The Dance Boots (8 page)

“Yes, I can do that now, Miss.”

“Julia,” said the matron, wiggling her freed and airing toes.

Maggie listened to the matron's instructions courteously, keeping the expression on her face smooth and pleasant. She had seen similar
instructions carried out when the “recalcitrants”—disobedient girls at the mission school—were disciplined.

Outside the laundry building, she opened the slanting cellar doors to the basement and swung them as far as they would go on their hinges, leaving them resting wide open to light the stairway, which was dark and smelled of lye soap and mildew. The wooden steps felt cold and soft through the thin leather of her soles. When she opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, the carbolic mustiness that had been growing and expanding within the heat and confines of the basement hit her face like a damp rag thrust over her nose and mouth. “Huh,” she breathed to expel the smell, and was answered by a gasp and huff from the dark and empty hallway. Fighting the impulse to run, she asked, “Is someone there?” The hallway huffed again. Her eyes adjusted to the near dark, and she saw the coal-fired water heater at the end of the hall, sucking in wet lye and mildew air, which it expelled with a huff into the rusty cylinder below the cistern of heating water. The gaslight in the middle of the hallway, turned low, provided just enough light for her to see the two doors that Julia had told her to look for. The one to the coal bin was solid; a square had been cut into the top half of the other, the door into the solitary room, and was covered by wood strips nailed to the outside that created a latticed grill, rougher than but similar to the window into a confessional. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Maggie thought.

A boy's unchanged voice, mild and sweet, answered from behind the grill, “Yes, Miss.”

Louis stood with his face pressed to the grate when he heard the cellar doors being swung open and leaned against their hinges. Supper, he thought. He had been there before and so knew that it would come after the other children and the teachers had eaten, brought by Mr. McGoun, Mr. Robineau, or the matron on a tin plate, and
that there would be smaller portions of food, not enough to fill his stomach, as part of his punishment.

The second time that he saw Maggie was through the wooden grate of the solitary room door, and every time he remembered it he pictured the shaded outline of a young woman against the twilight let into the cellar of the laundry building by an opened doorway. The shadow bent to pick up a tin plate and cup from the ground that she had set them on and walked cautiously down the cellar steps. At the bottom of the stairs she placed the cup into the crook of her other elbow and opened the door with her freed hand.

He heard steps, light on the basement stairs, then the doorknob turning. The steps into the basement were hesitant, brushing the concrete with a soft, gritty-sounding scrape. It's not Mr. Robineau, he thought. Not McGoun.

She walked from the dark end of the basement into half-light, a motion of cotton shirtwaist that captured yellow stripes against brown from the gaslight in the middle of the basement ceiling. Through the grate he saw her, then, in partial images that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared rapidly through squares of wooden strips. Woman, he saw, carrying a tray of food. She turned toward the door. Dark hair in a knot on the back of her neck. That Indian woman, the one he'd seen walking with the matron. Strong-looking, tall as Mr. Robineau. She was looking around, trying to peer into the corners. She sighed, hummed under her breath. She ducked nervously to look under the slate tub. She cleared her throat, swallowed. “Is someone there?” she asked. Her voice was soft, a near whisper.

“Yes, Miss,” he answered from behind the grill.

Punishment. The first time he ran away was the day after he arrived at Harrod from Grand Bois. He waited until bedtime, when the boys were undressing and putting on their nightshirts. The night
before, he had laughed at the sight of boys' heads above those long white dresses that looked like women's underwear.

“Mindemooye,” he had said to the boy in the next bed. “Old woman, gonna put on your nightgown?”

“Nightshirt. It's a shirt.”

“Gawiin, it's a dress! You look like a mindemooye!”

“Mindemooye, giin!” the other boy laughed and pushed Louis in the chest. “Old lady, yourself!”

Louis balled up his nightshirt and tossed it at the other boy. “Here! Bring it home to your grandma!”

The prefect had tapped them both on the head with the doubled leather strap he carried. “No horsing around. Talk English. Get undressed and get into bed.”

The boys slept on their backs with hands at their sides above the blankets. “We look like a bunch of dead people laid out,” thought Louis. “I ain't staying here.”

