Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  When the Elna reached San Francisco in October, Aksel was the best top man of the crew.

  The skipper allowed them only enough American dollars to have a hell of a time ashore while the ship was being unloaded. Giving them what they were owed before they got back to Stockholm would only invite desertion. Aksel hit the saloons with the rest of them but soon proved not as able in this particular seaman’s skill. He was throwing up bad food and worse beer after just five hours.

  He made his way to the docks and was dry heaving over the water when the mate and a couple of Aksel’s new friends came up behind him, laughing. Although mildly intoxicated, they seemed unimpaired. Aksel rose stiffly, taking his hands from his knees. He looked at them darkly.

  “Hey, Aksel. We got something for you.” There were muffled laughs.

  “What?”

  “Something you’ve never had before.”

  “I can’t eat a goddamned thing.”

  Laughing, they frog-marched him back toward the center of the town.

  The interior of the brothel was dark. Kerosene lamps set in sconces barely illuminated the unpainted walls of clear redwood boards.

  The mate was talking to the woman who supervised everything. They looked at Aksel, both smiling. Money was handed over and the woman walked to where Aksel was sitting at a card table, his back to it so he could see every passing girl.

  The supervisor asked a question.

  Aksel shook his head. “No English,” he said. He saw his friends averting their eyes, suddenly looking at their drinks, smiles on their faces.

  The woman reached to take Aksel’s chin in her hand. “How old? One, two, three, four.”

  Aksel caught on and brightened. He spread both hands wide, then showed seven additional fingers. The woman laughed and showed him fourteen with her fingers. He blushed.

  She led him up the stairs to a single bed in a small room, then walked out, closing the door.

  After he had waited about ten minutes, a woman, maybe in her early twenties, her eyes older than her face, walked in. She was wearing a cream-colored silk robe, tied with a red cord with tassels at both ends. She said hello to him in Swedish. Aksel fell in love.

  She wore silk stockings held up the old-fashioned way with a ribbon that went around her thighs and not with the little wire loops and straps that attached to the corsets that he’d seen in advertisements in Stockholm. Between the top of her stockings and the bottom of her corset, just peeping out and then disappearing with the flow of her chemise, he saw her pubic hair. He was embarrassingly erect.

  “Lie down,” she said in Swedish.

  Aksel looked around for help, but no one else was there. She pushed him gently onto his back and, straddling him with her knees, she walked herself up his legs. She held a condom in front of his eyes. “This is called a rubber,” she said, stretching it with both hands. “For obvious reasons.” She wriggled slightly to get into a better position. “Did you ever hear of syphilis?”

  Aksel nodded yes.

  “Did you ever hear of gonorrhea?”

  Aksel shook his head no.

  “It makes you pee pus and it hurts like hell when you do it.”

  Aksel felt a little sick and his erection started to subside.

  She got him hard again and rolled the condom on. Aksel gasped as she settled herself on him. “Easy … easy.”

  Aksel exploded and then fainted.

  He knew he was out only a second or two because she was still slowly withdrawing from him when he came to his senses. “If you leave here with nothing else in that square head of yours, remember this. If you don’t want to go blind, crazy, or run pus from your pecker for the rest of your life”—she pulled off the condom—“you use one of these.” She swung her feet to the floor and threw the condom into a trash can. She then matter-of-factly put the washbasin on the floor, squatted over it, and began washing herself.

  “That’s it?” Aksel asked.

  “That’s it, sugar,” she said. “It lasts longer the more you do it.”

  The woman stood up and dried herself with a towel that hung on the wall. Then she put on her silk robe. “Your ship’s from Stockholm. I grew up there. You don’t sound like someone from Stockholm,” she said.

  “Ostrobothnia.” Aksel felt as though he couldn’t say a coherent sentence. “Near Karleby.”

  “Ahh. I used to work up in Nordland.” Aksel’s face went quizzical. “Way north of here. Quite a lot of your folks are there, especially around Astoria. That’s in Oregon. Of course, the majority are Finnish-speakers.”

