Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

Jane only had to worry about the constable hitting her. Young Dan believed that nobody else would have dared to confront her—maybe not even Ketchum.
    While Jane would kiss Danny good-bye at the cookhouse, or virtually anywhere in Twisted River, she never kissed him when she dropped him at the Paris Manufacturing Company School—or when she picked him up in the vicinity of Phillips Brook, where those West Dummer kids might be hanging out. If the older boys saw Injun Jane kiss Danny, they would give him more trouble than usual. On this particular Friday, the twelve-year-old just sat beside Jane in the truck, not moving. Young Dan might have momentarily forgotten where they were—in which case, he was expecting her to kiss him—or else he’d thought of a question to ask Jane about his mother.
    “What is it, Danny?” the dishwasher said.
    “Do you do-si-do my dad?” the boy asked her.
    Jane smiled at him, but it was a more measured smile than he was used to seeing on her pretty face; that she didn’t answer made him anxious. “Don’t tell me to ask Ketchum,” the boy blurted out. This made Injun Jane laugh; her smile was more natural, and more immediately forthcoming. (As always, Chief Wahoo was madly grinning.)
    “I was going to say that you should ask your father,” the dishwasher said. “Don’t be anxious,” she added, punching his upper arm again—this time a little harder. “Danny?” Jane said, as the twelve-year-old was climbing out of the truck cab. “Don’t ask Ketchum.”
    IT WAS A WORLD of accidents, the cook was thinking. In the kitchen, he was cooking up a storm. The lamb hash, which he’d served for breakfast, would be good for a midday meal, too; he’d also made a chickpea soup (for the Catholics) and a venison stew with carrots and pearl onions. Yes, there was the infernal pot of baked beans, and the omnipresent pea soup with parsley. But there was little else that was standard logging-camp fare.
    One of the sawmill workers’ wives was cooking some Italian sweet sausage on the griddle. The cook kept telling her to break up the sausage meat as she cooked it—whereupon another of the sawmill workers’ wives started singing. “Try beatin’ your meat with a spatula!” she sang to the unlikely but overfamiliar tune of “Vaya con Dios;” the other women joined in.
    The lead singer among the sawmill workers’ wives was the woman the cook had put in charge of proofing the yeast for the pizza dough—he was keeping an eye on her. Dominic wanted to mix the pizza dough and start it rising before they drove off on the haul road to deliver the midday meals. (On a Friday night, there would be a bunch of pissed-off French Canadians if there weren’t enough meatless pizzas for the mackerel-snappers.)
    The cook was making cornbread, too. He wanted to start the stuffing for the roast chickens he was also serving in the cookhouse Friday night; he would mix the sausage with the cornbread and some celery and sage, adding the eggs and butter when he got back to his kitchen from the river site and wherever they were loading the trucks. In a large saucepan, in which Danny had warmed the maple syrup, Dominic was boiling the butternut squash; he would mash it up and mix it with maple syrup, and add the butter when he returned to town. On Friday night, together with the stuffed roast chickens, he would serve scalloped potatoes with the whipped squash. This was arguably Ketchum’s favorite meal; most Fridays, Ketchum ate some of the meatless pizza, too.
    Dominic was feeling sorry for Ketchum. The cook didn’t know if Ketchum truly believed they would find Angel in the spillway of the upper dam Sunday morning, or if Ketchum hoped they would never find the boy’s body. All the cook had determined was that he didn’t want young Daniel to see Angel’s body. Dominic Baciagalupo wasn’t sure if he wanted to see Angel’s body—or ever find the boy, either.
    The pot of water—in which the cook had poured a