Last Night In Twisted River

CHAPTER 1. UNDER THE LOGS

THE YOUNG CANADIAN, WHO COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE than fifteen, had hesitated too long. For a frozen moment, his feet had stopped moving on the floating logs in the basin above the river bend; he’d slipped entirely underwater before anyone could grab his outstretched hand. One of the loggers had reached for the youth’s long hair-the older man’s fingers groped around in the frigid water, which was thick, almost soupy, with sloughed-off slabs of bark. Then two logs collided hard on the would-be rescuer’s arm, breaking his wrist. The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.

Out on a logjam, once the key log was pried loose, the river drivers had to move quickly and continually; if they paused for even a second or two, they would be pitched into the torrent. In a river drive, death among moving logs could occur from a crushing injury, before you had a chance to drown-but drowning was more common.

From the riverbank, where the cook and his twelve-year-old son could hear the cursing of the logger whose wrist had been broken, it was immediately apparent that someone was in more serious trouble than the would-be rescuer, who’d freed his injured arm and had managed to regain his footing on the flowing logs. His fellow river drivers ignored him; they moved with small, rapid steps toward shore, calling out the lost boy’s name. The loggers ceaselessly prodded with their pike poles, directing the floating logs ahead of them. The rivermen were, for the most part, picking the safest way ashore, but to the cook’s hopeful son it seemed that they might have been trying to create a gap of sufficient width for the young Canadian to emerge. In truth, there were now only intermittent gaps between the logs. The boy who’d told them his name was “Angel Pope, from Toronto,” was that quickly gone.

“Is it Angel?” the twelve-year-old asked his father. This boy, with his dark-brown eyes and intensely serious expression, could have been mistaken for Angel’s younger brother, but there was no mistaking the family resemblance that the twelve-year-old bore to his ever-watchful father. The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters, and there was something about his son’s seriousness that reflected this; in fact, the boy looked so much like his father that several of the woodsmen had expressed their surprise that the son didn’t also walk with his dad’s pronounced limp.

The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs. It was the cook who’d warned the loggers that Angel was too green for the river drivers’ work; the youth should not have been trying to free a logjam. But probably the boy had been eager to please, and maybe the rivermen hadn’t noticed him at first.

In the cook’s opinion, Angel Pope had also been too green (and too clumsy) to be working in the vicinity of the main blade in a sawmill. That was strictly the sawyer’s territory-a highly skilled position in the mills. The planer operator was a relatively skilled position, too, though not particularly dangerous.

The more dangerous and less skilled positions included working on the log deck, where logs were rolled into the mill and onto the saw carriage, or unloading logs from the trucks. Before the advent of mechanical loaders, the logs were unloaded by releasing trip bunks on the sides of the trucks-this allowed an entire load to roll off a truck at once. But the trip bunks sometimes failed to release; the men were occasionally caught under a cascade of logs while they were trying to free a bunk.

As far as the cook was concerned, Angel shouldn’t have been in any position that put the boy in close proximity to moving logs. But the lumberjacks had been as fond of the young Canadian as the cook and his son had been, and Angel had said he was bored working in the kitchen. The youth had wanted more physical labor, and he liked the outdoors.

The repeated thunk-thunk of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel’s pike pole-more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished. The fifteen-foot pole was floating free of the log drive, out where the river currents had carried it away from the logs.

The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand. First by the familiarity of his cursing, and only secondarily by the logger’s matted hair and tangled beard, did the cook realize that the injured man was Ketchum-no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive.

It was April-not long after the last snowmelt and the start of mud season-but the ice had only recently broken up in the river basin, the first logs falling through the ice upstream of the basin, on the Dummer ponds. The river was ice-cold and swollen, and many of the lumberjacks had heavy beards and long hair, which would afford them some scant protection from the blackflies in mid-May.

Ketchum lay on his back on the riverbank like a beached bear. The moving mass of logs flowed past him. It appeared as if the log drive were a life raft, and the loggers who were still out on the river seemed like castaways at sea-except that the sea, from one moment to the next, turned from greenish brown to bluish black. The water in Twisted River was richly dyed with tannins.

“Shit, Angel!” Ketchum shouted from his back. “I said, ‘Move your feet, Angel. You have to keep moving your feet!’ Oh, shit.”

The vast expanse of logs had been no life raft for Angel, who’d surely drowned or been crushed to death in the basin above the river bend, although the lumberjacks (Ketchum among them) would follow the log drive at least to where Twisted River poured into the Pontook Reservoir at Dead Woman Dam. The Pontook Dam on the Androscoggin River had created the reservoir; once the logs were let loose in the Androscoggin, they would next encounter the sorting gaps outside Milan. In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin. It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there.

COME NIGHTFALL, THE COOK and his son were still attempting to salvage leftovers, for tomorrow’s meals, from the scores of untouched dinners in the small settlement’s dining lodge-the cookhouse in the so-called town of Twisted River, which was barely larger and only a little less transient than a logging camp. Not long ago, the only dining lodge on a river drive hadn’t been a lodge at all. There once was a traveling kitchen that had been permanently built onto a truck body, and an adjacent truck on which a modular dining hall could be taken down and reassembled-this was when the trucks used to perpetually move camp to another site on Twisted River, wherever the loggers were working next.

In those days, except on the weekends, the rivermen rarely went back to the town of Twisted River to eat or sleep. The camp cook had often cooked in a tent. Everything had to be completely portable; even the sleeping shelters were built onto truck bodies.

Now nobody knew what would become of the less-than-thriving town of Twisted River, which was situated partway between the river basin and the Dummer ponds. The sawmill workers and their families lived there, and the logging company maintained bunkhouses for the more transient woodsmen, who included not only the French Canadian itinerants but most of the river drivers and the other loggers. The company also maintained a better equipped kitchen, an actual dining lodge-the aforementioned cookhouse-for the cook and his son. But for how much longer? Not even the owner of the logging company knew.

The lumber industry was in transition; it would one day be possible for every worker in the logging business to work from home. The logging camps (and even the slightly less marginal settlements like Twisted River) were dying. The wanigans themselves were disappearing; those curious shelters for sleeping and eating and storing equipment had not only been mounted on trucks, on wheels, or on crawler tracks, but they were often attached to rafts or boats.

The Indian dishwasher-she worked for the cook-had long ago told the cook’s young son that wanigan was from an Abenaki word, leading the boy to wonder if the dishwasher herself was from the Abenaki tribe. Perhaps she just happened to know the origin of the word, or she’d merely claimed to know it. (The cook’s son went to school with an Indian boy who’d told him that wanigan was of Algonquian origin.)

While it lasted, the work during a river drive was from dawn till dark. It was the protocol in a logging operation to feed the men four times a day. In the past, when the wanigans couldn’t get close to a river site, the two midday meals had been trekked to the drivers. The first and last meal were served in the base camp-nowadays, in the dining lodge. But out of their affection for Angel, tonight many of the loggers had missed their last meal in the cookhouse. They’d spent the evening following the log drive, until the darkness had driven them away-not only the darkness, but also the men’s growing awareness that none of them knew if Dead Woman Dam was open. From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the logs-probably with Angel among them-might already have flowed into the Pontook Reservoir, but not if Dead Woman Dam was closed. And if the Pontook Dam and Dead Woman were open, the body of the young Canadian would be headed pell-mell down the Androscoggin. No one knew better than Ketchum that there would likely be no finding Angel there.

The cook could tell when the river drivers had stopped searching-from the kitchen’s screen door, he could hear them leaning their pike poles against the cookhouse. A few of the tired searchers found their way to the dining lodge after dark; the cook didn’t have the heart to turn them away. The hired help had all gone home-everyone but the Indian dishwasher, who stayed late most nights. The cook, whose difficult name was Dominic Baciagalupo-or “Cookie,” as the lumberjacks routinely called him-made the men a late supper, which his twelve-year-old son served.

“Where’s Ketchum?” the boy asked his dad.

“He’s probably getting his arm fixed,” the cook replied.

“I’ll bet he’s hungry,” the twelve-year-old said, “but Ketchum is wicked tough.”

“He’s impressively tough for a drinking man,” Dominic agreed, but he was thinking that maybe Ketchum wasn’t tough enough for this. Losing Angel Pope might be hardest on Ketchum, the cook thought, because the veteran logger had taken the young Canadian under his wing. He’d looked after the boy, or he had tried to.

Ketchum had the blackest hair and beard-the charred-black color of charcoal, blacker than a black bear’s fur. He’d been married young-and more than once. He was estranged from his children, who had grown up and gone their own ways. Ketchum lived year-round in one of the bunkhouses, or in any of several run-down hostelries, if not in a wanigan of his own devising-namely, in the back of his pickup truck, where he had come close to freezing to death on those winter nights when he’d passed out, dead drunk. Yet Ketchum had kept Angel away from alcohol, and he’d kept not a few of the older women at the so-called dance hall away from the young Canadian, too.

“You’re too young, Angel,” the cook had heard Ketchum tell the youth. “Besides, you can catch things from those ladies.”

Ketchum would know, the cook had thought. Dominic knew that Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive.

THE STEADY HISS and intermittent flickering of the pilot lights on the gas stove in the cookhouse kitchen-an old Garland with two ovens and eight burners, and a flame-blackened broiler above-seemed perfectly in keeping with the lamentations of the loggers over their late supper. They had been charmed by the lost boy, whom they’d adopted as they would a stray pet. The cook had been charmed, too. Perhaps he saw in the unusually cheerful teenager some future incarnation of his twelve-year-old son-for Angel had a welcoming expression and a sincere curiosity, and he exhibited none of the withdrawn sullenness that appeared to afflict the few young men his age in a rough and rudimentary place like Twisted River.

This was all the more remarkable because the youth had told them that he’d recently run away from home.

“You’re Italian, aren’t you?” Dominic Baciagalupo had asked the boy.

“I’m not from Italy, I don’t speak Italian-you’re not much of an Italian if you come from Toronto,” Angel had answered.

The cook had held his tongue. Dominic knew a little about Boston Italians; some of them seemed to have issues regarding how Italian they were. And the cook knew that Angel, in the old country, might have been an Angelo. (When Dominic had been a little boy, his mother had called him Angelù-in her Sicilian accent, this sounded like an-geh-LOO.)

But after the accident, nothing with Angel Pope’s written name could be found; among the boy’s few belongings, not a single book or letter identified him. If he’d had any identification, it had gone into the river basin with him-probably in the pocket of his dungarees-and if they never located the body, there would be no way to inform Angel’s family, or whoever the boy had run away from.

Legally or not, and with or without proper papers, Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire. Not the way it was usually done, either-Angel hadn’t come from Quebec. He’d made a point of arriving from Ontario -he was not a French Canadian. The cook hadn’t once heard Angel speak a word of French or Italian, and the French Canadians at the camp had wanted nothing to do with the runaway boy-apparently, they didn’t like English Canadians. Angel, for his part, kept his distance from the French; he didn’t appear to like the Québécois any better than they liked him.

Dominic had respected the boy’s privacy; now the cook wished he knew more about Angel Pope, and where he’d come from. Angel had been a good-natured and fair-minded companion for the cook’s twelve-year-old son, Daniel-or Danny, as the loggers and the saw mill men called the boy.

Almost every male of working age in Twisted River knew the cook and his son-some women, too. Dominic had needed to know a number of women-mainly, to help him look after his son-for the cook had lost his wife, Danny’s young mother, a long-seeming decade ago.

Dominic Baciagalupo believed that Angel Pope had had some experience with kitchen work, which the boy had done awkwardly but uncomplainingly, and with an economy of movement that must have been born of familiarity-despite his professed boredom with cooking-related chores, and his penchant for cutting himself on the cutting board.

Moreover, the young Canadian was a reader; he’d borrowed many books that had belonged to Dominic’s late wife, and he often read aloud to Daniel. It was Ketchum’s opinion that Angel had read Robert Louis Stevenson to young Dan “to excess”-not only Kidnapped and Treasure Island but his unfinished deathbed novel, St. Ives, which Ketchum said should have died with the author. At the time of the accident on the river, Angel had been reading The Wrecker to Danny. (Ketchum had not yet weighed in with his opinion of that novel.)

Well, whatever Angel Pope’s background had been, he’d had some schooling, clearly-more than most of the French Canadian woodsmen the cook had known. (More than most of the sawmill workers and the local woodsmen, too.)

“Why did Angel have to die?” Danny asked his dad. The twelve-year-old was helping his father wipe down the dining tables after the late-arriving loggers had gone off to bed, or perhaps to drink. And although she often kept herself busy in the cookhouse quite late into the night, at least well past Danny’s bedtime, the Indian dishwasher had finished with her chores; by now, she’d driven her truck back to town.

“Angel didn’t have to die, Daniel-it was an avoidable accident.” The cook’s vocabulary often made reference to avoidable accidents, and his twelve-year-old son was overfamiliar with his father’s grim and fatalistic thoughts on human fallibility-the recklessness of youth, in particular. “He was too green to be out on a river drive,” the cook said, as if that were all there was to it.

Danny Baciagalupo knew his dad’s opinion of all the things Angel, or any boy that age, was too green to do. The cook also would have wanted to keep Angel far away from a peavey. (The peavey’s most important feature was the hinged hook that made it possible to roll a heavy log by hand.)

According to Ketchum, the “old days” had been more perilous. Ketchum claimed that working with the horses, pulling the scoots out of the winter woods, was risky work. In the winter, the lumberjacks tramped up into the mountains. They’d cut down the trees and (not that long ago) used horses to pull the timber out, one log at a time. The scoots, or wheelless drays, were dragged like sleds on the frozen snow, which not even the horses’ hooves could penetrate because the sled ruts on the horse-haul roads were iced down every night. Then the snowmelt and mud season came, and-“back then,” as Ketchum would say-all the work in the woods was halted.

But even this was changing. Since the new logging machinery could work in muddy conditions and haul much longer distances to improved roads, which could be used in all seasons, mud season itself was becoming less of an issue-and horses were giving way to crawler tractors.

The bulldozers made it possible to build a road right to a logging site, where the wood could be hauled out by truck. The trucks moved the wood to a more central drop point on a river, or on a pond or lake; in fact, highway transport would very soon supplant the need for river drives. Gone were the days when a snubbing winch had been used to ease the horses down the steeper slopes. “The teams could slide on their haunches,” Ketchum had told young Dan. (Ketchum rated oxen highly, for their steady footing in deep snow, but oxen had never been widely used.)

Gone, too, was railroad logging in the woods; it came to an end in the Pemigewasset Valley in ’48-the same year one of Ketchum’s cousins had been killed by a Shay locomotive at the Livermore Falls paper mill. The Shay weighed fifty tons and had been used to pull the last of the rails from the woods. The former railroad beds made for firm haul roads for the trucks in the 1950s, although Ketchum could still remember a murder on the Beebe River Railroad-back when he’d been the teamster for a bobsled loaded with prime virgin spruce behind a four-horse rig. Ketchum had been the teamster on one of the early Lombard steam engines, too-the one steered by a horse. The horse had turned the front sled runners, and the teamster sat at the front of the log hauler; later models replaced the horse and teamster with a helmsman at a steering wheel. Ketchum had been a helmsman, too, Danny Baciagalupo knew-clearly, Ketchum had done everything.

The old Lombard log-hauler roads around Twisted River were truck roads now, although there were derelict Lombards abandoned in the area. (There is one still standing upright in Twisted River, and another one, tipped on its side, in the logging camp in West Dummer-or Paris, as the settlement was usually called, after the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine.)

Phillips Brook ran to Paris and the Ammonoosuc-and into the Connecticut River. The rivermen drove hardwood sawlogs along Phillips Brook to Paris, and some pulpwood, too. The sawmill in Paris was strictly a hardwoods operation-the manufacturing company in Maine made toboggans-and the logging camp in Paris, with its steam-powered sawmill, had converted the former horse hovel to a machine shop. The mill manager’s house was also there, together with a seventy-five-man bunkhouse and a mess hall, and some rudimentary family housing-not to mention an optimistically planted apple orchard and a schoolhouse. That there was no schoolhouse in the town of Twisted River, nor had anyone been optimistic enough about the settlement’s staying power to plant any apple trees, gave rise to the opinion (held chiefly in Paris) that the logging camp was a more civilized community, and less temporary, than Twisted River.

At the height of land between the two outposts, no fortune-teller would have been foolish enough to predict success or longevity for either settlement. Danny Baciagalupo had heard Ketchum declare certain doom for the logging camp in Paris and for Twisted River, but Ketchum “suffered no progress gladly”-as the cook had cautioned his son. Dominic Baciagalupo was not a storyteller; the cook routinely cast doubt on some of Ketchum’s stories. “Daniel, don’t be in too big a hurry to buy into the Ketchum version,” Dominic would say.

Had Ketchum’s aunt, an accountant, truly been killed by a toppled stack of edging in the lathe mill in Milan? “I’m not sure there is, or ever was, a lathe mill in Milan, Daniel,” the cook had warned his son. And according to Ketchum, one thunderstorm had killed four people in the sawmill at the outlet dam to Dummer Pond-the bigger and uppermost of the Dummer ponds. Allegedly, lightning had struck the log carriage. “The dogger and the setter, not to mention the sawyer holding the band-saw levers and the takeaway man, were killed by a single bolt,” Ketchum had told Danny. Witnesses had watched the entire mill burn to the ground.

“I’m surprised that another of Ketchum’s relatives wasn’t among the victims, Daniel,” was all that Dominic would say.

Indeed, another of Ketchum’s cousins had fallen into the slasher in a pulpwood slasher mill; an uncle had been brained by a flying four-foot log at a cut-up mill, where they’d been cutting long spruce logs into pulpwood length. And there’d once been a floating steam donkey on Dummer Pond; it was used to bunch logs for the sawmill entrance at the outlet dam, but the engine had exploded. A man’s ear was found frozen in the spring snow on the island in the pond, where all the trees had been singed by the explosion. Later, Ketchum said, an ice fisherman used the ear for bait in the Pontook Reservoir.

“More relatives of yours, I assume?” the cook had asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” Ketchum had replied.

Ketchum claimed to have known the “legendary asshole” who’d constructed a horse hovel upstream of the bunkhouse and mess hall at Camp Five. When all the men in the logging camp got sick, they strung up the purported legend in a network of bridles in the horse hovel above the manure pit-“until the asshole fainted from the fumes.”

“You can see why Ketchum misses the old days, Daniel,” the cook had said to his son.

Dominic Baciagalupo knew some stories-most of them not for telling. And what stories the cook could tell his son didn’t capture young Dan’s imagination the way Ketchum’s stories did. There was the one about the bean hole outside the cook’s tent on the Chick wolnepy, near Success Pond. In the aforementioned old days, on a river drive, Dominic had dug a bean hole, four feet across, and started the beans cooking in the ground at bedtime, covering the hole with hot ashes and earth. At 5 A.M., when it would be piping hot, he planned to dig the covered pot out of the ground for breakfast. But a French Canadian had wandered out of the sleeping wanigan (probably to take a pee) when it was still dark; he was barefoot when he fell into the bean hole, burning both his feet.

“That’s it? That’s the whole story?” Danny had asked his dad.

“Well, it’s kind of a cooking story, I guess,” Ketchum had said, to be kind. Ketchum would tease Dominic on the subject that spaghetti was replacing baked beans and pea soup on the upper Androscoggin.

“We never used to have so many Italian cooks around,” Ketchum would say, winking at Danny.

“You’re telling me you’d rather have baked beans and pea soup than pasta?” the cook asked his old friend.

“Your dad is a touchy little fella, isn’t he?” Ketchum would say to Danny, winking again. “Constipated Christ!” Ketchum had more than once declared to Dominic. “Are you ever touchy!”

NOW IT WAS THAT mud-season, swollen-river time of year again. There’d been a strong surge of water coming through one of the sluice gates-what Ketchum called a “driving head,” probably from the sluice gate at the east end of Little Dummer Pond-and a green kid from Toronto, whom they barely knew, had been swept away.

For only a while longer would the loggers increase the volume of water in Twisted River. They did this by building sluice dams on the tributary streams flowing into the main driving river; the water above these dams was released in the spring, adding torrents of water volume to a log drive. The pulpwood was piled in these streams (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 enhance Danny’s education,” Ketchum reasoned.

“Enhance,” Dominic repeated, still shaking his head. “Your vocabulary, Ketchum,” the cook began, but he stopped himself; he said nothing further.

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 Maine-one that manufactured toboggans, of all things.

“Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood-for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?”

“Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?”

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 education, the cook not infrequently kept his son home from school-so that the boy could read a book or two, a practice not necessarily encouraged by the Paris (or, as Ketchum would have it, the West Dummer) school. “Perish the thought that the children in a logging camp should learn to read!” Ketchum railed. As a child, he had not learned to read; he was forever angry about it.

THERE WERE-THERE still are-good markets for both sawlogs and pulpwood over the Canadian border. The north country of New Hampshire continues to feed wood in huge quantities to paper mills in New Hampshire and Maine, and to a furniture mill in Vermont. But of the logging camps, as they used to be, mere tumbledown evidence remains.

In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change. From the sluice dam at the bottom of Little Dummer Pond to the basin below Twisted River, a persistent fog or mist lay suspended above the violent water until midmorning-in all seasons, except when the river was frozen. From the sawmills, the keen whine of the blades was both as familiar and expected as the songs of birds, though neither the sounds of sawing nor the birdsongs were as reliable as the fact that there was never any spring weather in that part of New Hampshire-except for the regrettable period of time from early April till the middle of May, which was distinguished by frozen, slowly thawing mud.

Yet the cook had stayed, and there were few in Twisted River who knew why. There were fewer who knew why he’d come in the first place, and from where or when. But his limp had a history, of which everyone was aware. In a sawmill or logging-camp kind of town, a limp like Dominic Baciagalupo’s was not uncommon. When logs of any size were set in motion, an ankle could get crushed. Even when he wasn’t walking, it was obvious that the boot on the cook’s maimed foot was two sizes bigger than the one he wore on his good foot-and when he was either sitting down or standing still, his bigger boot pointed the wrong way. To those knowledgeable souls in the settlement of Twisted River, such an injury could have come from any number of logging accidents.

Dominic had been pretending to be a teenager; in his own estimation, he was not as green as Angel Pope, but he was “green enough,” as the cook would tell his son. He’d had an after-school job on the loading platforms at one of the big mills in Berlin, where a friend of Dominic’s absent father was a foreman. Until World War II, the supposed friend of Dominic’s dad was a fixture there, but the cook remembered so-called Uncle Umberto as an alcoholic who repeatedly bad-mouthed Dominic’s mom. (Even after the accident, Dominic Baciagalupo was never contacted by his absconding father, and “Uncle” Umberto not once proved himself as a family friend.)

There was a load of hardwood sawlogs on the log deck-mostly maple and birch. Young Dominic was using a peavey, rolling the logs into the mill, when a bunch of logs rolled all at once and he couldn’t get out of their way. He was only twelve in 1936; he handled a peavey with a rakish confidence. Dominic had been the same age as his son was now; the cook would never have allowed his beloved Daniel on a log deck, not even if the boy had been ambidextrous with a peavey. And in Dominic’s case, when he had been knocked down by the logs, the hinged hook of his own peavey was driven into his left thigh, like a fishhook without the barb, and his left ankle was crunched sideways-it was shattered and mangled under the weight of the wood. From the peavey wound, he was in no danger of bleeding to death, but one could always die of blood poisoning in those days. From the ankle injury, he might have died of gangrene later-or, more likely, had the left foot amputated, if not the entire leg.

