A young native kid tries to invent time travel to change history.
The Apple and Time Travel
I was six years old when I first heard about residential schools.
I didn't fully understand the significance at the time, but I listened in when a law student from the city came out to interview my grandfather. I heard about as a child my grandfather would spend his days helping his father farm, hunt and just routine upkeep of the reserve.
Then one day the Indian Agent came by along with members of the RCMP; they went door to door rounding up the kids and put them into the back of trucks. I listened as my grandfather described how it felt to be on that truck, listening to the wind; he felt lucky that he was there with two older brothers and his sister but it was still scary.
He talked about the school itself, some of the priests and nuns; he talked about some friends that he met that he's still friends with today. He told us a story about how he would catch frogs in the field and would try to keep them as pets hidden in the closet; only to discover at night they would croak. He laughed hard trying to describe what it sounded like in a giant room of silent kids.
Then the law student, his name was Charles asked something that made the room uncomfortable. "Do you remember anything that you'd like to forget?"
My grandfather put his hand over his mouth as he considered it, and I felt my grandmothers hands on my shoulders. "Lets go play outside."
I pleaded with my mother sitting next to grandpa, but she just gave me her 'go!' look.
I didn't like playing outside, for starters my cousins spent all their time playing cow boys and indians I always ended up being one of the cow boys. When they got bored of endlessly killing me over and over again I helped them out by wiring their club house with a working light with one of grandmas potatoes as a power source.
After which they kicked me out.
I remember thinking that when it potato rots, I'm not hooking them up another one.
That's when I noticed the law student by his car talking to my mother and her brother. I figured it was time I could go back inside.
Grandmother was in the middle of making bannock, she asked for help with mixing it.
It was two minutes later she was kicking me out of the kitchen; apparently she was taught to cook in a kitchen that didn't put emphasis on exact measurement and she didn't appreciate my lecturing her on why they put metric numbers on the cups.
"The best bannock comes from the heart."
Thirty years later grandma, my bannock is considered the best on the reserve; because its so exact. Grandma still won't admit it though.
I found my grandfather in the living room with his sister Aunt Nell, she was holding his hand and saying something to him. She stopped when she saw me standing there.
"Whatcha looking for little man?" She asked.
"Star trek is starting."
"Ooooh, yeah. Star Trek. You don't want to miss that." She says, she says something to Grandpa and gets up, leaving the room.
I crossed the room to grandma, took my spot on his right knee and leaned back. He used the remote and started the TV; Star Trek wasn't starting, coronation street was. But it didn't matter.
It was better he spent some time with me.
When I was ten I became obsessed with time travel.
Not stories or the future idea of it, but of actually time travelling myself; and as a ten year old I was convinced I could make it happen.
My grandfather took my cousin Rory and myself into town for building supplies; after the last if their kids had moved out they had decided now was the time for a bigger home. Indian logic.
While in town we stopped at the bookstore where Rory picked up several Archie comics and I grabbed Stephen Hawkings "a brief history of time" and a few other books including "the time machine." During the ride home I explained my thoughts on the matter to Rory.
"Time can be manipulated, like everything else its affected by gravity; so denser objects are actually travelling through time faster than other objects by comparison." He just kept reading his comic. "If I want to travel to the future. I would just have to make myself less dense; and if you were smarter you would find that sentence funny."
"Uh uh."
"I don't know how I would get back though, but maybe they have a machine in the future that could send me back...but I'd run into myself as I travelled forward. People would just see me moving like I was in slow motion..." My plan slowly starts to fall apart on me.
"How do I make myself lighter so I don't pull as much time."
"Helium."
"What?"
"Like in balloons." Rory looks at me. "Just breath it in and see if that works."
"Sometime in the future they're going to be able to map DNA, and I'm getting you and I tested."
"Uh?"
At home we were put to work moving boxes and nick nacks from the house into a large RV that they had borrowed from another cousin. Rory and I were given the chore of going into the crawl space to get what was in there...Rory loved it. I...not so much.
