The Search for Joyful

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR Mrs. Mike:

  “Mrs. Mike . . . is the story of the start of young love, its growth to maturity, and its acceptance of a dangerous, hard, but enthralling life. Its level of sheer entertainment is extremely high.”—Los Angeles Herald-Express

  “It is the personality of Sgt. Mike blowing through this account like a clear breeze that gives it a refreshing quality. Everyone’s dream of a cop, he was also a romantic and understanding husband, the fondest of fathers; a man of honor and humor.”

  —The New York Times

  “Mrs. Mike is an unforgettable story, not only because it portrays the deep abiding affection between a man and a woman, but because it pictures the austere beauty of a country where life is at once simple and free, yet complicated by danger and hardship.”—Boston Herald

  “The portraiture is true to life. Sergeant Mike’s masculine way of talk, his ability to get on with human nature, his unending but never dramatic helpfulness, his matching the big moments with bigness, but always simply, are commonplace of men in the Force, but rare in books. The Indians are equally well portrayed. Mrs. Mike’s maid, Oh-Be-Joyful, and her laconic suitor are masterly characterizations and deeply touching.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “This is a book the reader will be unable to put down until the last page is read.”—Library Journal

  Also by Benedict and Nancy Freedman

  MRS. MIKE

  THIS AND NO MORE

  THE SPARK AND THE EXODUS

  LOOTVILLE

  TRESA

  THE APPRENTICE BASTARD

  CYCLONE OF SILENCE

  By Nancy Freedman

  JOSHUA SON OF NONE

  THE IMMORTALS

  PRIMA DONNA

  THE SEVENTH STONE

  SAPPHO THE TENTH MUSE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  B

  A Berkley Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2002 by Benedict and Nancy Freedman

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin

  Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-18833-0

  Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com

  Freedman, Benedict.

  The search for Joyful / Benedict and Nancy Freedman.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Mrs. Mike.

  1. Cree women—Fiction. 2. Nursing students—Fiction. I. Freedman,

  Nancy Mars. II. Title

  PS3511.R416 S43 2002

  813’.54—dc21

  2001043497

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the readers of Mrs. Mike who asked for this story

  Acknowledgments

  Claire Gerus, for making the arrangements

  Susan Allison, for guiding the publication

  Anne Sowards, for shepherding the manuscript

  Johanna Shapiro, for her insightful literary psychotherapy

  Deborah Jackson, for recognizing truth

  Hartley John Freedman, for providing technical assistance

  Patricia Carroll, for being there

  One

  THE WHISTLE BLEW. The train lurched forward. Black clouds of smoke obscured Mama Kathy and Connie. Only seconds before they had been repeating their advice and hugging me. Mama Kathy held to her belief that I was headed for sin city, as she called Montreal. I felt I was embarked on an adventure like her own, when as a young girl she’d traveled from Boston into the wilderness of the Northwest Territory. I was reversing this, going from the prairie to the big city—like Mama, starting a new life in a different world.

  As I watched the land speed past in a blur of white drifts, I remembered the times Mama put us to bed with tales of her journey in the blizzard of ’07. The train stalled for weeks, waiting to be dug out by snowplows. Wiping the frost from the window she looked out at hundreds of cows and steers blown across the icy fields, packed along the stock fence, frozen and dead.

  When I wiped the frost from my window, the vista that greeted my eyes was smiling and sunny, the snow sparkling. I felt buoyant and excited. A call had gone out, and I had answered it. What would come of it, I didn’t know.

  I tried to disentangle exactly what it was that had propelled me toward this moment. Not one event, but many threads, twisted and woven together. Growing up with Mama Kathy and Papa was the main thing. There was something special between the two of them, kept alive by Mama Kathy’s stories of how it had been.

  “The Crees called me Mrs. Mike,” she’d say, “because they couldn’t get their tongues around a name like Flannigan.” And I’d beg for more stories about those times. I wanted to be part of them. But the special love, the special joy belonged to her and Papa Mike. When I realized that . . . the what-ifs began. What if I was really their daughter? What if the twins were really my brother and sister?

  The desire to fit in gave rise to all the what-ifs of my life. It became a game, and yet it was more than that. What if I was allowed to keep one of the kittens? What if I could go into town with Papa? What if I was a rabbit and lived in a burrow? What if I didn’t have to be “included.” Included was Mama Kathy’s word. “Remember,” she’d say to Connie and Georges, “Kathy is to be included.”

  What set me apart? We were all adopted, so it wasn’t that. I didn’t guess the reason because they never talked to me about it, and their love protected me from even thinking about it.

  Still, I had a sense of uneasiness. In the bathtub I scrubbed my copper skin hard in an attempt to lighten it. Mama Kathy, when she understood what I was doing, scooped me up in a big towel and held me against her. “Your skin is the color of a young fawn because you are Oh-Be-Joyful’s daughter. You can’t believe how close we were, Kathy. She was my more-than-sister.” She told me I belonged to the First Nation people and that my band was Cree. “You are Cree Indian.”

