The Dance Boots (5 page)

Henen had taken good care of her all right, so once Maggie got to Duluth, she walked, carrying Biik and holding Giizis's hand, over to the rooming house where Henen was staying to settle in for a
while, and of course Henen didn't ask any questions or say a word about that damn bastard Andre or ask where Louis was; that wasn't her way—she had always been very considerate of other people's feelings. The sisters shared the bed and the little boys slept on the floor, and it was like the old days at the mission school except there were no nuns telling them what to do, and except of course for the changes in Henen. It took a couple of days for Maggie to see that all of Henen's ways were just a little more so than they had been the last time she saw her, and then to realize that for years Henen's ways had been each time she saw her just a little more so, till it became clear that life had boiled down and distilled Henen to an exaggeration and mockery of the mission school girl she had been. She was as always kind and polite, and she still wore the brown scapular that the nuns had given her underneath her clothes right next to her skin, but Maggie could see that her sister's drinking was getting closer to winning the upper hand in its battle with her spirit. She indulged the boys, allowing them to do as they liked, never sharing in their discipline, though that was the way the LaForces and everyone else at Mozhay Point helped in the proper raising of children, yet hissed at Biik to never, never touch her things when he opened the bottle of cologne she kept on the dresser. She insisted that Maggie try on her rouge, stroked Maggie's hair, told her that they would never be apart again, that she would take care of her baby sister forever, then spent some of the rent money on a bottle of wine from the blind pig in the basement of the house next door, which she drank, secretly she thought, in the outhouse in the backyard that they shared with the rest of the boarders. She had begun to step stiffly and speak slowly, her lips slightly pursed and drooping at the corners as she attempted the precision of speech and posture that the nuns used to hold her up as both example and reproach in front of the other girls. Her belly slackened to a paunch as her waist thickened, yet her arms and legs grew thinner. Her face had begun to swell with the miseries of times she disappeared for days, reappearing with a bruised nose, a
new clip for her hair, puffy eyes, or without her coat or memory of liquor- and smoke-hazed bar flirtations that changed unexpectedly into arguments, fistfights, torn clothes, and abandonment. Henen, too proud to acknowledge those betrayals and mortifications, returned alone, making her way up the walk and through the door with a grace and dignity oddly enhanced by the landscape of her face. And she didn't say anything; that was her way.

When Maggie found a job at the mattress factory, she used her first paycheck to rent a house and brought her sister, now so fragile and needing Maggie as Maggie had needed her when they were girls, to live with her.

Sonny wrote home once a month, always the same letter.

Dear Mother,

I hope that this letter finds you well. I am in good health, and doing well in school.

Sincerely,

John Robineau

That time we were carrying the wash out for the girls to hang on the lines, me and my cousin Mickey, who we called Waboos at home, we started talking Indian and laughing; we weren't supposed to do that, to the teachers there I guess it was like we were saying dirty words.

“Giziibiiga-ige makak, it's heavy, hey.”

“Nimashkawaa.”

“Gimashkawaa like a little girl, ha!”

We stumbled with that big old washtub, each on one side of it, holding on to one of the handles. It was heavy, and we leaned our shoulders away from the tub to balance the weight. Mickey, he was so skinny his over-hall strap come off the one shoulder and dragged
down his arm, making it harder to carry his side. Well, we were breathing so hard from the work and laughing we didn't even know McGoun was sneaking up behind us till he says real loud, “Hey! Are you boys talking Sioux?” McGoun, he didn't know one Indian from another and sure wouldn't know we were talking Chippewa. I says to the prefect, “No, sir, we weren't talking Sioux.” And then Mickey says right after me, “No, sir, we wouldn't do that.” McGoun squints his eyes at us and says, “Well, see that you don't,” and left. We started laughing so hard he heard and came back and shoved Mickey, who fell right on the ground, and the washtub tipped over so all that white wash load was right in the mud, and McGoun said, “Look what you boys done now,” and unhooked that doubled leather strap off his waist and started hitting Mickey with it. Then he had us carry the washtub back to the laundry building, and we had to wash it ourselves, all that big pile of girls' underwear and nightgowns. We were humiliated to be touching all that stuff and the laundry girls so embarrassed that for once they stopped their giggling and looked away at anything but us.

