Last Night in Twisted River (5 page)

“I know which logs you mean, and which dam,” Ketchum told him. “Yes, the logs are already at the dam—they were there while you were making supper.”

“So you saw that moron doctor there?” the cook asked. “Not that you need a genius to put a cast on a broken wrist, but you must be a man who loves to take chances.” Dominic went out of the cookhouse to get the bacon from the cooler. It was black outside, and the sound of the river rushed into the warm kitchen.

“You used to take chances, Cookie!” Ketchum called out to his old friend; he looked cautiously at Danny. “Your dad used to be happier, too—when he drank.”

“I used to be happier—period,” the cook said; the way he dropped the slab of bacon on the cutting board made Danny look at his father, but Ketchum never turned his attention away from the meat loaf and applesauce.

“Given that bodies move downstream slower than logs,” Ketchum said with deliberate slowness, his speech slightly slurred, “what would you guess as to Angel’s estimated time of arrival at that spot I’m having trouble remembering, exactly?”

Danny was counting to himself, but it was clear to the boy, and to Ketchum, that the cook had already been estimating the young Canadian’s journey. “Saturday night or Sunday morning,” Dominic Baciagalupo said. He had to raise his voice above the hissing bacon. “I’m not going there with you at night, Ketchum.”

Danny quickly looked at Ketchum, anticipating the big man’s response; it was, after all, the story that most interested the boy, and the one closest to his heart. “I went there
with you
at night, Cookie.”

“The odds are better you’ll be sober Sunday morning,” the cook told Ketchum. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning—Daniel and I will meet you there.” (They meant Dead Woman Dam, though young Dan knew that neither man would say it.)

“We can all go in my truck,” Ketchum said.

“I’ll drive Daniel with me, in case you’re not quite sober,” Dominic replied.

Ketchum pushed his clean plate away; he rested his shaggy head on the countertop and stared at his cast. “You’ll meet me at the mill-pond, you mean?” Ketchum asked.

“I don’t call it that,” the cook said. “The dam was there before the mill. How can they call it a pond, when it’s where the river
narrows?”

“You know mill people,” Ketchum said with contempt.

“The dam was there before the mill,” Dominic repeated, still not naming the dam.

“One day the water will breach that dam, and they won’t bother to build another one,” Ketchum said; his eyes were closing.

“One day they won’t be driving logs on Twisted River,” the cook said. “They won’t need a dam where the river runs into the reservoir, though I believe they’ll keep the Pontook Dam on the Androscoggin.”

“One day
soon
, Cookie,” Ketchum corrected him. His eyes were closed—his head, his chest, and both his arms were sprawled on the countertop. The cook quietly removed the clean plate, but Ketchum wasn’t asleep; he spoke more slowly than before. “There’s a sort of spillway off to one side of the dam. The water makes a pool—it’s almost like an open well—but there’s a kind of containment boom, just a rope with floats, to keep the logs out.”

“It sounds like you remember it as
exactly
as I do,” Dominic told him.

That was where they’d found his mother, Danny knew. Her body floated lower in the water than the logs; she must have drifted under the containment boom and into the spillway. Ketchum had found her all alone in the pool, or the well—not a log around her.

“I can’t quite see how to
get
there,” Ketchum said, with some frustration. With his eyes still closed, he was slowly curling the fingers of his right hand, his fingertips reaching for but not quite touching the palm of his cast; both the cook and his son knew that the logger was testing his tolerance of the pain.

“Well, I can show you, Ketchum,” Dominic said gently. “You have to walk out on the dam, or across the logs—remember?”

The cook had carried one of the folding cots into the kitchen. He nodded to his son, who helped him set up the cot—where it wouldn’t be in the way of the ovens, or the inside-opening screen door. “I want to sleep in the kitchen, too,” Danny told his dad.

“If you make a little distance between yourself and the conversation, you might actually go back to sleep,” Dominic said to his son.

“I want to hear the conversation,” Danny said.

“The conversation is almost over,” the cook whispered in the boy’s ear, kissing him.

“Don’t count on it, Cookie,” Ketchum said, with his eyes still closed.

“I’ve got the baking to do, Ketchum—and I might as well start the potatoes.”

“I’ve heard you talk and cook at the same time,” Ketchum told him; he hadn’t opened his eyes.

The cook gave his son a stern look, pointing to the stairs. “It’s cold upstairs,” Danny complained; the boy paused on the bottom step, where the skillet was.

