The Truth About Stories Read online

  THE TRUTH

  ABOUT STORIES

  A Native Narrative

  THOMAS KING

  Copyright © 2003 Dead Dog Café Productions Inc. and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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  This edition published in 2010 by

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  CBC and Massey College logos used with permission.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges kind permission to reprint excerpts from the following: (pp. 44, 93, and 95) I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions by Louis Owens, © 2001 University of Oklahoma Press. Used by permission. (p. 62) “The Halfbreed Blues” by Andrea Menard, words and music © 2000 Andrea Menard, SOCAN. Used by permission.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  King, Thomas, 1943–

  The truth about stories: a native narrative / Thomas King.

  (CBC Massey lectures series)

  eISBN: 978-0-88784-895-7

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8571.I5298T77 2003 C813'.54 C2003-904921-3

  Cover design: Bill Douglas

  Cover photo: Thomas King

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Helen, who has heard these stories before

  I

  “YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE

  WHAT HAPPENED”

  IS ALWAYS A GREAT WAY

  TO START

  THERE IS A STORY I KNOW. It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I’ve heard this story many times, and each time someone tells the story, it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change is in the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it’s the dialogue or the response of the audience. But in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle’s back. And the turtle never swims away.

  One time, it was in Prince Rupert I think, a young girl in the audience asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of a turtle, what was below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told her. And below that turtle? Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle.

  The girl began to laugh, enjoying the game, I imagine. So how many turtles are there? she wanted to know. The storyteller shrugged. No one knows for sure, he told her, but it’s turtles all the way down.

  The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. The Okanagan storyteller Jeannette Armstrong tells us that “Through my language I understand I am being spoken to, I’m not the one speaking. The words are coming from many tongues and mouths of Okanagan people and the land around them. I am a listener to the language’s stories, and when my words form I am merely retelling the same stories in different patterns.”1

  When I was a kid, I was partial to stories about other worlds and interplanetary travel. I used to imagine that I could just gaze off into space and be whisked to another planet, much like John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars series. I’d like to tell you that I was interested in outer space or that the stars fascinated me or that I was curious about the shape and nature of the universe. Fact of the matter was I just wanted to get out of town. Wanted to get as far away from where I was as I could. At fifteen, Pluto looked good. Tiny, cold, lonely. As far from the sun as you could get.

  I’m sure part of it was teenage angst, and part of it was being poor in a rich country, and part of it was knowing that white was more than just a colour. And part of it was seeing the world through my mother’s eyes.

  My mother raised my brother and me by herself, in an era when women were not welcome in the workforce, when their proper place was out of sight in the home. It was supposed to be a luxury granted women by men. But having misplaced her man, or more properly having had him misplace himself, she had no such luxury and was caught between what she was supposed to be — invisible and female — and what circumstances dictated she become — visible and, well, not male. Self-supporting perhaps. That was it. Visible and self-supporting.

  As a child and as a young man, I watched her make her way from doing hair in a converted garage to designing tools for the aerospace industry. It was a long, slow journey. At Aerojet in California, she began as a filing clerk. By the end of the first year, she was doing drafting work, though she was still classified and paid as a filing clerk. By the end of the second year, with night school stuffed into the cracks, she was doing numerical-control engineering and was still classified and paid as a filing clerk.

  It was, after all, a man’s world, and each step she took had to be made as quietly as possible, each movement camouflaged against complaint. For over thirty years, she held to the shadows, stayed in the shade.

  I knew the men she worked with. They were our neighbours and our friends. I listened to their stories about work and play, about their dreams and their disappointments. Your mother, they liked to tell me, is just one of the boys. But she wasn’t. I knew it. She knew it better.

  In 1963, my mother and five of her colleagues were recruited by the Boeing Company to come to Seattle, Washington, as part of a numerical-control team. Everyone was promised equal status, which, for my mother, meant being brought into Boeing as a fully fledged, salaried engineer.

  So she went. It was more money, more prestige. And when she got there, she was told that, while everyone else would be salaried and would have engineer status, she would be an hourly employee and would have the same status as the other two women in the department, who were production assistants. So after selling everything in order to make the move, she found herself in a job where she made considerably less than the other members of the team, where she had to punch a time clock, and where she wasn’t even eligible for benefits or a pension.

  She objected. That wasn’t the promise, she told her supervisor. You brought everyone else in as equals, why not me?

