Last Night in Twisted River (2 page)

Almost every male of working age in Twisted River knew the cook and his son—some women, too. Dominic had needed to know a number of women—mainly, to help him look after his son—for the cook had lost his wife, Danny’s young mother, a long-seeming decade ago.

Dominic Baciagalupo believed that Angel Pope had had some experience with kitchen work, which the boy had done awkwardly but uncomplainingly, and with an economy of movement that must have been born of familiarity—despite his professed boredom with cooking-related chores, and his penchant for cutting himself on the cutting board.

Moreover, the young Canadian was a reader; he’d borrowed many books that had belonged to Dominic’s late wife, and he often read aloud to Daniel. It was Ketchum’s opinion that Angel had read Robert Louis Stevenson to young Dan “to excess”—not only
Kidnapped
and
Treasure Island
but his unfinished deathbed novel,
St. Ives
, which Ketchum said should have died with the author. At the time of the accident on the river, Angel had been reading
The Wrecker
to Danny. (Ketchum had not yet weighed in with his opinion of
that
novel.)

Well, whatever Angel Pope’s background had been, he’d had some schooling, clearly—more than most of the French Canadian woodsmen the cook had known. (More than most of the sawmill workers and the
local
woodsmen, too.)

“Why did Angel have to die?” Danny asked his dad. The twelve-year-old was helping his father wipe down the dining tables after the late-arriving loggers had gone off to bed, or perhaps to drink. And although she often kept herself busy in the cookhouse quite late into the night, at least well past Danny’s bedtime, the Indian dishwasher had finished with her chores; by now, she’d driven her truck back to town.

“Angel didn’t have to die, Daniel—it was an
avoidable
accident.” The cook’s vocabulary often made reference to
avoidable
accidents, and his twelve-year-old son was overfamiliar with his father’s grim and fatalistic thoughts on human fallibility—the recklessness of youth, in particular. “He was too green to be out on a river drive,” the cook said, as if that were all there was to it.

Danny Baciagalupo knew his dad’s opinion of
all the
things Angel, or any boy that age, was too green to do. The cook also would have wanted to keep Angel far away from a peavey. (The peavey’s most important feature was the hinged hook that made it possible to roll a heavy log by hand.)

According to Ketchum, the “old days” had been more perilous. Ketchum claimed that working with the horses, pulling the scoots out of the winter woods, was risky work. In the winter, the lumberjacks tramped up into the mountains. They’d cut down the trees and (not that long ago) used horses to pull the timber out, one log at a time. The scoots, or wheelless drays, were dragged like sleds on the frozen snow, which not even the horses’ hooves could penetrate because the sled ruts on the horse-haul roads were iced down every night. Then the snowmelt and mud season came, and—“back then,” as Ketchum would say—all the work in the woods was halted.

But even this was changing. Since the new logging machinery could work in muddy conditions and haul much longer distances to improved roads, which could be used in all seasons, mud season itself was becoming less of an issue—and horses were giving way to crawler tractors.

The bulldozers made it possible to build a road right to a logging site, where the wood could be hauled out by truck. The trucks moved the wood to a more central drop point on a river, or on a pond or lake; in fact, highway transport would very soon supplant the need for river drives. Gone were the days when a snubbing winch had been used to ease the horses down the steeper slopes. “The teams could slide on their haunches,” Ketchum had told young Dan. (Ketchum rated oxen highly, for their steady footing in deep snow, but oxen had never been widely used.)

Gone, too, was railroad logging in the woods; it came to an end in the Pemigewasset Valley in ’48—the same year one of Ketchum’s cousins had been killed by a Shay locomotive at the Livermore Falls paper mill. The Shay weighed fifty tons and had been used to pull the last of the rails from the woods. The former railroad beds made for firm haul roads for the trucks in the 1950s, although Ketchum could still remember a murder on the Beebe River Railroad—back when he’d been the teamster for a bobsled loaded with prime virgin spruce behind a four-horse rig. Ketchum had been the teamster on one of the early Lombard steam engines, too—the one steered by a horse. The horse had turned the front sled runners, and the teamster sat at the front of the log hauler; later models replaced the horse and teamster with a helmsman at a steering wheel. Ketchum had been a helmsman, too, Danny Baciagalupo knew—clearly, Ketchum had done everything.

