Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  When Aksel finished, the entire family was silent. Then, his father rose and took out the puukko he wore on special occasions. Its blade had been incised with beautiful old runes, a magic incantation that asked for safety on the sea. The birch handle had been carved with a slight blade guard to keep it dry in wet conditions.

  Aksel shook his head no. The puukko was passed down through the oldest son. It would be Gunnar’s when their father died. “If by grace of God’s goodness, he is returned to us,” his father said quietly, “you can give it back to him.” He looked down at the knife. “Gunnar’s life was his to give for what he felt was right. You had nothing to do with that. Maybe some Finn lives because of you, and Gunnar will have less blood on his hands when he meets his Savior.”

  He straightened his back. “Now, you must do as Gunnar told you. You have a man’s body. You have the skills of a seaman and you already know that you’re a better fisherman than me, or Gunnar.” He smiled. “It was you who got the gift of kenning the mind of those we seek beneath the water.” He handed the puukko to Aksel. “The police will be on the roads—and the others, too.” He looked at Aksel and Aksel nodded that he understood. “My cousin works for a shipping company in Stockholm. I will take you across to Holmsund. Now, say goodbye to your sisters and your mother.”

  9

  Maíjaliisa went to every official who would see her. She was met with condescending sympathy. No one knew. Maybe Okhrana. Maybe Russian army intelligence. Whatever the case, the matter was out of their hands. Sorry about your daughter. From most, she felt a polite, silent disapproval. It was her daughter’s choice to be a radical. She went to the army barracks to ask Corporal Kusnetsov for help. Kusnetsov looked out across the fields. When he turned to her, he shook his head no and walked off.

  Maíjaliisa went all the way to Helsinki, staying there two nights with her cousin. After a week of fruitless searching, Maíjaliisa returned home to keep up with the chores and her obligation to the Laakkonens. Every night she wrote by candlelight in the barn to Finnish officials in the required Russian, painstakingly using the pastor’s Russian/Finnish dictionary.

  Then, sixteen days after Aino’s arrest, the telegram from Maíjaliisa’s cousin in Helsinki arrived: “Alive. On 11:16 train.”

  When Aino got off the train at Kokkola, Maíjaliisa saw that her cousin had given Aino fresh clothes. They hung on her gaunt body. Aino collapsed into her arms. Maíjaliisa winced when she pulled Aino’s head against her chest; her head scarf was covered with wet spots. Maijaliisa pulled it back, exposing bald patches, oozing fluid where skin had been torn away along with hair. The Okhrana’s notorious “goose-plucking.”

  When Aino leaned into her, Maíjaliisa saw the raw sores on her wrists. Watching her climbing painfully into the Laakkonens’ wagon, she knew she’d been tortured in other ways.

  Mrs. Laakkonen immediately offered Aino their bedroom and she and Maíjaliisa shooed the men out of the house. Mrs. Laakkonen helped Maíjaliisa get Aino onto the bed and then left them alone.

  Maíjaliisa recoiled when she saw the damage. Then she went to work, gently moving aside Aino’s hands every time she tried to cover herself in shame. When she had done all she could, she lay next to Aino and let her sob it out.

  She’d been kept alone for nearly a week, not allowed to sleep, slapped during questioning. But she’d not talked. Then they removed her clothes and doused her with water for five days. She proudly never cracked. That was when the goose-plucking started, and it wasn’t just on her head. She’d been hung by her wrists with her shackled feet pulled up behind her, leaving her suspended in a sort of upright bow.

  “He kept whispering over my shoulder, nuzzling his cheek against my ear, asking me for names,” she sobbed. “God, his breath stank.” She twisted to look at Maíjaliisa’s face. “I never betrayed Voitto. Never.” She started crying again. Maíjaliisa stroked her hair, gently murmering, rearranging it to cover as best it could the bald spots on her mangled scalp.

  Aino groaned and twisted away to look at the wall. “But then he said just give us names of people you don’t know, just who you’ve heard about. You’ll betray none of your friends. I spit on him.”

  “Shh, shhh. My darling.”