“On your way, please put the skillet back where it belongs, Daniel.”

The boy went grudgingly upstairs, pausing on every step; he listened to his father work with the mixing bowls. Young Dan didn’t need to see in order to know what his dad was doing—the cook always made the banana bread first. As Danny hung the eight-inch cast-iron skillet on the hook in his father’s bedroom, he counted sixteen eggs cracked into the stainless-steel bowl; then came the mashed bananas and the chopped walnuts. (Sometimes, his dad topped the bread with warm apples.) The cook made the scones next, adding the eggs and the butter to the dry ingredients—the fruit, if he had any, he added last. From the upstairs hall, Danny could hear his father greasing the muffin tins, which he then sprinkled with flour—before he put the corn-muffin mixture into the tins. There was oatmeal in the banana bread—and sweet bran flour, which the boy could soon smell from his bedroom.

It was warmer under the covers, from where Danny heard the oven doors open and the baking pans and muffin tins slide in; then he heard the oven doors close. The unusual sound, which made the boy open his eyes and sit up in bed, was his father struggling to lift Ketchum—holding the big man under both arms while he dragged him to the folding cot. Danny hadn’t known that his dad was strong enough to lift Ketchum; the twelve-year-old crept quietly down the stairs and watched his father settle Ketchum on the cot, where the cook covered the logger with one of the unzipped sleeping bags, as if the opened bag were a blanket.

Dominic Baciagalupo was putting the potatoes on the griddle when Ketchum spoke to him. “There was no way I could let you see her, Cookie—it wouldn’t have been right.”

“I understand,” the cook said.

On the stairs, Danny closed his eyes again, seeing the story, which he knew by heart—Ketchum, taking small steps on the logs, drunk, while he reached into the pool created by the spillway. “Don’t come out here, Cookie!” Ketchum had called ashore. “Don’t you try walking on the logs—or on the dam, either!”

Dominic had watched Ketchum carry his dead wife along the edge of the containment boom. “Get away from me, Cookie!” Ketchum had called, as he came across the logs. “You can’t see her anymore—she’s not the same as she was!”

The cook, who was also drunk, had taken the blanket from the back of Ketchum’s truck. But Ketchum would not come ashore with the body; even drunk, he had kept walking on the logs with small, rapid steps. “Spread the blanket in the back of the truck, Cookie—then walk away!” When Ketchum came ashore, Dominic was standing at a triangular point—equidistant from the riverbank and Ketchum’s truck. “Just stand your ground, Cookie—till I cover her,” Ketchum had said.

Danny wondered if that was the source of his father’s frequent admonition: “Stand your ground, Daniel—just don’t get killed.” Maybe it had come from Ketchum, who had gently placed the cook’s dead wife in the back of his truck, covering her with the blanket. Dominic had kept his distance.

“Didn’t you want to see her?” Danny had asked his dad, too many times.

“I trust Ketchum,” his father had answered. “If anything ever happens to me, Daniel, you trust him, too.”

Danny realized that he must have crept back upstairs to his bedroom, and fallen asleep, when he smelled the lamb hash in addition to all the baking; he’d not been aware of his dad opening the difficult outer door to the cookhouse kitchen and getting the ground lamb from the cooler. The boy lay in his bed with his eyes still closed, savoring all the smells. He wanted to ask Ketchum if his mom had been faceup in the water when he’d first spotted her, or if he’d found her in the spillway facedown.

Danny got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen; only then did he realize that his father had found the time to come upstairs and get dressed, probably after Ketchum had passed out on the cot. Dan watched his dad working at the stove; when the cook was concentrating on three or four tasks that were all in close proximity to one another, his limp was almost undetectable. At such moments, Danny could imagine his father at the age of twelve—before the ankle accident. At twelve, Danny Baciagalupo was a lonely kid; he had no friends. He often wished that he could have known his dad when they were both twelve-year-olds.

WHEN YOU’RE TWELVE
, four years seems like a long time. Annunziata Saetta knew that it wouldn’t take her little Dom’s ankle four years to heal; Nunzi’s beloved Kiss of the Wolf was off the crutches in four
months
, and he was reading as well as any fifteen-year-old by the time he was only thirteen. The homeschooling worked. In the first place, Annunziata was an elementary-school teacher; she knew how much of the school day was wasted on discipline, recess, and snacks. The boy did his homework, and double-checked it, during what amounted to Nunzi’s school day; Dominic had time for lots of extra reading, and he kept a journal of the recipes he was learning, too.