  “What do you mean, a lot?”

  “Hell, sweetheart. It’s like all of Finland moved there. No work at home and the Russians drafting the boys … More work than people up there.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Logging, sawmills, mostly.” She was moving toward the door. He didn’t want her to go.

  “Are there fishermen in Astoria?”

  “Is that what you did in the old country?”

  Aksel nodded. “With my father and my …” He hesitated before adding, “big brother.”

  “Well you’d need them both if you want to get into fishing up there. The river is over eight kilometers wide and when the salmon run, you can cross the river on their backs.”

  Aksel looked at her askance. “Well, OK, maybe there is a little water between them.” She paused, a memory lighting her face. “But I tell you this, and this is no bullshit, they call the biggest salmon up there Chinooks. Those goddamned fish weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s nearly sixty kilos,” she said impressively. “I don’t even weigh that much.”

  Aksel’s mouth was open.

  “Of course you’d need your own boat to get into that game.”

  Aksel made a quick calculation. “How much do you get for logging or working in a sawmill?”

  “Dollar and a half, maybe a couple of bucks a day. But you eat well in the logging camps. They’ll board you, too. You pay for it, of course. But you’d never catch me in one of those fleapits they call bunkhouses. Damp straw and wet long johns.” Her voice trailed off and she looked into the distance. “I’d think twice about getting into the logging game.”

  She didn’t elaborate, but Aksel knew she was talking about danger. It excited him. How could it be more dangerous than fishing or sailing?

  “Do you have to speak English?”

  “You don’t have to speak at all, sugar.”

  All the next day, as the ship was still unloading, Aksel was in a nervous state. He couldn’t go home to Finland, at least not until Gunnar said it was all clear. Gunnar must be all right. Sweden wasn’t home. He liked the crew, mostly, but months at sea living as close to them as head lice, followed by a few days drunk and then more months at sea, didn’t seem appealing. On the one hand, he wouldn’t get paid until they returned to Sweden. On the other hand, if many of his home people lived around Astoria, maybe it would be like going home.

  Soaking wet and shivering slightly in the Sunday morning darkness, his wet seabag beside him, Aksel watched the Elna‘s lights as she put out to sea. The seabag being a dead giveaway, he had slipped overboard on the harborside of the ship, not the dockside, so as not to alert anyone. The only thing that made him sad: he was leaving the first mate, who had been kind to him, short of a hand again.

  When the ship was well out of the harbor, he hoisted the seabag on his shoulder and set off north. He had two dollars. He decided he could walk to Astoria. It couldn’t be too far.

  7

  The next night, far to the north, Ilmari cried out, sitting bolt upright in his bed. He’d been awakened by the recurring dream that had plagued him since childhood: of going to collect snow in a darkness harboring a terrible lurking presence, biding its time to come into the house. Afraid, he’d gather snow into his hands and turn for safety to the light behind him, where he heard his sisters crying upstairs and his father asking for the snow to cool their fevers. Just past the doorway, the snow he’d
gathered would turn to water, dripping from his hands to the floor, and he could not, could never, reach his sisters up the steep stairs.

  He knew the dark presence in his dream was death. Death had bided its time, watching him fail. It had come into the house and taken his older sisters and baby brother. He felt a dizzying terror. It was waiting outside to take him.

  He put on his outside clothes over the long underwear in which he’d been sleeping and walked to the hand pump on the kitchen counter where he pumped enough water to fill the blue-and-white-flecked coffeepot. He threw into the pot a handful of roasted barley supplemented by the powdered remains of a few carefully boiled and then evaporated hand-ground coffee beans. He loaded kindling into the firebox and blew the coals into life: fire, being blown into life, fire, consuming life, endlessly, forever. But maybe hell wasn’t fire. Maybe hell was his dream, endlessly going in and out of the doorway, his sisters crying, the snow melting—in and out, endlessly, forever. How much better to just be extinguished: to be like fire, put out by cold water from melted snow, extinguished forever into oblivion without pain.

