John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

Now nobody knew what would become of the less-than-thriving town of Twisted River, which was situated partway between the river basin and the Dummer ponds. The sawmill workers and their families lived there, and the logging company maintained bunkhouses for the more transient woodsmen, who included not only the French Canadian itinerants but most of the river drivers and the other loggers. The company also maintained a better equipped kitchen, an actual dining lodge-the aforementioned cookhouse-for the cook and his son. But for how much longer? Not even the owner of the logging company knew.

The lumber industry was in transition; it would one day be possible for every worker in the logging business to work from home. The logging camps (and even the slightly less marginal settlements like Twisted River) were dying. The wanigans themselves were disappearing; those curious shelters for sleeping and eating and storing equipment had not only been mounted on trucks, on wheels, or on crawler tracks, but they were often attached to rafts or boats.

The Indian dishwasher-she worked for the cook-had long ago told the cook’s young son that wanigan was from an Abenaki word, leading the boy to wonder if the dishwasher herself was from the Abenaki tribe. Perhaps she just happened to know the origin of the word, or she’d merely claimed to know it. (The cook’s son went to school with an Indian boy who’d told him that wanigan was of Algonquian origin.)

While it lasted, the work during a river drive was from dawn till dark. It was the protocol in a logging operation to feed the men four times a day. In the past, when the wanigans couldn’t get close to a river site, the two midday meals had been trekked to the drivers. The first and last meal were served in the base camp-nowadays, in the dining lodge. But out of their affection for Angel, tonight many of the loggers had missed their last meal in the cookhouse. They’d spent the evening following the log drive, until the darkness had driven them away-not only the darkness, but also the men’s growing awareness that none of them knew if Dead Woman Dam was open. From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the logs-probably with Angel among them-might already have flowed into the Pontook Reservoir, but not if Dead Woman Dam was closed. And if the Pontook Dam and Dead Woman were open, the body of the young Canadian would be headed pell-mell down the Androscoggin. No one knew better than Ketchum that there would likely be no finding Angel there.

The cook could tell when the river drivers had stopped searching-from the kitchen’s screen door, he could hear them leaning their pike poles against the cookhouse. A few of the tired searchers found their way to the dining lodge after dark; the cook didn’t have the heart to turn them away. The hired help had all gone home-everyone but the Indian dishwasher, who stayed late most nights. The cook, whose difficult name was Dominic Baciagalupo-or “Cookie,” as the lumberjacks routinely called him-made the men a late supper, which his twelve-year-old son served.

“Where’s Ketchum?” the boy asked his dad.

“He’s probably getting his arm fixed,” the cook replied.

“I’ll bet he’s hungry,” the twelve-year-old said, “but Ketchum is wicked tough.”

“He’s impressively tough for a drinking man,” Dominic agreed, but he was thinking that maybe Ketchum wasn’t tough enough for this . Losing Angel Pope might be hardest on Ketchum, the cook thought, because the veteran logger had taken the young Canadian under his wing. He’d looked after the boy, or he had tried to.

Ketchum had the blackest hair and beard-the charred-black color of charcoal, blacker than a black bear’s fur. He’d been married young-and more than once. He was estranged from his children, who had grown up and gone their own ways. Ketchum lived year-round in one of the bunkhouses, or in any of several run-down hostelries, if not in a wanigan of his own devising-namely, in the back of his pickup truck, where he had come close to freezing to death on those winter nights when he’d passed out, dead drunk. Yet Ketchum had kept Angel away from alcohol, and he’d kept not a few of the older women at the so-called dance hall away from the young Canadian, too.

“You’re too young, Angel,” the cook had heard Ketchum tell the youth. “Besides, you can catch things from those ladies.”

Ketchum would know, the cook had thought. Dominic knew that Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive.

THE STEADY HISS and intermittent flickering of the pilot lights on the gas stove in the cookhouse kitchen-an old Garland with two ovens and eight burners, and a flame-blackened broiler above-seemed perfectly in keeping with the lamentations of the loggers over their late supper. They had been charmed by the lost boy, whom they’d adopted as they would a stray pet. The cook had been charmed, too. Perhaps he saw in the unusually cheerful teenager some future incarnation of his twelve-year-old son-for Angel had a welcoming expression and a sincere curiosity, and he exhibited none of the withdrawn sullenness that appeared to afflict the few young men his age in a rough and rudimentary place like Twisted River.

This was all the more remarkable because the youth had told them that he’d recently run away from home.

“You’re Italian, aren’t you?” Dominic Baciagalupo had asked the boy.

“I’m not from Italy, I don’t speak Italian-you’re not much of an Italian if you come from Toronto,” Angel had answered.

The cook had held his tongue. Dominic knew a little about Boston Italians; some of them seemed to have issues regarding how Italian they were. And the cook knew that Angel, in the old country, might have been an Angelo. (When Dominic had been a little boy, his mother had called him Angelù-in her Sicilian accent, this sounded like an-geh-LOO.)

But after the accident, nothing with Angel Pope’s written name could be found; among the boy’s few belongings, not a single book or letter identified him. If he’d had any identification, it had gone into the river basin with him-probably in the pocket of his dungarees-and if they never located the body, there would be no way to inform Angel’s family, or whoever the boy had run away from.

Legally or not, and with or without proper papers, Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire. Not the way it was usually done, either-Angel hadn’t come from Quebec. He’d made a point of arriving from Ontario -he was not a French Canadian. The cook hadn’t once heard Angel speak a word of French or Italian, and the French Canadians at the camp had wanted nothing to do with the runaway boy-apparently, they didn’t like English Canadians. Angel, for his part, kept his distance from the French; he didn’t appear to like the Québécois any better than they liked him.

Dominic had respected the boy’s privacy; now the cook wished he knew more about Angel Pope, and where he’d come from. Angel had been a good-natured and fair-minded companion for the cook’s twelve-year-old son, Daniel-or Danny, as the loggers and the saw mill men called the boy.

Almost every male of working age in Twisted River knew the cook and his son-some women, too. Dominic had needed to know a number of women-mainly, to help him look after his son-for the cook had lost his wife, Danny’s young mother, a long-seeming decade ago.

Dominic Baciagalupo believed that Angel Pope had had some experience with kitchen work, which the boy had done awkwardly but uncomplainingly, and with an economy of movement that must have been born of familiarity-despite his professed boredom with cooking-related chores, and his penchant for cutting himself on the cutting board.