Oh, how we wished we could help him! Were he to live in Virginia and take the teacher-training class, he would finish in a year and be close enough so we could provide him with his food. But, of course, he still would have to work to pay for his room—and finding one with cooking privileges might be very difficult. If he were to teach in, say, a one-room school, he could earn about $90.00 a month because he had completed high school. Were he to add “Normal School training”—such as was offered in Virginia—he would earn $10.00 a month more.
Out of that would come rent (at up to $7.50 for a teacherage), his clothing because he would be expected to wear a suit every day with a tie and a dress shirt, and—depending on where he was placed—the cost of food.
No option sounded really good, but he was determined to go to college. He hoped to become a mining engineer. Were he to get a job at, say, the HullRust-Mahoning Mine, his pay might reach $320.00 a year, a princely sum.
It was just getting through those four years that was the problem.
Finally, he helped to solve it himself by going to “barber” school at a technical college in Minneapolis where he earned a certificate in “barbering.” He hated the work, but it paid fairly well—a shave and a haircut cost about $1.25 (“shave and a haircut—six bits” went the saying). He was able to keep $1.00 of that for himself, thanks to the kindness of the barber who owned the shop and who hired him, knowing he was saving money to go to college.
The barber, Mr. Schnell, turned into almost another father to Eino, inviting him to his home for dinner and introducing him to his wife, Lizzie, and their daughters Esmeralda and Athena. Esmeralda was only about six years old, he told us, but Athena was about eighteen, and “beautiful,” he wrote. Every letter included more information about her—that she was attending “Miss Woods School for Kindergarten Teachers,” a highly prestigious equivalent to college—that she liked movies (especially with Buster Keaton and Al Jolson), and that she read a lot. (Mother, you’ll be pleased to learn she’s read all of Dickens’s works. She and I spent some time last Saturday night discussing A Tale of Two Cities, and she also enjoys poetry although she doesn’t have a copy of One Hundred and One Famous Poems. I’m going to see if I can find one at the bookstore.)
Mr. Schneill had arranged for him to stay in the back room of his barber shop and had outfitted the room with a gas burner for cooking and a small icebox in addition to a table, two chairs, and a single bed with a mattress.
I immediately set to packing up a box of towels and sheets. We had some double ones frayed in the middle, so Mother and I re-stitched them to make them fit a single bed. Mother also made another quilt for him, crocheted an afghan and a pillow-cover, and wove a rug to give the room some “hominess.”
In another letter, in which he sent us heartfelt thanks for the box, which had included a loaf of pulla, one of rieska, and jars of blueberries and raspberries, he also told us that “Athena had sewed curtains for the window” out of some gingham material. They were red-checked, which matched the quilt and rug and afghan perfectly, he said.
At any rate, we sensed Athena had grown to be a very close friend and asked him if he could bring her home to meet us whenever he could take some time off.
“Time off?” he answered. “I’m not going to take any time off until I have saved enough money to pay for one semester. I’m making an incredible $5.00 a day! Having one’s hair cut and being shaved are certainly profitable pursuits for me and seem to be popular pursuits for many men—young and old—who come in every day. In fact, I’ve developed my own list of ‘clients’ who come back to me week after week in order to have their hair not just cut but also shampooed and then to be shaved! I marvel at the amount of money people in Minneapolis seem to have!” he exclaimed.
“That adds up to about $80.00 a month, of which I can save at least seventy-five by making my own breakfasts and washing and ironing—can you believe it?—my own white coats!” he continued. “I’m hoping by Christmas I’ll have enough set aside to pay my second semester’s tuition. Mr. Schnell says if I can arrange my classes around my work schedule (or the opposite), I can continue to work for him while I’m taking classes. Did I hit the jackpot or what?”
He certainly had, and we wrote to him—a letter filled with gratitude that we asked him to share with Mr. Schnell and his family, for Eino had become a regular dinner guest at their house, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. They were Jewish, so he was being exposed to a whole different way of life, which I thought was wonderful. He wrote us the following: “On Friday night, which is their Sabbath, Mr. Schnell leaves work early to help his wife prepare for the big dinner to which I’m always invited and for which they host a number of other guests.
“I’ve gotten into the habit of bringing a bottle of wine or some fresh flowers and trying to get there before Mrs. Schnell and the girls light the two candles and say the blessing, which sounds beautiful although I don’t understand it. Then, before we sit down, Mr. and Mrs. Schnell join their hands atop their daughters’ heads and say ‘May you be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.’ Then the parents recite the rest of the blessing:
‘May God bless you and guard you.
May God show you favor and be gracious to you,
May God show you kindness and grant you peace.’
After that they give each of their daughters a kiss.
“Then comes the ‘blessing over wine,’ during which they give thanks for the Sabbath, a day of rest, and recall the importance and holiness of resting. Each adult receives a glass of wine (Esmeralda gets grape juice), and the challah or special bread is uncovered, sliced or ripped into chunks, which are sprinkled with salt.