That night when we were getting ready for bed, I could see Mickey had bruises on his upper arm, four fingertip shaped on the back and one larger, thumb shaped on the front, from where McGoun pulled him, just about lifting him right off the ground, and a couple of welts on his skinny hind end. I whispered to him, “Maajaa daa, Waboos, let's get out of here tonight,” and he looked back at me and smiled so big, his snaggly and rotting teeth all crooked and his eyes all happy. “Eya, ‘ndaa,” he whispered back.

We lay there on our beds across from each other and listened to the other boys fall asleep as the light from the moon came in through the windows in wide stripes that moved across the floor and beds so we could see first Thomas on his back, arms out wide, with one leg sticking out of the covers, then Shigog, who pulled his covers over his head so he looked like a ghost. We heard Wesley snort and mumble,
“C'mere, you,” and I was glad he was sleeping because he was so wild. All the time me and Mickey were facing each other in our beds, Mickey laying on his right side, me on my left. After a while, when it was pretty quiet except for breathing sounds, we looked right at each other and I said, “Let's go, Cousin,” and Mickey's eyes widened there in the dark, then turned into crooked black triangles as he smiled and stood up. We picked up our uniform pants and jackets folded and laid out for morning at the ends of the beds, and our shoes and socks, and walked just quiet across the dormitory floor to the kitchen, where we tied some bread and apples into a dish towel to carry. Then we walked out the front door, leaving it open so nobody'd hear us pull it shut, and walked behind the barn in our nightshirts. We got dressed and slicked our hair down a little with some water from the trough and walked down the road toward home.

It was a long ways from Harrod to Duluth, and we were on the road for three, four days. We walked, and hitched, and slept in fields the first two nights, and even though we were wearing these soldier-style uniforms so anybody who looked could have guessed where we had come from, only one person, this one farmer who picked us up on the third day, asked us if we were from that Indian school. Since Mickey was so bashful and because I was afraid he'd tell the truth, doing so with that big smile of his, I did the talking for us. “Yes, sir, we were sent for,” I said, looking solemn. “We had a death in the family and have to get to Duluth.” The farmer said he was sorry to hear that; he was going to Allouez in the morning and could give us a ride almost to Duluth; if we wanted we could stay in his barn that night.

We helped the farmer unload the wagon and cleaned up a little in the chicken coop, then his wife set us a nice place to eat at their kitchen table. Fried chicken—relatives of the ones we had just fed—these ones' parts were all separated into sizzling little legs
and wings and breasts and looking mighty tasty there in the frying pan. The wife kept getting up from her chair to put more food on our plates, and because she was a big woman, built a lot like those chickens of hers, her front and behind hit the backs of our chairs and the sideboard as she moved, and she clucked these nice little chicken noises and fussed over us, how sorry she was about our loss and what brave boys we were to travel all by ourselves. In the morning she fed us again, and the farmer dropped us off in Allouez in front of the feed store. We walked the rest of the way to Duluth, more than ten miles to home.

Ma was surprised to see us walk in the door; the last time I'd run, McGoun had called the Duluth police, who had come to the house to tell her, so she knew about it by the time I got there. She said, “Sonny, Waboos, namadabin. Gibakade, na? I'll make some tea.” She called out the back door for Giizis and Biik, “Ambe, ambe, look who's here.” She fixed us tea and ladled out some soup, and we told her all about our trip and felt like heroes. Mickey wanted to get going to Mozhay to see the LaVirage cousins, so after he'd eaten, she gave him two quarters and packed him some food for the road.

