Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,63

warmed and wakened. She was peeled naked and new. She stirred, took tiny spoonfuls of molasses tea and slept again. Dagmar stroked the crown on her daughter’s forehead. The girl’s eyes opened. She could see from both.

Nyssa looked at her mother, who had shrunk smaller while she was gone, and she raised her arms up to her and received as much aching love as she could stand. She knew that it was bottomless and forever and in the end passing as a fallen leaf.

What day is it? she asked.

The day after the night before, said Dagmar.

I almost froze, said Nyssa. I saw your writing on my picture tacked to a tree. Winds rocked the boat and I was afraid of crashing into the ice and sinking. There was a strange wake and I was drawn by it to the shore. I took shelter in Moll’s hole when I could go no farther, but she tore off my boots. She left me for dead. I thought I was dead. I heard your voice calling me back.

Dagmar waited.

Nyssa said, Did he come after me?

Dagmar was silent and Nyssa judged Donal. She said, He would have let me die.

I could not sleep, said Dagmar. I imagined the most awful things. I tried to keep us from freezing and burning the house to the ground. Tell me what happened.

Where is Nana? said Nyssa.

Dagmar stroked her forehead and said, She didn’t know where she was or who she was. She forgot that you were born and dreamed you were back. She said my father was in the house. She wandered out back and froze in her cairn.

Nyssa closed her eyes.

Dagmar said, When you went missing she helped me as if she were my own two hands. She carried pictures of you, asking the sailors, Will you help find this girl?

Nyssa waited.

Perhaps she was still searching for you or perhaps she was walking toward what she wanted. That was what she always did, soothed Dagmar. All things are possible.

Tears slipped from Nyssa’s eyes.

Dagmar spoke from the place of wounding. I can see you now and touch you now, but you are lost to me forever.

Nyssa wanted to say, I will never leave you, but she could not.

All day, their minds at one, they tried to soothe each other.

Dagmar watched her mourning daughter and said with all the tenderness of an old woman for a young woman, There is always something left behind. That is the law. You have seen more than ever have I. You have so much more than I did. Make yourself better now. Make your decision.

From the sharpened edge, Nyssa spoke her wrath against him: He stays in his house and dreams of playing great concerts. Let him stay!

The storm was over and there were things to do. An old woman in a yellow straw hat on the kitchen table waiting to be buried.

The people of the settlement gathered with their fiddles and guitars outside Dagmar’s house. They came through the door with a pine box and lifted Norea into it. They wrapped Nyssa in blankets and carried her outside where the earth was flooded with meltwater. A hundred fiddles and whistles and drums played the pine box out the door of the house where a young girl from Ireland had composed her life. The choir of fiddles drowned out the roar of the ocean. The whole island melted, running in long shining streams to the sea, the land damp, the air awash in water. The whine and scratch and tune of a hundred fiddles. They played “Barrel of Fiddles” and “Nana’s Boots.” They lowered the pine box into the ground, and Dagmar sang in the tongue she’d listened to her mother speak and had never spoken with her:

É ho `ro’s ‘na eheil air m’air.

And the other women joined with her singing,

’S mór an nockd a tha mi ‘caoidh

Madeleine stepped out of the company, bent down and picked up a handful of the thin earth and took Nyssa’s wounded frostbitten hand and held it and filled it. Then the young woman raised her arm high above her head as if she were brandishing a clay axe through the air and with one cocked eyebrow she let the earth fall on top of the pine box.

Dagmar dug with ardour into the thawing ground. She moved through the smashed greenhouse and cleaned and stacked up her broken pots. Trees were down everywhere. She wandered into the cairn and stroked two delicate hepaticas balanced on hairy