Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,57
benumbed in the frozen darkness.
Only one stilt house in the settlement did not suffer greatly in the storm. Madeleine and Everett were accustomed to cold and darkness and thin rations. They endured these things because they had their secure store of paint and tobacco. Madeleine’s rocker feet were useless against the ice and Everett took over the cows during the storm. This left her inside. In the first days she painted what she could see from her window: the ice-locked harbour, a branch wrapped in a sleeve of ice, Everett milking a purple cow. She painted the insides of their rooms as she thought of them: an empty chair beside a window, a cat curled up on a brightly squared counterpane, a pot hanging above a hot stove. She painted in the pot’s shiny reflection her own chin pulled down into her neck and her webbed elbows. She smiled. She turned to a fresh paper and painted the only self-portrait she ever made. In the middle she outlined a door like any other on Millstone Nether, but in bright reds and blues and without a doorknob. Outside she drew herself, half turned away, her crabbed hand reaching up, unable to open the door but ready to enter. It had to be opened from the other side.
Madeleine put down her paintbrush and blew on her cold hands. She spent the rest of the morning mixing the brightest golds and yellows she could make, and then on the other side of the door she painted Moll.
Nyssa collapsed, slumped and curled up in the bottom of the dory, pellets of ice tangled into her hair, eye-brows thick with ice, her skin beginning to swell grotesquely under the beating wind. Breath slow, heart stumbling, she was in the region of what some think of as death. But she heard her name being called, Nyssa, by the one who did not give up searching. From a remote core in her mind’s dark recess she heard, and still she hung between death and what is commonly called consciousness.
She thought she was in a dream. She thought she was lying in a bed and felt no cold, no pain. She rolled to her side and got her eyes open and distinguished with confusion the ribs of the boat. But it did not rock or sway or in any way move or smell like a boat. She lay staring and saw nothing from her right eye and only the boat’s skeleton with her left. She roused herself up painfully on her elbows and fixed on a single idea, Do something.
She saw her coat frozen in the stern. She pulled at it and when it wouldn’t move, she struggled up again and grasped the gunwhale and rolled herself over the edge of the boat, hoping the ice would hold and it did, and on her hands and knees she grimped her way to shore. Winter wind northwest, she thought ponderously and faced her cheek into it to keep from getting lost, fingers without feeling, feet without feeling.
Inside the rooms all silence. Donal could not play. He looked out over the gulf and wondered why she ran off like that and when she’d come back. There were no lights along the shore. He was thinking, I’ll need to book a concert hall, get our pictures taken, print the programs. We’ll need to set a date. When the storm’s over. I believe it’s subsiding.
The next morning he slipped along the shore and saw that the dory was gone. He put his head down against the pelting. Ice balls formed across his thick eyebrows. Drops fell along the hairs in his nose and froze, caked his chin and hair. He pulled up the collar on his coat and tried to turn his face from the battering wind but whatever direction he turned he could not escape it. Stinging ice crystals gashed at his cheeks like tiny pickaxes. A storm accepts no offerings. He tried to go over the repertoire in his mind. He walked back along the trail behind the house to take in some more firewood. He fell, cracking his wrist hard, and without a stick of kindling he turned and struggled toward home. He thought, If I wait she’ll come back to me. I have to take care of things here. I don’t smash fiddles and run out into storms. I can’t just throw it all up like that. She’ll come back—we always come back. We’ll play.
When the small boys