The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  They all drank, of course, all of them, Mama and Aunt Helen and Daddy and Louis and everyone who was old enough to, and when I was home whenever they had a bottle it was the same thing. But I have to tell you that no matter how anybody else acted, Mama and Aunt Helen always acted like ladies, no matter what. They would sit there at the table perched on the edge of their chairs, with their backs straight and their skirts neat and straight over their legs just like they had learned from the sisters when they were at that mission school, and they would just sip, very delicately; they were never guzzlers. Every once in a while they would lean their heads together and laugh or, when they got pretty serious, sit very close together and talk in their low silvery voices, a pair of doves. And ladies, always ladies. Their indirect and kind eyes, behind Mama’s lovely and still mask and Aunt Helen’s, occasionally slipping when her graciousness was frayed by that betrayal of her spirit, met reality with courage and mission school manners. To this day, and I am an old woman now, two generations past the age they were in the times I am talking about, I sip my liquor, too, and remember how a lady is supposed to act. Pretty old-fashioned for these days, I guess, and because I am the only one left of all Maggie’s children, the first daughter and the last to die, Mama’s ways and Aunt Helen’s, too, that lived their longest in me will probably die with me. And their faces, too; I am the last living person who remembers those composed masks, marked by life to a state beyond beauty, and those kind and indirect eyes.

  We didn’t want to leave, George and Mickey and me, but like everybody else we didn’t have any choice. We would have to get on that train and get off at Harrod and somebody would be there to pick us up in the wagon to make sure we got to school. We would report to the matron and the prefect, who would march us to the girls’ and boys’ dormitories to get deloused and fumigated and try on our uniforms to see if they still fit. Mickey had gotten so tall that he was going to need a whole new uniform, jacket and pants and shoes, and I guessed that when they saw how big he was they’d take him out of the laundry and put him to work at the truck farm or the carpenter shop. That was the summer that he really grew, though he stayed skinny; his clothes had been big on him last spring but now his wrists stuck out of his shirtsleeves and his over-halls flapped around a couple of inches above his ankles when he walked. I asked him one night when we were watching the fire outside about what happened when McGoun got him back to school last spring. He told me that McGoun gave him a beating with that doubled leather strap, took away his quarters, then put him in the lockup room in the basement for three days. “It was nothin’,” he said, McGoun would get his one day. He smiled then, crooked and snaggletoothed, like Mickey, but with glints and flashes of something hungry and wolfish; in changing from boy to man he was also changing from Waboos to Maingen.

  DAGWAAGIN: MAGGIE IN AUTUMN

  Giizis’s last day as one of the little boys hidden at home was the day that the superintendent of the Indian school himself showed up on Maggie’s porch with tribal census records verifying that Vernon Gallette, son of Marguerite LaForce and Louis Gallette, was seven years old, that he lived with his mother, and that he was not attending school. He left a half-fare ticket for Giizis and full-fare tickets for Girlie, George, and Mickey.

  The next morning, they walked to the train station, Mickey and George carrying the lunch that Maggie had packed and their box of extra clothes, Girlie holding Vernon’s hand. Maggie stayed on the porch, holding Biik and waving his hand, bye-bye. “Take care of your little brother,” she called, “see you in the spring,” as she watched them walk away, growing smaller and smaller in her sight. Just before they disappeared around the corner, they turned to wave again, George and Girlie smiling to set an example for little Vernon, whose round moonface was shiny and stretched with crying. Waboos waved, then became Maingen, who thought of that day that would come, and smiled with bared pointed teeth, that thin young wolf hungry for the day McGoun would get his.

  Maggie kept her smooth and pleasant mask in place until they turned the corner. Her composure slipped for just a moment, exposing ravages of grief that made her look like Aunt Helen’s twin, but then she pressed the crook of one arm to her eyes to absorb her tears, which darkened the print of her cotton work dress sleeve, dried, and disappeared. Then, remasked, she smiled at Biik, took his hand and led him back inside, set him down, and knelt to fold her children’s quilts, smoothing and soothing the prints of their bodies into squares that she then pushed under the bed. She had practiced this so many times in her head that her body moved and her hands did the work without thought. Without direction from heart or head, her hands washed dishes, swept the floor, washed and dressed Biik, stroked his hair while they waited on the porch for Andre, helped him into Andre’s brother’s car for the ride up to her brother Earl’s house at Mozhay Point, waved bye-bye, see you soon little man, pulled her coat up over her arms and shoulders, pulled the front door shut behind her. Her feet, at their even greater distance than her hands from head and heart walked. Walked to the mattress factory, up the stairs, to the time clock, to her sewing station, where she worked without thought, eyes down, face composed, heart heavy and still as her face and as unreadable, as with the rhythm of the earth she prepared for winter, the season of hibernation and dreams of her children’s return.

