There were no answers.
“How many men die in the woods every year?” she went on. Again, there were no answers. Everyone knew that it was quite a few.
“Who looks out for your safety?”
Again, silence.
Toivo Huttula, the hook tender on the side worked by these loggers, had joined the group and was leaning on the bunkhouse door smoking a pipe. He said quietly, “She’s right. No one. How long have we been asking for dry straw and to let one man off half an hour early to light the stoves?”
Aino jumped on the statement. “Don’t you see, there is no dry straw for the same reason a man died today. The profit motive, capitalism, forces everyone, Reder included, to work for profits. We should work for the common good.”
“That’s communism,” someone muttered.
“That’s just common sense,” Aino shot back. She felt Matti tugging on her skirt. She got the message. The word “communism” was an emotional lightning rod. Some of the men looked enlivened, others sullen. She realized that converting loggers to the message of Marx and Engels was going to be even more difficult than what the socialists faced in Finland and Russia. These loggers were almost all young, without families, and they’d never eaten better in their lives. The very air was full of the two myths of individual prosperity just around the corner and every American as an equal. Even worse, like Matti they found logging exciting. Unlike workers facing the drudgery of factories or peasants the drudgery of tenant farming, these loggers faced danger every day with skill and aplomb. They came home feeling like men, not proletarians. Then she saw the angle.
“If Reder won’t let one of you come back half an hour early, why don’t all of you come back half an hour early?”
“That’s a strike,” someone said.
“Is that legal in America?” another asked.
Aino took a breath and jumped in. She tried to remember all the arguments and tricks of rhetoric she’d learned from Voitto. She found she was good at both. She made her arguments in Finnish and Swedish. She even tried a few sentences of English but found herself handicapped. Frustrated, she reverted to letting some of the bilingual loggers translate, knowing it was less effective than using her own voice.
The loggers listened, some occasionally nodding, some muttering disapproval. She pointed out with biting humor the contrasts between John Reder’s house in Knappton and their bunkhouses. She made fun of the human excrement, telling a story on herself about stepping in some before going to work in the dining hall. She made a mock bouquet of damp straw, holding its limp and drooping form for all to see, sarcastically exclaiming over its beauty and other virtues. She pointed out that if they organized as one group, Reder would have to give in or face hiring a hundred loggers with none of their skills. She made it clear, without in any way shaming them for their lack of courage, that it was their lack of courage that kept them in squalor. Then, she connected their living conditions and working conditions—and working conditions and the accident. She ended by saying it wasn’t just about straw. It was about the value of their lives. It was about dignity. Those were things worth striking for.
Aino walked back to the henhouse quite pleased with herself.
The next morning, Aksel was promoted.
He’d just started splitting wood in the near darkness when Reder got off a speeder, a tiny hand-pumped railcar used to move maintenance crews or get kids down the track to go to school. He walked up to Aksel, puffing slightly from the exertion of pumping the speeder by himself. Aksel took off his cap. Reder laughed.
“Put that back on. Loggers don’t doff their hats to anyone.”
Aksel’s eyes went wide at the word “logger.”
“You’re not there yet,” Reder chuckled. He pointed to a small canyon, barely discernible in the dawn light. “I’ve had to move some men around. Get down there with Huttula. Maybe he’ll make a logger out of you.”
Aksel’s first day of setting chokers was every bit as hard as Matti’s first day, with the same result: exhaustion and a fierce feeling of pride. He never thought once about the man who’d just died.