It was near the end of the day that I moved the last box into the RV and found it to be marked 'Charles Law Crap'. I put it down on other boxes and looked in to find binders full of papers and tapes marked with names.
Being in the family that runs the band office I'm used to binders and tapes, files and paperwork; but this one stood out because of the "law crap." It's unusual to see an emotional tinge put on the filing system.
The first binder read "Barry Hastings,". My grandfathers cousin, I met him once at a barbecue when he had gotten wasted and had to be escorted home. I flipped through the other binders, all marked with names of family members from the reserve. Uncles and cousins, Aunts and...Grandpa's name is on one.
I pulled it up and flipped open to the first page. I don't have an eidetic memory but some things stick in my head no matter what. The binder was a transcript of a conversation I was in the room for.
"Oh yeah..." I said to myself. I quickly read through what was there, the early questions and my grandfathers answers. The typist even typed out when I had asked 'why did they still have outhouses?' But didn't get when mom went 'shhhh' to me.
There was a paragraph about the frogs, but all it says after was '(he laughs.)' which really doesn't catch his laughter in the moment. I smile, I liked when he laughed; he usually doesn't talk this much anymore or only chuckles.
I pause.
Charles: Do you remember anything you'd like to forget?
Mrs.Hastings: (to unknown) lets go play outside.
Charles: Mr. Hastings?
Mr. Hastings: Yes...everything.
Charles: everything? You remember everything? Everything that happened, or everything...
Mr. Hastings: I want to forget. I remember everything. I don't want to remember but its all there.
Charles: For instance?
There's a time in your life as a child everything is new to you, when you don't know the rules yet you know that there are things that will hurt you. Sometimes the threat to your safety is real like touching an open heat source or a vicious dog; sometimes its imagined like vampires or the devil.
It's in those times that you rely on your parents, grandparents to protect you; to not only make sure that you're safe but make sure that you feel safe.
They do this by putting in a home, by locking the doors; and when you hear or see something you don't understand they show you what it is, they show you its not to be feared.
When I was four my older cousins explained to me the old woman on the mountain, she would come down from the mountain and steal kids to cook them on a fire; they finished the story with they heard she was asking about me and how big I was getting. I knew it wasn't true, but somewhere I believed it was true; enough that it kept me up at night.
Enough that at one point I asked my grandfather "is she real?"
He thought about it and shook his head "it's what we tell kids so they don't wonder off."
"So nobody's gonna take me?"
"Nope, not while I'm here."
Good. "What about vampires?"
He chuckles. "Nope."
"Monsters?"
"No monsters."
He lied. He lied to me.
There were monsters and he had seen them; they had his name, his number, and they came for him.
They wore suits, and uniforms, and black shirts with white collars. They took away his true parents and to add insult to injury forced him to call them 'father.'
He watched as these people hurt others, watched others become infected. He watched as the spirits of his friends and family whither and die.
His own brother, an uncle I never knew or even heard of till now was found naked in a field. Ernie, his name was Ernie. I've never lost a brother and couldn't imagine a world where I would so young.
My grandfather wasn't left untouched either, at ten I couldn't fully fathom or understand what he endured or the scars he was left with. Physical and sexual in nature it would be years before I would understand.
It didn't end. The binders didn't end. I spent the next two hours reading them, digesting them; horrified that these weren't just names on a pages, these were people I knew. People I run around with, who give me food, show up for my birthday...when I'm hurt, they ask if I'm ok.
How come nobody did the same for them?
My mother.
My great aunts and uncles had files, but I looked; what about my mother. She wasn't there and I felt some relief. Her cousins had folders, but her siblings didn't.
And I remembered my grandfathers words "not while I'm here."
He kept them. He protected them. He did what nobody did for him.
I spent the rest of the day sad. In my own world as my family brought home KFC and worked on building the first part of the house. It really was kind of a group effort.
