The Dance Boots (11 page)

“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.

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 behind 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.

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.