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    The River Gods
    The River Gods
    The River Gods
    Ebook164 pages2 hours

    The River Gods

    By Brian Kiteley

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    About this ebook

    The River Gods is a novel in fragments, a mix of fact and fiction, in which various inhabitants of the area around what is now Northampton, Massachusetts, from the eleventh century through the 1990s, speak of their lives and of the community, a place haunted by the pervasive melancholy of extinguished desire.

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateJan 28, 2011
    ISBN9781573668132
    The River Gods

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    • 4/5
      Back in 2002, I was in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. We did all the usual touristy things, but I was especially fascinated with Jackson Square in the French Quarter. I spent an afternoon on a bench there, people watching and just absorbing the history of the place. So many events have taken place in that location that I felt like all the other tourists should be paying more attention. It seems like a part of history was still alive even if few people were noticing it. And it was the first place I thought of when Katrina slammed the region: history continuing on, in that uniquely relevant place.That memory was triggered for me when I read Brian Kiteley’s novel, The River Gods. This book takes place in Northampton, Massachusetts, and creates a fictional history of events that occurred over several hundred years in that one location. The rambling river that divides the town also intersects the stories, then and now. The focus of the story is the characters: wildly diverse yet all living within that same region. They range from Puritan settlers to Native Americans, from famous celebrities to an ordinary family called the Kiteleys. The stories are short, and reveal just a snippet of a moment in time. It isn’t until later that the impact of the individual stories reveal the comprehensive whole of Northampton history. In one instance, we are introduced to Abigail Slaughter, one of the Puritan settlers who left England to protect their religious freedoms. She describes the region in 1680: “The land was from the beginning a savage antagonist. We pursued an immediate knowledge of the land to make it ours, but the complexity of this environment often killed or maddened us.” That same area, slightly tamed over the passage of a few hundred years, is still mysterious, when, in 1826 Arius Fuller describes an unsolved murder in the same region. Even later, in 1965, a young Brian Kiteley is spying on his grandfather and brother along a verdant river, wondering how he can ever measure up against his agreeable brother.The idea that one physical place can hold years of history is nothing new. This is why travelers visit the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. It isn’t just the location but the mystery of the unseen people that have lived and breathed at those sites. This is why Kiteley’s book is so intriguing. Imagining the heartache, the conflicts, and the joys of different people set against the same backdrop gives it depth, and makes each story, possibly insignificant on its own, have a keener meaning. Because each story is very short, the pace is very quick. Stopping to note the dates on each entry is essential to getting the big picture of how all these stories combine in Northampton. And since they aren’t told chronologically, but rather jump back and forth in time, there’s a dynamic sense of unity between each character and their place in Northhampton’s stream of time.

    Book preview

    The River Gods - Brian Kiteley

    Hughes

    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

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