Free Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

be more—after the war, when the men came home—but Rosie Baciagalupo, née Calogero, wouldn’t get to see the men return from war, nor would she ever educate their children.
    The young schoolteacher died in the late winter of 1944—shortly after her son, Dan, had turned two. The boy had no memory of his mother, whom he knew only by the photographs his father had kept—and by the passages she’d underlined in her many books, which his dad had saved, too. (As in the case of Dominic Baciagalupo’s mother, Rosie had liked to read novels.)
    To judge Dominic by his apparent pessimism—there was an air of aloofness about his conduct, or a noticeable detachment in his demeanor, and even something melancholic in his bearing—you might conclude that he had never recovered from the tragic death of his twenty-seven-year-old wife. Yet, in addition to his beloved son, Dominic Baciagalupo had got one thing that he’d wanted: The cookhouse had been built to his specifications.
    Apparently, there was a Paris Manufacturing Company connection; some bigwig’s wife, passing through Berlin, had raved about Dominic’s cooking. The word had gotten around: The food was way better than standard logging-camp fare. It wouldn’t have been right for Dominic to just pack up and leave, but the cook and his son had stayed for ten years.
    Of course there was an old logger or two—chief among them, Ketchum—who knew the miserable reason. The cook, who was a widower at twenty, blamed himself for his wife’s death—and he wasn’t the only man who made living in Twisted River resemble a mercilessly extended act of penance. (One had only to think of Ketchum.)
    IN 1954, DOMINIC BACIAGALUPO was only thirty—young to have a twelve-year-old son—but Dominic had the look of a man long resigned to his fate. He was so unflinchingly calm that he radiated a kind of acceptance that could easily be mistaken for pessimism. There was nothing pessimistic about the good care he took of his boy, Daniel, and it was only for the sake of his son that the cook ever complained about the harshness or the limitations of life in Twisted River—the town still didn’t have a school, for example.
    As for the school the Paris Manufacturing Company had built on Phillips Brook, there’d been no discernible improvements on the quality of education Rosie Baciagalupo had provided. Granted, the one-room schoolhouse had been rebuilt since the forties, but the school’s thuggish culture was dominated by the older boys who’d been held back a grade or two. There was no controlling them—the long-suffering schoolteacher was no Rosie Baciagalupo. The Paris school’s thugs were inclined to bully the cook’s son—not only because Danny lived in Twisted River and his dad limped. They also teased the boy for the proper way in which he invariably spoke. Young Dan’s enunciation was exact; his diction never descended to the dropped consonants and broad vowels of the Paris kids, and they abused him for it. (“The West Dummer kids,” Ketchum unfailingly called them.)
    “Stand your ground, Daniel—just don’t get killed,” his father predictably told him. “I promise you, one day we’ll leave here.”
    But whatever its faults, and his family’s sad story, the Paris Manufacturing Company School on Phillips Brook was the only school the boy had attended; even the thought of leaving that school made Danny Baciagalupo anxious.
    “ANGEL WAS TOO GREEN to be felling trees in the forest, or working on the log brows,” Ketchum said from the folding cot in the kitchen. Both the cook and his son knew that Ketchum talked in his sleep, especially when he’d been drinking.
    A log brow, which was made of log cribwork and built into a bank on the side of a haul road, had to be slightly higher than the bed of the logging truck, which was pulled up beside it. Logs brought in from the woods could be stored behind the cribwork until they were ready to be loaded. Alternatively, log skids