The Dance Boots (7 page)

An adenoidal gasp and snort from the girl with the accent from north of Miskwaa Rapids broke the rhythm of the room; the ribbons of air roiled and snapped, and Maggie jumped, sticking the duckling with the darning needle.

“Pardon me.”

“Elizabeth, do you need a drink of water?”

“Thank you, Miss, no,” she said, pronouncing the
a
as an
e
.

“Well then, for goodness' sake stop that, or you will have to leave the room.”

As the rhythm resumed, Maggie lost her concentration, distracted by Elizabeth's desperate efforts to breathe quietly through her mouth. To cover the distressing stifled gasps, she hummed, stopped, caught the matron's eye. “Can they sing while they work?”

“Yes, that would be fun, wouldn't it? Let's sing. But, before we do, don't forget to sit up straight.” The matron clapped her hands twice, for emphasis. The sleepy girls roused.

“Do you know ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair'? That's a
pretty song I like.” Maggie began to sing. The matron followed in her ringing voice, waving to direct the girls to do the same.

They sang the song over several times, until the girls followed most of the words and the melody. The mood in the room again became dreamlike as Maggie, the matron, and the row of young girls sang wistfully about the lovely and beloved Jeanie, “borne like a vapor on the soft summer air,” singing wild notes that were then warbled by blithe birds. Jeanie with the light brown hair, happy as dancing daisies. Their hands and wrists mended stockings gently and gracefully in time to the melody; the needles and black stockings might have been silent violins. Maggie led the girls again to the end of the song, holding, in her voice like a silver flute, “bo-orne li-i-i-ike….”

The matron's voice cracked slightly, and she cleared her throat. Embarrassed, she smoothed the false fringe hairpiece pinned over the top of her head, where the hair had thinned, and adjusted her spectacles, peering and squinting at the girls. “Let's hum it this time,” she suggested.

As the silent and industrious violins accompanied the song without words, the old matron swayed and smiled pensively. What was she thinking about? Maggie wondered. A lost love, or a longed-for love? A memory, or a dream? Matron was young, Maggie imagined—her blue eyes were round as a kitten's, her light brown hair a silken puff of pompadour above her smooth white forehead. A duke's daughter, she danced gracefully in the arms of a tall young man—a soldier, perhaps, thought Maggie, who had read and reread every novel in the St. Veronique Mission School library—a commoner, whose feet, in shiny black boots, twirled deft scallops around her ruffled and sweeping skirt. Their love was the more beautiful because it was doomed, denied. Alone and bereft, Matron would live out her life teaching Indian girls to sit up straight, to make their beds with sheets pulled and mitered tightly at the corners, to
emulate the bleak motions of her existence. Maggie sighed at the poignancy of Matron's life; the humming girls sighed with her at the poignancy of Stephen Foster's dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.

With a light tap against the window, a shadow flew across the black wool oval held in the palm of Maggie's left hand, so quickly that she thought a bird must have become confused by the glass and dashed against the window, thinking it was part of the sky. She looked up for the swoop of a wing; instead, a brown gingham shirt appeared to dance momentarily in midair—the sleeves fluttered and waved, the tails lifted, then the shirt half spun and sped away. Black broadcloth, a man's coat, moved into the space and stopped, flapping its sleeves. “McGoun! Robineau! Stop that boy!” The black broadcloth coat moved away from the window and down the stairs toward the yard and the barn. Scarecrowlike in his baggy pants, which rippled in the seat beneath where the wind lifted the pleats of his jacket, the upper-school teacher, Mr. Greeney, continued to shout. “McGoun, where are you? Robineau! Stop that boy!”

The brown plaid grew smaller and smaller as the boy ran toward the brush at the edge of the school grounds, blurring into the dull dusty brown of dried leaves. Except for the color of his hair he might have become lost to the sight of Mr. Greeney and the young Indian man who ran out the barn door in pursuit. The color was his betrayal, a near-black copper that the intensity of the oblique late-day sun lit to a red beacon.

“It's Louis!” one girl whispered.

“Lisette's brother!”

“Is he going run again?”

