John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“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.