Occasionally I would deliver a drink or piece of food, but I spent my time contemplating.
"Whatcha thinking hun?" My mom asked as she put plates out on the table near the buckets of grease.
"Probably something big, is the universe still getting bigger?" Aunty Saundra says.
"At 74 km per second per parsec." I say, staring at the plate in front of me.
"You're really weird." Rory says as he grabs chicken.
"I'm not hungry." I left the table, I remember trying to stop me and asking "what's that about?"
I found my grandfather standing in the yard as my uncle explained how he's going to put in the new shower. My uncle was a trained plumber, my grandfather was not; he just stood there saying "yeah, yeah."
I leaned up against him and he put his arm on my shoulder.
I don't think I ever felt less safe.
I also felt hate.
Straight from my gut, pure hate.
The weekend was spent putting up the rest of the frame of the new parts of the house, and adding in wires and pipes. I tried to explain to Uncle that he might want to use a different grade of wiring or at least more insulation on those.
"Are you paying for it?"
I also wasn't happy with the insulation they had picked but by than I was kicked out of the area and spent the rest of the weekend at home watching television in a slump.
Monday came around and like the rest of the kids I caught the bus and spent the day at school; waiting until the last bell to approach Mr. Jones, our Social Studies teacher.
"Yeah, what can I do for you?" He says as he starts packing up papers he has to grade; I always liked Mr.Jones, I found him to be one of those rare teachers that actually cares about what he was teaching. And if there was anything I liked, it was teachers; not so much the gym teacher.
"Can I ask you about something?"
"Sure, what about?"
"Residential schools."
"Oh." He stops what he's doing as he considers it. "It's not really something we cover in the course...or in high school I don't think."
"Did everybody go?"
"Everybody, as in Indians?"
"Yes."
"Yes, all across Canada. States as well."
"What did they do there?"
He hesitates, and then sits down in his chair as he considers it. "School I guess, much like here but they didn't get to go home at the end of the day." He can see that I know more than he thinks, I get that a lot from teachers. "Have you asked your parents?"
I have my head.
"What did you hear?"
I reach into my pocket and pull out a tape and put on the desk in front of him. On the front it says Travis Hastings '85. "My grandfathers brother. He made this, then killed himself the next year."
"What's on it?"
"Residential school."
"And you listened to it?"
I shrug. I did. And the other tapes; with head phones on in front of the television all weekend.
"Ok, there's not enough time between now and you having to catch your bus. So I'm going do some research, and I'll find you some books; then we can talk about it. That sound like a plan?" I nod. "And I urge you, strongly, to talk to your parents about it as well."
I nod. It's a lie.
The next day he gave me two books from the local bookstore and I read most of them by lunch.
He was right.
It was all over the country; the continent...Australia.
Beatings, sexual abuse, suicides, mass graves. It was the same story over and over again.
This was '89, the last school closed three years before. It was apart of my generation.
I spent the next week collecting junk; wires here, cables, boards, metal pieces, I volunteered to clean up my grandparents yard at the end of the day and put away tools.
I kept what I needed though in the RV in the back, some in the barn as bit by bit I added to it. Occasionally I would realize I was missing something and scrounge the reserve for that piece...it was easy when people would just abandon cars and furniture here and there.
I wasn't building a time machine.
I had no intention that year of travelling through time, I'm not an idiot and knew that the ability to was twenty years away. All I wanted to do that night was manipulate the time stream a little bit.
I wanted to see if I could speed it up around a particular spot in a measurable way.
I was going to make an object dense enough that its gravitational pull would increase; I wanted to warp time.
The device I made I had named Hank. It was about the size of a four drawer dresser and made mostly out of metal and rubber for insulation. Inside i had created a magnetic field to put my test subject into, then charge the magnetic field to pressurize the object, compressing it. If I could do that maybe I could with bigger objects, compressing a giant object such as a car to the size of a golf ball. The gravitational pull of a large object compressed to a single point might alter time?
