The Dance Boots (3 page)

“You should see my X-ray. My lungs, there's all these little silver spots. You wouldn't believe there could be so many. The doctor says that's the cancer, those little silver spots on the X-ray; you should see all of them! Like a swarm of fireflies, it reminds me! But that swamp tea, it's making me feel a lot better. The doctor said that's good, that it makes me feel better. He told me to drink all I want.”

“Hey, I ever tell you about when my mother was in the hospital, before she died? I was there all the time, every day, and she knew me even when she didn't know anybody else. Well, she couldn't swallow anymore, you know how that happens? So, they were feeding her through this little tube, and she was saying to me how she would sure like to have a beer. She couldn't drink anything, though, through her mouth; everything had to go in through the tube, and so when the doctor came by I asked him about it. ‘She's wishing for a beer'—I told him this privately ‘do you think it would be all right if I just poured a little bit of beer in that little tube?' He said to me, ‘Shirley, that dear lady can have anything she wants.' That's just what he said, that dear lady could have anything she wanted. So
I brought in a can of beer, and she could watch me pour a little bit into the tube, and she would say, ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.' Oh, she was funny. ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.' That's her picture right here, see?” She lifted a handful of photographs from the table. “In this one she's an old lady, but here she's younger than I am now. And in this one, you can just barely see her looking over the railing; she's this little girl right here, just a little girl, at Indian school.”

She had put on a sweater and was rocking slowly in the recliner. “I have something for you, Artense. Go in my bedroom, sweetheart; it's past the kitchen, way down at the end of that long hallway, past the bathroom; go in there, and go around the other side of the bed, and underneath the dressing table there's a pair of boots for you. They'll fit you; your feet are small, like mine. You can wear them to dance in; they'll go nice with your dress. You still dance in your blue dress with the red ribbon, don't you?”

Her bedroom was feminine, and more light and tidy than I would have thought. Her bed was made, the pink wallpaper print comforter fluffed up and even around the edges. The window shades were pulled up exactly to halfway; over them, the white lace curtains looked starched, spotless. Her many bottles of colognes and lotions looked attractively arranged on the mirrored tray on the vanity; did she do that deliberately, or did the pattern just occur? The air in the room was dry and smelled like Jean Naté talcum powder; there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. I found myself tiptoeing into the room toward the tray of perfume bottles, wanting to pick them up and touch them, like a curious little girl on an errand into her grownup aunt's bedroom. I remembered Shirley at Aunt Lisette's kitchen table, setting her hair in pin curls. In front of her were two glasses of beer. She drank from one, dipped the comb into the other to dampen each lock before she twirled it quickly around her finger and bobby-pinned it against her scalp. I stood at the corner of the table,
between my mother and Aunt Shirley, listening to their grown-up lady talk and aching for the day I would be sitting there, too, setting my hair with beer and carelessly enjoying adult freedoms. They could wear whatever they wanted, go to bed at whatever time they wanted. Talk about the color they would paint the kitchen someday and the girl down the street who sat outside in her swimming suit. Buy powder and lipstick at Woolworth. Shirley, who longed for a daughter and never did get one, saw the naked longing on my face and pulled me close to her knees. She picked up the comb to set my bangs into pin curls.

“Here, use water. Buster's not going to want me bringing her home smelling like beer.” My mother always set her hair with water.

“Artense's hair's just like mine, so straight it'll never hold the curl if I set it with water. Anyway, the alcohol evaporates when it dries so the smell goes right away; he'll never know it was beer, and her bangs'll keep the set. She'll look just like a teenager, won't you, Artense?”

Facing me from the other side of the bed was a graying and grown-up woman, younger than Aunt Shirley and plainer, without eye makeup or hair rinse. My reflection in the mirror above the vanity raised her eyebrows and smoothed the straight, fine filaments of white hair that sprang from her braids. She didn't touch the perfume bottles.

