(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.
“Well, I’m just making an effort to
Neither a storyteller nor a dynamite man, Danny Baciagalupo thought of his father. The boy loved his dad dearly, but there was also a habit the cook had, and his son had noticed it-Dominic often didn’t finish his thoughts. (Not out loud, anyway.)
NOT COUNTING THE Indian dishwasher-and a few of the sawmill workers’ wives, who helped the cook in the kitchen-there were rarely any women eating in the cookhouse, except on the weekends, when some of the men ate with their families. That alcohol was not permitted was the cook’s rule. Dinner (or “supper,” as the older rivermen used to eating in the wanigans called it) was served as soon as it was dark, and the majority of loggers and sawmill men were sober when they ate their evening meal, which they consumed quickly and with no intelligible conversation-even on weekends, or when the loggers weren’t engaged in the river drives.
As the men had usually come to eat directly from some manner of work, their clothes were soiled and they smelled of pitch and spruce gum and wet bark and sawdust, but their hands and faces were clean and freshly scented by the pine-tar soap that the cavernous washroom of the cookhouse made readily available-at the cook’s request. (Washing your hands before eating was another of Dominic’s rules.) Furthermore, the washroom towels were always clean; the clean towels were part of the reason that the Indian dishwasher generally stayed late. While the kitchen help was washing the last of the supper dishes, the dishwasher herself was loading the towels into the washing machines in the cookhouse’s laundry room. She never went home until the washing cycles had ended and she’d put all the towels in the dryers.
The dishwasher was called Injun Jane, but not to her face. Danny Baciagalupo liked her, and she appeared to dote on the boy. She was more than a decade older than his dad (she was even older than Ketchum), and she had lost a son-possibly he’d drowned in the Pemigewasset, if Danny hadn’t misheard the story. Or maybe Jane and her dead son were from the Pemigewasset Wilderness-they may have come from that part of the state, northwest of the mills in Conway-and the doomed son had drowned elsewhere. There was a bigger, uncontained wilderness north of Milan, where the spruce mill was; there were more logging camps up there, and lots of places where a young logger might drown. (Jane had told Danny that Pemigewasset meant “Alley of the Crooked Pines,” which conjured to the impressionable boy a likely place to drown.)
All young Dan could really remember was that it had been a wilderness river-driving accident-and from the fond way the dishwasher looked at the cook’s son, perhaps her lost boy had been about twelve when he drowned. Danny didn’t know, and he didn’t ask; everything he knew about Injun Jane was something he’d silently observed or had imperfectly overheard.
“Listen only to those conversations that are directed to you, Daniel,” his father had warned him. The cook meant that Danny shouldn’t eavesdrop on the disjointed or incoherent remarks the men made to one another when they were eating.
Most nights, after their evening meal-but never as flagrantly as in the wanigan days, and not usually when there was an early-morning river drive-the loggers and the sawmill men drank. The few who had actual homes in Twisted River drank at home. The transients-meaning most of the woodsmen and all the Canadian itinerants-drank in their bunkhouses, which were crudely equipped in that dank area of town immediately above the river basin. These hostelries were within walking distance of the dismal bars and the seedy, misnamed dance hall, where there was no actual dancing-only music and the usual too-few women to meet.
The loggers and sawmill workers with families preferred the smaller but contentiously more “civilized” settlement in Paris. Ketchum refused to call the logging camp “Paris,” referring instead to what he said was the real name of the place-West Dummer. “No community, not even a logging camp, should be named for a manufacturing company,” Ketchum declared. It further offended Ketchum that a logging operation in New Hampshire was named after a company in
“Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood-for paper! What about toboggans is worse than
There was a scarcity of children in Twisted River, and they went to school in Paris-as Danny Baciagalupo did, when he went to school at all. For the betterment of young Dan’s