I was ten. It made sense to me.
I wasn't aware at the time I would need as much pull as a small moon.
Or that the amount of power I needed was more than I could find.
My house didn't have the proper fuse system, it was twenty years old and out dated. So already being at my grandparents place with the gear I simply plugged into their wiring.
My design broke first.
The magnetic field inside Hank was off, its own charge held the metal piece in place but when I up the kilowatts into it the minor imbalance went ballistic. An invisible funnel was created of super pressurized magnetic north and south. My metal piece shot out going two hundred feet per second and embedded itself into the wall.
I took a moment kicking myself and should've turned the device off.
Which is when the fuse box sparked, the started burning. I watched as the wall started catching along the path of the wires.
Hanks wires shorted out and its fuses kicked in but it was too late.
The house was on fire.
And so I ran.
I looked for the fire extinguisher first but couldn't find it, stopping to look and mentally calculating that the hight and spread of the fire was beyond what I could do with it anyway. I ran into the house yelling.
I woke my grandparents up quickly shouting about the fire, I don't think they believed me at first but could see the light coming through the window.
"Get him out of here!" Grandma shouted, tossing her stuff on.
Grandpa waited for her and then moved me and her out of the house; he stopped at the phone and started dialling.
"Not from here, get out of the house!" I remember her yelling at him. He hesitated, and slammed the phone down. "You run to yours moms, get her to call the fire department. You go..."
And I did.
Mom was already up and had seen the flames, she met me at the door; asking about her parents. I told her they sent me here to call the fire department.
"They're coming...you stay here."
But I didn't. I waited until Mom left and then followed. From a distance I watched the house burn. I saw my family throwing water at it, and watched other try to get the reserve fire engine working.
My grandparents stood there, beside each other silhouetted by the fire; watching as their world disappeared into smoke and ash.
And I remember thinking...I can fix this.
The fire trucks showed up an hour after the fire started, leaving them only the act of spraying the ashes of the house. By then it was two in the morning, and most of the reserve was out to see what was going on.
It was twenty minutes after they arrives that someone found Hank, still wired to the ashes and melted metal that was the fuse box.
I remember the looks, the wall of faces turning to look at me by my siblings.
Fear.
Twenty minutes later I was sitting by myself in the back room of the community centre with my father and the fire chief explaining what I had done to the wiring.
I wondered where Mom was but she wasn't in here with me.
I left some things out with the Fire Chief, about time travel and magnetic fields. I told him it was a robot and this helped because I had drawn a face on Hank.
He sighed. Said it was going to be an interesting report and walked out. Dad went with him.
It was another twenty minutes before I heard the fighting, people arguing with each other but I couldn't tell about what; I deduced it was about me.
So I blocked it out, focusing on the fifty year old table in front of me as I mentally worked on the math of what went wrong with the wiring. I shouldn't have been drawing that much power.
That's when I noticed someone was standing just outside the door, waiting. It was Mom, it had to be.
My heart started to beat faster. Almost stopping when she opened the door and stepped inside.
She moved to the other side of the desk and crossed her arms; she was angry, she was definitely angry. When she spoke, it was calm and controlled, but you can sense she was holding back.
"What were you thinking?"
"I'm sorry." I was holding back myself, trying not to break down.
"Sorry does not cut it here buster, do you have any concept of what you did? You're the smartest person I know, you must have some vague idea what you just did."
"It's not my fault."
"You burned down their home, they're house, everything they owned was in there."
"I didn't..."
"Who's fault was it?"
"I told Uncle Steve his wiring was cheap, he knew it would heat up, but he didn't listen and he didn't insulate it properly. And I told them that insulation wasn't fire retardant, but they didn't listen, and the framing was treated, but nobody listened to me!! And the voltage coming into the house was above..."
"Shut up!"
