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Da
“What happened to Paris?” Da
“ West Dummer!” Ketchum barked. He was striding toward the knoll where the mess hall had been. “Why they waited till ninety-six to take it down, I couldn’t tell you-and they did a piss-poor job of it, when they finally got around to the bulldozing!” the logger yelled. He bent down and picked up a rusted pot and pan, clanging them together. Da
“They bulldozed it?” the writer asked. He could now see sharp shards of metal, from the sawmill, poking out of the ground like severed bones. The horse hovel had collapsed and was left in a pile; the seventy-five-man bunkhouse or hostelry had been churned half-underground, with the childlike remains of bunk beds scattered in the low-lying juniper. An old washstand stood like a scooped-out skeleton; there was an empty, circular hole where the washbasin had been. There was even the rusted hulk of a steam-engine Lombard log hauler-rolled on its side, with its boiler dented, by the destructive but ineffectual force of the bulldozer. The Lombard rose out of a patch of raspberry bushes; it resembled the violated carcass of a dinosaur, or some other extinct species.
“You want to get rid of a place, you should burn it!” Ketchum railed. Carmella traipsed far behind them, pausing to pluck the burrs and the milkweed off her city slacks. “I wanted you to see this ass-wipe place first, Da
“Why is the schoolhouse still standing?” Da
“I don’t know,” Ketchum told him. “That schoolhouse has some frigging recreational use, I suppose. I see cross-country skiers here, now and again-and snowmobilers all the time, of course. I hear from those energy assholes that they’re going to put these fucking windmills on the high ridges, all around. Three-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high turbines-they have one-hundred-and-fifty-foot blades! They’ll build and service them with a thirty-two-foot-wide gravel-surfaced access road-which, as any fool knows, means they’ll have to clear about a seventy-five-foot-wide path just to build the road! These towers will make a whorehouse of noise and throw a shitload of ice; they’ll have to shut them down when there’s too much snow or sleet, or freezing fog. And after the piss-poor weather has passed, and they start the stupid windmills up again, the ice that has frozen on the blades will get thrown eight hundred fucking feet! The ice comes off in sheets, several feet long but less than an inch thick. Those sheets could slice right through a fella, or a whole moose! And of course there’s the flashing red lights to warn the airplanes away. It’s wicked ironic that these energy assholes are the same sorry bunch of fuck-headed environmentalists who said that river driving wrecked the rivers and the forests, or they’re the environmentalists’ asshole children!”
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 Angelù lost his life?”
“Sure we can, Carmella-I was just showing Da
“I see they left the apple orchard,” Da
“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, Da
They got back in the truck, which Ketchum turned around; this time Da
On the road between Paris and Twisted River-at the height of land where Phillips Brook ran southwest to the Ammonoosuc and into the Co
“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?” Da
“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 su
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. Da
Here comes the left-hand story, the writer predicted. The mere mention of Da