Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “You’ve never been a servant,” she said very coldly and evenly.

  Ilmari looked at her with a look of love that normally melted her heart. Now, it just added to her fury. She knew he had done the right thing. Then Ilmari said, “Maybe you’ll find some nice fella.”

  That did it. Aino gave him her best withering look. “I already have a fella,” she said. “Back in Finland.”

  The two brothers looked at each other, their eyebrows raised. “The one Mother wrote is hiding from the police?” Ilmari asked.

  She fought back tears of frustration and anger. She realized that she’d thrown her coffee cup against the stove only when it shattered there. She ran out of the house.

  The two brothers looked at each other across the table.

  “She didn’t mean it,” Matti said.

  “Yoh,” Ilmari replied. Then he said, “She’s not the way I remember her. Was she like this when you left?”

  “Ei,” Matti said, no. “The Okhrana …” he tailed off.

  Finnish men don’t cry, but the sadness the two felt for a sister who existed only in their memories, for a world that could hurt their beautiful fiery sister so badly, sat with them at the table and shared their coffee. They both knew it would be a long time before that unwanted guest departed, if ever.

  4

  Up by five every morning, Aino reached Ullakko’s house by six thirty. At first, she felt dwarfed by the forest and nervous around the children. Having been the youngest girl, she had no experience with little children other than Matti, who was nearly her age. All she could remember about her baby brother, Väinö, was holding his tiny cold body. Within a few weeks, however, she began to relax. Ullakko’s children all spoke English fluently, and she began to pick up English from the oldest daughter. She even began to enjoy the walk to and from Ullakko’s. The blackberries were rapidly ripening, replacing the yellow, watery salmonberries and the few deep-red thimbleberries still around when she first arrived. She began carrying an old coffee can with a string handle threaded through two holes punched under the open rim to fill up on her way to Ullakko’s and again before she returned to Ilmari’s.

  Her first blackberry pie was a disaster. Ilmari and Matti politely ate the filling, leaving the dense crust. She had no one to turn to, so was stymied about what went wrong. The next day, she remembered Maíjaliisa folding in chunks of lard. They’d had pigs in Finland, but none here, so on her second try she used butter. The brothers ate the crust. Progress.

  When the blue huckleberries came in, she spent one evening picking the tiny berries until dark and came in with a full can. She was pleased to see that Ilmari waited outside the door and looked relieved when she appeared. On Sunday, the brothers said they liked the pie—the equivalent for Finnish men of a standing ovation.

  * * *

  In late August, Ilmari returned from Nygaard’s General Store in Knappton with a typically fat letter from Maíjaliisa. The store served as the only post office in the area.

  Aino and Ilmari waited for Matti to come home Saturday night to read it, but it turned out he’d walked to a dance at Knappton and didn’t get to Ilmahenki until two in the morning. Ilmari woke her and the three siblings sat around the kitchen table, the kerosene lamp in the table’s center lighting their faces.

  Aino was the best reader. The letter covered the usual late-summer farm talk: the size of the Laakkonens’ oat crop, how a new kid was growing and would be a fine milker, two pages about new babies, changing the draft flow in Laakkonens’ barn by adding another cupola so with the coming winter less condensation would be created. Then came the paragraph starting with “Aino, there is bad news …”

  She stopped reading aloud. Her hand went to her throat as she continued reading to herself. She started to quiver. She looked at her startled brothers and, her hand still at her throat, stood, dropped the letter onto the table, and walked out the door. In the darkness, she fell to her knees and looked up in anguish at the cold August stars. The horror, the guilt, and the loss came out in one long, anguished cry. She put her face on the cool forest duff, and the old fir needles stuck to the tears on her face as she mumbled over and over through her sobbing, “I didn’t know.”

  Inside the house, Matti picked up the letter and read it aloud to Ilmari. The young man from Kokkola, Oskar Penttilä, the one Aino called Voitto, had been in police hands for months. He had been found in Turku, just days after the raid, hiding in the home of a fellow traveler named Raitanen. The police had gone straight to the house and arrested both. Maíjaliisa conjectured that not only had the raid been compromised, but an informer had been planted in the cell. After weeks of inquiry, the Penttiläs, who were connected people, were informed that their son had died of natural causes while in prison. It was unlikely they would ever find out where he was buried.