  MAGGIE AND LOUIS, 1914

  The first time Maggie saw Louis she was sitting at the work table in the laundry building, next to the window for the light, mending stockings. She sat erect on the wooden chair, her body held inches away from the back in order to demonstrate proper posture to the group of girls learning how to set the darning egg into the curves of toes and heels.

  “Watch how I do this, first,” she said, demonstrating to the silent row that sat across from her at the table. “Use the darning needle to pick up the ends of knitted weave not torn or frayed, like this, do you see? Then cross it back and forth to the other side of the hole or the worn-out spot, do you see? And then do the same on the other two sides, but this time weave the needle over and under the threads you cross over. Don’t bunch up the threads, and don’t pull too tight; we want to leave a darn with edges smooth and even so that when the stocking is worn it doesn’t rub against the foot or the shoe—that makes the hole come back bigger, and you will have wasted your time.” She mended over a frayed heel and held up the stocking. “Do you see?” The girls nodded.

  “You may thread your needles and begin.” The girls’ matron, who would stay with the sewing class until she was sure that Maggie was capable of keeping the group in order, directed the girls in her deep and ringing voice. Maggie distributed a wooden darning egg and several black machine-knitted cotton stockings to each girl. They silently wetted and pinched the ends of threads between their lips, squinted to thread their needles, dropped darning eggs into their stockings, and sat straight as Maggie, their backs inches from the backs of the chairs as they began to mend.

  So quiet they were. All she could hear was breathing. One girl snuffled and swallowed; the matron glared. The girl said, “Pardon me, Miss,” dragging out the a and dropping the r in an accent from north of Miskwaa Rapids.

  Next to Maggie a heavyset girl with thick, coarse black hair braced her mending against her bosom, her nearsighted eyes wide open and nearly meeting at the bridge of her nose with the effort of trying to see black thread against black stocking. She looked up at Maggie; her pupils slowly uncrossed, focusing. Her smile was dazzling, her mouth a crescent of perfect white teeth, her round face dark-skinned and smooth. “She looks like she must be from Fleur de Pomme,” Maggie thought. The matron rapped on the table with her knuckles. “Eyes on your work,” she said sternly. The nearsighted girl ducked her head.

  Breathing. Some girls breathed lightly, some heavily, through their mouths, concentrating both to obey the matron and to please the new helper, an Indian girl dressed like a white lady, like a teacher. After a while, warm breath, curling ribbons of air, gently waved and wound through the room, twining air tendrils
around the girls, around Maggie and the matron, around the work table and chairs, the baskets of mending, the ironing table, the gaslight that hung from the center from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The room became dreamlike, the seamstresses sleepy. Someone’s nose whistled softly and plaintively, reminding Maggie of the cries of ducklings swimming behind their mothers at the shore of Lost Lake in late summer, paddling strenuously with infant webbed feet, straining to keep up. “Don’t leave me behind, don’t leave me behind,” their tiny weeping coos begged pitifully. Warm late-summer air wound and curled over the lake, twining damp tendrils around the ducklings and their mother, around Maggie and the rushes that grew higher than her shoulders, around the pale green frieze of ripening wild rice near Muk-kwe-mud Landing, across the lake. Maggie leaned into a crescent of air that supported her as she bent forward from the waist to scoop up and cradle in her hands the last duckling, the smallest and slowest, the one forgotten by its mother and left behind, the duckling that was really a darning egg inside a crumpled long black stocking, and stroked its downy back. “Shh, shh, she’ll back soon,” she soothed the baby, her lips against its soft feathers.