The boy’s cooking skills were more slowly acquired, and—after the accident—Annunziata made her own child-labor laws. She would not permit young Dominic to go off to work at a breakfast place in Berlin until the boy really knew his way around a kitchen, and he had to wait until he’d turned sixteen; in those four years, Dom became an extremely well-read sixteen-year-old, and an accomplished cook, who was less experienced at shaving than he was at walking with a limp.

It was 1940 when Dominic Baciagalupo met Danny’s mom. She was a twenty-three-year-old teaching in the same elementary school as Annunziata Saetta; in fact, the cook’s mother introduced her sixteen-year-old son to the new teacher.

Nunzi had no choice in the matter. Her cousin Maria, another Saetta, had married a Calogero—a common Sicilian surname. “After some Greek saint who died there—the name has something to do with children in general, I think, or maybe orphans in particular,” Nunzi had explained to Dominic. She pronounced the name cah-LOH-ger-roh. It was used as a first name, too, his mother explained—“frequently for bastards.”

At sixteen, Dominic was sensitive to the subject of illegitimacy—not that Annunziata wasn’t. Her cousin had sent her pregnant daughter away to the wilds of New Hampshire, bemoaning the fact that the daughter was the first woman in the Calogero family to have graduated from college. “It was only a teachers’ college, and a lot of good it did her—she still got knocked up!” the poor girl’s mother told Nunzi, who repeated this insensitivity to Dom. The boy understood without further detail that the pregnant twenty-three-year-old was being sent to them because Annunziata and
her
bastard were considered in the same boat. Her name was Rosina, but—given Nunzi’s fondness for abbreviations—the banished girl was already a Rosie before she made the trip from Boston to Berlin.

As was often the way “back then”—not only in the North End, and by no means limited to Italian
or
Catholic families—the Saettas and the Calogeros were sending one family scandal to live with another. Thus Annunziata was given a reason to resent her Boston relatives
twice
. “Let this be a lesson to you, Dom,” the teenager’s mother told him. “We are not going to judge poor Rosie for her unfortunate condition—we are going to
love
her, like nothing was the matter.”

While Annunziata should be commended for her spirit of forgiveness—especially in 1940, when unwed mothers could generally be counted among America’s most unforgiven souls—it was both reckless and unnecessary to tell her sixteen-year-old son that he was going to
love
his second cousin “like nothing was the matter.”

“Why is she my
second
cousin?” the boy asked his mom.

“Maybe that’s not what she is—maybe she’s called your cousin
once-removed
, or something,” Nunzi said. When Dominic looked confused, his mother said: “Whatever she’s called, she’s not really your cousin—not a first cousin, anyway.”

This information (or misinformation) posed an unknown danger to a crippled sixteen-year-old boy. His accident, his rehabilitation, his homeschooling, not to mention his reinvention as a cook—all these—had deprived him of friends his own age. And “little” Dom had a fulltime job; he already saw himself as a young man. Now Nunzi had told him that the twenty-three-year-old Rosie Calogero was “not really” his cousin.

As for Rosie, when she arrived, she was not yet “showing;” that she soon would be posed another problem.

Rosie had a B.S. in education from the teachers’ college; at that time, frankly, she was overqualified to teach at a Berlin elementary school. But when the young woman started to
look
pregnant, she would need to temporarily quit her job. “Or else we’ll have to come up with a husband for you, either real or imaginary,” Annunziata told her. Rosie was certainly pretty enough to find a husband, a
real
one—Dominic thought she was absolutely beautiful—but the poor girl wasn’t about to sally forth on the requisite social adventures necessary for meeting available young men, not when she was expecting!

FOR FOUR YEARS
, the boy had cooked with his mother. In some ways, because he wrote every recipe down—not to mention each variation of the recipes he would make, occasionally, without her—he was surpassing her, even as he learned. As it happened, on that life-changing night, Dominic was making dinner for the two women and himself. He was on his way to becoming famous at the breakfast place in Berlin, and he got home from work well before Rosie and his mom came home from school; except on weekends, when Nunzi liked to cook, Dominic was becoming the principal cook in their small household. Stirring his marinara sauce, he said: “Well,
I
could marry Rosie, or I could
pretend
to be her husband—until she finds someone more suitable. I mean, who needs to know?”