Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  With that, he pointed to the main line. “Take that choker.” He turned and pointed out a huge log. “Attach it to that.” He walked away.

  Matti was joined by another choker setter and the two of them hauled on the choker, pulling the heavier main line sideways along with them. When they reached the log, Matti’s eyes were at the same level as the point where the curve of the log started moving away from him.

  Matti could hear the piping of the brass steam whistle from the steam donkey, signaling something, he knew not what. The whistle was triggered by a small boy, the whistle punk, Kullerikki, who stood on a huge stump and pulled on the whistle lever with a wire several hundred feet long. The whole forest was screeching, squealing, crashing, shouting life. Giant logs were jerked from small canyons and pulled uphill across stumps that momentarily resisted the power of the steam donkey, the cable tightening to near breaking until the log suddenly popped over the stump and was reeled in to the landing. Buckers—who often were crushed by rolling logs, and so considered half-crazy by other loggers—cut the logs into mill-specified lengths with large crosscut saws held at nearly forty-five degrees above their heads.

  At a shout and a curse from Huttula, Matti began digging under the giant log, burrowing his way, dragging along the twenty-pound C-hook and resisting cable, to get it to his partner on the other side. Matti pulled the heavy cable through and tossed the C-hook up over the log where his partner scrambled to hook it over the cable. With his hand held above, his partner gave the signal to Kullerikki. Kullerikki piped the signal that the log was rigged. Matti ran for cover as the huge log was jerked into motion, spinning about a quarter of the way around to accommodate the angle of the cable. When that happened, Matti learned this first lesson of logging: to stay away from where the cable would end up after it was tight, not from where it was now. He dived for the ground to avoid being hit. The thick flying cable could take off a leg or head like a scythe through barley. He didn’t have time to think about how close he’d come to dying, because Huttula was already pointing at the next log as the haul-back cable went screaming by them, pulling the chokers back into position for the next turn.

  It went like that until they had twenty minutes for lunch and then it was like that until light failed.

  That night, ravenously hungry, Matti ate as he never had eaten in his life. He’d thought he was in great shape, but he felt his body stiffening as he ate. By the time he reached the bunkhouse, he felt as though he weighed three hundred pounds. He threw himself facedown on the hay of his bunk without taking off his clothes. Roused from his bunk before first light, he stumbled to breakfast to begin again. He’d never felt so alive.

  The day Matti joined Huttula’s crew was the day Aksel ran out of food. He hadn’t yet reached the Oregon-California border, and he had one dollar and thirty cents.

  The first two days after he left San Francisco weren’t so bad. Although his sea legs had proved themselves close to useless for hiking, he had at least run into the occasional farm, where he split wood in exchange for food and permission to sleep in the barn.

  Ten days later he found himself hiking through the largest trees he had ever seen or even imagined. He stopped at one giant and spread his arms wide against the trunk. Noting where his right hand stopped, he moved to that spot and measured again. It took twelve measurements to get around to where he had started. The tree appeared to be triple the mast of the Elna. If cut down—how this was possible, he didn’t know—lying sideways the tree would still be nearly as tall as his two-story house in Finland. The Swedish woman at the brothel told him the Douglas firs near Nordland were even taller but not quite so big around. He imagined cutting down trees like this, feeling a growing excitement that could put the sea behind him forever.

  The ninety-mile walk from Eureka to Crescent City took a week. Had he not stopped to chop wood for the occasional farmer or haul sawdust and scrap lumber to the big wigwam burners at two mills, he could have done it in five days. But he had to eat.

  When he reached Crescent City, after a meal at a little restaurant run by a Greek family, his belly full and his legs getting stronger every day, he walked into a newspaper office. He managed to convey that he wanted to see a map. When the man pointed to Astoria, part of him wished he’d never seen the map. The man also pointed out that the roads, unlike those between Crescent City and Eureka, did not go north-south. There was only an occasional railroad connecting a seaport town to the big valley on the other side of the Coast Range. Aksel thought briefly of just stopping where he was, maybe going back to Eureka and getting a job, but the woman had said that people from home lived around Astoria.

