The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  One morning the feeling of my littlest girl’s fine, straight hair in my hands as I braided then crossed and tied her braids in ribbons behind her ears brought to mind that she was the age my grandmother had been when she left home for boarding school, just five years old. I would be walking my own five-year-old to school; we would see each other again that same afternoon after I finished work. I began to appreciate more the struggles and tenacity of my family as well as of all Indian people, whose valuing of family and tribal culture made it possible for people like me to live with our own families and have our children experience an education that is in so many ways so different from that of our grandparents. I began to see that as Indian people our interactions with society and with each other include the specter of all that happened to those who went before us. As their schooling experiences defined too much of their lives, so that legacy continues to define much of ours. Yet without it, we disappear.

  The last time we visited Aunt Shirley at home, my dad and I, she was waiting for us and opened the screen door as soon as we got out of the truck in front of her trailer. She stood in the doorway, waving and smiling while we walked over the boards laid over the muddy yard and up the stairs to the vestibule outside the kitchen.

  “Buster! Artense! Come in; biindigen! Come on in!”

  Above the reddened dryness of her high, high cheekbones, stars rose in delight from the dark, dark depths of her eyes and danced. “Boozhoo, boozhoo! N’madabin; have a chair!”

  Her appearance was not shocking: she was thin, and a little pale, like she’d been up all night. And she acted the same, not as though she was dying, which she was, and which was the reason for our visit. This might not have been real. She might have only been dieting, and our visit only social; perhaps her death was not grinning at us from the corner of the room, where he leaned with the patience and anticipation of inevitability. Maagizhaa; maybe.

  Her manners were flawless, traditional: She made sure that we had the most comfortable place to sit, on her couch, which she had covered with her good afghan. She accepted the pink-flowered paper plate of peanut butter cookies that my mother had baked that morning and covered with pink Saran Wrap, and she placed it in the center of the dining room table, next to a box of chocolate doughnuts. She offered us tea. She asked how everybody was doing, my mother and brothers and sisters, my husband and children. My dad told her how good her house looked and what a nice place it was. He asked how old was the waterproofing stain on the front steps and said that it looked like new. “Boy, this is a really nice place,” he said again.

  I offered the plate of cookies to my dad because I knew that Shirley wouldn’t take one until he did. “Patsy made these, hey,” he said. “You should try one. Boy, they’re good.”

  “My mom said they’re supposed to be good for you,” I told Shirley. Could she possibly have any appetite, I wondered. Could the cookies help anything as serious as lung cancer? My mother’s peanut butter cookies could be magical, healing. They were not too big, not too small, tender in the middle, crisp around the edges, nearly as light as air. On the tongue, they dissolved into grains floating in a sweet and salty cream. She made them often and kept them in a commercial-sized pickle jar on the kitchen table. She packed them in plastic bags that she had my dad drop by relatives’ houses when they were sick. They were light on the stomach, she said, and helped keep your strength up. She advised saying a rosary, too.

  Shirley picked out the smallest cookie with her fragile hand, which was nearly fleshless, just thin and wrinkled skin over bone, and bit a neat scallop from the edge, chewing daintily with her front teeth. I said a Hail Mary silently. “My, these are delicious,” she said, and took another bite.

  We brought her a manila envelope filled with photocopies of old pictures. She spread them out on the coffee table, one by one, naming all of the people, until the surface was covered. There was Shirley, a little girl posed with her brothers and sisters in front an elm tree, just half a block from where their aunt, my grandma Maggie, who died before I was born, lived. Shirley’s mother, our great-aunt Lisette, and Grandma Maggie posed in a studio portrait with great-aunt Helen and their mothers, sometime in the 1920s. A dozen children, cousins, grouped together next to a picnic table. A hundred boys and girls in uniforms lined up in rows on the steps of the Harrod Indian School, Lisette with the big girls, Louis with the boys, Maggie between the girls’ matron and the cook. Shirley in skinny pedal pushers and harlequin glasses holding a little boy in shorts and engineer boots up to face the camera, her ponytail blowing almost straight up in the wind. An old woman in an ankle-length cotton print housedress, Aunt Lisette shaking her finger at the person behind the camera, tucking escaped wisps of hair back into her chignon with her other hand. Shirley in a lawn chair at Aunt Babe’s last August, legs crossed, one sandal balanced off her toes, fingers trailing over grass and dangling a cigarette, straw hat casting patterns of sunlight across her laughing face. Her mouth was open; her gold tooth glistened wetly in the light of that late summer day. On the ground next to her was a paper plate of untouched picnic food.

