The Dance Boots (12 page)

Dad slept holding our mother's trembling hands in both of his. On the good days, she woke early, before everyone; on those days the smell of the coffee woke us up, and we opened our eyes to watch from where we'd slept on the floor her skinny ankles and feet do
little dancing turns around the floor while she stirred oatmeal, took the lugallette out of the oven, set out bowls and spoons. “Kwesensag, ambe wiisinin,” she all but sang in her quiet and thin voice, smiling and as scrubbed and neatly combed as Mrs. McCuskey. “Ondii Baby-ens? Wiisinii-daa!”

Every day but Sunday, Daddy worked for Mr. McCuskey until suppertime. He plowed, planted, harvested, took care of the horses and cows, repaired the barn and the house, kept the yards clean, and sometimes hired out with Mr. McCuskey on other farms or to do roadwork. Violet and I helped our mother with Sam and the house and helped Mrs. McCuskey with the chickens. We had what seemed like the entire outdoors to play in. And on the other side of the fence was the horse paradise. It was a big improvement over our apartment in Duluth.

When we lived in Duluth, Cynthia didn't live with us. She was away at school with her friend Ernestine at the Tomah Indian college in Wisconsin, where they were becoming educated ladies. Ernestine had already graduated and had a paying job in the kitchen and her own room, and Cynthia was working at her outing placement, taking care of the laundry and small children for a family in Prairie du Chien. That summer right after school ended they took the train to visit us in Duluth, when we lived in that apartment in the West End, on the same block as the Robineau brothers, and stayed with us for two weeks.

Ernestine didn't have a family.

Ernestine had a peach-colored dress, still new looking, that she had made for graduation, with money that she had earned herself from her own outing placement.

Dear Superintendent Ripp:

I am requesting $12.00 from my work placement savings account to buy fabric, thread, and trim for summer dresses and underclothing for Cynthia Sweet and me. My dress will be worn for the graduation ceremony and will wear nicely for summer also. Cynthia is in need of a new summer dress as she has outgrown the one she has been wearing. I have nearly $40.00 in my account from my earnings, which after the $12.00 will be more than enough for train tickets for our visit to Cynthia's home this summer.

Sincerely,

Ernestine Gunnarson

Dear Miss Gunnarson

You may spend $7.00 on materials for your summer dress and underclothing. See the attendant in the discipline office for the money, which I have placed in an envelope for that use. Miss Sweet will receive a new summer-weight work uniform, which will suffice for her needs; however, because the $7.00 should be more than enough for your clothing expenses, you may buy additional trim for the summer dress you wore last year. You and Cynthia may turn and trim the dress, which will become hers for church and town.

Alma Ripp, Superintendent of Girls

Ernestine and Cynthia cleaned the apartment for Mother and washed and ironed and patched our clothes. They were kind to us and worked to bring a little of the order from Tomah to our lives, but they didn't have a lot to say to us; mostly, they spoke to each other. They didn't say more than two words to our dad. They stepped back or to the side when they passed him in the hallway, looking away
to the side. Cynthia's dad had left her with us just like that, gone to Minneapolis, when she was younger than Violet and I were. So our dad was the only one she had.

When she was old enough for school, a social worker came to the apartment one day and left with Cynthia; the next day Violet and I walked to the depot with Mother to wave to Cynthia as she left on the train. We didn't know why, Violet and I, and couldn't ask Mother, who was walking in her sleep that day, her cheeks puffy and her eyes and nose swollen and pink from the wine she had been drinking the night before.

We didn't find out about our dad's prison record until Sam enlisted in the army. I suppose the county couldn't let a little girl live with a person like that unless she was his own child. But he was always good to Cynthia, and to Violet, Sam, and me. And almost always to our mother.

Cynthia visited us in the summers and wrote a letter to Mother once a month. She and Ernestine lived in a dormitory, where every girl had her own bed and her own trunk to keep her letters and things in, and they had these sharp-looking Sunday uniforms with braid on the collar and chevrons on the sleeves and striped ticking work dresses they made themselves in sewing class to wear while they earned their keep. They went to football games and lyceums. They saw a ballet once. There was a matron in charge of the girls; she was supposed to take care of them. She made sure they had clean clothes and neat hair and made their beds and kept the place nice and acted like ladies. It was her job. She lived in a room in the dormitory and slept there every night so they were never left alone. That was her job.

