Each of the voices--including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others--ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.
Each of the voices--including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others--ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.
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Overview
Each of the voices--including a character named Brian Kiteley and his family, the original Native American inhabitants, the actor Richard Burton, Sojourner Truth, Richard Nixon, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jonathan Edwards, and many nameless others--ruminate on a past that is startlingly present and tangible. The main character, though, is the world of Northampton, irrevocably woven into the fabric of Western history, yet still grounded by the everyday concerns of health, money, food, love, and family. It is a novel of voices, the living and the dead, that illuminate the passage of time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668132 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 01/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 194 |
| File size: | 639 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The River Gods
By BRIAN KITELEY
FC2
Copyright © 2009 Brian KiteleyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-151-5
Chapter One
June 1974 Bill Beloit, 18 Northampton High School Tailback
The tree is smoother than we expect—the limbs at this height, about fifteen feet off the ground, are worn by something, an animal, a disease, weather? We manipulate our bodies, her back, my shoulder, her elbow, to reach a level of comfort and organization. Her parents are inside eating their TV dinners. The light from the television bathes our naked parts in blue. As we begin, there is a flash from the TV, the scene has shifted, and the brightness startles us. She grips a smaller branch just then, which makes us sway and heightens the tension of our contact, the reverberating tree swinging inside our bodies.
The next night, close to dawn, I ride my Harley Electra Glide up Elm Street just before Child's Park, coming back from T.J.'s, where we had a keg in the woods, a dry run for the festivities tomorrow, after graduation. The turn onto Woodlawn is always tricky. Drivers wanting to pull out can't see you coming around the curve, and I know I'm going too fast. The curious thing is I can see around a corner and down Woodlawn to her bedroom window, and I know she's lying in bed wearing the John Barleycorn tee shirt I gave her two years ago and no underwear. The station wagon comes into view, turning left on Elm Street, and I can tell a bad thing will happen, not necessarily to me, but to the three little kids in the back seat. What are they all doing up at two in the morning? I veer and slide. Thank God I'm wearing the helmet and leather chaps my father gave me. It'll be a bad burn, but at least they won't have to take skin from my ass to replace missing skin on the thigh. The slide is clean. I find I can hold the handgrips so the front wheel points slightly downward, which makes for a small gap my leg fits under.
While I'm noting this, the station wagon drives in slow motion across Elm into the little triangular park by the high school. The father must be drunk, because he speeds up and plows into a fifty-foot-tall pine tree. The sound is a cartoon-like blam. My body comes free of the bike and I do a nice roll, as if escaping oncoming linebackers. The end of my roll has me standing upright, dusting off my chaps, which show no skid marks. I see the kids slumped forward in the back seat of the station wagon, and one has fallen out of the car onto the grass. I break into a run, a tight button-hook, but something like a very large needle jabs me in the chest. I fall. Life leaps athletically out of me. The kid on the grass wakes to see blood gush from my mouth, me on my knees. Somehow I can see that I've broken a rib and the sheer dumb luck of running so hard has sent the splinter of bone into my heart. "He died instantly," I hear the ambulance driver tell the father, who isn't drunk after all. Or else my death has sobered him up quick.
Standing there, I watch these kids grow into manhood. It all happens too fast to narrate, but I witness their lives unfold and fall apart. They feel responsible for my death, except it's only the father's fault. Three beers and six bourbons at the backyard barbecue that went on way too long. They were the last to leave, their hosts giving them the evil eye, his kids asleep in the car for hours while his wife tried desperately to get him to leave. The father dies of drink, but not dramatically. I watch the liver grow gray, laced with more and more hard veins of dead tissue. He's sixty-seven when he goes—I have to wait as long as the living for the future to arrive.
March 1779 Israel Williams, Sr., 70 The Last of the River Gods
My name is Israel Williams and I am confined to a log jail in Northampton for a treasonous letter I wrote to an English supplier. I suffer from palsy, so my son Israel puts these words on paper for me. My wife Sarah died in her sleep three years ago, and much of the disastrous rebellion against the King I have witnessed since then has not made the sense it would have made were she in her chair next to the beehive oven. I freely admit I addressed the letter, of which I am convicted, to an English ship resting in New York Harbor, but this was only to achieve communication with a regular supplier of our shop in Hatfield. At that time, I surmised this war would soon be won by the King. Now the tide has turned. I am not a traitor. Nor am I Monarch of Hampshire County, as I was once called. The phrase "River God" should be retired. I prefer to apply it to my late cousin, Jonathan Edwards, or to his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. It was juvenile of me to ride past Parson Edwards' house off King Street so often, without once paying him a courtesy visit. Sarah frequently urged me to make amends, but the pleasure of the snub was too great.