The old Lombard log-hauler roads around Twisted River were truck roads now, although there were derelict Lombards abandoned in the area. (There is one still standing upright in Twisted River, and another one, tipped on its side, in the logging camp in West Dummer—or Paris, as the settlement was usually called, after the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine.)

Phillips Brook ran to Paris and the Ammonoosuc—and into the Connecticut River. The rivermen drove hardwood sawlogs along Phillips Brook to Paris, and some pulpwood, too. The sawmill in Paris was strictly a hardwoods operation—the manufacturing company in Maine made toboggans—and the logging camp in Paris, with its steam-powered sawmill, had converted the former horse hovel to a machine shop. The mill manager’s house was also there, together with a seventy-five-man bunkhouse and a mess hall, and some rudimentary family housing—not to mention an optimistically planted apple orchard and a schoolhouse. That there was no schoolhouse in the town of Twisted River, nor had anyone been optimistic enough about the settlement’s staying power to plant any apple trees, gave rise to the opinion (held chiefly in Paris) that the logging camp was a more civilized community, and less temporary, than Twisted River.

At the height of land between the two outposts, no fortune-teller would have been foolish enough to predict success or longevity for either settlement. Danny Baciagalupo had heard Ketchum declare certain doom for the logging camp in Paris
and
for Twisted River, but Ketchum “suffered no progress gladly”—as the cook had cautioned his son. Dominic Baciagalupo was not a storyteller; the cook routinely cast doubt on some of Ketchum’s stories. “Daniel, don’t be in too big a hurry to buy into the Ketchum version,” Dominic would say.

Had Ketchum’s aunt, an accountant, truly been killed by a toppled stack of edging in the lathe mill in Milan? “I’m not sure there is, or ever was, a lathe mill in Milan, Daniel,” the cook had warned his son. And according to Ketchum, one thunderstorm had killed four people in the sawmill at the outlet dam to Dummer Pond—the bigger and uppermost of the Dummer ponds. Allegedly, lightning had struck the log carriage. “The dogger and the setter, not to mention the sawyer holding the band-saw levers
and
the takeaway man, were killed by a single bolt,” Ketchum had told Danny. Witnesses had watched the entire mill burn to the ground.

“I’m surprised that another of Ketchum’s relatives wasn’t among the victims, Daniel,” was all that Dominic would say.

Indeed, another of Ketchum’s cousins had fallen into the slasher in a pulpwood slasher mill; an uncle had been brained by a flying four-foot log at a cut-up mill, where they’d been cutting long spruce logs into pulpwood length. And there’d once been a floating steam donkey on Dummer Pond; it was used to bunch logs for the sawmill entrance at the outlet dam, but the engine had exploded. A man’s ear was found frozen in the spring snow on the island in the pond, where all the trees had been singed by the explosion. Later, Ketchum said, an ice fisherman used the ear for bait in the Pontook Reservoir.

“More relatives of yours, I assume?” the cook had asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Ketchum had replied.

Ketchum claimed to have known the “legendary asshole” who’d constructed a horse hovel upstream of the bunkhouse and mess hall at Camp Five. When all the men in the logging camp got sick, they strung up the purported legend in a network of bridles in the horse hovel above the manure pit—“until the asshole fainted from the fumes.”

“You can see why Ketchum misses the old days, Daniel,” the cook had said to his son.

Dominic Baciagalupo knew some stories—most of them not for telling. And what stories the cook could tell his son didn’t capture young Dan’s imagination the way Ketchum’s stories did. There was the one about the bean hole outside the cook’s tent on the Chick wolnepy, near Success Pond. In the aforementioned old days, on a river drive, Dominic had dug a bean hole, four feet across, and started the beans cooking in the ground at bedtime, covering the hole with hot ashes and earth. At
5 A.M.
, when it would be piping hot, he planned to dig the covered pot out of the ground for breakfast. But a French Canadian had wandered out of the sleeping wanigan (probably to take a pee) when it was still dark; he was barefoot when he fell into the bean hole, burning both his feet.