The boots were behind the pink vinyl footstool that Shirley had pushed into the space under the vanity. They had been brushed and stuffed with tissue paper; the soles were lightly scuffed into circular patterns where the balls of her feet raised and lowered her body nine dips to the left, nine to the right, when she danced. She was taller than I was, and she wore her skirts shorter than I wore mine; the fringe that when she danced swayed and swung from the tops of the boots would be covered by my skirt and barely show as I dipped
and pivoted in my restrained version of Shirley's traditional style. When I picked them up, the touch of suede against my fingers was oily and cool, and I shivered, but back in the living room I held them to my heart like a baby and said, “They fit perfect. Miigwech.”

“I've been waiting to give them to you. I want you to have them,” Aunt Shirley answered. “I've been thinking about you dancing in them.”

She didn't live long after that. The small silver spots on her lungs, that swarm of fireflies caught in that mortal pattern in the moment the X-ray was taken, begat, and begat, and begat some more until there finally wasn't enough room for them to move at all. Crowded and static, they turned her lungs into solid sterling, and she died.

The first time I wore them I felt in their leather the outlines of slender, fine-boned feet that weren't mine, and I suppose the boots must have felt in the outlines of my own curved and muscular feet a hesitation, the tentativeness of a new tenant. Her smaller toes had molded subtle scallops not quite the shape of mine into the ends of the gathered vamps; I had to loosen the lacing over the insteps, tighten it at the ankles. At first they felt cool; I stood facing the mirror in the ladies' dressing room watching my cousin Dale Ann comb and braid my hair, and the leather warmed to my body heat and began to yield, relaxing to the shape of my calves and feet. I stood still as Dale Ann scraped my scalp and bent her fingers into gyrating, fantastic shapes that churned out stiff-looking braids that she secured at the ends with abalone buttons, then with a quilled barrette she anchored the white eagle feather and fluff to the tiny braid she had woven across the top of my head.

“How's that?” she asked. “Tight enough?”

“I can't even blink my eyes,” I answered, then flexed up and down on the balls of my feet, testing the feel of the boots.

“Are they comfortable on you?” Dale Ann was flexing her own
knees and feet, warming up. Her feet looked chubby in moose hide moccasins that fit tightly as ballet slippers; I could see her high, high insteps undulating under the pink wild roses beaded on the vamps, could see the movement of the tendons working along the sides of her feet and disappearing under her calico leggings, where she kept her hard ankles and sinewy calves under strict, traditional-dancer control.

“I'm working into them.” At body temperature, they began to feel like a second skin.

“Where are you ladies from?” The woman next to me in the mirror was gathering the ends of her French braids into a chignon at the back of her neck. The jingles on her red and black dress chinked a silvery scale as she moved her arms.

“Mozhay Point. But we live in Duluth, here,” Dale Ann answered. “How about you? Giin i dash?”

“Miskwaa River.” She was bent backward from the waist, twisting handfuls of shiny, slippery-looking hair around one fist; as the mass tightened the ends slid apart and out of her fingers and down her back. She laughed, embarrassed. “Oops. I don't usually wear my hair up.”

“Here, want me to do that? We have a lot of bobby pins.” Dale Ann coiled the woman's hair and wound the coils back and forth into a tight figure eight. Into the middle of the chignon she skewered a beaded hair tie of red sweethearts and black cut glass bugles. “Pretty,” she mumbled, with her mouth full of hairpins. “There, that's gonna hold. Too tight?”

The jingle-dress dancer worked her mouth a little and smiled. “No, no, it's all right. I can still move my face.”

We laughed.

“Miigwech.” She hesitated. “Do you think this skirt is too short? I borrowed my cousin's dress.”

“Not really.” Dale Ann sounded doubtful.

“It's really nice.” I meant that, it was, but the bottom of the jingles brushed the top of the leggings, and once she moved her knees would show flashes of skin while she danced.

I asked her, “Do you have a half-slip on?” I knew she did; I had seen it when she was getting dressed. “You want to trade? Mine is black, and it's longer than yours. It would look like your dress. Nobody would know.”

We switched undies, giggling. She said, “My name's Inez.”

“I'm Artense. And this is Dale Ann; we're cousins. Hey, that looks good, and the jingles really show against that black. Ready to go out and dance? My daughters are already out there lining up.”

“Yeah, let's maajaa.” We left the dressing room and walked toward the grand entry lineup at the far end of the powwow circle.

