The Dance Boots (4 page)

You're welcome, says the Creator.

I wink at Stan, who points with his lower lip to Mitchell, whose shoulders and feet are moving with the song.

When Maggie fled her family home on the Mozhay Point Indian Reservation headed for the railroad tracks that led to Duluth, it was without her husband, who was because of her lying unconscious on the floor next to the woodstove, or her three oldest children, who in the fall had been blown from home by the winds of seasonal change and federal Indian policy to boarding school. She did take her two small boys and—tied into a flowered quilt—some children's clothing, several potatoes, and a pan of lugallette. And his rifle, which she wrapped in a gunnysack and slung on her back, like an infant. Then she left him, that bastard she hit over the head with the frying pan after he had passed out, unconscious but breathing, on the floor of the two-room tarpapered house that had been her grandma's, on the forty-acre land allotment in Sweetgrass Township that had been taken from that renegade devil-Indian Joe Muskrat and assigned to the LaForce family when Maggie was a little girl.

Andre, that bastard. She had just come in the door with an armful
of wood, which stuck to her shawl. When she set the wood down on the floor, it left bits of snow and bark against the plaid wool crossed over her chest. Giizis and Biikwaastigwaan were asleep at the bottom of the bed, their hair stuck to their heads in that damp sleep sweat, from that hard work that children do in their dreams, Giizis snoring and Biik so still in his labor that she placed a hand on his chest to ease for a second her endless worrying that those two, the littlest, her last, would leave, too, in the relentless gusty wake of the three before them. “Biik? Ginibaa?” He breathed. Ah. And she smoothed the quilt over their bodies, faded maroon and pink flowers against a summer sky fogging and running after years of wear and washing to snow and sleet, her wedding quilt. Sixteen irregular large pieces of ladies' dresses crazy-stitched together.

Her wedding quilt. Remember that day. Andre, good-looking little man he was, with those short bowed legs that she couldn't help but follow the first time she saw him walk past her. But he was mean to her when he drank. She knew everybody could see that but nobody said anything, and she was as big as he was anyway and should be able to take care of herself. And Sonny was there too, not showing yet, him, a tiny boy carried right inside Maggie and nobody knew except Andre, not even the priest, so she committed mortal sin going to confession and leaving that out, and right before the sacrament of marriage, too. She supposed her mother knew, the way she was looking at her. Mother had made that quilt in a real hurry, stitched the top together in two days and batted, tied, and finished in two more, pieced so large that sleeves and bodices could be clearly seen clutching and elbowing expanses of skirt. When it was spread on the bed, the quilt told a hundred stories about Mother and Nokom and the aunts and the ladies who had donated whatever they could spare that was suitable for a wedding quilt that needed to be finished quickly.

He pushed open the door and leaned on the frame, Andre, right
after she set the wood down, and told her to move her big old hind end and get him something to eat. She put the frying pan on the woodstove, put some lard in to melt, started cutting up the potatoes, and said, “Go wash up, you. Where you been? You stink like Old Man Dommage's place.” Next thing she knew, he had her by the hair and he was gasping and wheezing with the work it was to swing her around, and she could smell his breath—bad enough to make her sick—snoose and meat and rotgut wet on her face asking, “Where the hell's Louis?” In their embrace, her mouth so close to his ear she whispered hoarsely, “Hold on, hold on. The supper's gonna burn.” He let go and stood there swaying, head down but eyes up staring without focus, putting a lot of work into trying to watch her cook till his legs gave out and he slept on the floor. “Bastard,” she thought. Andre, you bastard.

And Maggie realized that she was ready. She scraped the potatoes into the empty lard bucket and set the frying pan on the table, in the center, exactly on the blackened circle that it had charred into the wood that time he grabbed her around the waist and spun her away from the stove so quickly that she hadn't had time to let go of the frying pan and so held it with both hands while she twirled, arcing it high in the air to miss Biik's and Giizis's heads, before she dropped it on the table, where it gonged like a church bell before she went down like a sack of apples.

