The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  When Maggie found a job at the mattress factory, she used her first paycheck to rent a house and brought her sister, now so fragile and needing Maggie as Maggie had needed her when they were girls, to live with her.

  Sonny wrote home once a month, always the same letter.

  Dear Mother,

  I hope that this letter finds you well. I am in good health, and doing well in school.

  Sincerely,

  John Robineau

  ZIIGWAN: SONNY AND MICKEY IN SPRING

  That time we were carrying the wash out for the girls to hang on the lines, me and my cousin Mickey, who we called Waboos at home, we started talking Indian and laughing; we weren’t supposed to do that, to the teachers there I guess it was like we were saying dirty words.

  “Giziibiiga-ige makak, it’s heavy, hey.”

  “Nimashkawaa.”

  “Gimashkawaa like a little girl, ha!”

  We stumbled with that big old washtub, each on one side of it, holding on to one of the handles. It was heavy, and we leaned our shoulders away from the tub to balance the weight. Mickey, he was so skinny his over-hall strap come off the one shoulder and dragged down his arm, making it harder to carry his side. Well, we were breathing so hard from the work and laughing we didn’t even know McGoun was sneaking up behind us till he says real loud, “Hey! Are you boys talking Sioux?” McGoun, he didn’t know one Indian from another and sure wouldn’t know we were talking Chippewa. I says to the prefect, “No, sir, we weren’t talking Sioux.” And then Mickey says right after me, “No, sir, we wouldn’t do that.” McGoun squints his eyes at us and says, “Well, see that you don’t,” and left. We started laughing so hard he heard and came back and shoved Mickey, who fell right on the ground, and the washtub tipped over so all that white wash load was right in the mud, and McGoun said, “Look what you boys done now,” and unhooked that doubled leather strap off his waist and started hitting Mickey with it. Then he had us carry the washtub back to the laundry building, and we had to wash it ourselves, all that big pile of girls’ underwear and nightgowns. We were humiliated to be touching all that stuff and the laundry girls so embarrassed that for once they stopped their giggling and looked away at anything but us.

  That night when we were getting ready for bed, I could see Mickey had bruises on his upper arm, four fingertip shaped on the back and one larger, thumb shaped on the front, from where McGoun pulled him, just about lifting him right off the ground, and a couple of welts on his skinny hind end. I whispered to him, “Maajaa daa, Waboos, let’s get out of here tonight,” and he looked back at me and smiled so big, his snaggly and rotting teeth all crooked and his eyes all happy. “Eya, ‘ndaa,” he whispered back.

  We lay there on our beds across from each other and listened to the other boys fall asleep as the light from the moon came in through the windows in wide stripes that moved across the floor and beds so we could see first Thomas on his back, arms out wide, with one leg sticking out of the covers, then Shigog, who pulled his covers over his head so he looked like a ghost. We heard Wesley snort and mumble, “C’mere, you,” and I was glad he was sleeping because he was so wild. All the time me and Mickey were facing each other in our beds, Mickey laying on his right side, me on my left. After a while, when it was pretty quiet except for breathing sounds, we looked right at each other and I said, “Let’s go, Cousin,” and Mickey’s eyes widened there in the dark, then turned into crooked black triangles as he smiled and stood up. We picked up our uniform pants and jackets folded and laid out for morning at the ends of the beds, and our shoes and socks, and walked just quiet across the dormitory floor to the kitchen, where we tied some bread and apples into a dish towel to carry. Then we walked out the front door, leaving it open so nobody’d hear us pull it shut, and walked behind the barn in our nightshirts. We got dressed and slicked our hair down a little with some water from the trough and walked down the road toward home.

  It was a long ways from Harrod to Duluth, and we were on the road for three, four days. We walked, and hitched, and slept in fields the first two nights, and even though we were wearing these soldier-style uniforms so anybody who looked could have guessed where we had come from, only one person, this one farmer who picked us up on the third day, asked us if we were from that Indian school. Since Mickey was so bashful and because I was afraid he’d tell the truth, doing so with that big smile of his, I did the talking for us. “Yes, sir, we were sent for,” I said, looking solemn. “We had a death in the family and have to get to Duluth.” The farmer said he was sorry to hear that; he was going to Allouez in the morning and could give us a ride almost to Duluth; if we wanted we could stay in his barn that night.

  We helped the farmer unload the wagon and cleaned up a little in the chicken coop, then his wife set us a nice place to eat at their kitchen table. Fried chicken—relatives of the ones we had just fed—these ones’ parts were all separated into sizzling little legs and wings and breasts and looking mighty tasty there in the frying pan. The wife kept getting up from her chair to put more food on our plates, and because she was a big woman, built a lot like those chickens of hers, her front and behind hit the backs of our chairs and the sideboard as she moved, and she clucked these nice little chicken noises and fussed over us, how sorry she was about our loss and what brave boys we were to travel all by ourselves. In the morning she fed us again, and the farmer dropped us off in Allouez in front of the feed store. We walked the rest of the way to Duluth, more than ten miles to home.