  Winter was coming and he was homesick, powerful incentives to keep walking.

  Also aware that winter was coming, Ilmari was weighing the trade-offs of building in bad weather with the fact that winter was when farmers could work on something besides their own farms. He envisioned the new church as a simple Gothic structure, about twenty by forty feet, with a beautiful steeple rising to at least eighteen feet. Everything could be handcrafted by the congregation of ten families except the organ. Pastor Hoikka, the Evangelical Lutheran minister in Astoria, said it wouldn’t be a church without an organ.

  “Why can’t we just use a kantele or an accordion or a fiddle, whatever we’ve got?” Ilmari asked Hoikka after the service in Ilmahenki’s living room. Aino had skipped the service but returned to make a Sunday evening supper for Ilmari and Pastor Hoikka, who was spending the night with them. He’d come from Astoria to Knappton on the small passenger ferry called the General Washington after doing two services at the Astoria church that morning and had hiked the last ten miles for an evening service at Ilmahenki.

  “Of course, you can,” Hoikka said. “But they’re dance instruments.”

  “Not the kantele,” Ilmari said, annoyed by Hoikka’s constant rejoinders to any objection. Hoikka wasn’t a bad fellow. He did double duty to serve the new Tapiola congregation and asked for only boat fare, room and board, and a dollar for the church fund, which everyone knew paid his salary. No one begrudged him that, other than Aino. Even pastors and their families must eat. He was just rigid. Maybe that’s what it took to serve a congregation. If he wasn’t rigid, he’d do something outside the doctrine and then he really couldn’t say he was a Lutheran. Back in Finland, the government enforced the rules. And the Catholics had this centrally organized government of their own. He realized suddenly that people were waiting for him to answer a question. “Mitä?” he asked. What?

  “Pastor Hoikka says you can get a really nice Estey reed organ for around a hundred dollars from an organ dealer in Portland,” Aino said.

  “That would be another ten dollars per family. We’re already asking for money for lumber, pews, and Communion cups.”

  “To be able to gather in God’s house,” Hoikka said. “To have the fellowship and comfort of a community is money well spent.”

  Aino broke in. “So, you’ll be cutting down trees in God’s house to turn them into lumber to make God’s house.” She began clearing the table, foreclosing any rejoinder.

  Ilmari hoped they could have something built by Christmas. He knew that it was a forlorn hope even as he was hoping it, which, he supposed, was why it was called a hope. He read First Peter about hope and being an elder of the church. He’d read Ezra and Nehemiah about building a temple.

  Higgins donated a fifty-by-one-hundred-foot piece of land, well up from the river and potential floods, on the south edge of Tapiola, even though he was nominally Catholic.

  On the last Sunday in November, the entire congregation trudged from services at Ilmahenki through slashing rain and mud to huddle on the donated lot while Ilmari read the order for the laying of the cornerstone.

  How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!

  I was glad when they said unto me: Let us go into the house of the Lord.

  Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

  The men of
the congregation, enduring the rain and mud, leveled the land and laid the foundation stones in place by dark. Then they all met at Kalle and Lilo Puskala’s barn for a dinner cooked by the women.

  At this dinner, Ilmari met his first leadership problem: some of the congregation wanted to dance. He argued adamantly that while the Old Testament didn’t forbid dancing and the children of Israel did indeed dance, the New Testament said nothing about dancing being good. For Christians, the New Testament was what was relevant. Then he made the mistake of quoting Exodus: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” Antti Salmi pointed out that they’d been working all day. After an initial moment of confusion, Ilmari pointed out that building a church wasn’t really working; it was a form of worship. This seemed to satisfy Salmi and the rest of the pro-dance congregation, but it caused several nights of intense study by Ilmari to try to find the definitive answer.

