The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  LaDonna shuddered and lowered her head to the table.

  “Babe, you fussed. Look at that, Patsy. Daughter, you really fussed,” admired Babe’s mother and our family’s matriarch from the easy chair that Rollie pulled up to the table for her. Grandma Lisette had stopped frying sliced baloney ring and frybread in the kitchen, turned off the stove, and was ready to enjoy herself. Her plate was full, her shiny face round as the plate and damp from work, unlined and happy. “Patsy, try yourself one of those pretty sandwiches. Look, they’re just toasty and crispy looking.”

  My mother picked one up between her thumb and first finger and took a small bite, then her third sip of beer of the evening. “Babe, these are the best tuna sandwiches I ever ate.”

  “That’s because it’s chicken.”

  Rollie got up from his place next to me, excusing himself, “Forgot to say hello to Sonny,” and Frankie sat in the chair he vacated. “Hi, Artense.”

  Artense. My name. He could have said it under so many different circumstances. He pulled me out of the way just as I stepped off the sidewalk in front of a car, and said it again and again out of relief and gratitude for my life—Artense. He kissed me and was nearly out of breath with the experience—Artense. He asked to spend the rest of his life by my side, where he could watch me adore his dancing—Artense.

  “Hi, Frankie,” I smiled, my head down, and thought about what else I could say that could continue this conversation. I was nearly eighteen, almost a woman, and should finally be able to talk with him as a woman would to a man. I raised my head and inhaled, waiting for words to continue.

  “What do you do now, you done with school? You working?” The moment had passed me by but Frankie was considerate enough to continue and take me with him.

  “She’s going to start going to the junior college this fall,” my mother answered for me.

  “Oh.” Frankie, his turn to be the tongue-tied one, thought for a moment. I could see him searching for something to say to somebody so impressive and foreign. “Do you like Manischewitz?”

  “She doesn’t drink,” replied Patsy.

  THE DAY LOUIS DIED

  The police had found Louis lying where he had fallen, in a half-frozen puddle in the alley behind the Stevedore Surf and Turf, where Stan and I had gone to eat after the prom. While Louis was still conscious, he was able to tell them my dad’s name. Then his lungs congested and filled quickly with pneumonia, what they used to call the Old People’s Friend, and he died not long after they brought him to the hospital. Just like she’d thought, my mother had to be the one to identify the body, to tell the police that it was Louis, and she had to be the one to take his wallet from his pants pocket. Inside, there was nothing but my graduation picture. No money, no social security card. Just a black-and-white wallet-sized picture of me. A high school graduation picture, the first graduate in our entire family, and so a very big deal. I suppose that when he put it in the plastic sleeve we must have looked at one another face to face. Louis, unbroken by twentieth-century America and federal Indian policies, the Indian boarding school, alcohol, jobs hard and dangerous and impermanent, a life’s playing field set on the edge of a cliff. Louis, on that day as he would be on the day of his funeral, handsome still in a used coat and green pants from the county work farm. Louis the soft-voiced incorrigible. And his granddaughter Artense in black and white, perching on the photographer’s wooden stool the same way my mother sat, ready to fly, in a secondhand sweater, hair shingled and teased on top, smile a mask that almost did the job. Artense, who did as she was told and would graduate from high school. Artense, unbroken but yet untested. He was fifty when I was born. A half-century gap in our experiences. Fifty years. Our lives coincided for less than twenty.

