the truth about stories A Native NarrativeWritten by Thomas KingCopyright© 2003 Dead Dog Café Productions Inc. and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation“YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED”!IS ALWAYS A GREAT WAY TO STARTThere 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 onthe 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. Thestoryteller 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.”1When 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 grantedwomen by men. Buthaving 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 doingnumerical-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 heldto 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. Every-one 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 
othermembers 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 begetgood rewards. At eighty-one, she still believes that that world is possible, even thoughshe will now admit she never found it, never even caughta 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 waseasier 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, abar 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 newFord? 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, longlook. And just as he began to remember, just as he began to realize who I might be, I’d leave. Hasta la vista. Toodle-oo. See you around. I wouldn’t tell him about my life or what I had been able to accomplish, or how many grand-children he had or how much I had missed not having a father in my life.So when my brother called to tell me that we had found our father, I ranthrough 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 wehad 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. Christopherhad 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. 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.So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch outfor 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. Thekind 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 beingcurious.!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.Anotherday, 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, saidthe 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 elsemake 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.So one day the woman we’ve decided to call Charm went looking for something good to eat. She looked at the fish, but she was not in the mood for fish. She looked at the rabbit, but she didn’t feel like eating rabbit either.I’ve got this craving, said Charm.!What kind of craving? said Fish.!I want to eat something, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe you’re pregnant, said Rabbit. Whenever I getpregnant, I get cravings.!Hmmmm, said Charm, maybe I am.!And you know what? She was.!What you need, Fish and Rabbit told Charm, is someRed Fern Foot.!Yes, said Charm, that sounds delicious. What is it? It’s a root, said Fish, and it only grows under the oldest trees. And it’s the perfect thing for pregnant humans. Now, you’re probably thinking that this is getting pretty silly, what with chatty fish and friendly rabbits, with moose disappearing into lakes and talking toes. !Is that what you’re thinking?!It’s okay. You won’t hurt my feelings.So Charm went looking for some Red Fern Foot. She dug around this tree andshe dug around that tree, but she couldn’t find any. Finally she came to the oldest tree in the forest and she began digging around its base. By now she was very hungry, and she was very keen on some Red Fern Foot, so she really got into the digging. And before long she had dug a rather deep hole.Don’t dig too deep, Badger told her.!Mind your own business, Charm told him.!Okay, said Badger, but don’t blame me if you makea mistake.!You can 
probably guess what happened. That’s right,Charm dug right through to the other side of the world. That’s curious, said Charm, and she stuck her headinto that hole so she could get a better view.!That’s very curious, she said again, and she stuck herhead even farther into the hole.!Sometimes when I tell this story to children, I slow itdown and have Charm stick her head into that hole by degrees. But most of you are adults and have already figured out that Charm is going to stick her head into that hole so far that she’s either going to get stuck or she’s going to fall through.And sure enough, she fell through. Right through that hole and into the sky.Uh-oh, Charm thought to herself. That wasn’t too smart.But she couldn’t do much about it now. And she began to tumble through the sky, began to fall and fall and fall and fall. Spinning and turning, floating through the vast expanse of space.And off in the distance, just on the edge of sight, was a small blue dot floating in the heavens. And as Charm tumbled down through the black sky, the dot got bigger and bigger.You’ve probably figured this part out, too,but just so there’s no question, this blue dot is the earth. Well, sort of. It’s the earth when it was young. When there was nothing but water. When it was simply a water world.And Charm was heading right for it.In the meantime, on this water world, on earth, a bunch of water animals were swimming and floating around and diving and talking about how much fun water is.Water, water, water, said the Ducks. There’s nothing like water.Yes, said the Muskrats, we certainly like being wet.It’s even better when you’re under water, said the Sunfish.Try jumping into it, said the Dolphins. And just as the Dolphins said this, they looked up into the sky.Uh-oh, said the Dolphins, and everyone looked up in time to see Charm falling toward them. The Ducks, who havegreat eyesight, could see that Charm weighed in at about 150 pounds. And the Beavers, who have a head for physics and math, knew that she was coming in fast. Accelerating at thirty-two feet per 
second per second to be precise (give or take a little for dragand atmospheric friction). And the Whales knew from many years of study that water does not compress, while the Dolphins could tell anyone who asked that while it won’t compress, water will displace.Which brought the animals to the first of the two problems. If Charm hit the water at full speed, it was going to create one very large tidal wave and ruin everyone’s day.So quick as they could, all the water birds flew up and formed a net with their bodies, and, as Charm came streaking down, the birds caught her, broke her fall, and brought her gently to the surface of the water.Just in time.To deal with the second of the two problems. Where to put her.They could just dump her in the water, but it didn’t take a pelican to see that Charm was not a water creature.Can you swim? asked the Sharks.!Not very well, said Charm.!How about holding your breath for a long time? Askedthe Sea Horses.!Maybe for a minute or two, said Charm.!Floating? said the Seals. Can you float?!I don’t know, said Charm. I never really tried floating. So what are we going to do with you? said theLobsters.!Hurry up, said the Birds, flapping their wings as hardas they could.!Perhaps you could put me on something large andflat, Charm told the water animals.Well, as it turns out, the only place in this water world that was large and flat was the back of the Turtle.Oh, okay, said Turtle. But if anyone else falls out of the sky, she’s on her own.So the water animals put Charm on the back of the Turtle, and everyone was happy. Well, at least for the next month or so. Until the animals noticed that Charm was going to have a baby.It’s going to get a little crowded, said the Muskrats. What are we going to do? said the Geese.!It wouldn’t be so crowded, Charm told the water animals, if we had some dry land.!Sure, agreed the water animals, even though they hadno idea what dry land was.!Charm looked over the side of the Turtle, down intothe water, and then she turned to the water animals. Who’s the best diver? she asked.!A contest! screamed the Ducks.!All right! shouted the Muskrats.What do we have to do? asked the Eels.
It’s easy, said Charm. One of you has to dive down to the bottom of the water and bring up some mud.Sure, said all the water animals, even though they had no idea what mud was.So, said Charm, who wants to try first?Me! said Pelican, and he flew into the sky as high as he could and then dropped like a knife into the water. And he was gone for a long time.But when he floated to the surface, out of breath, he didn’t have any mud.It was real dark down there, said Pelican, and cold.The next animal to try was Walrus.I don’t mind the dark, said Walrus, and my blubber will keep me warm. So down she went, and she was gone for much longer than Pelican, but when she came to the surface coughing up water, she didn’t have any mud, either.I don’t think the water has a bottom, said Walrus. Sorry.I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder if there’s a point to this story or if I’m just going to work my way through all the water animals one by one.So one by one all the water animals tried to find the mud at the bottom of the ocean, and all of them failed until the only animal left was Otter.Otter, however, wasn’t particularly interested in finding mud.Is it fun to play with? asked Otter. Not really, said Charm.!Is it good to eat? asked Otter.!Not really, said Charm.Then why do you want to find it? said Otter.!For the magic, said Charm.!Oh, said Otter. I like magic.!SoOtter took a deep breath and dove into the water.And she didn’t come up. Day after day, Charm and the animals waited for Otter to come to the surface. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, just as the sun was rising, Otter’s body floated up out of the depths.Oh, no, said all the animals, Otter has drowned tryingto find the mud. And they hoisted Otter’s body onto the back of the Turtle.Now, when they hoisted Otter’s body onto the back of the Turtle, they noticed that her little paws were clenched shut, and when they opened her paws, they discovered something dark and gooey that wasn’t water.
from this answear these quastions