Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,8
head dropped through the sweat and she saw blood between her legs and felt the wrenching at her womb and the cramps that seized her. Moll’s cold hand pulled off her underthings. She fell on her elbows, cheek flat against the foul rags and begged for mercy from sour dry lips, but still the cramps waved through her body and still her insides heaved and the blood poured out of her until she fell limp into the floor.
In her delirium she saw all that she had been and what she would become. She saw seals and snow. She saw her own mother balancing on bird feet and broken wings. She saw Rory’s lips singing and Dagmar’s lips latching on to her swollen nipple. She saw Moll’s bones.
Moll looked dispassionate at the colour of her skin and her swollen tongue and her lifeless closed eyelids. Moll listened to her moaning and mumbling, My belly, my back. She listened and then she went to her hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze for the night.
On the second afternoon Meggie Dob came by looking for Norea and Moll threw rocks at her to keep her away. Meggie pushed in and saw Norea lying in a filthy bloody heap on the rags.
What have you done to her? she demanded of Moll.
What have flowers done? What has dory’s darkness done? Do not ask why! hurled back the bony woman squatting in the shadows between Norea and the door. Throw her in the sea. She’s not needed here.
Stop! screamed Meggie. She pushed past Moll and sat by Norea’s head and wiped her brow and commanded, Bring me water.
Moll brought her a bucket of water and Meggie wiped the blood and vomit from the limp woman and moistened her lips. She held her head in her lap and stroked her face and said, Norea, you can’t die. Your Dagmar is crying. Where is her mother?
The young woman’s lips opened, her eyes still shut. For three days and nights Meggie and the other women in the settlement took turns sitting with Norea in Moll’s shack, opening her lips and feeding her milk and soup and molasses tea, cleaning her when she threw up again, dampening her tongue, rubbing her arms and legs, stroking her hair. Finally, the poison worked its way through her blood and sinews, and Norea mumbled, then moved a finger, a toe, asked for her daughter. Two things the poison changed. It took away the child. It rendered Norea fully and forever blind.
When she could finally stand to go home, she could not find her way alone but had to be led.
From that day Norea lived excluded from light, whether it was day’s noon or a full-moon night. She caressed Dagmar’s face with her searching fingers and was afraid to cry. She commissioned the child to lead her around the house, over and over, counting the steps, memorizing the corners. When she accomplished the house, they began on the bawn out back. They laid stones for her to tap her way along the edges of the gardens, to the greenhouse and back. Norea taught Dagmar to place everything where she could find it again. She arranged the bottles in the milk wagon and took Dagmar with her until she was sure the old horse would follow his route and bring her home. The women came out of their houses shyly in the early dawn to collect their bottles. At first they pitied her but Norea began her joking. Can’t see for looking, she said. You’re a pretty sight today, just out of bed! She teased them until the women forgot that she was blind. Norea memorized the shape of the island with the soles of her feet. She memorized the winds in their seasons and the smell of each household. She could soon walk anywhere with her little cane, laughing in her old way, disguising her blindness. She used her finger inside her teacup to pour tea for friends and got an accurate ear for their voices and a good nose for their odours like a creature who lives underground. People stopped thinking of her with either shyness or pity; there were other things to worry over. And though Norea never said a word against Moll, the people of Millstone Nether were once again wary of the bony woman and stopped taking their sick to her.
But Moll would not be set aside. She appeared on the shore, waiting for fish when the boats