Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,36

Colin’s games and strangers. And Danny had that day informed her that he was the father of Marta Morris’s about-to-be-born baby. She sat beside the girl, who was uncomfortable and huge. Colin and his stranger were thirsty, and Danny poured them jars of whisky to sip through their hoods.

Nyssa disappeared into the apple tree and with a whoop jumped down, danced and fiddled toward the fire. Everyone laughed at her familiar trick. One of the boys took Colin’s drum and joined her, making the skins moan and throb as he’d learned from the older man. Nyssa danced over to drunken Colin, who was already beating his spoons, and she tipped her fiddle down to play into his mask. The men laughed to see the two of them, and applauded the children following Nyssa’s wild dance.

Dagmar, I’m not feeling so well, said Marta.

Here, lean back on me a little. Look at Nyssa. She’ll be exhausted again tomorrow. Danny! Come over here. Are you going to make him take care of this child?

Norea called to Nyssa, Play my duck song.

The girl lifted her fiddle and the old woman rose and found some square footing. Her clear, thin voice chiselled at the night air through Nyssa’s strings and her song made the children shiver.

My momma cut me and put me in the pot;

My dada said I was purty and fat;

My three little sisters they picked my small

bones,

And buried them under the marble stones.

Norea had been blind so long that she’d forgotten the shapes of things. At first she had dreamed in images and colours. But they faded and disappeared and now her darkness was filled with the sensations in which she lived. She could hear the sea on the shore and smell the pine and the sweat of her family. She could smell the thick spruce beer Colin was drinking, that charming mocking manlife that Dagmar took for herself. Now there was a great-grandchild about to be born. What happened to all my brothers? she thought as she sang. Some most likely dead now. I never saw them again.

When she finished and sat down and the scattered clapping stopped, the stranger planted his double bass into the earth a little removed from the fire, flames flickering off chipped varnish. Nyssa listened to his first notes, then lifted her fiddle again. She stepped up his melancholy rhythm and waited for him to follow, the others laughing and listening to this new player and Nyssa’s challenge. Donal led her into a lament he and Colin had played years ago called “Mother’s Grief.” Eyebrows cocked, Nyssa followed. How did this stranger know the old music? She’d never heard a bass tuned so cleanly to her fiddle, the throb a perfect octave or two or three below her. Colin didn’t like what he heard. He got up and noisily threw more logs on the fire until it blazed up and everyone moved back, crying for mercy from the heat. He handed Danny his spoons and the bottle. Danny called for “My Dungannon Sweetheart,” sang and beat out the rhythm. Nyssa played and Donal joined with a simple bass line. Danny tipped backwards off his chair, one leg snapping, and everyone laughed. Marta twisted unsteadily and said to Dagmar, I better go.

She rolled to her knees and got up awkwardly, bending over her stomach, the ground beneath her soaking wet. Dagmar pulled a boy away from men who were teasing him into tasting whisky from the bottle and Danny rolled over into the baby’s waters and passed out.

The stranger was playing a cadenza no one had ever heard before. He rang out harmonics at the top and deep rumbles at the bottom. The ground gaped from beneath. The shine of the stranger’s scars caught the flames and saucy Nyssa listened. Eager for what she felt when she heard this man play, she put her fiddle high on her shoulder and began to answer his sliding tones. He cut his bow deeper into the strings. She found his key and put in a few bars of a traditional strathspey. Colin laughed and called, Now there’s a girl, fiddle him down!

Wrapped in the music and the sound of the sea beyond, Nyssa didn’t hear her father. But Donal did. He picked up the tempo and played a counterpoint to Nyssa’s tune. She smiled and broke into a reel to see if he would follow. He did and she gave him the solo. He leaned into the strangeness of playing among