  He longed to see Pastor Jarvi and the old church. Then the idea came thundering back. He’d been asked by God to build God’s church here, by Deep River, a church to comfort those like him who mourned, to fortify the weak of spirit like him, so they would enter the kingdom of heaven, so they would no longer fear death. Perhaps when he finished the church, this terrible dream would let him be. It was time to start. He’d start by telling Aino what he’d never told anyone.

  Aino woke up to the sounds of Ilmari saying the beatitudes aloud. She smelled the coffee roiling in the water and dressed hurriedly in the dark. She came into the kitchen just as Ilmari was saying, “Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” She held her tongue—with some effort.

  Ilmari was nearly beside himself with something he wanted to tell her. His eyes glowed. There was joy in his usually deliberate movements. When they sat to eat, it came pouring out—six full sentences. She’d expected something religious, but this … He’d been called by God. Saint Ilmari, she thought, as blind as Paul on the road to Damascus. He’d find a wife, get married in the church, and become a church elder, a man of faith and stature.

  “What foolishness!” She could contain herself no longer. “People starve. The workingman toils endless hours for the comfort of the rich. You and Matti toil endless hours. For what? Some worthless building and a house for the leech pastor and his family who are going to suck off the workingman until people come to their senses and throw all that stupidity out the door.” She hadn’t expected to say so much.

  “God has told me His church needs to be built.”

  Aino rolled her eyes.

  “Like one in the old country.”

  “Like the one that won’t bury a baby dead from starvation?”

  Ilmari put his large hands over hers. “Aino,” he said gently. “The people need a church.”

  “The people need a brain.”

  She picked up her empty cup and walked to the sink.

  “How can we be married without a church?” Ilmari asked.

  “You have someone in mind?”

  Ilmari, a little embarrassed, said, “No one in particular.”

  “Someone in general then?”

  “Well.” Ilmari looked at his coffee again, avoiding eye contact. “There are Finnish girls up in Nordland.”

  “Yes, prostitutes,” Aino said.

  “Not Finnish girls,” Ilmari answered, offended that she’d even think a Finnish girl would prostitute herself. He walked over to a small makeshift desk—two two-by-twelves set on trestles—and returned with a letter. “It’s from Arne Vanhatalo. He’s cousin to Alma Wittala, you know, up at Reder’s Camp. There’s a Finnish girl of marriageable age in Nordland, and she’s a good worker.”

  “Oh,” Aino broke in. “So you are just going to go up there and get yourself a wife the way you get a horse.”

  “Easy for you to criticize,” Ilmari said. “Good Finnish boys are everywhere. Where do Matti and I find good Finnish girls? And how long can I leave the cow and cattle to even go looking?”

  “I’ll see what sort of cow you bring back.”

  “Families are important. Everyone needs to be married,” Ilmari said. “Someday,” he added a bit lamely, “you, too.”

  Aino gave him a look.

  “I’m serious. For example, Ullakko’s a good provider. He’s young and—”

  “He’s older than you are!”

  “Yoh.” Ilmari paused and then plunged in where angels fear to tread. “You’re already seventeen. Who are you going to find except some logger with nothing but his caulk boots?”

  “Better that than an old man with cow manure on his shoes,” she shot back. “I’m never going to marry anyone.” Aino knew Ilmari was only trying to do right by her. She could never explain that she’d promised herself to Voitto and had already betrayed him once. She would not betray him again.

  Ilmari gazed at her, taking in her comment about marriage. Then he said gently, “Your boyfriend is dead. The revolution might never come. You’re here and there’s no going back.”

  “The revolution will come, and I can wait as long as I please.”

  “I don’t know about the revolution, but I do know that women can’t wait like the men.”

  Aino knew he was right but stayed silent.

  “You have three choices,” Ilmari continued. “Marry a farmer, marry a logger, or be an old maid. I think being an old maid would be sad.” Ilmari looked at his coffee. “Same as an old bachelor.”

  Aino stood. “Fine. Go up to Nordland and buy yourself a bit and a bridle. After the revolution, marriage will be a thing of the past. We’ll love who we want, and the children will be raised by everyone. I’ll wait, thank you, and it won’t be long.”