There were no X-rays in Coos County in 1936. The medical authorities in Berlin were disinclined to undertake any fancy reassembly of a crushed ankle; in such cases, little or no surgery was recommended. It was a wait-and-see category of accident: Either the blood vessels were mashed flat and there would be a subsequent loss of circulation-then the doctors would have to cut the foot off-or the broken and displaced bits of the ankle would fuse together and heal every which way, and Dominic Baciagalupo would walk with a limp and be in pain for the rest of his life. (That would turn out to be the case.)

There was also the scar where the peavey had hooked him, which resembled the bite wound of a small, peculiar animal-one with a curved, solitary tooth and a mouth that wasn’t big enough to enclose the twelve-year-old’s thigh. And even before he took a step, the angle of Dominic’s left foot indicated a sharp left turn; the toes were aimed in a sideways direction. People often noticed the deformed shape of the ankle and the misdirected foot before they saw the limp.

One thing was certain: Young Dominic wouldn’t be a logger. You need your balance for that kind of work. And the mills were where he’d been injured-not to mention that his runaway father’s drunken “friend” was a foreman there. The mills were not in Dominic Baciagalupo’s future, either.

“Hey, Baciagalupo!” Uncle Umberto had often hailed him. “You may have a Neapolitan name, but you hang around like a Sicilian.”

“I am Sicilian,” Dominic would dutifully say; his mother seemed inordinately proud of it, the boy thought.

“Yeah, well, your name is napolitano,” Umberto told him.

“After my dad, I suppose,” young Dominic ventured to guess.

“Your dad was no Baciagalupo,” Uncle Umberto informed him. “Ask Nunzi where your name came from-she gave it to you.”

The twelve-year-old didn’t like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic’s mother, called her “Nunzi”-an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata-which Umberto didn’t say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)

“And you’re not really my uncle, I suppose?” Dominic inquired of Umberto.

“Ask your mama,” Umberto said. “If she wanted to keep you siciliano, she shoulda given you her name.”

His mother’s maiden name was Saetta-she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.

Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic’s heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned-bits of information, or misinformation-had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan’s childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?)

All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question “Where is he now?” (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: “Vicino di Napoli.” “In the vicinity of Naples,” young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep-Benevento and Avellino-Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.

As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle-and definitely a “legendary asshole,” as Ketchum would have said.

“What kind of name is Umberto?” Dominic had asked the foreman.

“From da king!” Umberto had answered indignantly.

“I mean it’s a Neapolitan name, right?” the boy had asked.

“What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!” Umberto cried.

“You told me to say I was sixteen,” Dominic reminded the foreman.

“Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo,” Umberto had said.

Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston’s North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She’d left the city and had moved to the north country when Gennaro Capodilupo had slipped away to the docks off Atlantic Avenue and Commercial Street, leaving her with child as he sailed (figuratively, if not literally) “back to Naples.”

Asshole (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic’s dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo-cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as Annunziata told her son, meant “Head of the Wolf.” What was the unwed mother to do? “For the lies he told, your father should have been a Boccadalupo!” she said to Dominic. This meant “Mouth of the Wolf,” the boy would learn-a fitting name for Asshole Umberto, young Dominic often thought. “But you, Angelù-you are my kiss of the wolf!” his mom said.

In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of) the wolf; for Annunziata Saetta, only a kiss of the wolf would do. It should have been spelled “Baciacalupo,” but Nunzi always pronounced the second “c” in Baciacalupo like a “g.” Over time, and due to a clerical error in kindergarten, the misspelled name had stuck. He’d become Dominic Baciagalupo before he became a cook. His mother also called him Dom, for short-Dominic being derived from doménica, which means “Sunday.” Not that Annunziata was a tireless adherent of what Ketchum called “Catholic thinking.” What was both Catholic and Italian in the Saetta family had driven the young, unmarried woman north to New Hampshire; in Berlin, other Italians (presumably, also Catholics) would look after her.

Had they expected she would put her child up for adoption, and come back to the North End? Nunzi knew that this was done, but she wouldn’t consider giving up her baby, and-notwithstanding the sizable nostalgia she expressed for the Italian North End-she was never tempted to go back to Boston, either. In her unplanned condition, she had been sent away; understandably, she resented it.

While Annunziata remained a loyal Sicilian in her own kitchen, the proverbial ties that bind were irreparably frayed. Her Boston family-and, by association, the Italian community in the North End, and whatever represented “Catholic thinking” there-had disowned her. In turn, she disowned them. Nunzi never went to Mass herself, nor did she make Dominic go. “It’s enough if we go to confession, when we want to,” she would tell young Dom-her little kiss of the wolf.

She wouldn’t teach the boy Italian, either-some essential cooking lingo excepted-nor was Dominic inclined to learn the language of “the old country,” which to the boy meant the North End of Boston, not Italy. It was both a language and a place that had rejected his mother. Italian would never be Dominic Baciagalupo’s language; he said, adamantly, that Boston was nowhere he ever wanted to go.

Everything in Annunziata Saetta’s new life was defined by a sense of starting over. The youngest of three sisters, she could read and speak English as well as she could cook siciliano. Nunzi taught children how to read in a Berlin elementary school-and after the accident, she took Dominic out of school and taught him some fundamental cooking skills. She also insisted that the boy read books-not just cookbooks but everything she read, which were mostly novels. Her son had been crippled while violating the generally overlooked child-labor laws; Annunziata had taken him out of circulation, her version of homeschooling being both culinary and literary.

Neither area of education was available to Ketchum, who had left school when he was younger than twelve. At nineteen, in 1936, Ketchum could neither read nor write, but when he wasn’t working as a logger, he was loading lumber onto the railroad flatcars from the open platforms at the end of the biggest Berlin mill. The deck crew tapered the load at the top, so that the flatcars could safely pass through the tunnels or under the bridges. “That was the extent of my education, before your mom taught me to read,” Ketchum enjoyed telling Danny Baciagalupo; the cook would commence to shake his head again, although the story of Dominic’s late wife teaching Ketchum to read was apparently incontestable.

At least the saga of Ketchum belatedly learning to read seemed not in the tall-tale category of Ketchum’s other stories-the one about the low-roofed bunkhouse at Camp One, for example. According to Ketchum, “some Injun” had been assigned the task of shoveling snow off the roof, but the Indian had neglected the job. When the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow, all but one logger escaped the bunkhouse alive-not the Indian, who was suffocated by what Ketchum called “the concentrated odor of wet socks.” (Of course the cook and his son were well aware of Ketchum’s nearly constant complaint-namely, that the stink of wet socks was the bane of bunkhouse life.)

“I don’t remember an Indian at Camp One,” was all Dominic had said to his old friend.

“You’re too young to remember Camp One, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.

Danny Baciagalupo had often observed that his father bristled at the mere mention of the seven-year age difference between himself and Ketchum, whereas Ketchum was inclined to overemphasize the discrepancy in their ages. Those seven years would have seemed insurmountable to them had the two young men met in the Berlin of their youth-when Ketchum had been a rawboned but strapping nineteen, already sporting a full if ragged beard, and Annunziata’s little Dom was not yet a teenager.

He’d been a strong, wiry twelve-year-old-not big, but compact and sinewy-and the cook had retained the appearance of a lean-muscled young logger, although he was now thirty and looked older, especially to his young son. It was his dad’s seriousness that made him look older, the boy thought. You could not say “the past” or “the future” in the cook’s presence without making him frown. As for the present, even the twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo understood that the times were changing.

Danny knew that his father’s life had been changed forever because of an ankle injury; a different accident, to the boy’s young mother, had altered the course of his own childhood and changed his dad’s life forever again. In a twelve-year-old’s world, change couldn’t be good. Any change made Danny anxious-the way missing school made him anxious.

On the river drives, in the not-so-old days, when Danny and his dad were working and sleeping in the wanigans, the boy didn’t go to school. That he didn’t like school-but that he always, and far too easily, made up the work he missed-also made Danny anxious. The boys in his grade were all older than he was, because they skipped school as often as they could and they never made up the work they missed; they’d all been held back and had repeated a grade or two.

When the cook saw that his son was anxious, he invariably said: “Stand your ground, Daniel-just don’t get killed. I promise you, one day we’ll leave here.”

But this made Danny Baciagalupo anxious, too. Even the wanigans had felt like home to him. And in Twisted River, the twelve-year-old had his own bedroom above the cookhouse-where his father also had a bedroom, and where they shared a bathroom. These were the only second-story rooms in the cookhouse, and they were spacious and comfortable. Each room had a skylight and big windows with a view of the mountains, and-below the cookhouse, at the foothills of the mountains-a partial view of the river basin.

Logging trails circumscribed the hills and mountains; there were big patches of meadow and second growth, where the woodcutters had harvested the hardwoods and the coniferous forest. From his bedroom, it seemed to young Daniel Baciagalupo that the bare rock and second growth could never replace the maples and birch, or the softwoods-the spruce and fir, the red and white pine, and the hemlock and tamarack. The twelve-year-old thought that the meadows were running wild with waist-high grass and weeds. Yet, in truth, the forests in the region were being managed for sustainable yields of timber; those woods are still producing-“in the twenty-first fucking century,” as Ketchum would one day say.

And as Ketchum regularly suggested, some things would never change. “Tamarack will always love swamps, yellow birch will forever be highly prized for furniture, and gray birch will never be good for fuck-all except firewood.” As for the fact that the river drives in Coos County would soon be limited to four-foot pulpwood, Ketchum was morosely disinclined to utter any prophecies. (All the veteran logger would say was that the smaller pulpwood tended to stray out of the current and required cleanup crews.)

What would change the logging business, and what might put an end to the cook’s job, was the restless spirit of modernity; the changing times could kill a mere “settlement” like Twisted River. But Danny Baciagalupo was just wondering, obsessively: What work would there be in Twisted River after the woodcutters moved on? Would the cook then move on? Danny worried. (Could Ketchum ever move on?)

As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do-as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro-to and fro. If, at this moment in time, Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy’s body to move on, too-move on, too.

CHAPTER 2. DO-SI-DO

IN A STORAGE CLOSET OFF THE PANTRY IN THE COOKHOUSE kitchen, the cook kept a couple of folding cots-from the wanigan days, when he’d slept in any number of portable kitchens. Dominic had salvaged a couple of sleeping bags, too. It was not out of nostalgia for the wanigans that the cook had kept the old cots and mildewed sleeping bags. Sometimes Ketchum slept in the cookhouse kitchen; occasionally, if Danny was awake, the boy would tirelessly endeavor to get his dad’s permission to sleep in the kitchen, too. If Ketchum hadn’t had too much to drink, Danny hoped to hear another of the logger’s stories-or the same story, wildly revised.

THE FIRST NIGHT after Angel Pope had disappeared under the logs, it snowed a little. It was still cold at night in April, but Dominic had turned the two gas ovens on in the kitchen. The ovens were set at 350 and 425 degrees, and the cook had premixed the dry ingredients for the scones, the corn muffins, and the banana bread before going to bed. His French toast (from the banana bread) was popular, and he would make pancakes from scratch in the morning. Because of the raw eggs, Dominic didn’t like to keep the pancake batter in the fridge more than two days. Also last-minute, almost every morning, he made buttermilk biscuits, which he baked quickly in the 425-degree oven.

It was usually Danny’s job to be sure that the potatoes were peeled and cubed and soaking overnight in salted water. His dad would fry the potatoes on the griddle in the morning, when he fried the bacon. The griddle on the old Garland was above the broiler, which was eye-level to the cook. Even with a long-handled spatula, and standing on tiptoe or on a low stool-neither method of elevating himself was the easiest thing for a cook with a crooked foot-Dominic would frequently burn his forearm when he reached to the back of the griddle. (Sometimes Injun Jane would spell the cook at the griddle, because she was taller and her reach was longer.)

It would be dark when Dominic got up to fry the bacon and do his baking, and dark when Danny woke in the upstairs of the cookhouse to the smell of bacon and coffee, and still dark when the kitchen help and the Indian dishwasher arrived from town-the headlights of their vehicles heralding their arrival almost simultaneously with the engine sounds. Most mornings, the Garland ’s broiler was flaming hot-for melting the cheese on top of the omelets. Among young Dan’s before-school jobs were cutting up the peppers and tomatoes for the omelets, and warming the big saucepan of maple syrup on one of the back burners of the eight-burner stove.

The outside door to the cookhouse kitchen didn’t open or close properly; it was so loose-fitting that it rattled in the wind. The inside screen door opened into the kitchen, which could be added to the list of things that made Danny Baciagalupo anxious. For any number of practical reasons, you wanted the door to open to the outside. There was enough traffic in the busy kitchen to not want a door getting in the way-and once, long ago, a bear had come into the cookhouse kitchen. It had been a balmy night-the troublesome outside door to the cookhouse was propped open-and the bear had just butted the screen door with its head and walked inside.

Danny had been too young to remember the bear, although he’d asked his father to tell him the story many times. The boy’s mother had long before put him to bed upstairs; she was having a late-night snack with Danny’s dad when the bear joined them. The cook and his wife were sharing a mushroom omelet and drinking white wine. When he used to drink, Dominic Baciagalupo had explained to his son, he had often felt compelled to fix late-night snacks for himself and his wife. (Not anymore.)

Danny’s mother screamed when she saw the bear. That made the bear stand up on its hind legs and squint at her, but Dominic had had quite a lot of wine; at first, he didn’t know it was a bear. He must have thought it was a hairy, drunken logger, coming to assault his beautiful wife.

On the stove was an eight-inch cast-iron skillet, in which the cook had recently sautéed the mushrooms for the omelet. Dominic picked up the skillet, which was still warm in his hand, and hit the bear in the face-mostly on its nose but also on the broad, flat bridge of its nose between the bear’s small, squinty eyes. The bear dropped to all fours and fled through the kitchen door, leaving the torn screen and the broken wooden slats hanging from the frame.

Whenever the cook told this story, he always said: “Well, the door had to be fixed, of course, but it still opens the wrong way.” In telling the story to his son, Dominic Baciagalupo usually added: “I would never hit a bear with a cast-iron skillet-I thought it was a man!”

“But what would you do with a bear?” Danny asked his dad.

“Try to reason with it, I guess,” the cook replied. “In that sort of situation, you can’t reason with a man.”

As for what “that sort of situation” was, Dan could only guess. Had his father imagined he was protecting his pretty wife from a dangerous man?

As for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet, it had acquired a special place for itself in the cookhouse. It no longer made its home in the kitchen with the other pots and pans. The skillet was hung at shoulder height on a hook in the upstairs of the cookhouse, where the bedrooms were-it resided just inside Dominic’s bedroom door. That skillet had proved its worth; it had become the cook’s weapon of choice, should he ever hear someone’s footsteps on the stairs or the sound of an intruder (animal or human) sneaking around in the kitchen.

Dominic didn’t own a gun; he didn’t want one. For a New Hampshire boy, he had missed out on all the deer hunting-not only because of the ankle injury but because he hadn’t grown up with a dad. As for the loggers and the sawmill men, the deer hunters among them brought the cook their deer; he butchered the deer for them, and kept enough meat for himself so that he could occasionally serve venison in the cookhouse. It wasn’t that Dominic disapproved of hunting; he just didn’t like venison, or guns. He also suffered from a recurrent dream; he’d told Daniel about it. The cook repeatedly dreamed that he was murdered in his sleep-shot to death in his own bed-and whenever he woke from that dream, the sound of the shot was still ringing in his ears.

So Dominic Baciagalupo slept with a skillet in his bedroom. There were cast-iron skillets of all sizes in the cookhouse kitchen, but the eight-inch size was preferable for self-defense. Even young Dan could manage to swing it with some force. As for the ten-and-a-half-inch skillet, or the eleven-and-a-quarter-inch one, they may have been more accommodating to cook in, but they were too heavy to be reliable weapons; not even Ketchum could swing those bigger skillets quickly enough to take out a lecherous logger, or a bear.

THE NIGHT AFTER Angel Pope had gone under the logs, Danny Baciagalupo lay in bed in the upstairs of the cookhouse. The boy’s bedroom was above the inside-opening screen door to the kitchen, and the loose-fitting outer door, which he could hear rattling in the wind. He could hear the river, too. In the cookhouse, you could always hear Twisted River -except when the river ran under the ice. But Danny must have fallen asleep as quickly as his father, because the twelve-year-old didn’t hear the truck. The light from the truck’s headlights had not shone into the cookhouse. Whoever was driving the truck must have been able to navigate the road from town in near-total darkness, because there wasn’t much moonlight that night-or else the driver was drunk and had forgotten to turn on the truck’s headlights.

Danny thought he heard the door to the truck’s cab close. The mud, which was soft in the daytime, could get crunchy underfoot at night-it was still cold enough at night for the mud to freeze, and now there was a dusting of new snow. Perhaps he hadn’t heard a truck door close, Dan was thinking; that clunk might have been a sound in whatever dream the boy had been having. Outside the cookhouse, the footsteps on the frozen mud made a shuffling sound-ponderous and wary. Maybe it’s a bear, Danny thought.

The cook kept a cooler outside the kitchen. The cooler was sealed tight, but it contained the ground lamb, for the lamb hash, and the bacon-and whatever other perishables wouldn’t fit in the fridge. What if the bear had smelled the meat in the cooler? Danny was thinking.

“Dad?” the boy spoke out, but his father was probably fast asleep down the hall.

Like everyone else, the bear seemed to be having trouble with the outer door to the cookhouse kitchen; it batted at the door with one paw. Young Dan heard grunting, too.

“Dad!” Danny shouted; he heard his father swipe the cast-iron skillet off the hook on the bedroom wall. Like his dad, the boy had gone to bed in his long johns and a pair of socks. The floor in the upstairs hall felt cold to Danny, even with his socks on. He and his dad padded downstairs to the kitchen, which was dimly lit by the pilot lights flickering from the old Garland. The cook had a two-handed grip on the black skillet. When the outer door opened, the bear-if it was a bear-pushed against the screen door with its chest. It came inside in an upright position, albeit unsteadily. Its teeth were a long, white blur.

“I’m not a bear, Cookie,” Ketchum said.

The flash of white, which Danny had imagined was the bear’s bared teeth, was the new cast on Ketchum’s right forearm; the cast went from the middle of the big man’s palm to where his arm bent at the elbow. “Sorry I startled you fellas,” Ketchum added.

“Close the outer door, will you? I’m trying to keep it warm in here,” the cook said. Danny saw his father put the skillet on the bottom step of the stairs. Ketchum struggled to secure the outer door with his left hand. “You’re drunk,” Dominic told him.

“I’ve got one arm, Cookie, and I’m right-handed,” Ketchum said.

“You’re still drunk, Ketchum,” Dominic Baciagalupo told his old friend.

“I guess you remember what that’s like,” Ketchum said.

Dan helped Ketchum close the outer door. “I’ll bet you’re real hungry,” he said to Ketchum. The big man, swaying slightly, ruffled the boy’s hair.

“I don’t need to eat,” Ketchum said.

“It might help to sober you up,” the cook said. Dominic opened the fridge. He told Ketchum: “I’ve got some meat loaf, which isn’t bad cold. You can have it with applesauce.”

“I don’t need to eat,” the big man said again. “I need you to come with me, Cookie.”

“Where are we going?” Dominic asked, but even young Dan knew when his father was pretending not to know something he clearly knew.

“You know where,” Ketchum told the cook. “I just have trouble remembering the exact spot.”

“That’s because you drink too much, Ketchum-that’s why you can’t remember,” Dominic said.

When Ketchum lowered his head, he swayed more; for a moment, Danny thought that the logger might fall down. And by the way both men had lowered their voices, the boy understood that they were negotiating; they were also being careful not to say too much, because Ketchum didn’t know what the twelve-year-old knew about his mother’s death, and Dominic Baciagalupo didn’t want his son to hear whatever odd or unwelcome detail Ketchum might remember.

“Just try the meat loaf, Ketchum,” the cook said softly.

“It’s pretty good with applesauce,” Danny said. The riverman lowered himself onto a stool; he rested his new white cast on the counter-top. Everything about Ketchum was hardened and sharp-edged, like a whittled-down stick-and, as Danny had observed, “wicked tough”-which made the sterile, fragile-looking cast as unsuited to the man as a prosthetic limb. (If Ketchum had lost an arm, he would have made do with the stump-he might have used it as a club.)

But now that Ketchum was sitting down, Danny thought the river driver looked safe enough to touch. The boy had never felt a cast before. Even drunk, Ketchum somehow knew what Dan was thinking. “Go on-you can touch it,” the logger said, extending his cast in the boy’s direction. There was dried blood, or pitch, on what Danny could see of Ketchum’s crooked fingers; they protruded from the cast, un-moving. With a broken wrist, it hurt to move your fingers for the first few days. The boy gently touched Ketchum’s cast.

The cook gave Ketchum a generous serving of meat loaf and applesauce. “There’s milk or orange juice,” Dominic said, “or I could make you some coffee.”

“What a disheartening choice,” Ketchum said, winking at Danny.

“Disheartening,” the cook repeated, shaking his head. “I’ll make some coffee.”

Danny wished that the two men would just talk about everything; the boy knew much of their history, but not enough about his mother. Of her death, no detail could be odd or unwelcome-Danny wanted to hear every word of it. But the cook was a careful man, or he had become one; even Ketchum, who had driven his own children away from him, was especially cautious and protective with Danny, much as the veteran logger had behaved around Angel.

“I wouldn’t go there with you when you’ve been drinking, anyway,” the cook was saying.

“I took you there when you’d been drinking,” Ketchum said; so he wouldn’t say more, he took a mouthful of meat loaf and applesauce.

“Except when it’s under a logjam, a body doesn’t move downstream as fast as a log,” Dominic Baciagalupo said, as if he were speaking to the coffeepot-not to Ketchum, whose back was turned to him. “Not unless the body is caught on a log.”

Danny had heard this explanation, in another context. It had taken a few days-three, to be exact-for his mother’s body to make the journey from the river basin to the narrows, where it had bumped up against the dam. First a drowned body sinks, the cook had explained to his son; then it rises.

“They’re keeping the dams closed through the weekend,” Ketchum said. (He meant not only Dead Woman Dam but the Pontook Dam, on the Androscoggin.) Ketchum ate steadily but not fast, the fork held unfamiliarly, and a little clumsily, in his left hand.

“It’s good with applesauce, isn’t it?” the boy asked him. Ketchum nodded in agreement, chewing vigorously.

They could smell the coffee brewing, and the cook said-more to himself than to his son, or Ketchum-“I might as well start the bacon, while I’m at it.” Ketchum just went on eating. “I suppose the logs are already at the first dam,” Dominic added, as if he were still speaking to no one but himself. “I mean our logs.”

“I know which logs you mean, and which dam,” Ketchum told him. “Yes, the logs are already at the dam-they were there while you were making supper.”

“So you saw that moron doctor there?” the cook asked. “Not that you need a genius to put a cast on a broken wrist, but you must be a man who loves to take chances.” Dominic went out of the cookhouse to get the bacon from the cooler. It was black outside, and the sound of the river rushed into the warm kitchen.