I stopped. "Nobody listens to me."
"Are you out of your fucking mind!?"
You could hear the creak of people outside listening; my breathing, my mothers. I felt the adrenaline and my hands shaking; I lost control of a single tear that rolled down my cheek.
"I..." I try to talk but its not coming out.
I slump, defeated. "I can fix this." I say softly to myself.
"What?" She says annoyed.
I shake my head.
"You can fix what? The house? The house is gone. It's gone. And everything in it."
I shrug. I can still fix it.
"What were you building?"
I look at her, I can't tell her. The concept is too big; it takes a theoretical physicists and some philosophy to comprehend the possibility. Once its too big, it becomes unbelievable.
Once its unbelievable you become a kid.
"What where you building?"
"A time manipulator."
"A time machine?" She says, annoyed.
"No. Manipulator. I was trying to warp time."
She closes her eyes, taking a few deep breaths.
"Time is relative, it can slow down, it can be sped up, it can be warped. I wasn't trying to time travel, I was trying to alter gravity to bend it." I sounded insane. Like those nuts in movies nobody believes until its too late. Only in real life, you just live your life looking like a nut.
She opens her eyes and looks at me. Calming herself.
"Why?"
"So thirty years from now, if it was possible; I would be able to go back in time. I just wanted to see if it was."
"It's not."
"Why not?"
"Cause you'd have come back and stopped tonight's fire, we wouldn't be sitting here right now."
Oh mom, there's a lot you don't know about time travel; although that makes a lot of sense.
Crap.
"Is this...this is why you've been weird all week?" She stares at me. There's a moment. "You were the one in Grandpas files."
I nod.
"You know you're not supposed to go through other people's..." She pauses. "What have you been reading?"
"August 29, 1925."
"What's August 29th?"
"That's when they came and took him." I can see she knows what I'm talking about. "They took him, and they put him in that place, and they beat him, and raped him; I can stop that. I can save him."
I lose it, not from the misery; from the realization I can't anymore. It's not possible. And on top of it, I burned down their home.
I made it all worse for him.
I was one of his monsters now.
"But not just him. Everybody. Indian act came in in 1876. I can stop that."
"No."
"The civilization act was in 1857, I can't stop that."
"No."
"They killed millions, millions. In 1608 we had a big dinner, I can't stop that. 1528 they gave us diseases, I can stop that. 1492, I can stop that."
"You can't."
"I can!"
I slammed my hands on the table.
"Wow, if you were any other kid, i'd think you were insane. You don't think small do you; its change the world or go home."
I don't know what she's talking about.
"It's not fair Mom."
"No. And it's more than any ten year old should have on his shoulders." She reaches out and takes my hand. "I don't know what to do. I can't fix this for you."
Part of me died when she said that.
I was ten, at that age when the world of hopes and dreams meet the wall of reality. I hit that wall at full speed.
We sat there for a few more minutes, I cried as she held my had. She stood up, kissed me on the forehead and said "wait here."
She left the room and the arguments started up, but only for a moment; I don't know what she said but she's always been able to silence a room with a word or a look.
I sat there for twenty minutes. Tired, once in awhile my head would start to slump but I would jolt awake.
Then the door opened and Grandpa came in, he looked at me for a moment and then closed the door. He moved and placed a pop can in front of me but all I did was look at it; so he took it back and put a water bottle down.
Grandpa moved to the other side of the table, sat down and opened the pop. I watched him the entire time.
"I'm sorry..." I start but he puts his hand up for a second.
He sits back, crosses one leg over the other and sits for a moment.
"For a long time," he starts. "I didn't think about the past. Long time. Nothing there but pain. Sad feelings. I didn't think of my parents, I blamed them for letting me go. I didn't think of my brothers and sisters, they reminded me of back then. I didn't think of my brother..." he stops, betraying some emotion. "Earnie."
He takes a drink.
