The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  Our mother. We never knew and never thought to wonder what it was that would cause her to leave those afternoons, because whatever it was, it was beyond our understanding and hers. There in the middle of listening to the radio, or rocking the baby, or stirring something on the stove, the tremor of her being would slow for just a few seconds and she would be still, as if hearing something of a softness or pitch beyond her children’s ears, put down the baby, or the spoon, or the mop, and walk out the door and down the road. If it was cold she stepped into the bedroom first, reaching into the closet for her coat, the brown cloth one that she buttoned the little fur collar to in the winter. Summers, she just took off her apron and hung it on the nail by the stove and left, walked out the door and down the road all along the McCuskeys’ farm and the horse paradise and didn’t look back.

  Up until that one time, she always came back, though. She had no place else she could stay.

  Our mother. The white people, except for our dad, called her by her boarding school name, Charlotte. Everybody else called her Shonnud. Thin—she was always thin—and big boned. And nervous, people said, with that tremor beating and quivering under her skin, her fingers always moving so slightly I still wonder to this day if I saw it, or heard, or felt. I suppose she was homely, with that bony, long-jawed face and those eyes of hers, long, triangular, maroon, and looking off to the side, the side her head tilted down toward, the side that her trembling wide and thin-lipped mouth turned down toward, the side she turned away from the world. Her left side. Her left shoulder dipped slightly; her right shoulder rose. Perennially oblique, her stance stepped its quarter turn away though she faced forward, her elbows out, the backs of her hands facing front. As she walked down the road away from us she looked forlorn, blown off course, on days windy or still, her walk seemingly aimless, her destination somewhere down that road.

  We never asked her to stay. We never asked her where she was going, knowing as we did that it was beyond our understanding and hers. When we were little and still living downtown, Cousin Cynthia sometimes took care of us while our mother was gone; when Cynthia went away to school, Violet and I became girls big enough to take care of ourselves and Daddy when she left. And Sam, after he was born.

  As I can recall, it always happened in the afternoon. There were the afternoons before she left. The afternoons she walked out the door. The afternoons she was gone. The afternoons she came back weren’t afternoons at all; they were the dark-clouded dawns, really, of long days of waiting for her next departure.

  We never asked her where she had been, when she came walking back up the road a few days later, tired and pale. If it was cold, she stepped into the bedroom first, reaching into the closet to hang up her coat and smooth it out with shaky hands before lying down to rest. She lay on her back, in the middle of the bed she shared with our father, hands folded on her stomach, fingers trembling, eyes sometimes open, sometimes closed, narrow nose and feet pointed at the ceiling. Her body sank into the dip in the middle of the bed and appeared to flatten just about down to the height of the mattress. She breathed so quietly that we held our own breaths in order to hear her.

  Our dad found out she’d left when he came in from working the farm, to a scrubbed kitchen in a quiet house. He never asked, “Where’s your mother?” Maybe that first time he did, asked Cynthia, but he never asked Violet and me, just went to the sink to wash and sat at the table for his supper. We dished it up for him, just as Mother did when she was home, and he ate it silently. If he wanted more, we could tell, and we dished it on his plate. He ate without talking, everything on his plate, then wiped up whatever was left with a piece of bread, chewed and swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  When Mother was gone, Violet and I became the mothers to the baby, Sam. He slept with us in our parents’ bed, and our dad slept on the kitchen floor, rolled in a blanket, next to the stove, where Violet and I slept when Mother was home. Our dad got up early to help Mr. McCuskey and didn’t want anybody to fix his breakfast or talk to him; he didn’t even want to see anybody when Mother was gone. We stayed in bed and kept Sam quiet until after our dad had left to work.

  We lived in the two-room house built by the Bjornborgs, who homesteaded the property long before the McCuskeys bought it. Mr. Bjornborg, his young wife, and her nephew had put up a shed first, where they lived with the animals for the first couple of years, and when they built the house it was on the little trail that led to the shed, which they added on to and made into a barn. When we lived there our father worked for Mr. McCuskey, who lived in the new house he had built for Mrs. McCuskey and all the children they had hoped for, and the trail was a county road. The Bjornborgs’ first barn had burned down years before the McCuskeys ever moved there. The Bjornborgs’ second son died trying to rescue the cow. We never walked on that spot.