  Matti quietly put the letter on the table and looked at Ilmari. They both could hear Aino sobbing.

  The night of the letter marked the moment when Aino retreated from them into a cold and secret world all her own. Her anguished guilt over betraying Voitto was channeled into icy anger toward all who opposed the revolution and hatred for whoever had betrayed them.

  5

  The same day that Aino read the letter from home, August 29, 1905, Aksel Långström, fourteen, was sick with fear. The Elna, a 215-foot iron square-rigger filled with 1,360 tons of manufactured goods and machinery, bound for San Francisco but still several thousand miles away, was smashing through towering waves just south of Cape Horn. Thirty-five feet at the beam, the Elna was barely making headway against the prevailing winds that hit the Drake Passage unimpeded after moving across thousands of miles of the empty South Pacific. In the southern hemisphere, August was a month of deadly winter storms.

  Years of fishing gave Aksel sure sea legs, but he never in his wildest imagination envisioned the rolling foam-topped swells that virtually stood the beautifully built Swedish ship on her stern and then sent her pitching down the back of the swell as if diving straight to hell. With a huge groan, she shuddered to shake free of the tons of seawater crashing across her forward deck, threatening to tear the sailors from their precarious handholds on sheets or rails and wash them hurtling into the sea, as ephemeral and weak as smoke against a mighty wind. Then, like a seaborne Sisyphus, the ship clawed to the top of the next towering wave, as the sailors fought gravity and slippery decks to maintain their balance and their lives.

  Clinging to a shroud, trying to keep from being washed overboard, Aksel watched a small sail set low on the mizzenmast suddenly tear loose from the yardarm and, clinging by a single sheet, stream to the stern like a wailing ghost. Aksel felt the sudden change in the motion of the ship and heard the helmsman cursing as he tried to control the bucking helm. Without the sail, the ship stopped making headway and was in peril of being swept sideways at the mercy of the seas. The captain, who’d made more than thirty voyages around the Horn, shouted orders through a speaking trumpet, and the first mate went past Aksel, clinging to whatever he could reach, shouting the names of two sailors. Two men struggled their way to the base of the mast, one of them holding another sail. After a brief hesitation as they looked at the shredded sail and then at each other, they began climbing.

  Aksel clung tenaciously to the fife rail as he looked up with wonder, fear, and admiration for the two men, both of whom he’d gotten to know well on the long but relatively smooth-sailing voyage through the tropics. Then he was hit with a wall of icy water that wrenched him free of the rope he was clinging to. Gasping for air, clawing at the wood on the deck, he was picked up, turned upside down, and bounced toward the stern. He raised his arm and it hooked one of the shrouds, wrenching his shoulder, but he hung on, his other hand grasping his wrist. The wave passed, leaving him gasping. The mate shouted at him to get his ass forward to help a man wrestling with a sheet and he stumbled toward the bow.

  He obtained the job because his father’s cousin knew someone at the firm that owned the ship and had lied about his
age. When he was shown to the forepeak where he would sleep, he was appalled by the narrow bunks above and below him, with only about six inches of headroom. If the sailor above him farted, the one below him felt the wind. He spent the first few days in a ragged haze literally learning the ropes. He’d crawl into his bunk still wet and fall asleep instantly. At first, the food was fresh and good. Then it started to rot. The meals turned to canned vegetables and meat and an obnoxious combination of lye-cured fish and oatmeal. He would shit the liquid remains of the rotten food, hanging his buttocks over the bow, wipe himself clean with cold seawater in the nearby bucket, and go back to work. But now, they faced this green-gray hell of howling wind and numbing water.