"Earnie was my older brother, we were the closest of them; and to think of him, I could only think of him dead, left naked in a dirt field. I didn't want to remember that, so I tried not to remember anything at all. Do you understand?"
I shake my head.
"I drank. I spent a lot of time dumb. I spent a lot of time hiding. Hating people, hating my family...hating myself." He leans forwards. "See, what they did to me, I saw it as punishment. I saw it as something I deserved for being who I was. It was bad times for me. There was nothing, no hope. No happiness. Nothing. Then I meant your mother."
"She's your daughter."
"I knew I had kids, but to me she was a noisy demanding little baby." He makes a horrible face. "Gawd. She was a loud baby. But I met her at three. She changed our kitchen, put the pots and pans in new places, moved the food around. And she says to your grandma 'this is how it is now.' And if anybody changes it, they would get that look, you know that look."
I chuckle. I get that look.
"She bossed her brothers around; at five she would get them up for school, she would help make breakfast. And if they said they wanted something else she'd say 'this is how it is now.' She was a bossy girl. She was twelve when she kicked me out." He looks at me and smiles. "She had her brothers hull me off. Said if I want to come back..." He starts to cry. "If I want to come back, I come back sober...'that's how it is now.'
He covers his mouth, controlling it.
"I came back a week later. The house was clean, so was I. And I saw something I have never seen." He smiles. "Hope. Your mother gave me hope."
He stops talking for a moments.
"I was afraid. I kept them from taking my kids. My babies. But she could take care of herself, she was safe and she can keep herself that way." He clears his throat. "Then I met you."
Me? Why me?
"And I remembered things I couldn't before. My brother Earnie. He was smart. He would take things apart, and he would put them together again. He would find things and make them better" He chuckles, "Dad hated it, he'd come out and find all his traps changed; or his rifle could fire another twenty yards. That was Earnie. When they took me, Earnie used to say they tell us they want us to get smarter, but they don't really; they want us dumb; you can control dumb people. You have to get smart, learn their rules, be better at it then them; beat them at their own game."
He stops, lost in thought.
"He learned Latin, he learned French. Spoke French to some man in a suit. The father couldn't speak French so Earnie told the man in a suit what was happening there." He takes a breath. "Two days later, he was gone."
There's silence. I knew not to talk.
"You remind me of him. You look like him." He watches me. "And you give me hope. It'll be indians like you that help us all, it'll be indians like you that play their rules better than them. Do you understand?"
I nod.
"And everything I went through, all of it; the good, the bad, can't be changed, and it shouldn't. Because all of it, led to to you. To me, I can live with it, knowing that."
I hug him. I hug him hard. And I tell him I'm sorry about his home.
He tells me "I didn't like the colour they picked anyway."
I was nineteen when he passed, away at school working on my degree. I was given time off from my professor and girlfriend at the time to go home for two weeks.
It was a nice wake, part of it was very traditional from one side of the family. I have an eulogy about his love of science fiction movies and shows.
His grandsons were the pall bearers, and it was surreal; I will always remember him as a capable man. Strong. Not the light form we carried from the car to the grave site.
Or the helpless child taken from his parents.
Later that night as a family we sat around talking, when grandma brought me an envelope with my name on it. She told me it was written ten years before and he wanted me to have it.
Inside I found the transcripts from his meeting with the law student, and a Star Trek book.
"I don't get it." Grandma shrugged and went off. I flipped through the book. Inside was a note.
'Don't change the past, only remember it; if you have to change anything, change the future. Give this to your first born, tell her she was worth it too."
The end
This is the fourth story from my novella, others are posted.
The first can be found here: https://steemit.com/story/@andrewgenaille/the-apple-takes-a-dare
The second can be found here: https://steemit.com/fiction/@andrewgenaille/the-apple-gets-a-date-short-story
The third can be found here: https://steemit.com/fiction/@andrewgenaille/the-apple-gets-beaten-up-a-short-story