by John Irving
"Kind of a cold spot for breakfast, ain't it?" she'd asked him.
After all, it was past mid-December--coming up on the longest night of the year. Twisted River rarely froze over until January, but what was Ketchum thinking? Yet (as Pam explained to Danny) they'd had breakfast together at the cookhouse site before. Ketchum always enjoyed making a fire. He would set some coals aside, and brew the coffee the way he liked it--in the roasting pan, with the coffee grounds and eggshells in the snow he melted for the water. He would grill a couple of venison steaks and poach three or four eggs on the fire. Six-Pack had agreed to meet him there for breakfast.
But the plan didn't add up, and Pam knew it. Six-Pack had taken a look in Ketchum's pickup; there was no tent and no sleeping bag. If the veteran river driver was camping out, he must have been planning on freezing to death--or else he was intending to sleep in the cab of his truck with the motor running. Furthermore, Ketchum had left Hero with Pam. "I think the cold kind of gets to Hero's hip, too," he'd told her.
"First I heard of it," as Six-Pack said to Danny.
And when she'd shown up at the cookhouse site the next morning, Six-Pack knew right away that there was no outdoor breakfast in Ketchum's plan. The coffee wasn't brewing; nothing was cooking. There was no fire. She spotted Ketchum sitting with his back against the remains of the crumbled brick chimney, as if the logger might have imagined that the cookhouse was still standing--the burned-to-the-ground building somehow warm and cozy, all around him.
Hero had run to his master, but the dog stopped short of where Ketchum sat on the snow-covered ground; Pam saw that the bear hound's hackles were up, and the dog suddenly walked stiff-legged, circling the old logger. "Ketchum!" Six-Pack had called, but there'd been no response from the woodsman; only Hero had turned his head to look at her.
"I couldn't walk over to him--not for the longest time," Six-Pack told Danny. "I could tell he was a fuckin' goner."
Because it had snowed the previous day, and the snow had stopped before nightfall, it was easy for Pam to see how he'd done it. There was a trail of blood in the fresh snow. Six-Pack followed the blood down the hill to the riverbank; there were some big stumps above the bank, and she saw where Ketchum had wiped the snow off one of them. The warm blood had seeped into the stump, and Ketchum's ax was stuck so firmly in the stump that Pam couldn't pull it out. There was no left hand to be found; obviously, Ketchum had thrown it in the river.
Having seen the spot in the river basin where Ketchum shot the apple-juice jar containing the cook's ashes, Danny had no trouble imagining exactly where Ketchum had thrown his left hand. But it must have been hard work for the old woodsman to walk back up the hill to the site of the cookhouse; from all the blood Pam saw in the snow, she knew Ketchum must have been bleeding profusely.
"Once, when they was still drivin' hardwoods on Phillips Brook," Six-Pack told Danny, "I seen Ketchum stealin' some firewood for himself. You know, he was just pickin' some pulpwood outta the pile--them four-foot small-diameter logs didn't amount to much. But I seen Ketchum turn half a cord of pulpwood into kindlin' in less than half an hour! That way, no one would recognize the stuff--if they spotted the wood in his truck, sometime later. Ketchum just choked up on the handle of his ax--he held it in one hand, you know, like a hatchet--and he split them logs lengthwise, and then split 'em again, till they was skinny enough so he could chop them four-foot logs inta two-foot sticks of fuckin' kindlin'! I never seen him swing that ax. He was so strong, Danny, and so accurate--he just wielded that ax with one hand, like it was a fuckin' hammer! Those Paris Manufacturin' Company clowns never knew why their pulpwood was disappearin'! Ketchum said the assholes were too busy makin' toboggans in Maine--that's where they were truckin' most of their hardwoods. Them Paris peckerheads never noticed where their pulpwood was goin'."
Yes, Ketchum could split a four-foot hardwood log one-handed; Danny had seen how the woodsman could wield an ax, both as an ax and as a hatchet. And after Ketchum had cut off his hand, the old river driver was still strong enough to walk up the hill, where he'd sat down to rest his back against all that was left of the cookhouse chimney. There'd been a bottle of whiskey beside him, Six-Pack said; she told Danny that Ketchum had managed to drink most of it.
