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Afterward, I was weighed down by its brief sweetness
.

    I stared across the white expanse of the Red River. Tupper whinnied, but I held fast. Did that horrible girl in the academy succeed in making me ashamed of my family? Of Aggathas, my beloved grandmother? Of my papa? No. It couldn’t be true
.
    Are you telling the truth, Beatrice?
the voice asked
. Are you?
    To Tupper’s startled ears, I cried, “I won’t be ashamed of those I love! Or ashamed of myself for being their child. I won’t!” The shadows once again slid around me with the swish of ravens’ wings
.
    Why does it feel at times as if my mind and body will suddenly shatter into thousands of pieces and never join into me again? Sometimes, when I look into the future, I see only a terrifying black nothingness. I have to keep these thoughts a secret from everyone – especially Ivy and her ox of a son. Papa is battling his own shadows; I can’t ask him to suffer mine as well. And I cannot burden my sick grandmother
.
    I am alone.
    Everything inside me changed during my stay at that faraway school. Even my faith. Now, after only a few weeks of teaching, my once-steadfast beliefs in the missionary and its so-called good work throughout the parish are being tested. Perhaps Dickens’s books and those of the Brontës have awaked something in me, for I’ve become convinced that the church’s purpose here is not just to preach the word of God to us “half-breed savages.” It’s to break the tie between the English mixed bloods and their Indian families; to make the Company servants into English farmers and citizens; and to turn the young daughters of Company officers – who will
run the homes of the men their fathers choose for them – into perfect little English ladies. A passage in
Jane Eyre
says:
     … they
[women]
suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
    When I first read it, I felt it had been written just for me. I wouldn’t spend my life making puddings and embroidering bags – there had to be more for me than that! I fumed with indignation and a strange kind of hope that I might be able to make something wonderful happen
.
    But not a single thing in my life has changed for the better since reading any of those books. Somehow, I feel even more stifled. How can I possibly make changes while I live in this closed community, with its religious patriarchal rules? And if I develop ideas of my own, how will I ever find the courage to act on them?
    I do feel better after I write my thoughts down, but I often wish I was writing to a friend who could advise me. One who understands. One who feels as I do
.
    Sometimes the shadows come at me from nowhere, like an unexpected low branch slapping my face on a summer walk in the woods. Sometimes they spiral slowly, like thick dark clouds, for days on end. Do they come from somewhere outside of me? Or are they bits of my soul turning to dust?
    When I think of the God who lives in that church, I cannot feel Him near. I am still told every Sunday that, although He watches over me, I cannot expect to understand His ways. I am told that He promises everything good. But, to me, He seems obscure, disinterested, even cruel, especially to people like the MacDonalds and their lost babies
.
    I try hard to remember spring afternoons as a child, when I sat under the budding trees along the shore and watched for silver flashings of fish; when I created wondrous images in the sweep of clouds over the far shore; when I listened to the distant rush of rapids. I try to remember, in winter, how I loved the scattered glitter of snow in the sun; how I breathed the scent of frozen balsam needles in my hand; how I felt the warmth of the sun on my woolen arm. How, then, I felt brief