Last Night in Twisted River Read Online Free PDF

pronounced the second “c” in Baciacalupo like a “g.” Over time, and due to a clerical error in kindergarten, the misspelled name had stuck. He’d become Dominic Baciagalupo before he became a cook. His mother also called him Dom, for short—Dominic being derived from doménica , which means “Sunday.” Not that Annunziata was a tireless adherent of what Ketchum called “Catholic thinking.” What was both Catholic and Italian in the Saetta family had driven the young, unmarried woman north to New Hampshire; in Berlin, other Italians (presumably, also Catholics) would look after her.
    Had they expected she would put her child up for adoption, and come back to the North End? Nunzi knew that this was done, but she wouldn’t consider giving up her baby, and—notwithstanding the sizable nostalgia she expressed for the Italian North End—she was never tempted to go back to Boston, either. In her unplanned condition, she had been sent away; understandably, she resented it.
    While Annunziata remained a loyal Sicilian in her own kitchen, the proverbial ties that bind were irreparably frayed. Her Boston family—and, by association, the Italian community in the North End, and whatever represented “Catholic thinking” there—had disowned her. In turn, she disowned them. Nunzi never went to Mass herself, nor did she make Dominic go. “It’s enough if we go to confession, when we want to,” she would tell young Dom—her little kiss of the wolf.
    She wouldn’t teach the boy Italian, either—some essential cooking lingo excepted—nor was Dominic inclined to learn the language of “the old country,” which to the boy meant the North End of Boston, not Italy. It was both a language and a place that had rejected his mother. Italian would never be Dominic Baciagalupo’s language; he said, adamantly, that Boston was nowhere he ever wanted to go.
    Everything in Annunziata Saetta’s new life was defined by a sense of starting over. The youngest of three sisters, she could read and speak English as well as she could cook siciliano . Nunzi taught children how to read in a Berlin elementary school—and after the accident, she took Dominic out of school and taught him some fundamental cooking skills. She also insisted that the boy read books—not just cookbooks but everything she read, which were mostly novels. Her son had been crippled while violating the generally overlooked child-labor laws; Annunziata had taken him out of circulation, her version of homeschooling being both culinary and literary.
    Neither area of education was available to Ketchum, who had left school when he was younger than twelve. At nineteen, in 1936, Ketchum could neither read nor write, but when he wasn’t working as a logger, he was loading lumber onto the railroad flatcars from the open platforms at the end of the biggest Berlin mill. The deck crew tapered the load at the top, so that the flatcars could safely pass through the tunnels or under the bridges. “That was the extent of my education, before your mom taught me to read,” Ketchum enjoyed telling Danny Baciagalupo; the cook would commence to shake his head again, although the story of Dominic’s late wife teaching Ketchum to read was apparently incontestable.
    At least the saga of Ketchum belatedly learning to read seemed not in the tall-tale category of Ketchum’s other stories—the one about the low-roofed bunkhouse at Camp One, for example. According to Ketchum, “some Injun” had been assigned the task of shoveling snow off the roof, but the Indian had neglected the job. When the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow, all but one logger escaped the bunkhouse alive—not the Indian, who was suffocated by what Ketchum called “the concentrated odor of wet socks.” (Of course the cook and his son were well aware of Ketchum’s nearly constant complaint—namely, that the stink of wet socks was the bane of bunkhouse life.)
    “I don’t remember an Indian at Camp