“During all of this time, those of us who are guests sit quietly, but once we receive our wine, we talk… and talk… and talk! I used to think we were the ones in our neighborhood who spent the most time at the table talking, but the Schnells outdo even us. They discuss politics, religion, music, art, books, and the news. I’ve had to work to keep up with what’s new politically and musically, but I can hold my own with them when it comes to books. In fact, Mrs. Schnell commented just last Friday night on the extent of my reading. I told her, ‘It’s all thanks to my mom, who reads to us every night before we go to bed. She’s done that ever since I was old enough to sit up to listen, and she reads—mostly novels—but once in a while a history or a biography if she finds one she thinks worth our time to hear.’”
“‘You are truly blessed,” Mrs. Schnell said, and I agreed wholeheartedly.
“Their Sabbath goes from Friday night to Saturday night, but Saturday night’s dinner is much less formal. We usually eat a normal dinner, but they do have a special ‘ending’ to their Sabbath ‘celebration.’ When the third star appears in the sky (if it’s a starry night) or about an hour after dinner (if it’s cloudy), they gather outside of the doorway—the girls flanking their parents—light a lovely braided candle, and say—in Hebrew—a wish for a good week.
“It’s altogether lovely, and I feel so blessed to have been invited to be a part of it for many weekends now.
“I work late on Saturday because Mr. Schnell doesn’t always come to work that day so everything I make is mine alone! And Saturday is usually the best day of the week for shaves, shampoos, and hair-cuts! Last Saturday I earned an unbelievable $10.00. Some of the richer men even leave tips for me. That’s why I made so much!
“At any rate, I’m happy to tell you I’m doing much better than I was working at the bookstore. I have to confess I hate and despise barbering! It’s not uncommon for men to come in with lice in their hair or with hair that’s so greasy it’s almost impossible to cut. But those are the exceptions. Most of our ‘clients’ (Mr. Schnell refuses to call them ‘customers’) are neat and clean!”
It was about that time, too, that Arvo decided enough was enough with regard to the laundry work and insisted that we or
der a wringer We priced them in the Wards’ catalog and really wanted the one that came with a bench. But after studying the picture carefully, Arvo said he could make us a bench that would be just as good as the one in the catalog, and so we wound up ordering the medium-priced wringer with a five-year guarantee from the Sears & Roebuck Company. It cost $3.35, and we were soon to find out that it was worth its weight in gold—much more than its cost!
No more wringing by hand. We liked the way Arvo set the whole thing up with the wringer between washtubs. The bench on the left could hold a washtub full of hot water with Mother’s lye soap, and the one on the right could be filled with cold rinsing water. We could use the wringer to move the clothes from the hot water into the cold water using the clothes stick to lift the pieces out of the hot water and shove them into the wringer. Once they had been rinsed once, we could simply move the wringer over to the right where Arvo had built another stand to hold the final rinsing water, and out the clothes went to the lines, much freer of water than we had ever managed to get them wringing them by hand.
“Why didn’t we do this years ago?” Mother asked.
Arvo and I just shook our heads. We could easily have afforded to buy the wringer years ago, but it had seemed to be a “frivolous” expense. “Frivolous?” I exclaimed when we talked about it afterward. “Think about our backs!”
“I know. I know,” Arvo said sheepishly. “It just never occurred to me.”
“Or to me either,” I admitted.
“Or to me,” Mother chimed in.
We all shook our heads at our joint stupidity.
Arvo had had another plan in the works that he shared with us after we finished patting ourselves on the back over the wringer. “How about if I dig us a cellar?” he asked.
“You couldn’t do that!” I exclaimed. “How would you hold the house up while you dug underneath it?”
“I’ve been thinking about this whole business of buying a furnace. In order to have one, we need to have a basement or at least a cellar. I think I could hire one of the guys who lives alone and works in the woods—like Toivo Liesmaki or Eero Mustala—or both of them—to help me. Either one of them would be willing to earn some extra money, and both are good workers. I’ve checked the timbers at the bottom of the house, and they are still holding firm. None has rotted. So…” he said, “what I’m thinking about is jacking the house up—doing one corner at a time—using the car jack, I think. I’ll insert boards crosswise, several of them, to use as supports. Then we can start to dig underneath the house. If the weather holds,” and he looked up to the sky as if he could prognosticate the weather, “we could start now and get it done by the time the snow flies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a basement under this house?” he asked, seeking Mother’s and my approval.
“Of course,” we both said, “but all of that digging… Are you sure you’re strong enough? And are you sure Toivo and Eero would be willing to help?”
He looked down sheepishly. “I’ve already asked them. They’re willing to start on Monday morning if, that is, you’ll supply them with breakfast, lunch, and dinner while they’re working?”
The statement had been phrased as a question, and Mother and I both answered, “Of course. I suppose they could sleep in the sauna dressing room… while they’re here.”