"Anything else?" Danny asked Six-Pack. "I mean--on the ground, beside him."
"Yeah--a big bottle of aspirin," Pam told the writer. "There were still plenty of aspirin left in the bottle," Six-Pack said. "Ketchum wasn't much of a painkiller person, but I suppose he took some aspirin for the pain--he musta just washed 'em down with the whiskey."
As Danny knew, the aspirin hadn't been "for the pain;" knowing Ketchum, Danny believed that the old riverman had probably relished the pain. The whiskey wasn't for the pain, either. Both the aspirin and the whiskey, the writer knew, were strictly to keep Ketchum bleeding; the logger had little forgiveness for anyone who had a job to do and did a piss-poor job of it. (Only Ketchum could kill Ketchum, right?)
"Ketchum couldn't forgive himself for failin' to keep Cookie alive," Six-Pack told the writer. "And before that--after your boy died, Danny--Ketchum felt he was powerless to protect you. All he could do was obsess about your writin'."
"Me, too," the writer said to Six-Pack. "Me, too."
SIX-PACK DIDN'T STAY for Christmas. After they'd carried Ketchum's guns up to Danny's bedroom on the second floor--Pam insisted that all the guns be stowed under Danny's bed, because this was what Ketchum had wanted--and once they'd lugged the boxes of Rosie's books up to Danny's third-floor writing room, Six-Pack warned the writer that she was an early riser.
"How early?" he asked her.
Ketchum's truck and Six-Pack Pam were gone when Danny woke up in the morning; she'd made coffee for him and had left him a letter, which she'd written by hand on several pages of the typing paper he kept in the gym. Six-Pack's handwriting was very familiar to Danny, from those years when she'd written Ketchum's letters for the then-illiterate logger. But Danny had forgotten how well Pam wrote--far better than she spoke. Even her spelling was correct. (The writer wondered if this was the result of all the reading-aloud she'd once done to Ketchum.)
Naturally, Six-Pack's letter included instructions for taking care of Hero, but most of her letter was more personal than Danny had expected. She was having the hip-replacement surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital, as Ketchum had recommended. She'd made a few new friends at the Saw Dust Alley campground, that nice-looking trailer park on Route 26--the attacks of September 11 had served to introduce her to many of her neighbors. Henry, the old West Dummer sawyer with the missing thumb and index finger, would look after Pam's dogs while she was having the surgery. (Henry had volunteered to look after the dogs while Six-Pack was driving Ketchum's truck to Toronto and back, too.)
Six-Pack had also made some long-standing friendships at the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she still worked nights as a cleaning person; she'd called her friends at the hospital when she found Ketchum's body at the cookhouse site. Six-Pack wanted Danny to know that she'd sat with Ketchum for the better part of that morning, just holding his one remaining hand, the right one--"the only one he ever touched me with," as Six-Pack put it in her letter.
Pam told Danny he would find some photographs pressed flat in the books that had once belonged to Danny's mother. It had been hard for Six-Pack not to burn the pictures of Rosie, though Pam did more than put her jealousy aside. Six-Pack admitted that she now believed Ketchum had loved the cook even more than the logger had once loved Rosie. Six-Pack could live with that--the left-hand business notwithstanding. Besides, Six-Pack said, Ketchum had wanted Danny to have those photos of the writer's mother.
"I know it's none of my business," Pam also wrote to Danny, "but if I were you, I would write and sleep in that third-floor room. It is peaceful up there, in my opinion--and it's the best room in the house. But--don't get your balls crossed about this, Danny--I suspect you are well acquainted with more than your fair share of ghosts. I suppos
e it's one thing to work in a room with a ghost, but quite another matter to sleep in the same room with one. I wouldn't know--I never had children, on purpose. My philosophy was always to do without those things I didn't dare to lose--Ketchum excepted."
