The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  “My God, poor Sweet,” he thought. “I mean it, Mrs. Sweet, one or the other, take your pick.”

  She went to bed.

  “I swear, sir, I didn’t touch her,” Dad lied again.

  “Maynard, man, let’s have some of that coffee.”

  Violet and I lay awake in the guest bed for a long time. To this day I wish I could enjoy fresh, ironed sheets and pillowcases the way other people do. But I don’t. It causes me to feel dread and suffer insomnia. Long nights I have, sometimes, remembering that beautiful bed. We lay awake, Violet and I, until she fell asleep, and for once she went first, slept with the side of her face against that white pillowcase, her mouth in sleep turned down on that side. She lay on her left side, facing me, right shoulder down, left up and forward. She looked beautiful in the way our mother was. I watched her sleep.

  But those were the bad nights. Things weren’t always bad. There were the days Mother was up before Dad and cooked and cleaned and swept and hung the blankets out on the clothesline to air out. There were the days she put on her good dress, the white one with the low waist and embroidery down by the hem on the left side, and brought us over to Mrs. McCuskey’s for coffee (our Mother had lovely manners that she had learned at boarding school, the one run by the mission, and the sight of Mother’s slender, long-boned hands stirring sugar into one of Mrs. McCuskey’s delicate wedding china cups contrasted so with Mrs. McCuskey’s red, work-roughened hands that were heavy as a man’s). And there was that one day she had me take her to the dump.

  Her eyes were bright that late summer morning; the floor was mopped and the windows were open to air the rooms. Violet and I were out in the yard with Sam, and she called to me, “Sister, go get the wagon! We’re going to the dump!”

  In those days it wasn’t an unusual thing for people to go out to the dump to see what they could find, and it wasn’t unusual for a girl like me, and I was only ten, to drive a wagon. So I hitched up Sugar Pie, the mule, to Mr. McCuskey’s wagon that he kept in our yard, harnessed up like I’d seen Dad do, and Mother and I went up the road way out in the country to the dump. Like I said, it wasn’t an unusual thing, and in those days people went to the dump to get all kinds of things.

  It was a nice day; the breeze that was airing out our house was airing out the whole outside, and Mother and I could smell the barn, and then the creek, and then we thought there must some sweetgrass close by. Sugar Pie’s rear shone in the sun; the mule tossed her head as she trotted up the county road. I held the reins and didn’t really need to do anything; Sugar Pie acted like she knew the road and was going someplace she really liked (we always called Sugar Pie “she” because Mrs. McCuskey said she was a girl no matter what anybody else said). She actually pranced as we got to the dump turnoff and stopped willingly when Mother found a good place for us to stop. And it was a good day at the dump. There were a lot of people there, people who knew us.

  “Shonnud, my girl, are you looking for a dresser?” called Old Man Shigog. “There’s a pretty nice one here.”

  “Boozhoo, Uncle. No, thank you,” my mother called back politely, “but if I hear of anybody who is, I’ll tell them about it.”

  My mother hopped around the dump in her black strap pumps like she was sixteen years old, her skinny legs in her black stockings almost skipping from one spot to the next. The day was so warm that she rolled her stockings down to just below her knees, which I could see flash white in the sun as she climbed hills of refuse. Her hair began to loose from its bun and hang in strings on each side of her face, which began to take on some color from her exertions. She smiled her crooked smile and laughed, a songbird it sounded like, with the other people at the dump. She introduced me proudly, “Mrs. Bigboy, this is my girl, Rose. Rose, Mrs. Bigboy knew you when you were a baby…. Yes, she is getting to be a young woman now, isn’t she…. Yes, very pretty…. Yes, we are very proud of her.”

  “Young woman, you take good care of your mother,” Mrs. Bigboy directed me as we went on to another refuse pile.

  We found a straight chair that was in very nice shape, and Mother told me that was all we should take since we didn’t really need anything else. At a clean grassy spot we ate the bread we’d brought in a basket, along with some crabapples we picked on the way to the dump. Mother lay on her back, hands folded at her waist, looking from me to the clouds. “When your dad gets his money from Mr. McCuskey this Friday I think I might be able to buy some material for new dresses for you and Violet,” she said, although she and I both knew this wasn’t possible. “What color do you like?” We talked about what colors would look the best on each, dark red on me, a blue plaid on Violet, and how a green print would look on the dress my mother might make for herself sometime, too, until the sun became so bright overhead that she closed her eyes. I watched her as she slept. She looked like Violet.