  Today, of course, nobody even remembers the McCuskeys but me. The prisoners work in a big concrete-floored barn where the Bjornborgs’ house was.

  When our dad got hired to work for Mr. McCuskey it was a good chance for us to live in the country. He was handy and good with animals and thought he was lucky to leave the scrap yard for the chance to work the farm, with free rent included. The house had a bedroom and a kitchen and a lean-to shed off the back of the kitchen. The outhouse, next to the Bjornborgs’ old one that had been filled up and shoveled over and made into a toolshed, was almost new, dug by Mr. McCuskey. When we moved into the old and empty house, I could just about see a ghost path from the house to the old outhouse that had become the toolshed, an ever so slight bareness in the quack grass where the ghosts of the ill-fated Bjornborgs must brush, cutting their vapor feet as they moved back and forth, back and forth in the night, looking for the outhouse. I shivered and carried the bag of my and Violet’s clothes into the house that, inside, didn’t look haunted at all. Mrs. McCuskey had washed the windows and swept and dusted and put new paper on the long shelf above the stove, which she folded into fancy squares and points along the edge. She had scrubbed the floors and walls and cleaned and blacked the woodstove. On the kitchen table, which she had painted apple green, was a plateful of doughnuts, so many that they were not quite covered by a white dishtowel that she had tucked over them. We moved into the old Bjornborg house after Sam was born. We fit fine in the house, Violet and I sleeping on the kitchen floor, Sam in the bedroom with our mother and dad.

  Dad slept holding our mother’s trembling hands in both of his. On the good days, she woke early, before everyone; on those days the smell of the coffee woke us up, and we opened our eyes to watch from where we’d slept on the floor her skinny ankles and feet do little dancing turns around the floor while she stirred oatmeal, took the lugallette out of the oven, set out bowls and spoons. “Kwesensag, ambe wiisinin,” she all but sang in her quiet and thin voice, smiling and as scrubbed and neatly combed as Mrs. McCuskey. “Ondii Baby-ens? Wiisinii-daa!”

  Every day but Sunday, Daddy worked for Mr. McCuskey until suppertime. He plowed, planted, harvested, took care of the horses and cows, repaired the barn and the house, kept the yards clean, and sometimes hired out with Mr. McCuskey on other farms or to do roadwork. Violet and I helped our mother with Sam and the house and helped Mrs. McCuskey with the chickens. We had what seemed like the entire outdoors to play in. And on the other side of the fence was the horse paradise. It was a big improvement over our apartment in Duluth.

  DULUTH

  When we lived in Duluth, Cynthia didn’t live with us. She was away at school with her friend Ernestine at the Tomah Indian college in Wisconsin, where they were becoming educated ladies. Ernestine had already graduated and had a paying job in the kitchen and her own room, and Cynthia was working at her outing placement, taking care of the laundry and small children for a family in Prairie du Chien. That summer right after school ended they took the train to visit us in Duluth, when we lived in that apartment in the West End, on the same block as the Robineau brothers, and stayed with us for two weeks.

  Erne
stine didn’t have a family.

  Ernestine had a peach-colored dress, still new looking, that she had made for graduation, with money that she had earned herself from her own outing placement.

  Dear Superintendent Ripp:

  I am requesting $12.00 from my work placement savings account to buy fabric, thread, and trim for summer dresses and underclothing for Cynthia Sweet and me. My dress will be worn for the graduation ceremony and will wear nicely for summer also. Cynthia is in need of a new summer dress as she has outgrown the one she has been wearing. I have nearly $40.00 in my account from my earnings, which after the $12.00 will be more than enough for train tickets for our visit to Cynthia’s home this summer.