“You used to take chances, Cookie!” Ketchum called out to his old friend; he looked cautiously at Danny. “Your dad used to be happier, too-when he drank.”

“I used to be happier-period,” the cook said; the way he dropped the slab of bacon on the cutting board made Danny look at his father, but Ketchum never turned his attention away from the meat loaf and applesauce.

“Given that bodies move downstream slower than logs,” Ketchum said with deliberate slowness, his speech slightly slurred, “what would you guess as to Angel’s estimated time of arrival at that spot I’m having trouble remembering, exactly?”

Danny was counting to himself, but it was clear to the boy, and to Ketchum, that the cook had already been estimating the young Canadian’s journey. “Saturday night or Sunday morning,” Dominic Baciagalupo said. He had to raise his voice above the hissing bacon. “I’m not going there with you at night, Ketchum.”

Danny quickly looked at Ketchum, anticipating the big man’s response; it was, after all, the story that most interested the boy, and the one closest to his heart. “I went there with you at night, Cookie.”

“The odds are better you’ll be sober Sunday morning,” the cook told Ketchum. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning-Daniel and I will meet you there.” (They meant Dead Woman Dam, though young Dan knew that neither man would say it.)

“We can all go in my truck,” Ketchum said.

“I’ll drive Daniel with me, in case you’re not quite sober,” Dominic replied.

Ketchum pushed his clean plate away; he rested his shaggy head on the countertop and stared at his cast. “You’ll meet me at the mill-pond, you mean?” Ketchum asked.

“I don’t call it that,” the cook said. “The dam was there before the mill. How can they call it a pond, when it’s where the river narrows?”

“You know mill people,” Ketchum said with contempt.

“The dam was there before the mill,” Dominic repeated, still not naming the dam.

“One day the water will breach that dam, and they won’t bother to build another one,” Ketchum said; his eyes were closing.

“One day they won’t be driving logs on Twisted River,” the cook said. “They won’t need a dam where the river runs into the reservoir, though I believe they’ll keep the Pontook Dam on the Androscoggin.”

“One day soon, Cookie,” Ketchum corrected him. His eyes were closed-his head, his chest, and both his arms were sprawled on the countertop. The cook quietly removed the clean plate, but Ketchum wasn’t asleep; he spoke more slowly than before. “There’s a sort of spillway off to one side of the dam. The water makes a pool-it’s almost like an open well-but there’s a kind of containment boom, just a rope with floats, to keep the logs out.”

“It sounds like you remember it as exactly as I do,” Dominic told him.

That was where they’d found his mother, Danny knew. Her body floated lower in the water than the logs; she must have drifted under the containment boom and into the spillway. Ketchum had found her all alone in the pool, or the well-not a log around her.

“I can’t quite see how to get there,” Ketchum said, with some frustration. With his eyes still closed, he was slowly curling the fingers of his right hand, his fingertips reaching for but not quite touching the palm of his cast; both the cook and his son knew that the logger was testing his tolerance of the pain.

“Well, I can show you, Ketchum,” Dominic said gently. “You have to walk out on the dam, or across the logs-remember?”

The cook had carried one of the folding cots into the kitchen. He nodded to his son, who helped him set up the cot-where it wouldn’t be in the way of the ovens, or the inside-opening screen door. “I want to sleep in the kitchen, too,” Danny told his dad.

“If you make a little distance between yourself and the conversation, you might actually go back to sleep,” Dominic said to his son.

“I want to hear the conversation,” Danny said.

“The conversation is almost over,” the cook whispered in the boy’s ear, kissing him.

“Don’t count on it, Cookie,” Ketchum said, with his eyes still closed.

“I’ve got the baking to do, Ketchum-and I might as well start the potatoes.”

“I’ve heard you talk and cook at the same time,” Ketchum told him; he hadn’t opened his eyes.

The cook gave his son a stern look, pointing to the stairs. “It’s cold upstairs,” Danny complained; the boy paused on the bottom step, where the skillet was.

“On your way, please put the skillet back where it belongs, Daniel.”

The boy went grudgingly upstairs, pausing on every step; he listened to his father work with the mixing bowls. Young Dan didn’t need to see in order to know what his dad was doing-the cook always made the banana bread first. As Danny hung the eight-inch cast-iron skillet on the hook in his father’s bedroom, he counted sixteen eggs cracked into the stainless-steel bowl; then came the mashed bananas and the chopped walnuts. (Sometimes, his dad topped the bread with warm apples.) The cook made the scones next, adding the eggs and the butter to the dry ingredients-the fruit, if he had any, he added last. From the upstairs hall, Danny could hear his father greasing the muffin tins, which he then sprinkled with flour-before he put the corn-muffin mixture into the tins. There was oatmeal in the banana bread-and sweet bran flour, which the boy could soon smell from his bedroom.

It was warmer under the covers, from where Danny heard the oven doors open and the baking pans and muffin tins slide in; then he heard the oven doors close. The unusual sound, which made the boy open his eyes and sit up in bed, was his father struggling to lift Ketchum-holding the big man under both arms while he dragged him to the folding cot. Danny hadn’t known that his dad was strong enough to lift Ketchum; the twelve-year-old crept quietly down the stairs and watched his father settle Ketchum on the cot, where the cook covered the logger with one of the unzipped sleeping bags, as if the opened bag were a blanket.

Dominic Baciagalupo was putting the potatoes on the griddle when Ketchum spoke to him. “There was no way I could let you see her, Cookie-it wouldn’t have been right.”

“I understand,” the cook said.

On the stairs, Danny closed his eyes again, seeing the story, which he knew by heart-Ketchum, taking small steps on the logs, drunk, while he reached into the pool created by the spillway. “Don’t come out here, Cookie!” Ketchum had called ashore. “Don’t you try walking on the logs-or on the dam, either!”

Dominic had watched Ketchum carry his dead wife along the edge of the containment boom. “Get away from me, Cookie!” Ketchum had called, as he came across the logs. “You can’t see her anymore-she’s not the same as she was!”

The cook, who was also drunk, had taken the blanket from the back of Ketchum’s truck. But Ketchum would not come ashore with the body; even drunk, he had kept walking on the logs with small, rapid steps. “Spread the blanket in the back of the truck, Cookie-then walk away!” When Ketchum came ashore, Dominic was standing at a triangular point-equidistant from the riverbank and Ketchum’s truck. “Just stand your ground, Cookie-till I cover her,” Ketchum had said.

Danny wondered if that was the source of his father’s frequent admonition: “Stand your ground, Daniel-just don’t get killed.” Maybe it had come from Ketchum, who had gently placed the cook’s dead wife in the back of his truck, covering her with the blanket. Dominic had kept his distance.

“Didn’t you want to see her?” Danny had asked his dad, too many times.

“I trust Ketchum,” his father had answered. “If anything ever happens to me, Daniel, you trust him, too.”

Danny realized that he must have crept back upstairs to his bedroom, and fallen asleep, when he smelled the lamb hash in addition to all the baking; he’d not been aware of his dad opening the difficult outer door to the cookhouse kitchen and getting the ground lamb from the cooler. The boy lay in his bed with his eyes still closed, savoring all the smells. He wanted to ask Ketchum if his mom had been faceup in the water when he’d first spotted her, or if he’d found her in the spillway facedown.

Danny got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen; only then did he realize that his father had found the time to come upstairs and get dressed, probably after Ketchum had passed out on the cot. Dan watched his dad working at the stove; when the cook was concentrating on three or four tasks that were all in close proximity to one another, his limp was almost undetectable. At such moments, Danny could imagine his father at the age of twelve-before the ankle accident. At twelve, Danny Baciagalupo was a lonely kid; he had no friends. He often wished that he could have known his dad when they were both twelve-year-olds.

WHEN YOU’RE TWELVE, four years seems like a long time. Annunziata Saetta knew that it wouldn’t take her little Dom’s ankle four years to heal; Nunzi’s beloved Kiss of the Wolf was off the crutches in four months, and he was reading as well as any fifteen-year-old by the time he was only thirteen. The homeschooling worked. In the first place, Annunziata was an elementary-school teacher; she knew how much of the school day was wasted on discipline, recess, and snacks. The boy did his homework, and double-checked it, during what amounted to Nunzi’s school day; Dominic had time for lots of extra reading, and he kept a journal of the recipes he was learning, too.

The boy’s cooking skills were more slowly acquired, and-after the accident-Annunziata made her own child-labor laws. She would not permit young Dominic to go off to work at a breakfast place in Berlin until the boy really knew his way around a kitchen, and he had to wait until he’d turned sixteen; in those four years, Dom became an extremely well-read sixteen-year-old, and an accomplished cook, who was less experienced at shaving than he was at walking with a limp.

It was 1940 when Dominic Baciagalupo met Danny’s mom. She was a twenty-three-year-old teaching in the same elementary school as Annunziata Saetta; in fact, the cook’s mother introduced her sixteen-year-old son to the new teacher.

Nunzi had no choice in the matter. Her cousin Maria, another Saetta, had married a Calogero-a common Sicilian surname. “After some Greek saint who died there-the name has something to do with children in general, I think, or maybe orphans in particular,” Nunzi had explained to Dominic. She pronounced the name cah-LOH-ger-roh. It was used as a first name, too, his mother explained-“frequently for bastards.”

At sixteen, Dominic was sensitive to the subject of illegitimacy-not that Annunziata wasn’t. Her cousin had sent her pregnant daughter away to the wilds of New Hampshire, bemoaning the fact that the daughter was the first woman in the Calogero family to have graduated from college. “It was only a teachers’ college, and a lot of good it did her-she still got knocked up!” the poor girl’s mother told Nunzi, who repeated this insensitivity to Dom. The boy understood without further detail that the pregnant twenty-three-year-old was being sent to them because Annunziata and her bastard were considered in the same boat. Her name was Rosina, but-given Nunzi’s fondness for abbreviations-the banished girl was already a Rosie before she made the trip from Boston to Berlin.

As was often the way “back then”-not only in the North End, and by no means limited to Italian or Catholic families-the Saettas and the Calogeros were sending one family scandal to live with another. Thus Annunziata was given a reason to resent her Boston relatives twice. “Let this be a lesson to you, Dom,” the teenager’s mother told him. “We are not going to judge poor Rosie for her unfortunate condition-we are going to love her, like nothing was the matter.”

While Annunziata should be commended for her spirit of forgiveness-especially in 1940, when unwed mothers could generally be counted among America ’s most unforgiven souls-it was both reckless and unnecessary to tell her sixteen-year-old son that he was going to love his second cousin “like nothing was the matter.”

“Why is she my second cousin?” the boy asked his mom.

“Maybe that’s not what she is-maybe she’s called your cousin once-removed, or something,” Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: “Whatever she’s called, she’s not really your cousin-not a first cousin, anyway.”

This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook-all these-had deprived him of friends his own age. And “little” Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was “not really” his cousin.

As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet “showing;” that she soon would be posed another problem.

Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers’ college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to look pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. “Or else we’ll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary,” Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a real one-Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful-but the poor girl wasn’t about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!

FOR FOUR YEARS, the boy had cooked with his mother. In some ways, because he wrote every recipe down-not to mention each variation of the recipes he would make, occasionally, without her-he was surpassing her, even as he learned. As it happened, on that life-changing night, Dominic was making dinner for the two women and himself. He was on his way to becoming famous at the breakfast place in Berlin, and he got home from work well before Rosie and his mom came home from school; except on weekends, when Nunzi liked to cook, Dominic was becoming the principal cook in their small household. Stirring his marinara sauce, he said: “Well, I could marry Rosie, or I could pretend to be her husband-until she finds someone more suitable. I mean, who needs to know?”

To Annunziata, it seemed like such a sweet and innocent offer; she laughed and gave her son a hug. But young Dom couldn’t imagine anyone “more suitable” for Rosie than himself-he had been faking the pretend part. He would have married Rosie for real; the difference in their ages, or that they were vaguely related, was no stumbling block for him.

As for Rosie, it didn’t matter that the sixteen-year-old’s proposal, which was both sweet and not-so-innocent, was unrealistic-and probably illegal, even in northern New Hampshire. What affected the poor girl, who was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy, was that the lout who’d knocked her up had not offered to marry her-not even under what had amounted to considerable duress.

Given the predilections of the male members of both the Saetta and Calogero families, this “duress” took the form of multiple threats of castration ending with death by drowning. Whether it was Naples or Palermo the lout sailed back to was not made clear, but no marriage proposal was ever forthcoming. Dominic’s spontaneous and heartfelt offer was the first time anyone had proposed to Rosie; overcome, she burst into tears at the kitchen table before Dominic could poach the shrimp in his marinara sauce. Sobbing, the distraught young woman went to bed without her dinner.

In the night, Annunziata awoke to the confusing sounds of Rosie’s miscarriage-“confusing” because, at that moment, Nunzi didn’t know if the loss of the baby was a blessing or a curse. Dominic Baciagalupo lay in his bed, listening to his second or once-removed cousin crying. The toilet kept flushing, the bathtub was filling-there must have been blood-and, over it all, came the sympathetic crooning of his mother’s most consoling voice. “Rosie, maybe it’s better this way. Now you don’t need to quit your job-not even temporarily! Now we don’t have to come up with a husband for you-not a real one or the imaginary kind! Listen to me, Rosie-it wasn’t a baby, not yet.”

But Dominic lay wondering, What have I done? Even an imaginary marriage to Rosie gave the boy a nearly constant erection. (Well, he was sixteen years old-no wonder!) When he heard that Rosie had stopped crying, young Dom held his breath. “Did Dominic hear me-did I wake him up, do you think?” the boy heard the girl ask his mother.

“Well, he sleeps like the dead,” Nunzi said, “but you did make quite a ruckus-understandably, of course.”

“He must have heard me!” the girl cried. “I have to talk to him!” she said. Dominic could hear her step out of the tub. There was the vigorous rubbing of a towel, and the sound of her bare feet on the bathroom floor.

“I can explain to Dom in the morning,” his mother was saying, but his not-really-a-cousin’s bare feet were already padding down the hall to the spare room.

“No! I have something to tell him!” Rosie called. Dominic could hear a drawer open; a coat hanger fell in her closet. Then the girl was in his room-she just opened his door, without knocking, and lay down on the bed beside him. He could feel her wet hair touch his face.

“I heard you,” he told her.

“I’m going to be fine,” Rosie began. “I’ll have a baby, some other day.”

“Does it hurt?” he asked her. He kept his face turned away from her on the pillow, because he had brushed his teeth too long ago-he was afraid his breath was bad.

“I didn’t think I wanted the baby until I lost it,” Rosie was saying. He couldn’t think of what to say, but she went on. “What you said to me, Dominic, was the nicest thing anyone ever said to me-I’ll never forget it.”

“I would marry you, you know-I wasn’t just saying it,” the boy said.

She hugged him and kissed his ear. She was on top of the covers, and he was under them, but he could still feel her body pressing against his back. “I’ll never have a nicer offer-I know it,” his not-really-a-cousin said.

“Maybe we could get married when I’m a little older,” Dominic suggested.

“Maybe we will!” the girl cried, hugging him again.

Did she mean it, the sixteen-year-old wondered, or was she just being nice?

From the bathroom, where Annunziata was draining and scrubbing the tub, their voices were audible but indistinct. What surprised Nunzi was that Dominic was talking; the boy rarely spoke. His voice was still changing-it was getting lower. But from the moment Annunziata had heard Rosie say, “Maybe we will!”-well, Dominic began to talk and talk, and the girl’s interjections grew fainter but lengthier. What they said was indecipherable, but they were whispering as breathlessly as lovers.

As she went on compulsively cleaning the bathtub, Annunziata no longer wondered if the miscarriage had been a blessing or a curse; the miscarriage was no longer the point. It was Rosie Calogero herself-was she a blessing or a curse? What had Nunzi been thinking? She’d opened her house to a pretty, intelligent (and clearly emotional) young woman-one who’d been rejected by her lover and banished from home by her family-without realizing what an irresistible temptation the twenty-three-year-old would be for a lonely boy coming of age.

Annunziata got off her knees in the bathroom and went down the hall to the kitchen, noting that the door to her son’s bedroom was partially open and the whispering went on and on. In the kitchen, Nunzi took a pinch of salt and threw it over her shoulder. She resisted the impulse to intrude on the two of them, but-first stepping back into the hall-she raised her voice.

“My goodness, Rosie, you must forgive me,” Annunziata announced. “I never even asked you if you wanted to go back to Boston !” Nunzi had tried to make this not appear to be her idea; she’d attempted a neutral or indifferent tone, as if she were speaking strictly out of consideration for what Rosie herself wanted to do. But the murmuring from Dominic’s bedroom was broken by a sudden, shared intake of breath.

Rosie felt the boy gasp against her chest the second she was aware of her own gasp. It was as if they had rehearsed the answer, so perfectly in unison was their response. “No!” Annunziata heard her son and Rosie cry; they were a chorus.

Definitely not a blessing, Nunzi was thinking, when she heard Rosie say, “I want to stay here, with you and Dominic. I want to teach at the school. I don’t ever want to go back to Boston!” (I can’t blame her for that, Annunziata realized; she knew the feeling.)

“I want Rosie to stay!” Nunzi heard her son call out.

Well, of course you do! Annunziata thought. But what would the repercussions of the difference in their ages be? And what would happen if and when the country went to war, and all the young men went? (But not her beloved Kiss of the Wolf-not with a limp like that, Nunzi knew.)

ROSIE CALOGERO KEPT her job and did it well. The young cook also kept his job and did it well-well enough that the breakfast place started serving lunch, too. In a short time, Dominic Baciagalupo became a much better cook than his mom. And whatever the young cook made for lunch, he brought the best of it home for dinner; he fed his mother and his not-really-a-cousin very well. On occasion, mother and son would still cook together, but on most culinary matters, Annunziata yielded to Dominic.

He made meat loaf with Worcestershire sauce and provolone, and served it warm with his multipurpose marinara sauce-or cold, with applesauce. He did breaded chicken cutlets alla parmigiana; in Boston, his mother had told him, she’d made veal Parmesan, but in Berlin he couldn’t get good veal. (He substituted pork for veal-it was almost as good.) Dominic made eggplant Parmesan, too-the sizable contingent of French Canadians in Berlin knew what aubergine was. And Dom did a leg of lamb with lemon and garlic and olive oil; the olive oil came from a shop Nunzi knew in Boston, and Dominic used it to rub roast chicken or baste turkey, both of which he stuffed with cornbread and sausage and sage. He did steaks under the broiler, or he grilled the steaks, which he served with white beans or roasted potatoes. But he didn’t much care for potatoes, and he loathed rice. He served most of his main dishes with pasta, which he did very simply-with olive oil and garlic, and sometimes with peas or asparagus. He cooked carrots in olive oil with black Sicilian olives, and more garlic. And although he detested baked beans, Dominic would serve them; there were lumbermen and mill workers, mostly old-timers who’d lost their teeth, who ate little else. (“The baked beans and pea soup crowd,” Nunzi called them disparagingly.)

Occasionally, Annunziata could get fennel, which she and Dom cooked in a sweet tomato sauce with sardines; the sardines came in cans from another shop Nunzi knew in Boston, and mother and son mashed them to a paste in garlic and olive oil, and served them with pasta topped with bread crumbs, and browned in the oven. Dominic made his own pizza dough. He served meatless pizzas every Friday night-in lieu of fish, which neither the young cook nor his mom trusted was fresh enough in the north country. Shrimp, frozen in chunks of ice the size of cinder blocks, arrived unthawed in trains from the coast; hence Dominic trusted the shrimp. And the pizzas made more use of his beloved marinara sauce. The ricotta, Romano, Parmesan, and provolone cheese all came from Boston -as did the black Sicilian olives. The cook, who was still learning his craft, chopped a lot of parsley and put it on everything-even on the ubiquitous pea soup. (Parsley was “pure chlorophyll,” his mother had told him; it offset garlic and freshened your breath.)

Dominic kept his desserts simple, and-to Nunzi’s vexation-there was nothing remotely Sicilian about them: apple pie, and blueberry cobbler or johnnycake. In Coos County, you could always get apples and blueberries, and Dominic was good with dough.

His breakfasts were even more basic-eggs and bacon, pancakes and French toast, corn muffins and blueberry muffins and scones. In those days, he would make banana bread only when the bananas had turned brown; it was wasteful to use good bananas, his mother had told him.

There was a turkey farm in the Androscoggin Valley, roughly between Berlin and Milan, and the cook made turkey hash with peppers and onions-and a minimal amount of potatoes. “Corned beef isn’t fit for hash-it must be Irish!” Annunziata had lectured to him.

That alcoholic asshole Uncle Umberto, who would drink himself to death before the war was over, never ate a meal cooked by his not-really-a-nephew. The veteran lumberman could scarcely tolerate being a foreman to the ever-increasing numbers of female mill workers, and the women refused to tolerate Umberto at all, which only served to exacerbate the troubled foreman’s drinking. (Minor character or not, Umberto would haunt Dominic’s memory, where the not-really-an-uncle played a major role. How had Dominic’s father been Umberto’s friend? And did Umberto dislike Nunzi because she wouldn’t sleep with him? Given his mother’s banishment from Boston, and her situation in Berlin, Dominic would often torture himself with the thought that Umberto had wrongly imagined Nunzi might be rather easily seduced.) And one winter month, some years ahead of Asshole Umberto’s demise, Annunziata Saetta caught the same flu all the schoolchildren had; Nunzi died before the United States had officially entered the war.

What were Rosie Calogero and young Dom to do? They were twenty-four and seventeen, respectively; they couldn’t very well live together in the same house, not after Dominic’s mother died. Nor could they tolerate living apart-hence the not-quite-cousins had a quandary on their hands. Not even Nunzi could tell them what to do, not anymore; the young woman and noticeably younger man only did what they thought poor Annunziata would have wanted, and maybe she would have.

Young Dom simply lied about his age. He and his (not-really-a) cousin Rosie Calogero were married in mud season, 1941-just before the first big log drives of that year on the Androscoggin, north of Berlin. They were a successful, if not prosperous, young cook and a successful, though not prosperous, schoolteacher. At least their work wasn’t transient, and what need did they have to be prosperous? They were both (in their different ways) young and in love, and they wanted only one child-just one-and, in March 1942, they would have him.

Young Dan was born in Berlin -“just before mud season,” as his father always put it (mud season being more definitive than the calendar)-and almost immediately upon his birth, the boy’s hardworking parents moved away from the mill town. To the cook’s sensibilities, the stench of the paper mill was a constant insult. It seemed plausible to believe that one day the war would be over, and when it was, Berlin would grow bigger-beyond all recognition, except for the smell. But in 1942, the town was already too big and too fetid-and too full of mixed memories-for Dominic Baciagalupo. And Rosie’s prior experience in the North End had made her wary of moving back to Boston, although both the Saetta and Calogero families entreated the young cousins to come “home.”

Children know when they are not loved unconditionally. Dominic was aware that his mother had felt she was spurned. And while Rosie never appeared to resent the circumstances that had compelled her to marry a mere boy, she truly resented how her family had banished her to Berlin in the first place.

The entreaties by the Saetta and Calogero families fell on deaf ears. Who were they to say all was forgiven? Apparently, it was okay with them that the cousins were married, and that they had a child; but what Dominic and Rosie remembered was how it had not been okay for either a Saetta or a Calogero to be pregnant and unmarried.

