its full height before him. Tentatively he tossed a fish to her and she strode out and picked it up. While he watched, Moll squatted down, staring at him from her blank black eyes and ate it raw, spitting the long backbone into her tattered blue dress. She beckoned him to follow her. The fisherman left his catch open in his dory to the screaming gulls and walked behind her at a careful distance. By the time he saw the drowned body, Moll had disappeared into the shadows.
An early winter storm of swirling grey snow whipped the shores of Millstone Nether that night and froze the windows of the room where the women huddled around Meggie Dob and her water-bloated mother in a pine box with its lid nailed shut. They repeated to each other what the fisherman had said about