14
The same morning that Aksel was promoted, the solution to Aino’s poor English was sitting erect on the floor of the engine cab, her ankles crossed neatly beneath her long wool skirt, feet dangling in the air above the steps too large for her to take without a helping hand. Margaret Reder watched the stumps seem to move against the distant trees as the small locomotive chuffed its way up to the camp. She had a valise filled with John’s freshly laundered clothes that she’d carried up the trail from Knappton to the east-running spur line that connected to the north-running main line that hauled the logs to tidewater on Willapa Bay. It also contained the Friday editions of the Weekly Astorian and the Oregonian. John read the Oregonian for business news and lumber prices, but he wasn’t above being amused by the regularly occurring corruption scandals at Portland city hall. It all balances out, Margaret thought to herself. The politicians make money doing scandal and corruption and the newspapers make money reporting on it. Neatly folded in a towel beneath the newspapers were a dozen oatmeal cookies, John’s favorites. She’d heard they’d lost a man the day before and John could probably use a little care.
The steam whistles became louder and she could now hear the whirring of the cables, the squealing of the block and tackle, and an occasional faint shout. Logging terrified her.
The fireman helped her down and offered to take her valise. She politely refused; logs needed to move to market and helping her wasn’t helping that. Even though John legally owned the business, as far as she was concerned it was their business, and she treated it accordingly, just as her mother had done with her father’s sawmill business in Minnesota.
When the smell of the outhouses hit her, she picked up her pace. The pigs rooting around added to the smell, but they were there to get rid of the garbage, so, on balance, maybe they diminished the smell. Then again, loggers liked bacon. The real culprit was, to put it plainly—and she didn’t mind plain talk—the shit. Years around loggers and her husband had rid her of prissiness about rough language if it didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.
At her suggestion, John had placed the outhouses almost a hundred yards from the bunkhouses. She’d thought the loggers would appreciate the smell being removed from where they slept. She’d failed to take account of traveling a hundred yards in pitch dark in the rain. When nature called under those conditions, feces collected at various points between the bunkhouses and the outhouses. They lived like animals. Immigrants mostly. They had lanterns.
Passing the dining hall, she noticed a young woman reading on the steps, a mug of coffee and a plate of food next to her. The young woman looked at her with intense, nearly black eyes behind thick lenses and then quickly looked back at her book, which Margaret could see from the large lettering on the light-brown paper cover was written in Russian. Her curiosity piqued, Margaret walked to the steps, smiled at the girl, and said hello.
The girl smiled back, saying hello in return. She looked and sounded Finnish, not Russian. Margaret introduced herself and learned that the girl’s name was Aino.
“What are you reading?” Margaret asked, pointing at the book.
The girl looked puzzled.
“What—are—you—reading? Book. What name?” she asked.
“Title of book is What Is to Be Done.”
Margaret had never heard of it. “Is it good book?”
The girl looked slightly amused. “It is very good book.”
“Is it a novel?
Again the girl looked puzzled. Bad English. Just off the boat. Margaret was disappointed. Here was someone reading and she couldn’t speak English. Margaret had loved John Reder since she met him in her father’s office in Minneapolis the day after she’d come home from convent school in Chicago, but John didn’t read anything but newspapers.
“Novel,” Margaret repeated. “Fiction.” The girl still looked puzzled. “Not true,
make up story.”
That connected. The girl smiled and took off her glasses. “Is not story. But is”—she searched for a word—“is named from storybook, same name, by man name is Nikolai Chernyshevsky. But is not telling story.” The enigmatic smile came back.
“I love books,” Margaret said. She put her valise and basket down and sat right next to the girl. “Do you?” she asked.
“Yes. I reading lots of books. But not so many books here. I order by mail.”
“We really should get a library in Knappton,” Margaret said. She felt the conversation was about to lag and made another try at keeping it going. “Who is the author?”
The look.
“Man … who … write … book.” She pointed at the book. “Man who write.” She made writing motions with her hand.
“Man who is writing book is called Lenin, but her name for really true is Vladimir Ulyanov.”
“Ohh,” Margaret said smiling, ignoring the pronoun. “A pseudonym.”
“Soo-doh-nim?”
“Like name for writing only. Like …” She paused. What would this girl know? “Like Mark Twain.”
The girl smiled broadly. “Yes. Like Mark Twain.”
