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“Living here can be compromising, Daniel,” the boy’s father often said.
“Women have to lose their looks before they’ll live with Constable Carl,” Ketchum had tried to explain to young Dan. “But when the women lose too much of their looks, Carl finds someone else.”
All the kitchen help, certainly each and every one of those sawmill workers’ wives, had lost their looks-in Da
“Is it their breasts that men like about women?” Da
“Ask Ketchum,” the cook had replied, but Da
And Jane-how old was she? Da
“I’ll bet you had a great night’s sleep,” Jane was saying to the cook. She smiled at Da
“Sure, I got enough,” the boy answered. He wished his dad and the sawmill workers’ wives weren’t there, because he wanted to ask Jane about his mother.
His dad could talk to him about Ketchum retrieving her battered body from the spillway; maybe that was because Ketchum had prevented the cook from seeing what the river and the logs had done to her. But Da
“I was the drunkest,” Dominic would assert, without fail. There was such blame attached to his drunke
“Maybe I was drunker than you, Cookie,” Ketchum sometimes said. “After all, I let her go out on the ice.”
“That was my fault,” the cook usually insisted. “I was so drunk that you had to carry me, Ketchum.”
“Don’t think I don’t remember,” Ketchum would say. But neither man could (or would) say exactly what had happened. Da
Injun Jane, who had not been drinking-she never drank-told the twelve-year-old the story. As many times as the boy had asked her, she’d told him the same story every time; that’s how he knew it was probably true.
JANE HAD BEEN DANNY’S babysitter that night; Da
Apparently, Ketchum was either too old or already too banged-up for the war. Although Constable Carl had fairly recently split open Ketchum’s forehead, Ketchum had already had a host of other injuries and maimings-enough to make him ineligible for military service, but not of sufficient severity to stop him from dancing. “Your mother taught Ketchum to read and dance,” the cook had told his son-in a curiously neutral-sounding way, as if Dominic either had no opinion or didn’t know which of these acquired skills was the more remarkable or important for Ketchum to have learned. In fact, Ketchum was Rosie Baciagalupo’s only dance partner; he looked after her as if she were his daughter, and (out on the dance floor) the cook’s wife was so small beside Ketchum that she almost could have passed for his child.
Except for the “noteworthy coincidence,” as Da
“Ketchum and your dad liked to drink together,” Jane told young Dan. “I don’t know what it is that men like about drinking together, but Ketchum and your dad liked it a little too much.”
Perhaps the drinking had allowed them to say things to each other, Da
According to Ketchum, “Injuns” couldn’t or shouldn’t drink at all-he took it as simple common sense that Injun Jane didn’t drink. Yet she lived with Constable Carl, who was a mean drunk. After the dance hall and the hostelry bars had closed, the constable drank himself into a belligerent temper. It was often late when Jane drove herself home-when she’d finished with washing the towels and had put them in the dryers in the laundry room, and could only then drive home from the cookhouse. Late or not, Constable Carl was occasionally awake and warlike when Jane was ready to go to bed. After all, she got up early and the cowboy didn’t.
“I’ll draw you a picture,” Injun Jane would say to young Dan, sometimes apropos of nothing. “Your father couldn’t drink as much as Ketchum, but he would try to keep up. Your mother was more sensible, but she drank too much, too.”
“My dad can’t drink as much as Ketchum because he’s smaller?” Da
“Weight has something to do with it, yes,” the dishwasher generally replied. “It wasn’t the first night that Ketchum carried your dad back to the cookhouse from the dance hall. Your mom was still dancing around them, doing her pretty little do-si-dos.” (Did young Dan ever detect a degree of envy or sarcasm in the way Injun Jane referred to Cousin Rosie’s pretty little do-si-dos?)
Da
The boy tried to imagine his mother do-si-doing Ketchum as the big man carried his dad. “Was Ketchum dancing, too?” Da
“I suppose so,” Jane replied. “I wasn’t with them until later. I was with you, remember?”
At the frozen river basin, Rosie Baciagalupo stopped do-si-doing Ketchum and called across the ice to the mountainside. When Twisted River was frozen, there was more of an echo; the ice brought your voice back to you quicker and truer than if it had traveled over the open water.
“I wonder why that is,” Da
“I heard them from the cookhouse,” Injun Jane went on, never offering any speculation on the echo. “Your mom called, ‘I love you!’ Your dad, over Ketchum’s shoulder, called back, ‘I love you, too!’ Ketchum just yelled, ‘Shit!’ and other such things; then he yelled, ‘Assholes!’ Pretty soon all three of them were yelling, ‘Assholes!’ I thought the yelling would wake you up, although nothing woke you up at night-not even when you were two.”