Last Night in Twisted River

As the men had usually come to eat directly from some manner of work, their clothes were soiled and they smelled of pitch and spruce gum and wet bark and sawdust, but their hands and faces were clean and freshly scented by the pine-tar soap that the cavernous washroom of the cookhouse made readily available--at the cook's request. (Washing your hands before eating was another of Dominic's rules.) Furthermore, the washroom towels were always clean; the clean towels were part of the reason that the Indian dishwasher generally stayed late. While the kitchen help was washing the last of the supper dishes, the dishwasher herself was loading the towels into the washing machines in the cookhouse's laundry room. She never went home until the washing cycles had ended and she'd put all the towels in the dryers.

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 infr

equently 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.

One thing was certain: Young Dominic wouldn't be a logger. You need your balance for that kind of work. And the mills were where he'd been injured--not to mention that his runaway father's drunken "friend" was a foreman there. The mills were not in Dominic Baciagalupo's future, either.

"Hey, Baciagalupo!" Uncle Umberto had often hailed him. "You may have a Neapolitan name, but you hang around like a Sicilian."

"I am Sicilian," Dominic would dutifully say; his mother seemed inordinately proud of it, the boy thought.

"Yeah, well, your name is napolitano," Umberto told him.

"After my dad, I suppose," young Dominic ventured to guess.

"Your dad was no Baciagalupo," Uncle Umberto informed him. "Ask Nunzi where your name came from--she gave it to you."

The twelve-year-old didn't like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic's mother, called her "Nunzi"--an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata--which Umberto didn't say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)

"And you're not really my uncle, I suppose?" Dominic inquired of Umberto.

"Ask your mama," Umberto said. "If she wanted to keep you siciliano, she shoulda given you her name."

His mother's maiden name was Saetta--she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.

Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic's heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned--bits of information, or misinformation--had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan's childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?)

All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question "Where is he now?" (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: "Vicino di Napoli." "In the vicinity of Naples," young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep--Benevento and Avellino--Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.

As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle--and definitely a "legendary asshole," as Ketchum would have said.