“Okay, well, it’s done then,” Arvo said, studying each of us, measuring the level of doubt we were experiencing. “We’ll give it a try.” With that he got up and hurried outside, as if to escape before we could change our minds.
“What do you think?” Mother asked me nervously.
“I think he can do whatever he sets his mind to doing,” I answered, stars still in my eyes after all these years when it came to Arvo.
Everything began with a thud on Monday morning. When one corner of the house was lifted, the timber on that whole side rose, causing everything inside the house to move toward the other side. Thank goodness we had sent the children to Irma’s for the day, except for the baby, of course. We had a lot of work to do inside the house once the timber on the other side was also lifted. The house then sat on “stilts”—layers of boards set diagonally across the ends of all of the timbers. The long ones on the east and west had gone first, the shorter ones on the north and south second. But moving them didn’t seem to cause any problem within the house so we were fortunate that way.
Right away, Arvo and the two workers built stairs so we could get from the porch door down to the ground safely. Arvo even made banisters for us to hold as we walked down. “The children will need them,” he told us in explanation.
Then the digging began. The soil under the house was like the soil in the fields and in the yard—sandy loam—which was wonderful for gardening but perhaps not quite as good for supporting the corners. But when we walked across the floors we couldn’t feel any movement underneath us at all so Father must have done a good job of setting the bottom timbers in place. In fact, Arvo found he had not only supported the corners with huge white pine logs but had marked white pine logs with half-circles cut out of them so they reached all the way from the north to the south—a firm and secure base for the house.
Father did something right, I thought, when Arvo told us the way the house had been built.
Huge white pine logs reached all the way to the roof—with cross-pieces between floors—so Ronny had done a very good job of adding the second story.
I wished he were here now so I could ask him how he had managed it, but we had heard almost nothing from him from the Dakotas. We had no idea of where he was or how he was, which caused me some very real worry—not the unreal kind that had bothered me for so long.
Toivo and Eero had some learning to do. When they appeared in the doorway ready to have lunch, Mother waited with a basin and a towel on a bench for them to wash and dry their hands, and she looked so pointedly down at their boots each one had asked, “Do you want us to take them off?”
“No,” Mother had answered pleasantly enough, “but I expect you’ll be sure to knock off all the loose dirt before you come into the porch.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said, qualmed by her stance and by the look in her eyes. “We’ll do that very thing right now.” And they did—from then on every time they entered the house.
Sitting down at the table also caused both of them some consternation because obviously neither one was used to eating at a table with a tablecloth, nice dishes, real silverware and glasses.
“Would you like some milk?” Mother asked, “or would you prefer some iced tea?”
I could tell by the looks on their faces neither of them had ever heard of iced tea.
“Coffee would be fine, if you’ve got it,” Toivo ventured.
“Of course,” Mother responded, filling his cup and after glancing at Eero, his, too.
Lunch that day was sandwiches made of pieces of ham with lettuce in between slices of Mother’s homemade whole-wheat bread with fried potatoes on the side.
They waited until Arvo lifted his sandwich up to take a bite before they did the same, commenting as they did that this was “mighty good, ma’am.”
Neither of them had taken off his hat before he sat down. I could see Mother was holding back her comments with all of the force she could muster.
“After this,” she told Arvo as they headed out again, “I absolutely refuse to serve anyone who sits down with his hat on. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yep,” was Arvo’s smart-alecky reply. He’d been aware of the fury lurking behind Mother’s calm exterior all during that meal. He simply had forgotten to tell the guys about the “house rules.”
After that, both men doffed their hats and laid them on the entry bench before sitting down at the table. And both cleaned their boots thoroughly.
Mother’s nose had sniffed them when they sat down to eat. Before dinner she told Arvo
to warm the sauna and tell the “boys” they were to leave their dirty clothes in a pile in the sauna dressing room for us to wash the next day. “I presume each one owns more than one outfit,” she had commented privately to me before giving Arvo her edict.
Each day’s work meant an accumulation of grime that defied even Mother’s desire for cleanliness, and finally even she gave in and admitted that, if Arvo could sleep in his drawers and I could abide his smell, he could go two days before changing clothes.
It took them the whole month of September to complete a hole large enough to hold a furnace. Arvo had decided to do the job correctly and to get cinder or cement blocks from the lumber mill in Virginia to build walls for what was to become the basement.
He, Toivo, and Eero made a trip to Virginia to investigate and found that, although cement blocks were perhaps more durable, each one weighed over a hundred pounds and would be virtually impossible to transport from Virginia, so they settled on “cinder blocks.” Arvo kept insisting he could have made them himself had we been burning coal, but Mother and I both said the additional cost of buying them would be minimal, considering all of the time and work the men had put into digging the hole.
It took several trips, a lot of gasoline, and no small amount of swearing, but finally all the cinder blocks they’d need were piled next to the opening.
Then they started putting them together, doing one wall at a time. Arvo’s initial plan to build a form around the edge of the basement out of lumber was found to make the perfect surface on which they placed the cinder blocks.
Gifts of the Spirit Page 34