The second night he approached the prefect while the boys were undressing. “I have to go outside,” he said.

“Nobody goes outside. Get ready for bed.”

“Have to.” He walked toward the door.

The prefect grabbed him by the back of the shirt. “What do you think you're doing?”

The boy from the bed next to Louis's explained. “Where he comes from, they mean the toilet. He don't really mean outside, he means the toilet.”

“Is he stupid? He knows the toilet is down the hall.”

“He just means the toilet; he's mixed up because they always say ‘outside' when they mean they have to do their business at Grand Bois, and that's where he comes from.”

“Do you mean the toilet?” the prefect asked.

Louis nodded.

“Well, from now on, say so.”

Louis had walked out of the dormitory room and down the hall toward the toilet, moving more quickly and quietly as he passed the door, and then sprinted down the stairway and out the front door, where he was caught by Mr. McGoun, who wrapped one heavy arm around Louis's skinny waist and the other around his skinny neck and half-carried the boy, who struggled like a cat, to the solitary room in the basement of the laundry building, where he spent only one night, because it was his first offense.

His mother's family, the Eberts, were known for their patience; his father's, the Gallettes, for their ability to endure discomfort, even hardship, without complaining. Louis bore each confinement, beating, and deprivation of food with calm, dry eyes and watched and waited for the next opportunity to escape.

“Are you hungry? I have brought your supper.” He watched Maggie, through a series of strips and squares, set the plate and cup on the floor. “How does the door open?”

He told her where the key to the padlock was kept, how it needed to be pushed deeply into the keyhole and forced to the right.

She tried it several times, thinking, “What if the laundry building caught fire? The boy would die.” On the fourth try, the side of her index finger caught on the padlock as it clicked open. She wound her handkerchief quickly over the bleeding finger and opened the door. The boy blinked in the half-light.

“You must sit on the bed.” Orders from the matron. “I will put your food on the chair.”

“I can carry it in for you. Did you hurt your hand?”

Louis stepped outside the cell, which was strictly forbidden, Maggie knew; she stepped inside. She saw a cot with a dirty mattress and a moth-eaten, linty blanket, a wooden kitchen chair, and in the corner a chipped and rusting chamber pot. It was so dark, the smell so foul. She turned back to the doorway, to the boy whose
dirty, dark-red hair gleamed like feathers under the gaslight. “Just a moment, I will tidy this.” Would he run? “Wiisinin,” she said, to comfort him. “Eat your supper.”

He had intended, once he maneuvered her into the cell, to push past her and run up the stairs and out of the building. It was nearly dark; she didn't know where McGoun would be. She did not look as though she would want to scream. She would have to try to find McGoun, to find help. This would take time; he would have a good start. By morning he could be nearly halfway to Duluth; by night he could be in a boxcar, on his way home to Grand Bois.

“Gii bakade, ina?” she asked. “Are you hungry?” In English, her soft voice had a slight accent; in Ojibwe, an inflection of home. “Namadabin. Wiisinin.”

He didn't run. He sat on the floor and ate, watched her bend to pick up the chamber pot and carry it to the slate tub next to the furnace, where she poured out the urine and then rinsed the pot with water from the cistern. She carried it back into the cell and came out with the blanket, which she brought up the cellar stairs. Seated on the basement floor, outside the cell door, he heard the dull flap of the blanket being shaken in the night air, of a woman's hand swatting dust out of woven wool. He watched her walk back down the stairs. Her feet, he saw, were small; her shoes were ladies' boots, like a teacher's, with high heels, laced severely at slender ankles.

“Will you help me turn the mattress?”

The cell was so small that the young woman and boy had to carry the mattress out into the basement in order to turn it. Under gaslight, the stains took on brilliant incandescent colors: blood was maroon and pink, urine sepia and mustard. He turned his head, ashamed, wanting to lie, to tell her that he had not caused this, to spare them both the embarrassment.

The other side of the mattress was as stained, but in duller hues, and she thought it felt dryer.

“This will be more comfortable, I think.”

