The Dance Boots by Linda L Grover Page B

“you’re going to be all right.”
THE FOURTH DAY
    Aunt Babe’s house was quiet and cold after the funeral, and the air clear, no smoke from frybread or cigarettes, a sharpness of clarity painful to inhale and painful to look through. Louis’s sister, Lisette, sat on a chair out in the kitchen; she had waved her daughters and nieces away as she would a flock of seagulls. No, she liked it in the kitchen. She would come out in a little while. Dennis, home from basic training, half knelt at her side, on one knee, holding her hand that rested on his other knee. In his army uniform he looked like Louis when he played the trumpet in the band at Harrod boarding school, Lisette thought to herself. Remember that picture she used to have of Louis in his boarding school uniform, holding his trumpet?Whatever happened to that picture? It was a picture postcard, remember, that he had addressed to his mother but never sent. He had left it for her under the door to the girls’ dormitory, the last time he ran away from school. Above the high collar of his uniform coat with the braid and the buttons his face was stern and serious, so unlike him. He held the trumpet upright on his knee, like a bayonet; she had thought that Louis looked like a soldier. “Like Dennis,” she thought, as she sat holding her grandson’s adult hand. They had the same mouth, smooth and full, tender, red lipped, and snub nose, and those dark gray-brown eyes that almost looked blue. The same round moon face, with the same deep cowlick like a whirlwind above the left eye. Dennis and young Louis.
    â€œWant some coffee, Grandma? I’ll get you some.” Dennis looked into her face, and she thought how he used to do that when he was small, standing where he now knelt, at the same chair, his feet on the outside of hers, his forearms on her knees, his face so like Louis’s as he looked right into hers, that mannerism Dennis’s alone, so unlike Louis yet so essentially Louis. She nodded yes and reached to wipe a cake crumb off her grandson’s lower lip. He rose gracefully, tall and adult in his army uniform, poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove, added canned milk and sugar, and knelt again next to her chair. He held her soft old hand in his again, and she remembered little Dennis’s small, star-shaped hand holding hers while they walked to the store, to the post office, to school on the first day, a little boy’s hand that fit inside hers.
    Louis’s hand had been that same size when he started school. The huddle of children had been herded off the train at the Harrod train depot by the school’s disciplinarian, a man who carried a doubled leather strap that he absently, menacingly waved back and forth. He lined them up in pairs, shortest first, tallest last, to get on the wagon that would take them to the boarding school. The smallest boy, Louis, was led by his big sister, Lisette, to the frontof the line, where she gently removed his hand, trusting and damp, from her own and joined it with the hand of the smallest girl. As she walked to her own place at the end of the line, the little boy turned his head to watch, stepping from the line, still holding the hand of the little girl.
    â€œStay with your partners,” the disciplinarian said sternly. He tapped the little boy’s shoulder with the strap, then slapped it with a wet sound against the palm of his hand.
    Miles away, and further away by the minute, a teenage boy drove a hearse up the county road to the cemetery. In the back, inside the coffin, Louis wore my dad’s clothes, his suit and shirt and tie and socks (he didn’t really need shoes, the mortician said; that wouldn’t show). The mortician’s son sang with his favorite radio station on the ride and said to the coffin in back, “You don’t mind if I turn this up, do you?”
    Louis watched us from the great distance that he had covered over the past