“Let them find someone else to forgive,” was how Rosie put it. Dominic, knowing how Nunzi had felt, agreed. Boston was a bridge that had been burned behind them; more to the point, the young couple felt confident that they hadn’t burned it.

Surely moral condemnation wasn’t new to New England, not in 1942; and while most people might have chosen Boston over Twisted River, the decisions made by many young married couples are circumstantial. To the newly formed Baciagalupo family, Twisted River may have seemed remote and raw-looking, but there was no paper mill. The sawmill and logging-camp settlement had never kept a cook through a single mud season, and there was no school-not in a town largely inhabited by itinerants. There was, however, the potential for a school in the smaller but more permanent-seeming settlement on Phillips Brook-namely, Paris (formerly, West Dummer), which was only a few miles on the log-hauler road from the visibly scruffier settlement in Twisted River, where the logging company had heretofore refused to invest in a permanent cookhouse. According to the company, the portable, makeshift kitchen and the dining wanigans would have to do. That this made Twisted River look more like a logging camp than an actual town failed to discourage Dominic and Rosie Baciagalupo, to whom Twisted River beckoned as an opportunity-albeit a rough one.

In the summer of ’42-leaving themselves enough time to order textbooks and other supplies, in preparation for the new Paris school-the cook and the schoolteacher, together with their infant son, followed the Androscoggin north to Milan, and then traveled north-northwest on the haul road from the Pontook Reservoir. Where Twisted River poured into the Pontook was simply called “the narrows;” there wasn’t even a sawmill, and the rudimentary Dead Woman Dam was as yet unnamed. (As Ketchum would say: “Things were a lot less fancy then.”)

The couple with their child arrived at the basin below Twisted River before nightfall and the mosquitoes. To those few who remembered the young family’s arrival, the man with the limp and his pretty but older-looking wife with her new baby must have appeared hopeful-although they carried only a few clothes with them. Their books and the rest of their clothes, together with the cook’s kitchenware, had come ahead of them-all of it on an empty logging truck, covered with a tarp.

The kitchen and dining wanigans needed more than a good cleaning: A full-scale restoration was what the wanigans wanted-and what the cook would insist on having, if he was going to stay. And if the logging company expected the cook to remain past the next mud season, they would have to build a permanent cookhouse-with bedrooms above the cookhouse, where the cook and his family intended to live.

Rosie was more modest in her demands: A one-room school would be sufficient for Paris, née West Dummer, where there had never been a school before; there were only a few families with school-age children on Phillips Brook in 1942, and fewer still in Twisted River. There would soon be more-after the war, when the men came home-but Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wouldn’t get to see the men return from war, nor would she ever educate their children.

The young schoolteacher died in the late winter of 1944-shortly after her son, Dan, had turned two. The boy had no memory of his mother, whom he knew only by the photographs his father had kept-and by the passages she’d underlined in her many books, which his dad had saved, too. (As in the case of Dominic Baciagalupo’s mother, Rosie had liked to read novels.)

To judge Dominic by his apparent pessimism-there was an air of aloofness about his conduct, or a noticeable detachment in his demeanor, and even something melancholic in his bearing-you might conclude that he had never recovered from the tragic death of his twenty-seven-year-old wife. Yet, in addition to his beloved son, Dominic Baciagalupo had got one thing that he’d wanted: The cookhouse had been built to his specifications.

Apparently, there was a Paris Manufacturing Company connection; some bigwig’s wife, passing through Berlin, had raved about Dominic’s cooking. The word had gotten around: The food was way better than standard logging-camp fare. It wouldn’t have been right for Dominic to just pack up and leave, but the cook and his son had stayed for ten years.

Of course there was an old logger or two-chief among them, Ketchum-who knew the miserable reason. The cook, who was a widower at twenty, blamed himself for his wife’s death-and he wasn’t the only man who made living in Twisted River resemble a mercilessly extended act of penance. (One had only to think of Ketchum.)

IN 1954, DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO was only thirty-young to have a twelve-year-old son-but Dominic had the look of a man long resigned to his fate. He was so unflinchingly calm that he radiated a kind of acceptance that could easily be mistaken for pessimism. There was nothing pessimistic about the good care he took of his boy, Daniel, and it was only for the sake of his son that the cook ever complained about the harshness or the limitations of life in Twisted River -the town still didn’t have a school, for example.

As for the school the Paris Manufacturing Company had built on Phillips Brook, there’d been no discernible improvements on the quality of education Rosie Baciagalupo had provided. Granted, the one-room schoolhouse had been rebuilt since the forties, but the school’s thuggish culture was dominated by the older boys who’d been held back a grade or two. There was no controlling them-the long-suffering schoolteacher was no Rosie Baciagalupo. The Paris school’s thugs were inclined to bully the cook’s son-not only because Danny lived in Twisted River and his dad limped. They also teased the boy for the proper way in which he invariably spoke. Young Dan’s enunciation was exact; his diction never descended to the dropped consonants and broad vowels of the Paris kids, and they abused him for it. (“The West Dummer kids,” Ketchum unfailingly called them.)

“Stand your ground, Daniel-just don’t get killed,” his father predictably told him. “I promise you, one day we’ll leave here.”

But whatever its faults, and his family’s sad story, the Paris Manufacturing Company School on Phillips Brook was the only school the boy had attended; even the thought of leaving that school made Danny Baciagalupo anxious.

“ANGEL WAS TOO GREEN to be felling trees in the forest, or working on the log brows,” Ketchum said from the folding cot in the kitchen. Both the cook and his son knew that Ketchum talked in his sleep, especially when he’d been drinking.

A log brow, which was made of log cribwork and built into a bank on the side of a haul road, had to be slightly higher than the bed of the logging truck, which was pulled up beside it. Logs brought in from the woods could be stored behind the cribwork until they were ready to be loaded. Alternatively, log skids formed a ramp up to the truck bed; then a horse, or a tractor-powered jammer (a hoist), was used to load the logs. Ketchum wouldn’t have wanted Angel Pope to have anything to do with loading or unloading logs.

Danny Baciagalupo had begun his kitchen chores when Ketchum spoke again in his drunken stupor. “He should have been sticking lumber, Cookie.” The cook nodded at the stove, though he knew perfectly well that Ketchum was still asleep, without once looking at the veteran riverman.

Stacking boards-or “sticking lumber,” as it was called-was usually a beginning-laborer position at a sawmill. Even the cook wouldn’t have considered Angel too green for that. The lumber was stacked by alternating layers of boards with “stickers;” these were narrow slats of wood laid perpendicular to the boards to separate them, to allow the air to circulate for drying. Dominic Baciagalupo might have allowed Danny to do that.

“Progressively increasing mechanization,” Ketchum mumbled. If the big man had so much as attempted to roll over on the folding cot, he would have fallen off or collapsed the cot. But Ketchum lay un-moving on his back, with his cast held across his chest-as if he were about to be buried at sea. The unzipped sleeping bag covered him like a flag; his left hand touched the floor.

“Oh, boy-here we go again,” the cook said, smiling at his son. Progressively increasing mechanization was a sore point with Ketchum. By 1954, rubber-tired skidders were already appearing in the woods. The larger trees were generally being yarded by tractors; the smaller horse-logging crews were being paid what was called a “piece rate” (by the cord or thousand board feet) to cut and haul timber to an assigned roadside location. As rubber-tired logging equipment became more common, an old horse-logger like Ketchum knew that the trees were being harvested at a faster rate. Ketchum was not a faster-rate man.

Danny opened the tricky outer door of the cookhouse kitchen and went outside to pee. (Although his father disapproved of peeing outdoors, Ketchum had taught young Dan to enjoy it.) It was still dark, and the mist from the rushing river was cold and wet on the boy’s face.

“Fuck the donkey-engine men!” Ketchum shouted in his sleep. “Fuck the asshole truck drivers, too!”

“You’re quite right about that,” the cook said to his sleeping friend. The twelve-year-old came back inside, closing the kitchen’s outer door. Ketchum was sitting up on the cot; perhaps his own shouting had woken him. He was frightening to behold. The unnatural blackness of his hair and beard gave him the appearance of someone who’d been burned in a terrible fire-and now the livid scar on his forehead seemed especially ashen in the whitish light from the fluorescent lamps. Ketchum was assessing his surroundings in an unfocused but wary way.

“Don’t forget to fuck Constable Carl, too,” the cook said to him.

“Absolutely,” Ketchum readily agreed. “That fucking cowboy.”

Constable Carl had given Ketchum the scar. The constable routinely broke up fights at the dance hall and in the hostelry bars. He’d broken up one of Ketchum’s fights by cracking the logger’s head with the long barrel of his Colt.45-“the kind of show-off weapon only an asshole would have in New Hampshire,” in Ketchum’s opinion. (Hence Constable Carl was a “cowboy.”)

Yet, in Danny Baciagalupo’s opinion, getting smacked on your forehead with a Colt.45 was preferable to Constable Carl shooting you in the foot, or in the knee-a method of breaking up fights that the cowboy generally favored with the Canadian itinerants. This usually meant that the French Canadians couldn’t work in the woods; they had to go back to Quebec, which was okay with Constable Carl.

“Was I saying something?” Ketchum asked the cook and his son.

“You were positively eloquent on the subject of the donkey-engine men and the truck drivers,” Dominic told his friend.

“Fuck them,” Ketchum automatically replied. “I’m going north-anywhere but here,” he announced. Ketchum was still sitting on the cot, where he regarded his cast as if it were a newly acquired but utterly useless limb; he stared at it with hatred.

“Yeah, sure,” Dominic said.

Danny was working on the countertop, cutting up the peppers and tomatoes for the omelets; the boy knew that Ketchum talked about “going north” all the time. Both the Millsfield and the Second College Grant regions of New Hampshire, which is now officially known as the Great North Woods, and the Aziscohos Mountain area southeast of Wilsons Mills, Maine, were the logging territories that beckoned to Ketchum. But the veteran river driver and horse-logger knew that the aforementioned “progressively increasing mechanization” would go north, too; in fact, it was already there.

“You should leave here, Cookie-you know you should,” Ketchum said, as the first of the headlights from the kitchen help shone into the cookhouse.

“Yeah, sure,” the cook said again. Like Dominic Baciagalupo, Ketchum talked about leaving, but he stayed.

The engine sound of the Indian dishwasher’s truck stood out among the other vehicles. “Constipated Christ!” said Ketchum, as he finally stood up. “Does Jane ever shift out of first gear?”

The cook, who had not once looked at Ketchum while he was working at the stove, looked at him now. “I didn’t hire her for her driving, Ketchum.”

“Yeah, sure,” was all Ketchum said, as Injun Jane opened the outer door; the Indian dishwasher and the rest of the kitchen help came inside. (Danny briefly wondered why Jane was the only one who seemed to have no trouble dealing with that tricky door.)

Ketchum had folded up the cot and the sleeping bag; he was putting them away when Jane spoke. “Uh-oh-there’s a logger in the kitchen,” she said. “That’s never a good sign.”

“You and your signs,” Ketchum said, without looking at her. “Is your husband dead yet, or do we have to postpone the celebration?”

“I haven’t married him yet, and I have no plans to,” Jane replied, as always. The Indian dishwasher lived with Constable Carl-a bone of contention with Ketchum and the cook. Dominic didn’t like the cowboy any better than Ketchum did-nor had Jane been with the constable long, and (speaking of signs) she gave some vague indication that she might leave him. He beat her. The cook and Ketchum had more than once remarked on Jane’s black eyes and split lips, and even Danny had noticed the thumb-size and fingerprint-shaped bruises on her upper arms, where the constable had evidently grabbed her and shaken her.

“I can take a beating,” was what Jane usually said to Ketchum or the cook, though it clearly pleased her that they were concerned for her safety. “But Carl should watch out,” she only occasionally added. “One day, I just might beat him back.”

Jane was a big woman, and she greeted the twelve-year-old (as she always did) by hugging him against one of her massive hips. The boy came up to her breasts, which were monumental; not even the baggy sweatshirt that she wore in the early-morning cold could conceal them. Injun Jane had a ton of coal-black hair, too-although this was unfailingly arranged in one thick braid, which hung to her rump. Even in sweatpants, or baggy dungarees-her kitchen clothes of choice-Jane couldn’t hide her rump.

On top of her head, with a hole cut out of it for the braid, was a 1951 Cleveland Indians baseball cap-a gift from Ketchum. One summer, sick of the blackflies and the mosquitoes, Ketchum had tried driving a truck; it was a long-distance lumber hauler, and he’d actually acquired the baseball cap in far-off Cleveland. (Danny could only imagine that this must have happened before Ketchum had decided that all truck drivers were assholes.)

“Well, Jane, you’re an Injun-this is the cap for you,” Ketchum had told her. The logo on the cap was the red face of Chief Wahoo, a toothy Indian with a crazed grin, his head, and part of his feather, encircled with the letter C. The wishbone-shaped C was red; the cap was blue. As for who Chief Wahoo was, neither Ketchum nor Injun Jane knew.

The twelve-year-old had heard the story frequently; it was one of Jane’s favorites. One of the more memorable times Danny saw her take the Cleveland Indians cap off was when she told the boy how Ketchum had given the cap to her. “Ketchum was actually kind of good-looking, when he was younger,” Jane never failed to tell the boy. “Though he was never as good-looking as your dad-or as good-looking as you’re going to be,” the Indian dishwasher always added. Her grinning-Indian baseball cap was water-marked and stained with cooking oil. Jane liked to put the Chief Wahoo cap on the twelve-year-old’s head, where it rested low on his forehead, just above the boy’s eyes; he could feel his hair sticking out of the hole in the back of the cap.

Danny had never seen Injun Jane’s hair unbraided, although she’d been his babysitter many times, especially when he was younger-too young, at the time, to accompany his dad on the river drives, which meant that the boy was too young to get a decent night’s sleep in the kitchen wanigan. Jane had regularly put young Dan to bed in his room above the cookhouse kitchen. (Danny had assumed that she must have slept in his dad’s bedroom on those nights when his father was away.)

The next morning, when Jane made the boy breakfast, there was no evidence that her long black braid had ever been undone-though it was hard to imagine that sleeping with a braid of hair that long and thick could be very comfortable. For all Danny knew, Jane might have slept in the Cleveland Indians baseball cap, too. The crazily grinning Chief Wahoo was a demonic, ever-watchful presence.

“I’ll leave you ladies to your chores,” Ketchum was saying. “Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to be in the way.”

“Lord knows,” one of the kitchen helpers said. She was one of the sawmill workers’ wives-most of the kitchen helpers were. They were all married and fat; only Injun Jane was fatter, and she wasn’t married to Constable Carl.

The constable was fat, too. The cowboy was as big as Ketchum-although Ketchum wasn’t fat-and Carl was mean. Danny had the impression that everyone despised the cowboy, but Constable Carl always ran for office unopposed; quite possibly, no one else in Twisted River had the slightest desire to be constable. The job chiefly entailed breaking up fights, and finding ways to send the French Canadian itinerants back to Quebec. Constable Carl’s way-namely, shooting them in the feet or in their knees-was mean, but it worked. Yet who wanted to split open people’s heads with a gun barrel, or shoot people in the feet and knees? Danny wondered. And why would Injun Jane, whom the boy adored, want to live with a cowboy like that?

“Living here can be compromising, Daniel,” the boy’s father often said.

“Women have to lose their looks before they’ll live with Constable Carl,” Ketchum had tried to explain to young Dan. “But when the women lose too much of their looks, Carl finds someone else.”

All the kitchen help, certainly each and every one of those sawmill workers’ wives, had lost their looks-in Danny Baciagalupo’s estimation. If Injun Jane was fatter than all of them, she still had a pretty face and amazing hair; and she had such sensational breasts that the cook’s son couldn’t bear to think about them, which meant (of course) that he couldn’t keep his thoughts from drifting to Jane’s breasts at unexpected times.

“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.

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.

The near-perfect choreography in the kitchen would have been imperceptible to a stranger, but Danny and the Indian dishwasher were used to it. They saw that everything was always the same, right down to the cook holding the hot tray of scones with the oven mitts while the sawmill workers’ wives deftly got out of his way-one of them knocking the corn muffins out of the muffin tins into a big china bowl as she did so. No one bumped into anyone, big as they all were-save Danny and his dad, who were (in the present company) noticeably small.

In the cramped aisle between the countertop and the stove, where there was a pan or a pot on six of the eight burners, the cook and the Indian dishwasher passed back-to-back. This wasn’t new-it happened all the time-but Danny caught a nuance in their dance, and he overheard (as he previously hadn’t) the brief but distinct dialogue between them. As they passed, back-to-back, Jane deliberately bumped Dominic-she just touched her big rump to the middle of his back, because the top of the cook’s head came up only to Jane’s shoulders.

“Do-si-do your partner,” the dishwasher said.

Despite his limp, the cook caught his balance; not one scone slid off the hot tray. “Do-si-do,” Dominic Baciagalupo softly said. Injun Jane had already passed behind him. No one but Danny had noticed the contact, though if Ketchum had been there-drunk or sober-Ketchum surely would have noticed. (But Ketchum, of course, was outside-presumably, still pissing.)

CHAPTER 3. A WORLD OF ACCIDENTS

ANGEL POPE HAD GONE UNDER THE LOGS ON THURSDAY. After breakfast on Friday, Injun Jane drove Danny in her truck to the Paris Manufacturing Company School, on Phillips Brook, and then drove back to the cookhouse in Twisted River.

The river-driving crew would be prodding logs on a site just upstream of Dead Woman Dam. The cook and his kitchen helpers would prepare four midday meals; they would backpack two meals to the rivermen, and drive two meals to the loggers loading the trucks along the haul road between the town of Twisted River and the Pontook Reservoir.

Fridays were hard enough without the woe of losing Angel. Everyone was in too much of a hurry for the weekend to start, although weekends in Twisted River (in the cook’s opinion) amounted to little more than drinking too much and the usual sexual missteps-“not to mention the subsequent embarrassment or shame,” as Danny Baciagalupo had heard his dad say (repeatedly). And from Dominic’s point of view, the Friday-night meal in the cookhouse was the week’s most demanding. For the practicing Catholics among the French Canadians, the cook made his renowned meatless pizzas, but for the “non-mackerel-snappers”-as Ketchum was fond of describing himself, and most of the loggers and sawmill workers-a meatless pizza on a Friday night wouldn’t suffice.

When Injun Jane dropped Danny at the Paris school, she punched him lightly on his upper arm; it was where the older boys at school would hit him, if he was lucky. Naturally, the older boys hit him harder than Jane did-whether they hit him on the upper arm or somewhere else. “Keep your chin down, your shoulders relaxed, your elbows in, and your hands up around your face,” Jane told him. “You want to look like you’re going to throw a punch-then you kick the bastard in the balls.”

“I know,” the twelve-year-old told her. He had never thrown a punch at anyone-nor had he ever kicked someone in the balls. Jane’s instructions to the boy bewildered him; he thought that her directions must have been based on some advice Constable Carl had given her, but Jane only had to worry about the constable hitting her. Young Dan believed that nobody else would have dared to confront her-maybe not even Ketchum.

While Jane would kiss Danny good-bye at the cookhouse, or virtually anywhere in Twisted River, she never kissed him when she dropped him at the Paris Manufacturing Company School -or when she picked him up in the vicinity of Phillips Brook, where those West Dummer kids might be hanging out. If the older boys saw Injun Jane kiss Danny, they would give him more trouble than usual. On this particular Friday, the twelve-year-old just sat beside Jane in the truck, not moving. Young Dan might have momentarily forgotten where they were-in which case, he was expecting her to kiss him-or else he’d thought of a question to ask Jane about his mother.

“What is it, Danny?” the dishwasher said.

“Do you do-si-do my dad?” the boy asked her.

Jane smiled at him, but it was a more measured smile than he was used to seeing on her pretty face; that she didn’t answer made him anxious. “Don’t tell me to ask Ketchum,” the boy blurted out. This made Injun Jane laugh; her smile was more natural, and more immediately forthcoming. (As always, Chief Wahoo was madly grinning.)

“I was going to say that you should ask your father,” the dishwasher said. “Don’t be anxious,” she added, punching his upper arm again-this time a little harder. “Danny?” Jane said, as the twelve-year-old was climbing out of the truck cab. “Don’t ask Ketchum.”

IT WAS A WORLD of accidents, the cook was thinking. In the kitchen, he was cooking up a storm. The lamb hash, which he’d served for breakfast, would be good for a midday meal, too; he’d also made a chickpea soup (for the Catholics) and a venison stew with carrots and pearl onions. Yes, there was the infernal pot of baked beans, and the omnipresent pea soup with parsley. But there was little else that was standard logging-camp fare.

One of the sawmill workers’ wives was cooking some Italian sweet sausage on the griddle. The cook kept telling her to break up the sausage meat as she cooked it-whereupon another of the sawmill workers’ wives started singing. “Try beatin’ your meat with a spatula!” she sang to the unlikely but overfamiliar tune of “Vaya con Dios;” the other women joined in.

The lead singer among the sawmill workers’ wives was the woman the cook had put in charge of proofing the yeast for the pizza dough-he was keeping an eye on her. Dominic wanted to mix the pizza dough and start it rising before they drove off on the haul road to deliver the midday meals. (On a Friday night, there would be a bunch of pissed-off French Canadians if there weren’t enough meatless pizzas for the mackerel-snappers.)

The cook was making cornbread, too. He wanted to start the stuffing for the roast chickens he was also serving in the cookhouse Friday night; he would mix the sausage with the cornbread and some celery and sage, adding the eggs and butter when he got back to his kitchen from the river site and wherever they were loading the trucks. In a large saucepan, in which Danny had warmed the maple syrup, Dominic was boiling the butternut squash; he would mash it up and mix it with maple syrup, and add the butter when he returned to town. On Friday night, together with the stuffed roast chickens, he would serve scalloped potatoes with the whipped squash. This was arguably Ketchum’s favorite meal; most Fridays, Ketchum ate some of the meatless pizza, too.

Dominic was feeling sorry for Ketchum. The cook didn’t know if Ketchum truly believed they would find Angel in the spillway of the upper dam Sunday morning, or if Ketchum hoped they would never find the boy’s body. All the cook had determined was that he didn’t want young Daniel to see Angel’s body. Dominic Baciagalupo wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Angel’s body-or ever find the boy, either.

The pot of water-in which the cook had poured a couple of ounces of vinegar, for the poached eggs-was coming to a boil again. For breakfast, he’d served the lamb hash with poached eggs, but when he served the hash as a midday meal, he would just have lots of ketchup handy; poached eggs didn’t travel well. When the water and vinegar came to a boil, Dominic poured it over the cutting boards to sterilize them.

One of the sawmill workers’ wives had made about fifty bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with the leftover breakfast bacon. She was eating one of the sandwiches while she eyed the cook-some mischief was on her mind, Dominic could tell. Her name was Dot; she was far too large to be a Dot, and she’d had so many children that she seemed to be a woman who had abandoned every other capacity she’d ever conceivably possessed, except her appetite, which the cook didn’t like to think about at all. (She had too many appetites, Dominic imagined.)