  She didn’t really have to ask that question. She knew the answer. You probably know it, too. The other five members of the team were men. She was the only woman. Don’t worry, she was told, if your work is good, you’ll get promoted at the end of the first year.

  So she waited. There wasn’t much she could do about it. And at the end of the first year, when the review of her work came back satisfactory, she was told she would have to wait another year. And when that year was up . . .

  I told her she was crazy to allow people to treat her like that. But she knew the nature of the world in which she lived, and I did not. And yet she has lived her life with an optimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. She understands the world as a good place where good deeds should beget good rewards. At eighty-one, she still believes that that world is possible, even though she will now admit she never found it, never even caught a glimpse of it.

  My father is a different story. I didn’t know him. He left when I was three or four. I have one memory of a man who took me to a small café that had wooden
booths with high backs and a green parrot that pulled at my hair. I don’t think this was my father. But it might have been.

  For a long time I told my friends that my father had died, which was easier than explaining that he had left us. Then when I was nine, I think, my mother got a call from him asking if he could come home and start over. My mother said okay. I’ll be home in three days, he told her.

  And that was the last we ever heard from him.

  My mother was sure that something had happened to him. Somewhere between Chicago and California. No one would call to say they were coming home and then not show up, unless they had been injured or killed. So she waited for him. So did I.

  And then when I was fifty-six or fifty-seven, my brother called me. Sit down, Christopher said, I’ve got some news. I was living in Ontario, and I figured that if my brother was calling me all the way from California, telling me to sit down, it had to be bad news, something to do with my mother.

  But it wasn’t.

  You’ll never believe what happened, my brother said.

  That’s always a good way to start a story, you know: you’ll never believe what happened.

  And he was right.

  We found our father. That’s exactly what he said. We found our father.

  I had dreamed about such an occurrence. Finding my father. Not as a child, but as a grown man. One of my more persistent fictions was to catch up with him in a bar, sitting on a stool, having a beer. A dark, dank bar, stinking of sorrow, a bar where men who had deserted their families went to drink and die.

  He wouldn’t recognize me. I’d sit next to him, and after a while the two of us would strike up a conversation.

  What do you do for a living? How do you like the new Ford? You believe those Blue Jays?

  Guy talk. Short sentences. Lots of nodding.

  You married? Any kids?

  And then I’d give him a good look at me. A good, long look. And just as he began to remember, just as he began to realize who I might be, I’d leave. Hasta la vista. Toodleoo. See you around. I wouldn’t tell him about my life or what I had been able to accomplish, or how many grandchildren he had or how much I had missed not having a father in my life.

  Screw him. I had better things to do than sit around with some old bastard and talk about life and responsibility.

  So when my brother called to tell me that we had found our father, I ran through the bar scene one more time. So I’d be ready.

  Here’s what had happened. My father had two sisters. We didn’t know them very well, and, when my father disappeared, we lost track of that side of the family. So we had no way of knowing that when my father left us, he vanished from his sisters’ lives as well. I suppose they thought he was dead, too. But evidently his oldest sister wasn’t sure, and, after she had retired and was getting on in years, she decided to make one last attempt to find out what had happened to him.

  She was not a rich woman, but she spotted an advertisement in a local newspaper that offered the services of a detective who would find lost or missing relatives for $75. Flat rate. Satisfaction guaranteed.

  My brother took a long time in telling this story, drawing out the details, repeating the good parts, making me wait.

  The detective, it turned out, was a retired railroad employee who knew how to use a computer and a phone book. If Robert King was alive and if he hadn’t changed his name, he’d have a phone and an address. If he was dead, there should be a death certificate floating around somewhere. The detective’s name was Fred or George, I don’t remember, and he was a bulldog.

  It took him two days. Robert King was alive and well, in Illinois.

  Christopher stopped at this point in the story to let me catch my breath. I was already making reservations to fly to Chicago, to rent a car, to find that bar.

  That’s the good news, my brother told me.

  One of the tricks to storytelling is, never to tell everything at once, to make your audience wait, to keep everyone in suspense.

  My father had married two more times. Christopher had all the details. Seven other children. Seven brothers and sisters we had never known about. Barbara, Robert, Kelly.

  What’s the bad news? I wanted to know.

  Oh, that, said my brother. The bad news is he’s dead.

