The Dance Boots (6 page)

I always worked hard, almost as hard as Ma, but I was somehow able to hang on to more of my money. It wasn't easy; it took some compromises that sometimes I think she didn't understand. But she always stood up for me when anybody called me a stingy-gut.

Like I said, she died poor. Gave it all away. Give you the shirt off her back and died poor, like a lot of other generous people.

With the weather getting warm and people able to travel around easier, the house got pretty full, with somebody there to watch the little boys and keep them company while Maggie and Sonny worked: Girlie and George and sometimes Henen if it was a good day, or some of the cousins from Mozhay, who visited for an afternoon,
or a week, or a month. Some nights there were people sleeping all over the place. They brought blankets and sometimes food with them and shared what they had.

Maggie's children slept on quilts that she had sewn during the spring on Sundays, her days off, while she watched Giizis and Biik play and roughhouse with Sonny, of pieces cut from clothing donated to St. Matthew's and discarded by Father Hagen because it was too worn for wear. Sonny and George had quilts patched from pieces of men's pants and jackets, dark wools, Girlie a flower garden of brights and pastels, ladies' skirts and dresses. Sonny and George slept on the front room floor, but Girlie brought her quilt into the bedroom and slept with the little boys on the floor next to Maggie's bed. For the first week after she got home from school she had followed Maggie from room to room, kitchen to front room to bedroom, as she did her work at home, cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing, and when Maggie sat in the rocking chair, Girlie sat on the floor next to her, touching the hem of her mother's skirt with the back of her hand or pinching it between her thumb and first finger, being Maggie's little girl again for just a little while.

Andre showed up one day while Maggie was at work and made himself at home. When she got home he was lying asleep on the front room floor on the wedding quilt that her mother had made them, the one she took when she left the allotment, that he must have taken off her bed, with his head on his damn jacket, and Girlie was in the kitchen slicing up some pork and lard for when he woke up. “Ai,” she thought, “sshhtaa,” and was going to say something when Girlie turned from the stove and said with a happy smile, “Look who's here!” Maggie thought, well the children were glad to see him; he was good to the children. Why ruin it for them?

He stayed two days and then took Sonny and George to find a ride with him back up to Mozhay Point; Maggie didn't see them again until the end of summer when the boys walked in the front
door swaggering a little because they had cash money from working at the tourist stand and ricing. They had Waboos with them but not their father, whom they'd left up at Old Man Dommage's.

George came back to town from Mozhay with Mickey right before we had to go back to boarding school, which was a good thing because I didn't want to have to go on the train by myself and then have to try to explain to Mr. McGoun where they were. It was going to be hard enough to leave Mama and the little boys, who were really old enough to go to school and really shouldn't be left alone like that when she went to work. Mama was doing everything she could to keep those boys with her and not send them to Indian school, but I knew she was going to have to send them sometime. One night we could hear her and one of the uncles talking out in the front room, late when they thought we were asleep, me and the little boys. The big boys were outside in the backyard by the fire, so it was just Mama and Uncle Noel sitting out there, the rhythm of Ma in the rocking chair making tiny rumbles against the floorboards, once in a while Uncle Noel spitting into a tin can, very soothing it was so I was lulled almost asleep till they started talking about the little boys. Noel was saying how they needed somebody to watch them with Mama having to be at work and he didn't see how anybody else could take them; once Indian school started the older children would be gone; Giizis really had to go to school and who could watch Biik? She couldn't count on Henen to do it; Henen had her own troubles and needed watching herself; maybe Maggie should go home. Grandma was too sick even to leave the allotment for Duluth; she wouldn't be able to take care of them even if Maggie sent them up to Mozhay and stayed in Duluth to work.

“Who else would watch them, my girl?” he asked.

Mama's voice was so quiet I had to hold my breath to hear her. “I don't know, I just don't know,” she said.

Biik and Giizis were scared; they pushed closer to me so that their little bodies got my sides all hot and sweaty, Biik's eyes big so he looked like a little owl there in the dark, and Giizis trying so hard not to cry that he shook. Little brothers. I sat up on the floor cross-legged and sat one on each knee to lean back against me while I rocked them side to side. Side to side. Little brothers. I played with Giizis's ears a little because that always made him all lovey and sleepy, and after a while his shoulders stopped that shaking and he turned his round face around up to look at me and smile before he fell asleep.

