John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

“First I heard of it,” as Six-Pack said to Danny.

And when she’d shown up at the cookhouse site the next morning, Six-Pack knew right away that there was no outdoor breakfast in Ketchum’s plan. The coffee wasn’t brewing; nothing was cooking. There was no fire. She spotted Ketchum sitting with his back against the remains of the crumbled brick chimney, as if the logger might have imagined that the cookhouse was still standing-the burned-to-the-ground building somehow warm and cozy, all around him.

Hero had run to his master, but the dog stopped short of where Ketchum sat on the snow-covered ground; Pam saw that the bear hound’s hackles were up, and the dog suddenly walked stiff-legged, circling the old logger. “Ketchum!” Six-Pack had called, but there’d been no response from the woodsman; only Hero had turned his head to look at her.

“I couldn’t walk over to him-not for the longest time,” Six-Pack told Danny. “I could tell he was a fuckin’ goner.”

Because it had snowed the previous day, and the snow had stopped before nightfall, it was easy for Pam to see how he’d done it. There was a trail of blood in the fresh snow. Six-Pack followed the blood down the hill to the riverbank; there were some big stumps above the bank, and she saw where Ketchum had wiped the snow off one of them. The warm blood had seeped into the stump, and Ketchum’s ax was stuck so firmly in the stump that Pam couldn’t pull it out. There was no left hand to be found; obviously, Ketchum had thrown it in the river.

Having seen the spot in the river basin where Ketchum shot the apple-juice jar containing the cook’s ashes, Danny had no trouble imagining exactly where Ketchum had thrown his left hand. But it must have been hard work for the old woodsman to walk back up the hill to the site of the cookhouse; from all the blood Pam saw in the snow, she knew Ketchum must have been bleeding profusely.

“Once, when they was still drivin’ hardwoods on Phillips Brook,” Six-Pack told Danny, “I seen Ketchum stealin’ some firewood for himself. You know, he was just pickin’ some pulpwood outta the pile-them four-foot small-diameter logs didn’t amount to much. But I seen Ketchum turn half a cord of pulpwood into kindlin’ in less than half an hour! That way, no one would recognize the stuff-if they spotted the wood in his truck, sometime later. Ketchum just choked up on the handle of his ax-he held it in one hand, you know, like a hatchet-and he split them logs lengthwise, and then split ’em again, till they was skinny enough so he could chop them four-foot logs inta two-foot sticks of fuckin’ kindlin’! I never seen him swing that ax. He was so strong, Danny, and so accurate-he just wielded that ax with one hand, like it was a fuckin’ hammer! Those Paris Manufacturin’ Company clowns never knew why their pulpwood was disappearin’ ! Ketchum said the assholes were too busy makin’ toboggans in Maine-that’s where they were truckin’ most of their hardwoods. Them Paris peckerheads never noticed where their pulpwood was goin’.”

Yes, Ketchum could split a four-foot hardwood log one-handed; Danny had seen how the woodsman could wield an ax, both as an ax and as a hatchet. And after Ketchum had cut off his hand, the old river driver was still strong enough to walk up the hill, where he’d sat down to rest his back against all that was left of the cookhouse chimney. There’d been a bottle of whiskey beside him, Six-Pack said; she told Danny that Ketchum had managed to drink most of it.

“Anything else?” Danny asked Six-Pack. “I mean-on the ground, beside him.”

“Yeah-a big bottle of aspirin,” Pam told the writer. “There were still plenty of aspirin left in the bottle,” Six-Pack said. “Ketchum wasn’t much of a painkiller person, but I suppose he took some aspirin for the pain-he musta just washed ’em down with the whiskey.”

As Danny knew, the aspirin hadn’t been “for the pain;” knowing Ketchum, Danny believed that the old riverman had probably relished the pain. The whiskey wasn’t for the pain, either. Both the aspirin and the whiskey, the writer knew, were strictly to keep Ketchum bleeding; the logger had little forgiveness for anyone who had a job to do and did a piss-poor job of it. (Only Ketchum could kill Ketchum, right?)

“Ketchum couldn’t forgive himself for failin’ to keep Cookie alive,” Six-Pack told the writer. “And before that-after your boy died, Danny-Ketchum felt he was powerless to protect you . All he could do was obsess about your writin’.”

“Me, too,” the writer said to Six-Pack. “Me, too.”

SIX-PACK DIDN’T STAY for Christmas. After they’d carried Ketchum’s guns up to Danny’s bedroom on the second floor-Pam insisted that all the guns be stowed under Danny’s bed, because this was what Ketchum had wanted-and once they’d lugged the boxes of Rosie’s books up to Danny’s third-floor writing room, Six-Pack warned the writer that she was an early riser.

“How early?” he asked her.

Ketchum’s truck and Six-Pack Pam were gone when Danny woke up in the morning; she’d made coffee for him and had left him a letter, which she’d written by hand on several pages of the typing paper he kept in the gym. Six-Pack’s handwriting was very familiar to Danny, from those years when she’d written Ketchum’s letters for the then-illiterate logger. But Danny had forgotten how well Pam wrote-far better than she spoke. Even her spelling was correct. (The writer wondered if this was the result of all the reading-aloud she’d once done to Ketchum.)

Naturally, Six-Pack’s letter included instructions for taking care of Hero, but most of her letter was more personal than Danny had expected. She was having the hip-replacement surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital, as Ketchum had recommended. She’d made a few new friends at the Saw Dust Alley campground, that nice-looking trailer park on Route 26-the attacks of September 11 had served to introduce her to many of her neighbors. Henry, the old West Dummer sawyer with the missing thumb and index finger, would look after Pam’s dogs while she was having the surgery. (Henry had volunteered to look after the dogs while Six-Pack was driving Ketchum’s truck to Toronto and back, too.)

Six-Pack had also made some long-standing friendships at the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she still worked nights as a cleaning person; she’d called her friends at the hospital when she found Ketchum’s body at the cookhouse site. Six-Pack wanted Danny to know that she’d sat with Ketchum for the better part of that morning, just holding his one remaining hand, the right one-“the only one he ever touched me with,” as Six-Pack put it in her letter.

Pam told Danny he would find some photographs pressed flat in the books that had once belonged to Danny’s mother. It had been hard for Six-Pack not to burn the pictures of Rosie, though Pam did more than put her jealousy aside. Six-Pack admitted that she now believed Ketchum had loved the cook even more than the logger had once loved Rosie. Six-Pack could live with that-the left-hand business notwithstanding. Besides, Six-Pack said, Ketchum had wanted Danny to have those photos of the writer’s mother.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Pam also wrote to Danny, “but if I were you, I would write and sleep in that third-floor room. It is peaceful up there, in my opinion-and it’s the best room in the house. But-don’t get your balls crossed about this, Danny-I suspect you are well acquainted with more than your fair share of ghosts. I suppose it’s one thing to work in a room with a ghost, but quite another matter to sleep in the same room with one. I wouldn’t know-I never had children, on purpose. My philosophy was always to do without those things I didn’t dare to lose-Ketchum excepted.”