“He'll get caught, him!”

The matron clapped her hands. “Silence! Young ladies, eyes on your work. We are mending stockings here.”

The girls quieted; then the sound of the cook ringing the triangle
that hung outside the dining hall created a rustle of dresses and heads turning and whispers, the sound of doves in wind.

The matron clapped twice. “Put your things away.” The girls gathered thimbles, needles, thread, and scissors into small cardboard sewing boxes that they placed on a shelf. “Line up.” They formed a queue, shortest to tallest, by the door. “March.” The smallest girl opened the door and held it as the girls filed out. Each said, “Thank you, Miss” as she left. Then the small girl closed the door and joined the line.

“You did very well, Marguerite. They were following your directions, I think.” The matron held several stockings up into the light from the window. “There will always be mending for them to do, of course, but some of the girls, if they show a knack for sewing and get something done, can start cutting out summer-weight dresses for the little ones soon.”

“Have they learned to follow a pattern, Matron?”

“Some have; the others will have to learn. Please call me Julia—among the female staff we use first names. With the men we don't, of course.”

“Of course.”

She would have to call Andre “Mr. Robineau.”

“Shall we walk to the dining hall? We use the cook's lavatory to wash before meals.” She looked curious. “Is Harrod anything like the Catholic mission school?” she asked, wondering if it was true that the young woman, newly hired to help sew and care for the younger children, had been taught by the religious sisters to speak French and make lace.

“It was smaller, and there were only girls, no boys. And the teachers were Sisters.” Sister Cecile might at that very moment be grasping a little girl's arm and leading her to the front doors of the classroom building to kneel on the wooden stairs, on a white navy bean. She might be scolding the little girl, as she had Maggie, lisping
through a fine spray of spit, “This is what happens to girls who talk like savages. Next time you'll remember English.” Her fingers and thumb might leave light blue-gray prints on the little girl's upper arm, four small circles on the underside, one larger on the outside, that the little girl might press with an index finger as she examined them before putting on her nightgown, just before prayers, feeling and controlling the faint ghost of pain and remembering the grasp of Sister Cecile's strong and holy fingers.

“Did you enjoy your studies?”

“Yes, I did, but I enjoyed sewing the most.” Her sister, Henen, had been the better student, and the Sisters' favorite; if she had been white, she might have become a Sister herself. Henen stood up straight, kept her fingernails clean, and enunciated carefully, copying Sister Jean Baptiste—‘Mar-geh-reet. Hell-en. Par-don me. Good mor-ning.” She read aloud without stumbling. Her mathematics problems were solved correctly and written neatly. Her lacemaking was exquisite. Her handwriting samples, disciplined Palmer Method arabesques and curlicues that matched the lace she made, were exhibited on the wall for the Indian agent to see when he visited the school. So delicate and refined was her touch that she was excused from kitchen work to assist Sister Therese with the preparation of the communion hosts before they were consecrated. At morning Mass she knelt without fidgeting while she prayed; at the altar railing she concentrated on the gift of the Eucharist with beseeching eyes, which closed in prayer as the priest placed the host on her tongue.

“Why can't you be more like Helen?” Sister Cecile asked the girls, nearly every day. The girls looked away from the paragon in sympathy; it was mortifying to Henen, of course.

They were, actually, more like Henen than Sister Cecile knew; or, Henen was more like them than Sister Cecile knew: before being sent to the mission school, Henen had, more than Maggie, absorbed all that had been taught at home by a baptized mother and old-fashioned,
traditional grandmother—to be thrifty, industrious, helpful to others, modest, reserved and soft-spoken—virtues that she practiced so overtly that the nuns didn't feel the need to watch her closely and never heard that she talked in Ojibwe language to the younger girls while she braided their hair in the morning or helped them to keep their clothing neat and their shoes clean and their sums and letters lined up in rows as neat as the two columns the girls made to march from the dormitory to morning Mass. The girls could see that Henen had been raised properly at home: she had been kind and generous, respectful and humble, concerned with the other girls' well-being. Left at home, she might have become knowledgeable about healing and herbs or about the old sacred stories that grandparents told during the dark winter months. She might have learned the old ways by heart and might have chosen and taught others to do the same when she became an old woman, the venerable grandmother of a large clan family. Instead, Sister Cecile thought that Henen would make a fine mother's helper, perhaps for a wealthy family in Duluth or Minneapolis, when she finished school.

