Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “Yeah, but you’re not off the property.” The man pulled back his coat to reveal a pistol in a shoulder holster.

  Aino looked around at the devastation of logged-off land. The man had probably cut down the trees and financed the fish-processing plant with the proceeds.

  She left, trembling with fear and anger. She walked seven miles to Rosburg, where she collapsed aboard the General Washington, arriving in Knappton just after dark. Feeling guilty about leaving her brother with all the chores, she headed up the Tapiola trail, muddy with a mixture of forest humus, fallen fir and hemlock needles from winter storms, and relentless rain. A waxing half-moon gave her just enough light to stay on the trail, but not enough to distinguish shallow standing water from deeper puddles.

  After a couple of miles, she got tired of dodging around the deeper puddles, took off her shoes, and just waded through them, holding her skirt above her knees, the mud beneath the puddles up to her ankles and the cold water sometimes up to her midcalves. She lost all feeling in her bare feet. Every small sound became a hungry cougar or bear in her mind. After two hours of slow going, a crackling in the brush to her left startled her and she lost her balance. She fell forward full-length in the mud, scattering pamphlets from her large purse. She turned onto her back screaming with frustration, kicking like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum, and covering herself with mud. She ended in tears, staring up at the faintly luminous moonlight visible between the dark trees. It occurred to her that if she were married she wouldn’t have to midwife. She could organize without the frustrations of trying to work around baby deliveries.

  She reached Ilmahenki after several hours. Ilmari took one look at her and began throwing wood into the kitchen stove. He pumped a large potful of water, placed it on top, and went outside to start a fire in the sauna. She undressed in the kitchen, her clothes so stiff with mud they could nearly stand up on their own. She put on one of Ilmari’s coats, shivering against the cold. Ilmari returned. “Half an hour for sauna,” he said. The water boiled and he made coffee. Then he went back to the sauna to let out the smoke.

  She sat in the sauna a long time, still, naked, and warm, staring at the glowing embers in the kiuas, listening to Ilmari’s kantele, lonely and spare in the night.

  While Aino had been organizing, Ilmari, Aksel, Jouka, and Matti had cut their way to the back side of Ilmahenki. Fearful that he was making progress too slowly for Rauha and her mother, Ilmari had made another trip to Nordland, leaving his blacksmithing work in the middle of the week, so he wouldn’t lose a Sunday with Matti. He had the sinking feeling that no matter what he did, he did it too slowly.

  By March 1908, the last of the timber stood on the other side of a steep ravine that blocked access to the river, now nearly three-quarters of a mile away. About two-thirds up a hill on the other side stood the granddaddy of them all, over fifteen feet in diameter and more than 120 feet to the first limb—a lot of clear fir waiting to be turned into cash.

  It took Matti, Ilmari, and Aksel four full Sundays using axes, saws, and wedges to get the behemoth down. When it went, they watched, hiding behind another tree, their mouths open with awe. In the quiet after it fell, needles still drifting in the air, they walked over to inspect it. The tree towered above their heads lying on its side.

  Everyone looked at Matti. Now what? Matti, who’d clearly been thinking about it, turned to Aksel and pointed to a still-standing three-foot-diameter fir. “Can you hang a block about two-thirds of the way up that fir?”

  “Are you crazy?” Aksel answered. “That’s three times the height of any mast I’ve ever seen, much less climbed.”

  Matti stood there, but his eyes were moving from point to point around him.

  “If you can get a small block and cable up there, I can haul up a bull block. Then, I can move the yarder over there.” He pointed. “We run line totally clear of the ground across the ravine. We can move every tree on this side, including the logs from this monster. In the air.”

  Jouka laughed. “And people accuse me of drinking too much,” he said.

  “I heard a logger on the Oregon side named Johnny Yeon has already done something like it,” Matti said.

  No one said anything; all were thinking. Then Ilmari said, “Horses can’t climb trees.” Everyone knew he meant there was no way to haul the line back to hook up the next log. They all turned to Matti.

