Dominic had been pretending to be a teenager; in his own estimation, he was not as green as Angel Pope, but he was "green enough," as the cook would tell his son. He'd had an after-school job on the loading platforms at one of the big mills in Berlin, where a friend of Dominic's absent father was a foreman. Until World War II, the supposed friend of Dominic's dad was a fixture there, but the cook remembered so-called Uncle Umberto as an alcoholic who repeatedly bad-mouthed Dominic's mom. (Even after the accident, Dominic Baciagalupo was never contacted by his absconding father, and "Uncle" Umberto not once proved himself as a family friend.)
There was a load of hardwood sawlogs on the log deck--mostly maple and birch. Young Dominic was using a peavey, rolling the logs into the mill, when a bunch of logs rolled all at once and he couldn't get out of their way. He was only twelve in 1936; he handled a peavey with a rakish confidence. Dominic had been the same age as his son was now; the cook would never have allowed his beloved Daniel on a log deck, not even if the boy had been ambidextrous with a peavey. And in Dominic's case, when he had been knocked down by the logs, the hinged hook of his own peavey was driven into his left thigh, like a fishhook without the barb, and his left ankle was crunched sideways--it was shattered and mangled under the weight of the wood. From the peavey wound, he was in no danger of bleeding to death, but one could always die of blood poisoning in those days. From the ankle injury, he might have died of gangrene later--or, more likely, had the left foot amputated, if not the entire leg.
There were no X-rays in Coos County in 1936. The medical authorities in Berlin were disinclined to undertake any fancy reassembly of a crushed ankle; in such cases, little or no surgery was recommended. It was a wait-and-see category of accident: Either the blood vessels were mashed flat and there would be a subsequent loss of circulation--then the doctors would have to cut the foot off--or the broken and displaced bits of the ankle would fuse together and heal every which way, and Dominic Baciagalupo would walk with a limp and be in pain for the rest of his life. (That would turn out to be the case.)
There was also the scar where the peavey had hooked him, which resembled the bite wound of a small, peculiar animal--one with a curved, solitary tooth and a mouth that wasn't big enough to enclose the twelve-year-old's thigh. And even before he took a step, the angle of Dominic's left foot indicated a sharp left turn; the toes were aimed in a sideways direction. People often noticed the deformed shape of the ankle and the misdirected foot before they saw the limp.
One thing was certain: Young Dominic wouldn't be a logger. You need your balance for that kind of work. And the mills were where he'd been injured--not to mention that his runaway father's drunken "friend" was a foreman there. The mills were not in Dominic Baciagalupo's future, either.
"Hey, Baciagalupo!" Uncle Umberto had often hailed him. "You may have a Neapolitan name, but you hang around like a Sicilian."
"I am Sicilian," Dominic would dutifully say; his mother seemed inordinately proud of it, the boy thought.
"Yeah, well, your name is napolitano," Umberto told him.
"After my dad, I suppose," young Dominic ventured to guess.
"Your dad was no Baciagalupo," Uncle Umberto informed him. "Ask Nunzi where your name came from--she gave it to you."
The twelve-year-old didn't like it when Umberto, who clearly disliked Dominic's mother, called her "Nunzi"--an affectionate family nickname, shortened from Annunziata--which Umberto didn't say affectionately at all. (In a play, or in a film, the audience would have had no trouble recognizing Umberto as a minor character; yet the best actor to play Umberto would be one who always believed he was cast in a major role.)
"And you're not really my uncle, I suppose?" Dominic inquired of Umberto.
"Ask your mama," Umberto said. "If she wanted to keep you siciliano, she shoulda given you her name."
His mother's maiden name was Saetta--she was very proud of the sigh-AY-tah, as she pronounced the Sicilian name, and of all the Saettas Dominic had heard her speak of when she chose to talk about her heritage.
Annunziata was reluctant to speak of Dominic's heritage at all. What little the boy had gleaned--bits of information, or misinformation--had been gathered slowly and insufficiently, like the partial evidence, the incomplete clues, in the increasingly popular board game of young Dan's childhood, one the cook and Ketchum played with the boy, and sometimes Jane joined them. (Was it Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the candlestick, or had the murder been committed by Miss Scarlet in the ballroom with the revolver?)
All young Dominic knew was that his father, a Neapolitan, had abandoned the pregnant Annunziata Saetta in Boston; he was rumored to have taken a boat back to Naples. To the question "Where is he now?" (which the boy had asked his mother, many times), Annunziata would shrug and sigh, and looking either to Heaven or in the direction of the exhaust vent above her kitchen stove, she would say mysteriously to her son: "Vicino di Napoli." "In the vicinity of Naples," young Dominic had guessed. With the help of an atlas, and because the boy had heard his mother murmur the names of two hill towns (and provinces) in the vicinity of Naples in her sleep--Benevento and Avellino--Dominic had concluded that his dad had fled to that region of Italy.
As for Umberto, he was clearly not an uncle--and definitely a "legendary asshole," as Ketchum would have said.
"What kind of name is Umberto?" Dominic had asked the foreman.
"From da king!" Umberto had answered indignantly.
