John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Probably after deer season, when the bay was frozen,” Ketchum considered. “I’m guessing that when he shot a deer-and your Mounties would have known when someone was shooting, given how quiet it would be here in the winter, with all the snow-and when the Mounties came and asked him what he was shooting, I expect your granddaddy told them some story. Like he was shooting over a red squirrel’s head, because the squirrel’s chattering was driving him crazy, or that a herd of deer had been feeding on his favorite cedars, and he shot over their heads so they would go eat all the cedars on someone else’s island-when the whole time he was talking, the deer, which Granddaddy would have gutted over this hole, so there wouldn’t be any blood in the snow, and where he was keeping the meat cold… well, do you see what I’m getting at, Charlotte?” Ketchum asked her. “This here hole is a poacher’s meat locker! I told you-there’s lots of deer around here, I’ll bet.”

Ketchum and Hero had stayed in that run-down log cabin, haunted or not. (“Hell, most places I’ve lived are haunted,” Ketchum had remarked.) The newer sleeping cabins were not to the old woodsman’s liking; as for the torn screens in Granddaddy’s cabin, Ketchum said, “If you don’t get bitten by a mosquito or two, you can hardly tell you’re in the woods.” And there was more loon activity in that back bay, because there were fewer boats; Ketchum had figured that out on the first day, too. He liked the sound of loons. “Besides, Hero farts something awful-you wouldn’t want him stinking up your sleeping cabins, Charlotte!”

At the end of the day, Charlotte wasn’t shocked by the idea that her granddaddy had been a poacher. He’d died destitute and alcoholic; gambling debts and whiskey had done him in. Now, at least, the trapdoor in the floor had been given a reason for its existence, and this rather quickly led Ketchum to his suggested improvements . It never occurred to the old river driver that Charlotte had not once been interested in living on her beloved island in the frigid winter months, when the prevailing wind had permanently bent the trees-when the bay was frozen and piled high with snow, and there wasn’t a human soul around, except the occasional ice fisherman and those madmen who rode their snowmobiles over the lake.