  “It’s me! Look, it’s me!” She held up the copy of a small snapshot of a little girl on a snow-covered porch, smiling into the camera, wearing a knit hood and mittens. “I don’t remember this picture! Where did you find all these?”

  She was so much thinner than last summer. Her brown hands were twigs, dry and chapped against the freshness of her nail polish as they moved stiffly among the stack of photographs.

  “And look at this one; it’s Maggie and Dolly. Oh, we used to love to go visit there, when they lived in that apartment in the west end. That Dolly, she was so nice, everybody liked her. Remember that, Buster? Remember how she used to give us kids money?”

  It was a good afternoon. We drank tea and ate doughnuts and left on the plate for Shirley the rest of the magical peanut butter cookies that my mother had made especially for her. She showed us the gallon jars of swamp tea that Joe Washington had sent down from Mozhay for her to drink, just a little bit at a time, all day. She was feeling a lot better, she said, felt like she had more energy. She felt cold sometimes, though.

  “You should see my X-ray. My lungs, there’s all these little silver spots. You wouldn’t believe there could be so many. The doctor says that’s the cancer, those little silver spots on the X-ray; you should see all of them! Like a swarm of fireflies, it reminds me! But that swamp tea, it’s making me feel a lot better. The doctor said that’s good, that it makes me feel better. He told me to drink all I want.”

  “Hey, I ever tell you about when my mother was in the hospital, before she died? I was there all the time, every day, and she knew me even when she didn’t know anybody else. Well, she couldn’t swallow anymore, you know how that happens? So, they were feeding her through this little tube, and she was saying to me how she would sure like to have a beer. She couldn’t drink anything, though, through her mouth; everything had to go in through the tube, and so when the doctor came by I asked him about it. ‘She’s wishing for a beer’—I told him this privately ‘do you think it would be all right if I just poured a little bit of beer in that little tube?’ He said to me, ‘Shirley, that dear lady can have anything she wants.’ That’s just what he said, that dear lady could have anything she wanted. So I brought in a can of beer, and she could watch me pour a little bit into the tube, and she would say, ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.’ Oh, she was funny. ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.’ That’s her picture right here, see?” She lifted a handful of photographs from the table. “In this one she’s an old lady, but here she’s younger than I am now. And in this one, you can just barely see her looking over the railing; she’s this little girl right here, just a little girl, at Indian school.”

  She had put on a sweater and was rocking slowly in the recliner. “I have something for you, Artense. Go in my bedroom, sweetheart; it’s past the kitchen, way down at the end of that long hallway, past the bathroom; go in there, and go around the other
side of the bed, and underneath the dressing table there’s a pair of boots for you. They’ll fit you; your feet are small, like mine. You can wear them to dance in; they’ll go nice with your dress. You still dance in your blue dress with the red ribbon, don’t you?”

  Her bedroom was feminine, and more light and tidy than I would have thought. Her bed was made, the pink wallpaper print comforter fluffed up and even around the edges. The window shades were pulled up exactly to halfway; over them, the white lace curtains looked starched, spotless. Her many bottles of colognes and lotions looked attractively arranged on the mirrored tray on the vanity; did she do that deliberately, or did the pattern just occur? The air in the room was dry and smelled like Jean Naté talcum powder; there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. I found myself tiptoeing into the room toward the tray of perfume bottles, wanting to pick them up and touch them, like a curious little girl on an errand into her grownup aunt’s bedroom. I remembered Shirley at Aunt Lisette’s kitchen table, setting her hair in pin curls. In front of her were two glasses of beer. She drank from one, dipped the comb into the other to dampen each lock before she twirled it quickly around her finger and bobby-pinned it against her scalp. I stood at the corner of the table, between my mother and Aunt Shirley, listening to their grown-up lady talk and aching for the day I would be sitting there, too, setting my hair with beer and carelessly enjoying adult freedoms. They could wear whatever they wanted, go to bed at whatever time they wanted. Talk about the color they would paint the kitchen someday and the girl down the street who sat outside in her swimming suit. Buy powder and lipstick at Woolworth. Shirley, who longed for a daughter and never did get one, saw the naked longing on my face and pulled me close to her knees. She picked up the comb to set my bangs into pin curls.