At the end of their last summer at home, Mother left late in the afternoon, on the day before Ernestine and Cynthia went back to Tomah. We were hanging out the open front room window to look
at the jail, watching a policeman walk a swaying and resigned drunk toward the sandstone steps to sleep it off in a cell. At the bottom of the steps, the drunk stopped and looked down at his feet, then turned from the waist and looked up at the sky and freedom and the little girls hanging out the window and waved. The policeman put one arm around the drunk's waist and held his other hand; the two of them turned and walked up the steps as if they were dancing or ice skating. As they walked through the door into the jail, our mother walked through the door out of our apartment.

Violet and I stood by the door staring at Ernestine and Cynthia, who would know what to do next. They stared back, and thought, and looked at each other. Then Ernestine said, “Well, let's finish cleaning this place up.”

“It's a dump,” answered Cynthia. “Look at it. We can't even wash the walls, the plaster's all crumbling.” She ran her hand along one bare patch, and white grains sprinkled like powdery sand to the floor. “All you could do with this is cover it up.” Again she and Ernestine looked at each other, young women becoming educated ladies. Then they walked into the bedroom, this their last afternoon of their last visit home. Cynthia pulled Mother's money bag from the hole in the mattress, where she kept it hidden, and counted out nearly three dollars. “Ernestine, my girl,” she said, “go see if the Robineau boys are home. We're gonna wallpaper this place.”

The Robineau boys brought over a bottle of their homemade brew and a lard bucket filled with flour to make paste. Cynthia and Ernestine used part of the flour to mix a pan of lugallette. When it was baked, Violet and I sat on the bed in the front room and watched them work and party; I remember it like it was yesterday. They drank the brew right from the bottle, and we ate the lugallette slice by slice, spreading each one with a little lard and sprinkling it with the sugar that Cynthia bought with the money left over from the wallpaper. They mixed the rest of the flour with water in
the bucket and spread it on the back of each wallpaper section that Johnny measured and cut. They shared that one bottle of brew the whole time they did this, and as the night went on they got silly and started laughing hard at anything anybody said, and George said, “Look at the wallpaper, it's all crooked,” which made them all laugh harder. Ernestine and Johnny began to dance, their hands and the front of Ernestine's apron all crusted with drying flour paste, and Cynthia and George sat on the bed next to Violet and me, singing and clapping to keep time.

“Come on, Sissy, let's dance,” Ernestine said to me, and took my hands. We swung and twirled, then Johnny grabbed Violet around the waist and carried her around the room, dancing with only his feet on the floor, her feet dangling near his knees. We were delighted with the attention; I watched the room tilt and spin as Ernestine held me by one hand and twirled me one direction, then the other. Violet smiled as Johnny hefted her weight a little higher, dancing with her behind sitting on his right forearm, his left hand holding her hand out like they were in a ballroom, and when Ernestine and Johnny got too tired to dance us around anymore we all fell right onto the bed, and George and Cynthia got up to dance.

George held Cynthia tightly, pulling her left hand behind his back, laying his cheek against hers, and she put her hands against his chest and pushed. “Cut that out, you!” she scolded, which offended him, so he went back to wallpapering, leaning against the wall while he did it so he could hold the bottle in one hand and wallpaper with the other.

Violet and I fell asleep while they were still partying, and when we woke up it was morning, the overhead light was still on, and the Robineau boys were asleep on the floor. Cynthia was packing the suitcases and Ernestine was wetting down the wallpaper so it would come off the wall. She cleaned the flour mess up and shook Johnny by the shoulder. “Johnny, you and George gotta fix this wallpaper.”

Daddy came back that afternoon; during the times Cynthia was visiting he never slept at the apartment when Mother was gone. By the time he arrived, the place was clean, Ernestine and Cynthia had left for the train station, and Johnny and George were getting the wallpaper on good and straight.

I wouldn't see Cynthia again for a long time.

