Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  She guided the head into the cervix, pulling with one hand, using Margaret’s muscles to push and turn the baby, pulling the tiny arm to position the shoulder, pulling, gently squeezing, pulling, feeling, Margaret clenching her teeth on the cloth towel, daylight coming into the room, the lanterns growing dim in comparison.

  Suddenly Margaret screamed. “Cut it out, Aino, cut the baby out.”

  John Reder knelt beside his wife and began to pray out loud.

  “No. We risking infection, bleeding.” Then she heard an inner voice saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to kill this baby and kill Margaret.”

  Margaret screamed again. Her womb tightened around Aino’s hands and wrist, the little body twisted so the shoulder went tight and then it was through. Now the head. The womb had the head flexed against the little chest. Aino gently kept the pressure on, keeping it there. The head must not leave the chest. The chin could hang it up. The umbilical cord could get in and around the neck. Nature wants the head against the chest.

  She squeezed with her hand, her long fingers grasping around the fontanelle, squeezing the head to a point, squeezing the baby’s skull to an egg shape, a hard-boiled egg without the shell. Squeezing. Then …

  The miracle of birth.

  After Aino had cut the umbilical cord and Reder had buried the afterbirth outside, the two sat at the kitchen table across from each other. They were sharing the pot of coffee Reder had made several hours earlier. “You all right walking back to your brother’s?” he asked. “I’d go with you, but …” He looked upstairs where Margaret was asleep with her daughter on her breast.

  “Best staying with Mrs. Reder. I going OK myself.”

  She went and took one more peek at Margaret asleep and breathing easy. John Reder followed and looked over her shoulder. She turned to him and whispered, “Clean. Everything very clean or bad little plant can kill mother. Mama’s milk usually make baby OK, but maybe bad little animals are making red bumps and white …” She couldn’t come up with the English for bacteria and pus. “Ugly bumps. You will see. You get doctor if little bumps.”

  Reder nodded.

  Rain rattled the windows, but the wind had died down. Reder helped Aino on with her coat. This gesture of politeness gave Aino a feeling of great satisfaction. Up at Reder’s Camp, John Reder was the king in his kingdom—and she was nothing. Here, for the past few hours, she had been the queen. She wondered if this was how Margaret felt all the time.

  “Just a moment,” Reder said. He disappeared into the small office off the living room. When he returned, he held out a twenty-dollar gold piece to her.

  “I cannot thank you enough. Please take it. You earned it.”

  Aino looked at the gold piece—nearly two month’s wages. She was out of a job. He was the man who fired her. After a moment of hesitation, she said slowly, “Someday people will see save a life is different from earning wages.”

  Reder tried to put the gold piece in her hand and she gently turned it away. “What is market price to save someone you love?” she asked softly. “It is all you have. How can price be fair when one side willing to pay everything?”

  Reder said nothing.

  “How you can make this business?” Aino said. “People not things like logs and lumber. Earnings, prices, supply, demand, they make no sense with people, only with things.”

  Reder looked at her a long time, cool and steady. He put the coin in his pocket. “Margaret likes you. Now I see why. You’re a special girl, Aino Koski. You’ll always be welcome in my house.” Then his eyes revealed just the smallest twinkle “But if I ever see you up at the camp, I’ll call the sheriff and have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Aino didn’t know how to respond.

  Reder opened the door. A gust of wind sent rain splattering into the hallway. “Aino,” Reder said. “I will recommend you to anyone as a midwife.” He smiled at her. “Until the revolution comes, I suggest you charge ten dollars a delivery.”

  When Aino reached the muddy street she suddenly felt compelled to turn around. He still stood by the door. He waved to her. She hesitated, then waved back. Tired, elated, and confused she set off in the rain for Ilmahenki.

  25

  Two weeks after the Reders’ daughter was born, Matti and Ilmari were ready to move the donkey. In the bunkhouse on Saturday night, June 1, Matti told Jouka and Aksel that he and Ilmari could use some help packing the haul-back line, grease, additional blocks, and wire to the site.

  “I’m not doing much tomorrow,” Jouka said.

  “I’ll help,” Aksel said.

  Matti was a little surprised at their eagerness.

  The next day the three of them walked from Reder’s Camp to Ilmahenki. When they got to Ilmari’s shop, Jouka asked, “How’s Aino?”

  “Ask her yourself,” Matti replied. “She’s at the house.”

  Jouka smiled and walked off. Cocking his head sideways and raising his eyebrows, Matti looked at Aksel. Aksel looked at the ground. Then, without a word, he followed Jouka. Ilmari also followed, smiling, proud that these two young men were vying for his little sister.

  When Aino saw Jouka coming, she scooted quickly into the house, going to the mirror on the kitchen wall to get her hair in order. She put her glasses in her apron pocket. Then, she put them on again and took her apron off. Then she thought better of that and put the apron back on. When she started again to take off her glasses, she saw another figure following behind the figure she guessed was Jouka. It was Aksel. She smiled.

  Aksel and Jouka came in, taking their hats off, followed by Ilmari. The three standing together, two tall and fair, one not so tall but dark and broad of chest, made the kitchen feel cramped. She took their hats and motioned them to the table. The three men sat, saying nothing, while Aino poured the coffee and cut each a slice of pulla.