The sawmill worker’s wife with the spatula-the one who needed to be reminded to break up the sausage on the griddle-appeared to be in on the mischief, because she had her eye on the cook, too. Since the woman eating the BLT had her mouth full, the one with the spatula spoke first. Her name was May; she was bigger than Dot and had been married twice. May’s children with her second husband were the same age as her grandchildren-that is, the children of her children from her first marriage-and this unnatural phenomenon had completely unhinged May and her second husband, to the degree that they couldn’t recover sufficiently to console each other concerning the sheer strangeness of their lives.

What Dominic found unnatural was May’s ceaseless need to lament the fact that she had children the age of her grandchildren. Why was it such a big deal? the cook had wondered.

“Just look at her,” Ketchum had said, meaning May. “For her, everything is a big fucking deal.”

Maybe so, the cook considered, as May pointed the spatula at him. Wiggling her hips in a seductive manner, she said in a purring voice: “Oh, Cookie, I would leave my miserable life behind-if only you would marry me, and cook for me, too!”

Dominic was using the long-handled dish scrubber on the cutting boards, which were soaking in boiling water; the vinegar in the hot water made his eyes tear. “You’re married already, May,” he said. “If you married me, and we had children, you’d have kids younger than your grandchildren. I dare not guess how that would make you feel.”

May looked genuinely stricken by the idea; maybe he shouldn’t have raised the dreaded subject, the cook was thinking. But Dot, who was still eating the BLT, spasmodically laughed with her mouth full-whereupon she commenced to choke. The kitchen helpers, May among them, stood waiting for the cook to do something.

Dominic Baciagalupo was no stranger to choking. He’d seen a lot of loggers and mill workers choke-he knew what to do. Years ago, he’d saved one of the dance-hall women; she was drunk, and she was choking on her own vomit, but the cook had known how to handle her. It was a famous story-Ketchum had even titled it, “How Cookie Saved Six-Pack Pam.” The woman was as tall and rawboned as Ketchum, and Dominic had needed Ketchum’s help to knock her to her knees, and then wrestle her to all fours, where the cook could apply a makeshift Heimlich maneuver. (Six-Pack Pam was so named because this was Ketchum’s estimate of the woman’s nightly quota, before she started on the bourbon.)

Dr. Heimlich was born in 1920, but his now-famous maneuver hadn’t been introduced in Coos County in 1954. Dominic Baciagalupo had been cooking for big eaters for fourteen years. Countless people had choked in front of him; three of them had died. The cook had observed that pounding someone on the back didn’t always work. Ketchum’s original maneuver, which entailed holding the chokers upside down and vigorously shaking them, had been known to fail, too.

But once Ketchum had been forced to improvise, and Dominic had witnessed the astonishingly successful result. A drunken logger had been too pugnacious and too big for Ketchum to shake upside down. Ketchum kept dropping the man, who was not only choking to death-he was trying to kill Ketchum, too.

Ketchum repeatedly punched the madman in the upper abdomen-all uppercuts. Upon the fourth or fifth uppercut, the choker expectorated a large, unchewed piece of lamb, which he had inadvertently inhaled.

Over the years, the cook had modified Ketchum’s improvisational method to suit his own smaller size and less violent nature. Dominic would slip under the flailing arms of the choker and get behind him or her. He would hold the victim around the upper abdomen and apply sudden, upward pressure with his locked hands-just under the rib cage. This had worked every time.

In the kitchen, when Dot began to flail her arms, Dominic quickly ducked behind her. “Oh, my God, Cookie-save her!” May cried; the children-grandchildren crisis was momentarily off her mind, if not entirely forgotten.

With his nose in the warm, sweaty area at the back of Dot’s neck, the cook could barely join his hands together as he reached around her. Dot’s breasts were too big and low; Dominic needed to lift them out of the way to locate where Dot’s rib cage ended and her upper abdomen began. But when he held her breasts, albeit briefly, Dot covered his hands with her own and forcefully shoved her butt into his stomach. She was laughing hysterically, not choking at all; crazy May and the rest of the kitchen helpers were laughing with her. “Oh, Cookie-how did you know that’s how I like it?” Dot moaned.

“I always thought that Cookie was a do-it-from-behind kind of guy,” May said matter-of-factly.

“Oh, you little dog!” Dot cried, grinding against the cook. “I just love how you always say, ‘Behind you!’”

Dominic finally freed his hands from her breasts; he lightly pushed himself away from her.

“I guess we’re not big enough for him, Dot,” May said sorrowfully. Something mean had entered her voice; the cook could hear it. I’m going to pay for the children-grandchildren remark, Dominic was thinking. “Or maybe we’re just not Injun enough,” May said.

The cook didn’t so much as look at her; the other kitchen helpers, even Dot, had turned away. May was defiantly patting the lamb hash flat against the griddle with the spatula. Dominic reached around her and turned the griddle off. He touched his fingers to the small of her back as he passed behind her. “Let’s pack up, ladies,” he said, almost the same way he usually said it. “You and May can pack the meals to the river-men,” the cook told Dot. “The rest of us will drive till we find the loggers on the haul road.” He didn’t speak to May, or look at her.

“So Dot and I do all the walkin’?” May asked him.

“You should walk more than you do,” Dominic said, still not looking at her. “Walking’s good for you.”

“Well, I made the damn BLTs-I guess I can carry them,” Dot said.

“Take the lamb hash with you, too,” the cook told her.

Someone asked if there were any “ultra-Catholic” French Canadians among the river drivers; maybe Dot and May should pack some of the chickpea soup to the river site, too.

“I’m not carryin’ soup on my back,” May said.

“The mackerel-snappers can pick the bacon out of the BLTs,” Dot suggested.

“I don’t think there are any mackerel-snappers among these river-men,” Dominic said. “We’ll take the chickpea soup and the venison stew to the loggers on the haul road. If there are any angry Catholics among the river drivers, tell them to blame me.”

“Oh, I’ll tell them to blame you, all right,” May told him. She kept staring at him, but he wouldn’t once look at her. When they were going their separate ways, May said: “I’m too big for you to ignore me, Cookie.”

“Just be glad I’m ignoring you, May,” he told her.

THE COOK HAD NOT expected to see Ketchum among the loggers loading the trucks on the haul road; even injured, Ketchum was a better river driver than any of the men on the river site. “That moron doctor told me not to get the cast wet,” Ketchum explained.

“Why would you get the cast wet?” Dominic asked him. “I’ve never seen you fall in.”

“Maybe I saw enough of the river yesterday, Cookie.”

“There’s venison stew,” one of the kitchen helpers was telling the loggers.

There’d been an accident with one of the horses, and another accident with the tractor-powered jammer. Ketchum said that one of the French Canadians had lost a finger unloading logs from a log brow, too.

“Well, it’s Friday,” Dominic said, as if he expected accidents among fools on a Friday. “There’s chickpea soup for those of you who care that it’s Friday,” the cook announced.

Ketchum noted his old friend’s impatience. “What’s the matter, Cookie? What happened?” Ketchum asked him.

“Dot and May were just fooling around,” the cook explained. He told Ketchum what had happened-what May had said about Injun Jane, too.

“Don’t tell me-tell Jane,” Ketchum told him. “Jane will tear May a new asshole, if you tell her.”

“I know, Ketchum-that’s why I’m not telling her.”

“If Jane had seen Dot holding your hands on her tits, she would have already torn Dot a new asshole, Cookie.”

Dominic Baciagalupo knew that, too. The world was a precarious place; the cook didn’t want to know the statistics regarding how many new assholes were being torn every minute. In his time, Ketchum had torn many; he would think nothing of tearing a few more.

“There’s roast chicken tonight, with stuffing and scalloped potatoes,” Dominic told Ketchum.

Ketchum looked pained to hear it. “I have a date,” the big man said. “Just my luck to miss stuffed chicken.”

“A date?” the cook said with disgust. He never thought of Ketchum’s relationships-mainly, with the dance-hall women-as dates. And lately Ketchum had been seeing Six-Pack Pam. God only knew how much they could drink together! Dominic Baciagalupo thought. Having saved her, the cook had a soft spot for Six-Pack, but he sensed that she didn’t like him much; maybe she resented being saved.

“Are you still seeing Pam?” Dominic asked his hard-drinking friend.

But Ketchum didn’t want to talk about it. “You should be concerned that May knows about you and Jane, Cookie. Don’t you think you should be a little worried?”

Dominic turned his attention to where the kitchen helpers were, and what they were doing; they had set up a folding table by the side of the haul road. There were propane burners in the wanigan; the burners kept the soup and the stew hot. There were big bowls and spoons on the folding table; the loggers went into the wanigan, each with a bowl and a spoon in hand. The women served them in the wanigan.

“You don’t look worried enough, Cookie,” Ketchum told him. “If May knows about Jane, Dot knows. If Dot knows, every woman in your kitchen knows. Even I know, but I don’t give a shit about it.”

“I know. I appreciate it,” Dominic said.

“My point is, how long before Constable Carl knows? Speaking of assholes,” Ketchum said. He rested his heavy cast on the cook’s shoulder. “Look at me, Cookie.” With his good hand, Ketchum pointed to his forehead-at the long, livid scar. “My head’s harder than yours, Cookie. You don’t want the cowboy to know about you and Jane-believe me.”

Who’s your date? Dominic Baciagalupo almost asked his old friend, just to change the subject. But the cook didn’t really want to know who Ketchum was screwing-especially if it wasn’t Six-Pack Pam.

Most nights, increasingly, when Jane went home, it was so late that Constable Carl had already passed out; the cowboy wouldn’t wake up until after she’d left for work in the morning. There was only the occasional trouble-mostly when Jane went home too early. But even a dumb drunk like the constable would eventually figure it out. Or one of the kitchen helpers would say something to her husband; the sawmill workers were not necessarily as fond of the cook and Injun Jane as the rivermen and the other loggers were.

“I get your point,” the cook said to Ketchum.

“Shit, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “Does Danny know about you and Jane?”

“I was going to tell him,” Dominic answered.

“Going to,” Ketchum said derisively. “Is that like saying you were going to wear a condom, or is that like wearing one?”

“I get your point,” the cook said again.

“Nine o’clock, Sunday morning,” Ketchum told him. Dominic could only guess that it was a date of two nights’ duration that Ketchum was having-more like a spree or a bender, maybe.

IN TWISTED RIVER, if there were nights the cook could have concealed from his son, they would have been Saturday nights, when the whoring around and drinking to excess were endemic to a community staking an improbable claim to permanence in such close proximity to a violent river-not to mention the people, who made a plainly perilous living and looked upon their Saturday nights as an indulgence they deserved.

Dominic Baciagalupo, who was both a teetotaler and a widower not in the habit of whoring around, was nonetheless sympathetic to the various self-destructions-in-progress he would witness on an average Saturday night. Maybe the cook revealed more disapproval for Ketchum’s behavior than he would ever show toward Twisted River ’s other louts and miscreants. Because Ketchum was no fool, perhaps the cook had less patience for Ketchum’s foolishness, but to a smart twelve-year-old-and Danny was both observant and smart-there appeared to be more than impatience motivating his father’s everlasting disappointment in Ketchum. And if Injun Jane didn’t defend Ketchum from the cook’s condemnation, young Dan did.

That Saturday night, when Angel had possibly arrived at Dead Woman Dam-where, because people float lower than logs, the boy’s battered body might already have passed under the containment boom, in which case the young Canadian would be eddying in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction to the right or left of the main dam and the sluice spillway-Danny Baciagalupo was helping his dad wipe down the tables after supper had been served in the cookhouse. The kitchen help had gone home, leaving Injun Jane to scour the last of the pots and pans while she waited for the washing cycles to end, so she could put all the towels and other linens in the dryers.

Whole families came to the cookhouse for Saturday-night supper; some of the men were already drunk and fighting with their wives, and a few of the women (in turn) lashed out at their children. One of the sawmill men had puked in the washroom, and two drunken loggers had shown up late for supper-naturally, they’d insisted on being fed. The spaghetti and meatballs, which the cook made every Saturday night-for the kids-was congealed and growing cold and was so beneath Dominic Baciagalupo’s standards that he fixed the men some fresh penne with a little ricotta and the perpetual parsley.

“This is fuckin’ delicious!” one of the drunks had declared.

“What’s it called, Cookie?” the other hammered logger asked.

“Prezzémolo,” Dominic said importantly, the sheer exoticness of the word washing over the drunken loggers like another round of beer. The cook had made them repeat the word until they could say it correctly-prets-ZAY-mo-loh.

Jane was disgusted; she knew it was nothing more exotic than the Italian word for parsley. “For two drunks who were born late!” Jane complained.

“You would let Ketchum go hungry, if it was Ketchum,” Danny said to his father. “You’re wicked harsh on Ketchum.”

But the two drunks had been given a special supper and sent on their contented way. Danny and his dad and Jane were at the tail end of their Saturday-night chores when the wind from the suddenly kicked-open door to the dining room heralded another late arrival at the cookhouse.

From the kitchen, Jane couldn’t see the visitor. She shouted in the direction of the rushing wind at the dining-room door. “You’re too late! Supper is over!”

“I ain’t hungry,” said Six-Pack Pam.

Indeed, there was nothing hunger-driven in Pam’s appearance; what little flesh she had hung loosely from her big bones, and her lean, feral-looking face, tight-lipped and drawn, suggested more of a mostly-beer diet than a penchant for overeating. Yet she was tall and broad-shouldered enough to wear Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt without looking lost in it, and her lank blond hair, which was streaked with gray, appeared to be clean but uncared for-like the rest of her. She held a flashlight as big as a billy club. (Twisted River was not a well-lit town.) Not even the sleeves of Ketchum’s shirt were too long for her.

“So I guess you’ve killed him and claimed his clothes for your own,” the cook said, watching her warily.

“I ain’t chokin’, either, Cookie,” Pam told him.

“Not this time, Six-Pack!” Jane called from the kitchen. Danny guessed that the ladies must have known each other well enough for Jane to have recognized Pam’s voice.

“It’s kinda late for the hired help to still be here, ain’t it?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic recognized Six-Pack’s special drunkenness with an envy and nostalgia that surprised him-the big woman could hold her beer and bourbon, better than Ketchum. Jane had come out of the kitchen with a pasta pot under her arm; the open end of the pot was leveled at Pam like the mouth of a cannon.

Young Dan, in a presexual state of one-third arousal and two-thirds premonition, remembered Ketchum’s remark about women losing their looks, and how the various degrees of lost looks registered with Constable Carl. To the twelve-year-old, Jane hadn’t lost her looks-not quite yet. Her face was still pretty, her long braid was striking, and more radiant to imagine was all that coal-black hair when she undid the braid. There were her stupendous breasts to contemplate, too.

Yet seeing Six-Pack Pam unhinged Danny in a different but similar way: She was as handsome (in the category of strong-looking) as a man, and what was womanly about her came with a rawness-how she had insouciantly thrown on Ketchum’s shirt, without a bra, so that her loose breasts swelled the shirt-and now her eyes darted from Jane to Danny, and then fixed upon the cook with the venturesome but nervous daring of a young girl.

“I need your help with Ketchum, Cookie,” Pam said. Dominic was fearful that Ketchum had had a heart attack, or worse; he hoped that Six-Pack would spare young Daniel the gruesome details.

“I can help you with Ketchum,” Injun Jane told Pam. “I suppose he’s passed out somewhere-if so, I can carry him easier than Cookie can.”

“He’s passed out naked on the toilet, and I ain’t got but one toilet,” Pam said to Dominic, not looking at Jane.

“I hope he was just reading,” the cook replied.

Ketchum appeared to be making his dogged way through Dominic Baciagalupo’s books, which were really Dominic’s mother’s books and Rosie’s beloved novels. For someone who’d left school when he was younger than Danny, Ketchum read the books he borrowed with a determination bordering on lunacy. He returned the books to the cook with words circled on almost every page-not underlined passages, or even complete sentences, but just isolated words. (Danny wondered if his mom had taught Ketchum to read that way.)

Once young Dan had made a list of the words Ketchum had circled in his mother’s copy of Hawthorne ’s The Scarlet Letter. Collectively, the words made no sense at all.

symbolize

whipping-post

sex

malefactresses

pang

bosom

embroidered

writhing

ignominious

matronly

tremulous

punishment

salvation

plaintive

wailings

possessed

misbegotten

sinless

innermost

retribution

paramour

besmirches

hideous

And these were only the words Ketchum had circled in the first four chapters!

“What do you suppose he’s thinking?” Danny had asked his dad. The cook had held his tongue, though it was hard to resist the temptation to reply. Surely “sex” and “bosom” were much on Ketchum’s mind; as for “malefactresses,” Ketchum had known some. (Six-Pack Pam among them!) Regarding the “paramour,” Dominic Baciagalupo was more of an authority than he wanted to be-the hell with what Ketchum made of the word! And considering “whippingpost” and “writhing”-not to mention “wailings,” “misbegotten,” “besmirches,” and “hideous”-the cook had no desire to investigate Ketchum’s prurient interest in those words.

The “matronly,” the “sinless,” the “innermost,” and above all “symbolize,” were mild surprises; nor would Dominic have imagined that Ketchum gave much thought to what was “embroidered” or “ignominious” or “tremulous” or “plaintive.” The cook believed that “retribution” (especially the “punishment” part) was as much up his old friend’s alley as the “possessed” factor, because Ketchum surely was possessed-to the degree that the “salvation” ingredient seemed highly unlikely. (And did Ketchum regularly feel a “pang”-a pang for whom or what? Dominic wondered.)

“Maybe they’re just words,” young Dan had reasoned.

“What do you mean, Daniel?”

Was Ketchum trying to improve his vocabulary? For an uneducated man, he was very well spoken-and he kept borrowing books!

“It’s a list of kind of fancy words, most of them,” Danny had speculated.

Yes, the cook concurred-“sex” and “bosom,” and perhaps “pang,” excluded.

“All I know is, I was readin’ out loud to him, and then he took the fuckin’ book and went into the bathroom and passed out,” Six-Pack was saying. “He’s got himself wedged in a corner, but he’s still on the toilet,” she added.

Dominic didn’t want to know about the reading out loud. His impression of Ketchum’s dance-hall women did not include an element of literary interest or curiosity; it was the cook’s opinion that Ketchum rarely spoke to these women, or listened to them. But Dominic had once asked Ketchum (insincerely) what he did for “foreplay.”

To the cook’s considerable surprise, Ketchum had answered: “I ask them to read out loud to me. It gets me in the mood.”

Or in the mood to take the book to the bathroom and pass out with it, Dominic now thought dryly. Nor did the cook imagine that the literacy level among Ketchum’s dance-hall women was especially high. How did Ketchum know which women could read at all? And what was the book that had put him out of the mood with Six-Pack Pam? (Quite possibly, Ketchum simply had needed to go to the bathroom.)

Injun Jane had gone into the kitchen and now returned with a flashlight. “So you can find your way back,” she said to Dominic, handing him the light. “I’ll stay with Danny, and get him ready for bed.”

“Can I go with you?” the boy asked his dad. “I could help you with Ketchum.”

“My place ain’t very suitable for kids, Danny,” Pam told him.

That concept begged a response, but all the cook said was: “You stay with Jane, Daniel. I’ll be right back,” he added, more to Jane than to his son, but the Indian dishwasher had already gone back inside the kitchen.

FROM THE UPSTAIRS OF THE COOKHOUSE, where the bedrooms were, there was a partial view of the river basin and a better view of the town above the basin. However, the town was so dark at night that one had little sense of the activities in the various saloons and hostelries from the distant cookhouse-nor could Danny and Injun Jane hear the music from the dance hall, where no one was dancing.

For a while, the boy and the Indian dishwasher had watched the two flashlights making their way to town. The cook’s bobbing light was easily identified by his limp-and by his shorter steps, for Dominic needed to take twice as many steps to keep up with the longer strides of Six-Pack Pam. (It was their conversation Jane might have wished she could hear; it was Ketchum naked on the toilet Danny definitely wanted to see.) But soon the flashlights were lost in the fog shrouding the river basin, and in the dimmer lights of the town.

“He’ll be back soon,” the twelve-year-old said, because he must have sensed that Jane hoped so. She made no response, other than to turn down the bed in his father’s room-she also turned the night-table light on.

Danny followed her into the upstairs hall, watching her touch the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as she left the bedroom. Shoulder-high to his dad, the skillet was breast-high to Injun Jane; it was level with Danny’s eyes as he passed by it, touching it, too.

“Thinking about whacking a bear?” Jane asked the boy.

“I guess you were thinking about it,” he told her.

“Go brush your teeth, and all that other stuff,” she said.

The boy went into the bathroom he shared with his father. When he’d put on his pajamas and was ready for bed, Jane came into Danny’s bedroom and sat on his bed beside him.

“I’ve never seen you undo your braid,” the boy said. “I wonder what you look like with your hair down.”

“You’re too young to see me with my hair down,” Jane told him. “I wouldn’t want it on my conscience that I frightened you to death.” The boy could see the playfulness in her eyes, under the visor of her Cleveland Indians cap.

There was a shout from the area of the town, and either a corresponding shout or an echo from the nearby river basin, but no words were distinguishable in the shouting, and any interconnected disputes or follow-up shouts were whipped away by the wind.

“It’s dangerous in town on a Saturday night, isn’t it?” Danny asked Injun Jane.

“I know this little fella with a limp-maybe you know who I mean-and he’s always saying how it’s ‘a world of accidents.’ Maybe that sounds familiar to you,” Jane said. Her big hand had sneaked under the covers and found young Dan’s armpit, where she knew he was the most ticklish.

“I know who you mean!” the twelve-year-old cried. “No tickling!”

“Well, the accidents are just more numerous on a Saturday night,” Jane continued, not tickling him but keeping her hand in his armpit. “However, nobody’s going to mess with your dad-not when Six-Pack is with him.”

“There’s the coming-home-alone part,” the boy pointed out.

“Don’t worry about your father, Danny,” Jane told him; she let go of his armpit and straightened up on the bed.

“Could you take Six-Pack?” Danny asked her. It was one of Daniel Baciagalupo’s favorite questions; he was always asking Injun Jane if she could “take” someone, the equivalent of Ketchum tearing an actual or alleged combatant a new asshole. Could Jane take Henri Thibeault, or No-Fingers La Fleur, or the Beaudette brothers, or the Beebe twins-or Scotty Fernald, Earl Dinsmore, Charlie Clough, and Frank Bemis?

Injun Jane generally answered: “I suppose so.” (When Danny had asked her if she could take Ketchum, she’d said: “If he were drunk enough, maybe.”)

But when the imaginary opponent was Six-Pack Pam, Jane hesitated. Danny had not known her to hesitate a whole lot. “Six-Pack is a lost soul,” Jane finally said.

“But could you take her?” young Dan insisted.

Jane leaned over the boy as she got up from the bed; squeezing his shoulders with her strong hands, she kissed him on his forehead. “I suppose so,” said Injun Jane.

“Why wasn’t Six-Pack wearing a bra?” Danny asked her.

“She looked like she got dressed in a hurry,” Jane told him; she blew him another kiss from the doorway of his bedroom, closing the door only halfway behind her. The light from the hall was Danny’s night-light-for as long as he could remember.

He heard the wind shake the loose-fitting outer door to the kitchen; there was a rattling sound as the wind tugged at that bothersome door. The twelve-year-old knew it wasn’t his dad coming home, or another night visitor.