  “Aino,” Ilmari said, as if responding to a child.

  A week after Ilmari revealed his plan to build a church to Aino, Matti made the first step in his own plan to have a logging company. A man had been crushed by a log. His crew had dragged the body up to the donkey and laid it next to the railroad tracks at the landing, followed by Toivo Huttula. Matti watched Huttula talk to the supervisor the loggers called the side rod. The two men looked at him, and the side rod nodded his head.

  When Huttula reached Matti he asked, “How old are you, really?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Huttula looked at the cordwood. Matti was easily two days ahead. “You think you’re ready?” he asked Matti.

  Matti drove his splitting maul into the block and never looked back.

  He started at the bottom, setting chokers.

  Setting chokers was the toughest, dirtiest, most exhausting job in the woods. A choker setter’s job was to dig, burrow, climb, and crawl under and over the huge logs to wrap a steel cable, called a choker, around the log and back onto itself using a C-hook. The thinner choker cable was attached to a much larger cable called the main line, which was reeled in by the steam donkey, sometimes hundreds of yards away. When the main line was jerked into action by the donkey engineer, the smaller cable choked down on the log, hence its name. The log was ripped from its place on the ground, twisting as it moved, to be hauled at great speed up to the landing next to the steam donkey. When that log moved, the choker setter must have already been moving out of its way, or he would be killed or maimed. Choker setters had to be young, strong, fast on their feet, and fearless. It was where all loggers started—real loggers.

  Matti swelled with pride as he headed for the ravine through the jackstraw confusion of slash.

  The thrill of the new job lasted about thirty seconds. He would reach the top of a tangle of limbs, feeling them moving beneath him, only to fall through to the ground, the top of the tangle above his head. It took a huge effort to get back on top of the slash. He could hear Huttula cursing at him for his slowness, obviously enjoying h
imself. Breathing hard, he watched Huttula and other experienced loggers moving across the slash as if they were dancers, timing their moves, using the spring-back of the limbs to move gracefully on to the next tangle. They covered ground easily at ten times his own speed. He arrived at the downed trees in the ravine gasping for air, understanding fully what loggers meant by brush legs.

  Fallers were chopping or sawing trees, balancing six to eight feet above the ground on metal-tipped boards hammered into the tree’s side. This way they were above the swell of the tree’s butt, making it easier to fell. Two fallers to a tree, they swung their double-bitted axes alternately in steady, efficient rhythms, each bite of the ax taking out large chips of wood. Other fallers who’d already made their undercut were balanced on the back sides of their trees, pulling twelve-foot-long crosscut saws between them. Back and forth, each one pulling in turn, cutting toward the undercut, pouring oil or kerosene on the saw to keep it from binding, occasionally driving wedges to keep the cut open. Sawing, without a stop, sometimes for hours before the tree started to tremble then groan as the remaining wood hinge between the undercut and the saw cut gave way with a sustained cracking sound. The fallers would then scramble for their lives, as the huge tree moaned and whistled through the air, nearly silent once the splintering at its base ended, to smash into the earth, sending vibrations through the ground for hundreds of feet. The fallers would gather their equipment, walk to the next tree, and do it again.

  Huttula pulled out his puukko and began slashing the hem of Matti’s trouser legs about halfway up the boot. “This is called stagging your trousers. You are less likely to get snagged on something and, if you do, you would much rather have your trousers rip than lose a leg.” He stood. “Or worse. This is not a game for children.” He looked carefully at the buttons holding Matti’s suspenders and grunted. “Not too much thread. And no belt. Same reason.” Matti knew that “Same reason” meant you could die.

  “You pay attention,” Huttula said. “All the time. No daydreaming about your girlfriends. I tell you to do something, you do it instantly. Watch everyone, all the time. Work from the uphill side whenever you can. If you lose your balance, always fall toward the rigging. Don’t walk, don’t run. Fly. The place to rest is the grave.”