Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,64

stems, little patches of mauve in the cold.

She tended her daughter, split in two as if she were a chest-nut broken open and both halves her. She watched and waited and wanted to hold her close, wrap her arms around her shoulders, run her hands through her red hair, devour her eyes. But as soon as she was up, the girl defied touch. She wandered away and would not sleep in the house. She took a few things to live down by the sea in an old fisherman’s summer shack.

Dagmar, who could not yield to trouble, let her go. Now Dagmar was alone for the first time in all her long life.

As she piled branches and chopped trees for drying she looked around and thought, The understory will do very well in all this light and air. There will be plenty of sun coming through for new ferns and grasses. There are so many cavity trees now. The smaller, weaker creatures will flourish.

The old do not sleep soundly. She chopped harder and tried to wear herself out. In the evenings she wandered down to look at the sea. The ticklaces nested in the cliffs, small pearl-grey gulls soared in their great circles, rose off the water and whirled like gusts of snow driven by the wind. She remembered how she trailed after Norea as a child, learned to care for the strongest seedlings and kill the rest, how she made the clouds part and how she made things grow. Since the storm, the seedlings did not sprout roots under her fingers as they had once done and she wondered if a woman’s powers are used up or passed on. Standing outside the fisher-man’s hut, she listened to Nyssa’s chants and silence. She remembered the girl with all that kinked hair flying out of the apple tree at a summer bonfire and fiddling a reel for dancers. All that music.

One day Dagmar borrowed a fiddle for Nyssa and left it by the door of the fisherman’s hut. The next evening she heard plinks and ringing notes. She heard the windy scraping of the bow played far from the bridge. She heard one clear, plain note. She listened to music that sees through, music played with the open ear. In one note all notes, over-tones and harmonics ringing together, unperceived vibrations waiting to be heard. The mother listened and remained silent. Here in her daughter’s music were all the sounds of the island. Here was the power that could grow seedlings and part clouds.

And when Dagmar stretched out that night in her old bed, her ears still ringing with her daughter’s music, she thought about how much she had pared life down. To planting and sowing. To a lover and children and her mother. She had cut off anything that had asked her to be other than what she was. She had loved as best she could. Had it been enough? In her loneliness she still hoped for the tap, tap, tap, of a coin on the window. She admitted that if she heard it she would rise stiffer than before to walk outside in the dark to be with him. To be once again and once more with the watery one who lived not in her wisdom but in his own.

There is a time for the chatter of ice and a time for the passing of flesh. There is a time to test the mettle and a time for agon. There is a time to rest.

Nyssa was whirled and spun below and divested of what she had once been. Ice filled her veins and she was in the lowest deep, a lower deep. There she achieved the silence that portends a new tongue. She grew stronger and she walked the shore and the gaze. She picked up the little fiddle Dagmar had left by the door and found in it strange new sounds. When she tried to write the sounds, they did not seem to belong on a musical staff at all. And then one day two full seasons after the storm she wrote down a new tune and she heard inside and unbidden, fingertips brushing against her skin and the rhythm of a ground bass. That day she mourned fitfully, Gone is my love, my sweet love.

She walked along the shore to find Donal’s sister. She called outside her door, Madeleine!

Madeleine was working on a large piece of plywood. She cut the board in half with two horizontal lines, one