  The first day at mission school was my first real contact with Indian children. They regarded me with solemn black eyes very like my own. I stared at them, at their heavy straight braids. What if my hair grew long and was plaited, wouldn’t it look exactly like theirs? Their skin was the same tone too, the tone Mama Kathy called sun-kissed.

  The Indian children kept to themselves. They sent glances in my direction, but didn’t speak to me. One girl fingered a pouch of some kind she wore around her neck, looking at me all the time. I did not return her glance; it was too full of things I knew nothing of.

  At recess no one talked to me. I stood isolated and alone in the noisy schoolyard. Both sets of children, the Indian and the white, ignored me. I was marked as not belonging.

  I w
atched the white girls jumping rope. I knew how to jump rope. I jumped better than they did. My feet never got tangled up. I continued to watch. Finally I went over to them. “I can jump rope.”

  Several girls giggled, the rest stared, but no one said anything. There was a short line; I joined it and waited my turn. When it came I stepped into the arc of the rope. It made a fine whooshing sound each time it struck the gravel. I jumped and jumped and never fell out of rhythm.

  The Cree girl, who was called Elk Girl, contemplated me with dispassionate eyes and reserved judgment.

  I wanted to know more about being Indian. I got Mama Kathy to tell me again how she brought Oh-Be-Joyful from the mission to help with her babies, who died afterwards in the diphtheria epidemic. Seven years later it was the flu, born in the dirt of European trenches, that created world-wide havoc and carried off the twins’ mother and grandmother too. Mama Kathy always finished by harking back to her own children. “Mary Aroon and Ralph were taken, but the good Lord gave me you three rascals to raise.” Because, when the disease was almost over and the danger seemed past, it claimed a final victim, Oh-Be-Joyful.

  I didn’t like this part of the story. “Tell me,” I prompted, “tell me about Jonathan Forquet.” And I recited along with her, “Jonathan Forquet loved her from the moment he set eyes on her. . . . Now tell who he was.” I knew that too, which was what made it such a wonderful tale.

  “He was your father.” And we hugged each other in delight.

  As she related how ill he had been, how despondent after my mother’s death, a memory formed hazily in my mind. A strange Indian standing on our porch, his eyes searching me out, just me, from all the others. I was the only one he saw. After gazing at me a long time, he opened his arms.

  I wouldn’t go to him. I held on to Mama’s skirt, but she gave me a gentle shove. “It’s your father, Kathy.” She chose the word well, because while I couldn’t have two papas, a father was all right.

  When he held me I thought of pine trees and streams, and smoky fires. He clasped me against him a long time, until I began to squirm. He turned my face so that I looked at him, and said, “I bring you a name.”

  That seemed an odd thing to say. I had a name. My name was Kathy.

  He continued almost without pause. “I traveled a long journey to bring it. Your mother’s spirit guided me to the Grandmothers.” His voice was taut, vibrant. “Listen to me, child. In the lodges of your people you are named Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter.”

  Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter was my Indian name, but it had never been part of me. I wasn’t that girl.

  Except . . .

  I think it was Oh-Be-Joyful’s Daughter who showed me how to fight for acceptance at school. I used a gift I had from Mama Kathy—storytelling. Stories came effortlessly into my head, and I would spin them out for Connie and Georges during long evenings.

  Most of my plots were borrowed. When I got to high school I learned this wasn’t such a bad thing. Shakespeare borrowed a lot of his plots too.

  An endless source of books was Old Irish Bill. He probably had the finest collection of tattered and dilapidated books in the Northwest Territory and his own library system. You could take home up to ten books at a time, but you had to sign for them. You also had an obligation to repair them to the best of your ability. I spent many hours with brown wrapping paper, paste, scissors, and sometimes cardboard. A special satchel at our house was dedicated to Irish Bill’s books.

  I grew up with Kim, Robin Hood, and Long John Silver. Those afternoons when I sat on the worn couch in Irish Bill’s living room, he would prepare hot chocolate, adding a nip to his—“against the cold,” he would say. It was very companionable, he with a pipe, me scattering crumbs as I dunked corn bread.

  Mama was a history buff and wanted us to take advantage of Irish Bill’s wonderful store of knowledge. She told us she had once spent an entire winter immersed in his prized history of China, which on the flyleaf bore the inscription, “Property of the McTavishes.” Georges liked how-to books, on magic and fixing things and surviving in the wilderness. He would explain to Connie, who never opened a book if she could help it, how the world ran, what was wrong with it, and how it could be improved.