“You gotta be careful out there with us, though,” Dale Ann warned. “Sometimes we kick up all these divots and you've got to look out so you don't fall in the holes they leave!” She held on to my arm so she wouldn't fall down laughing.

“Oh, was that you, then, who I noticed doing that up at the Mozhay Point spring powwow? You were dancing so fast it was just dusty out there, you were just a blur, so I couldn't see who it was!”

We quieted down as grand entry time got closer and approached the group of dancers lining up to go into the powwow circle. The flag bearers stood at the front, four men abreast, one with the American flag, one with the Canadian, one with the Eagle Staff, one with the black pow mia flag. Next were the male dancers: traditionals, some in black velvet beaded with flowers and vines, some in leather and calico; fancy dancers in double bustles; grass dancers, whose shoulders stayed level while their feet and yarn fringes brushed the ground, spun and skipped. Ahead of us, the ladies in buckskin dresses held out their hands for the pinch of tobacco that would be placed in their palms as they entered. Dale
Ann and I lined up behind them, Dale Ann after me because she was younger, then my daughters behind us. Inez from Miskwa River hugged us; she would enter farther down the line, with the jingle-dress dancers.

“Nice to meet you ladies. See you later. Miigwech for helping me. Hey, Artense, I really like your boots; they look good with your outfit.”

“They're a gift from my aunt. Miigwech. Nice to meet you, too, Inez. See you out there, then.”

Shirley's dance boots entered the powwow circle with my careful steps, matching my toe-heel gliding dip to the beat of the Tamarack Boys' drum's opening song and following the fur-topped moccasins of the graceful elderly lady ahead of me in line, who followed the ladies in buckskin dresses ahead of her, all of us matching our rhythm, left-toe-left-foot, right-toe-right-foot. I always thought that woman traditional dancers looked like a flock of wild geese ready to leave the ground and fly, in that V formation, but of course, because we were traditional dancers and bound by choice to the earth, our feet always touched the ground. We held our tobacco in our left hands, which are closer to the heart than the right; with our right hands we held our fans. Behind us we could hear the jingle-dress lady dancers enter the circle with their singing dresses; rounding the circle, we passed at the entrance the fancy shawl dancers, young women who sprang like deer and spun like dandelion fluff, in colors of the summer sky, and pink and orange sunsets, and the yellow of buttercups and bees. With the entrance of the little children behind the fancy shawl dancers, the line of dancers more than completed a circle. The lead buckskin lady danced the traditional women dancers past the flags and off to the side, where we completed the grand entry song in a line of swaying and pivoting dancing in place, ladies in buckskin or beaded velvet or beribboned calico, all with our feet on the ground and turning as though connected to the same lathe,
counting toe-heel in place, four to the left, four to the right, center, four to the right, four to the left.

And now it is this moment, another of the many so unexpectedly profound that they turn instantly tangible, another moment that I learn by rote and remember by heart. To Dale Ann's and my right, my grown daughters, Anjeni and Michelle, have taken their places in that line of women who anchor the powwow, as the women before us, our grandmothers and aunts and older sisters and cousins, anchored the powwow before we became traditional dancers ourselves. I glance at our feet—Anjeni's in gold deer hide with beaded vamps, Michelle's in tennis shoes, mine in Shirley's suede boots—then at our dresses—Anjeni's black sprigged calico, Michelle's black velvet skirt with beaded red, pink, and yellow flowers blooming from dark green vines, my dark blue dress with red ribbon sent to me by Shirley in a dream. As we pivot to the right I see Stan, who holds his hat over his heart with his right hand and holds the hand of our grandson with his left. Mitchell, our grandson, stares at his mother, stunned by her beauty, looking so different from the young woman in jeans and a sweatshirt who went into the women's dressing room. Stan stares at me in the same way. Against the sole of my left foot, where it curves, under the arch, I feel the small bit of tobacco and sage that I placed inside my stocking before I put on the suede dance boots.

I raise my eagle feather to bless and honor them all and include in my dancing prayer my thanks to the Creator for these people I love. And for the ones I will to come to love. And for the ones who have left whom I have loved and love still. And for Aunt Shirley and her boots.