  The small sail was set and immediately the ship came back to a more controlled heaving. One man started down just as a freakish blast of wind hit the ship from the side. The man above him lost his footing. The ship heeled over, forcing his body out away from the mast and he clung there, his feet flailing in the air. Then, like a piece of paper whisked from the window of a moving train, he was gone.

  Two days later they headed north, the coast of Chile to their starboard, the winter seas, if not friendly, at least not totally hostile. Aksel was reeving storm-damaged rigging when the mate sat next to where he was working. He lit a pipe, puffing at it vigorously. The smoke whipped astern and shredded to invisibility before it even reached the wheel.

  “I’ve been watching you,” the mate said. “You’re quick and you’ve got good sea legs for someone so young. How come?”

  “I fished with my father ever since I can remember. Over by Karleby in Finland.” He gave the Swedish name for Kokkola.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  Aksel thought quickly. What had his father’s cousin said? What could he get away with? He was big for his age, but the still-downy hair on his face might betray him. “Just turned seventeen, sir.”

  The man grunted and puffed on his pipe, watching Aksel work. “I don’t believe you, nor do I care. I’m short a top man.”

  Aksel took a deep breath and looked at the distant shoreline. “I know, sir. Bergerson.”

  The mate nodded. “Bergerson. He was a good sailor.” He was silent for some time. Aksel continued working.

  “You’d get a raise and move aft to the top man’s berth area.”

  Aksel looked up at the mast swinging against the gray sky and gulped.

  “Do I get the raise as soon as I start?”

  The mate laughed. “Hell no. We pay you for what you can do not what you can learn. I’d guess you’ll be earning your keep soon enough, though.”

  Aksel licked his lips, looking up again at the swinging mast, remembering how easily Bergerson had been swept away. Then he looked at the mate and said, “I’ll do it. Thank you.”

  6

  Aino could feel Ullakko watching her as she washed the dinner dishes. She wasn’t at all worried that he would harm or even frighten her; he wasn’t that sort of man. She just wished he wouldn’t moon at her with those sad blue eyes of his. An image of Voitto waiting for her by the old church in the darkness, the glow of his cigarette, a memory of the feel of him through all their winter clothes as they hugged. She looked at the plate in her hand. She looked at her hand, red and raw from harsh soap and hot water. It had been five days since she’d read the letter and she’d thrown herself into her work at Ullakko’s to bury the pain. She understood Ullakko’s longing, but he was an old man and life was hard. She saw the police storming into Raitanen’s house where Voitto was hiding. She had given them Raitanen’s name. Fighting anguish and anger, she slammed a plate down on the counter next to the sink a little harder than she’d wanted to. Ullakko moved his head back a little in surprise. She sighed. “It’s getting dark,” she said, turning to him. The September days were getting shorter. “I’d better get going.”

  “Yoh,” he said.

  Aino took off her apron and hung it on the wall in the ensuing but not unexpected silence. The kitchen was gloomy with only the waning light coming through the window. No need to waste kerosene until it was too dark to see. The little five-year-old came running into the kitchen and hugged Aino’s knees. She buried her face in Aino’s long skirt and then looked up at her. “Take me with you. Take me with you.”

  Aino touched the little girl’s hair, then stood straighter and went for her coat. The little girl trailed after her, no longer grasping her skirt. Aino put on her hat and went to the mirror to make sure it was on properly. She saw her face with her glasses and frowned at it. “It’s too far for a little girl to walk and besides, you’ll miss bedtime,” she said. She knew the girl hadn’t expected any other answer.

  Her big sister came in the room. “Quitting time,” she said in English.

  “Qvit-ting time,” Aino repeated.

  “It means it is time to stop working,” the girl said in Finnish. “I quit,” she went on, “means ‘I won’t work anymore.’”

  “I qvit. You qvat. They qvut.”

  The girl laughed, adding to Aino’s frustration with this language that was so different from Finnish. This girl had probably never read anything besides that stupid Sears Roebuck catalog, Aino thought darkly.

  “I quit. You quit. They quit,” she said.

  “Qvit, qvit, qvit? It’s a stupid language. It’s no wonder the Norwegians pick it up so fast.”

