Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  Accustomed to eating at Margaret’s, she was hungry. She looked at the two silver dollars and single four-bit piece in her purse. Soup and a sandwich would cost fifteen cents, nearly a third of her daily pay. Eating her soup, she struggled with the knowledge that she paid for it with money earned by working for John Reder. Without Reder, there would be no Reder’s Camp. Who would coordinate the loggers and get the machines if not Reder? We would do it ourselves, she thought. She saw herself leading a meeting of loggers, deciding to buy a new steam donkey or lay a new rail line.

  “Soup any good?” someone asked in Swedish.

  She looked up in delighted astonishment at Joseph Hillström. Not knowing whether to rise or stay seated, she stayed seated. “Yes. A bit overpriced.”

  He sat, gave his order to the waitress, and began talking in Swedish. “This time it’s going to be different. We will have mills and camps shut down at the same time. Not a stick will move after Monday, April first, until we get two dollars and fifty cents for an eight-hour day.”

  Aino did the division in her head. “So, about twenty-eight cents an hour.”

  “Yes, but don’t put it that way. Limiting the workday to nine hours is paramount. That gets lost in an hourly wage demand. ‘Two Fifty for nine.’ Catchy and short, always.”

  “It should be eight.”

  “That’s the goal. Nine first.”

  “And if the owners bring in the scabs?”

  “It will be harder and harder for the owners. I’ve been at all the labor exchange places on the river. I’ve been in the boardinghouses, the saloons. I’ve handed out more than a thousand red cards.” He reached for his coat pocket and placed a red card in front of Aino. “You get all the workers to carry the card; they feel they’re part of us. Scabs will no longer exist. All workers will be in the One Big Union. How many do you need?” he asked.

  Suddenly fired by his enthusiasm, Aino quickly calculated. “One hundred and twenty.” He reached into his valise and threw three bundles of fifty cards each onto her side of the table.

  “How much are dues?” she asked.

  “A dollar to join, fifty cents if you’re unemployed. Twenty-five cents a month, ten if you’re out of work. Nothing like the AF of L.” Aino nervously held one of the packets, looking at it.

  “Will you help me?”

  “Aino. I wish I could, but Reder Logging is small potatoes. You’ll have to handle it yourself. We’re going after Inman, Paulsen, Weyerhaeuser, the big boys. I can’t stay.”

  She stared at the cards.

  “Look, I’m giving a speech tonight,” Hillström said. “That’ll help.”

  She looked at him. “Speeches are easy, if you speak the language. Organizing is hard.”

  “I’m just a rabble-rouser next to people like you.”

  Aino gave a clear signal of what she thought about flattery and false modesty.

  Hillström quickly changed his tone. “That’s why we need you. Don’t you see? We, you and me, and the IWW, together we can eliminate wage slavery. When we’re all in One Big Union, there will be no war, no poverty. Imagine a world of peace and plenty for all. Imagine.”

  Imagine, she did.

  22

  Ilmari and Matti spent their Sundays in March hauling material up to the yarder to make the kiln and then fix the blown tube. Aino spent her Sundays—and all of her evenings—trying to light fires of a different kind.

  Logger by logger, talking sometimes to one logger alone, sometimes to a small group, she began to make headway. More and more loggers took the red cards and signed their names, but she had to have a large majority of them if the Reder loggers were going to join the big industry-wide strike planned for April first.

  She’d made no progress with her men. Matti was focused on moving the yarder. Jouka was sympathetic but skeptical about bucking the whole industry and afraid of being blacklisted. Aksel was his usual independent self. Kullerikki would do whatever they did.

  Margaret Reder always spent her Sunday evenings going over the books. Increasingly, she didn’t like what she saw.

  “This is the third week in a row the price of two and better two-by-fours has fallen,” she said to her husband, who was reading the paper. “San Francisco’s over. Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland are slow. The money’s due on that thousand feet of one-and-a-quarter-inch wire in two weeks.”

  She didn’t really expect him to reply. Logging was his turf and he was good at it. Her job was the future. “Prices for lumber go down, stumpage prices follow.”