  Aino was trembling. “There was a stool.” She stopped. “There was a stool. They turned it upside down and …”

  Maíjaliisa hugged here tightly.

  “And they lowered me.” Aino wailed, choking with the horror of what had happened and with shame at what she’d done. “I gave them every name I’d ever heard … Raitanen in Turku, three in Helsinki, and even one in Riga, Latvia.” She clutched at her mother. “I never gave them Voitto or anyone in the cell.”

  When the crying stopped, in a husky voice she asked, “Will I have babies?”

  Maíjaliisa caressed her hair, murmuring, “Of course, my baby.” She pulled away slightly, her tone becoming clinical. “The cervix and everything behind it is untouched. You’ll heal”—she looked Aino straight in the eye—“physically.”

  That night, Maíjaliisa dug up the ceramic jar she’d secreted in the wall of the barn. It held the money that she had managed to save after Matti fled. She helped Aino pack, carefully folding her good dress and second skirt in newspaper, placing them in a small leather valise, along with all of Aino’s underclothes and a jar of viili starter. Every family had its own culture of viili, a Finnish yogurt, that often had been passed down for generations. It would be unthinkable to begin a new life without it.

  Just before they climbed into the Laakkonens’ wagon, Maíjaliisa handed Aino a letter she’d written to her sons. “You’ll get there faster than the mail service. This explains everything. You know your brothers. They’ll take care of you.”

  It was a very quiet ride. Aino was trying to take everything in, everything she could hold of her home in her heart, the gentle landscape with its thousands of lakes hidden in quiet birches, spruce, and pine trees, as if the retreating glacier had left behind tears that mourned its passing, the neat fields where rye, barley, and hay were shooting bright and green up to the white spring sky as they moved toward their full golden destiny in the nearly constant summer light, racing to grow to fullness against the retreating sun before Pokkanen laid the land to sleep under his frost and all the world would dream of spring again.

  She ached to be able to say goodbye to Voitto. Instead, she stood before the train that would take her to Hanko on the south coast and said goodbye to what was left of her family, her mother. At Hanko she would take a boat to Hull in England and board another train there for Liverpool where she would embark for America. Crying was beneath both of them. Standing erect, her face controlled, Maíjaliisa said, “You keep your sisu.” She gave Aino one last quick kiss and pulled back.

  The last Aino ever saw of her mother was at the Kokkola train station, her face stoic and noble.

  She sat down on the hard bench of the compartment, refusing to cry, feeling her own face hardened beyond anything she could have imagined just three weeks ago. She vowed that if she ever found out who’d betrayed them, she would kill him.

  Three days later, as the steamer picked its way carefully between the rocky islands that surrounded Hanko, she stood on the deck watching the shore pines slide past and the islands recede in the wake. The next time she would see trees and islands would be from the rail of a ship on Willapa Bay in the state of Washington as she made her way south to her brother’s farm on Deep River.

  PART TWO

  1904–1910

  Prologue

  The majestic westward-flowing river went without a name for millions of years, but for nearly four thousand years she was called Wimah, Big River, by the first immigrants to her shores. Since 113 years before Aino’s arrival, she has been called the Columbia.

  She begins life in rills along the immense north-south crest of a complex chain of mountains starting with the Selkirks in British Columbia, which merge into the Bitterroots of Idaho and Montana and then turn into the Grand
Tetons of Wyoming. The rills become rivulets that become creeks that push and flow through waterfalls and rapids, pulled on by inexorable gravity to form the Duncan, the Kootenay, the Pend Oreille, the Kettle, and the Spokane, all flowing to join her. From the eastern slopes of the Cascade mountains that divide Oregon and Washington and merge into the Sierra Nevada of California, she is met by the Okanogan, the Wenatchee, and the Yakima. The immense Snake River, formed by the Boise, the Owyhee, the Malheur, the Salmon, the Grande Ronde, and the Clearwater, merges with her from the south. From the highlands of eastern Oregon, the Umatilla, the John Day, and the Deschutes add to her strength. She cuts through the scarp lands of the great lava flood of millions of years ago forming deep canyons and passes the sunrise side of the great mountain called Klickitat by the Yakima Indians and Adams by American settlers. She alone of all rivers has the strength to force her way through the Cascade mountains, themselves pushed ever skyward by the vast power of the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates diving beneath the North American continent where former ocean floors are turned into hot liquid that makes the land groan and tremble with the strain, until the lava bursts forth, forming peak after snow-covered volcanic peak from Mount Silverthrone by the Straits of Georgia in British Columbia to horizon-filling Ta-koma of the Lushootseed speakers, the English-speakers’ Mount Rainier, which broods, waiting until it can again pour lava into the Salish Sea, all the way to translucent Shasta and dark-skinned Lassen, volcanoes deep into California. The river, cutting faster than these mountains rise, forms the majestic Columbia River gorge that separates the perfectly proportioned maiden Loowit and Klickitat’s angry rival for her hand, fierce Wyeast, named by the British navy, Mount Saint Helens, and Mount Hood.

