John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“Why are you always armed , Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked the river driver.

Maybe it was the armed word that caught Ketchum off-guard, because he hadn’t been armed that long-ago night when the logger and the cook and the cook’s cousin Rosie had started out on the ice-do-si-doing their way on the frozen river. Right there-in the bear-stinking truck, in the woodsman’s wild eyes-a vision of Rosie must have appeared to Ketchum. Danny noticed that Ketchum’s fierce beard was once more wet with tears.

“I have made … mistakes,” the riverman began; his voice sounded choked, half strangled. “Not only errors of judgment, or simply saying something I couldn’t live up to, but actual lapses.”

“You don’t have to tell the story, Ketchum,” Danny told him, but there was no stopping the logger now.

“A loving couple will say things to each other-you know, Danny-just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn’t good, or if they shouldn’t feel good about it,” Ketchum said. “A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by-if you know what I mean.”

“Not really,” Danny answered. The writer saw that the haul road to what had been the town of Twisted River was washed out-flooded, years past-and now the rocky road was overgrown with lichen and swamp moss. Only the fork in the road-a left turn, to the cookhouse-had endured, and Ketchum took it.

“My left hand was the one I touched your mom with, Danny. I wouldn’t touch her with my right hand-the one I had touched, and would touch, other women with,” Ketchum said.

“Stop!” Carmella cried. (At least she hadn’t said, “My goodness,” Danny thought; he knew Ketchum wouldn’t stop, now that he had started.)

“That was our first rule-I was her left-handed lover,” the logger explained. “In both our minds, my left hand was hers- it was Rosie’s hand, hence my most important hand, my good hand. It was my more gentle hand-the hand least like myself,” Ketchum said. It was the hand that had struck fewer blows, Danny was thinking, and Ketchum’s left index finger had never squeezed a trigger.

“I see,” Danny told him.

“Please stop,” Carmella begged. (Was she gagging or crying? the writer wondered. It hadn’t occurred to Danny that it wasn’t the story Carmella wanted to stop; it was the truck.)

“You said there was a lapse . So what was the mistake ?” Danny asked the old woodsman.

But they were cresting the hill where the cookhouse had been. Just then-in the bouncing, vomitous truck-there hove into view the deceptively calm river basin, and below the basin was the bend in the river, where both Rosie and Angel had been swept away. Carmella gasped to see the water. For Danny, the shock was to see nothing there-not a board of the cookhouse remained-and as for the view of the town from where the cookhouse had been, there was no town.

“The mistake?” Ketchum shouted. “I’ll say there was a lapse! We were all drunk and hollering when we went out on the ice, Danny-you know that much, don’t you?”

“Yes-Jane told me,” Danny said.

“And I said, or I thought I said, to Rosie, ‘Give me your hand.’ I swear that’s what I said to her,” Ketchum declared. “But-being drunk, and being right-handed-I instinctively reached for her with my right hand. I had been carrying your father, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too-so I put him down.” Ketchum finally stopped the truck.

Carmella opened the passenger-side door and vomited in the grass; the poor woman kept retching while Danny surveyed the crumbled chimney of the cookhouse. Nothing taller than two or three feet of the bricks was left standing where once the cook’s pizza oven had been.

“But your mother knew our rules,” Ketchum continued. “Rosie said, ‘Not that hand-that’s the wrong hand.’ And she danced away from me-she wouldn’t take my hand. Then your father slipped and fell down, and I was pushing him across the ice-as if he were a human sled-but I couldn’t close the distance between your mom and me. I didn’t have hold of her hand, Danny, because I’d reached for her with my right one-the bad one. Do you see?”

“I see,” Danny said, “but it seems like such a small thing.” Yet the writer could see it, vividly-how the distance between his mom and Ketchum had been insurmountable, especially when the logs tore downstream from the Dummer ponds and onto the ice in the river basin, where they quickly picked up speed.

Carmella, on her knees, appeared to be praying; her view of where her beloved Angelù had been lost was truly the best in Twisted River, which was why the cook had wanted the cookhouse erected there.

“Don’t cut off your left hand, Ketchum,” Danny told him.

“Please don’t, Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella begged the old woodsman.

“We’ll see,” was all Ketchum would tell them. “We’ll see.”

IN THE LATE FALL of the same year he’d set fire to Twisted River, Ketchum came back to the site of the cookhouse with a hoe and some grass seed. He didn’t bother to sow any of it in what had been the town of Twisted River, but in the area of the cookhouse-and everywhere on the hillside above the river basin, where the ashes from the fire had settled into the ground-Ketchum hoed the ashes and the earth together, and he scattered the grass seed. He’d picked a day when he knew it was going to rain; by the next morning, the rain had turned to sleet, and all winter long the grass seed lay under the snow. There was grass the next spring, and now there was a meadow where the cookhouse had been. No one had ever mowed the grass, which was tall and wavy.

Ketchum took Carmella by the arm, and they walked down the hill through the tall grass to where the town had been. Danny followed them, carrying his dad’s ashes and-at Ketchum’s insistence-the Remington carbine. There was nothing left standing in the town of Twisted River, save the onetime lone sentinel that had stood watch in the muddy lane alongside what had been the dance hall-namely, the old steam-engine Lombard log hauler. The fire must have burned so hot that the Lombard was permanently blackened-impervious to rust but not to bird shit, yet otherwise perfectly black. The strong sled runners were intact, but the bulldozer-type tracks were gone-taken as a souvenir, maybe, if not consumed in the fire. Where the helmsman had sat-at the front of the Lombard, perched over the sled runners-the long-untouched steering wheel looked ready to use (had there been a helmsman still alive who knew how to steer it). As the cook once predicted, the ancient log hauler had outlasted the town.

Ketchum guided Carmella closer to the riverbank, but even on a dry and sunny September morning, they couldn’t get within six feet of the water’s edge; the riverbank was treacherously slippery, the ground spongy underfoot. They didn’t dam up the Dummer ponds anymore, but the water upstream of the river basin nonetheless ran fast-even in the fall-and Twisted River often overflowed its banks. Closer to the river, Danny felt the wind in his face; it came off the water in the basin, as if blown downstream from the Dummer ponds.

“As I suspected,” Ketchum said. “If we try to scatter Cookie’s ashes in the river, we can’t get close enough to the water. The wind will blow the ashes back in our faces.”

“Hence the rifle?” Danny asked.

The woodsman nodded. “Hence the glass jar, too,” Ketchum said; he took Carmella’s hand and pointed her index finger for her. “Not quite halfway to the far shore, but almost in the middle of the basin-that’s where I saw your boy slip under the logs,” the riverman told her. “I swear to you, Danny, it wasn’t more than an arm’s length from where your mom went through the ice.”