Danny wrote the Ketchum excepted words on a scrap of typing paper and taped it to one of his outdated typewriters--another IBM Selectric II, the one he was currently using in that third-floor room he shared with Joe's ghost. The writer liked the phrase Ketchum excepted; maybe he could use it.
All that had happened three years ago, and counting. The only reason Danny hadn't thrown out his relic of a fax machine, which was still in the kitchen of that house on Cluny Drive, was that Six-Pack occasionally faxed him and he faxed her. Pam must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine--the same age Ketchum would have been, if the old logger were still alive--and her messages via the fax machine had lost what literary pizazz she'd once demonstrated as a letter writer.
Six-Pack had grown more terse in her old age. When there was something she'd read, or had seen in the news on TV--and provided the item was in the dumber-than-dog-shit category of human stupidities--Six-Pack would fax Danny. Pam unflinchingly stated what Ketchum would have said about this or that, and Danny never hesitated to fax her back with the writer's version of the river driver's vernacular.
It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Danny or Six-Pack. It was what Ketchum would have said about anything. It was the old logger's voice that Danny and Six-Pack wanted to hear.
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
THE MID-FEBRUARY STORM had blown across Lake Huron from western Canada, but when the wind and snow hit the Georgian Bay islands, the wind shifted and the snow just kept falling; the wind now blew from a southerly direction, from Parry Sound to Shawanaga Bay. From his writing shack, Danny could no longer see where the bay ended and the mainland began. Because of the whiteout from the storm, the fir trees on what Danny knew was the mainland appeared as a mirage of a floating forest--or the trees seemed to be growing out of the frozen bay. The wind whipped little spirals of snow skyward; these twisters looked like small tornadoes of snow. Sometimes, when the wind blew northward, along the length of Shawanaga Bay, there were actual tornadoes--not unlike the kind you see in the American Midwest or on the Canadian prairies, Danny knew. (Andy Grant had warned the writer to watch out for them.)
Tireless had called Danny on his cell phone. She didn't want to be an island cleaning woman today; it wasn't a good idea to be out in the Polar airboat, not when the visibility was this bad. In a similar storm, only a few years ago, Tireless told Danny, some butt-brained oaf from Ohio had run his airboat aground on the O'Connor Rocks--just a little northwest of Moonlight Bay. (Danny had to come that way in order to pick Tireless up at the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.)
"What happened to him--the butt-brained oaf from Ohio?" Danny asked her.
"They found the poor fool frozen--stiff as a stick," Tireless told him.
"I'll come get you tomorrow, or the next day--whenever the storm's over," Danny said. "I'll call you, or you call me."
"Kiss Hero for me," she said.
"I don't kiss Hero a lot," Danny told Tireless. "At least I'm not inclined to."
"Well, you should kiss him more," the First Nation woman said. "I think Hero would be nicer to you if you kissed him a lot."
All morning, in the writing shack, Hero had been farting up a storm--the near equal of the snowstorm Danny was watching out his window. It was a morning when the writer wasn't tempted to make his relationship with the bear hound a closer one. "Jesus, Hero!" Danny had exclaimed several times in the course of the foul-smelling morning, but it was unfit weather for the Walker bluetick to be put outside. And despite the dog's unrelenting flatulence, the writing had been going well; Danny was definitely getting closer to the start of his first chapter.
Certain sentences now came to him whole, intact; even the punctuation seemed permanent. When two such sentences were born consecutively, one emerging immediately after the other, the writer felt especially riveted to his task. He'd written the first twosome of the morning on a piece of typing paper and had thumbtacked the page to the rough pine-board wall of his writing shack. Danny kept looking at the sentences, rereading them.
"As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do--as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro--to and fro."
Danny liked the repetition. He knew this was first-chapter material, but the passage belonged at the end of the chapter--it definitely didn't sound like a beginning. Danny had circled the under the logs phrase, which the writer thought wouldn't be a bad chapter title. Yet much of the focus of the first chapter seemed to be on the cook; the focus really wasn't on the boy who'd slipped under the logs.