  THE CLASS OF 1968

  Frankie found something he could say to a girl who would be going to college. “So, Artense, what class did you like the best in school?” He had poured four fingers of purple Manischewitz into a glass decorated with decals of flying ducks and opened a can of Coke for me with the little church key attached to his nail clippers. “Did you take history? I used to like history. Did you study about George Washington? What did you think of him? Do you know that some people think he was a better president than Abraham Lincoln? Why would they think that? What do you think about that, Artense?” I was tongue-tied. Frankie was flirting with me—with me! And he must have been five or ten years older than I was, I thought. A man. He’d been in the navy, and he’d been around the country, and he worked at the packing plant, and he’d bought his mother a color TV, and he rode a motorcycle. A man. I could see over the neckline of his white undershirt that his chest was smooth, with a few delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair, and when he reached across me to pour a little Coke into LaDonna’s empty glass (‘Frankie! Frankie, how are you doing? Where’s the rum?” she pulled one hand out from under her head to pat his arm, tender-looking skin the color of vanilla caramel), I could see below the stretching sleeves of his clean T-shirt delicately curling damp-looking tendrils of hair in his armpits as well. He smelled like cigarettes, wine, and spearmint gum. I looked down at my lap, then, because he was turned toward LaDonna, over at his. His jeans looked new, crisp dark blue and rolled up on the bottom. I turned around and could see on the front room couch Stan steadying Butchie’s hand, the one holding the can of beer, which Butchie was waving as he made a point. Stan had no chest hair. He was still a boy. His pants were chinos, with creases. His sister ironed his shirts, his mother sorted his socks. He would be leaving in the morning to go away to a real college and live in a dormitory. At almost eighteen, how could I know that one day he would be one of us? All I knew at the time was that he was going to leave. At almost eighteen, what I did know was that he wasn’t really mine, any more than Frankie was.

  Frankie unrolled a pack of Marlboros from his T-shirt sleeve and flicked it toward me with a little snap of his wrist (bone and muscle flexed, knit), and two cigarettes (one for me and one for him!) neatly slid out, just like in the commercials. “Artense, sugaswaa?”

  I looked over to my mother’s perch, which was empty. I reached for the cigarette.

  “Frankie? Frankie, you want … hey, Frankie.” Frankie turned toward LaDonna, who was looking at the ceiling now trying to remember what she started to say, concentrating, thinking so hard that she looked sober. From her point of balance, the balls of her feet planted on the floor, she tipped her head farther and farther back as she looked up and up at the light fixture then beyond that and suddenly LaDonna, though still in her chair, was on the floor, lying on her back, her plaid skirt flipped up so that her underpants showed, big white ones so loose they looked all creased and dented, above her long skinny white legs, and she realized where she was and looked at Frankie and me, so surprised, and I reached down to pull her skirt to cover those underpants (they’re so big, I thought; they must be her mother’s). She didn’t say a word. Frankie quickly tipped her chair back upright. She smiled then, seeing the room back where it was had been, and laughed just once, a fuzzy blue chuckle.

  “Muldoon.” From the windowsill, my dad called her name. “Frankie. Did Muldoon get knocked out?”

  “She’s good, Buster, just lost her balance is all, didn’t you. You’re good, aren’t you, LaDonna?” said Frankie. LaDonna leaned back into his arm that was across the back of her chair. She was smitten.

  “Muldoon,” said my dad, “you’re going to be all right.”

  THE FOURTH DAY

  Aunt Babe’s house was quiet and cold after the funeral, and the air clear, no smoke from frybread or cigarettes, a sharpness of clarity painful to inhale and painful to look through. Louis’s sister, Lisette, sat on a chair out in the kitchen; she had waved her daughters and nieces away as she would a flock of seagulls. No, she liked it in the kitchen. She would come out in a little while. Dennis, home from basic training, half knelt at her side, on one knee, holding her hand that rested on his other knee. In his army uniform he looked like Louis when he
played the trumpet in the band at Harrod boarding school, Lisette thought to herself. Remember that picture she used to have of Louis in his boarding school uniform, holding his trumpet? Whatever happened to that picture? It was a picture postcard, remember, that he had addressed to his mother but never sent. He had left it for her under the door to the girls’ dormitory, the last time he ran away from school. Above the high collar of his uniform coat with the braid and the buttons his face was stern and serious, so unlike him. He held the trumpet upright on his knee, like a bayonet; she had thought that Louis looked like a soldier. “Like Dennis,” she thought, as she sat holding her grandson’s adult hand. They had the same mouth, smooth and full, tender, red lipped, and snub nose, and those dark gray-brown eyes that almost looked blue. The same round moon face, with the same deep cowlick like a whirlwind above the left eye. Dennis and young Louis.