  An adenoidal gasp and snort from the girl with the accent from north of Miskwaa Rapids broke the rhythm of the room; the ribbons of air roiled and snapped, and Maggie jumped, sticking the duckling with the darning needle.

  “Pardon me.”

  “Elizabeth, do you need a drink of water?”

  “Thank you, Miss, no,” she said, pronouncing the a as an e.

  “Well then, for goodness’ sake stop that, or you will have to leave the room.”

  As the rhythm resumed, Maggie lost her concentration, distracted by Elizabeth’s desperate efforts to breathe quietly through her mouth. To cover the distressing stifled gasps, she hummed, stopped, caught the matron’s eye. “Can they sing while they work?”

  “Yes, that would be fun, wouldn’t it? Let’s sing. But, before we do, don’t forget to sit up straight.” The matron clapped her hands twice, for emphasis. The sleepy girls roused.

  “Do you know ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’? That’s a pretty song I like.” Maggie began to sing. The matron followed in her ringing voice, waving to direct the girls to do the same.

  They sang the song over several times, until the girls followed most of the words and the melody. The mood in the room again became dreamlike as Maggie, the matron, and the row of young girls sang wistfully about the lovely and beloved Jeanie, “borne like a vapor on the soft summer air,” singing wild notes that were then warbled by blithe birds. Jeanie with the light brown hair, happy as dancing daisies. Their hands and wrists mended stockings gently and gracefully in time to the melody; the needles and black stockings might have been silent violins. Maggie led the girls again to the end of the song, holding, in her voice like a silver flute, “bo-orne li-i-i-ike….”

  The matron’s voice cracked slightly, and she cleared her throat. Embarrassed, she smoothed the false fringe hairpiece pinned over the top of her head, where the hair had thinned, and adjusted her spectacles, peering and squinting at the girls. “Let’s hum it this time,” she suggested.

  As the silent and industrious violins accompanied the song without words, the old matron swayed and smiled pensively. What was she thinking about? Maggie wondered. A lost love, or a longed-for love? A memory, or a dream? Matron was young, Maggie imagined—her blue eyes were round as a kitten’s, her light brown hair a silken puff of pompadour above her smooth white forehead. A duke’s daughter, she danced gracefully in the arms of a tall young man—a soldier, perhaps, thought Maggie, who had read and reread every novel in the St. Veronique Mission School library—a commoner, whose feet, in shiny black boots, twirled deft scallops around her ruffled and sweeping skirt. Their love was the more beautiful because it was doomed, denied. Alone and bereft, Matron would live out her life teaching Indian girls to sit up straight, to make their beds with sheets pulled and mitered tightly at the corners, to emulate the bleak motions of her existence. Maggie sighed at the poignancy of Matron’s life; the humming girls sighed with her at the poignancy of Stephen Foster’s dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.

  With a light tap against the window, a shadow flew across the black wool oval held in the palm of Maggie’s left hand, so quickly that she thought a bird must have become confused by the glass and dashed against the window, thinking it was part of the sky. She looked up for the swoop of a wing; instead, a brown gingham shirt appeared to dance momentarily in midair—the sleeves fluttered and waved, the tails lifted, then the shirt half spun and sped away. Black broadcloth, a man’s coat, moved into the space and stopped, flapping its sleeves. “McGoun! Robineau! Stop that boy!” The black broadcloth coat moved away from the window and down the stairs toward the yard and the barn. Scarecrowlike in his baggy pants, which rippled in the seat beneath where the wind lifted the pleats of his jacket, the upper-school teacher, Mr. Greeney, continued to shout. “McGoun, where are you? Robineau! Stop that boy!”

  The brown plaid grew smaller and smaller as the boy ran toward the brush at the edge of the school grounds, blurring into the dull dusty brown of dried leaves. Except for the color of his hair he might have become lost to the sight of Mr. Greeney and the young Indian man who ran out the barn door in pursuit. The color was his betrayal, a near-black copper that the intensity of the oblique late-day sun lit to a red beacon.

  “It’s Louis!” one girl whispered.

  “Lisette’s brother!”

  “Is he going run again?”

  “He’ll get caught, him!”

  The matron clapped her hands. “Silence! Young ladies, eyes on your work. We are mending stockings here.”