"You could not say 'the past' or 'the future' in the cook's presence without making him frown," Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. There were other, isolated sentences about this young cook; they were like landmarks or signposts for Danny, helping to orient the writer as he plotted his first chapter. Another sentence was: "In the cook's opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river's name." There would be much more about the cook, of course; it kept coming. "The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand," Danny wrote.
The cook would be a major point-of-view character in the first chapter, the writer imagined--as Danny also imagined the cook's twelve-year-old son would be. "The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs," Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. And there was one sentence about the cook that the writer left unfinished--at least for the moment. "The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters"--well, that was as far as Danny wanted to go with that sentence, which he knew he would have to complete another day. For now, it was enough to type all these thoughts about the cook on a single piece of paper and thumbtack the page to the wall of the writing shack.
"In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn't change," Danny had also written; it could work as a first sentence to the chapter, but the writer knew he could do better. Still, the sentence about the weather was a keeper; Danny could use it somewhere. "Now it was that mud-season, swollen-river time of year again," Daniel Baciagalupo wrote--a better beginning sentence, but it wasn't really what the writer was looking for.
Everything about the Ketchum character was more fragmentary. Nothing about the Ketchum character came to Danny in a complete sentence--not yet. There was something to the effect that "Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive;" Danny liked that line, but he couldn't see where the sentence was going. There was another fragment about Ketchum being "no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive." Danny knew he could and would use that, but he wasn't sure where--maybe in proximity to an as-yet-uncertain sentence about Ketchum lying on his back on the riverbank "like a beached bear." Yet these fragments also found their way to the writing-shack wall, where they were thumbtacked alongside the first chapter's other signposts or landmarks.
At this point, the writer could see the Angel character more clearly than he could see the Ketchum character--though it was obvious to Daniel Baciagalupo that the Ketchum character was more major. (Maybe most major, Danny was thinking.)
Just then--at what amounted to a wave of more noxious farting from the dog--Danny's cell phone rang again.
"Buenos dias, Senor Writer," Lupita said.
"Buenos dias, Lupita," Danny said.
The Mexican cleaning woman didn't call often. In those ten weeks of the winter when Danny lived on the island in Georgian Bay, Lupita looked after the house on Cluny Drive; she opened and read the author's mail, she replayed the messages on his answering machi
ne, she kept an eye on the fax machine, too. Once a week, Lupita would compile a list of what she considered was important for Danny to know--in essence, what she believed couldn't wait until he returned to Toronto. She faxed the list of priority messages to Andy Grant's office in Pointe au Baril Station.
Danny always left a couple of checkbooks of signed blank checks for Lupita, who paid his bills while he was gone. Most of all, the Mexican cleaning woman demonstrably enjoyed reading the writer's mail and deciding what was important--and what wasn't. This doubtless appealed to Lupita's pride--her sense of herself as having an immeasurable authority, an almost managerial control over the bestselling author's domestic life.
Danny knew that Lupita would have seized any opportunity that presented itself for her to take charge of the writer's wretched personal life, too. If she'd had daughters, she would have introduced them to Danny. Lupita did have nieces; she would shamelessly leave their photographs on the kitchen countertop, calling Danny (after she'd gone home) to tell him that she'd "lost" some photos that were dear to her. Perhaps he'd seen the pictures lying around somewhere?
"Lupita, the pictures are on my kitchen countertop--where you evidently left them," he would tell her.
"The dark-haired beauty in the pink tank top--the one with the wonderful smile and the gorgeous skin? My precious niece, actually, Mr. Writer."
"Lupita, she looks like a teenager," Danny would point out.
"No, she's older--a little," Lupita would tell him.
Once Lupita had told him: "Just don't marry another writer. All you'll do is depress each other."
"I'm not going to marry anybody--not ever," he told her.
"Why don't you stab yourself in the heart instead?" she asked him. "Soon you'll be consorting with prostitutes! I know you talk to the dog--I've heard you!" she told him.
If Lupita was calling him in Pointe au Baril, she was vexed about something, Danny knew. "What's up, Lupita?" he asked her on the cell phone. "Is it snowing in Toronto? We're having quite a snowstorm up here--Hero and I are stranded."
