“Is it their breasts that men like about women?” Danny had asked his father.
“Ask Ketchum,” the cook had replied, but Danny thought that Ketchum was too old to take an interest in breasts-Ketchum seemed too old to even notice breasts anymore. Granted, Ketchum had lived hard; he’d been roughed up and looked older than he was. Ketchum was only thirty-seven-he just looked a lot older (except for how black his hair and beard were).
And Jane-how old was she? Danny wondered. Injun Jane was twelve years older than Danny’s dad-she was forty-two-but she looked older, too. She’d been roughed up as well, and not only by Constable Carl. To the twelve-year-old, everyone seemed old-or older than they were. Even the boys in Danny’s grade at school were older.
“I’ll bet you had a great night’s sleep,” Jane was saying to the cook. She smiled at Danny. When she reached behind herself to tie the apron strings around her thick waist, her breasts were gigantic! the boy was thinking. “Did you get any sleep, Danny?” the Indian dishwasher asked him.
“Sure, I got enough,” the boy answered. He wished his dad and the sawmill workers’ wives weren’t there, because he wanted to ask Jane about his mother.
His dad could talk to him about Ketchum retrieving her battered body from the spillway; maybe that was because Ketchum had prevented the cook from seeing what the river and the logs had done to her. But Danny’s father could never talk about the accident itself-at least not to his son, and not with anything approximating specific details. Ketchum could barely bring himself to say more. “We were all drunk, Danny,” Ketchum always began. “Your dad was drunk, I was drunk-your mom was a little drunk, too.”
“I was the drunkest,” Dominic would assert, without fail. There was such blame attached to his drunkenness that the cook had stopped drinking, though not immediately.
“Maybe I was drunker than you, Cookie,” Ketchum sometimes said. “After all, I let her go out on the ice.”
“That was my fault,” the cook usually insisted. “I was so drunk that you had to carry me, Ketchum.”
“Don’t think I don’t remember,” Ketchum would say. But neither man could (or would) say exactly what had happened. Danny doubted that the details had eluded them; it was more a matter of the details being unutterable, or that it was unthinkable for either man to divulge such details to a child.
Injun Jane, who had not been drinking-she never drank-told the twelve-year-old the story. As many times as the boy had asked her, she’d told him the same story every time; that’s how he knew it was probably true.
JANE HAD BEEN DANNY’S babysitter that night; Danny would have been two. On a Saturday night, there was dancing in the dance hall-there was both actual dancing and square dancing then. Dominic Baciagalupo didn’t dance; with a limp like his, he couldn’t. But his somewhat older wife-Ketchum called her “Cousin Rosie”-loved to dance, and the cook loved to watch her dance, too. Rosie was pretty and small, both thin and delicate-in a way that most of the women her age in Twisted River and Paris, New Hampshire, were not. (“Your mom didn’t have the body of someone pushing thirty-not someone from around here, anyway,” as Injun Jane put it, whenever she told the story to young Dan.)
Apparently, Ketchum was either too old or already too banged-up for the war. Although Constable Carl had fairly recently split open Ketchum’s forehead, Ketchum had already had a host of other injuries and maimings-enough to make him ineligible for military service, but not of sufficient severity to stop him from dancing. “Your mother taught Ketchum to read and dance,” the cook had told his son-in a curiously neutral-sounding way, as if Dominic either had no opinion or didn’t know which of these acquired skills was the more remarkable or important for Ketchum to have learned. In fact, Ketchum was Rosie Baciagalupo’s only dance partner; he looked after her as if she were his daughter, and (out on the dance floor) the cook’s wife was so small beside Ketchum that she almost could have passed for his child.
Except for the “noteworthy coincidence,” as Danny had heard Injun Jane say, that the boy’s mom and Ketchum were both twenty-seven years old.
“Ketchum and your dad liked to drink together,” Jane told young Dan. “I don’t know what it is that men like about drinking together, but Ketchum and your dad liked it a little too much.”
Perhaps the drinking had allowed them to say things to each other, Danny thought. Since Dominic Baciagalupo had become a teetotaler-though Ketchum still drank like a riverman in his early twenties-maybe the men had more guarded conversations; even the twelve-year-old knew there was a lot they left unsaid.
According to Ketchum, “Injuns” couldn’t or shouldn’t drink at all-he took it as simple common sense that Injun Jane didn’t drink. Yet she lived with Constable Carl, who was a mean drunk. After the dance hall and the hostelry bars had closed, the constable drank himself into a belligerent temper. It was often late when Jane drove herself home-when she’d finished with washing the towels and had put them in the dryers in the laundry room, and could only then drive home from the cookhouse. Late or not, Constable Carl was occasionally awake and warlike when Jane was ready to go to bed. After all, she got up early and the cowboy didn’t.
“I’ll draw you a picture,” Injun Jane would say to young Dan, sometimes apropos of nothing. “Your father couldn’t drink as much as Ketchum, but he would try to keep up. Your mother was more sensible, but she drank too much, too.”
“My dad can’t drink as much as Ketchum because he’s smaller?” Danny always asked Jane.
“Weight has something to do with it, yes,” the dishwasher generally replied. “It wasn’t the first night that Ketchum carried your dad back to the cookhouse from the dance hall. Your mom was still dancing around them, doing her pretty little do-si-dos.” (Did young Dan ever detect a degree of envy or sarcasm in the way Injun Jane referred to Cousin Rosie’s pretty little do-si-dos?)
Danny knew that a do-si-do was a square-dance figure; he’d asked Ketchum to show him, but Ketchum had shaken his head and burst into tears. Jane had demonstrated a do-si-do for Danny; with her arms folded on her enormous bosom, she passed by his right shoulder, circling him back-to-back.
The boy tried to imagine his mother do-si-doing Ketchum as the big man carried his dad. “Was Ketchum dancing, too?” Danny asked.
“I suppose so,” Jane replied. “I wasn’t with them until later. I was with you, remember?”
At the frozen river basin, Rosie Baciagalupo stopped do-si-doing Ketchum and called across the ice to the mountainside. When Twisted River was frozen, there was more of an echo; the ice brought your voice back to you quicker and truer than if it had traveled over the open water.
“I wonder why that is,” Danny usually said to Jane.
“I heard them from the cookhouse,” Injun Jane went on, never offering any speculation on the echo. “Your mom called, ‘I love you!’ Your dad, over Ketchum’s shoulder, called back, ‘I love you, too!’ Ketchum just yelled, ‘Shit!’ and other such things; then he yelled, ‘Assholes!’ Pretty soon all three of them were yelling, ‘Assholes!’ I thought the yelling would wake you up, although nothing woke you up at night-not even when you were two.”
“My mom went out on the ice first?” Danny always asked.
“Do-si-dos on the ice were hard to do,” Jane answered. “Ketchum went out on the ice to do-si-do with her; he was still carrying your dad. It was black ice. There was snow in the woods, but not on the river basin. The basin was windblown, and there’d been no new snow for almost a week.” Jane usually added: “Most years, the ice didn’t break up in the river basin this way.”
The drunken cook couldn’t stand, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too; he made Ketchum put him down. Then Dominic fell down-he just sat down on the seat of his pants, and Ketchum pushed him like a human sled. Danny’s mom do-si-doed the two of them. If they hadn’t been yelling, “Assholes!” so loudly, one of them might have heard the logs.