  Sincerely,

  Ernestine Gunnarson

  Dear Miss Gunnarson

  You may spend $7.00 on materials for your summer dress and underclothing. See the attendant in the discipline office for the money, which I have placed in an envelope for that use. Miss Sweet will receive a new summer-weight work uniform, which will suffice for her needs; however, because the $7.00 should be more than enough for your clothing expenses, you may buy additional trim for the summer dress you wore last year. You and Cynthia may turn and trim the dress, which will become hers for church and town.

  Alma Ripp, Superintendent of Girls

  Ernestine and Cynthia cleaned the apartment for Mother and washed and ironed and patched our clothes. They were kind to us and worked to bring a little of the order from Tomah to our lives, but they didn’t have a lot to say to us; mostly, they spoke to each other. They didn’t say more than two words to our dad. They stepped back or to the side when they passed him in the hallway, looking away to the side. Cynthia’s dad had left her with us just like that, gone to Minneapolis, when she was younger than Violet and I were. So our dad was the only one she had.

  When she was old enough for school, a social worker came to the apartment one day and left with Cynthia; the next day Violet and I walked to the depot with Mother to wave to Cynthia as she left on the train. We didn’t know why, Violet and I, and couldn’t ask Mother, who was walking in her sleep that day, her cheeks puffy and her eyes and nose swollen and pink from the wine she had been drinking the night before.

  We didn’t find out about our dad’s prison record until Sam enlisted in the army. I suppose the county couldn’t let a little girl live with a person like that unless she was his own child. But he was always good to Cynthia, and to Violet, Sam, and me. And almost always to our mother.

  Cynthia visited us in the summers and wrote a letter to Mother once a month. She and Ernestine lived in a dormitory, where every girl had her own bed and her own trunk to keep her letters and things in, and they had these sharp-looking Sunday uniforms with braid on the collar and chevrons on the sleeves and striped ticking work dresses they made themselves in sewing class to wear while they earned their keep. They went to football games and lyceums. They saw a ballet once. There was a matron in charge of the girls; she was supposed to take care of them. She made sure they had clean clothes and neat hair and made their beds and kept the place nice and acted like ladies. It was her job. She lived in a room in the dormitory and slept there every night so they were never left alone. That was her job.

  At the end of their last summer at home, Mother left late in the afternoon, on the day before Ernestine and Cynthia went back to Tomah. We were hanging out the open front room window to look at the jail, watching a policeman walk a swaying and resigned drunk toward the sandstone steps to sleep it off in a cell. At the bottom of the steps, the drunk stopped and looked down at his feet, then turned from the waist and looked up at the sky and freedom and the little girls hanging out the window and waved. The policeman put one arm around the drunk’s waist and held his other hand; the two of them turned and walked up the steps as if they were dancing or ice skating. As they walked through the door into the jail, our mother walked through the door out of our apartment.

  Violet and I stood by the door staring at Ernestine and Cynthia, who would know what to do next. They stared back, and thought, and looked at each other. Then Ernestine said, “Well, let’s finish cleaning this place up.”

  “It’s a dump,” answered Cynthia. “Look at it. We can’t even wash the walls, the plaster’s all crumbling.” She ran her hand along one bare patch, and white grains sprinkled like powdery sand to the floor. “All you could do with this is cover it up.” Again she and Ernestine looked at each other, young women becoming educated ladies. Then they walked into the bedroom, this their last afternoon of their last visit home. Cynthia pulled Mother’s money bag from the hole in the mattress, where she kept it hidden, and counted out nearly three dollars. “Ernestine, my girl,” she said, “go see if the Robineau boys are home. We’re gonna wallpaper this place.”

  The Robineau boys brought over a bottle of their homemade brew and a lard bucket filled with flour to make paste. Cynthia and Ernestine used part of the flour to mix a pan of lugallette. When it was baked, Violet and I sat on the bed in the front room and watched them work and party; I remember it like it was yesterday. They drank the brew right from the bottle, and we ate the lugallette slice by slice, spreading each one with a little lard and sprinkling it with the sugar that Cynthia bought with the money left over from the wallpaper. They mixed the rest of the flour with water in the bucket and spread it on the back of each wallpaper section that Johnny measured and cut. They shared that one bottle of brew the whole time they did this, and as the night went on they got silly and started laughing hard at anything anybody said, and George said, “Look at the wallpaper, it’s all crooked,” which made them all laugh harder. Ernestine and Johnny began to dance, their hands and the front of Ernestine’s apron all crusted with drying flour paste, and Cynthia and George sat on the bed next to Violet and me, singing and clapping to keep time.

