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  Praise for Dagmar’s Daughter

  “Dagmar’s Daughter is an unusual novel of singular beauty, which seeks to reinforce in us a sense of the monumental and miraculous in everyday events.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “An accomplished work with compelling and unusual imagery, lively prose, bizarre fact, as well as the confidence of a world completely known and rendered.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “As she did in her first novel, Elephant Winter, Echlin writes with a fluent sensual vocabulary, layering images like a musician building to the perfect chord.”

  —National Post

  “Hauntingly beautiful … Dagmar’s Daughter is a mesmerizing dance that encourages the reader to leap into a mystical Celtic cauldron where regular people seem enlivened with supernatural passions and extraordinary powers.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Dagmar’s Daughter is an enchanted tale.”

  —Books in Canada

  “At times, Dagmar’s Daughter feels as much an epic poem as a novel. Echlin uses old forms of storytelling, blending myth and lyrical language to translate music into words. So much beautiful language and fantastic imagery … when the narrative picks up speed, drawing readers into the strange world of Millstone Nether, the power of the story takes hold and doesn’t let go.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Kim Echlin creates sentences beyond our imagining … this is an exquisite novel.”

  —Literary Review of Canada

  “Although this story is captivating, it is the writing that dazzles as it echoes the wild weather and wild emotions.”

  —The Hamilton Examiner

  PENGUIN CANADA

  DAGMAR’S DAUGHTER

  KIM ECHLIN has been a documentary filmmaker, editor, and teacher. She has worked and travelled in Europe, China, the Marshall Islands, Africa, and Cambodia, and has completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway storytelling. She currently writes and teaches in Toronto. Her first novel, Elephant Winter, won the Torgi Talking Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel is The Disappeared, a love story set against the backdrop of the Pol Pot era.

  Also by Kim Echlin

  Elephant Winter

  Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer

  The Disappeared

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2001

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2002

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Kim A. Echlin, 2001

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in

  any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without

  the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons

  living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-317059-4

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data

  available upon request to the publisher.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  for

  Olivia and Sara

  a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

  From the Great Above she opened her ear

  to the Great Below.

  From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear

  to the Great Below.

  From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear

  to the Great Below.

  Inanna abandoned heaven and earth

  to descend to the underworld.

  The Descent of Inanna

  —Sumerian story, 2000 B.C.

  There is geometry in the humming of the strings.

  There is music in the spacings of the spheres.

  Study the monochord.

  —Pythagoras

  There. In the darkness a bony girl. She ties an oilskin pouch close to her waist and hides it under salvaged blue homespun. Her breasts leak milk and swell with pain. She dreams of cutting them off. The rest of her is hunched and thin. The skin under her eyes is smudged. She prepares to disappear into the hold of a ship heading down the coast to the gulf. She hides under a seine-gallows hung with newly barked nets. The sea crashes against the shore with neither joy nor remorse. Men’s skulls down there. Poisoned fish. Torn and tangled nets of bad springs. The girl will stow away in the home boat’s stale hold behind barrels of instruments. Now she waits.

  Her name is Moll, though she was never baptized. The woman she called mother went silent before she was born. Her father was known as a fisherman, arms powerful as a machine. He sailed the great trawlers that swept the sea clean of fish. When he came back, men looked for him, asking, Where’s buddy? They wanted spruce beer from his root cellar. They were his friends. When he got drunk he fought them and went to his daughter’s bed.

  Moll bore a blue baby, hardly knowing what was happening to her. She took it and tied it to a stone and dropped it into the sea. She was long-limbed and taller than any man in her village, too skeletal to show what everyone knew and didn’t speak. She couldn’t read. She signed herself into the world with drops of pee in a hole in the woods. This is her truth unconcealed. Even this will darken.

  With the girl in its maw, the boat left the Labrador shore for the g
ulf. She took her father’s eyestone and wore it in the oilskin pouch against her bottom rib. He would not notice it was gone until a summer and a fall and a winter had passed, and when he found out he cursed nature. By then Moll no longer feared death, for death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

  A storm cracked Moll’s ship in rough halves and everyone went down. She went down. She was whirled and spun below and divested of what she once was. Saltwater filled her mouth and throat and she became, in the lowest deep, a lower deep. There she achieved the silence that portends a new tongue. She came up again without hair and tied herself to a barrel of fiddles in the freezing salt waves. After two days and a night she washed up a blue meagre hag on the shore of a little island in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence called Millstone Nether.