  Matti grinned and walked over to the yarder. He jumped up on one of the skids. Pointing down into the gears he said, “I can get a second drum in here, just like the two-drum skidders Reder’s got.” He paused. “If Ilmari can make it.” They all turned to Ilmari.

  Ilmari looked at the gears for a long time. “You draw it; I’ll make it,” he said. Everyone turned to Aksel.

  Aksel looked at the tree a long time. The others knew what was going through his mind. This tree looked healthy, but with old-growth trees, you never knew if they were solid all the way up. A perfectly good-looking tree could just be waiting for the next strong blow to break apart, weakened by insect damage or rot.

  Aksel took a deep breath. “You expect me to go up there? Risk my neck for a dollar a day?”

  At the mention of money, Matti knew he had him. “I’ll give you three dollars extra after we sell the logs.”

  Aksel stared at a point over a hundred feet above him, considering and discarding several ideas for getting not just himself but a massive steel block that weighed several hundred pounds as well as about a hundred feet of heavy cable up that high. He looked around. They’d probably need to find a similar tree near the east end of the show. That would be an extra six dollars. At his savings rate, the fishing boat would be reality months sooner.

  “I think I can do it on springboards,” he said to Matti. “It’ll cost you four dollars.”

  “Three fifty.”

  “OK. But you pay for the coffin and burial on Peaceful Hill over east of Tapiola. And you pay to ship everything I own and my money back to my parents.” Everyone could see that Aksel was serious.

  “You’ll have to write me into a will,” Matti replied, equally serious. “Where’s your money?”

  “I don’t believe this,” Jouka said. He looked at Ilmari, who remained passive. This was between Matti, Aksel, and God.

  “There’s a twenty-dollar gold piece and thirteen silver dollars in a can on the back side of a stump down by Bean Creek,” Aksel said. “I’ll show you tonight.”

  “It would be thirteen pieces of silver,” Ilmari said. “Only you’re selling your soul to Matti.”

  They all looked at Ilmari with astonishment: he had cracked a joke.

  Aksel showed both Matti and Jouka the location of the money, because accidents didn’t always happen to just one person. He wrote out a will to benefit his parents, naming Matti as the administrator with Ilmari as the second and Jouka as the third.

  The next Sunday afternoon, Aksel quietly tied a small swamping ax and a short crosscut saw that Ilmari had fashioned from a larger broken one onto his waist. He’d found two solid springboards, both about eight inches wide and five feet long, with one end jacketed with steel plate. He tied one to his belt. He then attached about three hundred feet of carefully coiled line to the back side of his belt, where it would be relatively out of the way. He chopped out a niche for the first springboard at head level and hammered the board into it so that with weight on it the end inside the niche pushed up against the top of the niche, making it solid but possible to pull out when upward force was applied. Pulling down on the board just above his head to test it, he looked at his friends, licked his lips, and jumped, grabbing the board, scrambling to get on top of it. There, balanced on the narrow board, with nothing between him and the ground but his caulk boots and balance, he started chopping out the next niche.

  He knew from his days on the ship to focus on the work in front of him. Below him, he could hear the other three working. No use wasting their time watching Aksel do his job. After an hour of work, he was higher than on any m
ast he’d climbed on the Elna.

  Chop, pull the lower board loose with the attached rope, hammer it in above, test it, jump, scramble to the next level, teeter uncertainly for a moment, get balanced and centered, repeat.

  He reached the first limb at about eighty feet above the ground. It had to be removed so it wouldn’t interfere with the lines. He looked down at his three friends, their legs foreshortened beneath them. This was a perspective he knew, but he never had to cut his way to the top of a mast. He undercut the limb just above him and then began hacking at it. It cracked with its weight and started to bend down, swiveling on the wood still attached to the trunk. Aksel gave a hard swing and cut through. The limb sailed slowly down, its long smaller limbs and needles making it almost float as it grew smaller and smaller beneath him. The tree trembled and shook slightly with the shift in weight. The limb crashed to the ground. He saw Matti and Jouka start to move it away from the base of the tree. He looked above him to the next limb.

