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Ketchum claimed to have known the "legendary asshole" who'd constructed a horse hovel upstream of the bunkhouse and mess hall at Camp Five. When all the men in the logging camp got sick, they strung up the purported legend in a network of bridles in the horse hovel above the manure pit--"until the asshole fainted from the fumes."
"You can see why Ketchum misses the old days, Daniel," the cook had said to his son.
Dominic Baciagalupo knew some stories--most of them not for telling. And what stories the cook could tell his son didn't capture young Dan's imagination the way Ketchum's stories did. There was the one about the bean hole outside the cook's tent on the Chick wolnepy, near Success Pond. In the aforementioned old days, on a river drive, Dominic had dug a bean hole, four feet across, and started the beans cooking in the ground at bedtime, covering the hole with hot ashes and earth. At 5 A.M., when it would be piping hot, he planned to dig the covered pot out of the ground for breakfast. But a French Canadian had wandered out of the sleeping wanigan (probably to take a pee) when it was still dark; he was barefoot when he fell into the bean hole, burning both his feet.
"That's it? That's the whole story?" Danny had asked his dad.
"Well, it's kind of a cooking story, I guess," Ketchum had said, to be kind. Ketchum would tease Dominic on the subject that spaghetti was replacing baked beans and pea soup on the upper Androscoggin.
"We never used to have so many Italian cooks around," Ketchum would say, winking at Danny.
"You're telling me you'd rather have baked beans and pea soup than pasta?" the cook asked his old friend.
"Your dad is a touchy little fella, isn't he?" Ketchum would say to Danny, winking again. "Constipated Christ!" Ketchum had more than once declared to Dominic. "Are you ever touchy!"
NOW IT WAS THAT mud-season, swollen-river time of year again. There'd been a strong surge of water coming through one of the sluice gates--what Ketchum called a "driving head," probably from the sluice gate at the east end of Little Dummer Pond--and a green kid from Toronto, whom they barely knew, had been swept away.
For only a while longer would the loggers increase the volume of water in Twisted River. They did this by building sluice dams on the tributary streams flowing into the main driving river; the water above these dams was released in the spring, adding torrents of water volume to a log drive. The pulpwood was piled in these streams (and on the riverbanks) during the winter and then sluiced into Twisted River on t
he water released from the dams. If this was soon after the snowmelt, the water ran fast, and the riverbanks were gouged by the moving logs.
In the cook's opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river's name. The river ran straight down out of the mountains; there were only two bends in it. But to the loggers, particularly those old-timers who'd named the river, these two bends were bad enough to cause some treacherous logjams every spring--especially upstream of the basin, nearer the Dummer ponds. At both bends in the river, the trapped logs usually needed to be pried loose by hand; at the bend upriver, where the current was strongest, no one as green as Angel would have been permitted out on a logjam.
But Angel had perished in the basin, where the river was comparatively calm. The logs themselves made the water in the river basin choppy, but the currents were fairly moderate. And at both bends, the more massive jams were broken up with dynamite, which Dominic Baciagalupo deplored. The blasting wreaked havoc with the pots and pans and dangling utensils in the cookhouse kitchen; in the dining hall, the sugar bowls and the ketchup bottles slid off the tables. "If your dad is not a storyteller, Danny, he is definitely not a dynamite man," was how Ketchum had put it to the boy.
From the basin below the town of Twisted River, the water ran downstream to the Androscoggin. In addition to the Connecticut, the big log-driving rivers in northern New Hampshire were the Ammonoosuc and the Androscoggin: Those rivers were documented killers.
But some rivermen had drowned, or been crushed to death, in the relatively short stretch of rapids between Little Dummer Pond and the town of Twisted River--and in the river basin, too. Angel Pope wasn't the first; nor would the young Canadian be the last.
And in the compromised settlements of Twisted River and Paris, a fair share of sawmill workers had been maimed, or had even lost their lives--no small number of them, unfortunately, because of the fights they got into with the loggers in certain bars. There weren't enough women--that was usually what started the fights--although Ketchum had maintained that there weren't enough bars. There were no bars in Paris, anyway, and only married women lived in the logging camp there.
In Ketchum's opinion, that combination put the men from Paris on the haul road to Twisted River almost every night. "They never should have built a bridge over Phillips Brook," Ketchum also maintained.
"You see, Daniel," the cook said to his son. "Ketchum has once again demonstrated that progress will eventually kill us all."
"Catholic thinking will kill us first, Danny," Ketchum would say. "Italians are Catholics, and your dad is Italian--and so are you, of course, although neither you nor your dad is very Italian, or very Catholic in your thinking, either. I am mainly speaking of the French Canadians when I refer to Catholic thinking. French Canadians, for example, have so many children that they sometimes number them instead of name them."
"Dear God," Dominic Baciagalupo said, shaking his head.
"Is that true?" young Dan asked Ketchum.
"What kind of name is Vingt Dumas?" Ketchum asked the boy.
"Roland and Joanne Dumas do not have twenty children!" the cook cried.
"Not together, maybe," Ketchum replied. "So what was little Vingt? A slip of the tongue?"
Dominic was shaking his head again. "What?" Ketchum asked him.
"I promised Daniel's mother that the boy would get a proper education," the cook said.
"Well, I'm just making an effort to enhance Danny's education," Ketchum reasoned.
"Enhance," Dominic repeated, still shaking his head. "Your vocabulary, Ketchum," the cook began, but he stopped himself; he said nothing further.
Neither a storyteller nor a dynamite man, Danny Baciagalupo thought of his father. The boy loved his dad dearly, but there was also a habit the cook had, and his son had noticed it--Dominic often didn't finish his thoughts. (Not out loud, anyway.)
NOT COUNTING THE Indian dishwasher--and a few of the sawmill workers' wives, who helped the cook in the kitchen--there were rarely any women eating in the cookhouse, except on the weekends, when some of the men ate with their families. That alcohol was not permitted was the cook's rule. Dinner (or "supper," as the older rivermen used to eating in the wanigans called it) was served as soon as it was dark, and the majority of loggers and sawmill men were sober when they ate their evening meal, which they consumed quickly and with no intelligible conversation--even on weekends, or when the loggers weren't engaged in the river drives.