  “Damn it, Margaret, don’t teach me to suck eggs.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “You have more cause than lumber prices.” Reder folded the paper. “The IWW is raising hell upriver and that red you didn’t want me to fire is handing out IWW membership cards.” He slapped the folded paper on his thigh. “I treat them better than anyone else in the country.” He looked at her. “Can we take another strike?”

  After some quick arithmetic, Margaret said, “You have two weeks of inventory rafted on the river. If they strike, prices will go up, and we’ll have no labor or food costs.” She tapped her teeth with the pencil eraser, thinking. “The bigger the inventory, the more time we have before we dig into savings.”

  They both knew what that meant—cutting faster.

  Finally, Margaret said, “They’re not going to like it.”

  “I’ll put Huttula on another line east of Johnson’s crew. Good six-foot timber. We can yank it out faster than this big stuff we’re felling right now.”

  After a silence, Margaret said, “John.” The tone was no longer business.

  “Hmm?”

  “Our baby’s due in May.”

  Motivated by a possible strike and a child, Reder was all over the operation, cursing at people he thought too slow, figuring angles and rigging, selecting stands, doing anything to save time—a fervor of activity to increase production. Normal precautions were overlooked. Impatient at a slow choker setter, Reder would jump onto the sled of the steam donkey and blow the main haul signal himself, shouting at the engineer as the choker setters dived for cover. Responding to Reder’s threats of firing them, buckers took on logs sitting precariously on slopes rather than repositioning them to more stable lays with screw jacks. Only superb reflexes and athletic skill avoided catastrophe on more than one occasion. Loggers had a word for it, taken from the railroad signal calling for full speed: highballing. Highballing killed.

  The loggers came back even more exhausted than usual. With each near miss, with every torn shoulder muscle, with every cable-burned hand, with every cursing for what Reder considered poor performance, the grumbling grew. Aino was right there, fueling the fire with every ladle of stew and every stack of pancakes, her anger growing with theirs every time another injured man limped in for dinner. After two weeks, Aino sensed that the loggers had had enough of it. Then Matti walked in to dinner with two badly mangled fingers. He was angry. Aino was outraged.

  That night, Aino talked individually with all the hook tenders, urging them to go as a group to confront Reder. The last one she talked to was Huttula.

  “You see Reder for what he is, Toivo. Now we vote to strike. Now.”

  “Not so easy, Aino.”

  “Now, Toivo. Together with our fellow workers. Only together are we big enough to fight the owners.”

  “Aino,” Huttula said. “What’s a fair wage?”

  Aino was taken aback at the simplicity of the question. “When you get the full value of what your labor added to the product,” she answered carefully.

  “I don’t understand any of that socialist gobbledygook. It’s just German and Russian castles in the sky. What’s a fair wage, for us, for Reder. In dollars and cents?”

  Aino thought about dignity and fairness but realized if she were to have any success she had to have a simple answer to this simple question.

  “The IWW is demanding a raise from a dollar seventy-five a day, with a day being basically dark to dark
, to two dollars and fifty cents for a nine-hour day. I would ask Reder for two fifty for an eight-hour day with safe working conditions and tell him that if we don’t get it by April first, we’ll strike with the IWW.”

  Once again Toivo Huttula was selected to speak for the hook tenders, but this time they all went with him. The confrontation took place in Reder’s office after Saturday’s shift. The six men fit themselves into the room and shut the door, surrounding Reder, who sat at his desk.

  “Mr. Reder,” Toivo said. “No more this highballing. Too dangerous.”

  “You tell the IWW to stop threatening a strike and I’ll slow down.”

  “We not IWW, but all good loggers. The only reason no one getting killed here.”

  “If you don’t want to do what it takes to keep this operation afloat, you know how to leave.”

  “John Reder, we log together long time,” Huttula said. “You keep this up, for sure, someone getting killed.”

  “We have been together a long time, Toivo, but you let me run my own goddamned outfit. You want to run one, go build one. It’s a free country.”

