Last Night in Twisted River

Ketchum suddenly stopped shouting, because he could see that Carmella was crying. She had not progressed very far from the truck; either the raspberry bushes had blocked her way, or the debris from the bulldozed logging camp had impeded her. With the uproar Ketchum had been making, Carmella couldn't have heard Phillips Brook--nor could she see the water. The toppled Lombard log hauler, which was an utter unknown and, as such, forbiddingly foreign to her, appeared to have frightened her.

"Please, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said, "could we see where my Angelu lost his life?"

"Sure we can, Carmella--I was just showing Danny a part of his history," the old river driver said gruffly. "Writers have to know their history, don't they, Danny?" With a sudden wave of his hand, the woodsman exploded again: "The mess hall, the mill manager's house--all bulldozed! And there was a small graveyard around here somewhere. They even bulldozed the graveyard!"

"I see they left the apple orchard," Danny said, pointing to the scraggly trees--untended for years now.

"For no good reason," Ketchum said, not even looking at the orchard. "Only the deer eat those apples. I've killed my fair share of deer here." (Doubtless, even the deer were dumber than dog shit in West Dummer, Danny was thinking. Probably, the dumb deer just stood around eating apples, waiting to be shot.)

They got back in the truck, which Ketchum turned around; this time Danny took the middle seat in the cab, straddling the gearshift. Carmella rolled down the passenger-side window, gulping the incoming air. The truck had sat in the sun, unmoving, and the morning was warming up; the stench from the dead bear was as oppressive as a heavy, rank blanket. Danny held his dad's ashes in his lap. (The writer would have liked to smell his father's ashes, knowing that they smelled like steak spice--a possible antidote to the bear--but Danny restrained himself.)

On the road between Paris and Twisted River--at the height of land where Phillips Brook ran southwest to the Ammonoosuc and into the Connecticut, and where Twisted River ran southeast to the Pontook and into the Androscoggin--Ketchum stopped his foul-smelling truck again. The woodsman pointed out the window, far off, to what looked like a long, level field. Perhaps it was a swamp in the spring of the year, but it was dry land in September--with tall grasses and a few scrub pine, and young maple suckers taking root in the flat ground.

"When they used to dam up Phillips Brook," the river driver began, "this was a pond, but they haven't dammed up the brook in years. There hasn't been a pond--not for a long time--though it's still called Moose-Watch Pond. When there was a pond, the moose would gather here; the woodsmen came to watch them. Now the moose come out at night, and they dance where the pond was. And those of us who are still alive--there aren't many--we come to watch the moose dance."

"They dance?" Danny said.

"They do. It's some kind of dance. I've seen them," the old logger said. "And these moose--the ones who are dancing--they're too young to remember when there was a pond! They just know it, somehow. The moose look like they're trying to make the pond come back," Ketchum told them. "I come out here some nights--just to watch them dance. Sometimes, I can talk Six-Pack into coming with me."

There were no moose now--not on a bright and sunny September morning--but there was no reason not to believe Ketchum, Danny was thinking. "Your mom was a good dancer, Danny--as I know you know. I suppose the Injun told you," Ketchum added.

When the old logger drove on, all Carmella said was: "My goodness--moose dancing!"

"If I had seen nothing else, in my whole life--only the moose dancing--I would have been happier," Ketchum told them. Danny looked at him; the logger's tears were soon lost in his beard, but Danny had seen them.

Here comes the left-hand story, the writer predicted. The mere mention of Danny's mother, or her dancing, had triggered something in Ketchum.

Up close, the old riverman's beard was more grizzled than it appeared from farther away; Danny couldn't take his eyes off him. He'd thought that Ketchum was reaching for the gearshift when the logger'

s strong right hand grabbed Danny's left knee and squeezed it painfully. "What are you looking at?" Ketchum asked him sharply. "I wouldn't break a promise I made to your mom or your dad, but for the fucking fact that some promises you make in your miserable life contradict some others--like I also promised Rosie that I would love you forever, and look after you if there came a day when your dad couldn't. Like that one!" Ketchum cried; his reluctant left hand gripped the steering wheel, both harder and for longer than he allowed his left hand to hold the wheel when he was merely shifting gears.

Finally, the big right hand released Danny's knee--Ketchum was once more driving right-handed. The logger's left elbow pointed out the driver's-side window, as if it were permanently affixed to the truck's cab; the now-relaxed fingers of Ketchum's left hand only indifferently grazed the steering wheel as he turned onto the old haul road to Twisted River.

Immediately, the road surface worsened. There was little traffic to a ghost town, and Twisted River wasn't on the way to anywhere else; the haul road hadn't been maintained. The first pothole the truck hit caused the glove-compartment door to spring open. The soothing smell of gun oil washed over them, momentarily relieving them from the unrelenting reek of the bear. When Danny reached to close the door of the glove compartment, he saw the contents: a big bottle of aspirin and a small handgun in a shoulder holster.

"Painkillers, both of them," Ketchum remarked casually, as Danny closed the glove compartment. "I wouldn't be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon."

In the pickup's bed, nestled together on the woodpile under the tarp--along with the Remington .30-06 Springfield--Danny knew there was also a chainsaw and an ax. In a sheath above the sun visor of the truck, on the driver's side, was a foot-long Browning knife.

"Why are you always armed, Mr. Ketchum?" Carmella asked the river driver.

Maybe it was the armed word that caught Ketchum off-guard, because he hadn't been armed that long-ago night when the logger and the cook and the cook's cousin Rosie had started out on the ice--do-si-doing their way on the frozen river. Right there--in the bear-stinking truck, in the woodsman's wild eyes--a vision of Rosie must have appeared to Ketchum. Danny noticed that Ketchum's fierce beard was once more wet with tears.

"I have made ... mistakes," the riverman began; his voice sounded choked, half strangled. "Not only errors of judgment, or simply saying something I couldn't live up to, but actual lapses."

"You don't have to tell the story, Ketchum," Danny told him, but there was no stopping the logger now.

"A loving couple will say things to each other--you know, Danny--just to make each other feel good about a situation, even if the situation isn't good, or if they shouldn't feel good about it," Ketchum said. "A loving couple will make up their own rules, as if these made-up rules were as reliable or counted for as much as the rules everyone else tried to live by--if you know what I mean."

"Not really," Danny answered. The writer saw that the haul road to what had been the town of Twisted River was washed out--flooded, years past--and now the rocky road was overgrown with lichen and swamp moss. Only the fork in the road--a left turn, to the cookhouse--had endured, and Ketchum took it.

"My left hand was the one I touched your mom with, Danny. I wouldn't touch her with my right hand--the one I had touched, and would touch, other women with," Ketchum said.

"Stop!" Carmella cried. (At least she hadn't said, "My goodness," Danny thought; he knew Ketchum wouldn't stop, now that he had started.)

"That was our first rule--I was her left-handed lover," the logger explained. "In both our minds, my left hand was hers--it was Rosie's hand, hence my most important hand, my good hand. It was my more gentle hand--the hand least like myself," Ketchum said. It was the hand that had struck fewer blows, Danny was thinking, and Ketchum's left index finger had never squeezed a trigger.

"I see," Danny told him.