  “Come on, Sissy, let’s dance,” Ernestine said to me, and took my hands. We swung and twirled, then Johnny grabbed Violet around the waist and carried her around the room, dancing with only his feet on the floor, her feet dangling near his knees. We were delighted with the attention; I watched the room tilt and spin as Ernestine held me by one hand and twirled me one direction, then the other. Violet smiled as Johnny hefted her weight a little higher, dancing with her behind sitting on his right forearm, his left hand holding her hand out like they were in a ballroom, and when Ernestine and Johnny got too tired to dance us around anymore we all fell right onto the bed, and George and Cynthia got up to dance.

  George held Cynthia tightly, pulling her left hand behind his back, laying his cheek against hers, and she put her hands against his chest and pushed. “Cut that out, you!” she scolded, which offended him, so he went back to wallpapering, leaning against the wall while he did it so he could hold the bottle in one hand and wallpaper with the other.

  Violet and I fell asleep while they were still partying, and when we woke up it was morning, the overhead light was still on, and the Robineau boys were asleep on the floor. Cynthia was packing the suitcases and Ernestine was wetting down the wallpaper so it would come off the wall. She cleaned the flour mess up and shook Johnny by the shoulder. “Johnny, you and George gotta fix this wallpaper.”

  Daddy came back that afternoon; during the times Cynthia was visiting he never slept at the apartment when Mother was gone. By the time he arrived, the place was clean, Ernestine and Cynthia had left for the train station, and Johnny and George were getting the wallpaper on good and straight.

  I wouldn’t see Cynthia again for a long time.

  AT THE WORK FARM

  When Daddy got the job with Mr. McCuskey, he left the scrap yards for good and we moved out of the West End, all of us, Daddy, Mother, Violet, baby Sam, and me, out to the country. Violet and I loved living at the farm, loved Mrs. McCuskey, who waved at us when she was out hanging her wash. Her windburned, reddened face shone as bright and happy as the sun below her frilled mop cap; her spotless white sheets hung in bleached brilliance below the bright and happy McCuske
y farm’s sun. She had us over for coffee and caramel rolls, treated our mother like special company, me and Violet like ladies, snuggled Sam in her lap and smelled his head, and told us how they were hoping to have a little one of their own one of these days, she and the Mister. And she and the Mister treated us kindly, always kindly. A couple of times when Mother actually woke them up in the middle of the night screaming unspeakable things as she and Dad shoved and hit each other, Mrs. McCuskey wrapped our blankets around the three of us children and brought us to her own house, putting me and Violet to bed in her guest bedroom, between sheets (they were so smooth, so clean, so fragrant), our heads on pillowcases she had embroidered with pansies, and slept with Sam in her own bed while Mr. McCuskey, a massive man, made pots of coffee while he calmed our parents in the same pretty McCuskey kitchen where we had been special company.

  “I didn’t touch her, sir,” Dad told him in a shaky voice. “Shonnud, you crazy Indian, tell him I didn’t touch you.”

  Mother stood gripping the back of a kitchen chair, too overwrought to sit or speak, in her coat that Mrs. McCuskey had wrapped around her shoulders for modesty (“Here, Charlotte, here, put this on, I’ll take your kiddies to my house tonight. Here, Charlotte, put on your coat”), in her nightgown so thin and worn it was nearly transparent, her eyes downcast, her face shiny with sweat, her hair black snakes writhing round her long damp neck.

  “Mrs. Sweet, come on now, you can either sit down and have some coffee, or you can go home and go to bed,” Mr. McCuskey growled in his deep voice.

  She stood silently, frightfully, knuckles sharp white bones showing through the skin of her hands. He repeated himself. She raised her eyes and nearly unnerved him with her unfocused purple glare.