  The girls quieted; then the sound of the cook ringing the triangle that hung outside the dining hall created a rustle of dresses and heads turning and whispers, the sound of doves in wind.

  The matron clapped twice. “Put your things away.” The girls gathered thimbles, needles, thread, and scissors into small cardboard sewing boxes that they placed on a shelf. “Line up.” They formed a queue, shortest to tallest, by the door. “March.” The smallest girl opened the door and held it as the girls filed out. Each said, “Thank you, Miss” as she left. Then the small girl closed the door and joined the line.

  “You did very well, Marguerite. They were following your directions, I think.” The matron held several stockings up into the light from the window. “There will always be mending for them to do, of course, but some of the girls, if they show a knack for sewing and get something done, can start cutting out summer-weight dresses for the little ones soon.”

  “Have they learned to follow a pattern, Matron?”

  “Some have; the others will have to learn. Please call me Julia—among the female staff we use first names. With the men we don’t, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  She would have to call Andre “Mr. Robineau.”

  “Shall we walk to the dining hall? We use the cook’s lavatory to wash before meals.” She looked curious. “Is Harrod anything like the Catholic mission school?” she asked, wondering if it was true that the young woman, newly hired to help sew and care for the younger children, had been taught by the religious sisters to speak French and make lace.

  “It was smaller, and there were only girls, no boys. And the teachers were Sisters.” Sister Cecile might at that very moment be grasping a little girl’s arm and leading her to the front doors of the classroom building to kneel on the wooden stairs, on a white navy bean. She might be scolding the little girl, as she had Maggie, lisping through a fine spray of spit, “This is what happens to girls who talk like savages. Next time you’ll remember English.” Her fingers and thumb might leave light blue-gray prints on the little girl’s upper arm, four small circles on the underside, one larger on the outside, that the little girl might press with an index finger as she examined them before putting on her nightgown, just before prayers, feeling and controlling the faint ghost of pain and remembering the gras
p of Sister Cecile’s strong and holy fingers.

  “Did you enjoy your studies?”

  “Yes, I did, but I enjoyed sewing the most.” Her sister, Henen, had been the better student, and the Sisters’ favorite; if she had been white, she might have become a Sister herself. Henen stood up straight, kept her fingernails clean, and enunciated carefully, copying Sister Jean Baptiste—‘Mar-geh-reet. Hell-en. Par-don me. Good mor-ning.” She read aloud without stumbling. Her mathematics problems were solved correctly and written neatly. Her lacemaking was exquisite. Her handwriting samples, disciplined Palmer Method arabesques and curlicues that matched the lace she made, were exhibited on the wall for the Indian agent to see when he visited the school. So delicate and refined was her touch that she was excused from kitchen work to assist Sister Therese with the preparation of the communion hosts before they were consecrated. At morning Mass she knelt without fidgeting while she prayed; at the altar railing she concentrated on the gift of the Eucharist with beseeching eyes, which closed in prayer as the priest placed the host on her tongue.

  “Why can’t you be more like Helen?” Sister Cecile asked the girls, nearly every day. The girls looked away from the paragon in sympathy; it was mortifying to Henen, of course.

  They were, actually, more like Henen than Sister Cecile knew; or, Henen was more like them than Sister Cecile knew: before being sent to the mission school, Henen had, more than Maggie, absorbed all that had been taught at home by a baptized mother and old-fashioned, traditional grandmother—to be thrifty, industrious, helpful to others, modest, reserved and soft-spoken—virtues that she practiced so overtly that the nuns didn’t feel the need to watch her closely and never heard that she talked in Ojibwe language to the younger girls while she braided their hair in the morning or helped them to keep their clothing neat and their shoes clean and their sums and letters lined up in rows as neat as the two columns the girls made to march from the dormitory to morning Mass. The girls could see that Henen had been raised properly at home: she had been kind and generous, respectful and humble, concerned with the other girls’ well-being. Left at home, she might have become knowledgeable about healing and herbs or about the old sacred stories that grandparents told during the dark winter months. She might have learned the old ways by heart and might have chosen and taught others to do the same when she became an old woman, the venerable grandmother of a large clan family. Instead, Sister Cecile thought that Henen would make a fine mother’s helper, perhaps for a wealthy family in Duluth or Minneapolis, when she finished school.