"I mean it's a Neapolitan name, right?" the boy had asked.
"What are you questioning me for? You da twelve-year-old, pretending to be sixteen!" Umberto cried.
"You told me to say I was sixteen," Dominic reminded the foreman.
"Look, you gotta job, Baciagalupo," Umberto had said.
Then the logs rolled, and Dominic became a cook. His mother, a Sicilian-born Italian-American transported by an unwanted pregnancy from Boston's North End to Berlin, New Hampshire, could cook. She'd left the city and had moved to the north country when Gennaro Capodilupo had slipped away to the docks off Atlantic Avenue and Commercial Street, leaving her with child as he sailed (figuratively, if not literally) "back to Naples."
Asshole (if not Uncle) Umberto was right: Dominic's dad was no Baciagalupo. The absconding father was a Capodilupo--cah-poh-dee-LEW-poh, as Annunziata told her son, meant "Head of the Wolf." What was the unwed mother to do? "For the lies he told, your father should have been a Boccadalupo!" she said to Dominic. This meant "Mouth of the Wolf," the boy would learn--a fitting name for Asshole Umberto, young Dominic often thought. "But you, Angelu--you are my kiss of the wolf!" his mom said.
In an effort to legitimize him, and because his mother had a highhanded love of words, she would not name Dominic a head of (or a mouth of) the wolf; for Annunziata Saetta, only a kiss of the wolf would do. It should have been spelled "Baciacalupo," but Nunzi always 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 domenica, 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 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 changing times could kill a mere "settlement" like Twisted River. But Danny Baciagalupo was just wondering, obsessively: What work would there be in Twisted River after the woodcutters moved on? Would the cook then move on? Danny worried. (Could Ketchum ever move on?)
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. If, at this moment in time, Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy's body to move on, too--move on, too.
CHAPTER 2
DO-SI-DO
IN A STORAGE CLOSET OFF THE PANTRY IN THE COOKHOUSE kitchen, the cook kept a couple of folding cots--from the wanigan days, when he'd slept in any number of portable kitchens. Dominic had salvaged a couple of sleeping bags, too. It was not out of nostalgia for the wanigans that the cook had kept the old cots and mildewed sleeping bags. Sometimes Ketchum slept in the cookhouse kitchen; occasionally, if Danny was awake, the boy would tirelessly endeavor to get his dad's permission to sleep in the kitchen, too. If Ketchum hadn't had too much to drink, Danny hoped to hear another of the logger's stories--or the same story, wildly revised.
THE FIRST NIGHT after Angel Pope had disappeared under the logs, it snowed a little. It was still cold at night in April, but Dominic had turned the two gas ovens on in the kitchen. The ovens were set at 350 and 425 degrees, and the cook had premixed the dry ingredients for the scones, the corn muffins, and the banana bread before going to bed. His French toast (from the banana bread) was popular, and he would make pancakes from scratch in the morning. Because of the raw eggs, Dominic didn't like to keep the pancake batter in the fridge more than two days. Also last-minute, almost every morning, he made buttermilk biscuits, which he baked quickly in the 425-degree oven.
It was usually Danny's job to be sure that the potatoe
s were peeled and cubed and soaking overnight in salted water. His dad would fry the potatoes on the griddle in the morning, when he fried the bacon. The griddle on the old Garland was above the broiler, which was eye-level to the cook. Even with a long-handled spatula, and standing on tiptoe or on a low stool--neither method of elevating himself was the easiest thing for a cook with a crooked foot--Dominic would frequently burn his forearm when he reached to the back of the griddle. (Sometimes Injun Jane would spell the cook at the griddle, because she was taller and her reach was longer.)
It would be dark when Dominic got up to fry the bacon and do his baking, and dark when Danny woke in the upstairs of the cookhouse to the smell of bacon and coffee, and still dark when the kitchen help and the Indian dishwasher arrived from town--the headlights of their vehicles heralding their arrival almost simultaneously with the engine sounds. Most mornings, the Garland's broiler was flaming hot--for melting the cheese on top of the omelets. Among young Dan's before-school jobs were cutting up the peppers and tomatoes for the omelets, and warming the big saucepan of maple syrup on one of the back burners of the eight-burner stove.
The outside door to the cookhouse kitchen didn't open or close properly; it was so loose-fitting that it rattled in the wind. The inside screen door opened into the kitchen, which could be added to the list of things that made Danny Baciagalupo anxious. For any number of practical reasons, you wanted the door to open to the outside. There was enough traffic in the busy kitchen to not want a door getting in the way--and once, long ago, a bear had come into the cookhouse kitchen. It had been a balmy night--the troublesome outside door to the cookhouse was propped open--and the bear had just butted the screen door with its head and walked inside.
Danny had been too young to remember the bear, although he'd asked his father to tell him the story many times. The boy's mother had long before put him to bed upstairs; she was having a late-night snack with Danny's dad when the bear joined them. The cook and his wife were sharing a mushroom omelet and drinking white wine. When he used to drink, Dominic Baciagalupo had explained to his son, he had often felt compelled to fix late-night snacks for himself and his wife. (Not anymore.)