Last Night In Twisted River

“That’s poaching,” Danny told the logger.

“The Mounties didn’t hear any shots, did they?” Ketchum asked.

“It’s still poaching, Ketchum.”

“If you don’t hear anything, it’s more like nothing, Danny. I know Cookie’s not a fan of venison, but I think it tastes pretty good this way.”

Danny didn’t really like deer hunting-not the killing part, anyway-but he enjoyed spending time with Ketchum, and that February of ’86, when they stayed for a few nights in the main cottage on Turner Island, Danny discovered that the winter on Georgian Bay was wonderful.

From his new writing shack, Danny could see a pine tree that had been shaped by the wind; it was bent at almost a right angle to itself. When new snow was falling, and there were near whiteout conditions-so that where the rocks on shore ended and the frozen bay began were all one-it struck Danny Angel that the little tree had a simultaneously tenacious and precarious grip on its own survival.

Danny sat transfixed in his writing shack, looking at that wind-bent pine; he was actually imagining what it might be like to live on the island in Lake Huron for a whole winter. (Of course he knew that Charlotte wouldn’t have tolerated it for longer than one weekend.)

Ketchum had come into the writing shack; he’d been hauling water from the lake, and had brought some pasta pots to a near boil on the gas stove. He’d come to inquire if Danny wanted to take the first bath or the next one.

“Do you see that tree, Ketchum?” Danny asked him, pointing to the little pine.

“I suppose you mean the one the wind has fucked over,” Ketchum said.

“Yes, that’s the one,” Danny answered. “What does it remind you of?”

“Your dad,” Ketchum told him, without hesitation. “That tree’s got Cookie written all over it, but it’ll be fine, Danny-like your dad. Cookie’s going to be fine.”

KETCHUM AND DANNY went deer hunting around Pointe au Baril in November of ’86-their third and last deer season together-and they went “camping,” as they called it, on Turner Island in late January of ’87, too. At Danny’s insistence, and to Ketchum’s considerable consternation, there was no more bow hunting out of season. Instead of his bow and the hunting arrows, Ketchum brought Hero along-together with the just-in-case 12-gauge, which was never fired.

Danny believed that the bear hound’s reputation for farting was exaggerated; that January, Ketchum again used the dog as an excuse to sleep in Granddaddy’s log cabin, which was unheated. With all the winterizing, the main cottage was a little too warm (and too comfortable) for the old woodsman, who said he liked to see his breath at night-when he could see at all. Danny couldn’t imagine what Ketchum could see at night in Granddaddy’s cabin, because there was no electricity or propane lamps there. The logger took a flashlight with him when he went off to bed, but he carried it like a club; Danny never saw him turn it on.

Ketchum had come to Charlotte ’s island only one time in summer, the same time when the cook had also come and gone. Charlotte never knew that Ketchum had the 12-gauge with him then, but Danny did. He’d heard Ketchum shooting a rattlesnake down at the back dock. Charlotte had taken the boat into Pointe au Baril Station; she didn’t hear the shot.

“The rattlesnakes are protected-an endangered species, I think,” Danny told the river driver. Ketchum had already skinned the snake and cut off its rattles.

In the summer, Charlotte had her boat serviced at Desmasdon’s, the boat works where they dry-docked boats in the winter. Now, when Danny watched Ketchum skinning the snake, he was reminded of a poster on the ice cream freezer at Desmasdon’s-it displayed the various snakes of Ontario, the Eastern Massasauga rattler among them. Those rattlesnakes really were protected, Danny was trying to make Ketchum understand, but the woodsman cut him off.

“Hero’s smart enough not to get bitten by a fucking snake, Danny-I don’t need to protect him,” Ketchum started in. “But I’m not so sure about you and Charlotte. You walk all over this island-I’ve seen you!-just talking to each other and not looking where you’re stepping. People in love aren’t looking for rattlers; they’re not listening for them, either. And you and Charlotte are going to have a baby, isn’t that right? It’s not the rattlesnakes that need protection, Danny.” With that, Ketchum cut off the snake’s head with his Browning knife. He drained the venom from the fangs on a rock; then he hurled the head off the back dock, into the bay. “Fish food,” he said. “I’m a regular environmentalist, sometimes.” He tossed the snakeskin up on the roof of Granddaddy’s cabin, where the sun would dry it out, he said-adding, “If the seagulls and the crows don’t get it first.”