The mob rule that incites this wicked rebellion annuls those elements of justice our people do have in their favor. I once opposed the Crown's pine laws that saved for Royal Navy ship masts the tallest white pines, which we in the colonies wanted to fashion joists and studs out of for meeting houses. I do not lament any other earlier opinions. The mob made us run in circles on the town green, while my daughter Eunice lay dying in Pittsfield. I signed an agreement I do regret, but it was under duress. Because of my infirmities I now consult my ease, and I do not foresee the day I will walk up the steps of the old Hatfield home. I wish I believed in ghosts, for then I might have tangible evidence of my wife. I will not hurry this life on, but I am eager to catch up with Sarah beyond, hear the news, listen to her wisdom and sense of restraint, and be told where my shoes and my pipe are.
July 1962 Jean Kiteley, 33 Mother of Barbara, Brian, and Geoffrey, wife of Murray, daughter of Em and Joe
I am no longer so shy and out of my depth in ritzy western Massachusetts. We drove up from New Jersey (where my parents live), at the end of our cross-country trek from San Jose. The view of the Pioneer Valley when we passed Mt. Tom and Mt. Holyoke was breathtaking and hopeful. We sold our house on Dent Avenue in San Jose and will not buy a new one until we learn the lay of the land. It has been a surprisingly cool July. We moved into the Smith College faculty apartments on Fort Hill Terrace, a large horseshoe-shaped set of one- and two-story buildings. My husband, Murray, will teach philosophy at Smith College in the fall. There are over a dozen families at Fort Hill, mostly new faculty, from all across the country. Everyone welcomed us with open arms, but I worry this is too easy, an uncharacteristic experience in what I know is usually stuffy, cold-shouldered, aristocratic New England.
But the parties! The flirting! Every Saturday night since we arrived someone sets up a kiddie pool of ice and beer. We pass jug wine from Dixie cup to Dixie cup. Someone cooks hot dogs and hamburgers—or exotic shish kabobs—on a grill built into the central picnic area. Adults swing drunkenly on the swings—or make themselves sick on the merry-go-round. There is laughter. At least on Saturday night, no one's marriage seems rocky. The children's bedroom windows are always in earshot. Most of the children are under the age of ten, which makes things easier. The infants are quiet and contented, perhaps because they can hear us laughing, shouting, telling bawdy jokes nearby.
Northampton won me over almost immediately—against my better judgment. The town appeals to me a great deal, but I don't want to be hurt by it. Murray cheerfully encourages me to make friends—with women or men, he truly does not care—and I believe him. So I try to ask questions, understand the knotty problems these men-and some of their wives—wrestle with. We are used to the college life, after three years at San Jose State, but there is a quality to the questions here, poking, prodding, asking for ever more amplification. Murray is thrilled. It's as if I am listening to myself answer questions from above my body. One of our nearest neighbors, Robert Golden, seems to love talking with me. He is a kind man. He genuinely loves his wife Grace, who is moving more quickly than the rest of us into middle age. Grace has a sixteen-year-old son who is off at a Jewish camp in the Catskills. Robert is telling me about the history of the town. His area is American history. He's written a famous book, and Murray says he is likely to be snapped up by the Ivy Leagues any day now.
I try to pay attention to Robert's story—something about a man named Joseph Hawley and his uncle Jonathan Edwards, whose church we're now attending. Halfway across the wide play area, Hugh Cowell, a sociologist, is hectoring his wife Anna again, telling her and several other wives how he needs six hours alone in the study off the living room to do his work. Impossible, with two infant girls bumping into furniture ten feet away. Murray never needs alone time, but he is always alone in his mind, working out difficulties that in spoken English sound like another language. Hugh Cowell is in many ways a dear, even if he is a bit intimidating, but the way he and Anna argue—well, I imagine their sex life is satisfying. This thought makes me color, and, even in the dark, Robert notes this. He asks if I am feeling well. Behind this question is the next logical question, "Are you pregnant?" Robert has four children and he is rooting for us to catch up with them. No thanks, Robert. The implication of this unstated question makes me blush fiercely—and I decide I truly love this town. I tell Robert what I was thinking about Hugh and Anna, and Robert, bless his heart, laughs as loudly as anyone has ever laughed at something I said. This causes several satellite couples and singles to wander near to hear what was so funny. Life cannot, for the moment, be any more pleasurable.
May 1654 Gideon Child, 60 Member of the original Settlement of nonotuck (Northampton, Massachusetts)
We came here for Gold, not God. The Moors drove Spain and Portugal west to look for new trade routes to the Indies and China, so Spain and Portugal divided the New World, with the complicity of the Popes. The discovery of all the Gold in the southern Americas, but not here, drove down the price of Gold in Europe, Bankrupting our treasuries, which were already devastated by the Black Death. The fall in the value of Gold (and I might say God) had the unforeseen Benefit of wiping out much of the Ottoman's wealth in the Near East. The Sultan still pounded at Europe's back gate, but it was clear the Turks would not be able to pay their soldiers long or buy land out from under us. The Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal mismanaged their trade, killing off or expelling their best tradesmen, the Arabs and the Jews. The Dutch and the British, both seafaring Protestant nations, ended Catholic Spain's pretense of ruling the Old World, the New World, and the Next World. Every once in a while, an English sailor was captured and trapped in the machinery of their Inquisition. When one English sailor escaped and reported the horrors to London, we redoubled our efforts against the Papists.
