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“My mom went out on the ice first?” Da
“Do-si-dos on the ice were hard to do,” Jane answered. “Ketchum went out on the ice to do-si-do with her; he was still carrying your dad. It was black ice. There was snow in the woods, but not on the river basin. The basin was windblown, and there’d been no new snow for almost a week.” Jane usually added: “Most years, the ice didn’t break up in the river basin this way.”
The drunken cook couldn’t stand, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too; he made Ketchum put him down. Then Dominic fell down-he just sat down on the seat of his pants, and Ketchum pushed him like a human sled. Da
In those days, the horse-loggers dumped as many logs as they could on the river ice between Little Dummer Pond and the basin in Twisted River-and on the tributary streams upriver, too. Sometimes, the weight of the logs broke through the ice on Dummer Pond first; it was the bigger of the Dummer ponds, held back by a sluice dam that didn’t always hold. One way or another, the ice upstream of the town of Twisted River always broke up first, and in the late winter of 1944, the logs shot down the rapids from Little Dummer Pond, the ice breaking ahead of the logs-both the broken slabs of ice and all the logs coming into the river basin in an unimpeded torrent.
In the late winter or early spring, this invariably happened; it just usually happened in the daytime, because the daytime weather was warmer. In 1944, the avalanche of logs came into the river basin at night. Ketchum was pushing Dominic across the ice on the seat of his pants; the cook’s pretty, “somewhat older” wife was dancing around them.
Was the phrase “somewhat older” a part of Injun Jane’s account of that night? (Da
Injun Jane had opened the door from the cookhouse kitchen; she was going to tell them to stop yelling, “Assholes!” or they would wake up little Da
No one was yelling, “Assholes!” now. The first of the logs skidded onto the ice in the river basin; the logs were wet, and they seemed to pick up speed when they hit the ice. Some of the logs were driven deep into the basin, under the ice; when they rose, the bigger logs broke through the ice from underwater. “Like torpedoes,” Injun Jane always said.
By the time Jane reached the river basin, the sheer weight of the logs was breaking up the ice; when the ice first broke, some of the slabs were as big as cars. Ketchum had left the cook in a sitting position when he first saw Rosie disappear. One second, she was do-si-doing; in the next second, she had slipped out of sight behind a slab of ice the size of a wall. Then the logs completely covered where she’d been. Ketchum picked his way back across the chunks of ice and bobbing logs to where the cook had fallen on one side. Dominic Baciagalupo was drifting downstream on a pulpit-size slab of ice.
“She’s gone, Cookie-gone!” Ketchum was calling. The cook sat up, surprised to see a log rise out of the basin and come crashing down beside him.
“Rosie?” Dominic asked. If he had yelled, “I love you, too,” there would have been no discernible echo now-not with the noisy music the logs and broken ice were making. Ketchum put the cook over his shoulder and tiptoed from log to log ashore; sometimes he stepped on an ice floe instead of a log, and his sinking leg would get wet above his knee.
“Assholes!” Injun Jane was yelling from the riverbank-to both of them, or all three of them. “Assholes! Assholes!” she cried and cried.
The cook was wet and cold and shivering, and his teeth were chattering, but Ketchum and Jane could understand him well enough. “She can’t be gone, Ketchum-she can’t just disappear like that!”
“But she was gone that fast, Da
“But he didn’t cut his hand off?” Da
“Well, no-he didn’t,” Jane told the boy, with some impatience. “You’ve noticed that Ketchum still has a left hand, haven’t you?”
Sometimes, especially when Ketchum was drunk, Da
THEY WERE BUSTLING about the kitchen-all the fat women, and the lean cook with his leaner son. You didn’t pass behind someone without saying, “Behind you!” or putting your hand on the person’s back. When the sawmill workers’ wives passed behind Da
Ketchum had gone outside to pee-a seemingly unbreakable habit from the wanigan days-while Injun Jane went into the dining room to set the tables. In those “good old days” in the portable logging camps, Ketchum liked to wake up the rivermen and the other loggers by pissing on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans. “There’s a wanigan in the river!” he was fond of hollering. “Oh, sweet Jesus-it’s floating away!” A cacophony of swearing followed, from inside the portables.
Ketchum also liked to beat on the metal siding of the sleeping wanigans with one of the river drivers’ pike poles. “Don’t let the bear in!” he would holler. “Oh, Lord-it’s got one of the women! Oh, Lord-dear God, no!”
Da
Before he went outside for an apparently never-ending piss, Ketchum had spoken to the twelve-year-old. “Nine o’clock, Sunday morning-don’t let your dad forget, Da