Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin Page B

little one on the way and me stuck fishing forever.
    Dagmar was ravenous and restive, her child soon ready for the world. She listened to his plan to travel to the mainland, to his dream to play his music, to record it.
    He said in his charming way, Little sister, I’m a gatcher. I can’t help it. I know if I go, I can get them to record Millstone Nether’s music.
    She looked through his man-hope and thought, Already his sweet love is sated. I am jealous of the bed he sits on, of the words he sings, of the strings his fingers play. Now he will leave and we will be two dead lovers, our bones embracing on the rocks.
    The neighbour women shook their heads and the old fishermen watched with lips closed against unadmitted thoughts when Colin left and lonely Dagmar wandered up each day to visit her mother in the old farmhouse, to dig in the greenhouse, to keep making things grow.
    Norea held her daughter’s face in her hands, traced the dark disappointed rings under her eyes and said, There is only one first love. But secretly she mourned.
    The light faded slowly from Dagmar’s eyes. The young woman bore her beautiful son, carried him through her mother’s greenhouse in a sling across her breasts, nursed and dreamed with him. Colin wrote fine letters from his wandering that buoyed Dagmar’s girlish loneliness. She left them lying on the kitchen table and read them to her mother, proof that she was loved.
My angel with all lullabies under your tongue, I’m coming. I hope your labour was not too hard. For my part I won’t cry crack. I prick, peck, pluck and pull and they say they’ll make me a record I swear it—for you and our son. So you see, my love, I have not escaped the labour either. I return on angels’ wings in all haste.
    Norea said, Romantic raving! Where’s he when your sheets are cold? Where’s your fish and brewis?
    Dagmar said, Don’t talk like that. He says he’ll die without me.
    Men have died from time to time and rainworms have eaten them but not for love, said Norea.
    Dagmar folded her letters away. What would you know about it?
    Love, said Norea, is the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise.
    There were portents and silences but Dagmar ignored them and slipped Colin’s letters under her pillow:
Dearest D,
This room is too lonely for words, only a mittful of people in the audience tonight. I have no rest from the picture of our Danny in your arms. He looks out of mirrors that before I saw myself in. He speaks to me in mouth music that words would only impoverish. He begs that I live at home with you and throw stones with him up the shore. But, dearest love, I am so close. Just a little more time. When we played kiss-in-the-ring under the sand cliffs by the breakers there was only one miracle could crown it.
    Averse as he was to the first days and nights of mewling wide-eyed life, Colin did not return for months. He preferred his own disarray. When he did come back, a promise of a recording written in the flat language of the mainland tucked in his pocket, he held loving lonely Dagmar, her lips eager for his. The baby wailed in his crib in the corner of the green-house. Colin told Dagmar he had to go back again. To fulfil his promise.
    And what of your promise to me? she said, throwing her trowel at him. What use to record a past that has no present in it?
    The next morning Norea wasn’t surprised to hear that Colin’s clothes were lying on the ground, tossed out his door. Oh, oh, she said, now it begins in earnest. She tapped her way over to their little house and on the front step speared a pair of Colin’s shorts with her cane.
    Inside, the baby had a basket of eggs on the floor. He crawled with them to different hiding spots and broke them in a careful ritual. Dagmar was crying in a darkened corner of the kitchen when she heard the tap, tap of her mother’s cane.
    Norea pushed the door open and, feeling the coolness of the room, said, Why have you drawn the curtains when the day is