John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

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.”