Last Night In Twisted River

earlier there.

The old logger had never been able to interest the cook in deer hunting; Dominic didn’t like guns, or the taste of venison, and his limp was no fun in the woods. But after Danny and his dad moved to Canada, and Danny met Charlotte Turner, Ketchum was invited to Charlotte’s island in Lake Huron; it was the first summer she and Danny were a couple, when the cook was also invited to Georgian Bay. That was where and when-on Turner Island, in August 1984-Ketchum talked Danny into trying deer hunting.

DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO DESPISED the imposed rusticity of the summer-cottage life on those Georgian Bay islands-in ’84, Charlotte ’s family still used an outhouse. And while they had propane lights and a propane fridge, they hauled what water they needed (by the bucket method) from the lake.

Furthermore, Charlotte’s family seemed to have furnished the main cottage and two adjacent sleeping cabins with the cast-off couches, chipped dishes, and mortally uncomfortable beds that they’d long ago replaced in their Toronto home; worse, the cook surmised, there was a tradition among the Georgian Bay islanders that upheld such stingy behavior. Anything new-such as electricity, hot water, or a flush toilet-was somehow contemptible.

But what they ate was what the cook most deplored. The mainland provisions at Pointe au Baril Station-in particular, the produce and anything that passed for “fresh”-were rudimentary, and everyone burned the shit out of what they blackened beyond recognition on their outdoor barbecues.

In his first and only visit to Turner Island, Dominic was polite, and he helped out in the kitchen-to the degree this was tolerable-but the cook returned to Toronto at the end of a long weekend, relieved by the knowledge that he would never again test his limp on those unwelcoming rocks, or otherwise set foot on a dock at Pointe au Baril Station.

“There’s too much of Twisted River here-it’s not Cookie’s kind of place,” Ketchum had explained to Charlotte and Danny, after Dominic went back to the city. While the logger said this in forgiveness of his old friend, Danny was not entirely different from his dad in his initial reaction to island life. The difference was that Danny and Charlotte had talked about the changes they would make on the island-certainly after (if not before) her father passed away, and her mother was no longer able to safely get into or out of a boat, or climb up those jagged rocks from the dock to the main cottage.

Danny still wrote on an old-fashioned typewriter; he owned a half-dozen IBM Selectrics, which were in constant need of repair. He wanted electricity for his typewriters. Charlotte wanted hot water-she’d long dreamed of such luxuries as an outdoor shower and an oversize bathtub-not to mention several flush toilets. A little electric heat would be nice, too, both Danny and Charlotte had agreed, because it could get cold at night, even in the summer-they were that far north-and, after all, they would soon be having a baby.

Danny also wanted to construct “a writing shack,” as he called it-he was no doubt remembering the former farmhouse shed he’d written in, in Vermont-and Charlotte wanted to erect an enormous screened-in verandah, something large enough to link the main cottage to the two sleeping cabins, so that no one would ever have to go out in the rain (or venture into the mosquitoes, which were constant after nightfall).

Danny and Charlotte had plans for the place, in other words-the way couples in love do. Charlotte had cherished her summers on the island since she’d been a little girl; perhaps what Danny had adored were the possibilities of the place, the life with Charlotte he’d imagined there.

OH, PLANS, PLANS, PLANS-how we make plans into the future, as if the future will most certainly be there! In fact, the couple in love wouldn’t wait for Charlotte ’s father to die, or for her mother to be physically incapable of handling the hardships of an island in Lake Huron. Over the next two years, Danny and Charlotte would put in the electricity, the flush toilets, and the hot water-even Charlotte ’s outdoor shower and her oversize bathtub, not to mention the enormous screened-in verandah. And there were a few other “improvements” that Ketchum suggested; the old woodsman had actually used the improvements word, on his very first visit to Georgian Bay and Turner Island. In the summer of ’84, Ketchum had been a spry sixty- seven-young enough to still have a few plans of his own.

