"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, fro
m 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.