Free Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin Page A

hope. This child would never suffer, not Nyssa.

    N yssa grew uncommonly tall with long legs and arms. From the beginning she climbed and fell. With her baby strength she pulled herself up from a chair to the table and Dagmar swooped in to catch her when she stepped over the edge. Soon Nyssa shimmied up trees to hang from branches and balanced on the railing of Norea’s balcony. Her third spring she climbed into the apple blossoms, took off all her clothes and applauded herself. She would not fully inhabit her mother’s farmhouse, preferring to roam the shore and cliffs. She never slept in her own cot in Dagmar’s room. She wandered between her mother’s big bed and Nana Norea’s up in the outside loft above the kitchen, crawling in bed with one, disappearing in the middle of the night and awakening with the other. She liked to nestle beyond the back field near the sheep sorrel. She inherited her father’s natural pleasingness and her mother’s direct apprehension of the world. She enchanted everyone with her red curls, tart tongue, cocked eyebrow and buoyant step. Her mother and grandmother marvelled over her childish diaries, which they read secretly. The first thing she ever wrote was I dremd nanas har smelld lik mulch .
    When the girl was still tiny, Norea pulled a little fiddle case out of an old bulb sack and opened it. She tightened the bow and rubbed rosin on the yellowing hair. Feeling with her gnarled fingers, she pushed in the pegs, turned one, plucked, listened, loosened, played again. She reached for Nyssa’s small hands and arranged them on the frog and the neck.
    She said, Child, here is a fiddle and bow. The ivory is chopped off screaming elephants, the strings are guts cut and pulled out of sheep still warm. The wood is hauled by slaves. This little fiddle is fashioned from the suffering of the world. Are you worthy of it?
    Nyssa held on tight, put horsehair to sheepgut and played a single note. Then she picked out Norea’s favourite, “The Nutbrown Maid.” Music fell off the ends of her fingers. She fiddled and stepped with her brother and father at the summer bonfires in her mother’s back field. She climbed into the apple tree and hid until everyone came out at night. After Colin put a torch to the beard moss, and Dagmar settled away from the smoke, and Danny beat his drums and played his whistles, and Norea took the flask from under her shawl and all the others from the settlement gathered with their spoons and fiddles, Nyssa leapt with a wild whoop from the tree to the very edge of the fire, dancing and playing as she fell through the air. Her fiddling could seduce a seed from the ground. They laughed and bade her keep playing. She could play all the traditional tunes and she liked to add little bits of extra bowing and drones. Everyone drank and rocked on old chairs until the legs loosened and cracked.
    Danny drumming wild crashed first into the earth and Norea said in a loud whisper to Nyssa, Your mother uses those baffed-out chairs to keep everyone off balance. Nyssa ran to her brother and tried to pull him up from the ground, lost her balance and fell toward the fire. Dagmar jumped up and pulled them both away. The old folks called for more music from Nyssa. When she finally sat down in the first grey streaks of dawn, Colin took out his spoons and improvised rhymes about his spring-haired daughter:
Be wary of Nyssa
the boys will come kiss ’er
And right or wrong
I give her song!
I take it! said Nyssa.
She dances hey diddle
and takes up her fiddle
By her we’re all smote
I give her notes!
I take it! said Nyssa.
Her fiddle’s so cheeky
Not mild or meeky
Such a sweet singing voice
I give her choice.
I take it! laughed Nyssa.
    The two old women in the house guarded the girl’s world with fierce affection, tucking her words under their pillows at night, opening their own word hoards to her and telling what they had learned from plain long years of living. When Dagmar urged Nyssa to get some