Read Online Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin - Free Book Online Page A

with his father. The next two winters she brought on ice that blocked the harbours and kept Colin at home with his son.
    The people of Millstone Nether observed the little family with their strange way of living in two houses and joked, They’ve knit their net with holes in it. And though it was not what Norea would have wished for her daughter, she only shook her head and said, Well, at least they’re on the pig’s back and I’m grateful for that much.
    So it was that Dagmar Nolan and Colin Cane might have lived into old age, their love bewildering them until they died. But there’s no certainty in human life that can’t change from one moment to the next. Old patterns give way to new ones and something fierce begins unbidden. At the age of forty-five Dagmar Nolan got pregnant by Colin Cane once more and late one night in her greenhouse the birth pangs began. Dagmar resolved with hope that this child’s life would be different. Time and trouble can tame a young woman but an old woman is undaunted by any earthly force.



O nly Dagmar Nolan could labour like that. She swayed away from the house along the rough path through the greenhouse door to the seedlings at the back. With each pain she bent double, buried her face in rows of bulbs, straightened, paced, rested, tasted her own grit and sweat.
    Hard labour came fast to that wily aging body. She held on to a clay pot and squeezed until it burst and nicked her hands. Wiping the blood on her hips, she pushed her heels into the floor to find roots of their own. Blossoms opened and seed pods drooped all through the greenhouse as she dropped into her pain. The pores of the leaves breathed fast and deep, filling the damp air with heady oxygen. Dagmar groaned and sharpened her desire. Swallowing time she bent over, pushed like an earthquake and screamed a holy beatitude, Awwawwwa.
    Above the dirty glass panes over her head night clouds scattered and temperatures rose as Dagmar groaned in her flesh, tugged out the shoulders, then slipped the body and legs of this newborn daughter in a skid of muck up along the length of her collapsed torso to her breasts. She looked with not a little awe into the grave wide-open eyes of a baby born taut and potent. She held the child close inside her wide green robe. Then she snipped the cord with a pair of greenhouse shears, pushed out the placenta easily, light and flat and slippery as a bit of water weed. Stray dogs ate the mess of blood and afterbirth, stained the floor with their wet tongues.
    Dagmar wiped and wrapped her newborn daughter, listened to her breath, examined jubilant the colour in her cheeks and her tom-tiddler toes. She felt for her tiny heart-beat, counted her fingers. When it was clear that the child was whole and well, Dagmar sank back. She guided the baby’s tiny lips to her thickened nipple and right away the newborn pulled down milk, the light of her eyes twisted into her mother’s, two sets of stars fixed in the same constellation. The baby slept and dreamed her first dream in the world, of a pressing descent through darkness, of the taste of milk and the smell of air, of the feeling of weight. She heard in single chorus the sound of the sea, the rush of the wind and her mother’s breath. As her eyes moved under their closed lids Dagmar swaddled her daughter firmly and with her free hand gingerly dabbed between her own swollen legs.
    Outside, steps approached, tapping along the stones on the path, the door opened and Norea shuffled in on bedroom slippers. She croaked in her dry middle-of-the-night voice, Dagmar?
    By the seeds, back here. I’ve got her. She came.
    Woman-worthy! Norea cried out, scuffing toward the potting tables. How long have you been at this? Reaching out her hands to Dagmar’s, she touched the baby’s face, dropped her robe off her shoulders and wrapped up her daughter and her new granddaughter as best she could, then kneeled beside them, tracing the baby’s body with her stiff