  Evidently, just after the railroad detective found him, my father slipped in a river, hit his head on a rock, and died in a hospital. My aunt, the one who had hired the detective, went to Illinois for the funeral and to meet her brother’s other families for the first time.

  You’re going to like the next part, my brother told me.

  I should warn you that my brother has a particular fondness for irony.

  When my aunt got to the funeral, the oldest boy, Robert King Jr., evidently began a sentence with “I guess as the oldest boy …” Whereupon my aunt told the family about Christopher and me.

  They knew about each other. The two families. Were actually close, but they had never heard about us. My father had never mentioned us. It was as though he had disposed of us somewhere along the way, dropped us in a trash can by the side of the road.

  That’s my family. These are their stories.

  So what? I’ve heard worse stories. So have you. Open today’s paper and you’ll find two or three that make mine sound like a Disney trailer. Starvation. Land mines. Suicide bombings. Sectarian violence. Sexual abuse. Children stacked up like cordwood in refugee camps around the globe. So what makes my mother’s sacrifice special? What makes my father’s desertion unusual?

  Absolutely nothing.

  Matter of fact, the only people who have any interest in either of these stories are my brother and me. I tell the stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live.

  Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous. The Native novelist Leslie Silko, in her book Ceremony, tells how evil came into the world. It was witch people. Not Whites or Indians or Blacks or Asians or Hispanics. Witch people. Witch people from all over the world, way back when, and they all came together for a witches’ conference. In a cave. Having a good time. A contest, actually. To see who could come up with the scariest thing. Some of them brewed up potions in pots. Some of them jumped in and out of animal skins. Some of them thought up charms and spells.

  It must have been fun to watch.

  Until finally there was only one witch left who hadn’t done anything. No one knew where this witch came from or if the witch was male or female. And all this witch had was a story.

  Unfortunately the story this witch told was an awful thing full of fear and slaughter, disease and blood. A story of murderous mischief. And when the telling was done, the other witches quickly agreed that this witch had won the prize.

  “Okay you win,” they said. “[B]ut what you said just now — it isn’t so funny. It doesn’t sound so good. We are doing okay without it. We can get along without that kind of thing. Take it back. Call that story back.”2

  But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

  So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told. But if I ever get to Pluto, that’s how I would like to begin. With a story. Maybe I’d tell the inhabitants of Pluto one of the stories I know. Maybe they’d tell me one of theirs. It wouldn’t matter who went first. But which story? That’s the real question. Personally, I’d want to hear a creation story, a story that recounts how the world was formed, how things came to be, for contained within creation stories are relationships that help to define the nature of the universe and how cultures understand the world in which they exist.

  And, as luck would have it, I happen to know a few. But I have a favourite. It’s about a woman who fell from the sky. And it goes like this.

  Back
at the beginning of imagination, the world we know as earth was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was a larger, more ancient world. And on that world was a woman.

  A crazy woman.

  Well, she wasn’t exactly crazy. She was more nosy. Curious. The kind of curious that doesn’t give up. The kind that follows you around. Now, we all know that being curious is healthy, but being curious can get you into trouble.

  Don’t be too curious, the Birds told her.

  Okay, she said, I won’t.

  But you know what? That’s right. She kept on being curious.

  One day while she was bathing in the river, she happened to look at her feet and discovered that she had five toes on each foot. One big one and four smaller ones. They had been there all along, of course, but now that the woman noticed them for the first time, she wondered why she had five toes instead of three. Or eight. And she wondered if more toes were better than fewer toes.

  So she asked her Toes. Hey, she said, how come there are only five of you?

  You’re being curious again, said her Toes.

  Another day, the woman was walking through the forest and found a moose relaxing in the shade by a lake.

  Hello, said the Moose. Aren’t you that nosy woman?

  Yes, I am, said the woman, and what I want to know is why you are so much larger than me.

  That’s easy, said the Moose, and he walked into the lake and disappeared.

  Don’t you love cryptic stories? I certainly do.

  Now before we go any further, we should give this woman a name so we don’t have to keep calling her “the woman.” How about Blanche? Catherine? Thelma? Okay, I know expressing an opinion can be embarrassing. So let’s do it the way we always do it and let someone else make the decision for us. Someone we trust. Someone who will promise to lower taxes. Someone like me.

  I say we call her Charm. Don’t worry. We can change it later on if we want to.