  In the following weeks, working on Sunday afternoons after the service, they placed sturdy twelve-by-twelve cedar posts on the foundation stones, which then supported the doubled two-by-four plates and knotless two-by-ten Douglas fir floor joists and the two-by-four studs. Some of the women supplied hot food and strong coffee at breaks, while others met at different homes in small groups to sew the altar cloths, vestments for the future pastor, and sturdy cushions to be used at the future altar rail for Communion. Weekend after weekend the walls slowly rose, then the ceiling joists, then the roof. By March, the little twenty-by-forty-foot church was weathertight and fulfilled Ilmari’s vision of an eighteen-foot steeple. Arvid Saarenpää, who had a reputation for fine carpentry, had made sure the windows and doors were watertight and had no drafts. Then the remaining chores were assigned. Lars Laakkonen, a cousin of the Koskis’ Laakkonen neighbors in Finland, and Johan Pakanen began carving beautiful designs on the backrests of chairs being made by Matti Haapakangas. Antti Salmi, Jouka Autiovarra, and Abraham Wirkkala met every Sunday afternoon to work on the solid-oak pews. Ilmari assembled a small woodstove and stovepipes for the rear of the little church, and he and Isak Herajarvi both worked on the blue-and-white wine-stem pulpit that would stand at the left of the altar. Adolfiina Laakkonen and Meija Herajarvi took on the task of finding a suitable painting for behind the altar, while Ruusu Pakanen took on choir robes along with Linna Salmi and Pirkka Autiovarra. After considerable soul-searching, it was decided that selling refreshments at the Saturday dances was really doing God’s work. Lilo Puskala and Tuuli Wirkkala organized the women making cake and cookies to raise the cash for the painting, individual glass Communion cups, and a silver host platen. Henni Haapakangas took on the window curtains.

  Aino stayed home, feeling left out and wanting female company.

  While the church was being built, Aksel spent Christmas alone, huddled on the side of a trail. Just after the New Year, he found shelter against the warmth of a rusting wigwam burner in the little port town of Bandon, Oregon, where he could see a thin line of lighter gray stretched across the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He hadn’t been dry in two weeks. There were now only around eight hours of daylight, less on the many rainy days. Astoria was simply too far away. He hugged his knees to choke off the desire to cry.

  A mill worker found him in the morning. A Swede was summoned to translate and the story told. The two men exchanged looks, seeming to say, “What are you going to do? He’s a kid.” They escorted Aksel to a rough office, MOORE LUMBER neatly painted by hand over the door. The manager asked a few questions in English, nodded, and the Swede took Aksel to a long table about waist-high filled with steel rollers. Boards, timbers, and dimension lumber of all sizes rattled along as fast as men could yank them off the table and stack them. The Swede talked to a foreman and the foreman nodded. That was the day Aksel learned the English words “green chain.”

  The freshly cut green lumber was soaking wet with sap—and heavy. None of the men had gloves. Soon Aksel’s hands were bleeding and blistered, despite his having done hard work to get this far. The lumber moved relentlessly, the huge head-rig saw, band saws, and gang saws all spewing lumber to the green chain. By nightfall, Aksel staggered into a rough dining hall and ate until he thought he would burst. By spring he was a seasoned worker and twenty pounds heavier.

  8

  Spring in the Deep River valley began with trilliums in mid-March. By late April it brought longing, and Ilmari convinced Aino to move temporarily into Ullakko’s house so he could go find a bride. He figured it would take him ten days, maximum.

  Aino had raised hell, pointing out that she was perfectly capable of being alone, she’d had enough of being someone’s live-in servant in Finland, and it looked very much like the opening move toward an arranged marriage with which she forcefully disagreed. Ilmari in turn argued forcefully that it was in no way the opening move in an arranged marriage and that young women all over America worked for people and boarded with them. What was not argued but was well known to all was that when Ilmari came back with his bride, Aino would be redundant.

  When the storm subsided, the rock on the shore had remained unmoved and Ilmari helped Aino move to Ullakko’s.

