Free The Dance Boots by Linda L Grover

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.”
    â€œWhen 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.
    â€œYes, I can do that now, Miss.”
    â€œJulia,” said the matron, wiggling her freed and airing toes.
    Maggie listened to the matron’s instructions courteously, keeping the expression on her face smooth and pleasant. She had seen similarinstructions carried out when the “recalcitrants”—disobedient girls at the mission school—were disciplined.
    Outside the laundry building, she opened the slanting cellar doors to the basement and swung them as far as they would go on their hinges, leaving them resting wide open to light the stairway, which was dark and smelled of lye soap and mildew. The wooden steps felt cold and soft through the thin leather of her soles. When she opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, the carbolic mustiness that had been growing and expanding within the heat and confines of the basement hit her face like a damp rag thrust over her nose and mouth. “Huh,” she breathed to expel the smell, and was answered by a gasp and huff from the dark and empty hallway. Fighting the impulse to run, she asked, “Is someone there?” The hallway huffed again. Her eyes adjusted to the near dark, and she saw the coal-fired water heater at the end of the hall, sucking in wet lye and mildew air, which it expelled with a huff into the rusty cylinder below the cistern of heating water. The gaslight in the middle of the hallway, turned low, provided just enough light for her to see the two doors that Julia had told her to look for. The one to the coal bin was solid; a square had been cut into the top half of the other, the door into the solitary room, and was covered by wood strips nailed to the outside that created a latticed grill, rougher than but similar to the window into a confessional. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Maggie thought.
    A boy’s unchanged voice, mild and sweet, answered from behind the grill, “Yes, Miss.”
    Louis stood with his face pressed to the grate