  “Come to help Matti with the wire rope?” Ilmari asked after everyone had taken a sip and a bite.

  “Yoh,” Jouka replied. Aksel just nodded.

  There was more silence while the men chewed. Aino knew they were friends, but she could almost feel the air quivering. It made her anxious and simultaneously terribly pleased with herself. Finally, Aino asked, “How’s it going at camp? Reder keeping to the bargain?”

  “Yoh,” Jouka replied.

  Aino waited to see if anything would follow. It didn’t. She looked at Aksel. “The savings for the boat coming along?”

  “Yoh,” Aksel replied.

  And so it went, until Matti poked his head in the door and Aksel and Jouka left. A nice Sunday chat.

  Jouka came along to help again the next Sunday as well. Aksel had taken off for Astoria the night before and no one expected him back. This time, Aino was hoeing the garden weeds when she heard Jouka clear his throat. She startled, then turned to face him, fighting the urge to take her glasses off. She was self-aware enough to know that she was vain, but there was no need for Jouka to know. She left them on.

  Jouka took the hoe from her. “Kiitos,” she said. She followed behind him, pulling the uprooted weeds.

  He stopped after a while and faced her. “You weren’t at the dance last night.”

  “Busy.”

  “Too busy to dance? Aino …” He gestured around him, questioning why she would stay home.

  “I was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Aino could feel Jouka struggling between genuine interest and some sort of jealousy.

  “I was at the Astorian Suomalainen Sosialisti Klubi.”

  “And you walked home at night? Alone?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, but no. I stayed in the new ASSK hall.”

  “Alone?”

  “Jouka. It is all perfectly legitimate.”

  “People will talk.”

  “People talk no matter what I do.”

  “So, why not do things people won’t talk about?”

  “Like?”


  “Like come to the dance at Knappton next Saturday. I won’t be playing. There’s a band from Astoria.”

  “People will talk about that, for sure.”

  “Yes, but that kind of talk is expected. Matti can come. It’ll all be legitimate.”

  Aino paused. She looked at Jouka solemnly. “Jouka, I’d love to go, but I’ve committed to making a speech in Willapa.”

  “A speech?”

  “What? I can’t talk?”

  Jouka got flustered. “No …” He started hoeing, fiercely. She followed, weeding.

  Jouka turned to her. “Is it because of Aksel Långström?”

  “Nooo,” Aino said. “He’s my little brother’s friend. He’s a kid.”

  “He doesn’t look like one.”

  Aino didn’t respond.

  “Matti says you’ll be twenty next March,” Jouka said.

  “How am I supposed to take that little piece of information that I already knew?”

  Jouka looked at her, as if she were doing something to hurt herself. “I turned twenty-two in April,” he said.

  “I like you, Jouka, but this stops now.”

  Looking into her eyes, pressing his lips together, Jouka dropped the hoe at her feet and walked off, leaving Aino trembling.

  * * *

  Jouka joined Matti and Ilmari as they walked to the donkey site. Ilmari had patched the hole in the steam tube and now the three began the backbreaking work of replacing the lost water with creek water. They reeved the cable through two blocks and Matti ran one of the blocks, paying out the wire rope as he went, to a stump, attaching it with a hook choker looped back on the standing line. They greased every moving part.

  Then the moment came. The three stood looking at the iron monster, saying nothing. Matti lit the fire. This time only a little rust flaked off as the boiler expanded. They watched it tensely, Matti throwing wood into the firebox, building steam pressure. Two large steam pistons began to hammer back and forth, moving drivers, smaller versions of those found on a steam locomotive, one on each side of the donkey. Ilmari climbed onto the machine, grabbed the five-foot-long steel gear lever, and gave Matti a grim look. He threw his weight against the friction clutch that linked the axle of the single drum to the main shaft being spun by twin drivers. Screaming in protest at being wakened from its long sleep, the yarder drum bucked briefly and then began turning.

  The three of them looked at each other and said nothing.

  Matti gave two pulls of his fist for an imaginary whistle and Ilmari gave two toots back from the tarnished brass whistle, then put tension on the line.

  The line lifted off the ground, quivering with the strain. With a belch of steam the old donkey lurched from the mud accumulated around the two large skids bolted beneath it. The donkey bucked and squealed in protest, but it moved. Matti ran to clear obstacles as it jerked toward the fixed block. When the donkey closed on the block, Matti removed the block from the stump and reset it another two hundred feet closer to the bay. Grunting with the strain, pulling the cable to unwind it from the donkey’s drum and attaching it to the reset block, they started the next leg.

  Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1907, the occasional midwife job kept up Aino’s contribution to Ilmari—along with cooking, cleaning, milking, mending, knitting, and tending the vegetable garden. In late September, Aino was bundling the hay in the field, moving behind Ilmari, smooth and steady with the scythe. He’d been in the forest with Vasutäti the whole day before and Aino had lit into him because he’d left her with all the work.

