Dance Boots

Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth

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 refugees living and dying in the west end of duluth 60 re fug ees in t he west end of duluth 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. “Here, want to fix a plate for your dad? Take this one with the flowers. Go ask him if he wants a cup of coffee, first.” “You girls all have such pretty hair, so shiny, eh?” “Look at her. Doesn’t she look like Marguerite?” Our grandmother Maggie died before we were born, and we were each of us girls like her, the aunts told us: Artense, who secretly liked pretty things, brave Suzanne, generous Jeannette, graceful Eveline, bashful Jeanne with our dad’s quizzical triangular eyes, all of us like our brave,generous,graceful,bashful grandma,who liked pretty things, who’d looked out at the world with those quizzical triangular eyes like our dad’s.And she would be,as she had always been for us,missing ,aandakii,the Ojibwe word for “somewhere else,” joined then by our finally eternally missing aandakii somewhere-else grandfather Louis,their absence shockingly tangible,permanently and unexpectedly massive in that bright, cold, cleaned dining room. 1968 But that would be nearly two years into the unseen future that was inevitable as the past: for tonight we were between funerals,and the light in front of the house was yellow,soft through the lampshades in the front room,brighter and sharper in the dining room through the refug ees in the west end of duluth 61 white handkerchief-patterned overhead light fixture.In the kitchen the light was cool blue-white from the florescent ceiling ring, light that thickened and weighted the air, causing the smoke from the cast iron pan of frybread to hover in webs and veils that stuck to our clothes and hair when we walked through the swinging door from the front hallway, where through the beautiful framed oval glass of the front door Uncle Sonny and Uncle George could watch people come up the sidewalk to the front porch, stopping at the door to turn the beautiful egg-shaped iron doorknob,feeling the raised floral design that felt so cool and right, fitting everyone’s hand so beautifully .Once in the door,the men slowed or stopped,but the women, their hands full,walked past the old uncles to the swinging kitchen door,into the hazy kitchen,where the aunts and their mother were taking turns at the stove, slowing or stopping only then to talk and drop off...