  We decided to take a shortcut on the way home and followed this road that was paved almost to the outskirts of town. Here I was, ten years old and coming back from the dump with a sleepy mother with grass in her hair and a straight chair in very nice shape, driving a mule with Mr. McCuskey’s farm wagon on a street right in the middle of town, almost in the middle of all those cars. “Hey! Hey, youse! Go back to the reservation!” a young man in a flivver shouted. I drew my elbows tightly to my sides and put my head down, looking only at Sugar Pie’s shiny backside and what I could see between her big ears of the street. Mother sat with oblique dignity, left shoulder dipping slightly, right shoulder up, her long neck gracefully holding her head with chin high, eyes quizzical, mouth smiling shyly, crookedly, looking around at the houses and buildings without a sign that she could see anyone looking at the sight of her and her little girl and Sugar Pie, her demeanor and manners as lovely as if she were sitting sipping sweet coffee out of Mrs. McCuskey’s wedding china. Beautiful she was, on that wooden farm wagon seat, sitting gracefully and lightly in the way I imagine Violet must be sitting today, our mother.

  And mother was beautiful—the sum of all she was, was beauty. In her white low-waisted dress with the embroidery down the left side of the skirt. In the dress she wore to powwows, black cotton with red tape trim, cones rolled from snuff can covers sewn on the hem, the pleasant jingle they made as she walked and as she danced next to her dear friend Lisette, off to the side of the powwow circle, the way all the ladies did in those days, swaying ever so slightly, swiveling slowly, nine steps left, nine steps right. Lisette, she was called, and Mother was called Shonnud. Lisette was a maple tree, strong and stately, Shonnud an aspen that trembled to the music that moved the still air.

  Like Ojibwe ladies should, Mother and Lisette dressed modestly. All that showed were their faces, hands, arms below the elbow, and their necks, Mother’s long and thin, Lisette’s rounded and strong. Mother wore a black velvet jacket over her dress, beaded with flowers and vines on the front and back and white scallops on edges of its short sleeves. They both wore lisle stockings and moccasins with flowers beaded on the toes. Their dancing was hard work, controlled, disciplined, and prayerful; their calves were trim and very firm from this dancing, their feet muscular. And I watched them and waited for the day that I would be a young lady in a black dress and beaded jacket, waited and watched them dance as they had since they were young ladies, Shonnud and Lisette dancing side by side, dipping gracefully in a rhythm deeper in the hearts and souls of women than the drumbeat.

  It was the following summer that Mother disappeared for good, leaving one day and not coming back the next, or two days later, or a week. Some of the relatives from Mozhay Point came and stayed at the house for a while, and two of her cousins went down to Minneapolis, where somebody said they thought they knew somebody who thought they saw her downtown. But it never came to anything. Dad called the police, but we never heard anything.

  We kept her things on the dresser, her hairbrush and comb and the little cardboard soap box with her hairpins. We left her under-things and nightgown in the dresser drawer and her other housedress hanging
from the nail in the bedroom with her green-checked apron. We left her good white dress and her powwow dress in the box under the bed, where she had kept them wrapped in an old sheet.

  We stayed at the McCuskeys’ farm until the year after that, when Daddy died of stomach cancer and the county took me and Sam away for placement. Mrs. McCuskey said she would take Violet, and the last time I saw her was just before Sam and I got into the county worker’s car. She was holding Mrs. McCuskey’s hand and the two of them were walking away from us and toward the farmhouse, skinny Violet and big-bottomed, kind Mrs. McCuskey, who over coffee and donuts had told Charlotte that she wanted one of her own. Violet’s face was turned to the clouds, looking for our mother; she stepped so lightly her feet seemed above the ground, as if she would rise right into those clouds and vanish, perhaps into the invisibility of our mother’s arms, except for the anchor of Mrs. McCuskey’s hand.

  Sometime after that the McCuskeys sold their farm to the county and left the state. I don’t know what happened to Mother’s things, if Mrs. McCuskey put them away somewhere intending for us to have someday, if she sorted what to keep and what not, gave Mother’s housedress and underthings away, or threw them out, or used them for rags. I don’t know if she used Mother’s comb and brush and hairpins, or gave them to Violet. I don’t know what she did with the box under the bed, what she did with Mother’s good white dress and powwow dress wrapped in sheets. And I don’t know where Violet is.

