Dagmars Daughter Read Online Free Page B

sweet-smelling blossoms on the floor. Moll poured out a cup of water, snapped off some of the tansy flowers, stems and leaves, and mixed them in. She waved Norea over to a heap of old rags in the corner and handed her the tea.
    Bitter buttons for the path wanderer, Moll said. Do not sorrow when what you lose you’ll never have again.
    Norea raised the cup to her lips and drank the hot sweet-smelling liquid. She swallowed and drank again and swallowed until it was all gone and then she waited. The poison spread warm and violent through her body, and terrified she put her fingers into her mouth and tried to get rid of what was not yet down. Her skin beaded in sweat and cramps roiled up from her stomach against her heart and down into her womb. She bent over herself as if she were going to die, then threw up to the side and fell back from the knotting pain that twisted from her insides out. She lay back panting and faint. Then the blood. She did not at first notice it. She was throwing up yellow froth, and desperately she turned on her hands and knees and sagged into a crawling creature. Her head dropped through the sweat and she saw blood between her legs and felt the wrenching at her womb and the cramps that seized her. Moll’s cold hand pulled off her underthings. She fell on her elbows, cheek flat against the foul rags and begged for mercy from sour dry lips, but still the cramps waved through her body and still her insides heaved and the blood poured out of her until she fell limp into the floor.
    In her delirium she saw all that she had been and what she would become. She saw seals and snow. She saw her own mother balancing on bird feet and broken wings. She saw Rory’s lips singing and Dagmar’s lips latching on to her swollen nipple. She saw Moll’s bones.
    Moll looked dispassionate at the colour of her skin and her swollen tongue and her lifeless closed eyelids. Moll listened to her moaning and mumbling, My belly, my back. She listened and then she went to her hole lined with blackberry earth up on the gaze for the night.
    On the second afternoon Meggie Dob came by looking for Norea and Moll threw rocks at her to keep her away. Meggie pushed in and saw Norea lying in a filthy bloody heap on the rags.
    What have you done to her? she demanded of Moll.
    What have flowers done? What has dory’s darkness done? Do not ask why! hurled back the bony woman squatting in the shadows between Norea and the door. Throw her in the sea. She’s not needed here.
    Stop! screamed Meggie. She pushed past Moll and sat by Norea’s head and wiped her brow and commanded, Bring me water.
    Moll brought her a bucket of water and Meggie wiped the blood and vomit from the limp woman and moistened her lips. She held her head in her lap and stroked her face and said, Norea, you can’t die. Your Dagmar is crying. Where is her mother?
    The young woman’s lips opened, her eyes still shut. For three days and nights Meggie and the other women in the settlement took turns sitting with Norea in Moll’s shack, opening her lips and feeding her milk and soup and molasses tea, cleaning her when she threw up again, dampening her tongue, rubbing her arms and legs, stroking her hair. Finally, the poison worked its way through her blood and sinews, and Norea mumbled, then moved a finger, a toe, asked for her daughter. Two things the poison changed. It took away the child. It rendered Norea fully and forever blind.
    When she could finally stand to go home, she could not find her way alone but had to be led.
    From that day Norea lived excluded from light, whether it was day’s noon or a full-moon night. She caressed Dagmar’s face with her searching fingers and was afraid to cry. She commissioned the child to lead her around the house, over and over, counting the steps, memorizing the corners. When she accomplished the house, they began on the bawn out back. They laid stones for her to tap her way along the edges of the gardens, to the greenhouse and back.