When Daddy got the job with Mr. McCuskey, he left the scrap yards for good and we moved out of the West End, all of us, Daddy, Mother, Violet, baby Sam, and me, out to the country. Violet and I loved living at the farm, loved Mrs. McCuskey, who waved at us when she was out hanging her wash. Her windburned, reddened face shone as bright and happy as the sun below her frilled mop cap; her spotless white sheets hung in bleached brilliance below the bright and happy McCuskey farm's sun. She had us over for coffee and caramel rolls, treated our mother like special company, me and Violet like ladies, snuggled Sam in her lap and smelled his head, and told us how they were hoping to have a little one of their own one of these days, she and the Mister. And she and the Mister treated us kindly, always kindly. A couple of times when Mother actually woke them up in the middle of the night screaming unspeakable things as she and Dad shoved and hit each other, Mrs. McCuskey wrapped our blankets around the three of us children and brought us to her own house, putting me and Violet to bed in her guest bedroom, between sheets (they were so smooth, so clean, so fragrant), our heads on pillowcases she had embroidered with pansies, and slept with Sam in her own bed while Mr. McCuskey, a massive man, made pots of coffee while he calmed our parents in the same pretty McCuskey kitchen where we had been special company.

“I didn't touch her, sir,” Dad told him in a shaky voice. “Shonnud, you crazy Indian, tell him I didn't touch you.”

Mother stood gripping the back of a kitchen chair, too overwrought to sit or speak, in her coat that Mrs. McCuskey had wrapped around her shoulders for modesty (“Here, Charlotte, here, put this on, I'll take your kiddies to my house tonight. Here, Charlotte, put on your coat”), in her nightgown so thin and worn it was nearly transparent, her eyes downcast, her face shiny with sweat, her hair black snakes writhing round her long damp neck.

“Mrs. Sweet, come on now, you can either sit down and have some coffee, or you can go home and go to bed,” Mr. McCuskey growled in his deep voice.

She stood silently, frightfully, knuckles sharp white bones showing through the skin of her hands. He repeated himself. She raised her eyes and nearly unnerved him with her unfocused purple glare.

“My God, poor Sweet,” he thought. “I mean it, Mrs. Sweet, one or the other, take your pick.”

She went to bed.

“I swear, sir, I didn't touch her,” Dad lied again.

“Maynard, man, let's have some of that coffee.”

Violet and I lay awake in the guest bed for a long time. To this day I wish I could enjoy fresh, ironed sheets and pillowcases the way other people do. But I don't. It causes me to feel dread and suffer insomnia. Long nights I have, sometimes, remembering that beautiful bed. We lay awake, Violet and I, until she fell asleep, and for once she went first, slept with the side of her face against that white pillowcase, her mouth in sleep turned down on that side. She lay on her left side, facing me, right shoulder down, left up and forward. She looked beautiful in the way our mother was. I watched her sleep.

But those were the bad nights. Things weren't always bad. There were the days Mother was up before Dad and cooked and cleaned
and swept and hung the blankets out on the clothesline to air out. There were the days she put on her good dress, the white one with the low waist and embroidery down by the hem on the left side, and brought us over to Mrs. McCuskey's for coffee (our Mother had lovely manners that she had learned at boarding school, the one run by the mission, and the sight of Mother's slender, long-boned hands stirring sugar into one of Mrs. McCuskey's delicate wedding china cups contrasted so with Mrs. McCuskey's red, work-roughened hands that were heavy as a man's). And there was that one day she had me take her to the dump.

Her eyes were bright that late summer morning; the floor was mopped and the windows were open to air the rooms. Violet and I were out in the yard with Sam, and she called to me, “Sister, go get the wagon! We're going to the dump!”

In those days it wasn't an unusual thing for people to go out to the dump to see what they could find, and it wasn't unusual for a girl like me, and I was only ten, to drive a wagon. So I hitched up Sugar Pie, the mule, to Mr. McCuskey's wagon that he kept in our yard, harnessed up like I'd seen Dad do, and Mother and I went up the road way out in the country to the dump. Like I said, it wasn't an unusual thing, and in those days people went to the dump to get all kinds of things.