  And I don’t think Violet knows where we are, Sam and I. We lived at the county orphanage for a while, but when I turned fourteen I had to leave, because the county said I had to go to work. They found me a job at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic diocese’s home for unwed mothers, to work in the kitchen for my keep and walking-around money. I finished school right there at the home, with girls my age who were hidden away until they gave birth and gave away their babies for adoption. I shared a bedroom with girls, one at a time, who grew rounder and rosier and shorter of breath, girls who bloomed like hothouse flowers and then vanished. I have seen some of them over the years, on the street, at the grocery store, even sat next to one in the emergency room once, but we never say a word, of course. That time and place is their secret, and mine to keep for them.

  I do see Mother everywhere, and Violet, too. Once or twice a month I drive down into Duluth past the work farm and take that road to the horse paradise, which is where Lisette lives now, in this big concrete block nursing home built right in the meadow. Mother and Violet stand by the fence and wave as I pass by before the turn into the parking lot; I spot them right away partly because I recognize Mother’s green-checkered apron and the wash dress Violet is wearing, one I have nearly outgrown, but even more recognizable is Mother’s stance, that slight turn to her left, her arms wrapped over her middle, and the set of Violet’s chin, high on her graceful neck. They wave, and I wave back, and sometimes when I get out of the car I walk over to where the fence was to look for them, though of course they are not really, solidly, there. Vapor they are, the checkered apron and wash dress, just vapor hanging in the air, disappearing as my hands reach to touch. And vapor I become when I go into the home to see Lisette.

  She shares a room with a Finnish lady who crochets rag rugs and thinks that Lisette steals her upper plate. Lisette rises above it; that’s her way. Last time I was there she had been just minding her own business, propped up in her bed with her hair down, waiting for somebody to come braid it, and Mrs. Kinnunen had looked over at her and said, “You think you’re so damn good-looking. Where are my teeth, you whore?” and Lisette had tried to reach over toward the lunch tray to see if the old Finn’s teeth were somewhere with the dirty dishes, and Mrs. Kinnunen started to scream. “Leave me alone, don’t you raise your hand to me you filthy Indian whore! Help! Help me, somebody help me!” which is when I walked in, right behind the orderly who stepped between them like a firewall that would keep flames off Lisette. He smoothed Mrs. Kinnunen’s wild spiky hair, stroked her mean old hand, all shriveled and dried up, that old Finlander skin darker than Lisette’s. Mrs. Kinnunen’s hand looks like an old peach pit, probably feels like one too. “Moomoo, that is a lovely rug…. Here’s a nice little bit of sponge cake for you…. Is your daughter coming to visit soon?” He waved me past. “She forgets right away,” he whispered at me. “She doesn’t mean it,” he whispered at Lisette. She nodded graciously. “Thank you, young man.”

  I began to braid one side of Lisette’s hair. “You always act like such a lady,” I told her.

  “That’s right. I was raised that way, to be a lady,” she answered the air in the room. “When she gets like that I just tell her to kiss my ass.” I have to keep my laugh to myself, can’t snort out loud. Lisette can’t do anything for herself, and how she would even get over to that lady’s teeth, wherever she leaves them, is beyond me, but whenever they’re lost, Lisette gets blamed, and when they’re found, it’s because Lisette must have done it, Mrs. Kinnunen insists, hid them on the lunch tray, or on the dresser, or under the bed, and, this one time, in a volunteer’s smock pocket.

  I braided both sides of her hair and smoothed the braids down past her collarbone, almost to where her breasts might have been if she were younger, wishing that her room was on the other side of the building so that we could both look out the window to see Mother and Violet.

  I wish I could reach through the pain that fits tighter than my skin, that I could bring myself to ask her about things. “Tell me about Mother and you,” I would say. “Tell me about Shonnud and Lisette.” She hears my wish as a ghost voice borne in on the breeze blowing in the open window at the foot of her bed and looks past my shoulder, remembering, telling the story silently to herself, forgetting to tell it to me.

  Sometimes I think how it might have been if Violet and I had gone away to the Tomah Indian school, like Ernestine and Cynthia, what our lives might have been like, and what they would be like now. Sometimes I used to think about that even when we lived in Duluth, or at the McCuskeys’ farm, used to wonder how it would be to live in a dormitory, have your own bed and a little trunk to keep your letters and things in. To sleep between sheets, to wear clean clothes all washed and ironed, to line up in the lunchroom to get your meals on a tray, at exact times of the day. To know just where to go every minute, and just what to do. I thought of Violet and me in wool Sunday uniform dresses with braid around the collars and chevrons on the sleeves marching with other girls in precisely measured and numbered steps, drilling in formations, marching in time up and down on the Tomah football field while the townspeople watched and applauded. I thought how Mother would just have to take care of herself, and Sam and Daddy, too, all by herself; Violet and I would be busy becoming educated ladies, like Ernestine and Cynthia.