  “Want some coffee, Grandma? I’ll get you some.” Dennis looked into her face, and she thought how he used to do that when he was small, standing where he now knelt, at the same chair, his feet on the outside of hers, his forearms on her knees, his face so like Louis’s as he looked right into hers, that mannerism Dennis’s alone, so unlike Louis yet so essentially Louis. She nodded yes and reached to wipe a cake crumb off her grandson’s lower lip. He rose gracefully, tall and adult in his army uniform, poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove, added canned milk and sugar, and knelt again next to her chair. He held her soft old hand in his again, and she remembered little Dennis’s small, star-shaped hand holding hers while they walked to the store, to the post office, to school on the first day, a little boy’s hand that fit inside hers.

  Louis’s hand had been that same size when he started school. The huddle of children had been herded off the train at the Harrod train depot by the school’s disciplinarian, a man who carried a doubled leather strap that he absently, menacingly waved back and forth. He lined them up in pairs, shortest first, tallest last, to get on the wagon that would take them to the boarding school. The smallest boy, Louis, was led by his big sister, Lisette, to the front of the line, where she gently removed his hand, trusting and damp, from her own and joined it with the hand of the smallest girl. As she walked to her own place at the end of the line, the little boy turned his head to watch, stepping from the line, still holding the hand of the little girl.

  “Stay with your partners,” the disciplinarian said sternly. He tapped the little boy’s shoulder with the strap, then slapped it with a wet sound against the palm of his hand.

  Miles away, and further away by the minute, a teenage boy drove a hearse up the county road to the cemetery. In the back, inside the coffin, Louis wore my dad’s clothes, his suit and shirt and tie and socks (he didn’t really need shoes, the mortician said; that wouldn’t show). The mortician’s son sang with his favorite radio station on the ride and said to the coffin in back, “You don’t mind if I turn this up, do you?”

  Louis watched us from the great distance that he had covered over the past four days of his long and arduous walk westward to the next life.

  At the end of the fourth day, she was waiting on the other side of the last river, among the stars, her dark hair neatly knotted at the back of her neck, her white blouse reflecting the silver-blue of starlight. The night wind blew and lifted her dark skirt to one side; below, her small feet, which were laced severely at the ankles in ladies’ boots, like a teacher’s, stepped closer to the shore; the heels left the ground as she rose to her toes, clasping her hands as if in prayer. The sight filled his eyes as he waded into the river and swam; then as his feet touched bottom again he nearly galloped through the cold and heavy current. The rocks on the shore warmed and dried his feet those last steps.

  “Maggie,” he said, his feet light as smoke. “Maggie.”

  “Nishimoshe, my sweetheart,” Maggie sang in her light and silvery voice, “a long time I have waited for you to come over to where I am.”

  “Wijiiwagan,” he answered, and folded his hands over hers, covering her prayers with his own.

  And so Louis joined his true love, Maggie, and they joined the others who watch us from far beyond where the sun sets, the past that birthed the present that even now births the future. They pray as we pass into life, they pray us through our lives, they pray as we pass out of life; when we die, they pray our steps across the walk west. Thus blessed, we live and die in an air hung with their prayers, the breath of their words on our faces and bodies, their spirits among us, trying to see and hear and understand. Wegonen, what is it, we think. Amanj i dash, and I wonder. We ponder this all of our lives, not realizing what we already know.

  SHONNUD’S GIRL

  1936

  The horses lived on the other side of the wooden fence at the edge of Mr. McCuskey’s farm, in their own horse paradise of woods and meadow and barn. Violet and I secretly rode them from time to time both summers we lived there, in the meadow that like the McCuskey farm was lost in forfeit to the county for back taxes not long after Mrs. McCuskey took Violet and after little Sam and I went to the orphanage. For decades now the horse paradise has been the jail and work farm, and McCuskey’s farm the nursing home, where Lisette lives.

