In those days, the horse-loggers dumped as many logs as they could on the river ice between Little Dummer Pond and the basin in Twisted River-and on the tributary streams upriver, too. Sometimes, the weight of the logs broke through the ice on Dummer Pond first; it was the bigger of the Dummer ponds, held back by a sluice dam that didn’t always hold. One way or another, the ice upstream of the town of Twisted River always broke up first, and in the late winter of 1944, the logs shot down the rapids from Little Dummer Pond, the ice breaking ahead of the logs-both the broken slabs of ice and all the logs coming into the river basin in an unimpeded torrent.
In the late winter or early spring, this invariably happened; it just usually happened in the daytime, because the daytime weather was warmer. In 1944, the avalanche of logs came into the river basin at night. Ketchum was pushing Dominic across the ice on the seat of his pants; the cook’s pretty, “somewhat older” wife was dancing around them.
Was the phrase “somewhat older” a part of Injun Jane’s account of that night? (Danny Baciagalupo wouldn’t remember, although he knew for a fact that Jane never failed to interject-at the moment the logs rushed into the river basin-the aforementioned “noteworthy coincidence” that Ketchum and Cousin Rosie were the same age.)
Injun Jane had opened the door from the cookhouse kitchen; she was going to tell them to stop yelling, “Assholes!” or they would wake up little Danny. Jane was high enough above the river basin to hear the rushing water and the logs. All winter long, the sound of the river was muffled under the ice and snow. Not that Saturday night. Jane closed the kitchen door and ran down the hill.
No one was yelling, “Assholes!” now. The first of the logs skidded onto the ice in the river basin; the logs were wet, and they seemed to pick up speed when they hit the ice. Some of the logs were driven deep into the basin, under the ice; when they rose, the bigger logs broke through the ice from underwater. “Like torpedoes,” Injun Jane always said.
By the time Jane reached the river basin, the sheer weight of the logs was breaking up the ice; when the ice first broke, some of the slabs were as big as cars. Ketchum had left the cook in a sitting position when he first saw Rosie disappear. One second, she was do-si-doing; in the next second, she had slipped out of sight behind a slab of ice the size of a wall. Then the logs completely covered where she’d been. Ketchum picked his way back across the chunks of ice and bobbing logs to where the cook had fallen on one side. Dominic Baciagalupo was drifting downstream on a pulpit-size slab of ice.
“She’s gone, Cookie-gone!” Ketchum was calling. The cook sat up, surprised to see a log rise out of the basin and come crashing down beside him.
“Rosie?” Dominic asked. If he had yelled, “I love you, too,” there would have been no discernible echo now-not with the noisy music the logs and broken ice were making. Ketchum put the cook over his shoulder and tiptoed from log to log ashore; sometimes he stepped on an ice floe instead of a log, and his sinking leg would get wet above his knee.
“Assholes!” Injun Jane was yelling from the riverbank-to both of them, or all three of them. “Assholes! Assholes!” she cried and cried.
The cook was wet and cold and shivering, and his teeth were chattering, but Ketchum and Jane could understand him well enough. “She can’t be gone, Ketchum-she can’t just disappear like that!”
“But she was gone that fast, Danny,” the dishwasher told the boy. “Faster than the moon can slide behind a cloud-your mom was gone like that. And when we got back to the cookhouse, you were wide awake and screaming-it was worse than any nightmare I ever saw you have. I took it as a sign that you somehow knew your mom was gone. I couldn’t get you to stop crying-you or your father. Ketchum had got hold of a cleaver. He just stood in the kitchen with his left hand on a cutting board, holding the cleaver in his right hand. ‘Don’t,’ I told him, but he kept staring at his left hand on the cutting board-imagining it gone, I guess. I left him in order to look after you and your dad. When I came back to the kitchen, Ketchum was gone. I looked everywhere for his left hand; I was sure I was going to find his hand somewhere. I didn’t want you or your father finding it.”
“But he didn’t cut his hand off?” Danny always interrupted her.
“Well, no-he didn’t,” Jane told the boy, with some impatience. “You’ve noticed that Ketchum still has a left hand, haven’t you?”
Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Danny had seen the way the logger looked at his left hand; it was the way he’d stared at his cast last night. If Injun Jane had seen Ketchum staring at his cast, she might have taken this as a sign that Ketchum still thought about cutting off his hand. (But why the left one? Danny Baciagalupo would wonder. Ketchum was right-handed. If you hated yourself, if you were really taking yourself to task or holding yourself accountable, wouldn’t you want to cut off your good hand?)
THEY WERE BUSTLING about the kitchen-all the fat women, and the lean cook with his leaner son. You didn’t pass behind someone without saying, “Behind you!” or putting your hand on the person’s back. When the sawmill workers’ wives passed behind Danny, they often patted the boy on his bum. One or two of them would pat the cook on his bum, too, but not if Injun Jane was watching. Danny had noticed how Jane often placed herself between his father and the kitchen helpers-especially in the narrow gauntlet between the stove and the countertop, which got narrower whenever the oven doors needed to be opened. There were other tight quarters in the cookhouse kitchen, challenging the cooks and the servers, but that passage between the stove and the countertop was the tightest.
Ketchum had gone outside to pee-a seemingly unbreakable habit from the wanigan days-while Injun Jane went into the dining room to set the tables. In those “good old days” in the portable logging camps, Ketchum liked to wake up the rivermen and the other loggers by pissing on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans. “There’s a wanigan in the river!” he was fond of hollering. “Oh, sweet Jesus-it’s floating away!” A cacophony of swearing followed, from inside the portables.
Ketchum also liked to beat on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans with one of the river drivers’ pike poles. “Don’t let the bear in!” he would holler. “Oh, Lord-it’s got one of the women! Oh, Lord-dear God, no!”
Danny was ladling the warm maple syrup from the big saucepan on the back burner into the pitchers. One of the sawmill workers’ wives was breathing down the back of the boy’s neck. “Behind you, cutie!” the woman said hoarsely. His dad was dipping the banana bread in the egg mixture; one of the kitchen helpers was putting the banana-bread French toast on the griddle, while another kept turning the lamb hash with a spatula.
Before he went outside for an apparently never-ending piss, Ketchum had spoken to the twelve-year-old. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning-don’t let your dad forget, Danny.”
“We’ll be there,” the boy had said.
“What plans are you making with Ketchum?” Injun Jane whispered in the twelve-year-old’s ear. Big as she was, the boy hadn’t noticed her behind him; he first mistook her for the sawmill worker’s wife who’d been breathing down his neck, but Jane had returned from the dining room.
“Dad and I are meeting Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam on Sunday morning,” Danny told her.
Jane shook her head, her long braid, longer than a horse’s tail, swishing above her big rump. “So Ketchum talked him into it,” she said disapprovingly; the boy couldn’t see her eyes above the pulled-down visor of her Cleveland Indians cap. As always, Chief Wahoo was grinning insanely at the twelve-year-old.