in her strong shoulder and the scent of her skin. She pulled up his hood to glimpse a face darkened by years in the sun, his straw hair and tremulous eyes. She was interested and she opened her own shirt for his surprised lips to kiss her breasts. He eased his arm under her shoulders to shield her back from earth’s dampness, his bow hand and lips caressing her. In the tumid darkness he ran his finger along her forehead and saw the little crown-shaped mark at her hairline. He filled her ear with the roar of his breath. From her firm muscles, willingly she took the lead from him due corde. She wondered at this strange feeling of wanting him as she wanted herself.
Dagmar stood covered in blood and dirt, thin hair hanging lank around her face, dark-smudged eyes judging and condemning. Nyssa looked into those eyes familiar as her own and rose with lingering lithesome grace, pulled closed her shirt and forgot her fiddle on the ground. She ran across the field toward home.
Dagmar walked to the other side of the fire, picked up the water bucket and dumped it over Danny, who still lay passed out beside the dying embers. She touched her foot to his thigh and said, Fine thing. You’ve just made me a grand-mother. You’d better get up!
He stirred in the dirt. Uncertainly he looked around and said, Wha’?
Your son was just born. They’re all at the house. And she pushed him again and said, Get up there and help.
The words slowly penetrated his soggy mind and his long legs loped over the field, carrying him upright out of sheer will, the Nolan in him propelling him toward new life.
Donal stood and for the first time in all those years Dagmar looked into his eyes. He broke her silence.
She looks a lot like you did, Dagmar.
A white-throated sparrow trilled four notes. Grey light. Dagmar raised her chin and said, Leave her alone—you’re too old for her. She studied his eyes. He was thicker and more powerful than he had been as a boy. He inhabited his own skin as he had not before.
She said, You can’t come back here like this. You can’t do this. I won’t let you.
He got up from the ground and said, How much longer should I have waited, Dagmar, before I came home?
You took to your scrapers and left. It is too late.
Not too late. I am back.
Words like open husks.
She said fiercely, It’s not. Go away. With my bare hands I’ll hurt you if you go near her again. Leave her be. She’s young.
From his thick height he smiled. Nothing waits. You didn’t. I left and you went on. Isn’t that how it goes? I’m young still too. I like the way she plays.
A brutal grief seized her heart. She lashed out against him. I tried to play with you. I sat with you. You didn’t say a word. You turned away. How was I to know you cared?
I thought you knew. But you didn’t play like she does.
He kicked the pant-leg mask into the ashes of the fire, turned his back on her, left Colin’s double bass and walked away past the farmhouse toward his sister’s house. Lights flickered in every window of Dagmar’s rooms. Young people clattered early morning breakfast things, sang songs for the new mother and baby, bickered together comfortably.
In the morning Norea nudged a sooty shearwater lying dead outside the door to her balcony. She crouched over it and spread out and stroked the delicate and powerful wings that could drop into the trough of a wave and slide over its crest without wetting a feather’s tip. Broken neck.
Nana, said Nyssa, coming through the door, what happened to that hagdown? I’m in love.
He’s dead, said Norea.
How? said Nyssa.
Harbingers of bad weather, said Norea. But that’s when they’re alive. Does it have a graceful eye?
I guess, said Nyssa. It’s only a seabird.
Norea said, Forget the spirit and it dies.
She felt a tear slip down her bevelled skin and was careful to wipe it away.
Norea turned the bird over in her stiff hands. Patiently Nyssa watched her stroke the feathers, and finally Norea raised her head. You’re in love, then? I’ll have to bury this poor thing.
Yes, said the girl. His eyes are light in darkness, his hands strong and scarred, his music fills me as if it were my own.
You’ve fallen hard, said the old woman. Don’t break your neck!
Nyssa laughed and said, You