  “Here, use water. Buster’s not going to want me bringing her home smelling like beer.” My mother always set her hair with water.

  “Artense’s hair’s just like mine, so straight it’ll never hold the curl if I set it with water. Anyway, the alcohol evaporates when it dries so the smell goes right away; he’ll never know it was beer, and her bangs’ll keep the set. She’ll look just like a teenager, won’t you, Artense?”

  Facing me from the other side of the bed was a graying and grown-up woman, younger than Aunt Shirley and plainer, without eye makeup or hair rinse. My reflection in the mirror above the vanity raised her eyebrows and smoothed the straight, fine filaments of white hair that sprang from her braids. She didn’t touch the perfume bottles.

  The boots were behind the pink vinyl footstool that Shirley had pushed into the space under the vanity. They had been brushed and stuffed with tissue paper; the soles were lightly scuffed into circular patterns where the balls of her feet raised and lowered her body nine dips to the left, nine to the right, when she danced. She was taller than I was, and she wore her skirts shorter than I wore mine; the fringe that when she danced swayed and swung from the tops of the boots would be covered by my skirt and barely show as I dipped and pivoted in my restrained version of Shirley’s traditional style. When I picked them up, the touch of suede against my fingers was oily and cool, and I shivered, but back in the living room I held them to my heart like a baby and said, “They fit perfect. Miigwech.”

  “I’ve been waiting to give them to you. I want you to have them,” Aunt Shirley answered. “I’ve been thinking about you dancing in them.”

  She didn’t live long after that. The small silver spots on her lungs, that swarm of fireflies caught in that mortal pattern in the moment the X-ray was taken, begat, and begat, and begat some more until there finally wasn’t enough room for them to move at all. Crowded and static, they turned her lungs into solid sterling, and she died.

  The first time I wore them I felt in their leather the outlines of slender, fine-boned feet that weren’t mine, and I suppose the boots must have felt in the outlines of my own curved and muscular feet a hesitation, the tentativeness of a new tenant. Her smaller toes had molded subtle scallops not quite the shape of mine into the ends of the gathered vamps; I had to loosen the lacing over the insteps, tighten it at the ankles. At first they felt cool; I stood facing the mirror in the ladies’ dressing room watching my cousin Dale Ann comb and braid my hair, and the leather warmed to my body heat and began to yield, relaxing to the shape of my calves and feet. I stood still as Dale Ann scraped my scalp and bent her fingers into gyrating, fantastic shapes that churned out stiff-looking braids that she secured at the ends with abalone buttons, then with a quilled barrette she anchored the white eagle feather and fluff to the tiny braid she had woven across the top of my head.

  “How’s that?” she asked. “Tight enough?”

  “I can’t even blink my eyes,” I answered, then flexed up and down on the balls of my feet, testing the feel of the boots.

  “Are they comfortable on you?” Dale Ann was flexing her own knees and feet, warming up. Her feet looked chubby in moose hide moccasins that fit tightly as ballet slippers; I could see her high, high insteps undulating under the pink wild roses beaded on the vamps, could see the movement of the tendons working along the sides of her feet and disappearing under her calico leggings, where she kept her hard ankles and sinewy calves under strict, traditional-dancer control.

  “I’m working into them.” At body temperature, they began to feel like a second skin.

  “Where are you ladies from?” The woman next to me in the mirror was gathering the ends of her French braids into a chignon at the back of her neck. The jingles on her red and black dress chinked a silvery scale as she moved her arms.

  “Mozhay Point. But we live in Duluth, here,” Dale Ann answered. “How about you? Giin i dash?”

  “Miskwaa River.” She was bent backward from the waist, twisting handfuls of shiny, slippery-looking hair around one fist; as the mass tightened the ends slid apart and out of her fingers and down her back. She laughed, embarrassed. “Oops. I don’t usually wear my hair up.”

