Sunbury

Towns are, inevitably, more than the people who reside in them. They are the institutions that outlast those people, like the local bank or the Presbyterian church or the city council. They are also the memories passed down between generations of people, stretching past the lifespans of any one man or even any one family. And, of course, they are also the physical setting where they emerged, the plot of soil they sprung up from and the river and rainfall that water them and the mountains that shadow them or plains that stretch out around them. In the 1800s there was a town called Sunbury in western Massachusetts. It was comprised of a thousand or so homes, a bank, two taverns, an inn, two churches, an undertaker, and dozens of other small establishments and structures carved out of the woods that stretched for miles and miles towards the mountains, like several oceans of green rolling in turbulent waves unbroken for as far as one could see. 

There were names in Sunbury’s history, Sidney Seagram (founder of the bank and, as a Trustee, one of the founders of the town itself as it was known by the 1890s) and Joseph Carlysle (owner of the town’s largest employer, a flour mill, in the middle of the 1800s) and Reverend Francis Lowell, longtime pastor of the Presbyterian church. But her memories and her soil were a bit murkier, though by the 1890s no one would have had any idea quite why. Some of the elements of what comprised Sunbury were unseen, hidden by mile after mile of thick woods and decades of silence. 

There were caves out there in the woods. Limestone caves, most less than a dozen feet deep. But at least two men had thought they’d heard noises, scratching or something akin to it, in some of the gashes scoring bluffs far out in the southern woods. But one man was crazy, and the other was a drifter, and certain kinds of memories didn’t have long lives in Sunbury. So no one truly knew about what happened out under the trees. 

But towns also hold another quality. Like people, they are planted in soil and under sky they didn’t author. They live on lent land, space and air and moments that are crafted and ruled over by a Providence they can’t subvert. Towns spring up on an earth owned by God. As are the enemies that might haunt them. 

In 1892, Sunbury’s woods let loose what she’d forgotten. 

*”Nephilim,” the story of Sunbury and what happened in and around her in 1892, is due out later this summer from Stone Table Books.