  After several hours, Matti signaled he’d gone high enough. Aksel lowered one end of the thin line and Matti attached a small block and length of chain to it. Aksel chained the block to the tree and looped the line over the sheave, paying it out until both ends were on the ground. Then Matti attached a large block weighing several hundred pounds along with more chain to the line and attached the other end to one of the yarder drums. He wound the line in, pulling the large block up to Aksel, over one hundred feet above the ground.

  His arms and legs trembling with the effort, Aksel tied in the large heavy block. Matti attached the heavy main cable to the lighter line, hauled it up the same way, and Aksel ran it through the large block. When all the steel cable was set, Matti gave Aksel the signal on the whistle and Aksel began his equally perilous journey back down, relying on the friction from a length of rope he’d looped around the tree to hold him. He finally reached the ground and staggered off to sit against a stump. His racing heart slowed, the trembling stopped, and he was back to work in ten minutes.

  It was two more weeks before they had bucked the monster into sixteen-foot and twenty-four-foot lengths and split the two largest logs down the middle by drilling a line of holes deep into their cores, filling the holes with blasting powder, and blowing the logs apart.

  They had laid small alder and fir trees in a corduroy road in front of the huge logs’ path, sniped their ends so the logs would not catch on the road logs, then foot by foot, Ilmari babied, cajoled, sweet-talked, and on occasion even swore to wrestle the logs to Deep River.

  By the end of each Sunday, more logs floated in Deep River, held together in a boom by scraps of chain and wire rope. In April, with Deep River still swollen and turbulent from winter rains, the four friends ran the boom of several hundred logs to Willapa Bay. They hired a tug to haul the boom to a mill in Willapa. The mill paid with a check.

  After showing Rauha and Louhi the check and sealing the betrothal with a shy kiss in front of his future mother-in-law, Ilmari walked into the Bank of Nordland and asked to open an account in the name of Sampo Manufacturing. Al Drummond invited Ilmari into his office. The check was examined. It proved to be from a reputable buyer and Drummond said that when it cleared, Ilmari could write checks on his new account.

  “I need cash start now. Pay my brother.”

  “Not until the check clears.”

  “But … but I wanting get married. I needing cash money now.”

  “Three weeks.”

  “I taking my money else place.”

  “Your decision. You do know that Louhi Jokinen is a silent partner of mine. I don’t think she’d feel too happy about you taking your money ‘else place,’” he said with a smirk.

  It was the first bad feeling about the money. The second came when Rauha said the wedding would be after the mill was operating. He’d objected, though it was soon clear that it wasn’t entirely Rauha’s doing but her mother’s. He acquiesced. Then Rauha hit him with the third bad feeling. He must sign a document stating that if he died or there was a divorce, his share of Sampo Manufacturing would go to her.

  Ilmari was taken aback by this hardness.

  “There will be no divorce. A marriage is before God.”

  “And if you die?”

  “What about my brothers and sister?”

  “Their mother isn’t putting up the other half of the initial capital. And my mother isn’t either unless she’s sure her daughter will be taken care of.”

  Ilmari took a small step back. She took his hands in hers. “Ilmari, we can build Sampo together.” She kissed him suddenly. He went stiff. She kissed him again. “It’s not about me; it’s about our children.” The blue eyes, the soft dress flowing over the soft body, the swell of her breasts, the long blond hair done neatly in braids atop her head, a ribbon the color of forget-me-not matching her blue eyes, making them seem as wide and deep as the lakes of Finland. The deal was done. The wedding was set for Sunday, October 25, 1908—provided the mill was running.

  27

  Ilmari’s check cleared three weeks after the sale of the Ilmahenki logs and Matti opened an account in Astoria in the name of 200-Foot Logging. The following Sunday, Aino watched Matti and Aksel, who were studying the old steam donkey. The two friends hadn’t spoken for several minutes.

  Finally, Matti said, “We’d get more power if Ilmari could rig an extra gear right there.” He pointed to a spot in the machinery.

  “Yoh,” Aksel said.

  They looked at the problem for a while.

  “You’d lose power to the friction,” Aksel said.

  Matti said nothing for a full minute. Then he pointed out another spot, “Maybe put it right there.”

  “Yoh.”