  Connie had her own fantasy life. Very early, about age six, she planned her wedding, “down to the last detail.” A gown of billowing satin, a veil, orange blossoms—she pictured it all against a background of wedding guests. The fact that the nuptials were years in the future, and that no groom loomed on the horizon, bothered her not at all. He would appear, along with a tiered wedding cake, when it was time.

  Stories. I loved stories. And stories became my passport.

  I sat on a bench in the playground and began my inventions. My audience was a boy with a sprained ankle, who couldn’t participate in football practice. The first tale owed a large debt to Jack London’s White Fang. As I got into it, more and more children came to hear. My great triumph was when Elk Girl joined the group to listen to the saga of Gray Wolf.

  Gray Wolf went from adventure to adventure. White Wolf was his mate and everyone knows wolves mate for life. The story continued for months, and then something impelled me to bring disaster on poor Gray Wolf. In fighting free of a trapper’s snare he was shot and blinded.

  I drew a deep breath wondering how he could survive in the wild. But only for a moment. It was clear to me that White Wolf came to his aid, inviting Gray Wolf to lay his muzzle against her flank and gallop through the forest with her. From then on he ran at her side. She was his eyes.

  Elk Girl came up to me later in the week and put a bushy animal tail in my lap. “The spirit of the wolf liked your story. He will be your guardian.”

  I took the wolf tail home and examined it further. It was gray with a ring of white and one of a darker fur, a symbol of good luck, which through mysterious Indian magic would keep evil at bay.

  PACKING FOR MONTREAL, I had put in my old talisman at the last moment. I was glad I had. As the silver and blue Canadian Pacific rushed on, I wondered if I would be the only First Nation person to enroll at Charity Hospital. The only First Nation person to answer the call for army nurses.

  The only First Nation person.

  I had faced that situation when Connie and Georges began dating. They always double-dated. Even for twins they were close. I watched them whisper together, finish each other’s sentences, and laugh at private jokes. They invented a secret cryptographic code—the Twins’ Code—that Georges boasted no one could break. Another signal between them was the word tomahawk. Whenever either mentioned the word, it meant, “This is boring. Let’s get out of here.” The problem was working a word like tomahawk into ordinary conversation.

  I took it all in. I watched as they were caught up in a social life, and realized this would not happen for me. I was already in high school and no white boy asked me out. Although Randy Harrison tried to kiss me when he caught me alone behind the gym.

  I took to staring into my looking glass and brooding. Was I pretty, I wondered, studying my prominent cheekbones. My eyes were large and set well apart. My lashes, long and straight. My teeth white and straight, and my mouth full, even when I laughed. My nose? What can be said about noses? Mine wasn’t big, it wasn’t small. It was just a nose. Did these features add up to a pretty face? I decided to ask Mama Kathy.

  “Mama,” I said that evening as I took down the dishtowel, “do you think I’m at all pretty?”

  “Pretty?” She seemed startled. But I could see she was considering the question. “You’ve always been a sturdy girl. And thank goodness your health is excellent.”

  “Yes, yes, but am I pretty?”

  “There’s a look of Oh-Be-Joyful about you, but I see your father too. You have his strength.”

  I smiled. It was hopeless.

  When Connie came in, I told her I wanted a sister walk. Connie, because she was older, saw how hard it was for me to get things out, so years ago she had instituted sister walks. A sister walk is of course onl
y for sisters. No one else can come along, because that’s when you tell whatever is on your mind.

  “Connie,” I said when we were halfway to the pond where a colony of ducks and a pair of white egrets had made their home, “I want to know, it’s important to me: Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “Of course you’re pretty.”

  That was a big-sister reply and it didn’t satisfy me. “What do the girls at school say about me?”

  “They think you’re exotic.”

  “Exotic? That isn’t pretty.”

  “You have a Metis French grandfather, and that strain shows. I’d guess you were Indian, but I wouldn’t be sure. Let’s ask Georges.”

  “No,” I said, suddenly shy, “forget it.”

  I got an after-school job at the drugstore. I was stationed behind the soda fountain, where I mixed frothy sarsaparillas and chocolate shakes.

  I was mixing and scooping and waiting tables while China was wracked by civil war. I barely recognized the names Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. When the Japanese set up a puppet government in Manchukuo, I was serving Coca-Colas and rainbow ice cream cones.

  Two women sat down at the soda fountain and fanned themselves. Saying “I really shouldn’t,” they ordered double malts. A little kid, scarcely as high as the counter, undid a dime tied into a corner of his handkerchief. A couple of girls from my own grade, in circular swing skirts wearing lipstick, came in. I hardly recognized them out of our school uniform. How hard we tried to pin our middy blouses in a sexy way, emphasizing slim waists and hinting at something on top as well. When the Sisters spotted the new fashion, it was immediately abolished.

  Now my classmates were young ladies, meeting boys here. Was I also a young lady?