It was quite a shock to everyone, but especially the Sisters, when Henen was sent home from the mission school in disgrace.

“I hope that you will enjoy working at Harrod,” said the matron. “There is a great deal to be done here, and as you have probably guessed, some of the students, the boys in particular but some of the girls, too, are quite wayward. Not completely their fault, of course; their families are so backward. So unfortunate. It is our task to correct what we can.”

The walkway between the classroom building and dining hall was wide enough for only two people, and so the three males who approached from the opposite direction stepped off of the concrete to allow the ladies to pass. One man removed his hat; the other looked quickly at Maggie, then at the sky. Each held an upper arm
of the boy in the brown gingham shirt, which was open and missing its buttons. The skin of one shoulder showed at the seam, where a sleeve had been torn nearly off.

The larger man nodded courteously at the women. “Miss Hall. Miss LaForce. We got him. He didn't get very far this time.”

The matron shook her head. “Tsk tsk. What a shame. What a lot of trouble it is to have to spend time on this, Mr. McGoun.”

“It is. We are on our way to the laundry. It will be solitary tonight for this boy. Once again.”

“Miss LaForce,” the matron asked, “have you met Mr. Andre Robineau? He works in the barn and helps with handyman duties, but as you can see all of the staff must take care of other situations as they arise.”

“Yes, we have met.” The matron must not have realized that they were both from Mozhay Point, Maggie thought. Of course, everyone from Mozhay knew Andre Robineau. He was the handsomest man on the entire reservation, the handsomest man she had ever seen.

Andre tipped his cap and looked Maggie directly in the eye, like a white man; she felt flustered. “Good evening, Miss LaForce.” He had gone to Harrod since he was six years old and stayed to work after he finished the fifth grade, at seventeen. He knew the proper way to address a young woman who worked for the school, Indian or white.

During the exchange, the captive boy in the brown gingham shirt waited courteously, as if he were on a stroll with two friends, as though the men beside him weren't each gripping one of his arms. As though his hair weren't a sweat-stiffened mass of dark-red flames. As though his shirt weren't torn, his breathing weren't exhausted and ragged, as though there weren't welts rising on his exposed shoulder. His eyes were clear and calm; above all, they were patient. “Don't feel sorry for me,” they said to Maggie. “It doesn't hurt at all. It's nothing to me at all. I don't even notice. There is more to life than this.”

She didn't see Andre in the dining hall. Maggie helped the matron oversee the children's table manners; he stayed in the kitchen to do the cook's lifting and carrying. The children ate quickly and neatly—not a drop of milk or single baked bean or potato lump or slice of carrot or crumb of bread was left on the tables. Each child waited silently for the others to finish, hands folded neatly on the edge of the table, then when the matron clapped her hands, two children from each table of twelve collected the plates, spoons, and mugs and brought them to the kitchen. When she clapped again, the children stood and pushed the long benches under the tables. When she clapped for the third time, they marched out the door in line, table by table. After the children left, the matron and Maggie filled plates and carried them into the small teachers' dining room off the kitchen. They sat at the cold end of the table, near the drafty outside door, below the teachers, who had finished their own dinners and were drinking coffee.

Andre backed through the swinging door from the kitchen with a tin plate in one hand and a tin cup in the other. He placed them on the table. “For the solitary room.”

“When you have quite finished, Maggie, will you take Louis Gallette his dinner?” The matron had removed her shoes and was cooling and resting her feet on the wooden chair across the table. In the chair next to them, Maggie tried to ignore, while she ate, the fetid raisin-and-onion scent that rose from them and mingled unpleasantly with the aroma of the beans and potatoes on her plate. Inhaling through her mouth and exhaling through her nose she had nearly bolted the food, which pressed in an unpleasant lump just below the base of her throat.