Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  While Aino was down the hall dressing, Jouka dressed and walked to the dirty window and looked east, up the river. He could see several headlands that formed bays on both sides before the river merged in the gray clouds. He had often thought about making love to Aino, and he guessed that he had; only it hadn’t felt the way he had imagined. He’d been with prostitutes in Nordland several times and once he’d gone into Astoria with Aksel to the Lucky Logger. Certainly it had felt different from that, but … He shrugged into his Sunday coat. She had been so tense, as if she were afraid he was going to hurt her. Then, that last time, she’d just lain on her back looking at the ceiling, as if she weren’t there. As if he weren’t there. He felt a wave of shame. She had just lain there—maybe every time.

  On the trail to Reder’s camp, Aino fell in behind Jouka watching his broad back and wide shoulders as he moved so full of power and ease on the trail. She wished she had his confidence. She still wasn’t sure how Reder felt about her coming back to Camp Two, despite Jouka’s assurances that Reder preferred to put up with Mrs. Kaukonen rather than lose Mr. Kaukonen.

  She wished she could just get Jouka to sing, but they were silent all the way to the camp.

  Even though it was no surprise, the crudity of their new cabin still dismayed her. It was surrounded by the chaos of logging slash and mud. They had to pick their way across downed trees and around stumps to reach it or take the train tracks. She knew Jouka had managed to get one of the cabins with a roof instead of just a canvas tarp, and she was grateful. The floor, however, slanted enough to make a yarn ball roll down it, as one of the two logs the cabin sat on was slightly downslope from the other. The cabin hadn’t moved since it had been lifted off one of the railcars. The train tracks were about ten feet from the single door set in the middle of the single room. A sink and a small woodstove were to the right of the door as she went in—a small table in front of them with two plain wooden chairs. To her left was an iron bed with the mattress rolled up against the simple headboard.

  Ilmari had made her a cedar chest as a wedding gift. Matti and Aksel had hauled it from Ilmahenki to the camp and placed it against the far wall, leaving a note for the newlyweds. She opened it and inside found her everyday clothes, two cotton sheets, and two wool blankets—more gifts from Ilmari and Rauha. She looked at the rough planks on the floor. Dirt from the previous inhabitants had caked into the cracks—probably good to keep the floor draft down. She sat on the bed. Jouka went over to the window and managed to open it by hitting it with the heel of his hand. Light came through several places in the wall where a batten either was missing or had warped off one of the one-by-eight boards.

  Jouka went to the stove and shoved the clinker bar in and out to get some of the damp ashes to move into the ash box. Their acrid smell filled the small space. He turned to her. She was staring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s going to need a lot of work.”

  He blinked a couple of times. “Yoh,” he said, then went outside with the ashes and started making kindling. When he returned with a large armload, Aino had made the bed and changed into her everyday clothes. Sitting at the table, she looked blankly at the bare wall opposite the door, the light from the single window catching the nape of her neck and showing stray hair that escaped the braids of her chignon.

  “What’s for supper?” he asked.

  The rocky start was smoothed with routine. Arising in the dark, shivering in the damp cold, Jouka would get the fire going in the stove and then go out to split wood and bring in water, while Aino made eggs or heated oatmeal or beans. Jouka no longer had to pay Reder for food in the mess hall, but Aino struggled to feed them both for the same amount. Jouka would pull on his caulk boots, sitting on the floor in the doorway, his legs outside in the cool darkness. They would kiss, and he’d walk to the waiting cars that now took the men nearly a mile from camp to where they were logging. Aino would watch him swing onto a car with the other loggers streaming from the mess hall. When she saw Lempi standing at the rail of the mess hall porch and they waved to each other, she realized Lempi probably envied her. Jouka was a good man, a good worker, and she knew he loved her.

  But, many a day, she envied Lempi, who still lived and worked with other girls. Aino missed making cracks and giggling about the dirty bathwater. The few other married women kept their distance, polite and cool—Aino bore the double burden of being a red and dancing the Grizzly Bear. She was woman with whom any decent woman would not keep company. And Jouka didn’t provide much relief for her loneliness—even when he did come home at night, he came home exhausted. He fell asleep soon after dinner, often during the meal, and sometimes even while Aino was talking to him.

  She’d always worked as part of a team: for the striking loggers, the IWW, the farm in Finland, Ilmahenki, even for Ullakko and the children. She was used to hard work, but that hard work was always done with others, in a community, talking, sharing. Now the hard work kept her isolated. It was just the work and nothing else. And it was never-ending.

  On Monday, she spent hours carrying water to the washtub, heating it, mixing in the soap flakes, wringing, hauling more water, rinsing, more water, rinsing again, and then hanging clothes to dry. They hung there for days, always brushing her face and head. In winter, damp was as dry as clothes got. Her hands were red and raw by the end of wash day. She envied Lempi on ironing day when she’d just get the iron hot on the woodstove and put it down on the clean shirt or sheet, and it would smudge black. That would put her back to a secondary wash day and scrubbing the iron and reheating it to try again.

  On baking days, she struggled valiantly to remember how Maíjaliisa did it. Maíjaliisa didn’t even have store-bought yeast. Aino would work fast, furiously even, because she’d been told store-bought yeast shouldn’t rise all night. But it wouldn’t rise at all if the room was too cold or if she put it too close to the stove and it got too hot. Jouka ate the bread without saying anything, which was good. Then again, it wasn’t. Why didn’t he say anything?

  There were no saunas in the camp. People talked about building one, but Reder wouldn’t put up the money, and the loggers were too tired to do it. So, on Saturdays she would sit in the washtub, after Jouka had used the water, her knees to her chin. Scrubbing herself with the huge bar of laundry soap, she valiantly tried to stay warm in the tepid water. Jouka would often put the kettle on and when it was hot, slowly pour the water in between her feet. It was as close to heaven as she got during the week.