  The girl laughed at the joke and Aino felt better.

  Ullakko went to the kitchen window and looked outside. It was raining, and the heavy clouds were bringing darkness on fast. He turned to her. “I’ll go with you. I kept you here too long.”

  She was heading for the door. “No need. I’m fine.” She did not want to owe him any favors. It was bad enough being his servant.

  “No, no, no. No problem,” He said. He put a fresh candle in the square glass-enclosed lantern and lit it. Aino waited impatiently. There was no stopping him from coming.

  They walked silently on the dirt road, the quavering light of the lantern just reaching the dark forest at their sides, to be lost in the darkness behind them. They came out of the tunnel of the forest and they saw the dim light of a candle showing through a farmhouse window across a cleared field. Ullakko finally spoke. “It gets dark early,” he said.

  Aino raised her eyebrows, imploring the heavens, but he couldn’t see her doing it. “It’s nearly November,” she said, not wanting to be impolite.

  “Yoh.”

  The road went into a patch of alders and brush. She heard rustling. Just last week Ilmari killed a cougar that had been prowling around his cattle. Suddenly, in spite of herself, she was glad Ullakko had come along.

  When they got to Tapiola, faint light from the warehouse by the boat landing softly lit the dirt street. “You don’t need to come any more,” she said. “It’s only a mile and you need to get back and put the little ones to bed.”

  Ullakko held the lantern up to see her face. It illuminated his own, along with his yearning blue eyes at the same time. “Really, I’ll be fine.”

  Ullakko nodded and smiled at her. He handed her the lantern. “Here, you take this.”

  She refused the first time, but on the second offer she took it, secretly glad he’d let her have it. It meant he’d walk back in the dark, but then he was a man.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I mean it’s yours. You’ll need it now that the days are getting shorter.”

  Every time she thought she’d come even with him, he did some other kindness that put her right back in the hole again. She thanked him and took the road to Ilmari’s. She could sense him watching her as she moved in her small circle of light into the darkness. She didn’t want to turn around and give him any ideas. She passed the old snag on the north side of town without really seeing it, thinking about Voitto, thinking about the coming revolution.

  Upon reaching Ilmahenki, she stopped and blew out the candle, feeling the spirit of the air after whom Ilmahenki was named moving all around her. Off in the distance, with only the faintest lig
ht from a candle showing through a window, she heard Ilmari playing the kantele and singing. She stood there, the wind rustling the few remaining birch and alder leaves, the slow response of the Douglas fir boughs seeming to move with Ilmari’s song. A fine mist had started falling, cooling her face. She became aware of the smell of her damp wool skirt. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed with love for her brothers, here with her in this dark forested land with its distantly separated spots of light. An ache rose in her heart for Finland and her family, and then her whole body ached for Voitto. But that ache turned quickly to revulsion. It seemed as if that stool leg was still there between her legs. In her mind’s eye, she pictured herself hanging there, heard herself saying the name Raitanen.

  Now weeping, looking into the darkness above, imagining Voitto listening to her, she whispered, “I will never betray you again.” She didn’t say it aloud, but she felt then that she’d never marry another. She would dedicate herself to the revolution. She saw herself undergoing a novitiate, renouncing the world, expiating her guilt.

  She breathed deeply to stop herself from crying. She could not, however, stop the trembling that now seized her as it had been doing at unexpected moments ever since she arrived in America. She remembered her sisu.

  By the time the Elna crossed the equator, Aksel was a skilled seaman. He’d come to like the solitude of the crosstree so far above the decks and would sit there when he could, watching for whales, seabirds, anything to break the monotony and get away from the cramped quarters belowdecks. He also went there when he was terribly homesick. He would look east, trying to imagine flying across South America and then the Atlantic like a seabird, flying straight home to see his mother, father, and sisters and, hopefully, Gunnar. He could see Gunnar smiling at him and tousling his hair with a big callused hand. Maybe it turned out all right. He could not know because he always moved ahead of any mail. Where would his parents send a letter anyway?