“That’s it? That’s the whole story?” Danny had asked his dad.

“Well, it’s kind of a
cooking
story, I guess,” Ketchum had said, to be kind. Ketchum would tease Dominic on the subject that spaghetti was replacing baked beans and pea soup on the upper Androscoggin.

“We never used to have so many
Italian
cooks around,” Ketchum would say, winking at Danny.

“You’re telling me you’d rather have baked beans and pea soup than pasta?” the cook asked his old friend.

“Your dad is a
touchy
little fella, isn’t he?” Ketchum would say to Danny, winking again. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum had more than once declared to Dominic. “Are you ever
touchy
!”

NOW IT WAS THAT
mud-season, swollen-river time of year again. There’d been a strong surge of water coming through one of the sluice gates—what Ketchum called a “driving head,” probably from the sluice gate at the east end of Little Dummer Pond—and a green kid from Toronto, whom they barely knew, had been swept away.

For only a while longer would the loggers increase the volume of water in Twisted River. They did this by building sluice dams on the tributary streams flowing into the main driving river; the water above these dams was released in the spring, adding torrents of water volume to a log drive. The pulpwood was piled in these streams (and on the riverbanks) during the winter and then sluiced into Twisted River on the water released from the dams. If this was soon after the snowmelt, the water ran fast, and the riverbanks were gouged by the moving logs.

In the cook’s opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river’s name. The river ran straight down out of the mountains; there were only two bends in it. But to the loggers, particularly those old-timers who’d named the river, these two bends were bad enough to cause some treacherous logjams every spring—especially upstream of the basin, nearer the Dummer ponds. At both bends in the river, the trapped logs usually needed to be pried loose by hand; at the bend upriver, where the current was strongest, no one as green as Angel would have been permitted out on a logjam.

But Angel had perished in the basin, where the river was comparatively calm. The logs themselves made the water in the river basin choppy, but the currents were fairly moderate. And at both bends, the more massive jams were broken up with dynamite, which Dominic Baciagalupo deplored. The blasting wreaked havoc with the pots and pans and dangling utensils in the cookhouse kitchen; in the dining hall, the sugar bowls and the ketchup bottles slid off the tables. “If your dad is not a storyteller, Danny, he is definitely not a dynamite man,” was how Ketchum had put it to the boy.

From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the water ran downstream to the Androscoggin. In addition to the Connecticut, the big log-driving rivers in northern New Hampshire were the Ammonoosuc and the Androscoggin: Those rivers were documented killers.

But some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death, in the relatively short stretch of rapids between Little Dummer Pond and the town of Twisted River—and in the river basin, too. Angel Pope wasn’t the first; nor would the young Canadian be the last.

And in the compromised settlements of Twisted River and Paris, a fair share of sawmill workers had been maimed, or had even lost their lives—no small number of them, unfortunately, because of the fights they got into with the loggers in certain bars. There weren’t enough women—that was usually what started the fights—although Ketchum had maintained that there weren’t enough bars. There were no bars in Paris, anyway, and only married women lived in the logging camp there.

In Ketchum’s opinion, that combination put the men from Paris on the haul road to Twisted River almost every night. “They never should have built a bridge over Phillips Brook,” Ketchum also maintained.

“You see, Daniel,” the cook said to his son. “Ketchum has once again demonstrated that progress will eventually kill us all.”

“Catholic thinking will kill us first, Danny,” Ketchum would say. “Italians are Catholics, and your dad is Italian—and so are you, of course, although neither you nor your dad is very Italian, or very Catholic in your thinking, either. I am mainly speaking of the French Canadians when I refer to Catholic thinking. French Canadians, for example, have so many children that they sometimes number them instead of name them.”

“Dear God,” Dominic Baciagalupo said, shaking his head.

“Is that true?” young Dan asked Ketchum.

“What kind of name is Vingt Dumas?” Ketchum asked the boy.

“Roland and Joanne Dumas do not have twenty children!” the cook cried.

“Not together, maybe,” Ketchum replied. “So what was little Vingt? A slip of the tongue?”

Dominic was shaking his head again. “What?” Ketchum asked him.

“I promised Daniel’s mother that the boy would get a proper education,” the cook said.