It hadn’t been too tough to find a house to rent in Putney, one big enough to include his father-and Carmella, if she ever came to Vermont. It was a former farmhouse on a dirt road, which Danny liked because a brook ran alongside it; the road also crossed the brook in a couple of places. The running water was a reminder to Daniel Baciagalupo of where he’d come from. As for the farmhouse, it was a few miles from the village of Putney, which was little more than a general store and a grocery-called the Putney Food Co-op-and a convenience store with a gas station that was diagonally across from the old paper mill, on the road to the college. When Danny first saw the paper mill, he knew that his dad wouldn’t like living in Putney. (The cook came from Berlin; he hated paper mills.)
Windham College was an architectural eyesore on an otherwise beautiful piece of land. The faculty were a mix of moderately distinguished and not-so-distinguished professors; Windham had no academic virtues to speak of, but some of its faculty were actually good teachers who could have been working at better colleges and universities, but they wanted to live in Vermont. Many of the male students might not have been attending college at all if there hadn’t been a war in Vietnam; four years of college was the most widely available deferment from military service that young males of draft age had. Windham was that kind of place-not long for this world, but it would last as long as the war dragged on-and as the source of Danny’s first not-in-a-restaurant job, it wasn’t bad.
Danny wouldn’t have many students who were genuinely interested in writing, and the few he had weren’t talented or hardworking enough to suit him. At Windham, you were lucky if half the students in your classroom were interested in reading. But as a first novelist who’d been saved from the Vietnam War, which Daniel Baciagalupo knew was his case, he was a lenient teacher. Danny wanted everyone-his male students, especially-to stay in school.
If, as some cynics said, Windham ’s sole justification for existence was that it managed to prevent a few young men from going to Vietnam, that was okay with Danny Angel; he’d grown up enough politically to hate the war, and he was more of a writer than a teacher. Danny didn’t really care how academically responsible (or not) Windham College was. The teaching was just a job to him-one that gave him enough time to write, and to be a good father.
Danny let Ketchum know as soon as he and Joe had moved into the old farmhouse on Hickory Ridge Road. Danny didn’t care who was reading the logger’s letters to him now; the young writer assumed it was the library lady, the schoolteacher whose work-in-progress was teaching Ketchum how to read.
“There’s plenty of room for Dad,” Danny wrote to the woodsman; the writer included his new phone number and directions to the Putney house, from both Coos County and Boston. (It was nearly the end of June 1967.) “Maybe you’ll show up for the Fourth of July,” Danny wrote to Ketchum. “If so, I trust you to bring the fireworks.”
Ketchum was a big fireworks fan. There’d once been a fish he couldn’t catch. “I swear, it’s the biggest damn trout in Phillips Brook,” he’d declared, “and the smartest.” He’d blown up the fish, and no small number of nearby brook trout, with dynamite.
“Don’t bring any dynamite,” Danny had added, as a postscript. “Just the fireworks.”
IT WASN’T PRINCIPALLY “fireworks” that Ketchum brought to Boston, the first leg of his trip. The North Station was in that part of the West End that bordered on the North End. Ketchum got off the train, carrying a shotgun over one shoulder and a canvas duffel bag in the other hand; the duffel bag looked heavy, but not the way Ketchum was toting it. The gun was in a leather carrying case, but it was clear to everyone who saw the woodsman what the weapon was-it had to be either a rifle or a shotgun. The way the carrying case was tapered, you could tell that Ketchum was holding the barrel of the weapon with the butt-end over his shoulder.
The kid who was then the busboy at Vicino di Napoli had just put his grandmother on a train. He saw Ketchum and ran ahead of him, back to the restaurant. The busboy said it appeared that Ketchum was “taking the long way around”-meaning that the logger must have looked at a map, and he’d chosen the most obvious route, which was not necessarily the fastest. Ketchum must have come along Causeway Street to Prince Street, and then intersected with Hanover-a kind of roundabout way to get to North Square, where the restaurant was, but the busboy alerted them all that the big man with a gun was coming.
“Which big man?” Dominic asked the busboy.
“I just know he’s got a gun-he’s carrying it over his shoulder!” the busboy said. Everyone who worked at Vicino di Napoli had been forewarned that the cowboy might be coming. “And he’s definitely from up north-he’s fucking scary-looking!”
Dominic knew that Carl would have the Colt.45 concealed. It was big for a handgun, but no one carried a revolver over his shoulder. “It sounds like you mean a rifle or a shotgun,” the cook said to the bus-boy.
“Jesus and Mary!” Tony Molinari said.
“He’s got a scar on his forehead like someone split his face with a cleaver!” the busboy cried.
“Is it Mr. Ketchum?” Carmella asked Dominic.
“It must be,” the cook told her. “It can’t be the cowboy. Carl is big and fat, but he’s not especially ‘scary-looking,’ and there’s not much of the north country about him. He just looks like a cop-either in or out of uniform.”
The busboy was still babbling. “He’s wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he’s got a huge hunting knife on his belt-it hangs almost to his knee!”
“That would be the Browning,” Dominic said. “It’s definitely Ketchum. In the summer, he just cuts the sleeves off his old flannel shirts-the ones that have torn sleeves, anyway.”
“What’s the gun for?” Carmella asked her dear Gamba.
“Maybe he’s going to shoot me before Carl gets a chance to,” Dominic said, but Carmella didn’t see the humor in it-none of them did. They went to the door and windows to look for Ketchum. It was that time of the afternoon they had to themselves; they were supposed to be eating their big meal of the day, before they started the dinner service.
“I’m setting a place for Mr. Ketchum,” Carmella said, and she started to do so. The two younger waitresses were checking themselves out in a mirror. Paul Polcari held a pizza paddle in both hands; it was the size of a giant tennis racquet.
“Put the paddle down, Paul,” Molinari told him. “You look ridiculous.”
“There’s a lot of stuff in the duffel bag he’s carrying-ammunition, maybe,” the busboy said.
“Dynamite, possibly,” the cook said.
“The way the man looks, someone might arrest him before he gets here!” the busboy told them all.
“Why did he come? Why didn’t he call first?” Carmella asked her Gamba.
The cook shook his head; they would all just have to wait and see what Ketchum wanted.
“He’s coming to take you, Gamba, isn’t he?” Carmella asked the cook.
“Probably,” Dominic answered.
Even so, Carmella smoothed the little white apron over her black skirt; she unlocked the door and waited there. Someone should greet Mr. Ketchum, she was thinking.
What will I do in Vermont? the cook thought to himself. Who cares about eating Italian there?
Ketchum would waste little time with them. “I know who you are,” he told Carmella pleasantly. “Your boy showed me your picture, and you haven’t changed much.” She had changed in the thirteen-plus years since that wallet photo had been taken-she was at least twenty pounds heavier, they all knew-but Carmella appreciated the compliment. “Are you all here?” Ketchum asked them. “Or is someone in the kitchen?”