  Millstone Nether was a place first inhabited by rascals: merry-begots and hangashores, sleveens and slawmeens, some plain slackfisted, others eager to distract fate. From their couplings was born a settlement of people who subsisted on the sea’s fish and the shallow soil’s roots. There were many remote strips of land in the mouth of that great river, places that came and went with the tides and frail memory, places with poor harbours and treacherous shoals called by such names as Gulf Graveyard or Captain’s Concern and never marked on the maps. Only a seaman who could rote the shore dared Millstone Nether’s tricky western harbour, listening for the waves against hidden rocks. Off the northern tip was another tiny harbour, an hour’s row on a civil sea to a remote and sparsely inhabited stretch of mainland.

  Each of the islands in the gulf had its own nature, some better for hay, some for lumber, some for coal. Their mongrel languages were cobbled out of French and Gaelic and English and Montagnais. With time, pride came to the rascal-infested places and some islands claimed the best fishermen, some the best woodsmen. Millstone Nether’s impractical claim for itself was music. Everyone there could play something or sing a ballad or dance a bit. Fishermen created a whistling language to talk between their lonely boats out at sea, and young girls clapped intricate rhythms invented from listening to the endlessly varied strophes of robins.

  Sometimes ships went down off the north shore and barrels washed up from their splintered hulls. One year it was barrels of flour. In the year the people called the fat-spring, it was twelve barrels of whisky. But one miraculous year a barrel of fiddles in fancy cases blew up. And with it, another barrel full of whistles and guitars. There was even a double bass. The Millstone Nether people pulled up the barrels and dried everything out and tuned the instruments and taught themselves to play. They played in each other’s kitchens and then they raised a simple pole house with a rind roof and a platform out in the woods beyond the settlement. On summer nights they lit ships’ lanterns along the front of the platform and everyone came to play. There was laughter through those nights as they wove each other’s riffs into their songs and pushed the music hard toward the silence that separates the rising from the falling measure.

  One dry spring, everything brittle with thirst, the people of the settlement were having a time at the pole house. They drank plenty of beer and blueberry wine and played jigs and reels and sang. As night wearied on most of them left and those who stayed were too drunk to want to move. One small boy fell asleep by a lantern, left by his mother for his father to carry home. Hidden in the woods Moll bent over the bronze pot she had salvaged from the sea. She tapped its side and ran a heavy smoothed stick around its rim until the metal vibrated with moans and echoes. The musicians set down their fiddles and pocketed their spoons. Here was a sound they did not know. They had seen the traces her skeletal fingers and toes left along the shore and the waves washed away. She scavenged the woods and shore for things to eat. With nothing but her bony fingers she hollowed out holes where she hid stolen potatoes and spines of fish. She was indifferent to the people, her own bones and flesh more prima materia than woman. She was remote even to herself.

  She set down her singing bowl and walked into the pole house among those who were left that night, all blind with drink. She stood over the beloved child sleeping on a pile of fragrant, dry pine needles, curled up beside a lantern, his eyes darting back and forth under fallen lids. Transparent as a sudden gale whipped up out on the sea, Moll kicked the lantern over. The child’s sweater caught fire, then his trousers. The pine needles blazed skyward in a single wheeze and engulfed him in a little coffin of flame. Before he could awaken, his skin bubbled and his eyes melted back into his blackening skull.

  No one saw her. No one at the pole house remembered anything. They had drunkenly beat out the fire and no one noticed the child was missing until dawn when they returned and pulled his bones out of the ashes.

  Freak accident, they said, heads thick with remorse.

  Sad-cruel, they answered, looking for elusive solace in their sighs. And they grew yet more hardened against ways that may not be questioned on an island in the sea.