  Ma was surprised to see us walk in the door; the last time I’d run, McGoun had called the Duluth police, who had come to the house to tell her, so she knew about it by the time I got there. She said, “Sonny, Waboos, namadabin. Gibakade, na? I’ll make some tea.” She called out the back door for Giizis and Biik, “Ambe, ambe, look who’s here.” She fixed us tea and ladled out some soup, and we told her all about our trip and felt like heroes. Mickey wanted to get going to Mozhay to see the LaVirage cousins, so after he’d eaten, she gave him two quarters and packed him some food for the road.

  It was when we were going out the front door to send Mickey on his way that we saw the black Ford parked in front of the house and McGoun sitting on the running board having a cigarette. He got up as soon as he saw us come out and grabbed me and Mickey each by an arm. “Mrs. Robineau, I am here to escort these young men back to the Harrod School,” he said, in this formal and official way but breathing hard because it must have been hard to talk with Mickey squirming and me pulling the way we were. Giizis and Biik hadn’t gotten all the way out the front door, so Ma pushed them back before McGoun saw them. They knew what to do, went into the bedroom and under the bed, behind the quilt. Ma went right up to the prefect and took me by the other arm and said, “Mr. McGoun, Sonny is sixteen now and we need him at home, here, to go to work. You can’t keep him anymore.” It was McGoun’s job to bring two boys back, but I have to hand it to Ma, she didn’t back down this time and he was losing. Finally he said that I was more trouble than I was worth anyway and shoved Mickey into the backseat of the car. Mickey was too big to cry; he smiled just brave with those snaggly teeth and waved at Ma just before they drove away, but then I could see through the back window that his head was down and I could feel it that he wasn’t smiling anymore. We went back inside and Ma told Giizis and Biik that they could come out now.

  NIIBIN: GEORGE IN SUMMER

  Ma was able to send money to school for train tickets home so that when summer started Girlie and me could come home and not be put to work on the truck farm for our room and board. We had a good time at home. Once it got warm out a lot of people would come to visit at Ma’s, stopping by to visit and stay a while, people from Mozhay Point and Lost Lake, relatives and friends, the Brules and Gallettes, the Sweets, the Bariboos. They brought their kids and their quilts and food, flour or salt pork or maybe a sack of rice, if they had some left over from last fall. We had some good times. All day we would be visiting, kids playing and the grownups having tea while the
y talked, people coming and going. Some of the men got jobs shoveling grain at the elevators or working in the scrap yard and were able to find places for their families to live here in town, too. So now we knew some people here. Good times. And Ma’s house was right in the middle of it when Girlie and me got home that summer.

  Some nights after it was dark outside we would have a fire in the backyard, in the pit Sonny had dug, and sit to visit, watching till it burned out. Ma would set potatoes in the fire, close to the outside edge and under the wood, to cook. She picked up the potatoes when they were blackened and done, with her bare hands, and handed them out. Split open, the insides looked so white out there in the dark.

  Ma was always very generous with people; she had that reputation. She’d give you the shirt off her back, people said. They always talked that way, like they admired her, but I saw people take advantage of her, too, and she died poor, like a lot of other generous people. Not everybody is like Ma, but she didn’t care about that. I remember not long after we got home me and Sonny were sleeping on the front room floor after everybody was asleep, and we could hear these people, some friends of some of our cousins, in the kitchen. They were real quiet in there, with the door to the front room shut, making these rustling noises as they unwrapped food that they’d brought for just themselves. Here they were staying at Ma’s, and she made them welcome, and with her good manners offering them whatever she had—and that wasn’t much. Before everybody went to bed, they’d finished up the coffee she had on hand and ate more than their share of potatoes, so that there weren’t going to be enough for everybody for the next day, but Ma didn’t say anything because that wouldn’t have been polite. And there they were, eating, in the middle of the night there, all by themselves in the kitchen, and there were me and Sonny in the front room, still hungry, listening to them eat. Paper bags rattling. Chewing. Whispering.

  They got up early and left with their garbage so we wouldn’t know what they’d been up to. When I told Ma about it she said that was their own business and not ours.

  “Why should they get away with that, those bums?” I asked.

  “Maybe they think they need it.”

  “Maybe we think we do, too.”

  “Not like that, we don’t.”

  And Girlie and Aunt Helen just nodded their heads in that way, saying in those voices that sounded like they were singing together, “Mmmm, hmmm,” to let me know that Ma was acting the way a person should.

  “It was cookies, and doughnuts, and it smelled like they were eating dried meat, too. Next time they come here we should throw them out, those bums.”

  “People do what they do for reasons we don’t know about. They must need it more than we do.”

  “E-e-en za,” Aunt Helen added, “so I’ve heard,” which made Ma laugh.

  Ma lived long enough for me to buy a Buick and take her out driving and visiting when I came home, and she made sure that I took everybody else out who needed a ride, too. And let them borrow money. I bought her things I knew she would like, pretty things, a bowl with red and blue stripes painted on the outside, a statue of a little girl holding a flower, a blue powder box with a music box inside—when she opened the lid she could listen to it play while she powdered her face.