Ready. She had practiced this so many times in her head that her body moved and her hands did the work without thought. She watched herself do this. First the frying pan, to keep him out for a while. Then the twine. It was under the bed with Andre's broken traps and the lard can that Giizis and Biik peed in when it was too cold and dark for them to go outside. She tied Andre's hands to the biggest trap and then wound the twine around his ankles, his knees, around his shoulders and arms, tying the knot right over where he had torn that hole in the back of his red-and-black buffalo plaid jacket, catching
it on the saw next to the woodpile that time he swung at her and missed when she was chopping wood. Then she took the quilt off the bed and wrapped the potatoes, the pan of lugallette, and Giizis's and Biik's other shirts. She woke the boys and helped them put on their shoes and coats and hoods and the mittens she'd made them from the tops of Andre's old socks. Finally, she grabbed the rifle and slung it with the quilt bundle over her shoulder. The boys followed her out the door and down the road all the way to the tracks where the railroad men kept their handcar. She hefted and loaded onto the platform her little boys and the quilt that held what she needed now instead of the hopes and dreams she'd been silly enough to fill it with when she'd married that bastard. Then Maggie stepped up, lifted one end of the pump, and began to move her little boys and her wedding quilt down the tracks to Mesabi, where she hocked the rifle and bought a train ticket to Duluth.

Henen was a good sister, Maggie'd always thought, a truly good person who would do anything for you, and one of those people everybody liked. When they were girls at mission school, those long years away from home, Henen always got along well with the nuns, was always there at the front of the line all neat and clean when it was time for morning Mass, always spoke up nice and clear just the way they liked,
yes sister no sister please sister thank you sister
, and always pronounced her name just the way the nuns liked it,
Hell-en
. She was the only one of the girls who got to help the sisters make the little communion hosts, and once in a while she put some that got overbaked into her apron pocket and gave them to Maggie and the other girls to eat when they were getting ready for bed. And the nuns never said anything, even though it wasn't allowed, when on those nights when Maggie was so lonesome for Mother that she
couldn't get warm she crept down the dark hallway after lights out, between the little girls' and big girls' dormitory rooms, on bare cold feet over icy floorboards that creaked under her weight, to crawl under the covers with Henen.

Henen had taken good care of Maggie all right, and after Henen was sent home after disgracing herself, she began writing to Maggie, her letters so interesting that they would have made good school essays, her handwriting so precise and clean that if she hadn't been sent away they would have been put up on the wall in continuity of that rebuke of the other girls' laziness, sloppiness, and general inability to measure up to the standard set by the nuns' favorite pupil. Maggie read the letters to the other girls in the dormitory; Henen's letters were better than the books from the library shelf. The letters eased and aggravated the girls' homesickness with stories about maple sugaring and picking berries and washing clothes and hauling wood, all in the company of Mother and Baba, Nokom, and all the neighbors at Mozhay Point. Henen didn't mention anything about the baby, or if she did, the letter never got to Maggie. When Maggie got home the next summer, Mother told her not to talk about it to Henen. And Henen didn't say a word about it; the first thing she did when she saw Maggie was give her a new blouse that she had made for her, yellow flowers on white, that sack style that all the grown-up ladies wore, and to say, tell me about all the girls at school, what did you read, are you learning how to embroider, do you want to practice penmanship with me. That was all, no word about a baby, just Henen all cheerful and happy during daylight, fading to silence when the sun went down.

She never did get back to school, Henen. When Sister Rock noticed her belly, that hard round lump below the waistband of her skirt, grown to the size of a small saucepan and pushing her waistband up closer every day to her bust, she confined Henen to the infirmary, where she couldn't be seen by the other girls, to wait for the doctor
to arrive and confirm the result of Henen's sin. That evening, Maggie complained of an earache, and in the middle of the night woke Sister Rock by crying in her sleep. The drainage of blood and fluid had soaked through the pillowcase and smeared the sheets and the sleeves of her nightgown. Sister clicked her tongue and muttered, stripped the bed and Maggie, bundled the dirty linens under her arm, and led Maggie out of the little girls' dormitory, down the stairs to the basement, where she threw the wad onto the pile of whites to be washed, then back upstairs. Naked, Maggie shivered in the cold night air of the damp hallways. She crouched as she walked on tiptoe, mortified, in the wake of Sister Rock's large backside, which bounced back and forth under a wool dressing gown the shape and style of her daytime habit, into the infirmary, where Henen sat up in bed and asked, “Wegonen? Nishimay, Maggie, gidaakoz ina?”