It was when we were going out the front door to send Mickey on his way that we saw the black Ford parked in front of the house and McGoun sitting on the running board having a cigarette. He got up as soon as he saw us come out and grabbed me and Mickey each by an arm. “Mrs. Robineau, I am here to escort these young men back to the Harrod School,” he said, in this formal and official way but breathing hard because it must have been hard to talk with Mickey squirming and me pulling the way we were. Giizis and Biik hadn't gotten all the way out the front door, so Ma pushed them back before McGoun saw them. They knew what to do, went into the bedroom and under the bed, behind the quilt. Ma went right up to the prefect and took me by the other arm and said, “Mr. McGoun, Sonny is sixteen now and we need him at home, here, to go to
work. You can't keep him anymore.” It was McGoun's job to bring two boys back, but I have to hand it to Ma, she didn't back down this time and he was losing. Finally he said that I was more trouble than I was worth anyway and shoved Mickey into the backseat of the car. Mickey was too big to cry; he smiled just brave with those snaggly teeth and waved at Ma just before they drove away, but then I could see through the back window that his head was down and I could feel it that he wasn't smiling anymore. We went back inside and Ma told Giizis and Biik that they could come out now.

Ma was able to send money to school for train tickets home so that when summer started Girlie and me could come home and not be put to work on the truck farm for our room and board. We had a good time at home. Once it got warm out a lot of people would come to visit at Ma's, stopping by to visit and stay a while, people from Mozhay Point and Lost Lake, relatives and friends, the Brules and Gallettes, the Sweets, the Bariboos. They brought their kids and their quilts and food, flour or salt pork or maybe a sack of rice, if they had some left over from last fall. We had some good times. All day we would be visiting, kids playing and the grownups having tea while they talked, people coming and going. Some of the men got jobs shoveling grain at the elevators or working in the scrap yard and were able to find places for their families to live here in town, too. So now we knew some people here. Good times. And Ma's house was right in the middle of it when Girlie and me got home that summer.

Some nights after it was dark outside we would have a fire in the backyard, in the pit Sonny had dug, and sit to visit, watching till it burned out. Ma would set potatoes in the fire, close to the outside edge and under the wood, to cook. She picked up the potatoes when
they were blackened and done, with her bare hands, and handed them out. Split open, the insides looked so white out there in the dark.

Ma was always very generous with people; she had that reputation. She'd give you the shirt off her back, people said. They always talked that way, like they admired her, but I saw people take advantage of her, too, and she died poor, like a lot of other generous people. Not everybody is like Ma, but she didn't care about that. I remember not long after we got home me and Sonny were sleeping on the front room floor after everybody was asleep, and we could hear these people, some friends of some of our cousins, in the kitchen. They were real quiet in there, with the door to the front room shut, making these rustling noises as they unwrapped food that they'd brought for just themselves. Here they were staying at Ma's, and she made them welcome, and with her good manners offering them whatever she had—and that wasn't much. Before everybody went to bed, they'd finished up the coffee she had on hand and ate more than their share of potatoes, so that there weren't going to be enough for everybody for the next day, but Ma didn't say anything because that wouldn't have been polite. And there they were, eating, in the middle of the night there, all by themselves in the kitchen, and there were me and Sonny in the front room, still hungry, listening to them eat. Paper bags rattling. Chewing. Whispering.

They got up early and left with their garbage so we wouldn't know what they'd been up to. When I told Ma about it she said that was their own business and not ours.

“Why should they get away with that, those bums?” I asked.

“Maybe they think they need it.”

“Maybe we think we do, too.”

“Not like that, we don't.”

And Girlie and Aunt Helen just nodded their heads in that way,
saying in those voices that sounded like they were singing together, “Mmmm, hmmm,” to let me know that Ma was acting the way a person should.

“It was cookies, and doughnuts, and it smelled like they were eating dried meat, too. Next time they come here we should throw them out, those bums.”

“People do what they do for reasons we don't know about. They must need it more than we do.”

“E-e-en za,” Aunt Helen added, “so I've heard,” which made Ma laugh.

Ma lived long enough for me to buy a Buick and take her out driving and visiting when I came home, and she made sure that I took everybody else out who needed a ride, too. And let them borrow money. I bought her things I knew she would like, pretty things, a bowl with red and blue stripes painted on the outside, a statue of a little girl holding a flower, a blue powder box with a music box inside—when she opened the lid she could listen to it play while she powdered her face.