The birds would get it, and they made such a ruckus over the snakeskin early the next morning that Ketchum was tempted to fire off his 12-gauge again, this time to drive the seagulls and the crows off the roof of the log cabin. But he restrained himself, knowing Charlotte would hear the shot; Ketchum went outside and threw rocks at the birds instead. He watched a gull fly off with the remains of the snakeskin. (“Nothing wasted,” as the logger later described the event to Danny.)

That day, the Mounties came by in their boat to inquire about the gunshot the day before. Had anyone heard it? Someone on Barclay Island said that they thought they’d heard a shot on Turner Island. “I heard it, too,” Ketchum spoke up, getting the two young Mounties’ attention. Ketchum even recalled the time of day, with impressive accuracy, but he said that the shooting definitely came from the mainland. “Sounded like a twelve-gauge to me,” the veteran woodsman said, “but gunfire can be both magnified and distorted over water.” The two Mounties nodded at such a sage assessment; the beautiful but unsuspecting Charlotte nodded, too.

Then Joe had died, and Danny lost what little taste he had for killing things. And when Danny lost Charlotte, he and Ketchum gave up their dead-of-winter trips to Turner Island in Georgian Bay.

There was something about Pointe au Baril Station that stayed with Danny, though he didn’t go there anymore. In fact, his parting from Charlotte had been so civilized-she’d even offered to share her summer island with him, when they were no longer together. Maybe he could go there in July, and she would go in August, she said. After all, he’d put his money into those improvements, too. (Charlotte ’s offer was sincere; it wasn’t only about the money.)

Yet it wasn’t Georgian Bay in the summer that Danny had adored. He’d loved being there with her-he would have loved being anywhere with Charlotte -but when she was gone, whenever he thought about Lake Huron, he thought mostly about that wind-bent pine in the wintertime. How could he ask Charlotte for permission to let him have a winter view of that little tree from his writing shack-the weather-beaten pine he saw now only in his imagination?

And how could Danny have had another child, after losing Joe? He’d known the day Joe died that he would lose Charlotte, too, because he sensed almost immediately that his heart couldn’t bear losing another child; he couldn’t stand the anxiety, or that terrible ending, ever again.

Charlotte knew it, too-even before he found the courage to tell her. “I won’t hold you to your promise,” she told him, “even if it means that I might have to move on.”

“You should move on, Charlotte,” he told her. “I just can’t.”

She’d married someone else soon after. A nice guy-Danny had met him, and liked him. He was someone in the movie business, a French director living in L.A. He was much closer to Charlotte ’s age, too. She already had one baby, a little girl, and now Charlotte was expecting a second child-one more than Danny had promised her.

Charlotte had kept her island in Georgian Bay, but she’d moved away from Toronto and was living in Los Angeles now. She came back to Toronto every September for the film festival, and that time of year-early fall- always seemed to Danny like a good time to leave town. They still talked on the phone-Charlotte was always the one who called; Danny never called her-but it was probably easier for both of them not to run into each other.

Charlotte Turner had been very pregnant-she was about to have her first child-when she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for East of Bangor, at the Academy Awards in March 2000. Danny and his dad had watched Charlotte accept the statuette. (Patrice was always closed on Sunday nights.) Somehow, seeing her on television-from Toronto, when Charlotte was in L.A. -well, that wasn’t the same as actually seeing her, was it? Both the cook and Danny wished her well.

It was just bad luck. “Bad timing, huh?” Ketchum had said. (If Joe had died three months later, it’s likely Danny would have already gotten Charlotte pregnant. It had been bad timing, indeed.)