  Now, with the force of all her tributaries, she emerges alone from the western end of the great gorge to meet the broad north-flowing Willamette, giver of rich, black earth. Then, through forests so thick the sun does not reach their floors, flowing a mile wide, flowing two miles wide, flowing west, adding the rain-swollen waters of the Lewis and the Cowlitz Rivers, now flowing five miles wide, she reaches her mother the sea, bearing her salmon fry, depositing her silt and sand, the carved rock of her battles with the land, forming twenty-mile-long beaches on both sides of the ship-killing bar where the great river meets the surging tide, throwing up forty-foot standing waves as she shudders and bludgeons her way back to her origins, the sea, fecund with latent heat, cold to the human touch, but the source of enormous energy, feeding and growing the vast ocean storms that move ever eastward until they collide with the mountains and transform into the steady rain that nurses the rivulets, causing them to grow like sprawling children, until they are born again in the great river that cycles, cycles …

  Where the great river reaches the Pacific, a vast temperate rain forest grows faster and denser than the Amazon jungle, producing trees inconceivable to Europeans and Asians before they saw for themselves. The first people to see these forests did not penetrate them. Moving ever south in the blink of time when the great glaciers sucked the shoreline thirty miles from their present position and formed a bridge for them to cross from Asia, they settled along the rising shorelines, rivers formed by the melting glaciers, taking only from the very edge of the vast forest the occasional cedar to make a canoe to help gather fish and whales from their mother, the sea, to help them build shelter against the rain and snow falling from their father, the sky. The ice passed from memory. The forest, sea, and rivers provided; time, like the salmon that every year returned without fail, cycled, cycled …

  Strangers came in canoes large enough to hold small villages and took away the pelts of the sea otter and beaver, leaving iron axes, beads of wondrous color that glowed with light, and an overwhelming knowledge that those who came first had known only a tiny part of a vast world. New villages rose, made of the same cedar and fir, but the dwellings were stiff and angular and had eyes that allowed you to see through their walls. The strangers kept on cutting the cedar and fir, forming the logs into lumber and sending the lumber on the huge ships to that vast unknown world where the trees must not grow. So, too, these people without trees were a people without salmon, and the strangers caught the salmon, cut the salmon to put in metal containers, and shipped the containers, as they did the lumber, to the distant insatiable people who lived where the salmon did not. And the large ships came back for more and cycled, cycled …

  1

  When Matti left home in the summer of 1904, he had fled inland. Avoiding towns, taking on odd jobs at farms for food, he moved steadily north, the land becoming increasingly forested and then increasingly barren as the forest gave way to reindeer country. After several months, he crossed an unmarked border into Norway. At Hammerfest, a lively center where Lapps, Finns, Swedes, Russians, and Norwegians all came together to trade with each other and the wider world, he talked his way on to a boat headed for England, not using and not telling anyone about the money he’d sewn into his clothes. There, he used part of it to buy passage to Boston, near where he found work in a shoe factory in Fitchburg. As soon as he’d earned enough for a train ticket, he set out for his brother’s farm on Deep River.

  As Matti was leaving Boston, Ilmari was climbing over the trunk of a huge, newly felled Oregon oak. He had spent most of the summer clearing ground for more pasture by felling the smaller trees and drilling fire holes deep into the larger ones. It pained him, but alfalfa didn’t grow in shade.