  “It’s not just highballing,” one of the other hook tenders said.

  “Oh, there’s more?” Reder asked sarcastically.

  “Yes, Mr. Reder, there is more.”

  “Well? I’m listening.”

  The man looked at the others, getting several nods. “We want two fifty for an eight-hour day.”

  Reder laughed. “And I want a virgin whore and a drunken Saturday night with no hangover on Sunday.”

  “You give what we asking,” Huttula said, “and we log like hell for you.”

  “I give you that and there’ll be no Reder Logging to log these woods. Not even the IWW is asking that.”

  Huttula slowly straightened himself to his full height. “After eight hours, men tired and not so fast. Logging is enough danger when not so tired. Two dollars and fifty cents for an eight-hour day. Or by God we strike.”

  “You can work eight hours for two dollars and fifty cents in hell and I’ll help every goddamned one of you get there. I hear one peep more out of you and you’ll be looking for hook-tending jobs all over this side of the mountains and you won’t find one because I’ll make goddamn sure you don’t. Now get the hell out of my office.”

  The group looked at Huttula.

  “Get the hell out or goddamnit I’ll start firing you sons of bitches right now.”

  “John,” Huttula said. “You making one big mistake.”

  “I’ll run my logging company as I please, Toivo. Now get out of here. I’ve got work to do.”

  When the door shut, Reder sat looking at it for a long time.

  When Aino heard the outcome of the meeting, she talked with the girls in the henhouse. That night, the girls began moving beans and other storable food from the kitchen to hiding places in the woods.

  On Friday, March 29, the accident happened. Harold Iverson, the man Matti had fought in the bunkhouse, was an experienced bucker. He’d just cut a log to length and was tending to his saw downslope as Matti and Aksel struggled to pull the choker to another big log uphill from him. They shouted at Kullerikki to whistle two longs and two shorts for slack. They got it, but the engineer, having just been threatened by Reder with being fired for going too slow, forgot that slack had been requested and, ever mindful of keeping the line moving, tightened up on the main line before Aksel got the choker hook around the choker cable. The hook jerked out of Aksel’s hands, stuck momentarily on the underside of the log, and then was underneath and away as the main line tightened, starting the log rolling. Matti shouted at Aksel and dived for a hole while Aksel jumped clear of the rolling log. It pounded right over Matti and down the hill, forty or fifty tons of wood in the shape of a steamroller picking up speed. Iverson heard the shouts and looked up to see the log barreling toward him. Throwing his saw, he ran to the right, but his boot caught and he went down. Had he been half a second faster, had that piece of slash not been there, had the line not been tightened prematurely, had Aksel just managed to hook the line before it tightened—a series of unfulfilled hads. The log crushed Iverson’s legs and bounded down the hill where it came to a rest.

  Kullerikki was signaling “man-down” as hard as he could, and the donkey engineer pulled the drums out of gear. John Reder heard the man-down piping and his heart sank.

  “What happened?” he asked, breathing hard as he reached the yarder.

  “Don’t know yet. Can’t see,” the engineer replied nervously. They waited. There was a whistle for go ahead slow from Kullerikki, and the engineer carefully began winding in the main line. Another jerk on the whistle wire signaled him to stop. Small figures below the landing appeared from the defile where they’d been hidden from view, carrying a man between them.

  “That’s Iverson,” the engineer said. “Långström and Koski have him between them.”

  “Who are those men coming behind them?”

  “That’s Huttula’s crew. They’re coming to whip my ass.”

  By the time Matti and Aksel reached the landing with Iverson, the rest of the crew had beaten the donkey engineer nearly unconscious, ignoring Reder’s attempts to stop them. Iverson’s eyes were wild with pain, but he said nothing. They laid him next to the moaning engineer on the yarder skids and looked up expectantly at Reder.

  “Get back to work,” Reder said.

  “Maybe we take Iverson to—” Aksel began to say, but he was cut off by Reder.

  “We’ll handle it. Any damage to the rigging?”