  Moll found the body of Meggie Dob’s mother on the shore during the late fall storms, flesh bloated with saltwater, a strange open-mouthed fish caught between her legs. She ran her hands in consecration over the stretched and stinking purple skin, untwisted the flotsam from her hair and broke the chain of a locket from around her neck where the swelling skin had cut itself around the links. She dragged the heavy corpse far enough away from the sea’s edge that the tide could not snatch it back. Then she walked down to the wharves. She loitered behind a spruce tree, and when a fisherman came ashore with his catch she stepped out and for the first time revealed herself. The man stared at the skeletal figure drawn to its full height before him. Tentatively he tossed a fish to her and she strode out and picked it up. While he watched, Moll squatted down, staring at him from her blank black eyes and ate it raw, spitting the long backbone into her tattered blue dress. She beckoned him to follow her. The fisherman left his catch open in his dory to the screaming gulls and walked behind her at a careful distance. By the time he saw the drowned body, Moll had disappeared into the shadows.

  An early winter storm of swirling grey snow whipped the shores of Millstone Nether that night and froze the windows of the room where the women huddled around Meggie Dob and her water-bloated mother in a pine box with its lid nailed shut. They repeated to each other what the fisherman had said about the bony woman who appeared out of the woods. Listening to the pinging of ice on the thin panes, they wondered how a woman could survive winter abroad, and they commissioned the men to build Moll a hut at the far edge of the settlement and to leave its door open for her. This was accomplished and though no one ever saw her during the short days, bits of spat-out bones appeared in a pile by the front door, and the skull of a whale and the rib cage of a harp seal appeared lopsided on each side of the door. All winter the misshapen body of a swile-head codfish hung frozen over the frame, lumpy at its crown where a larger fish had bitten but not killed it and the skin and scales had grown back in disorder. Later when spring warmth thawed it out, the flesh and scales drooped and stank and fell to the ground, leaving only the skeleton like a bit of coarse lace. The door opened and closed below it and the continuous round of day and night prevailed.

  Far away from Millstone Nether, Norea Nolan was thirteen years old when she talked to a passing tinker one afternoon outside the village pub in her little town on the west coast of Ireland. The next morning she woke up to find her boots gone. She knew who took them, three tin-faced Catholic women with noses like crones’. It was the custom when Norea was a girl to take young girls’ shoes and to bury them secretly out in the fields under rough piles of stones so the girls couldn’t run away. Norea was the eldest of eight and the only girl.

  Her village was on the edge of the sea, a worn quilt of land laid out in uneven squares. Against the crooked stone fences thin cows and scraps of sheep huddled away from the cold winds and drizzle. A girl could never find her shoes out there under stained curtains of rain. Now Norea had to go bare-foot. She grew reedy and competent, helping her mother, Dagmar, watching the cycle o
f pregnancies and births, sharing with her in that house full of boys a narrow life of secret glances and bedtime caresses after all the work was done, more like a sister than a daughter.

  Norea had just turned seventeen and her mother lay bleeding after giving birth to her last son. The midwife caught the baby, the placenta and then something that shone dull purple, the limp bloody flesh of a woman’s worn-out uterus. The midwife did not know what it was and set her jaw at the sight of it. If it didn’t belong outside, she thought, it must belong in, and she pushed it back but she couldn’t stop the blood. Norea’s mother pulled her frightened daughter’s ear to her white lips.

  Child, she whispered, tears falling from her eyes. Don’t cry. Tá mé sásta le m’staid. I’m a bird with a broken wing. Carry me away on your shoulder. You can do better than I did. Promise me. Take me away from here.

  Drinking and telling stories, they kept the body in the front room three days and nights and Norea had plenty of time to think. Before they moved the coffin from the house to the churchyard to bury her mother, Norea had a fit in front of her brothers, her father and the priest, in front of the neighbour women who’d scrubbed and dressed the corpse and now took turns keening for the dead and tending the motherless new-born. Sinewy of spirit, Norea stood at the end of the coffin and screamed, Leave me alone with her, leave me alone!

  She tossed her long red hair and wept so bitterly that the young priest took everyone away and closed the door, murmuring, Give her a moment, then. Her only mother, and her now left to cope.

  It was the first time in her life Norea had been alone in a room. Quick as she could and wailing loud enough to cover up any noise, she reached into the coffin and took the boots right off her mother’s stiff still feet. She tied them under her skirt against her legs, closed down the lid and lay on top of the coffin, sobbing. Finally the priest pushed in, took the girl by the shoulders and nodded at the men to carry the coffin away without another look inside.