Sister Rock shushed Henen and told her to help Maggie into a clean nightgown and then go directly to the kitchen to wait, and to not say a word, not one word.

In the wash basin was clean water for morning. Henen warmed the wash cloth with her hands before wiping the blood off of Maggie's hair and ear and face and her thin and childlike body and whispered that it was all right. She put a clean towel down over the pillowcase and told Maggie that it would feel soft and warm against her sore ear. Then she went to the kitchen, where she slept on the floor of the pantry, rolled in a blanket left for her by Sister Rock.

The next day, because Maggie was too sick to move out of the infirmary, the doctor examined Henen in the pantry, with Sister Rock present but averting her eyes. The girl obediently removed her bloomers and placed one foot on a stepstool. Astonishingly, the doctor knelt before her and leaned his forehead against her knee. He reached under her skirt and ran a thick and warm hand up the inside of her thigh, then probed inside with two fingers, where, she now understood, the baby had been placed. She stared at the
gaslight fixture suspended by a metal chain from the pantry ceiling. Out of the corner of her eye she watched, although she tried not to, the doctor's head gleam with a shiny sweat, and his red face twist unhappily while he grunted, reaching in vain for her virginity.

He withdrew and stood, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. “Spoiled. She has been spoiled,” he said to Sister Rock. She shook her head.

“On the table, my dear,” he said to Henen. He held her hand as she stepped onto the stool. “Lie down, my dear, on your back.” He lifted her skirt and folded it back above her waist; sunlight poured onto her skin. In the humiliation of her exposure on an oilcloth-covered pantry work table, she watched patterns of light dance through tree branches that waved in the wind outside the window, casting thin waves of warmth on her round belly, on her baby. The chain that attached the gas fixture to the ceiling was really three metal cords, she could see, braided and painted brown.

Again, the doctor's face twisted, reddened. He pulled a dishtowel from a shelf to cover Henen from ribs to knees, then used both hands to cup, through threadbare cotton faintly yellowed with food stains bleached by the girls in the laundry room, her belly and then prod in a circle around the small saucepan shape that was a baby. A baby. “Oh, yes … oh, yes.” He prodded her breasts. “Are they sore?” And again her belly. “Ye-e-es. About halfway there, I would guess. Have you felt quickening? Moving?”

“No,” she answered softly, thinking, “but I will.”

“Well, you will. Would you like to see this, Sister?”

Sister Rock, eyes on a row of canned goods, shook her head.

The doctor fumbled, searching in his pocket, as he had fumbled under Henen's skirt, and placed a piece of horehound candy wrapped in white paper and a lemon drop fuzzy with pocket lint on the dishtowel. He and Sister Rock left Henen in the pantry to step back into her bloomers.

When she got home, she helped her mother and wrote letters. She read every day, silently in the morning and aloud before bed, from the only book in the house, the Bible. When the Indian agent's wife paid Mother for ironing with a length of yellow calico, Henen cut and sewed a new blouse for Maggie on the new kitchen table—heavy and solid as a sow—that Baba had built right in the house. Sitting there one night, sewing with her delicate and even stitches, listening to Baba and Mother talk while they drank raspberry tea, listening to Nokom sucking on her pipe as she lit it with a coal from the stove, Henen felt a tapping from within her belly, a lurch to the side. She hummed a song of gratitude.

The baby never moved again; instead, it shrank within Henen's belly, imperceptibly from day to day but nevertheless steadily from week to week. She began to reach for her belly when alone in the house, or in the outhouse, or when she forgot to keep her hands from idleness, searching in sickening composure for a small body, cupping her belly and using her fingers to prod a circle around the lump that every time she searched was harder, more dense, as the little body of her baby calcified and shrank to the shape and consistency of a robin's egg, until any appearance of a small saucepan shape that was a baby simply disappeared. And then, after that, every day, the spirit of her baby receded from her own and the others that continued to live, growing more and more distant, until when the children came back from school in June it had joined those other baby spirits who, because they were too small to walk, traveled to the other world on the east wind, which carried them gently in the sky, borne by visions of the Great Ojibwe Migration of long ago. Out of sight, they were mourned by bereft earth-bound mothers like Henen.