Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,9

came in. She crouched in the shadows of the pole house listening when the people gathered for music. She pressed her smudged face up against the panes of the greenhouse when young Dagmar worked alone. But if Norea heard her rustling in the bushes as she worked the gardens with her daughter, she said, Don’t worry, Dagmar. She doesn’t want you, only what you may become.

The fabled music of Millstone Nether had a well-defined centre but no clear circumference. The best of the island’s musicians had a capacity like the sea’s to find the single note in the vastness and to give it birth, shaping it into a life of scenes and inflections, pauses and climaxes, and finally allowing it to sink back into the currents whence it came, music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all.

Donal Dob and his best friend, Colin Cane, were like any of the island boys, jigging in the summer and hopping icebergs in the winter. They heard Millstone Nether’s music in their cradles and picked up their first instruments young. Donal clambered up on a stool at a kitchen party, wrapped one small hand around the long neck of a double bass, grasped a bow in his fist and sawed out his first sounds. He begged Meggie to find a bass for him and she did. The boy was fascinated by the instrument’s low sounds—especially the C string—as he had never been equally engaged by a human voice. He played its highs and lows, searched its range and potency. Up on the three-legged stool in the kitchen at home, hands stretched, bow held firmly, he played his double bass for his mother and sister. His instrument made him feel he could fill up a room. He strengthened and stretched his hands to caress and thrum out single notes and thick chords. More and more he recognized himself in the striding glissandos of his bass’s majesty, the darting dark notes of its lover’s dance, the athletic shapes of its light-footed, pleasure-loving young man.

Colin Cane’s parents had died young, when their boat was tossed against the rocks in a sudden storm. There were no photographs of them. His relatives cleared out their rooms and gave young Colin his family’s old fiddle, a guitar and the broken-down piano. Colin could get a tune out of any instrument that was lying around and always carried a pair of spoons in his pocket. He played to be part of whatever house in the settlement he was staying at until he was finally old enough to return to his parents’ house alone. He scratched away on the fiddle because he was sure he could hear his mother’s sweet voice in it, and he thumped on the old piano, listening for his father’s beat and caress. His disposition was like a wave’s, by turns calm and turbulent, still and still moving. Resigned young to all change, he had a natural pliability that let him move around the rocks and shoals that were too great to shape differently. When he played the music of Millstone Nether as the old people did, he was soothed against adversity and he took the traditional tunes for his own and strung them together in medleys. There wasn’t a musician on the island who couldn’t play along with Colin, so familiar were his songs.

But his friend Donal Dob was more like the red rock cliffs rising over the north end of the island, carved by wind and waves into craggy shapes that pleased the eye with their changing shadows and reflected light. He was rarely at ease in the traditional music. He worked harder than Colin did at playing the exact sounds and rhythms he heard and he was much admired by other musicians for his youthful mastery. He never felt satisfied, but he too always returned to the traditional notes, yearning to believe that somewhere at their unconquerable core—if he only searched hard enough—was the key to his restlessness. He did not understand that he was searching not for music but for virtuosity. As he grew older he believed that his fate did not lie in the reels and strathspeys of Millstone Nether but in music that came from away.

Madeleine Dob, with her little tucked chin and her sloped shoulders and her webbed elbows, did not grow tall. She collected blueberries and squashed them and painted pictures of blue cows with a frayed stick on the stalls of her mother’s barn. When blueberry