The Search for Joyful by Benedict Freedman Read Free Book Online

stopped by a piece of notepaper tacked to the door. WHITES ONLY.
    Shock imploded in me as though I’d taken a depth charge. I ripped the paper from the door, balled it, and, entering the bathroom, threw it into the wastebasket.
    â€œWhat was that?” Trisha asked, with a mocking grin.
    I turned on her. “The Cree,” I said, speaking slowly, articulating carefully, “do not speak ill of anyone. They may take their scalp in the night, but they do not speak ill of them.”
    The other girls watched from a distance, in an uneasy clump.
    I continued in the same tight voice, “I will just say this one thing. I intend to stay here and become a nurse.”
    Mention of our common goal broke the spell. To my amazement the girls crowded around me, stumbling over words in their anxiety to get them out, assuring me all together that they were behind me a hundred percent. Trisha, I noticed, slipped out to remove a similar sign pasted on the drinking fountain. I saw her crumple it in her hands. I went back to my room, my heart still pounding, still turning the incident over in my mind.
    I didn’t tell Mandy, but by lunch she knew all about it. “I’m so proud of you, Kathy, for standing up to them. And most of them don’t feel that way, you know.”
    â€œI don’t really care how they feel, as long as they don’t interfere with my plans.” I heard myself say this and thought, Wow! a new Kathy. I felt a flush of excitement. Was this new Kathy possibly an aspect of Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter, which had eluded me such a long time?
    â€œTell me about First Nation people,” Mandy was saying. “I really want to know, to understand.”
    I couldn’t. I didn’t know that much about them. I disappointed her by having a white mama and papa and a white brother and sister. “The twins have lighter hair than you do.”
    Mandy’s questions set me thinking. It was too bad to know nothing of the traditions of my own people. If I was to be persecuted as an Indian, I should at least understand why.

T hree
    OUR FIRST CLASS was a lecture, and we trooped into a large auditorium. There was a brief swearing-in ceremony, at the end of which we were told we were now privates, subject to the rules and regulations of the Royal Canadian Army. Our grades would be monitored, and we would have to maintain a passing average. But on graduation we would be commisioned as second lieutenants. I was conscious of a new feeling, pride and a sense of responsibility.
    The assembly was turned over to Mother Superior, who welcomed us, first in French, then in English. The audience settled into respectful silence.
    I hadn’t realized she was a small woman. Strength and energy seemed to overflow and escape her body.
    She paused to look us over with piercing black eyes. When she had made her assessment, she launched into the body of her speech. “The history of nursing in Canada is in a very real sense the history of women in Canada. Marie Rollet Hebert was the first woman to provide nursing care. In l642 another woman, Jeanne Mance, established the first hospital here in Ville-Marie.
    â€œOur order, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, eventually added an orphanage and dispensed free health care, funded in part by philanthropy, but mainly through a brewery and a freight company that the Sisters organized and ran themselves.” She paused, daring us to laugh. No one did.
    â€œThe next hundred years saw nurses trained to serve as administrators, doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Canadian nurses first came under fire in the Riel Rebellion.”
    I pricked up my ears at the mention of Louis Riel. I knew from Papa that my mostly French grandfather, Raoul Forquet, was his lieutenant. But I judged it would be as well not to mention that here. The past was very much part of the present in these cloistered walls. It would be prudent not to trumpet the fact that I was the