Last Night in Twisted River Read Online Free PDF Page B

One,” was all Dominic had said to his old friend.
    “You’re too young to remember Camp One, Cookie,” Ketchum had said.
    Danny Baciagalupo had often observed that his father bristled at the mere mention of the seven-year age difference between himself and Ketchum, whereas Ketchum was inclined to overemphasize the discrepancy in their ages. Those seven years would have seemed insurmountable to them had the two young men met in the Berlin of their youth—when Ketchum had been a rawboned but strapping nineteen, already sporting a full if ragged beard, and Annunziata’s little Dom was not yet a teenager.
    He’d been a strong, wiry twelve-year-old—not big, but compact and sinewy—and the cook had retained the appearance of a lean-muscled young logger, although he was now thirty and looked older, especially to his young son. It was his dad’s seriousness that made him look older, the boy thought. You could not say “the past” or “the future” in the cook’s presence without making him frown. As for the present, even the twelve-year-old Daniel Baciagalupo understood that the times were changing.
    Danny knew that his father’s life had been changed forever because of an ankle injury; a different accident, to the boy’s young mother, had altered the course of his own childhood and changed his dad’s life forever again . In a twelve-year-old’s world, change couldn’t be good. Any change made Danny anxious—the way missing school made him anxious.
    On the river drives, in the not-so-old days, when Danny and his dad were working and sleeping in the wanigans, the boy didn’t go to school. That he didn’t like school—but that he always, and far too easily, made up the work he missed—also made Danny anxious. The boys in his grade were all older than he was, because they skipped school as often as they could and they never made up the work they missed; they’d all been held back and had repeated a grade or two.
    When the cook saw that his son was anxious, he invariably said: “Stand your ground, Daniel—just don’t get killed. I promise you, one day we’ll leave here.”
    But this made Danny Baciagalupo anxious, too. Even the wanigans had felt like home to him. And in Twisted River, the twelve-year-old had his own bedroom above the cookhouse—where his father also had a bedroom, and where they shared a bathroom. These were the only second-story rooms in the cookhouse, and they were spacious and comfortable. Each room had a skylight and big windows with a view of the mountains, and—below the cookhouse, at the foothills of the mountains—a partial view of the river basin.
    Logging trails circumscribed the hills and mountains; there were big patches of meadow and second growth, where the woodcutters had harvested the hardwoods and the coniferous forest. From his bedroom, it seemed to young Daniel Baciagalupo that the bare rock and second growth could never replace the maples and birch, or the softwoods—the spruce and fir, the red and white pine, and the hemlock and tamarack. The twelve-year-old thought that the meadows were running wild with waist-high grass and weeds. Yet, in truth, the forests in the region were being managed for sustainable yields of timber; those woods are still producing—“in the twenty-first fucking century,” as Ketchum would one day say.
    And as Ketchum regularly suggested, some things would never change. “Tamarack will always love swamps, yellow birch will forever be highly prized for furniture, and gray birch will never be good for fuck-all except firewood.” As for the fact that the river drives in Coos County would soon be limited to four-foot pulpwood, Ketchum was morosely disinclined to utter any prophecies. (All the veteran logger would say was that the smaller pulpwood tended to stray out of the current and required cleanup crews.)
    What would change the logging business, and what might put an end to the cook’s job, was the restless spirit of modernity; the