That summer, Ketchum had brought the dog. The fine animal was as alert as a squirrel from the second he put his paws on the island’s main dock. “There must be a bear around here-Hero knows bears,” Ketchum said. There was a stiff-standing ridge of fur (formerly, loose skin) at the back of the hound’s tensed neck; the dog stayed as close to Ketchum as the woodsman’s shadow. Hero wasn’t a dog you were inclined to pat.

Ketchum wasn’t a summer person; he didn’t fish, or screw around with boats. The veteran river driver was no swimmer. What Ketchum saw in Georgian Bay, and on Turner Island, was what the place must be like in the late fall and the long winter, and when the ice broke up in the spring. “Lots of deer around here, I’ll bet,” the old logger remarked; he was still standing on the dock, only moments after he’d arrived and before he picked up his gear. He appeared to be sniffing the air for bear, like his dog.

“Injun country,” Ketchum said approvingly. “Well, at least it was-before those damn missionaries tried to Christianize the fucking woods.” As a boy, he’d seen the old black- and-white photographs of a pulpwood boom afloat in Gore Bay, Manitoulin Island. The lumber business around Georgian Bay would have been at its height about 1900, but Ketchum had heard the history, and he’d memorized the yearly cycles of logging. (In the autumn months, you cut your trees, you built your roads, and you readied your streams for the spring drives-all before the first snowfall. In the winter, you kept cutting trees, and you hauled or sledded your logs over the snow to the edge of the water. In the spring, you floated your logs down the streams and the rivers into the bay.)

“But, by the nineties, all your forests went rafting down to the States-isn’t that right?” Ketchum asked Charlotte. She was surprised by the question; she didn’t know, but Ketchum did.

It was like logging everywhere, after all. The great forests had been cut down; the mills had burned down, or they’d been torn down. “The mills perished out of sheer neglect,” as Ketchum liked to put it.

“Maybe that bear’s on a nearby island,” Ketchum said, looking all around. “Hero’s not agitated enough for there to be a bear on this island.” (To Danny and Charlotte, the lean hound looked agitated enough for there to be a bear on the dock.)

It turned out that there was a bear on Barclay Island that summer. The water between the two islands was a short swim for a bear-both Danny and Ketchum discovered they could wade there-but the bear never showed up on Turner Island, perhaps because the bear had smelled Ketchum’s dog.

“Burn the grease off the grill on the barbecue, after you’ve used it,” Ketchum advised them. “Don’t put the garbage out, and keep the fruit in the fridge. I would leave Hero with you, but I need him to look after me.”

There was an uninhabited log cabin, the first building to be assembled on Turner Island, near the back dock. Charlotte gave Ketchum a tour of it. The screens were a little torn, and a pair of bunk beds had first been separated and then nailed together, side by side, where they were covered with a king-size mattress that overhung the bed frames. The blanket on the bed was moth-eaten, and the mattress was mildewed; no one had stayed there since Charlotte ’s grandfather stopped coming to the island.

It had been his cabin, Charlotte said, and after the old man died, no other member of the Turner family went near the run-down building, which Charlotte said was haunted (or so she’d believed as a girl).

She pulled aside a well-worn, dirty rug; she wanted to show Ketchum the hidden trapdoor in the floor. The cabin was set on cement posts, not much taller than cinder blocks-there was no foundation-and under the trapdoor was nothing but bare ground, about three feet below the floor. With the pine trees all around, pine needles had blown under the cabin, which gave the ground a deceptively soft and comfortable appearance.

“We don’t know what Granddaddy used the trapdoor for,” Charlotte explained to Ketchum, “but because he was a gambling man, we suspect he hid his money here.”

Hero was sniffing the hole in the floor when Ketchum asked: “Was your granddaddy a hunting man, Charlotte?”

“Oh, yes!” Charlotte cried. “When he died, we finally threw away his guns.” (Ketchum winced.)

“Well, this here’s a meat locker,” Ketchum told her. “Your granddaddy came up here in the winter, I would bet.”

“Yes, he did!” Charlotte said, impressed.

“Probably after deer season, when the bay was frozen,” Ketchum considered. “I’m guessing that when he shot a deer-and your Mounties would have known when someone was shooting, given how quiet it would be here in the winter, with all the snow-and when the Mounties came and asked him what he was shooting, I expect your