A flunky stuck her head out the door and shouted something in Finnish. The girl—Was it Aino? Why couldn’t these Finns be named Mary or something?—jumped to her feet and stuffed the book into her apron.
“I working now,” the girl said as she ran nimbly up the stairs and into the dining hall.
Margaret looked at the small, one-room family shacks and observed that a few had only canvas roofs; they were sitting askew and cockeyed on the mud, some not even level, almost overwhelmed by the slash and stumps, some stumps taller than the little shacks’ roofs. Looking up at the gray sky with its perpetual, soft, insistent damned mist falling cool and gentle on her face, Margaret felt lonely.
When Aino came inside, Lempi was peering through the window at Margaret Reder as she picked her way carefully toward the office. “Talking to the boss’s wife, huh?”
Aino followed Lempi’s gaze. “Spoiled little rich girl. Doesn’t even know who Lenin is.” She laughed and then—wickedly imitating a whining spoiled child—said, “Oh, a pseudonym, like Mark Twain.”
For a moment, Lempi looked at her blankly. Then, covering her ignorance, she laughed and said, “She doesn’t talk to any of us.” That gave Aino an idea. Then Lempi laughed. “Nice dress, though. You think it came from Portland?”
“You think I care?” Aino said. She then almost involuntarily glanced out the window to see Margaret’s dress. She instantly averted her eyes back to Lempi, to see Lempi smiling at her knowingly.
“Not much, you don’t care,” Lempi said.
Furious, Aino stormed into the kitchen.
Margaret knew John didn’t like to waste time talking during working hours, so after catching him up on local news, mostly about other lumber families, and getting his dirty laundry, she turned her face up to his. He hated kissing her in public, but it delighted her to tease him. He knew it delighted her, and that delighted him—but he still kept the kiss brief. Margaret impishly swished her head and shoulders back and forth, a motion which also swished her hips and the bottom of her dress. John looked furtively out of the window and Margaret laughed. She kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them on his lips. “I’ll see you at home,” she said. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“What is it?”
“If I tell you, it’s not a surprise.”
She walked out the door, aware he was watching her backside. He had no clue at all, but why would he? She never talked about her periods with anyone.
Humming happily as she passed the mess hall, she had an idea. She mounted the rough-sawn steps, holding up the hem of her skirt to avoid catching it on the splinters left from the caulk boots, and walked into the dining hall. The flunkies all stopped working. She hated how being married to John made her seem like royalty to them. She spotted Aino.
“Aino, can I talk with you for a second?”
She saw Aino glance at the other girls, who quickly returned to their tasks. Aino set a huge bowl of beans on a table and came to the door. She said nothing but had drawn herself perfectly erect and was looking at her with that damned Finnish imperturbability, revealing neither pleasure nor displeasure, nothing.
Margaret took a quick breath. “Aino, I know, maybe …” She hesitated, then plunged on. “It sometimes feels … being a person who reads, and no one else does … I mean”—she indicated the world outside the dining hall—“you know … books aren’t much good here. No one really has the time. Logging isn’t really bookish.”
Aino didn’t say a word, but something in her face changed.
“I thought, maybe we could sometime on a Sunday or even a Saturday … before the dance … you could even get ready at our house. We could talk about what we’re reading.” Aino just looked at her. Margaret wanted to shout at her: I need a friend I can talk with. Desperate, she said, “You could help me learn Finnish and I could help you with your English.” She’d never thought before that she wanted to learn Finnish. She waited, fearful of the very likely rejection.
Finally, Aino said, “I like that.”
Relieved, and feeling a sudden wave of excitement, Margaret said, “Next Saturday? Maybe you could come for tea?” She saw Aino’s disappointment.
“I working Saturday.”
“Maybe I could see if John would let you off work.” She saw the girl’s face cloud. She remembered she was dealing with a Finn and her pride. “Just a few hours early. I know you would have to give up some pay. I mean John could prorate the daily rate for say just a few hours.”
