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

hands.
    Dagmar teased, She looks like you.
    Norea wrinkled up with a pursed-lip smile. Two squashed heads. Don’t be fooled, the black hen lays a white egg.
    She wiped away a few tears but not before one fell and stained forever the top of the child’s forehead at her hairline with a mark shaped like a little crown. Knots of blue veins stood out like pebbles on Norea’s calves and the loose flesh from under her old woman’s arms cradled her daughter and this new baby. She rubbed Dagmar’s neck and stroked the child’s head, the three of them coiled around and through each other like spring-wakening garter snakes.
    Never perhaps ever have mother and daughter been closer than Dagmar was with the little girl she named Nyssa. Conjubilant. Roots of one below skin of other. Baby’s eyes fixed on the light of mater gloriosa too soon to be stabat mater . Dagmar measured the length of her newborn daughter’s foot with her index finger, wiped and dried and caressed that dimpling baby bottom and that oversized vulva. In the moment of birth she willingly became her daughter’s cradle, her sleep’s darkness, the comfort of her hunger and the first song in her ear.
    She was Nyssa Nolan, daughter of Dagmar Nolan who unwittingly turned weather fair or bitter, who was daughter of Norea Nolan who stole her dead mother’s boots and made life from tears, who was daughter of the first Dagmar who took her husband’s name and died young after bearing eight children.

    L uthiers say that the tautness of the strings ensures the potency of the instrument. If there were ever a child who leapt taut and potent from between her mother’s thighs, it was Nyssa Nolan. From birth her feet never stopped beating the air. By three and a half she played everything she heard, her first pint-sized fiddle tucked under her chin, and her feet tapping across the floor. How she played has never been equalled before or since. Let the singer weave it into song, let it flow from ear to mouth, let it pass from old to young. Long-limbed Nyssa and her fiddle came and changed the music of Millstone Nether forever.
    She never forgot a tune.
    She had perfect pitch.
    These two mysterious gifts alone gave Nyssa Nolan a whole and separate grasp on her world, a sureness of footing, a soaring of spirit, an inborn conviction that she commanded both heaven and earth. Only the realm of darkness was not hers from the beginning. Even as a child she never played anything exactly the way it was played to her. She put her little stamp on it with ornament and grace. She raised her arms straight up into the air, fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, a gesture at once of defiance and supplication. She understood that of all human expression music is most silent to meaning. She sought to wrest from it the line forward into full declamation.
    They might have guessed that Nyssa was different if they’d known the lost art of reading the lines on a baby’s feet, the curled-up toes and soft soles still more spirit-borne than earth-bound. The foot’s long line in the middle speaks of voyages—broken, wandering, dangerous, lonely. The line below the hug of the big toe speaks of will, determination and the willing disposition of the heart. The lines from the little toes predict talents and capriciousness, the creases near the insides of the ankles, adventures in the world. The shape of the heel foretells fortitude and happiness, the curve of the instep, tragedy and sorrow. Good foot-readers used to watch a baby’s kicking and predict long life or short, large spirit or small, read how the child would trudge or glide through life. Nyssa arced and danced when she nursed. Laid naked on the floor, she lifted her feet as if ready to fly toes first. She splashed her legs in the bath and thumped on Dagmar’s thighs. In her cradle her feet kicked the air as if she were already dancing.
    Dagmar marvelled at her baby’s strength and was dismayed by her bloody-mindedness. On days when the