  More silence.

  Aino thought she would go crazy. They were not even looking at each other, just looking at the equipment.

  Finally, Aksel said, “It’ll take more inch-and-a-quarter cable. It’s expensive.”

  “Yoh.”

  “What would it leave us?”

  “Two hundred,” Matti said.

  More silence.

  “You said ‘us,’” Matti said.

  “Until I get my boat.”

  Matti kicked the skids of the donkey gently, thinking. After a while he said, “Saaranpa has fifty acres of good fir and cedar left over from selling his homestead before moving to Astoria. No one will touch it, because it’s on a really steep ravine and over a mile from the river. He’ll sell it for two hundred dollars.”

  “That’s the whole farm,” Aksel said. “What do you think we’d get for the logs?”

  “Eight hundred. That quadruples the capital.”

  “If everything goes right.”

  Matti climbed up on the steam donkey and tugged on the large gear lever, moving the cogs into and out of the gears absentmindedly. “Sixty-forty, because I’m putting up the money. You want to look at the site?”

  Aksel, his hands in his pockets, looked at his shoes and said nothing. Then he said, “Yoh.”

  They shook hands and the partnership was formed.

  Aino just shook her head and went back into the house.

  The two friends took Ilmari’s boat upriver, towing it over the occasional rapids to just below where Deep River split into the north and middle forks. The river had narrowed to a steep canyon full of prime old-growth trees, thickly packed, most of them six to eight feet in diameter, but some monsters as well.

  “I can see why it’s going for just two hundred dollars,” Aksel said. “You’ll have to yard downhill and you’ll get hung up on stumps all day long.”

  Matti said nothing, his eyes moving from point to point. He gestured at a large tree. “Can you get a block to the top of that one the way you did back at Ilmahenki?”

  Aksel looked at the tree, about a third of the way up the steep slope. “Yoh.”

  Matti nodded. “Saaranpa will think we’re suckers. He doesn’t know what we know, and he doesn’t know we know it.”

  * * *

&n
bsp; Two weeks later, Aksel and Matti collected their final pay from John Reder. On Sunday, they were on the General Washington crossing the Columbia to Astoria. The canning factories were not working Sundays, but the June blueback run would be starting about now, followed by the big August Chinook run. Soon, dozens of canneries would be operating on two or even three shifts, seven days a week, from Hammond near the mouth of the river all the way upstream past Tongue Point on the Oregon side and Skomakawa on the Washington side. Next year, Aksel thought. Always next year.

  Saaranpa was home and he sat down with the two of them while his wife served coffee. After half an hour of discussion, Saaranpa and his wife disappeared into their living room, leaving Matti and Aksel looking expectantly, even a little anxiously, at each other. Saaranpa came into the kitchen with a sales agreement. They shook hands on $180. Matti paid him in cash and 200-Foot Logging had its first timber purchase.

  “Most loggers would just do it for the logging,” Aksel said in the boat going back.

  “Most loggers,” Matti said.

  “You’ve only got twenty dollars left.”

  “No, twenty dollars of cash and eight hundred dollars of timber. We’ve already made a profit.”

  “Golly sakes,” Aksel said in English, mimicking someone who didn’t curse. “Do I get to buy my boat tomorrow then?”

  Matti looked at him. “You think you’re joking. Look. You go to the bank and put up your share of the timber as collateral, get the money, then sign a note with someone who sells you the boat, and you’re in business.”

  Aksel laughed. “With no money?”

  Matti looked up the river at the timber stretching away on both sides of the factories, nearly covering the waterfront of Astoria. “Aksel, this is America.”

  Aksel and Matti moved into the sauna at Ilmahenki until they’d built themselves a crude shack next to Saaranpa’s timber. Then they moved the old steam donkey to the Saaranpa site and started logging.

  Aino had told Lempi that Aksel was going to hang the high block, and she was at Ilmahenki only an hour after sunrise, helping Aino make sandwiches, getting coffee ready for when the boys showed up. When she poured Aksel his cup, she made sure she brushed his sleeve. He smiled up at her, a little shyly. Maybe she’d been too forward.