“Just the wind!” Injun Jane called to him, from down the hall. Ever since the bear story, she knew the boy had been apprehensive about intruders.

Jane always left her shoes or boots downstairs, and came upstairs in her socks. If she had gone downstairs, Danny would have heard the stairs creak under her weight, but Jane must have stayed upstairs, as silent in her socks as a nocturnal animal. Later, young Dan heard water running in the bathroom; he wondered if his father had come home, but the boy was too sleepy to get up and go see. Danny lay listening to the wind and the omnipresent turmoil of the river. When someone kissed him on his forehead again, the twelve-year-old was too deeply asleep to know if it was his dad or Injun Jane-or else he was dreaming about being kissed, and it was Six-Pack Pam who was kissing him.

STRIDING THROUGH TOWN-with the cook limping after her like a loyal but damaged dog-Pam was too formidable and purposeful a figure to inspire anyone to dream of kissing her, or of being kissed by her. Certainly, the cook was dreaming of no such thing-not consciously.

“Slow down, Six-Pack,” Dominic said, but either the wind carried his words beyond her hearing or Pam willfully lengthened her stride.

The wind tunneled furrows in the three-story tower of sawdust outside the sawmill, and the dust blew into their eyes. It was very flammable, what Ketchum called a “potential inferno”-at this time of year, especially. The winter-long pile wouldn’t be trucked out of town until the haul roads hardened up at the end of mud season; only then would they truck it away, and sell it to the farmers in the Androscoggin Valley. (Of course, there was more inside the mill.) A fire in the sawdust would ignite the whole town; not even the cookhouse on the hill nearest the river bend would be spared, because the hill and the cookhouse bore the brunt of the wind off the river. The bigger, more brightly burning embers would be blown uphill from the town to the cookhouse.

Yet the building the cook had insisted upon was the most substantial in the settlement of Twisted River. The hostelries and saloons-even the sawmill itself, and the so-called dance hall-were mere kindling for the sawdust fire Ketchum imagined in his doomsayer dreams of ever-impending calamities.

Possibly, Ketchum was even dreaming now-on the toilet. Or so Dominic Baciagalupo considered, as he struggled to keep pace with Six-Pack Pam. They passed the bar near the hostelry favored by the French Canadian itinerants. In the muddy lane alongside the dance hall was a 1912 Lombard steam log hauler; it had been parked there so long that the dance hall had been torn down and rebuilt around it. (They’d used gasoline-powered log haulers to pull the loaded sleds of logs through the woods since the 1930s.)

If the town burned, Dominic was thinking, maybe the old Lombard forwarder would be the only surviving remains. To the cook’s surprise, when he regarded the Lombard now, he saw the Beaudette brothers asleep or dead in the front seat over the sled runners. Perhaps they’d been evicted from the dance hall and had passed out (or been deposited) there.

Dominic slowed as he limped by the slumped-over brothers, but Pam had seen them, too, and she wasn’t stopping. “They won’t freeze-it ain’t even snowin’,” Six-Pack said.

Outside the next saloon, four or five men had gathered to watch a desultory fight. Earl Dinsmore and one of the Beebe twins had been brawling so long that they’d exhausted their best punches, or maybe the men were too inebriated to be fighting in the first place. They seemed beyond hurting each other-at least, intentionally. The other Beebe twin, out of either boredom or sheer embarrassment for his brother, suddenly started fighting with Charlie Clough. In passing, Six-Pack Pam knocked Charlie down; then she leveled Earl Dinsmore with a forearm to his ear, leaving the Beebe twins to aimlessly regard each other, the recognition slowly dawning on them that there was no one to fight-not unless they dared to take on Pam.

“It’s Cookie with Six-Pack,” No-Fingers La Fleur observed.

“I’m surprised you can tell us apart,” Pam told him, shoving him out of her way.

They reached the flat-roofed row houses-the newer hostelries, where the truckers and donkey-engine men stayed. As Ketchum said, any contractor who would construct a flat-roofed, two-story building in northern New Hampshire was enough of a moron to not know how many assholes a human being had. Just then, the dance-hall door blew (or was shoved) open and the miserable music reached them-Perry Como singing “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.”

There was an outside flight of stairs to the nearest hostelry, and Pam turned, catching Dominic by his shirtsleeve and pulling him after her.

“Watch the next-to-last step, Cookie,” she told him, tugging him up the stairs.

Stairs had never worked well with his limp-especially not at the pace Six-Pack led him. The next-to-last step from the top was missing. The cook stumbled forward, catching his balance against Pam’s broad back. She simply turned again and lifted him under both arms-hoisting him to the topmost step, where the bridge of his nose collided with her collarbone. There was a womanly smell at her throat, if not exactly perfume, but the cook was confused by whatever odors of maleness clung to Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt.

The music from the dance hall was louder at the top of the stairs-Patti Page singing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” No wonder no one dances anymore, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, just as Six-Pack lowered her shoulder and forced open the door. “Shit, I hate this song,” she was saying, dragging the cook inside. “Ketchum!” she shouted, but there was no answer. Thankfully, the awful music stopped when Pam closed the door.

The cook couldn’t comprehend where the kitchen, which they had entered, ended and the bedroom began; scattered pots and pans and bottles gave way to strewn undergarments and the giant, unmade bed, the only light on which was cast by a greenish aquarium. Who knew that Six-Pack Pam was a fish person, or that she liked pets of any species? (If fish were what was in the aquarium-Dominic couldn’t see anything swimming around in the algae. Maybe Six-Pack was an algae person.)

They navigated the bedroom; it was hard, even without a limp, to get around the enormous bed. And while it was easy for Dominic to imagine the extreme situation and awkward location of Ketchum’s collapse, and why this might have made it necessary for Pam to hastily dress herself without a bra, they passed three bras en route to the bathroom-any one of which, even in a hurry, surely would have been opportune.

Six-Pack now scratched her breast under Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt. Dominic wasn’t immediately worried that she was fondling herself suggestively, or otherwise flirting with him; it was as unplanned a gesture as her knocking Charlie Clough to the muddy ground, or the spontaneous forearm to the ear that had dropped Earl Dinsmore. The cook knew that if Six-Pack were to suggest anything, she would be far less ambiguous about it than to merely touch her breast in passing. Besides, Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt must have been itchy against her bare skin.

They found Ketchum on the toilet, more or less as Pam must have discovered him-with the paperback he’d been reading pinned by his cast, and held open on one of his bare thighs, and with both knees splayed wide apart. The water in the toilet was laced with bright bloodred streaks-as if Ketchum had been slowly bleeding to death.

“He’s gotta be bleedin’ internally!” Six-Pack exclaimed, but the cook realized that Ketchum had dropped a pen with red ink into the toilet; he must have been using the pen to circle certain words. “I already flushed, before leavin’ him,” Pam was saying, as Dominic rolled up his sleeve and (reaching between Ketchum’s knees) picked the pen out of the toilet bowl-flushing again. Dominic washed his hands and the pen in the sink, drying them with a towel.

It was only then that he noticed Ketchum’s erection. One of the cook’s most fervent hopes-namely, to never see Ketchum with an erection-may have caused him to first overlook the obvious. Naturally, Six-Pack hadn’t overlooked it. “Well, I wonder what he thinks he’s goin’ to do with that!” she was saying, as she lifted Ketchum under his heavy arms. She was able to prop him more upright on the toilet seat, rescuing him from his wedged position. “If you take hold of his ankles, Cookie, I can handle the rest.”

The book, which nearly followed the pen’s path into the toilet, slid off Ketchum’s thigh to the floor. Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot was a surprise to Dominic Baciagalupo, who could more easily understand Ketchum passing out with the novel on (or off) a toilet than he could imagine Six-Pack reading out loud to Ketchum from the gigantic greenly-lit bed. Dominic instinctively uttered aloud the book’s title, which was misunderstood by Pam.

“You’re tellin’ me he’s an idiot!” she said.

“How were you liking the book?” the cook asked her, as they lugged Ketchum out of the bathroom; they managed to hit Ketchum’s head on the doorknob as they passed the open door. Ketchum’s cast was dragging on the floor.

“It’s about fuckin’ Russians,” Six-Pack said dismissively. “I wasn’t payin’ much attention to the story-I was just readin’ it to him.”

The passing blow to his head hadn’t awakened Ketchum, although it seemed to serve as an invitation for him to speak. “As for those kind of dives, where you could get into a shitload of trouble just looking at some super-sensitive asshole, there was never anything in downtown Berlin to equal Hell’s Half Acre in Bangor-not in my experience,” Ketchum said, his erection as upstanding and worthy of attention as a weather vane.

“What do you know about Maine?” Pam asked him, as if Ketchum were conscious and could understand her.

“I didn’t kill Pinette-they could never pin it on me!” Ketchum declared. “That wasn’t my stamping hammer.”

They’d found Lucky Pinette, murdered in his bed, in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin-about two miles north of Milan. He’d had his head bashed in with a stamping hammer, and there were those rivermen who claimed that Lucky had had a dispute with Ketchum at the sorting gaps on the river earlier in the afternoon. Ketchum, typically, was discovered to be spending the night at the Umbagog House in Errol-with a dim-witted woman who worked in the kitchen there. Neither the stamping hammer that had repeatedly hit Pinette (indenting his forehead with the letter H) nor Ketchum’s hammer was ever found.

“So who killed Lucky?” Six-Pack asked Ketchum, as she and Dominic dropped him onto the bed, where the river driver’s undying erection trembled at them like a flagpole in a gale-force wind.

“I’ll bet Bergeron did it,” Ketchum answered her. “He had a stamping hammer just like mine.”

“And Bergeron wasn’t bangin’ some retard from Errol!” Pam replied.

With his eyes still closed, Ketchum merely smiled. The cook resisted the urge to go back into the bathroom and see what words Ketchum had circled in The Idiot-anything to get away from his old friend’s towering erection.

“Are you awake, or what?” Dominic asked Ketchum, who appeared to have passed completely out again-or else he was imagining himself as one of the passengers in a third-class compartment on the Warsaw-St. Petersburg train, because Ketchum had only recently borrowed The Idiot, and the cook found it unlikely that Six-Pack had read very far into the first chapter before the passing-out-on-the-toilet episode had interrupted what Ketchum called his chosen foreplay.

“Well, I guess I’ll go home,” Dominic said, as Ketchum’s finally drooping erection seemed to signify the end of the evening’s entertainment. Perhaps not to Pam-facing the cook, she began to unbutton her borrowed shirt.

Here comes suggestive, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. There was no room between the foot of the bed and the bedroom wall, where Six-Pack blocked his way; he would have had to walk on the bed, stepping over Ketchum, to get around her.

“Come on, Cookie,” Pam said. “Show me what you got.” She tossed the wool-flannel shirt on the bed, where it covered Ketchum’s face but not his fallen erection.

“She was semi-retarded,” Ketchum mumbled from under the shirt, “and she wasn’t from Errol-she came from Dixville Notch.” He must have meant the kitchen worker in the Umbagog House, the woman he’d been banging the night Lucky Pinette was hammered to death in the old Boom House on the Androscoggin. (It could have been just a coincidence that neither Ketchum’s stamping hammer nor the murder weapon was ever found.)

Six-Pack fiercely took hold of the cook’s shoulders and snapped his face between her breasts-no ambiguity now. It was half a Heimlich maneuver that he made on her, ducking under her arms to get behind her-his hands locking on her lower rib cage, under her pretty breasts. With his nose jammed painfully between Pam’s shoulder blades, Dominic said: “I can’t do this, Six-Pack-Ketchum’s my friend.”

She easily broke his grip; her long, hard elbow smacked him in the mouth, splitting his lower lip. Then she headlocked him, half smothering him between her armpit and the soft side of her breast. “You ain’t no friend of his if you let him find Angel! He’s tearin’ himself up over that damn kid, Cookie,” Pam told him. “If you let him so much as see that boy’s body, or what’s left of it, you ain’t no friend of Ketchum’s!”

They were rolling around on the bed beside Ketchum’s covered face and his naked, unmoving body. The cook couldn’t breathe. He reached around Six-Pack’s shoulder and punched her in the ear, but she lay on him unflinchingly, with her weight on his chest; she had his head and neck, and his right arm, locked up tight. All the cook could do was hit her again with his awkward left hook-his fist struck her cheekbone, her nose, her temple, and her ear again.

“Christ, you can’t fight worth shit, Cookie,” Six-Pack said with contempt. She rolled off him, letting him go. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember lying there, his chest heaving alongside his snoring friend. The ghastly green light from the aquarium washed over the gasping cook; in the tank’s murky water, the unseen fish might have been mocking him. Pam had picked up a bra and was putting it on, with her back to him. “The least you can do is take Danny with you, earlier than when you’re goin’ to meet Ketchum. You two find Angel’s body-before Ketchum gets there. Just don’t let Ketchum see that boy!” she shouted.

Ketchum pulled the shirt off his face and stared unseeing at the ceiling; the cook sat up beside him. Pam had put the bra on and was angrily struggling into a T-shirt. Dominic would also remember this: Six-Pack’s unbelted dungarees, low on her broad but bony hips, and the unzipped fly, through which he caught a glimpse of her blond pubic hair. She’d dressed herself in a hurry, to be sure-and she was hurrying now. “Get out, Cookie,” she told him. He looked once at Ketchum, who had closed his eyes and covered his face with his cast. “Did Ketchum let you see your wife when he found her?” Pam asked the cook.

Dominic Baciagalupo would try to forget this part-how he got up from the bed, but Six-Pack wouldn’t let him step around her. “Answer me,” she said to him.

“No, Ketchum didn’t let me see her.”

“Well, Ketchum was bein’ your friend,” she said, letting the cook limp past her to the door in the kitchen area. “Watch that step, second from the top,” she reminded him.

“You ought to ask Ketchum to fix that step for you,” Dominic said.

“Ketchum removed the step-so he could hear someone comin’ up the stairs, or sneakin’ down,” Six-Pack informed the cook.

There was no doubt Ketchum had to take certain precautions, Dominic was thinking, as he let himself out the door. The missing step awaited him-he stepped over it carefully. The depressing music from the dance hall hit him on the stairs. Teresa Brewer was singing “Till I Waltz Again with You” when the wind blew open the door the cook thought he had closed.

“Shit!” he heard Pam say.

Either the wind or the dance-hall music momentarily revived Ketchum-enough for the riverman to make a final comment before Six-Pack slammed the door. “Not so fucking lucky now-are you, Lucky?” Ketchum asked the windy night.

Poor Pinette, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Lucky Pinette may already have been past hearing the question-that is, the first time Ketchum had asked it, if he’d really asked it. (Certainly, Lucky was long past hearing anything now.)

The cook skirted the shabby hostelry bars with their broken, interrupted lettering.

NO MINO S! the neon blinked at him.

TH RD BEER FR E! another sign blinked.

After he passed the neon announcements, Dominic would realize he’d forgotten his flashlight. He was pretty sure that Six-Pack wouldn’t be friendly if he went back for it. The cook tasted the blood from his split lip before he put his hand to his mouth and looked at the blood on his fingers. But the available light in Twisted River was dim and growing dimmer. The dance-hall door blew (or was slammed) closed, cutting off Teresa Brewer as suddenly as if Six-Pack had taken the singer’s slender throat in her hands. When the dance-hall door blew (or was kicked) open again, Tony Bennett was crooning “Rags to Riches.” Dominic didn’t for a moment doubt that the town’s eternal violence was partly spawned by irredeemable music.

Out in front of the saloon where the Beebe twins had been fighting, there was no evidence of a brawl; Charlie Clough and Earl Dinsmore had managed to pick themselves up from the muddy ground. The Beaudette brothers, either murdered or passed out, had roused themselves (or been removed) from the old Lombard forwarder forever occupying the lane alongside the dance hall, which it would almost certainly outlive.

Dominic Baciagalupo wove his way forward in the darkness, where his limp could easily have been mistaken for the tentative progress of a drunk. At the bar near the hostelry most frequented by the French Canadian itinerants, a familiar figure lurched toward Dominic out of the dark, but before the cook could be certain it was Constable Carl, a flashlight blinded him. “Halt! That means ‘Stop!’ Arrête, if you’re fuckin’ French,” the cowboy said.

“Good evening, Constable,” Dominic said, squinting into the light. Both the flashlight and the windblown sawdust were causing him problems.

“You’re out kinda late, Cookie-and you’re bleedin’,” the constable said.

“I was checking up on a friend,” the cook replied.

“Whoever hit you wasn’t your friend,” the cowboy said, stepping closer.

“I forgot my flashlight-I just bumped into something, Carl.”

“Like a knee… or an elbow, maybe,” Constable Carl speculated; his flashlight was almost touching Dominic’s bloody lower lip. The boilermakers on the constable’s rank breath were as evident as the sawdust stinging the cook’s face.

As luck would have it, someone had upped the volume on the music from the dance hall, where the virtual revolving door was flung open again-Doris Day singing “Secret Love”-while Injun Jane’s two lovers stood face-to-face, the drunken cowboy patiently examining the sober cook’s lip injury. Just then, the favorite hostelry of the French Canadian itinerants rudely disgorged one of the night’s luckless souls. Young Lucien Charest, yipping like a coyote pup, was hurled out naked and landed on all fours in the muddy road. The constable swung his flashlight toward the frightened Frenchman.

It was deathly quiet then, as the dance-hall door slammed shut on Doris Day-as abruptly as the indiscriminate door had released “Secret Love” into the night-and both Dominic Baciagalupo and Lucien Charest clearly heard the knuckle-cracking sound of Constable Carl cocking his absurd Colt.45.

“Jesus, Carl, don’t…” Dominic was saying, as the constable took aim at the young Frenchman.

“Get your naked French ass back indoors where you belong!” the constable shouted. “Before I blow your balls off, and your pecker with ’em!”

On all fours, Lucien Charest peed straight down at the ground-the puddle of piss quickly spreading to his muddy knees. The Frenchman turned and, still on all fours, scampered like a dog toward the hostelry, where the mischief-makers who’d thrown the young man outside now greeted him at the hostelry door as if his naked life depended on it. (It probably did.) Cries of “Lucien!” were followed by French-speaking gibberish too fast and hysterical for either the cook or the constable to comprehend. When Charest was safely back inside the hostelry, Constable Carl turned off his flashlight. The ridiculous Colt.45 was still cocked; the cook was disconcerted that the cowboy slowly uncocked the weapon while it was pointed at the knee of Dominic Baciagalupo’s good leg.

“You want me to walk you home, little Cookie?” Carl asked.

“I’m okay,” Dominic answered. They could both make out the lights of the cookhouse, uphill from the river-basin end of town.

“I see you got my darlin’ Jane workin’ late again tonight,” the constable said. Before the cook had time to consider a careful reply, Carl added: “Isn’t that boy of yours gettin’ old enough to put himself to bed?”

“Daniel’s old enough,” Dominic answered. “I just don’t like leaving him alone at night, and he’s wicked fond of Jane.”

“That makes two of us,” Constable Carl said, spitting.

That makes three of us! Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking, but the cook said nothing. He was also remembering how Pam had pressed his face between her breasts, and how close she had come to suffocating him. He felt ashamed, and disloyal to Jane, because Six-Pack had also aroused him-in a peculiarly life-threatening way.

“Good night, Constable,” the cook said. He had started uphill before the cowboy shone his flashlight on him, briefly illuminating the way ahead.

“Good night, Cookie,” Carl said. When the flashlight went out, the cook could feel that the constable was still watching him. “You get around pretty good for a cripple!” the cowboy called up the dark hill. Dominic Baciagalupo would remember that, too.

Just a snatch of the song from the dance hall reached him, but Dominic was now too far from town to hear the words clearly. It was only because he’d heard the song so many times that he knew what it was-Eddie Fisher singing “Oh My Papa”-and long after the cook could no longer hear the stupid song, he was irritated to find himself singing it.

CHAPTER 4. THE EIGHT-INCH CAST-IRON SKILLET

THE COOK COULDN’T ENTIRELY DISPEL THE FEELING THAT the constable had followed him home. For a while, Dominic Baciagalupo stood at the window in the darkened dining hall, on the lookout for a flashlight coming up the hill from town. But if the cowboy were intent on investigating the goings-on at the cookhouse, not even he would have been dumb enough to use his flashlight.

Dominic left the porch light on by the kitchen door, so that Jane could see the way to her truck; he put his muddy boots beside Jane’s at the foot of the stairs. The cook considered that, perhaps, he had lingered downstairs for another reason. How would he explain his lip injury to Jane, and should he tell her about his meeting with the constable? Shouldn’t Jane know that Dominic had encountered the cowboy, and that both Constable Carl’s behavior and his disposition were as unpredictable and unreadable as ever?

The cook couldn’t even say for certain if the constable somehow knew that Jane was Dominic’s “paramour,” as Ketchum might have put it-in reference to the toilet-reader’s list of words from another illicit love story.

Dominic Baciagalupo went quietly upstairs in his socks-though the stairs creaked in a most specific way because of his limp, and he could not manage to creep past his open bedroom door without Jane sitting up in bed and seeing him. (He sneaked enough of a look at her to know she’d let her hair down.) Dominic had wanted to clean up his wounded lower lip before he saw her, but Jane must have sensed he was hiding something from her; she sailed her Cleveland Indians cap into the hall, nearly hitting him. Chief Wahoo landed upside down but still grinning-the chief appearing to stare crazily down the hall, in the direction of the bathroom and young Dan’s bedroom.

In the bathroom mirror, the cook saw that his lower lip probably needed to be stitched; the wound would heal eventually, without stitches, but his lip would heal faster and there would be less of a scar if he had a couple of stitches. For now, after he’d painfully brushed his teeth, he poured some hydrogen peroxide on his lower lip and patted it dry with a clean towel-noting the blood on the towel. It was just bad luck that tomorrow was Sunday; he would rather let Ketchum or Jane stitch up his lip than try to find that moron doctor on a Sunday, in that place Dominic wouldn’t even think of by its ill-fated name.

The cook came out of the bathroom and continued down the hall to Daniel’s room. Dominic Baciagalupo kissed his sleeping son good night, leaving an unnoticed spot of blood on the boy’s forehead. When the cook came out into the hall, there was Chief Wahoo grinning upside down at him-as if to remind him that he better watch his words carefully with Injun Jane.

“Who hit you?” she asked him, as he was getting undressed in the bedroom.

“Ketchum was wild and unruly-you know how he can be when he’s passed out and talking at the same time.”

“If Ketchum had hit you, Cookie, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

“It was just an accident,” the cook insisted, relying on a favorite word. “Ketchum didn’t mean to hurt me-he just caught me with his cast, by accident.”

“If he’d hit you with his cast, you would be dead,” Jane told him. She was sitting up in bed, with her hair all around her; it hung down below her waist, and she had folded her arms over her breasts, which were hidden by both her hair and her arms.

Whenever she took her hair down, and later went home that way, she could get in real trouble with Constable Carl-if he hadn’t already passed out. It was a night when Jane should stay late and leave early in the morning, if she went home at all, Dominic was thinking.

“I saw Carl tonight,” the cook told her.

“It wasn’t Carl who hit you, either,” Jane said, as he got into bed beside her. “And it doesn’t look as if he shot you,” she added.

“I can’t tell if he knows about us, Jane.”

“I can’t tell, either,” she told him.