So it was true what I'd been telling the matron at school, Mama needed me at home. Matron didn't know about Giizis and Biik and I couldn't tell her, so she couldn't really understand, and I suppose she must have thought Mama must have something else going on—maybe she thought Mama was a drinker like Aunt Helen. Matron said she thought that school was a good place for me.

They all drank, of course, all of them, Mama and Aunt Helen and Daddy and Louis and everyone who was old enough to, and when I was home whenever they had a bottle it was the same thing. But I have to tell you that no matter how anybody else acted, Mama and Aunt Helen always acted like ladies, no matter what. They would sit there at the table perched on the edge of their chairs, with their backs straight and their skirts neat and straight over their legs just like they had learned from the sisters when they were at that mission school, and they would just sip, very delicately; they were never guzzlers. Every once in a while they would lean their heads together and laugh or, when they got pretty serious, sit very close together and talk in their low silvery voices, a pair of doves. And ladies, always ladies. Their indirect and kind eyes, behind Mama's
lovely and still mask and Aunt Helen's, occasionally slipping when her graciousness was frayed by that betrayal of her spirit, met reality with courage and mission school manners. To this day, and I am an old woman now, two generations past the age they were in the times I am talking about, I sip my liquor, too, and remember how a lady is supposed to act. Pretty old-fashioned for these days, I guess, and because I am the only one left of all Maggie's children, the first daughter and the last to die, Mama's ways and Aunt Helen's, too, that lived their longest in me will probably die with me. And their faces, too; I am the last living person who remembers those composed masks, marked by life to a state beyond beauty, and those kind and indirect eyes.

We didn't want to leave, George and Mickey and me, but like everybody else we didn't have any choice. We would have to get on that train and get off at Harrod and somebody would be there to pick us up in the wagon to make sure we got to school. We would report to the matron and the prefect, who would march us to the girls' and boys' dormitories to get deloused and fumigated and try on our uniforms to see if they still fit. Mickey had gotten so tall that he was going to need a whole new uniform, jacket and pants and shoes, and I guessed that when they saw how big he was they'd take him out of the laundry and put him to work at the truck farm or the carpenter shop. That was the summer that he really grew, though he stayed skinny; his clothes had been big on him last spring but now his wrists stuck out of his shirtsleeves and his over-halls flapped around a couple of inches above his ankles when he walked. I asked him one night when we were watching the fire outside about what happened when McGoun got him back to school last spring. He told me that McGoun gave him a beating with that doubled leather strap, took away his quarters, then put him in the lockup room in the basement for three days. “It was nothin',” he said, McGoun would get his one day. He smiled then, crooked and snaggletoothed, like
Mickey, but with glints and flashes of something hungry and wolfish; in changing from boy to man he was also changing from Waboos to Maingen.

Giizis's last day as one of the little boys hidden at home was the day that the superintendent of the Indian school himself showed up on Maggie's porch with tribal census records verifying that Vernon Gallette, son of Marguerite LaForce and Louis Gallette, was seven years old, that he lived with his mother, and that he was not attending school. He left a half-fare ticket for Giizis and full-fare tickets for Girlie, George, and Mickey.

The next morning, they walked to the train station, Mickey and George carrying the lunch that Maggie had packed and their box of extra clothes, Girlie holding Vernon's hand. Maggie stayed on the porch, holding Biik and waving his hand, bye-bye. “Take care of your little brother,” she called, “see you in the spring,” as she watched them walk away, growing smaller and smaller in her sight. Just before they disappeared around the corner, they turned to wave again, George and Girlie smiling to set an example for little Vernon, whose round moonface was shiny and stretched with crying. Waboos waved, then became Maingen, who thought of that day that would come, and smiled with bared pointed teeth, that thin young wolf hungry for the day McGoun would get his.