  Lisette was my mother’s dearest friend; she used to call me Rosie-ens or Sister-ens or “my little niece,” but now she thinks I am a ghost. When I call her Auntie, her mind searches through all the relatives and friends who still live in her head; not finding me frightens her.

  Going into Duluth when we drive down from the reservation to visit Lisette at the old folks’ home, we pass the prisoners who work outside on the farm or on the grounds of the home. Some of the men who get caught breaking the law and have to do their time get to work with the horses there, maybe even ride them, when nobody’s looking, like me and Violet. But we were never caught.

  Once in a while, on afternoons that we thought that our mother would be all right without us for a while, that she was going to stay home, that she was not going to leave us, we would sneak away from the house to meet the horses there at the fence, Violet and I. We waited on Mr. McCuskey’s side of the fence. The first summer, Violet was tall enough to stand with her forearms and folded hands on the top rail, her chin on her hands; the second summer, I could do the same, stretching so that my dress, one of those skimpy cotton wash dresses that little girls wore during those days of the Great Depression, pulled up, and my bloomers showed. From the fence we could see all the way to the edge of paradise, where the horses stood under the tamaracks. We never called them; they seemed to sense us: their bodies would become very still, their necks would stiffen; ripples ran across their sides like those tiny waves on their drinking pond during steady wind. I wonder now if they watched for us, too, but obliquely, like Ojibwe people do. The obliqueness of a horse’s gaze is a necessity, because of the way its eyes have been placed by God, for reasons we will only understand after we die, if we still care to know. The obliqueness of an Ojibwe’s gaze is also a necessity, because of what transpired after we were moved from where God had placed us. The gaze of an aandakii Ojibwe, who lives elsewhere, beyond even that, is the most oblique of them all.

  We never called them. They approached us, the beautiful horses, when the time—given to us and meant to be by the Great Spirit who is God—was right, slowly and indirectly, gliding toward us in figure eights around the trees, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, until they came up to the fence and stuck their noses through to be petted. We would stand up on our toes to reach their foreheads, stroking them from between their eyes down to their nostrils, while they stood perfectly still, those beautiful horses, each more breathtaking than the last. We were in love with them all and never could have chosen one over the other—the brown with white spots, the almost black with the white blaze forehead, the round, short-legged pony, the light brown with the maroon eyes like our mother’s, the old faded gray, blind in one eye. They chose favorites, however: the almost black liked me the best; the light brown liked Violet.

  From behi
nd the fence we could, by moving from side to side, look between the trees all the way to the owners’ house and barn and the pickup truck parked in the yard. Sometimes if the truck was gone we would walk along the fence almost to the house and coax a couple of those horses all along the fence to where their woods ended and the meadow began and then creep under the fence. We walked toward them slowly, speaking softly in baby talk, one hand out. They stood still, their eyes focused somewhere above our heads while they listened, knowing what we wanted and what we would do next. Close enough to touch, we patted their noses, so lightly; they tolerated our little girl hands as we stepped slowly and gently to their sides, talking and stroking noses, necks, then sides. Our little girl voices rang high and husky in the stillness of the owners’ absence, the horses’ breaths a lower pitch in the stillness of their waiting.

  I always went first; that’s how it was with me and Violet. When the patting and soothing, the soft urging of our young voices, and the warm low-pitched breathing of the horses blended into an almost audible hum of anticipation, I grasped the almost black’s mane in both hands and swung my right leg up across his back, belly-flopping the front of my body, elbows bent, face buried in the base of his neck where his mane ended; then, with my arms, I pushed myself upright, sitting astride, the skirt of my dress tucked tightly under my legs from the front, floating in a washed cotton puff out the back. Because Violet’s legs were longer, she always went up a little more easily, a little more gracefully; her slender, straight back and her long neck looked like a natural extension of the horse. As I have thought of her over the years, I have imagined Violet like that all through her life, wherever she has lived it, even today if she is still alive, sitting gracefully and lightly atop whatever life gives her to ride on, chin high, eyes quizzical, mouth smiling shyly. To me, she was beautiful in the way our mother was. I don’t know if anyone else saw her that way.