The History of Now by Daniel Klein

Author:Daniel Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1579622410
Publisher: The Permenant Press

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It took three generations for Grandville’s first white settlers to make their way from Boston.

The first, the English-born Malcolm Wright family, trekked west by foot to Sturbridge Village, having heard that settlement was in need of a blacksmith to replace the one who had succumbed to bronchitis the previous winter. There, some ten years later, the Wright’s eldest son, Robert, married a young woman by the name of Louise Button, the only child of Sturbridge’s barber and blood-letter, Barnard Button.

Feeling hemmed in by the village’s increasing density— there were already more than thirty houses, barns, and shops thickly settled at its center—the newlyweds saved up for a horse and wagon before taking up the second generational leg of the westward journey. But crossing the Connecticut River on the third day of their expedition, they lost both horse and wagon to a frenzied current that had begun as a squall in the White Mountains on the same day they departed Sturbridge. With literally no more than the sopping clothes on their shivering backs, Robert and Louise staked out a plot on the west bank of that great river. Here, in the course of two decades, they built a homestead and a subsistence farm, and bred eight children, five of whom survived to maturity. In that time, several other families settled nearby, forming the nucleus of what would later be Westfield.

Of Robert and Louise Wright’s brood, it was their second son, James, who completed the odyssey to the Housatonic River valley at the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, to the place that would, half a century later, be incorporated by the Massachusetts Settlement Council as Grandville. To understand why James Wright stopped at this particular spot and did not range on to Albany or points further west, or turn south to the fertile soil of what would become Connecticut to grow tobacco along with other enterprising colonial farmers, or even north, deep into mountains teeming with deer, rabbit, and bear whose pelts were prized on the other side of the Atlantic, we first need to fathom this young man’s character and heart.

From the time he was a toddler, James was an eccentric boy—argumentative, dreamy, and given to fits of melancholy that his father saw as laziness and his mother as a sign of spirituality. Indeed, James grew to be an avid Bible reader, although this was fundamentally because the Bible was the only book in the house. The Good Book was both his primer when, at the age of ten, he taught himself to read, and his fodder when later on he discovered that the written word could nourish his dreams. He favored the Old Testament, in particular tales of flight. He could recite by heart long passages from Exodus.

As it happened, James was declaiming the story of the parting of the Red Sea in the family barn when he had his final clash with his father. Robert told his boy he was sick and tired of his malingering ways, that the cows needed to be milked, not preached to.

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