Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,47

for leaving. Didn’t you know? Mothers are sometimes the last.

Dagmar felt her hand stinging his cheek. What did he know about signs?

He grabbed her wrist hard and brought it down between them, startled as he had been for forty years by her strength. He said, It’s as it should be and always was.

Had he no fear?

I will not bend to ways that have no meaning for me, she thought. What divine order have I disobeyed?

She spat on the floor between them and left.

At home she said to Norea, not for the first time, The gods will make me kill him.

Norea answered, That is no god speaking. That is your heart. The truth of it is, she’s gone.

I refuse that truth.

It is the truth.

Wrong! That truth will kill me.

What good is this, Dagmar? She is already gone. It’s happened, she’s off.

Now they were two old women grieving each for her own daughter.

Norea paused and said quietly, When I used to deliver milk I found all sorts of things just because people told me they were looking. The side of my wagon was taped up with notices. Once I found a lost china teacup not even chipped. Come, we’ll send signs across to the north shore. That’s sure where he is. If you measure your sorrow by her worth, it will know no end. Come. A girl like Nyssa doesn’t disappear. I’ll help you bring her back.

Dagmar went into her room and returned mutely in her oldest flowered dress.

Ping.

The icestorm began with a single ice crystal falling on the humid glass of Dagmar’s greenhouse and melting. A drop dripping harmless. And then another.

Ping.

The people of Millstone Nether lay in their beds, listening to the beginning of the storm. Spring-winter, they thought sleepily and pulled up the covers against the temperatures strangely dropping. Late-March storms—they’d weathered plenty of these springs. Capricious crystals. Over the ocean strange ice-snow swirled onto the shore.

When the old people awoke next morning, rooms cold, snow falling with ice, they said, resigned to the weather, Well, the old lady’s picking her goose again. They called the snow dung mixen and watched the darkened world already lightly glazed with ice as if caught in the stare of a fevered eye. Transparent sleeves of ice covered young leaf buds and swish ice formed in the shallow water along the shore, tinkling like broken glass. Day deepened again and harder the ice rain fell, layer upon mottled layer, an effervescent icy cataract covering the island. One unique crystal at a time.

Ping.

Norea and Dagmar walked through the storm and gave pictures of Nyssa’s face with words scrawled below to sailors hurrying away from the rising storm. They asked the men from away to put them up on the north shore where a girl might see them. Moved by the two old women huddled under thick coats, the sailors took their signs and tacked them up on the other side of the great river. The winds ripped at them and bits of Nyssa fluttered over all the region. The girl with all that red hair smiling, her fiddle under her chin. Bits of Nyssa everywhere. Common as a fallen leaf.

Ping.

At first, people huddled together against the storm as they always did, defying pressures. The first to suffer were the very old. Papery skin and tired hearts, they huddled over kerosene lamps and camp stoves. Arms aching, women kept small babies in slings against their own skin, wrapped warm against the storm.

Ping.

At Dagmar’s the branches of the stiff old pine behind the greenhouse sagged with heavy glistening ice. A marvel. Each needle was wrapped in shining ice, each cone shining with frozen ice. It thickened in layers on branches that squeaked and cracked and finally crashed down under the weight. Branches fell away from the trunk in long reluctant tears until the whole tree cracked and broke and smashed the green-house with a spectacular crash in the freezing wind. Shattered glass mingled with ice in heaps of shards around crumpled green piles of plants and tomato seedlings. Glass sliced through rows of Dagmar’s indigo pansies freaked with jet, luminous for a few hours under the frozen leaves. Tumid ice branches fell and lay freezing on the earth. Dagmar’s radiant and difficult pink bougainvilleas, even her opuntia compressa with its yellow prickly pears could not withstand the rubble of ice and glass. She wrapped her apple trees with thick rags. She kept Norea’s outside loft heated with the wood fireplace and they cooked on the Rayburn