  Ilmari had named his farm Ilmahenki, after Ilmatar, the spirit of the air. It stood on the south bank of Deep River, twelve miles by river east of its mouth on Willapa Bay. About a mile downstream was the nascent settlement of Tapiola, which, in the dreams of John Higgins, who’d established a general store next to a natural landing site at the edge of tidewater, would someday become a thriving valley town.

  The house was surrounded by newly planted apple trees and hay fields, wrested from the forest through labor that equaled that of any Russian penal colony. The fields were dotted with cattle that grazed around piles of limbs and smoldering seven-foot-high stumps, which were slowly disappearing because of the drilled holes into which Ilmari stuffed hot coals that he relentlessly tended day and night. It was also the way he’d felled the enormous old-growth hemlocks and Douglas firs, many twelve or fourteen feet in diameter. He let fire do his work, while he plowed and planted between the massive trees and stumps. He’d have starved if he’d tried to clear them before planting.

  Slow and majestic beating of large wings caused him to look upward, and he watched an eagle descend onto a branch of one of the light-barked alder trees he had left standing by the river to remind him of the birch trees in Finland. The eagle ruffled itself slightly and then remained still, its eyes intent on the river. Ilmari tried to imagine what the river looked like through the eagle’s eyes. The sun, usually hidden by clouds in June, warmed his back as he lost track of himself, just being with the eagle and the alders and the river. A flicker of white belly feathers caught his eye as another bird flashed against the edge of the dark forest. Long white feathers with black ends formed what looked like stripes on the bird’s tail, which flared wide, slowing the bird’s speed so it could perch on the limb of a Douglas fir. It turned its head toward him and a prominent yellow beak identified it as a yellow-billed cuckoo. Ilmari’s neck hair rose. He once again got the feeling, the one other people didn’t get, the feeling he couldn’t explain. The yellow-bill normally lived east of the Cascade mountains. Someone was coming. Maybe two. The eagle and the cuckoo.

  Ilmari’s house had grown from a single lean-to cabin to the bottom floor of a planned two-story farmhouse that he hoped someday would shelter a wife and children. The interior of the house had no furniture other than a raised platform he used as a bed in the single bedroom, a kitchen table and four chairs, and an ornate red-velvet couch a mill owner, short of cash, had offered in lieu of payment. It had taken Ilmari two days to haul it home, first by steamer to the mouth of Deep River and then by his flat-bottomed rowboat. I
lmari took it good-naturedly when his friend Hannu Ullakko kidded him about the yet unknown woman he hoped to entice with the couch.

  The couch stood on a hard-packed dirt floor in an otherwise empty living room with a river-stone fireplace and chimney. In the kitchen, however, Ilmari already had laid a floor of clear Douglas fir planks, upon which he proudly set a large wood-burning kitchen stove built from various scrap parts he picked up for next to nothing. He’d placed the stairs to the incomplete second story in the kitchen, because he knew that the kitchen would be the warm center of the family and where the children could dress on cold mornings. He also envisioned a wife sitting before the fireplaces, should fortune smile on him. Single Finnish girls, even single Scandinavian girls, even any girls at all were rarer than cash.

  Close to the house was the first thing Ilmari had built: the low, six-by-eight-foot chimneyless sauna made of logs, dug in against a gentle hill and covered with turf. Once it was completed, he’d slept on its two-foot-wide stair-step benches and cooked on its kiuas, not much more that a pile of round river rocks heated during the day by burning the slash from tree clearing. When the day’s work was done, he would let the smoke out and stay warm next to the hot stones throughout the night. Every Saturday evening, without fail, he heated the kiuas until some of the rocks glowed. Throwing water from Deep River onto the stones, he filled the sauna with löyly, the sacred cleansing steam, and remembered Suomi.

  “Yes, yes, someone is coming,” Hannu Ullakko said. “So is Christmas.” Ullakko lifted the saucer onto which he’d poured his coffee and sucked the coffee in through a sugar cube that he held between his lips.