  As always, Ilmari took criticism as he took praise, which is to say without affect. He said he was sorry, got out his whetstone, and started sharpening his scythe. His eyes, however, were seeing something hers didn’t see.

  It was a typical late-September day, the sun out, the air cool, but she could almost feel the rain gathering itself out to sea. Ilmari said there were two seasons here, not four. The wet season would start in October and go through June, succeeded by the dry season, which went through September. She remembered following behind her father and Ilmari, Matti following her, gathering sheaves with her mother, just before Ilmari left for America, helping her mother weave the hay into stacks that would shed the rain and snow. She remembered Suomi, its birches and lakes, rolling hills, icy still rivers in deep winter, the sun low in the south casting blue shadows from cozy houses onto the snow and the smell of pines and wood smoke. She paused to look at Ilmari’s tiny purchase of civilization in the vast forest where rain-swollen streams, hidden from view by trees too large and close together to see through or by salal taller than a man and too thick to penetrate, ran unseen to wide tidal rivers. The farms here, unlike the tidy farms at home, seemed more like survivors in a battlefield of stumps and slash, just waiting to be reclaimed by the forest that rolled unconquered and impenetrable, all the way to the other side of the Cascade mountains. She wanted desperately to return to Suomi.

  Her brothers were focused on the here and now. Sunday by Sunday, two hundred feet at a time, the length of the main cable, Ilmari and Matti yanked, bucked, and hauled the donkey to Willapa Bay, just south of Long Island. They built a raft around the yarder and, through several more weeks of nearly superhuman effort, managed to get an A-frame set in the mud exposed at low tide. They hoisted the donkey into the air, so it hung beneath the A-frame like a fat spider, and at high tide lowered it to the raft and towed it to the mouth of Deep River behind a hired tug. Again, using the yarder to pull itself, they moved the raft to Ilmahenki.

  The entire journey took five months of Sundays, but by November 1907, Matti and Ilmari were ready to start logging. Their first piece of business was to negotiate with Higgins to buy more cable on credit. The Koski brothers’ collateral was their promise of sawmill-ready logs, because they had timber and a working yarder on-site.

  Logging was less about cutting down trees than about moving them. Ideal logs were four to eight feet in diameter and up to forty feet long. These logs weighed over twenty tons. The bigger logs, if left at forty feet, could weigh more than fifty tons, requiring that they be cut to thirty-two-foot or even sixteen-foot lengths. To move a log from where the tree was felled to water deep enough to float it required bravery, brute strength, and endurance. More important, it required extremely creative engineering. It quickly became apparent that Matti was a natural engineer. He’d solve the most difficult problems of angles, slopes, and gravity with secondhand jerry-rigged equipment made by Ilmari, and with hand tools. If he had had the opportunity to go to school, he would have been building bridges and skyscrapers, but work like that would have bored him.

  Jouka and Aksel agreed to help on Sundays for a dollar a day in cash plus the sandwiches that Aino provided along with coffee. They logged the easy trees close to the river first, a mixture of spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock, the last of which they worked around because hemlock wasn’t worth much. As they moved farther from Deep River, the logging got tougher. They made corduroy skid roads from smaller logs to move the bigger ones. Ideal-size trees, four to six feet in diameter and easier to move, were plentiful. There were plenty of eight- to ten-footers, but they took a gamble on those, as there was a higher risk of rotten cores and other defects. The giants, twelve feet across or more, were predominately the Sitka spruce, but included cedar and Douglas fir. It could take two weekends just to get one of these giants down.

  26

  That fall and winter of 1907 to 1908, Aino gained some renown speaking at socialist club meetings, at dances, after church potlucks. Fellow IWWs helped promote her lectures with flyers. The few who owned homes put her up for the night.

  She stood in the rain outside the mess halls and bunkhouses of the logging camps. She stood on boxes outside boardinghouses. She spoke in the living rooms of fellow socialists. She joined in the growing repertoire of songs, singing the strange English words in a forceful soprano. She would follow a Salvation Army band in the larger towns like Willapa and Nordland and re
tain some of the crowd to preach—yes, it was preaching, she thought—the good news of the coming revolution, the wake-up call of class consciousness, how the system exploited labor, and how to forever banish exploitation of the poor by the rich. She had no interest in changing society gradually; she even thought it would be better to have the capitalist class clamp down harder on labor, because like a boiler building steam the system would one day simply burst.

  But it was slow going. Meetings had to be scheduled by mail weeks in advance, and the letters had to be mailed and picked up in Knappton. She would miss important meetings because of a woman going into labor early or late, annoying her comrades.

  In late February 1908, already exhausted from a difficult three-day delivery with little sleep, Aino had been up the river, talking to sawmill workers. She had to take the boat back to Knappton, because another mother was due and she could not chance another day away. The midwife business was growing, perhaps too much. Desperate for sleep, she forced herself off the boat at Altoona, where there was a large fish-processing plant. Just half a day more. She’d catch the next boat. When the shift changed, she handed out flyers to both shifts. She passed one to a large man who looked her in the eye as he slowly tore it to shreds.

  “You’re on private property. Leave.”

  Aino stood as tall as she could, but she came only to the man’s chest level. “I am outside the fence.”