Maggie kept her smooth and pleasant mask in place until they turned the corner. Her composure slipped for just a moment, exposing ravages of grief that made her look like Aunt Helen's twin, but then she pressed the crook of one arm to her eyes to absorb her tears, which darkened the print of her cotton work dress sleeve, dried, and disappeared. Then, remasked, she smiled at Biik, took his hand and led him back inside, set him down, and knelt to fold her children's
quilts, smoothing and soothing the prints of their bodies into squares that she then pushed under the bed. She had practiced this so many times in her head that her body moved and her hands did the work without thought. Without direction from heart or head, her hands washed dishes, swept the floor, washed and dressed Biik, stroked his hair while they waited on the porch for Andre, helped him into Andre's brother's car for the ride up to her brother Earl's house at Mozhay Point, waved bye-bye, see you soon little man, pulled her coat up over her arms and shoulders, pulled the front door shut behind her. Her feet, at their even greater distance than her hands from head and heart walked. Walked to the mattress factory, up the stairs, to the time clock, to her sewing station, where she worked without thought, eyes down, face composed, heart heavy and still as her face and as unreadable, as with the rhythm of the earth she prepared for winter, the season of hibernation and dreams of her children's return.

The first time Maggie saw Louis she was sitting at the work table in the laundry building, next to the window for the light, mending stockings. She sat erect on the wooden chair, her body held inches away from the back in order to demonstrate proper posture to the group of girls learning how to set the darning egg into the curves of toes and heels.

“Watch how I do this, first,” she said, demonstrating to the silent row that sat across from her at the table. “Use the darning needle to pick up the ends of knitted weave not torn or frayed, like this, do you see? Then cross it back and forth to the other side of the hole or the worn-out spot, do you see? And then do the same on the other two sides, but this time weave the needle over and under the threads you cross over. Don't bunch up the threads, and don't pull too tight; we want to leave a darn with edges smooth and even so that when the stocking is worn it doesn't rub against the foot or the shoe—that makes the hole come back bigger, and you will have wasted your time.” She mended over a frayed heel and held up the stocking. “Do you see?” The girls nodded.

“You may thread your needles and begin.” The girls' matron, who would stay with the sewing class until she was sure that Maggie was capable of keeping the group in order, directed the girls in her deep and ringing voice. Maggie distributed a wooden darning egg and several black machine-knitted cotton stockings to each girl. They silently wetted and pinched the ends of threads between their lips, squinted to thread their needles, dropped darning eggs into their stockings, and sat straight as Maggie, their backs inches from the backs of the chairs as they began to mend.

So quiet they were. All she could hear was breathing. One girl snuffled and swallowed; the matron glared. The girl said, “Pardon me, Miss,” dragging out the
a
and dropping the
r
in an accent from north of Miskwaa Rapids.

Next to Maggie a heavyset girl with thick, coarse black hair braced her mending against her bosom, her nearsighted eyes wide open and nearly meeting at the bridge of her nose with the effort of trying to see black thread against black stocking. She looked up at Maggie; her pupils slowly uncrossed, focusing. Her smile was dazzling, her mouth a crescent of perfect white teeth, her round face dark-skinned and smooth. “She looks like she must be from Fleur de Pomme,” Maggie thought. The matron rapped on the table with her knuckles. “Eyes on your work,” she said sternly. The nearsighted girl ducked her head.

Breathing. Some girls breathed lightly, some heavily, through their mouths, concentrating both to obey the matron and to please the new helper, an Indian girl dressed like a white lady, like a teacher. After a while, warm breath, curling ribbons of air, gently waved and wound through the room, twining air tendrils around the girls, around Maggie and the matron, around the work table and chairs, the baskets of mending, the ironing table, the gaslight that hung from the center from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The room became dreamlike, the seamstresses sleepy. Someone's nose whistled softly and plaintively, reminding Maggie of the cries of
ducklings swimming behind their mothers at the shore of Lost Lake in late summer, paddling strenuously with infant webbed feet, straining to keep up. “Don't leave me behind, don't leave me behind,” their tiny weeping coos begged pitifully. Warm late-summer air wound and curled over the lake, twining damp tendrils around the ducklings and their mother, around Maggie and the rushes that grew higher than her shoulders, around the pale green frieze of ripening wild rice near Muk-kwe-mud Landing, across the lake. Maggie leaned into a crescent of air that supported her as she bent forward from the waist to scoop up and cradle in her hands the last duckling, the smallest and slowest, the one forgotten by its mother and left behind, the duckling that was really a darning egg inside a crumpled long black stocking, and stroked its downy back. “Shh, shh, she'll back soon,” she soothed the baby, her lips against its soft feathers.