  Ullakko had made a platform bed for her in the girls’ room and had given up his own mattress for it. She was touched. Being above the kitchen, the girls’ room had the double advantage of the heat from the floor and the sheet metal chimney. Aino liked the prospect of sharing the room with the girls. She loved her brothers dearly, but they weren’t sisters.

  Ilmari walked to Willapa Bay and caught the Reliable to Willapa where he spent the night. The next morning in a hard rain he took a second boat out to sea then back across the roiling bar at the mouth of Grays Harbor and into Nordland, dark against the gray sky in the gloom of late afternoon.

  A few streets were paved with sawdust and straw. The rest were mud. The buildings within several blocks of the waterfront were built on pilings. Having arrived at low tide, Ilmari could smell the excrement and garbage lying in the mud beneath the buildings. When the tide came in, most of the excrement and garbage was washed out to the river and then down to the sea—most of it.

  He settled in a rooming house on Herron Street, the room just big enough for a single bed. He whittled until there was no light.

  He was up at dawn. The meeting was to be at three, so he spent the morning looking at all the merchandise in the stores. At one, he rubbed brilliantine into his hair and combed it in front of the single round mirror hanging next to the two-hole privy that opened over the river below. Then he stood on the boardwalk outside the hotel for over an hour, occasionally going back to recomb his hair. It wasn’t like going to a dance.

  Louhi Jokinen was in her office at the Tannika House, a brothel in which she held 51 percent. She also was getting ready to leave for the meeting, but she had a problem: Al Drummond lying on her office couch snoozing off a heavy lunch and too much alcohol. Drummond, the owner of the First National Bank of Nordland, was the 49 percent partner. In addition to being a ruthless businessman and an all-around son of a bitch, he was a snoop and Louhi couldn’t leave him there alone. He could, however, be childishly belligerent if disturbed. She decided to wake him anyway. She had been handling belligerent men since her parents died when she was fourteen and she took up hooking in Seattle to feed herself.

  She shook Al’s shoulder and he grunted to low-level consciousness. “It’s nearly three,” Louhi said. “I’m worried someone might be missing you over at the bank.”

  Drummond reached up for her, smiling sleepily. “Ah, come on Louhi. Give me a kiss.”

  She turned her back and went for her coat. A small gat-toothed woman, curvy in all the right places, she could still hold a man’s eye although she was no longer young. Her physical appearance combined with a force of personality forged by triumphing over many hard years could attract a strong man and scare the hell out of a weak one. “Come on, Al. If you’re horny
, go over to the Tannika and pay for it.”

  “Ahh, Louhi. How unkind.”

  She shrugged into her long, dark-blue wool coat with a rich chocolate mink collar. “I’ve got a visitor over at the house at three and you’ve got a reputation to keep.” She paused. “Or at least keep from getting worse.” She smiled to let him know she was kidding him. She, however, wasn’t kidding. “Come on. If your wife shows up at the bank, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Drummond sighed and attempted a kiss, deftly avoided. He left the office saying, “Work, work, work. That’s all I do.” She had to smile. He wasn’t without a sense of humor.

  When Louhi reached home, she shouted for Rauha to bring her best shoes. She took the clothes brush by the door and began brushing the mud off the hem of her skirt. It left the hem slightly darker with the dampness, but she realized she wouldn’t have time to change, and it would have to do. She put her muddy shoes on a low rack in the foyer and went into the parlor just as Rauha came down the stairs.

  Louhi sat on the couch, putting on her good shoes while inspecting Rauha, who had seated herself opposite her. Louhi took in the very discreet lip coloring and rouge on Rauha’s nearly perfect face and fair skin. She had put her blond hair up but allowed a tendril to dangle down on each side.

  “The tendrils are a good idea,” Louhi said. Rauha touched one of them and gave a quick nervous smile. “Now get that goddamned color off your lips. He’ll think you work at the Tannika.”

  Pressing and licking her lips to comply with her mother’s order, but still leave some color, she asked, “Does he know about the Tannika?”