“Did Ketchum kill Lucky Pinette?” the cook asked.

“Nobody knows, Cookie. We haven’t known doodley-squat about that for ages! Why did Six-Pack hit you?” Jane asked him.

“Because I wouldn’t fool around with her-that’s why.”

“If you had screwed Six-Pack, I would have hit you so hard you wouldn’t ever have found your lower lip,” Jane told him.

He smiled, which the lip didn’t like. When he winced at the pain, Jane said, “Poor baby-no kissing for you tonight.”

The cook lay down next to her. “There are other things besides kissing,” he said to her.

She pushed him to his back and lay on top of him, the sheer weight of her pressing him into the bed and taking his breath away. If the cook had closed his eyes, he would have seen himself in Six-Pack’s suffocating headlock again, so he kept his eyes wide open. When Injun Jane straddled his hips and firmly seated herself in his lap, Dominic felt a sudden intake of air fill his lungs. With an urgency possibly prompted by Six-Pack having assaulted him, Jane mounted the cook; she wasted no time in slipping him inside her.

“I’ll show you other things,” the Indian dishwasher said, rocking herself back and forth; her breasts fell on his chest, her mouth brushed his face, carefully not touching his lower lip, while her long hair cascaded forward, forming a tent around the two of them.

The cook could breathe, but he couldn’t move. Jane’s weight was too great for him to budge her. Besides, Dominic Baciagalupo wouldn’t have wanted to change a single element of the way she was rocking back and forth on top of him-or her gathering momentum. (Not even if Injun Jane had been as light as Dominic’s late wife, Rosie, and the cook himself were as big as Ketchum.) It was a little like riding a train, Dominic imagined-except all he could do was hold tightly to the train that was, in reality, riding him.

IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW that Danny was certain he’d heard water running in the bathroom, or that the kiss on his forehead-either his father’s kiss or a second good-night kiss from Jane-had been real. It didn’t matter, either, that the boy had incorporated the kiss into a dream he was having about Six-Pack Pam, who’d been ardently kissing him-not necessarily on his forehead. Nor did it matter that the twelve-year-old knew the odd creak his dad’s limp made on the stairs, because he’d heard the limp a while ago and there was a different, unfamiliar creaking now. (On stairs, his father always put his good foot forward; the lame foot followed, more lightly, after it.)

What mattered now was the new and never-ending creaking, and where the anxious, wide-awake boy thought the creaking came from. It wasn’t only the wind that was shaking the whole upstairs of the cookhouse; Danny had heard and felt the wind in every season. The frightened boy quietly got out of bed, and-holding his breath-tiptoed to his partially open bedroom door and into the upstairs hall.

There was Chief Wahoo with his lunatic, upside-down grin. But what had happened to Jane? young Dan wondered. If her hat had ended up in the hall, where was her head? Had the intruder (for surely there was a predator on the loose) decapitated Jane-either with one swipe of its claws or (in the case of a human predator) with a bush hook?

As he made his cautious way down the hall, Danny half expected to see Jane’s severed head in the bathtub; as he passed the open bathroom door, without spotting her head, the twelve-year-old could only imagine that the intruder was a bear, not a man, and that the bear had eaten Jane and was now attacking his dad. For there was no denying where the violent creaks and moans were coming from-his father’s bedroom-and that was definitely moaning (or worse, whimpering) that the boy could hear as he came closer. When he passed the Cleveland Indians cap, the recognition that Chief Wahoo had landed upside down only heightened the twelve-year-old’s fears.

What Danny Baciagalupo would see (more accurately, what he thought he saw), upon entering his dad’s bedroom, was everything the twelve-year-old had feared, and worse-that is, both bigger and hairier than what the boy had ever imagined a bear could be. Only his father’s knees and feet were visible beneath the bear; more frightening still, his dad’s lower legs weren’t moving. Maybe the boy had arrived too late to save him! Only the bear was moving-the rounded, humpbacked beast (its head not discernible) was rocking the entire bed, its glossy-black hair both longer and more luxuriant than Danny had ever imagined a black bear’s hair would be.

The bear was consuming his father, or so it appeared to the twelve-year-old. With no weapon at hand, one might have expected the boy to throw himself on the animal attacking his dad in such a savage or frenzied manner-if only to be hurled into a bedroom wall, or raked to death by the beast’s claws. But family histories-chiefly, perhaps, the stories we are told as children-invade our most basic instincts and inform our deepest memories, especially in an emergency. Young Dan reached for the eight-inch cast-iron skillet as if it were his weapon of choice, not his father’s. That skillet was a legend, and Danny knew exactly where it was.

Holding the handle in both hands, the boy stepped up to the bed and took aim at where he thought the bear’s head ought to be. He’d already started his two-handed swing-as Ketchum had once shown him, with an ax, being sure to get his hips behind the swinging motion-when he noticed the bare soles of two clearly human feet. The feet were in a prayerful position, just beside his dad’s bare knees, and Danny thought that the feet looked a lot like Jane’s. The Indian dishwasher was on her feet all day, and-for such a heavy woman-it was only natural that her feet often hurt her. She liked nothing better, she’d told young Dan, than a foot rub, which Danny had more than once given her.

“Jane?” Danny asked-in a small, doubting voice-but nothing slowed the forward momentum of the cast-iron skillet.

Jane must have heard the boy utter her name, because she raised her head and turned to face him. That was why the skillet caught her full-force on her right temple. The ringing sound, a dull but deep gong, was followed by a stinging sensation young Dan first felt in his hands; a reverberant tingle passed through both wrists and up his forearms. For the rest of his life, or as long as his memory endured, it would be small consolation to Danny Baciagalupo that he didn’t see the expression on Jane’s pretty face when the skillet struck her. (Her hair was so long that it simply covered everything.)

Jane’s massive body shuddered. She was too massive, and her hair was too sleekly beautiful, for her ever to have been a black bear-not in this life or the next, where she most assuredly was going. Jane rolled off the cook and crashed to the floor.

There was no mistaking her for a bear now. Her hair had fanned out-flung wide as wings, to both sides of her inert, colossal torso. Her big, beautiful breasts had slumped into the hollows of her armpits; her motionless arms reached over her head, as if (even in death) Jane sought to hold aloft a heavy, descending universe. But as astonishing as her nakedness must have been to an innocent twelve-year-old, Danny Baciagalupo would best remember the faraway gaze in Jane’s wide-open eyes. Something more than the final, split-second recognition of her fate lingered in Injun Jane’s dead eyes. What had she suddenly seen in the immeasurable distance? Danny would wonder. Whatever Jane had glimpsed of the unforeseeable future had clearly terrified her-not just her fate but all their fates, maybe.

“Jane,” Danny said again; this time it wasn’t a question, though the boy’s heart was racing and he must have had many questions on his mind. Nor did Danny more than glance at his dad. Was it his father’s nakedness that made the boy so quickly look away? (Perhaps it was what Ketchum had called the little-fella aspect of the cook; the latter aspect was greatly enhanced by how near Dominic now was to the dead dishwasher.) “Jane!” Danny cried, as if the boy needed a third utterance of the Indian’s name to finally register what he had done to her.

The cook quickly covered her private parts with a pillow. He knelt in the vast expanse of her far-flung hair, putting his ear to her quiet heart. Young Dan held the skillet in both hands, as if the reverberation still stung his palms; possibly, the ongoing tingle in his forearms would last forever. Though he was only twelve, Danny Baciagalupo surely knew that the rest of his life had just begun. “I thought she was a bear,” the boy told his dad.

Dominic could not have looked more shocked if, at that moment, the dead dishwasher had turned herself into a bear; yet the cook could see for himself that it was his beloved Daniel who needed some consoling. Trembling, the boy stood clutching the murder weapon as if he believed a real bear would be the next thing to assail them.

“It’s understandable that you thought Jane was a bear,” his father said, hugging him. The cook took the skillet from his shaking son, hugging him again. “It’s not your fault, Daniel. It was an accident. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“How can it be nobody’s fault?” the twelve-year-old asked.

“It’s my fault, then,” his dad told him. “It will never be your fault, Daniel. It’s all mine. And it was an accident.”

Of course the cook was thinking about Constable Carl; in the constable’s world, there was no such thing as a no-fault accident. In the cowboy’s mind, if you could call it that, good intentions didn’t count. You can’t save yourself, but you can save your son, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. (And for how many years might the cook manage to save them both?)

For so long, Danny had wanted to see Jane undo her braid and let down her hair-not to mention how he had dreamed of seeing her enormous breasts. Now he couldn’t look at her. “I loved Jane!” the boy blurted out.

“Of course you did, Daniel-I know you did.”

“Were you do-si-doing her?” the twelve-year-old asked.

“Yes,” his father answered. “I loved Jane, too. Just not like I loved your mom,” he added. Why was it necessary for him to say that? the cook asked himself guiltily. Dominic had truly loved Jane; he must have been yielding to the fact that there was no time to grieve for her.

“What happened to your lip?” the boy asked his dad.

“Six-Pack smacked me with her elbow,” the cook answered.

“Were you do-si-doing Six-Pack, too?” his son asked him.

“No, Daniel. Jane was my girlfriend-just Jane.”

“What about Constable Carl?” young Dan asked.

“We have a lot to do, Daniel,” was all his dad would tell him. And they didn’t have a lot of time, the cook knew. Before long, it would be light outside; they had to get started.

IN THE CONFUSION and sheer clumsiness that followed, and in their frantic haste, the cook and his son would find a multitude of reasons to relive the night of their departure from Twisted River -though they would remember the details of their forced exit differently. For young Dan, the monumental task of dressing the dead woman-not to mention bringing her body down the cookhouse stairs, and toting her to her truck-had been herculean. Nor did the boy at first understand why it was so important to his father that Jane be correctly dressed-that is, exactly as she would have dressed herself. Nothing missing, nothing awry. The straps to her stupendous bra could not be twisted; the waistband of her mammoth boxer shorts could not be rolled under; her socks could not be worn inside out.

But she’s dead! What does it matter? Danny was thinking. The boy wasn’t considering the scrutiny that Injun Jane’s body might soon come under-what the examining physician would conclude was the cause of death, for example. (A blow to the head, obviously, but what was the instrument-and where was it?) The approximate time of death would need to be factored in, too. Clearly it mattered to the cook that, at the time of her death, Jane would appear to have been fully clothed.

As for Dominic, he would forever be grateful to Ketchum-for it was Ketchum who’d acquired a dolly for the cookhouse, on one of his drunken binges in Maine. The dolly was useful in unloading the dry goods from the trucks, or the cases of olive oil and maple syrup-even egg cartons, and anything heavy.

The cook and his son had strapped Jane onto the dolly; thus they were able to bring her down the cookhouse stairs in a semi-upright position, and wheel her standing (almost straight) to her truck. However, the dolly had been no help getting Injun Jane into the cab, which the cook would later recall as the “herculean” part of the task-or one herculean part, among several.

As for the instrument of death, Dominic Baciagalupo would pack the eight-inch cast-iron skillet among his most cherished kitchen items-namely, his favorite cookbooks, because the cook knew he had no time, and scant room, to pack his kitchenware. The other pots and pans would stay behind; the rest of the cookbooks, and all the novels, Dominic would leave for Ketchum.

Danny scarcely had time to gather some photos of his mom, but not the books he’d kept her pictures pressed flat in. As for clothing, the cook packed only the bare necessities of his own and young Dan’s clothes-and Dominic would pack more clothes for himself than he did for his son, because Daniel would soon outgrow what he was wearing.

The cook’s car was a 1952 Pontiac station wagon-the so-called semiwoodie Chieftain Deluxe. They’d made the last real “woodie” in 1949; the semiwoodie had fake wooden panels outside, offset against the maroon exterior, and real wood inside. The interior had maroon leather upholstery, too. Because of Dominic’s lame left foot, the Pontiac Chieftain Deluxe came with automatic transmission-in all likelihood making it the only vehicle with automatic transmission in the settlement of Twisted River -which made it possible for Danny to drive the car, too. The twelve-year-old’s legs weren’t long enough to depress a clutch pedal all the way to the floor, but Danny had driven the semiwoodie station wagon on the haul roads. Constable Carl didn’t cruise the haul roads. There were many boys Danny’s age, and even younger, driving cars and trucks on the back roads around Phillips Brook and Twisted River -unlicensed preteens with pretty good driving skills. (The boys who were a little taller than Danny could depress the clutch pedals all the way to the floor.)

Considering the contingencies of their escape from Twisted River, it was a good thing that Danny could drive the Chieftain, because the cook would not have wanted to be seen walking through town, back to the cookhouse, after he drove Jane (in her truck) to Constable Carl’s. By that early hour of the morning, in the predawn light, Dominic Baciagalupo’s limp would have made him recognizable to anyone who might have been up and about-and for the cook and his son to have been seen walking together at that ungodly hour would have been most unusual and suspicious.

Of course, Dominic’s maroon semiwoodie was the only car of its kind in town. The ’52 Pontiac Chieftain might not pass unnoticed, although it would pass more quickly through the settlement than the cook with his limp, and the station wagon would never be parked within sight of where Dominic would leave Jane’s truck-at Constable Carl’s.

“Are you crazy?” Danny would ask his father, as they were preparing to leave the cookhouse-for the last time. “Why are we bringing the body to the constable?”

“So the drunken cowboy will wake up in the morning and think he did it,” the cook told his son.

“What if Constable Carl is awake when we get there?” the boy asked.

“That’s why we have a back-up plan, Daniel,” his dad said.

A misty, almost imperceptible rain was falling. The long maroon hood of the Chieftain Deluxe glistened. The cook wet his thumb on the hood; he reached inside the open driver’s-side window and rubbed the spot of dried blood off his son’s forehead. Remembering his goodnight kiss, Dominic Baciagalupo knew whose blood it was; he hoped it hadn’t been the last kiss he would give Daniel, and that no more blood (not anyone’s blood) would touch his boy tonight.

“I just follow you, right?” young Dan asked his dad.

“That’s right,” the cook said, the back-up plan foremost in his mind as he climbed into the cab of Jane’s truck, where Jane was slumped against the passenger-side door. Jane wasn’t bleeding, but Dominic was glad that he couldn’t see the bruise on her right temple. Jane’s hair had fallen forward, covering her face; the contusion (it was swollen to the size of a baseball) was pressed against the passenger-side window.

They drove, a caravan of two, to the flat-roofed, two-story hostelry where Six-Pack was renting what passed for a second-floor apartment. In the rearview mirror of Jane’s truck, the cook had only a partial view of his son’s small face behind the wheel of the ’52 Pontiac. The Chieftain’s exterior visor resembled that of a baseball cap pulled low over the windshield-eyes of the eight-cylinder station wagon with its shark-toothed grille and aggressive hood ornament.

“Shit!” Dominic said aloud. He had suddenly thought of Jane’s Cleveland Indians cap. Where was it? Had they left Chief Wahoo upside down in the upstairs hall of the cookhouse? But they were already at Six-Pack’s place; not a soul had been on the streets, and the dance-hall door had not once opened. They couldn’t go back to the cookhouse now.

Danny parked the Pontiac at the foot of the outside stairs to Pam’s apartment. The boy had squeezed into the cab of Jane’s truck, between poor dead Jane and his father, before Dominic noticed Injun Jane’s missing baseball cap-young Dan was wearing it.

“We need to leave Chief Wahoo with her, don’t we?” the twelve-year-old asked.

“Good boy,” his dad said, his heart welling with pride and fear. Regarding the back-up plan, there was so much for a twelve-year-old to remember.

The cook needed his son’s help in getting Injun Jane from the cab of the truck to Constable Carl’s kitchen door, which Jane had said was always left unlocked. It would be all right if they dragged her feet through the mud, because the constable would expect Jane’s boots to be muddy; they just couldn’t allow another part of her to touch the ground. Naturally, the dolly would have left wheel tracks in the mud-and what would Dominic have done with the dolly? Leave it in Jane’s truck, or at Constable Carl’s door?

They drove to that forlorn part of town near the sawmill and the hostelry favored by the French Canadian itinerants. (Constable Carl liked living near his principal victims.) “What would you guess Ketchum weighs?” Danny asked, after his dad had parked Jane’s truck in her usual spot. They were standing on the running board of the truck; young Dan held Jane upright in the passenger seat while his father managed to guide her stiffening legs out the open door. But once her feet were on the running board, what then?

“Ketchum weighs about two-twenty, maybe two-thirty,” the cook said.

“And Six-Pack?” young Dan asked.

Dominic Baciagalupo would feel the stiffness in his neck from Six-Pack’s headlock for about a week. “Pam probably weighs about one-seventy-five-one-eighty, tops,” his dad answered.

“And what do you weigh?” Danny asked.

The cook could see where this line of questioning was going. He let Injun Jane’s feet slide all the way to the mud; he stood on the wet ground beside her, holding her around her hips while Daniel (still standing on the running board) hugged her under her arms. We will both end up in the mud with Jane on top of us! Dominic was thinking, but he said, as casually as possible, “Oh, I don’t know what I weigh-about one-fifty, I guess.” (He weighed all of 145 with his winter clothes on, he knew perfectly well-he had never weighed as much as 150 pounds.)

“And Jane?” young Dan grunted, stepping down to the ground from the truck’s running board. The body of the Indian dishwasher pitched forward into his and his father’s waiting arms. Though Jane’s knees buckled, they did not touch the mud; the cook and his son staggered to hold her, but they didn’t fall.

Injun Jane weighed at least 300 pounds-maybe 315 or 320-although Dominic Baciagalupo would profess not to know. The cook could scarcely get his breath as he dragged his dead paramour to her bad boyfriend’s kitchen door, but he managed to sound almost unconcerned as he answered his son in a whisper: “Jane? Oh, she weighs about the same as Ketchum-maybe a little more.”

To their mutual surprise, the cook and his son saw that Constable Carl’s kitchen door was not only unlocked-it was open. (The wind, maybe-or else the cowboy had come home so drunk that he’d left the door open in a blind, unthinking stupor.) The misty rain had wet what they could see of the kitchen floor. While the kitchen was dimly lit, at least one light was on, but they couldn’t see beyond the kitchen; they could not know more.

When Jane’s splayed feet were touching the kitchen floor, Dominic felt confident that he could slide her the rest of the way inside by himself; it would help him that her boots were muddy and the floor was wet. “Good-bye, Daniel,” the cook whispered to his son. In lieu of a kiss, the twelve-year-old took Jane’s baseball cap off his head and put it on his father’s.

When the cook could no longer hear Danny’s retreating steps on the muddy street, he steered Jane’s great weight forward into the kitchen. He could only hope that the boy would remember his instructions. “If you hear a gunshot, go to Ketchum. If you wait for me in the Pontiac for more than twenty minutes-even if there is no shot-go to Ketchum.”

Dominic had told the twelve-year-old that if anything ever happened to his dad-not just tonight-go to Ketchum, and tell Ketchum everything. “Watch out for the next-to-last step at the top of Pam’s stairs,” the cook had also told his son.

“Won’t Six-Pack be there?” the boy had asked.

“Just tell her you need to talk to Ketchum. She’ll let you in,” his father had said. (He could only hope that Pam would let Daniel in.)

Dominic Baciagalupo slid Injun Jane’s body past the wet area on the kitchen floor before he let her come to rest against a cabinet. Holding her under her arms, he allowed her immense weight to sag onto the countertop; then, with excruciating slowness, he stretched her body out upon the floor. While he was bending over her, the Cleveland Indians cap fell off the cook’s head and landed upside down beside Jane; Chief Wahoo was grinning insanely while Dominic waited for the cocking-sound of the Colt.45, which the cook was certain he would hear. Just as Danny would be sure to hear the discharging of the gun-it was more than loud. At that hour, everyone in town would hear a gunshot-maybe even Ketchum, still sleeping off his bender. (On occasion, even from the distance of the cookhouse, Dominic had heard that Colt.45 discharge.)

But nothing happened. The cook let his breathing return to normal, choosing not to look around. If Constable Carl was there, Dominic didn’t want to see him. The cook would rather let the cowboy shoot him in the back as he was leaving; he left carefully, using the outward-turned toe of his bad foot to smear his muddy footprints as he left.

Outside, a wooden plank was stretched across the gutter from the road. Dominic used the plank to wipe flat the drag marks where the toes and heels of Jane’s boots had carved deep ruts-marking the tortured path from her truck to the constable’s kitchen door. The cook returned the plank to its proper place, wiping the mud from his hands on the wet fender of Jane’s truck, which the increasingly steady rain would wash clean. (The rain would take care of his and young Dan’s footprints, too.)

No one saw the cook limp past the silent dance hall; the Beaudette brothers, or their ghosts, had not reoccupied the old Lombard log hauler, which stood as the lone sentinel in the muddy lane alongside the hall. Dominic Baciagalupo was wondering what Constable Carl might make of Injun Jane’s body when he stumbled over it in the bleary-eyed morning. What had he hit her with? the cowboy might speculate, having hit her more than once before. But where is the weapon, the blunt instrument? the constable would be sure to ask himself. Maybe I’m not the one who hit her, the cowboy might later conclude-once his head cleared, or most certainly when he learned that the cook and his son had left town.

Please, God, give me time, the cook was thinking, as he saw his boy’s small face behind the water-streaked windshield of the Chieftain Deluxe. Young Dan was waiting in the passenger seat, as if he’d never lost faith that his father would safely return from Constable Carl’s and be their driver.

By time, that dogged companion, Dominic Baciagalupo meant more than the time needed for this most immediate getaway. He meant the necessary time to be a good father to his precious child, the time to watch his boy become a man; the cook prayed he would have that much time, though he had no idea how he might arrange such an unlikely luxury.

He got into the driver’s seat of the station wagon without receiving the.45-caliber bullet he’d been expecting. Young Dan began to cry. “I kept listening for the gunshot,” the twelve-year-old said.

“One day, Daniel, you may hear it,” his dad told him, hugging him before he started the Pontiac.

“Aren’t we going to tell Ketchum?” Danny asked.

All the cook could say might one day be in danger of sounding like a mantra, but Dominic would say it nonetheless: “We haven’t time.”

Like a long, slowly moving hearse, the maroon semiwoodie took the haul road out of the settlement. As they drove south-southeast, sometimes within sight of Twisted River, the dawn was fast approaching. There would be the dam to deal with, when they reached the Pontook Reservoir; then, wherever they went next, they would be on Route 16, which ran north and south along the Androscoggin.

Exactly how much time remained to them, in their more immediate future, would be determined by what they found at Dead Woman Dam-and how long they would need to linger there. (Not too long, Dominic would hope as he drove.)

“Are we ever going to tell Ketchum?” young Dan asked his dad.

“Sure we are,” his father answered, though the cook had no idea how he might get the necessary message to Ketchum-one that would be safe yet somehow manage to be clear.

For now, the wind had dropped and the rain was letting up. Ahead of them, the haul road was slick with tire-rutted mud, but the sun was rising; it shone in the driver’s-side window, giving Dominic Baciagalupo a bright (albeit unrealistic) view of the future.

Only hours ago, the cook had been worried about finding Angel’s body-specifically, how the sight of the dead Canadian youth might affect his beloved Daniel. Since then, the twelve-year-old had killed his favorite babysitter, and both father and son had wrestled with her body-bringing Injun Jane the not-inconsiderable distance from the upstairs of the cookhouse to her near-final resting place at Constable Carl’s.

