Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,32

it.

A nightdress like that is not meant for keeping on as much as for being taken off, said the old woman.

Nyssa admired her own round breasts under the thin material and looked across at her grandmother’s sagging skin. She said without thinking, Will I turn like you?

A woman must be as her nature is, said time-shrunken Norea to the heedless girl.

Nyssa wandered out and up to the gaze in the nightdress. She smelled the smoke from Moll’s short pipe.

Girl, called Moll, a woman only is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

She held out the pipe to Nyssa and said, Have some dudeen.

Nyssa took the pipe and drew and swirled the smoke inside her mouth. She watched Moll stick a piece of grass through a black hole in her tooth and pull it out the other side. When the pipe went cold, she handed it back, and with her long bony fingers the woman stuffed it with more crumbled leaves, held a match to it, sucked and said, Can’t stand a ring on a man’s little finger!

Nyssa! called Dagmar from down the shore.

The girl squatted lower in the hole and said, I’m not going.

She was weary of the calling from home, drawn to Moll’s hole as a wanderer is to the morning ship.

Nyssa! called Dagmar.

Weather’s misky, said Moll. A man with a ring on his little finger thinks he’s the jinks. Seen one on a fishing man? On a sailor? Mainlanders have ’em.

Moll reached between her legs, pulled out a small ring, and handed it over to Nyssa, who held it up in front of her, and asked, Is this a pinkie ring?

Moll nodded and with a whoop Nyssa stood up in the hole and threw it as hard as she could over the edge of the gaze.

Moll’s cracked lips twitched and she waved her naked hands in front of her face. All gone, all over, girl. I’m hungry.

Nyssa handed her some biscuits from the nightgown’s pocket. Moll stuffed the whole package into her mouth, spitting out the paper as she chewed, crumbs spraying down her chin. A fine rain began to fall.

Moll pulled a tattered rabbit pelt from under her heap of rags. She draped it over Nyssa’s head against the rain, pulled off her own thick and filthy sweater and buttoned it around Nyssa.

In the drizzle Moll held up her hands to Nyssa as if they were a mirror and said, Where’s the girl?

There is no more girl, said Nyssa. Only a hare.

She made the sound of a hare by closing her lips and squeezing air between her tongue and her palate. I will write down this song and play it on my fiddle.

Writing makes the spirit lazy, girl, said Moll, tapping her long fingers on her hairless head. A fixed word risks becoming a dead word. Hold it in your ear.

Nyssa did not understand. She scrambled away and headed down to the shore and Moll called after her, The girl is as the girl does.

By the time she was eighteen Nyssa had absorbed all the music Colin had to give her. He wanted something new for her birthday and chose Bach’s “Chaconne in D.” He handed it to her and said, A chaconne makes much out of little.

Picking up her fiddle and nimbly playing at sight, adding her signature drone, she said, But, Daddy, I want to dance!

Colin laughed. Bach is the essence of all that can be made in music. Will you get rid of that drone. It’s making us all mad.

She shrugged. I like it. I want it to be like the sea always there. To speak of the sea is to refuse to speak of yourself.

Colin shrugged. Can’t tell you anything. Like your mother. Here, I have something maybe you will like.

He went to his junk drawer in the kitchen, pulled out some old screws, a couple of erasers, some nails and a bottle cap. He dropped them into Nyssa’s cupped, waiting hands, led her back to the old piano and lifted the front off. She smelled the musty insides of dry wood and metal, saw for the first time the guts of the whale. Eighty-eight felt-covered hammers were lined up imperfectly, waiting to be plunked against the rows of strings. Inscribed on the coppery pin-block were pictures of nine prizes and the words of a craftsman’s pride: Above Medals of Merit Awarded to Us at Exhibitions Throughout the World. It was piano number 19407 stamped in black on the upper-left-hand side and inscribed