  They both shook their heads no. “Then what in hell are you standing here for?”

  Reder took over the yarder. The engineer and Iverson were carried to the bunkhouse. Alma Wittala, who doubled as the camp surgeon, went to work cutting away Iverson’s stagged trousers and high boots. Both of Iverson’s tibias and his left fibula were broken in several places. One piece of his right tibia had pierced the skin. She had seen worse. She gave Iverson several shots of rye whiskey and a cloth to clench between his teeth, then she pulled the bones back together so they could have a chance of knitting. She finished by pouring kerosene over the open wounds before splinting and bandaging. Then she tended to the donkey engineer, who’d said nothing and asked for nothing. Going against the whistle was a major crime and in a logging crew all justice is local. He just hoped he’d paid in full.

  Reder paid Iverson for the full day’s pay but said he’d stop his wages after that. He could heal in the bunkhouse if he wanted, but he was probably through logging for Reder for the foreseeable future. If not forever.

  That night, Huttula rose from his place at dinner. He pulled his red IWW membership card from his pocket and held it high above him, saying nothing. Soon at least twenty loggers held their red cards high. No one spoke. They were all looking at Huttula.

  “Iskemme.” he said. Then he repeated it in English. “We strike.”

  23

  Reder’s first response was to grab his rifle, several lengths of chain, and some padlocks. Making sure everyone saw him, he locked and chained the mess hall doors.

  He handed the rifle to the cook. “Shoot anyone who tries to steal the company’s food.”

  The cook gave the rifle back.

  Aino and Lempi, anticipating Reder’s move, had carried pots and kettles into the henhouse the night before. With help from the loggers and the tacit approval of Alma and the cook, they’d added more sacks of beans and flour to what they had already hidden in the woods. They built a fire pit in front of the mess hall porch and began cooking. The conflict between labor and capital, spun out so elegantly in political and economic theories, was fundamentally about hunger outlasting avarice.

  Everyone chipped in to pay for a doctor from Ilwaco. He changed Iverson’s bandages, grunted in satisfaction at Alma’s work, and said Iverson would heal but would never log again. Iverson turned his head to the wall and spoke to no one for two days. That was when Lempi came into the dark bunkhouse one morning and hande
d him a cup of coffee. She soon had him talking to her—then to the others.

  A week went by without anyone’s even seeing John Reder. Aksel watched his savings for the gill net boat dwindle. Alma Wittala, Aino, and the other girls prepared food on the outside fires until Aino talked Ilmari into improvising some outdoor stoves. Jouka would sit next to the fire pit, playing his violin if it wasn’t raining too hard, watching Aino and the other girls cooking. Matti took advantage of the strike to move cable up to the donkey. He and Ilmari had laboriously spliced two coils of one hundred feet of seven-eighths-inch cable from lengths of scrap. On the first day they each took a coil. The coils could be packed only a short distance before legs and backs gave out. A good part of the time was spent dragging one coil at a time, the two brothers counting aloud and heaving simultaneously on the uphills or when the mud got bad. Matti cursed the cable frequently. Even Ilmari cursed it once. That first day, they got the coils about a third of the way to the site.

  At the end of the second week, Alma, Aino, and Lempi added up the strike committee’s cash and took inventory of the food on hand. Then they made up two daily menus, one based on restricted rations and the other on very restricted rations.

  Two days later, Aino found herself trying to get a sawbuck pack saddle onto the camp mule, Sally, to go down to Higgins’s store with some of the precious strike-fund money for beans and other needed food. Ten years earlier, Sally had hauled back the heavy main line to the next log. With the arrival of Reder’s first steam donkey, Sally was made redundant, but no one, including Reder, had the heart to turn her into meat as had been done with the oxen. Technically, she belonged to Reder, but even Reder knew she belonged to the camp.

  Sally was blowing out her belly to frustrate Aino’s attempt to tighten the girth when Jouka came up and punched the mule just below her rib cage. The puffed-up belly disappeared. Aino quickly cinched the pack saddle into place.