Read Online The Dance Boots by Linda L Grover - Free Book Online

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, toemulate 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.
    â€œIt’s Louis!” one girl whispered.
    â€œLisette’s brother!”
    â€œIs he going run again?”
    â€œHe’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 trianglethat