  I always worked hard, almost as hard as Ma, but I was somehow able to hang on to more of my money. It wasn’t easy; it took some compromises that sometimes I think she didn’t understand. But she always stood up for me when anybody called me a stingy-gut.

  Like I said, she died poor. Gave it all away. Give you the shirt off her back and died poor, like a lot of other generous people.

  NIIBIN: MAGGIE IN SUMMER

  With the weather getting warm and people able to travel around easier, the house got pretty full, with somebody there to watch the little boys and keep them company while Maggie and Sonny worked: Girlie and George and sometimes Henen if it was a good day, or some of the cousins from Mozhay, who visited for an afternoon, or a week, or a month. Some nights there were people sleeping all over the place. They brought blankets and sometimes food with them and shared what they had.

  Maggie’s children slept on quilts that she had sewn during the spring on Sundays, her days off, while she watched Giizis and Biik play and roughhouse with Sonny, of pieces cut from clothing donated to St. Matthew’s and discarded by Father Hagen because it was too worn for wear. Sonny and George had quilts patched from pieces of men’s pants and jackets, dark wools, Girlie a flower garden of brights and pastels, ladies’ skirts and dresses. Sonny and George slept on the front room floor, but Girlie brought her quilt into the bedroom and slept with the little boys on the floor next to Maggie’s bed. For the first week after she got home from school she had followed Maggie from room to room, kitchen to front room to bedroom, as she did her work at home, cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, and when Maggie sat in the rocking chair, Girlie sat on the floor next to her, touching the hem of her mother’s skirt with the back of her hand or pinching it between her thumb and first finger, being Maggie’s little girl again for just a little while.

  Andre showed up one day while Maggie was at work and made himself at home. When she got home he was lying asleep on the front room floor on the wedding quilt that her mother had made them, the one she took when she left the allotment, that he must have taken off her bed, with his head on his damn jacket, and Girlie was in the kitchen slicing up some pork and lard for when he woke up. “Ai,” she thought, “sshhtaa,” and was going to say something when Girlie turned from the stove and said with a happy smile, “Look who’s here!” Maggie thought, well the children were glad to see him; he was good to the children. Why ruin it for them?

  He stayed two days and then took Sonny and George to find a ride with him back up to Mozhay Point; Maggie didn’t see them again until the end of summer when the boys walked in the front door swaggering a little because they had cash money from working at the tourist stand and ricing. They had Waboos with them but not their father, whom they’d left up at Old Man Dommage’s.

  GIIWE-NIIBIN: GIRLIE IN LATE SUMMER

  George came back to town from Mozhay with Mickey right before we had to go back to boarding school, which was a good thing because I didn’t want to have to go on the train by myself and then have to try to explain to Mr. McGoun where they were. It was going to be hard enough to leave Mama and the little boys, who were really old enough to go to school and really shouldn’t be left alone like that when she went to work. Mama was doing everything she could to keep those boys with her and not send them to Indian school, but I knew she was going to have to send them sometime. One night we could hear her and one of the uncles talking out in the front room, late when they thought we were asleep, me and the little boys. The big boys were outside in the backyard by the fire, so it was just Mama and Uncle Noel sitting out there, the rhythm of Ma in the rocking chair making tiny rumbles against the floorboards, once in a while Uncle Noel spitting into a tin can, very soothing it was so I was lulled almost asleep till they started talking about the little boys. Noel was saying how they needed somebody to watch them with Mama having to be at work and he didn’t see how anybody else could take them; once Indian school started the older children would be gone; Giizis really had to go to school and who could watch Biik? She couldn’t count on Henen to do it; Henen had her own troubles and needed watching herself; maybe Maggie should go home. Grandma was too sick even to leave the allotment for Duluth; she wouldn’t be able to take care of them even if Maggie sent them up to Mozhay and stayed in Duluth to work.

  “Who else would watch them, my girl?” he asked.

  Mama’s voice was so quiet I had to hold my breath to hear her. “I don’t know, I just don’t know,” she said.

  Biik and Giizis were scared; they pushed closer to me so that their little bodies got my sides all hot and sweaty, Biik’s eyes big so he looked like a little owl there in the dark, and Giizis trying so hard not to cry that he shook. Little brothers. I sat up on the floor cross-legged and sat
one on each knee to lean back against me while I rocked them side to side. Side to side. Little brothers. I played with Giizis’s ears a little because that always made him all lovey and sleepy, and after a while his shoulders stopped that shaking and he turned his round face around up to look at me and smile before he fell asleep.

  So it was true what I’d been telling the matron at school, Mama needed me at home. Matron didn’t know about Giizis and Biik and I couldn’t tell her, so she couldn’t really understand, and I suppose she must have thought Mama must have something else going on—maybe she thought Mama was a drinker like Aunt Helen. Matron said she thought that school was a good place for me.