Here are some of the religious sects in London at the moment: Papists, Brownists, Calvinists, Lutherans, Family of Love, Mahometans, Adamites, Brightanists, Armenians, Sosinians, Thessalonians, Anabaptists, Separatists, Chaldfns, Electrians, Donatists, Persians, Antinomeans, Assyrians, Macedonians, Heathens, Panonians, Saturnians, Junonians, Bacchanalians, and Damassians.
In Virginia, the Gold they discovered was Tobacco, nearly as valuable. I confess to finding its taste vile. Farther north, in New Holland, we tempted Fate. Furs, lumber, potatoes, and dried fish were all we could trade in—meager profit. I was there for the Establishment of Fort Good Hope—later called Hartford. I happened to be along for the Founding of Agawam, which Pynchon renamed Springfield. To be at the end of another Civilization pleases me in my old age. The idea of the town preceded the fact of the town. Pynchon and his partners sold the land of Nonotuck out from under these Indians. There were 300 Indians and perhaps 100 Warriors among that number. The deed:
All the said Premises the said Pynchon & his Assigns shall have & enjoy Absolutely & clearly forever, all Incumbrances from any Indians or their Cornfields. In Witness of these present the said Indians have Subscribed their marks this twenty-fourth day of September, 1653. Pequahalent, Nanassahalent, Chickwallop, Nassicohee, Skittomp.
I will enjoy Nonotuck absolutely but not Forever.
November 1963 Brian Kiteley, age 7
The fifth graders play marbles every day after school. The South Street School is two blocks from home at Fort Hill. Geoffrey and I walk home most days hand in hand. Geoffrey is in third grade, I am in second. Some days our mother meets us at the crosswalk. Other days she does not. I want to play marbles with the big kids, and every day I bring my own small bag of marbles as an offering. They never let me in the game. Geoffrey and I sit or stand outside the circle and watch. One day, a big kid brings a new marble. He unveils it carefully from his pocket. It is the biggest marble I have ever seen, perfectly clear, with a flat spot. Someone says, "No fair. That's for a sofa." But the other boys allow this giant into the ring. I watch helplessly. At one point the marble comes rolling (with a limp) toward me, and I do what seems most natural. I pick it up. I run. When I come to the crosswalk my beautiful mother is waiting at the other side, my baby sister standing very still. My mother waves. The crossing guard escorts me across. My mother gives me a small hug, and my sister says nothing, though she looks hard at my fist, which barely covers the marble. The three of us walk home.
Geoffrey arrives a few minutes later. He is old enough to cross, with the crossing guard, without our mother on the other side of the street. I lie on the bottom bunk of our bunk bed, staring at the marble, which I press into my pillow. Geoffrey enters the bedroom casually, hanging his jacket on the peg, examining a book on his little desk, writing something on a piece of pink construction paper. Finally he comes over to the bed. He asks me what I will do tomorrow. I haven't thought about that. I imagine going back to the school, the big kids following me down the halls just two paces behind, right up to the door of my classroom. I imagine them standing there all through class, just staring at me. Geoffrey says he will take the marble back to school right now, and there probably won't be any harm. With tears in my eyes, I hold the marble against my chest and let the marble roll from my hand into my brother's hand. Geoffrey walks into the kitchen—I follow—and Geoffrey tells our mother he is going back to school. Our mother says, "Hmmm," but no more. She is making dinner, a wonderful casserole with potato chips on top. I stay to smell the dinner, but I also watch out the window, as my brother walks with maddening deliberation past the deep drain that goes so far down no one knows where it comes out.
October 1965 Mike Nichols, 34 Who's afraid of Michael Igor Peschkowsky
Location filming for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? started last week. I did a run-through outside the house we were going to use as George and Martha's place. It was on the corner of the Smith College campus, a few dozen yards from the waterfall at the end of this aptly named Paradise Pond. I realized quickly that the waterfall noise was going to drown out the one scene we really needed in Northampton, so I asked the dean of the college, who was just hanging out around the edges of the setup for the shot (the actors weren't even in town yet), if he could do anything. He said, "Sure. I'll just have them turn it off." Turn off a waterfall. It was done the next day.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The River Gods by BRIAN KITELEY Copyright © 2009 by Brian Kiteley. Excerpted by permission of FC2. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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