“Prorate?” Aino asked.
“You give up one quarter of the day and John cuts one quarter of your pay. That’s prorate.” She watched Aino’s face cloud. She suddenly felt foolish. She’d just suggested Aino pay to have lessons with her. There simply was no spare time. There was no one “extra” to cover for her, even if she could talk John into giving her the time, which she would probably not accept so as not to be privileged above the other girls. She’d never thought just how trapped these girls were.
Then Aino said, “Maybe you asking husband me working early so qvit early.”
Margaret leaped on the idea. “I’m sure he’d be OK with that. And you can eat at our house and not have to pay for your evening meal that night.” She saw Aino’s head move just slightly toward an affirmative. “Oh, would you please? I know we’ll have such a good time. You do like tea, don’t you? Oh, of course, your people like coffee. We can do coffee.” She laughed. “We can do both.”
Aino watched Margaret pick her way through the mud and slash, dress hem in one hand, valise in the other, heading for the railroad tracks. Tea. Aino gave a barely audible snort. Just like an English aristocrat. As soon as she had that thought, it didn’t feel quite fair. She wondered if Margaret had china and then pushed that thought out of her mind as well. She needed to keep her focus. Her English was bad. No one in the henhouse spoke English. Margaret did.
On Saturday, after work, Aino walked to Margaret Reder’s house, a two-story wood building with cedar shingle siding and a roof of hand-split cedar shakes that sat on the side of a steep hill overlooking the Knappton Lumber Company sawmill. The muddy tidal flat under the splintered planks smelled of rotting fish and decaying river weed. Her eyes stung with smoke from the wigwam burners incinerating the sawdust.
The house was set into a hillside, so from the front it looked three stories tall. A steep stairway led to a covered porch that spanned the front of the house. The climb up the unpaved road had Aino taking deep breaths. Scattered along the road were similar large houses that belonged to owners and higher-level managers.
Margaret greeted her in a different dress from the one she’d worn at the camp. Struggling with envy, Aino wondered how many dresses the woman owned. Margaret led her into the living room, which demonstrated a refined sense of taste. She had made
a comfortable and pleasing home of a drafty, all-wood structure. There were stuffed armchairs and a davenport with soft cushions. Under a table that Margaret called a coffee table was a wool rug. A wool rug! Margaret could just waste wool and walk on it instead of using it for clothing. There wasn’t a single rug made of rags torn from worn-out clothes. And a table used only for coffee! Aino struggled with anger as well as envy. She thought of Matti and his friends, sleeping on straw, crowded like animals in a pen, risking their lives for a dollar a day while Margaret held herself like royalty, serving tea, her back erect, her manners flawless. Well, she thought angrily, in America capitalists were the royalty, holders of unearned privilege. Their day would come just as it had in France. If she had to drink tea in dainty cups to further the cause, then so be it. The fulfillment of the cause would destroy the unearned privilege of people like Margaret. The revolution would end undeserved and unfair wealth and power. She threw herself into her first lesson with ferocity.
To Aino’s surprise, Margaret was a born teacher with a lively and curious mind and, though she didn’t want to admit it, a good heart. She was serious about wanting to learn Finnish and asked intelligent questions about Aino’s experiences midwifing with Maíjaliisa, making Aino think she might be pregnant. She couldn’t help liking her.
15
That next Thursday night, Lempi Rompinen was braiding her long, light-brown hair while looking over Aino’s shoulder. Aino was reading a copy of Työmies, the Finnish socialist newspaper published in Michigan. “You’d better be careful with that stuff,” Lempi said.
“Why?”
Lempi tied off the thick single braid with a strip of cloth. “Everyone knows you’ve been talking up a strike with the bunkhouse reds.”
Aino put the newspaper down. “All they want is clean, dry straw and one man off half an hour early to light fires. We live in a castle compared with the bunkhouses.”
Deep River Page 17