He nodded. Should he run? In the near darkness of the cell, her white shirtwaist absorbed most of the yellow gaslight. She looked so clean, he thought, to be in that bad place, to be touching the filthy mattress. He had looked at her fingernails, which were short and immaculate, had accidentally brushed her hand, which felt so smooth and dry against the gritty sweatiness of his own.

“I will take the plate and cup. Will you be going to sleep, now?” She was standing beside him, under the gaslight. A strand of hair had come loose from the knot with the work of carrying and turning the mattress and hung at the side of her face, curving in an s shape around her cheekbone and down to her jaw. She bent her head to that side, pulled a hairpin from the knot, and held it between her teeth while she tucked the strand back into the knot. Her teeth looked as clean as her shirtwaist, he thought; her mouth, which she closed as she pulled the hairpin from between her teeth, gentle and kindly.

“Thank you, Miss.” Louis answered. “Mino pagwad. The food was good.” He re-entered the cell and lay on the mattress. She covered him with the blanket and closed the door.

He saw her again, through the grate, in a series of strips and squares under the gaslight. “When you shut the padlock, you need to push it together hard, or it won't stay locked,” he told her. “Don't cut yourself again.”

The mattress and blanket smelled of night air, almost like sleeping outside, he told himself. He closed his eyes and imagined stars, a half-moon, and, just as he fell asleep, the northern lights arcing and bowing in waves of green, blue, and purple. One of them became Miss LaForce, who gracefully bent into the crescent of air that supported her to place a plate and cup on a cloud, then shook a damp wool blanket into the cold night sky, loosening bits of lint that crystallized into a spray of ice that fell to the earth, green and
purple and blue crystals blowing and drifting outside the cellar door, filling in the footprints that Miss LaForce's shoes had made in the freezing mud. In his sleep, Louis heard the sound of ice falling on ice. He rose and floated through the grate, in strips and squares that became his whole and solid self standing on the basement floor. He walked up the stairs and touched the slanting cellar doors, which opened like a pair of wings. Above his head the northern lights grew larger and stomped mightily in the sky around Miss LaForce, whose pointed lady shoes kneaded a cloud, toes-heels, toes-heels, Miss LaForce, who pivoted slowly in the sky, her brilliant shawl rising and falling over her broad shoulders and bent elbows, like the wings of a dragonfly.

“Ambe niimiwin, come and dance,” came the invitation from the sky. “Ambe nagamon, come and sing.”

“Waas noodin, shining wind,” he acknowledged, inhaling cold, icy air, which cleared his lungs and opened his eyes. Humming, with his eyes on the lights, he danced into Maggie's footprints.

We wouldn't be back at Aunt Babe's house until two years later, the afternoon in 1970 after Louis's funeral, which would be in most ways but not all a different type of gathering. After the funeral, the dining room would look bare, the chairs moved back against the walls and the table set with a lace cloth, potato salad, sandwiches, and a bottle of Dubonnet, and while the room was still death cooled and the rest of the living not back yet from the mortuary, so quiet with nobody talking yet, Auntie Girlie and Sis would go up and pour themselves an inch, once they had set out the silverware. Auntie Girlie would let Sis go first and ask, as she lifted her own glass to her lips, “How's your Dubonnet?” Sis would consider before she talked, like she always did, and frown seriously and answer after four or five beats, “How's yours?” in her deep and solemn voice, and they would almost laugh, then laugh. That party after Louis's funeral would be quieter than tonight's, chilly in early afternoon lit by white daylight, light entering in horizontal blocks from the windows, light as penetrating as a bar closing time, and more revealing in
its own way. And it would take the aunts Sis and Beryl and Girlie, who would drive together all the way to town from the reservation, and that day even Shirley and Babe, with their ways as tender that afternoon as the flesh on their upper arms, as tough as their eyes as they lifted their chins to point the direction we would walk into that fog of the unseen, that unknown and inevitable future, to warm the room and break that frightening awkward silence, speaking kindly to us, Louis's grandchildren, their words silver strings connecting us to the rest of the family, affirming and confirming our right and proper place among the wounded.