by John Irving
"Hell, I wiped the bear blood off the seat," the river driver was saying, as the truck pulled into Paris. "I do wonder, though, how long the critter's reek will last. Bears do smell something awful, don't they?"
Ketchum dropped the truck down to first gear, his rough right hand briefly brushing one of Carmella's knees. "I'm not trying to feel you up, Carmella," the logger said to her. "I didn't plan on my stick shift ending up between your legs! We'll put Danny in the middle next time."
Danny was looking all around for the steam-powered sawmill, but he couldn't see it. Hardwood sawlogs had once been driven down Phillips Brook to Paris; the Paris Manufacturing Company of Paris, Maine, had made toboggans, the writer remembered. But where was the old sawmill? What had happened to the horse hovel and the tool shops? There'd been a mess hall and a hostelry--a seventy-five-man bunkhouse, as Danny recalled--and what had appeared to be (at the time) a rather fancy-looking house for the mill manager. Now, as Ketchum stopped the truck, Danny saw that only the schoolhouse remained. The logging camp was gone.
"What happened to Paris?" Danny asked, getting out of the truck. He could hear Phillips Brook; it sounded just the same.
"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. Danny followed him, leaving Carmella behind.
"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 lowlying 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, Danny--it's a fucking disgrace that they couldn't even dispose of it properly! They were always dumber than dog shit in West Dummer!" the old logger hollered.
"Why is the schoolhouse still standing?" Danny asked. (Given how those West Dummer kids had abused him, Danny would have liked to burn the Paris Manufacturing Company School to the ground.)
"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 fuckheaded 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 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.
"Please stop," Carmella begged. (Was she gagging or crying? the writer wondered. It hadn't occurred to Danny that it wasn't the story Carmella wanted to stop; it was the truck.)
"You said there was a lapse. So what was the mistake?" Danny asked the old woodsman.
But they were cresting the hill where the cookhouse had been. Just then--in the bouncing, vomitous truck--there hove into view the deceptively calm river basin, and below the basin was the bend in the river, where both Rosie and Angel had been swept away. Carmella gasped to see the water. For Danny, the shock was to see nothing there--not a board of the cookhouse remained--and as for the view of the town from where the cookhouse had been, there was no town.
"The mistake?" Ketchum shouted. "I'll say there was a lapse! We were all drunk and hollering when we went out on the ice, Danny--you know that much, don't you?"
"Yes--Jane told me," Danny said.
"And I said, or I thought I said, to Rosie, 'Give me your hand.' I swear that's what I said to her," Ketchum declared. "But--being drunk, and being right-handed--I instinctively reached for her with my right hand. I had been carrying your father, but he wanted to slide around on the ice, too--so I put him down." Ketchum finally stopped the truck.
Carmella opened the passenger-side door and vomited in the grass; the poor woman kept retching while Danny surveyed the crumbled chimney of the cookhouse. Nothing taller than two or three feet of the bricks was left standing where once the cook's pizza oven had been.
"But your mother knew our rules," Ketchum continued. "Rosie said, 'Not that hand--that's the wrong hand.' And she danced away from me--she wouldn't take my hand. Then your father slipped and fell down, and I was pushing him across the ice--as if he were a human sled--but I couldn't close the distance between your mom and me. I didn't have hold of her hand, Danny, because I'd reached for her with my right one--the bad one. Do you see?"
"I see," Danny said, "but it seems like such a small thing." Yet the writer could see it, vividly--how the distance between his mom and Ketchum had been insurmountable, especially when the logs tore downstream from the Dummer ponds and onto the ice in the river basin, where they quickly picked up speed.
Carmella, on her knees, appeared to be praying; her view of where her beloved Angelu had been lost was truly the best in Twisted River, which was why the cook had wanted the cookhouse erected there.
"Don't cut off your left hand, Ketchum," Danny told him.
"Please don't, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella begged the old woodsman.
"We'll see," was all Ketchum would tell them. "We'll see."
IN THE LATE FALL of the same year he'd set fire to Twisted River, Ketchum came back to the site of the cookhouse with a hoe and some grass seed. He didn't bother to sow any of it in what had been the town of Twisted River, but in the area of the cookhouse--and everywhere on the hillside above the river basin, where the ashes from the fire had settled into the ground--Ketchum hoed the ashes and the earth together, and he scattered the grass seed. He'd picked a day when he knew it was going to rain; by the next morning, the rain had turned to sleet, and all winter long the grass seed lay under the snow. There was grass the next spring, and now there was a meadow where the cookhouse had been. No one had ever mowed the grass, which was tall and wavy.
Ketchum took Carmella by the arm, and they walked down the hill through the tall grass to where the town had been. Danny followed them, carrying his dad's ashes and--at Ketchum's insistence--the Remington carbine. There was nothing left standing in the town of Twisted River, save the onetime lone sentinel that had stood watch in the muddy lane alongside what had been the dance hall--namely, the old steam-engine Lombard log hauler. The fire must have burned so hot that the Lombard was permanently blackened--impervious to rust but not to bird shit, yet otherwise perfectly black. The strong sled runners were intact, but the bulldozer-type tracks were gone--taken as a souvenir, maybe, if not consumed in the fire. Where the helmsman had sat--at the front of the Lombard, perched over the sled runners--the long-untouched steering wheel looked ready to use (had there been a helmsman still alive who knew how to steer
it). As the cook once predicted, the ancient log hauler had outlasted the town.
Ketchum guided Carmella closer to the riverbank, but even on a dry and sunny September morning, they couldn't get within six feet of the water's edge; the riverbank was treacherously slippery, the ground spongy underfoot. They didn't dam up the Dummer ponds anymore, but the water upstream of the river basin nonetheless ran fast--even in the fall--and Twisted River often overflowed its banks. Closer to the river, Danny felt the wind in his face; it came off the water in the basin, as if blown downstream from the Dummer ponds.
"As I suspected," Ketchum said. "If we try to scatter Cookie's ashes in the river, we can't get close enough to the water. The wind will blow the ashes back in our faces."
"Hence the rifle?" Danny asked.
The woodsman nodded. "Hence the glass jar, too," Ketchum said; he took Carmella's hand and pointed her index finger for her. "Not quite halfway to the far shore, but almost in the middle of the basin--that's where I saw your boy slip under the logs," the riverman told her. "I swear to you, Danny, it wasn't more than an arm's length from where your mom went through the ice."
The three of them looked out across the water. On the far shore of Twisted River, they could see a coyote watching them. "Give me the carbine, Danny," Ketchum said. The coyote took a long, delirious drink from the river; the animal still watched them, but not furtively. Something was the matter with it.
"Please don't shoot it, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said.
"It must be sick, if it's out in the daytime and not running away from us," the woodsman told her. Danny handed him the Remington .30-06 Springfield. The coyote sat on the opposite riverbank, watching them with increasing indifference; it was almost as if the animal were talking to itself.
"Let's not kill anything today, Mr. Ketchum," Carmella said. Lowering the gun, Ketchum picked up a rock and threw it into the river in the coyote's direction, but the animal didn't flinch. It seemed dazed.
"That critter is definitely sick," Ketchum said. The coyote took another long drink from the river; now it didn't even watch them. "Look how thirsty it is--it's dying of something," Ketchum told them.