  “Here, want me to do that? We have a lot of bobby pins.” Dale Ann coiled the woman’s hair and wound the coils back and forth into a tight figure eight. Into the middle of the chignon she skewered a beaded hair tie of red sweethearts and black cut glass bugles. “Pretty,” she mumbled, with her mouth full of hairpins. “There, that’s gonna hold. Too tight?”

  The jingle-dress dancer worked her mouth a little and smiled. “No, no, it’s all right. I can still move my face.”

  We laughed.

  “Miigwech.” She hesitated. “Do you think this skirt is too short? I borrowed my cousin’s dress.”

  “Not really.” Dale Ann sounded doubtful.

  “It’s really nice.” I meant that, it was, but the bottom of the jingles brushed the top of the leggings, and once she moved her knees would show flashes of skin while she danced.

  I asked her, “Do you have a half-slip on?” I knew she did; I had seen it when she was getting dressed. “You want to trade? Mine is black, and it’s longer than yours. It would look like your dress. Nobody would know.”

  We switched undies, giggling. She said, “My name’s Inez.”

  “I’m Artense. And this is Dale Ann; we’re cousins. Hey, that looks good, and the jingles really show against that black. Ready to go out and dance? My daughters are already out there lining up.”

  “Yeah, let’s maajaa.” We left the dressing room and walked toward the grand entry lineup at the far end of the powwow circle.

  “You gotta be careful out there with us, though,” Dale Ann warned. “Sometimes we kick up all these divots and you’ve got to look out so you don’t fall in the holes they leave!” She held on to my arm so she wouldn’t fall down laughing.

  “Oh, was that you, then, who I noticed doing that up at the Mozhay Point spring powwow? You were dancing so fast it was just dusty out there, you were just a blur, so I couldn’t see who it was!”

  We quieted down as grand entry time got closer and approached the group of dancers lining up to go into the powwow circle. The flag bearers stood
at the front, four men abreast, one with the American flag, one with the Canadian, one with the Eagle Staff, one with the black pow mia flag. Next were the male dancers: traditionals, some in black velvet beaded with flowers and vines, some in leather and calico; fancy dancers in double bustles; grass dancers, whose shoulders stayed level while their feet and yarn fringes brushed the ground, spun and skipped. Ahead of us, the ladies in buckskin dresses held out their hands for the pinch of tobacco that would be placed in their palms as they entered. Dale Ann and I lined up behind them, Dale Ann after me because she was younger, then my daughters behind us. Inez from Miskwa River hugged us; she would enter farther down the line, with the jingle-dress dancers.

  “Nice to meet you ladies. See you later. Miigwech for helping me. Hey, Artense, I really like your boots; they look good with your outfit.”

  “They’re a gift from my aunt. Miigwech. Nice to meet you, too, Inez. See you out there, then.”

  Shirley’s dance boots entered the powwow circle with my careful steps, matching my toe-heel gliding dip to the beat of the Tamarack Boys’ drum’s opening song and following the fur-topped moccasins of the graceful elderly lady ahead of me in line, who followed the ladies in buckskin dresses ahead of her, all of us matching our rhythm, left-toe-left-foot, right-toe-right-foot. I always thought that woman traditional dancers looked like a flock of wild geese ready to leave the ground and fly, in that V formation, but of course, because we were traditional dancers and bound by choice to the earth, our feet always touched the ground. We held our tobacco in our left hands, which are closer to the heart than the right; with our right hands we held our fans. Behind us we could hear the jingle-dress lady dancers enter the circle with their singing dresses; rounding the circle, we passed at the entrance the fancy shawl dancers, young women who sprang like deer and spun like dandelion fluff, in colors of the summer sky, and pink and orange sunsets, and the yellow of buttercups and bees. With the entrance of the little children behind the fancy shawl dancers, the line of dancers more than completed a circle. The lead buckskin lady danced the traditional women dancers past the flags and off to the side, where we completed the grand entry song in a line of swaying and pivoting dancing in place, ladies in buckskin or beaded velvet or beribboned calico, all with our feet on the ground and turning as though connected to the same lathe, counting toe-heel in place, four to the left, four to the right, center, four to the right, four to the left.