Whatever the cook and his dear boy would find at Dead Woman Dam, Dominic was optimistically thinking, how bad could it really be? (Under stress, as he was, the cook had uncharacteristically thought of the place by its ill-gotten name.)

AS THE CHIEFTAIN CAME CLOSER to the Pontook Reservoir, the boy and his dad could see the seagulls. Although the Pontook was more than one hundred miles from the ocean, there were always sea gulls around the Androscoggin -it was such big water.

“There’s a kid in my class named Halsted,” Danny was saying worriedly.

“I think I know his father,” the cook said.

“His dad kicked him in the face with his caulk boots on-the kid has holes in his forehead,” young Dan reported.

“That would definitely be the Halsted I know,” Dominic replied.

“Ketchum says someone should stick a sawdust blower up Halsted’s ass, and see if the fat bastard can be inflated-Ketchum means the dad,” Danny explained.

“Ketchum recommends the sawdust blower for no small number of assholes,” the cook said.

“I’ll bet you we’re going to miss Ketchum wicked,” the boy said obsessively.

“I’ll bet you we do,” his father agreed. “Wickedly.”

“Ketchum says you can’t ever dry out hemlock.” Danny talked on and on. The twelve-year-old was clearly nervous about where they were going-not just Dead Woman Dam, but where they might go after that.

“Hemlock beams are good for bridges,” Dominic countered.

“Hook your whiffletree as close to the load as possible,” young Dan recited, from memory-for no apparent reason. “Success Pond has the biggest fucking beaver pond there is,” Danny continued.

“Are you going to quote Ketchum the whole way?” his dad asked him.

“The whole way where?” the twelve-year-old asked anxiously.

“I don’t know yet, Daniel.”

“Hardwoods don’t float very well,” the boy replied, apropos of nothing.

Yes, but softwoods float pretty high, Dominic Baciagalupo was thinking. Those had been softwoods in the river drive, when Angel went under the logs. And with the wind last night, some of the topmost logs might have been blown outside the containment boom; those logs would be eddying in the overflow spillway to either side of the sluice dam. The stray logs, mostly spruce and pine, would make it hard to get Angel out of the circling water. Both the high-water shoreline and the more slowly moving water in the millpond had been formed by the dam; with any luck, they might find Angel’s body there, in the shallows.

“Who would kick his own kid in the face with a caulk boot?” the distraught boy asked his dad.

“No one we’ll ever see again,” Dominic told his son. The sawmill at Dead Woman Dam looked abandoned, but that was just because it was Sunday.

“Tell me once more why they call it Dead Woman Dam,” Danny said to his father.

“You know perfectly well why they call it that, Daniel.”

“I know why you don’t like to call it that,” the boy quickly rejoined. “Mom was the dead woman-that’s why, right?”

The cook parked the ’52 Pontiac next to the loading dock at the mill. Dominic wouldn’t answer his son, but the twelve-year-old knew the whole history-“perfectly well,” as his dad had said. Both Jane and Ketchum had told the boy the story. Dead Woman Dam was named for his mother, but Danny never ceased wanting his father to talk about it-more than his father ever would.

“Why does Ketchum have a white finger? What does the chainsaw have to do with it?” young Dan started up; he simply couldn’t stop talking.

“Ketchum has more than one white finger, and you know what the chainsaw has to do with it,” his father said. “The vibration, remember?”

“Oh, right,” the boy said.

“Daniel, please relax. Let’s just try to get through this, and move on.”

“Move on where?” the twelve-year-old shouted.

“Daniel, please-I’m as upset as you are,” his father said. “Let’s look for Angel. Let’s just see what we find, okay?”

“We can’t do anything about Jane, can we?” Danny asked.

“No, we can’t,” his dad said.

“What will Ketchum think of us?” the boy asked.

Dominic wished he knew. “That’s enough about Ketchum,” was all the cook could say. Ketchum will know what to do, his old friend was hoping.

But how would they manage to tell Ketchum what had happened? They couldn’t wait at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. If it took half that long to find Angel, they couldn’t even wait until they found him!

It all depended on when Constable Carl woke up and discovered Jane’s body. At first, the cowboy would surely think he was the culprit. And the cookhouse never served breakfast on a Sunday morning; an early supper was the only meal served on Sundays. It would be midafternoon before the kitchen helpers arrived at the cookhouse; when they learned that the cook and his son were gone, they wouldn’t necessarily tell the constable. (Not right away.) The cowboy would have no immediate reason to go looking for Ketchum, either.

Dominic was beginning to think that it might be all right to wait for Ketchum at Dead Woman Dam until nine o’clock in the morning. From what the cook knew about Constable Carl, it would be just like him to bury Jane’s body and forget about her-that is, until the cowboy heard that the cook and his son were gone. Most people in Twisted River would conclude that Injun Jane had left town with them! Only the constable would know where Jane was, and, under the circumstances (the guilty-looking, premature burial), the cowboy wouldn’t be likely to dig up Jane’s body just to prove what he knew.

Or was this wishful thinking on Dominic Baciagalupo’s part? Constable Carl wouldn’t hesitate to bury Injun Jane, if he believed he killed her. What would be wishful thinking on the cook’s part was to imagine that the cowboy might feel contrite about killing Jane-enough to blow his brains out, one could only hope. (That would be wishful thinking-to dream of a penitent Constable Carl, as if the cowboy could even conceive of contrition!)

To the right of the flashboards and the sluice spillway, outside the containment boom, the water was eddying against the dam in a clockwise direction, a few windblown logs (some stray red pine and tamarack among the spruce) circling in the open water. Young Dan and his dad couldn’t spot a body there. Where the main water passed through the sluice spillway, the containment boom bulged with tangled logs, but nothing stood out from the wet-bark, dark-water tones.

The cook and his son carefully crossed the dam to the open water on the left side of the boom; here the water and some stray logs were eddying in a counterclockwise direction. A deerskin glove was twirling in the water, but they both knew Angel hadn’t been wearing gloves. The water was deep and black, with floating slabs of bark; to Dominic’s disappointment and relief, they didn’t see a body there, either.

“Maybe Angel got out,” Danny said, but his dad knew better; no one that young slipped under moving logs and got out.

It was already past seven in the morning, but they had to keep looking; even the family Angel had run away from would want to know about their boy. It would take longer to search the broader reaches of the millpond-at some distance from the dam-although the footing would be safer there. The closer they were to the dam and the containment boom, the more the cook and his son worried about each other. (They weren’t wearing caulk boots, they weren’t Ketchum-they weren’t even rivermen of the greenest kind. They simply weren’t loggers.)

It would be half past eight before they found Angel’s body. The long-haired boy, in his red, white, and green plaid shirt, was floating facedown in the shallows, close to shore-not one log was anywhere around him. Danny didn’t even get his feet wet bringing the body ashore. The twelve-year-old used a fallen branch to hook Angel’s Royal Stewart shirt; young Dan called to his dad while he towed the Canadian youth to within his grasp. Together they got Angel to higher ground on the riverbank; lifting and dragging the body was light work compared to toting Injun Jane.

They unlaced the young logger’s caulk boots and converted one of the boots to a pail, to bring fresh water ashore. They used the water to wipe the mud and pieces of bark from Angel’s face and hands, which were a pale pearl color tinged with blue. Danny did his best to run his fingers like a comb through the dead youth’s hair.

The twelve-year-old was the first to find a leech. As long and thick as Ketchum’s oddly bent index finger, it was what the locals called a northern bloodsucker-it was attached to Angel’s throat. The cook knew it wouldn’t be the only leech on Angel. Dominic Baciagalupo also knew how Ketchum hated leeches. The way things were working out, Dominic might not be able to spare his old friend the sight of Angel’s body, but-with Daniel’s help-they might spare Ketchum the bloodsuckers.

By nine o’clock, they had moved Angel to the loading dock at the sawmill, where the platform was at least dry and partly sunny-and in view of the parking lot. They had stripped the body and removed almost twenty leeches; they’d wiped Angel clean with his wet plaid shirt, and had managed to re-dress the dead boy in an anonymous combination of the cook’s and his son’s unrecognizable clothes. A T-shirt that had always been too big for Danny fit Angel fine; an old pair of Dominic’s dungarees completed the picture. For Ketchum’s sake, if Ketchum ever showed up, at least the clothes were clean and dry. There was nothing they could do about the pearl-gray, bluish tint to Angel’s skin; it was unreasonable to hope that the weak April sun would return the natural color to the dead youth, but somehow Angel looked warm.

“Are we waiting for Ketchum?” Danny asked his dad.

“For just a little while longer,” the cook replied. His dad was the anxious one now, young Dan realized. (The thing about time, Dominic knew, was that it was relentless.)

The cook was wringing out Angel’s soaking-wet and dirty clothes when he felt the wallet in the left-front pocket of the Canadian’s dungarees-just a cheap, imitation-leather wallet with a photo of a pretty, heavy-looking woman under a plastic window, which was now fogged by its immersion in the cold water. Dominic rubbed the plastic on his shirtsleeve; when he could see the woman more clearly, her resemblance to Angel was apparent. Surely, she was the dead boy’s mother-a woman a little older than the cook but younger than Injun Jane.

There wasn’t much money in the wallet-just some small bills, only American dollars (Dominic had expected to find some Canadian dollars, too), and what appeared to be a business card from a restaurant with an Italian name. This confirmed the cook’s earliest impression that Angel was no stranger to working in a kitchen, though it might not have been the boy’s foremost career choice.

However, something else was not as Dominic Baciagalupo had expected: The restaurant wasn’t in Toronto, or anywhere else in Ontario; it was an Italian restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts, and the name of the restaurant was an even bigger surprise. It was a phrase that the illegitimate son of Annunziata Saetta knew well, because he’d heard his mother utter it with a bitterness born of rejection. “Vicino di Napoli,” Nunzi had said-in reference to where Dominic’s absconding father had gone-and the boy had thought of those hill towns and provinces “in the vicinity of Naples,” where his dad had come from (and, allegedly, gone back to). The names of those towns and provinces that Annunziata had said in her sleep- Benevento and Avellino -came to Dominic’s mind.

But was it possible that his deadbeat dad had run no farther than an Italian restaurant on Hanover Street -what Nunzi had called “the main drag” of the North End of Boston? Because, according to the business card in Angel’s wallet, the restaurant was called Vicino di Napoli-clearly a Neapolitan place-and it was on Hanover Street, near Cross Street. The street names themselves were as familiar to Dominic’s childhood as Nunzi’s oft-repeated recommendations for parsley (prezzémolo), or her frequent mention of Mother Anna’s and the Europeo-two other restaurants on Hanover Street.

Nothing struck the cook as too coincidental to be believed-not on a day when twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo had killed his father’s lover with the same skillet the cook had put to such legendary use. (Who would believe he’d once saved his now-dead wife from a bear?) Even so, Dominic was unprepared for the last item he discovered in Angel Pope’s wallet. As near as the cook could tell, this was a summer pass to Boston ’s streetcar and subway system-a transit pass, Dominic had heard his mother call it. The pass declared that the bearer was under the age of sixteen in the summer of 1953-and there was Angel’s date of birth, to prove it. The boy had been born on February 16, 1939, which meant that Angel had only recently turned fifteen. The youth would have had to have run away from home when he was only fourteen-if he had really run away. (And of course there was no way of knowing if Boston was still the dead boy’s “home,” although the transit pass and the business card from Vicino di Napoli strongly suggested that this was so.)

What would most convincingly catch Dominic Baciagalupo’s attention was Angel’s real name-it wasn’t exactly Angel Pope.

ANGELÙ DEL POPOLO

“Who?” Danny asked, when his father read the name on the streetcar and subway pass out loud.

The cook knew that Del Popolo meant “Of the People,” and that Pope was a common Americanization of the Sicilian name; while Del Popolo was probably but not necessarily Sicilian, the an-geh-LOO was definitely Sicilian, which the cook knew, too. Had the boy worked in a Neapolitan restaurant? (At fourteen, a part-time job was permitted.) But what had made him run away? From the photograph, it appeared he had still loved his mom.

But all the cook said to his son was: “It seems that Angel wasn’t who he said he was, Daniel.” Dominic let Danny look over the transit pass-it and the business card from Vicino di Napoli in the North End were all they had to go on, if they were going to try to find Angelù Del Popolo’s family.

Naturally, there was a more pressing problem. Where the hell was Ketchum? Dominic Baciagalupo was wondering. How long could they afford to wait? What if Constable Carl hadn’t been all that drunk? What if the cowboy had found Injun Jane’s body, but he’d known in an instant that he hadn’t laid a hand on her-at least not last night?

It was hard to imagine what written message the cook could leave for Ketchum on Angel’s body, because what if Ketchum didn’t find Angel first? Wouldn’t the message have to be in code?

Surprise! Angel isn’t Canadian!

And, by the way, Jane was in an accident!

Nobody did it-not even Carl!

Well, just how could the cook leave a note like that?

“Are we still waiting for Ketchum?” young Dan asked his dad.

It was with notably less conviction that his father replied: “For just a little while longer, Daniel.”

THE SONG ON THE RADIO in Ketchum’s badly lived-in truck reached them on the loading dock of the sawmill before the truck itself appeared on the haul road-maybe it was Jo Stafford singing “Make Love to Me,” but Ketchum turned off the radio before the cook could be sure about the song. (Ketchum was on his way to becoming chainsaw-deaf. The radio in his truck was always overloud, the windows-now that it was what passed for spring-usually open.) Dominic was relieved to see that Six-Pack hadn’t come along for the ride; that would have seriously complicated matters.

Ketchum parked his rattling heap a discreet distance from the Pontiac; he sat in the cab with his white cast resting on the steering wheel, his eyes looking past them on the platform to where Angel was reclining in the uncertain sunlight.

“You found him, I see,” Ketchum said; he looked away, toward the dam, as if he were counting the logs in the containment boom.

As always, both predictable and unaccountable things were transported in the back of Ketchum’s pickup truck; a homemade shelter covered the bed of the pickup, turning the entire truck into a wanigan. Ketchum carried his chainsaws around, together with an assortment of axes and other tools-and, under a canvas tarp, an inexplicable half-cord of firewood, in case the suddenly urgent need to build a bonfire possessed him.

“Daniel and I can put Angel in the back of your pickup, where you don’t have to see him,” Dominic said.

“Why can’t Angel ride with you in the Chieftain?” Ketchum asked.

“Because we’re not going back to Twisted River,” the cook told his old friend.

Ketchum sighed, his eyes coming slowly to rest on Angel. The river driver got out of his truck and walked with an unexplained limp to the loading dock. (Dominic wondered if Ketchum was limping to mock him.) Ketchum picked up the dead youth’s body as if it were a sleeping baby; the logger carried the fifteen-year-old to the cab of his truck, where Danny had run ahead to open the door.

“I guess I might as well see him now as wait till I have to unload him back in town,” Ketchum told them. “I suppose these are your clothes on him?” he asked young Dan.

“Mine and my dad’s,” the twelve-year-old said.

The cook limped over to the truck, carrying Angel’s wet and dirty clothes; he put them on the floor of the cab, by the dead boy’s feet. “Angel’s clothes could stand some washing and drying,” he told Ketchum.

“I’ll have Jane wash and dry his clothes,” Ketchum told them. “Jane and I can clean Angel up a little, too-then we’ll dress him in his own clothes.”

“Jane is dead, Ketchum,” the cook told him. (It was an accident, he was about to add, but his beloved Daniel was quicker.)

“I killed her with the skillet-the one Dad hit the bear with,” Danny blurted out. “I thought Jane was a bear,” the boy told Ketchum.

The cook confirmed the story by immediately looking away from his old friend. Ketchum put his good arm around Danny’s shoulders and pulled the boy against him. Young Dan buried his face in the stomach of Ketchum’s wool-flannel shirt-the same green and blue Black Watch plaid that Six-Pack Pam had been wearing. To the twelve-year-old, the commingled smells of Ketchum and Six-Pack inhabited the shirt as confidently as their two strong bodies.

Raising his cast, Ketchum pointed to the Pontiac. “Christ, Cookie, you haven’t got poor Jane in the Chieftain, have you?”

“We took her to Constable Carl’s,” Danny said.

“I don’t know if Carl had passed out in another room, or if he wasn’t home, but I left Jane on his kitchen floor,” the cook explained. “With any luck, the cowboy will find her body and think he did it.”

“Of course he’ll think he did it!” Ketchum thundered. “I’ll bet he buried her an hour ago, or he’s digging the damn hole as we speak. But when Carl hears that you and Danny have left town, he’ll begin to think he didn’t do it! He’ll think you did it, Cookie-if you and Danny don’t get your asses back to Twisted River!”

“Bluff it out, you mean?” Dominic asked.

“What’s to bluff?” Ketchum asked. “For the rest of his rotten life, the cowboy will be trying to remember exactly how and why he killed Jane-or he’ll be looking for you, Cookie.”

“You’re assuming he won’t remember last night,” the cook said. “That’s a pretty big assumption, isn’t it?”

“Six-Pack told me you paid us a visit last night,” Ketchum told his old friend. “Well, do you think I remember you being there?”

“Probably not,” Dominic answered. “But what you’re suggesting is that I gamble everything.” It was both unconscious and uncontrollable that, when the cook said everything, he looked straight at young Daniel.

“You go back to the cookhouse, I help you unpack the Chieftain, you and Danny are completely settled in by the time the kitchen helpers show up this afternoon. Then, around suppertime,” Ketchum continued, “you send Dot or May-or one of those worthless fucking sawmill workers’ wives-to Constable Carl’s. You have her say, ‘Where’s Jane? Cookie’s going crazy without his dishwasher!’ That’s bluffing it out! You win that bluff hands down,” Ketchum told him. “The cowboy will be shitting his pants. He’ll be shitting them for years-just waiting for some dog to dig up the Injun’s body!”

“I don’t know, Ketchum,” the cook said. “It’s a huge bluff. I can’t take a chance like that-not with Daniel.”

“You’re taking a bigger chance if you leave,” his old friend told him. “Shit, if the cowboy blows your head off, I’ll take good care of Danny.”

Young Dan’s eyes kept moving from his father to Ketchum, and back to his father again. “I think we should go back to the cookhouse,” the twelve-year-old told his dad.

But the cook knew how change-any change-made his son anxious. Of course Daniel Baciagalupo would vote to stay and bluff it out; leaving represented a more unknown fear.

“Look at it this way, Cookie,” Ketchum was saying, his white cast leveled at his friend-as heavy as the cowboy’s Colt.45-“if I’m wrong and Carl shoots you, he won’t dare lay so much as a finger on Danny. But if I’m right, and the cowboy comes after you, he could kill you both-because you’d both be fugitives.”

“Well, that’s what we are-we’re fugitives,” Dominic said. “I’m not a gambler, Ketchum-not anymore.”

“You’re gambling now, Cookie,” Ketchum told him. “Either way, it’s a gamble, isn’t it?”

“Give Ketchum a hug, Daniel-we should be going,” his dad said.

Danny Baciagalupo would remember that hug, and how he thought it strange that his father and Ketchum didn’t hug each other-they were such old friends, and such good ones.

“Big changes are coming, Cookie,” Ketchum tried to tell his friend. “They won’t be moving logs over water much longer. Those dams on the Dummer ponds will be gone-this dam here won’t last, either,” he said, with a wave of his cast indicating the containment boom but choosing to leave Dead Woman Dam unnamed.

“Dummer Pond and Little Dummer and Twisted River will just flow into the Pontook. I suspect the old boom piers on the Androscoggin will last, but they won’t be using them anymore. And the first time there’s a fire in West Dummer or Twisted River, do you think anyone will bother to rebuild those sorry settlements? Who wouldn’t rather move to Milan or Errol-or even Berlin, if you were old and feeble enough?” Ketchum added. “All you have to do is stay and outlast this miserable place, Cookie-you and Danny.” But the cook and his son were making their way to the Chieftain. “If you run now, you’ll be running forever!” Ketchum called after them. He limped around his truck from the passenger’s to the driver’s side.

“Why are you limping?” the cook called to him.

“Shit,” Ketchum said. “There’s a step missing on Six-Pack’s stairs-I fucking forgot about it.”

“Take care of yourself, Ketchum,” his old friend told him.

“You, too, Cookie,” Ketchum said. “I won’t ask you about your lip, but I’m familiar with that injury.”

“By the way, Angel wasn’t Canadian,” Dominic Baciagalupo told Ketchum.

“His real name was Angelù Del Popolo,” young Dan explained, “and he came from Boston, not Toronto.”

“I suppose that’s where you’re going?” Ketchum asked them. “ Boston?”

“Angel must have had a family-there’s got to be someone who needs to know what happened to him,” the cook said.

Ketchum nodded. Through the windshield of his truck, the insufficient sunlight was playing tricks with the way Angelù Del Popolo sat up (almost straight) and faced alertly forward. Angel not only looked alive, but he seemed to be just starting the journey of his young life-not ending it.

“Suppose I tell Carl that you and Danny are delivering the bad news to Angel’s family? You didn’t leave the cookhouse looking like you were leaving it for good, did you?” Ketchum asked.

“We took nothing anybody would notice,” Dominic said. “It would appear that we were coming back.”

“Suppose I tell the cowboy that I was surprised Injun Jane wasn’t with you?” Ketchum asked. “I could say that, if I were Jane, I would have gone to Canada, too.” Danny saw how his dad considered this, before Ketchum said, “I think I won’t say you’ve gone to Boston. Maybe it’s better to say, ‘If I were Jane, I would have gone to Toronto .’ Suppose I say that?”

“Just don’t say too much, whatever you say,” the cook told him.

“I believe I’ll still think of him as ‘Angel,’ if that’s okay,” Ketchum said, as he climbed into his truck; he glanced only briefly at the dead boy, quickly looking away.

“I’ll always think of him as ‘Angel’!” young Dan called.

To what extent a twelve-year-old is aware, or not, of the start of an adventure-or whether this misadventure had begun long before Danny Baciagalupo mistook Injun Jane for a bear-neither Ketchum nor the cook could say, though Danny seemed very “aware.” Ketchum must have known that he might be seeing them for the last time, and he wanted to cast this phase of the gamble the cook was taking in a more positive light. “Danny!” Ketchum called. “I just want you to know that, on occasion, I more than once mistook Jane for a bear myself.”

But Ketchum was not one for casting a positive light for long. “I don’t suppose Jane was wearing the Chief Wahoo hat-when it happened,” the logger said to Danny.

“No, she wasn’t,” the twelve-year-old told him.

“Damn it, Jane-oh, shit, Jane!” Ketchum cried. “Some fella in Cleveland told me it was a lucky hat,” the river driver explained to the boy. “This fella said Chief Wahoo was some kind of spirit; he was supposed to look after Injuns.”

“Maybe he’s looking after Jane now,” Danny said.

“Don’t get religious on me, Danny-just remember the Injun as she was. Jane truly loved you,” Ketchum told the twelve-year-old. “Just honor her memory-that’s all you can do.”

“I am missing you already, Ketchum!” the boy suddenly cried out.

“Oh, shit, Danny-you best get going, if you’re going,” the river-man said.

Then Ketchum started his truck and drove off on the haul road, toward Twisted River, leaving the cook and his son to their lengthier and less certain journey-to their next life, no less.