Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,6

heart she hugged Meggie, arms full of those long-desired babies, and said, I don’t know how they got here, but it’s cruel wonderful for you. What will you name them?

Donal is the boy, Meggie said. Though he comes from tears, he will one day be world mighty. And this poor little fish will be Madeleine, after my own mother who drowned under the sea.

Norea gave birth at home alone and watched over her stubborn-jawed newborn with fierce resignation and the clear conviction that she would lose this daughter as she’d lost everyone she loved. When the child lived past a year, Norea finally believed she might survive and named her Dagmar.

Dagmar grew sturdy and strong and Norea let her do as she liked. She dropped her from the milk wagon at the little school each morning but the child always ran home early to watch the planting and picking. One day Norea gave her three carrot tops to root in shallow dishes of water on the windowsill. The next day the child’s carrots had roots spilling in white tangles down to the floor. The little girl carried them outside and planted them near the house. That evening she solemnly dug up three well-formed carrots and gave them to Norea.

And where did you get these? said Norea.

I grew them from the tops you gave me, answered Dagmar.

Norea had no reason to disbelieve her. Instead she chopped off three more tops, handed them back to the child and watched with amazement as she repeated the miraculous growing of the day before. Then she gave her daughter apple seeds and watched a small orchard appear in twenty-eight days.

Norea studied her unnatural child and concluded that a bit of soil from this new country had got into her to make an unnatural species. Norea would have quietly contented herself with her daughter’s crops of carrots, tomatoes and apples, but little Dagmar couldn’t stop, and cleared larger sections of garden into the black spruce and tamarack, made a cold frame, and when she was older, she built the island’s first greenhouse. Roots she sowed overnight—onions, potatoes—and the above-ground squashes and cucumbers she let take a little longer. There was enough to give away during the thin springs. Only once Norea said, Do you know how you do it?

The girl looked at her. It is easy. Plants want to live.

Norea then knew that her daughter grasped her uncanny power. She tried to teach Dagmar to speak Irish. But she refused and kept to the language of Millstone Nether. Exchanging seeds and looks and words, the girl and the young woman created a life in their small rooms filled with mysteries neither understood. Each night they lay side by side in bed, Norea soothing her daughter with stories and fingers laced through the child’s.

Dagmar stuck her feet up in the air, grabbed her young mother’s muscular thigh and teased, I’ve got your leg.

Norea wrapped her hand around the child’s foot and said, I’ve got your toes.

The girl slipped away, scrambled down to the bottom of the bed and snatched at Norea’s toes saying, No you don’t, I’ve got yours.

Then she tipped off the bed and hid underneath, calling, Come find me! Before Norea could look, Dagmar appeared from under the other side, dragging out a pair of old boots, and asked, What’re these?

Those are my mother’s boots, said Norea as the girl put them on and shuffled along the floor. Hide them away again when you’re done. They’ll be yours when you’re old enough, though you’ll never need them. I’ll see to that, and that’s a promise.

Norea was only twenty, but she had travelled an ocean and married and buried a man and given birth to a daughter. There were still appetites. When her daughter was asleep at night, Norea sometimes stole out to meet a fisherman whose wife with five children was too tired for him in her bed. That was how, under an overturned dory, Norea got pregnant with a child she feared the island people would not abide. She decided she wouldn’t carry a child whose father did not want to be known.

That droughty spring dry weather threatened all the meagre crops. Small forest birds, foxy-Toms and striped-heads and mopes and purple finches, kept flying against the settlement’s windows. Norea and Dagmar got up at dawn and found them lying, necks broken on the ground, and gathered them up. Together they examined the coloured feathers, the staring eyes, the stiff, still feet. Norea delighted