The Dance Boots by Linda L Grover Read Free Book Online

like those chickens of hers, her front and behind hit the backs of our chairs and the sideboard as she moved, and she clucked these nice little chicken noises and fussed over us, how sorry she was about our loss and what brave boys we were to travel all by ourselves. In the morning she fed us again, and the farmer dropped us off in Allouez in front of the feed store. We walked the rest of the way to Duluth, more than ten miles to home.
    Ma was surprised to see us walk in the door; the last time I’d run, McGoun had called the Duluth police, who had come to the house to tell her, so she knew about it by the time I got there. She said, “Sonny, Waboos, namadabin. Gibakade, na? I’ll make some tea.” She called out the back door for Giizis and Biik, “Ambe, ambe, look who’s here.” She fixed us tea and ladled out some soup, and we told her all about our trip and felt like heroes. Mickey wanted to get going to Mozhay to see the LaVirage cousins, so after he’d eaten, she gave him two quarters and packed him some food for the road.
    It was when we were going out the front door to send Mickey on his way that we saw the black Ford parked in front of the house and McGoun sitting on the running board having a cigarette. He got up as soon as he saw us come out and grabbed me and Mickey each by an arm. “Mrs. Robineau, I am here to escort these young men back to the Harrod School,” he said, in this formal and official way but breathing hard because it must have been hard to talk with Mickey squirming and me pulling the way we were. Giizis and Biik hadn’t gotten all the way out the front door, so Ma pushed them back before McGoun saw them. They knew what to do, went into the bedroom and under the bed, behind the quilt. Ma went right up to the prefect and took me by the other arm and said, “Mr. McGoun, Sonny is sixteen now and we need him at home, here, to go towork. You can’t keep him anymore.” It was McGoun’s job to bring two boys back, but I have to hand it to Ma, she didn’t back down this time and he was losing. Finally he said that I was more trouble than I was worth anyway and shoved Mickey into the backseat of the car. Mickey was too big to cry; he smiled just brave with those snaggly teeth and waved at Ma just before they drove away, but then I could see through the back window that his head was down and I could feel it that he wasn’t smiling anymore. We went back inside and Ma told Giizis and Biik that they could come out now.
NIIBIN: GEORGE IN SUMMER
    Ma was able to send money to school for train tickets home so that when summer started Girlie and me could come home and not be put to work on the truck farm for our room and board. We had a good time at home. Once it got warm out a lot of people would come to visit at Ma’s, stopping by to visit and stay a while, people from Mozhay Point and Lost Lake, relatives and friends, the Brules and Gallettes, the Sweets, the Bariboos. They brought their kids and their quilts and food, flour or salt pork or maybe a sack of rice, if they had some left over from last fall. We had some good times. All day we would be visiting, kids playing and the grownups having tea while they talked, people coming and going. Some of the men got jobs shoveling grain at the elevators or working in the scrap yard and were able to find places for their families to live here in town, too. So now we knew some people here. Good times. And Ma’s house was right in the middle of it when Girlie and me got home that summer.
    Some nights after it was dark outside we would have a fire in the backyard, in the pit Sonny had dug, and sit to visit, watching till it burned out. Ma would set potatoes in the fire, close to the outside edge and under the wood, to cook. She picked up the potatoes whenthey were blackened and done, with her bare hands, and handed them out. Split open, the insides looked so white out there in the dark.
    Ma was always