Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [7]
The dates are not important. I’ll summarize them later.
All of Massachusetts must have been an extended family. A cousin shipped out, an in-law followed, an uncle got news of free land, a chance for rebeginning … like villages in Poland and Italy and Ireland emptying for America two centuries later.
Case in point: my family.
Rebecca Easton née Walker’s grandmother was a cousin of Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster’s father; her family had been legitimate passengers on the Gabriel (two years later to sink off Pemaquid, Maine) that Charles had stowed away on. Vaguely, then, I’m part of this story, the Salem Bibi is part of the tissue of my life. Walkers appear on the ship’s records, but Charles Muster never did. They’d probably settled in Boston, or even Rhode Island. Perhaps primogeniture did him out of land or inheritance, but by 1653 Elias Walker, his wife and infant daughter, Rebecca, arrived in Brookfield and leased, from their distant relatives the Masters (the three sons of Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster), three hundred acres of prime Quabaug River bluff and bottomland. By all accounts, Elias Walker was a frugal farmer and stockman; by 1665, he had purchased his land outright. My direct Masters ancestors pocketed the cash and further dissipated their father’s wealth.
At that time, Brookfield was a hesitant hilltop Puritan outpost deep inside Nipmuc country. Elias Walker held the usual attitudes of his time, and ours, toward the Indians: they are children; they are trusting; they are proud and generous. Even capable of nobility. But at heart they are savages: bestial, unspeakably cruel. He counseled, and cultivated, the path of mutual avoidance. Eight years later, the Walkers gained a neighbor, a sickly looking but resourceful recent arrival by the name of Edward Easton, who purchased with his English savings a brown ribbon of a field, a rickety shed, a cabin with privy and two barns.
The stage was set: older bachelor farmer with education and some money. The robust farmer’s daughter next door was only eight years old when first glimpsed, but no one was going anywhere. By the time she was fifteen, in 1668, Rebecca Walker was married to Edward Easton.
By seventeen, she’d had two pregnancies. The second, a daughter named Hannah, survived. In the remotest of ways, Hannah Easton is a relative of mine. Hannah Easton would walk the parapets of a Mughal fort, would hold the world’s most perfect diamond in her hands.
This was country for those raw and strong enough to hack prosperity out of wild, volatile land. And this was country for the middle-aged and bitter, discontented city dwellers and immigrants to start over in the wilderness, where the Prince of the Air was said to reign. Edward Easton was forty-three (already living on borrowed time, statistically speaking) the year that Hannah was born.
1632 Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster arrives in Massachusetts
1653 Elias Walker and family arrive in Brookfield.
Birth of Rebecca Walker.
1661 Arrival of Edward Easton.
1668 Marriage of Rebecca and Edward.
1670 Birth of Hannah Easton.
Of Edward Easton’s life before the winter of 1661, when he showed up in Boston, little is known. He sailed out of the Downs soon after Charles II, the Stuart restored to the English throne, had Oliver Cromwell’s embalmed body dug from its secret grave and decapitated, and the head stuck on a pole in Westminster Hall. They sent potent messages in those days; Edward, a Roundhead sympathizer, must have caught the first packet boat to the colonies.
In the Old World, Edward Easton had been an East India Company man with a sedentary occupation,