  She never came back, Cynthia, never lived with any of us again. She left Tomah with Ernestine, eventually, for Minneapolis, and during the war I went to Minneapolis, too, and lived with them for a while when I worked at the munitions plant. After the war was over I moved back home and up to our reservation, to Mozhay Point. Cynthia and Ernestine never did. But that doesn’t mean they’re not here with us, along with everybody else, Lisette, Mother, Violet, Daddy, everybody.

  See, for me, what I have learned is that we have a place where we belong, no matter where we are, that is as invisible as the air and more real than the ground we walk on. It’s where we live, here or aandakii: those of us who returned to the old LaForce land allotment, those of us in Duluth, those of us far away. We were there before we were born and we will be there after we die, all of us, including Cynthia, too. It doesn’t matter if we leave, or if we think we will never even come back. It’s where our grandparents, and their grandparents, lived and died; it’s where we and our grandchildren and their grandchildren will, too.

  I learned it in a dream.

  Any of us by ourselves, we’re just one little piece of the big picture, and that picture is home. We love it, we think we hate it sometimes, but that doesn’t change anything
. We are part of it; we are in the picture. It’s home.

  OJIBWE BOYS

  Setting pins at the Palace Bowl was repetitious work. To do it took rhythm, but not the kind of rhythm that let you forget about what you were doing and think of other things—that was Punk’s advice. A lot of guys had gotten hurt that way, he told us that first night. “It’s easy to let your mind wander away, but you gotta be careful. Work with the rhythm but just make sure you pay attention, and you’ll be all right.” After a while I was able to do that, work with the rhythm but pay attention, yet my mind wandered just the same, and I began to think of other things.

  Before I got the rhythm I smashed my fingers and knuckles a few times, and my body ached to where it was just about unbearable, then all of a sudden I felt it, almost heard it, and gave in to the beat. I would be all but dancing to the pattern of the Palace Bowl beat, shuffling, bending, picking up two, three pins at a time in each hand, and over the sound of balls rolling down the lanes right at me and on both sides of my pit and hitting pins and pins hitting each other and the floor as they fell, I could hear that click-click as the pins in my hands touched heads and bodies and feel their smooth cool necks between my fingers. I bent and rose, swinging, using the muscles in my hips, shoulders, stomach, and back for strength, those in my hands and feet for the more detailed work of picking up pins and dancing out of the way of the scramble of rolling wood on the floor of the pit. And once my body began to dance to the rhythm, my mind did, too, and I began to hear it, the melody of past and present, and see the other dancers all round me—Vernon and Punk and Biik in the pits, the bowlers who looked so tiny down at the approach ends of their lanes, Mr. Mountbatten at the bar, Ingrum at the counter, and Miss Winnie smoking at her table, flirtatiously blowing smoke rings—the playing against that the harmony of everything that was happening back home in Duluth and everything that happened before that, too. My mother and dad—he was dead for sure and I suppose she must have been, too—and my sisters, Violet lost and Sis on her own, the federal boarding school at Harrod, and my dreams. My recurring dreams of horses in fields, one brown with white spots, one almost black with a white blaze down his forehead, a round and short-legged pony, an old faded gray blind in one eye, a light brown with eyes as purple and sad as a moose’s. My dreams, the same ones I have to this day: Two girls in dresses and boys’ high-topped work boots riding bareback in a field bounded by a fence and forests, gripping the manes of their horses. The slender girl sits regally, holding the purple-eyed brown’s mane with both hands, her chin high; she half smiles, watching her sister, round faced, with a laughing mouth full of teeth, lift one hand to wave at the sky. In my dreams, the woman in the green-checked apron is holding my hand, her thumb and three fingers circling my wrist in a firm bracelet, her forefinger wrapped around my thumb, so that her dry cool hand is a mitten. “Lookit, Sam. See, there’s your sisters. There’s Violet, there’s Sis. Look, they don’t even see us, them girls!” I wave to my sisters, and laugh with them, although they don’t know it; the woman bends to stroke my head, which is resting against her green-checked hip, with her bony and tender hand. “Them girls, they don’t even know we’re lookin’ at them, do they, Sam?” My mother, I suppose she must be, before she took off for wherever the hell she went. Next I dream of Harrod. When I run away to Maggie’s, I wake up when I get caught by the disciplinarian and brought back to boarding school. Whenever I sleep it starts all over again.