John Irving: Last Night In Twisted River

The dishwasher was called Injun Jane, but not to her face. Danny Baciagalupo liked her, and she appeared to dote on the boy. She was more than a decade older than his dad (she was even older than Ketchum), and she had lost a son-possibly he’d drowned in the Pemigewasset, if Danny hadn’t misheard the story. Or maybe Jane and her dead son were from the Pemigewasset Wilderness-they may have come from that part of the state, northwest of the mills in Conway-and the doomed son had drowned elsewhere. There was a bigger, uncontained wilderness north of Milan, where the spruce mill was; there were more logging camps up there, and lots of places where a young logger might drown. (Jane had told Danny that Pemigewasset meant “Alley of the Crooked Pines,” which conjured to the impressionable boy a likely place to drown.)

All young Dan could really remember was that it had been a wilderness river-driving accident-and from the fond way the dishwasher looked at the cook’s son, perhaps her lost boy had been about twelve when he drowned. Danny didn’t know, and he didn’t ask; everything he knew about Injun Jane was something he’d silently observed or had imperfectly overheard.

“Listen only to those conversations that are directed to you, Daniel,” his father had warned him. The cook meant that Danny shouldn’t eavesdrop on the disjointed or incoherent remarks the men made to one another when they were eating.

Most nights, after their evening meal-but never as flagrantly as in the wanigan days, and not usually when there was an early-morning river drive-the loggers and the sawmill men drank. The few who had actual homes in Twisted River drank at home. The transients-meaning most of the woodsmen and all the Canadian itinerants-drank in their bunkhouses, which were crudely equipped in that dank area of town immediately above the river basin. These hostelries were within walking distance of the dismal bars and the seedy, misnamed dance hall, where there was no actual dancing-only music and the usual too-few women to meet.

The loggers and sawmill workers with families preferred the smaller but contentiously more “civilized” settlement in Paris. Ketchum refused to call the logging camp “Paris,” referring instead to what he said was the real name of the place-West Dummer. “No community, not even a logging camp, should be named for a manufacturing company,” Ketchum declared. It further offended Ketchum that a logging operation in New Hampshire was named after a company in Maine- one that manufactured toboggans, of all things.

“Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood-for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?”

“Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?”

There was a scarcity of children in Twisted River, and they went to school in Paris-as Danny Baciagalupo did, when he went to school at all. For the betterment of young Dan’s education , the cook not infrequently kept his son home from school-so that the boy could read a book or two, a practice not necessarily encouraged by the Paris (or, as Ketchum would have it, the West Dummer) school. “Perish the thought that the children in a logging camp should learn to read!” Ketchum railed. As a child, he had not learned to read; he was forever angry about it.

THERE WERE-THERE still are- good markets for both sawlogs and pulpwood over the Canadian border. The north country of New Hampshire continues to feed wood in huge quantities to paper mills in New Hampshire and Maine, and to a furniture mill in Vermont. But of the logging camps, as they used to be, mere tumbledown evidence remains.

In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change. From the sluice dam at the bottom of Little Dummer Pond to the basin below Twisted River, a persistent fog or mist lay suspended above the violent water until midmorning-in all seasons, except when the river was frozen. From the sawmills, the keen whine of the blades was both as familiar and expected as the songs of birds, though neither the sounds of sawing nor the birdsongs were as reliable as the fact that there was never any spring weather in that part of New Hampshire-except for the regrettable period of time from early April till the middle of May, which was distinguished by frozen, slowly thawing mud.

Yet the cook had stayed, and there were few in Twisted River who knew why. There were fewer who knew why he’d come in the first place, and from where or when. But his limp had a history, of which everyone was aware. In a sawmill or logging-camp kind of town, a limp like Dominic Baciagalupo’s was not uncommon. When logs of any size were set in motion, an ankle could get crushed. Even when he wasn’t walking, it was obvious that the boot on the cook’s maimed foot was two sizes bigger than the one he wore on his good foot-and when he was either sitting down or standing still, his bigger boot pointed the wrong way. To those knowledgeable souls in the settlement of Twisted River, such an injury could have come from any number of logging accidents.

Dominic had been pretending to be a teenager; in his own estimation, he was not as green as Angel Pope, but he was “green enough,” as the cook would tell his son. He’d had an after-school job on the loading platforms at one of the big mills in Berlin, where a friend of Dominic’s absent father was a foreman. Until World War II, the supposed friend of Dominic’s dad was a fixture there, but the cook remembered so-called Uncle Umberto as an alcoholic who repeatedly bad-mouthed Dominic’s mom. (Even after the accident, Dominic Baciagalupo was never contacted by his absconding father, and “Uncle” Umberto not once proved himself as a family friend.)

There was a load of hardwood sawlogs on the log deck-mostly maple and birch. Young Dominic was using a peavey, rolling the logs into the mill, when a bunch of logs rolled all at once and he couldn’t get out of their way. He was only twelve in 1936; he handled a peavey with a rakish confidence. Dominic had been the same age as his son was now; the cook would never have allowed his beloved Daniel on a log deck, not even if the boy had been ambidextrous with a peavey. And in Dominic’s case, when he had been knocked down by the logs, the hinged hook of his own peavey was driven into his left thigh, like a fishhook without the barb, and his left ankle was crunched sideways-it was shattered and mangled under the weight of the wood. From the peavey wound, he was in no danger of bleeding to death, but one could always die of blood poisoning in those days. From the ankle injury, he might have died of gangrene later-or, more likely, had the left foot amputated, if not the entire leg.

There were no X-rays in Coos County in 1936. The medical authorities in Berlin were disinclined to undertake any fancy reassembly of a crushed ankle; in such cases, little or no surgery was recommended. It was a wait-and-see category of accident: Either the blood vessels were mashed flat and there would be a subsequent loss of circulation-then the doctors would have to cut the foot off-or the broken and displaced bits of the ankle would fuse together and heal every which way, and Dominic Baciagalupo would walk with a limp and be in pain for the rest of his life. (That would turn out to be the case.)

There was also the scar where the peavey had hooked him, which resembled the bite wound of a small, peculiar animal-one with a curved, solitary tooth and a mouth that wasn’t big enough to enclose the twelve-year-old’s thigh. And even before he took a step, the angle of Dominic’s left foot indicated a sharp left turn; the toes were aimed in a sideways direction. People often noticed the deformed shape of the ankle and the misdirected foot before they saw the limp.