  The kerosene lamp blackened the chimney when the wick went low, so it had to be cleaned daily along with the smudge on the ceiling above it. The woodstove covered everything in fine soot—the woodwork, the cupboards, table legs, walls, under the bed; it even got under the sheets and on the cotton-stuffed mattress.

  Every day was scrub-the-floor day, on her knees, trying to avoid splinters from the soft fir planks.

  Sunday was not a day of rest. She almost became a Christian so she could walk to Ilmari’s church and sit still for two hours. Instead, Sunday was when she cleaned the fireboxes in the stove, shook down the soot in the chimney to avoid a chimney fire, the constant dread of all the wives. Sunday afternoon, however, when Jouka would work on his violin or practice on it, she would wash her hair and try it in different styles that she saw in catalogs and magazines. Sometimes Lempi would come over. Aino would nearly weep when she left.

  She never imagined getting married would make her lonesome.

  In February, she missed her period. When it still hadn’t come by March, she began secretly eating the seeds of Queen Anne’s lace that she had carefully been drying and storing in her cedar chest. On the twentieth of March, she felt a change. On the twenty-third, lying on the cabin floor between the sink and the table, she delivered an eight-week fetus. She wrapped it in some rags and cleaned up the blood.

  She left Jouka a note, drawing a simple map of the farm on Deep River with two stick figures of Rauha and Ilmari.

  When she r
eached the banks of Deep River, she buried the unborn child, about the size of a kidney bean, just upstream from Ilmahenki beneath a stately cedar on the south side of the river. It was a spot where she sat often, as close to home as she could get, missing her mother, feeling her presence in the river that nourished her brother’s farm, just as Maíjaliisa had nourished them all. She marked the spot with stones in a pattern that would look random to anyone but her. Then she cried.

  PART THREE

  1910–1917

  Prologue

  On May 10, 1910, in Yukon, Pennsylvania, a crowd of striking miners, who were protesting a 16 percent cut in their piecework wages, began making fun of twenty-five sheriff’s deputies who were searching their boardinghouse. The deputies opened fire on the crowd, killing one and wounding thirty. That same month, some of the striking miners got too close to coal company property and twenty sheriff’s deputies and state policemen attacked and severely beat them, killing one miner who was trying to protect a child in his arms. On July 28, a worker picketing against the American Sugar Refining Company in Brooklyn, New York, was shot multiple times by the police. During the garment workers’ strike in Chicago against Hart Schaffner Marx in December, two strikers were shot by private detectives. Everywhere that people rose to right the balance, the forces of “law and order” rose to reset the balance back. Laws designed for completely different problems were applied to stop labor. Workers walking together on a public road after a union meeting could be put in jail for “contempt” or forced to pay a fine equal to a month’s wages. Labor organizers or people identified as “ringleaders” were savagely beaten and tortured by deputized private detectives or the police. Who do you turn to for protection if it’s the police who are attacking you?

  1

  Answering that question, among many, kept Aino organizing. Freed from the pregnancy and freed from working long hours in the dining hall, she began widening her contacts with other Wobblies, as IWWs were increasingly being called. All spring she’d tried to keep up her duties at home, leaving only for a day or two three or four times a month to help sign up new members. She knew that it was hard on Jouka, and she felt a little guilty about it. Jouka came home in the dark, ate dinner, and collapsed into bed, only to get up the next morning in the dark. He rightfully expected breakfast and a packed lunch.

  She would ask Lempi or some of the other wives who were more sympathetic to the Wobbly cause to check in on Jouka. She felt burdened, not by Jouka, but by a system that kept wages just high enough to keep her and Jouka alive, both working constantly but unable to save anything. Exhausting as organizing was, she saw the One Big Union as the only way out for her and Jouka and everyone like them.

  Membership was a key component of union power. Even at Reder Logging, despite all her efforts, only a third of the loggers secretly carried the IWW’s red card. From members came money and money was what sustained strikes. She’d learned this the hard way at Camp Two. She’d also learned that striking against a single owner was far less effective than striking an entire industry.

  Month after month, sleeping on the floor at fellow Wobblies’ homes, talking her way on to boats for free rides, occasionally splurging on a rail ticket, but mostly doing a great deal of walking, she signed men up to carry the red card of the One Big Union.

  Aino kept up with events through Työmies (the Worker), a Finnish-language labor newspaper printed in Hancock, Michigan, which several of the Finns in camp had pitched in to get. Several others had jointly subscribed to the Industrial Worker, the IWW newspaper printed in Spokane. The papers passed from hand to hand, becoming tattered and torn with use, but they provided the only countervailing voice to the capitalist-controlled press. The news was rarely good. Sometimes Aino felt so oppressed by it—by the overwhelming odds labor faced—that she wished she didn’t have to read it. Sometimes it made her just damned mad and got her sisu up.

  Women conquered their fear, just like the men. The men could not let fear of death or crippling stop them from providing for their families. The women could not show their fear for their men or their fear of the very real consequences for them and their children of death or crippling, lest it weaken the men’s resolve. The dangers of logging were faced with a united and silent front.

  In late June, a logger named Hendrickson lost an arm. Aino had helped Mrs. Hendrickson deliver her fourth child just four months earlier. Now she was helping her move out of the company shack. The Hendricksons, all six of them, were moving to Portland, hoping there would be work for a one-armed man or that Mrs. Hendrickson could get domestic or cannery work.

  Aino got home from the Hendricksons’ after Jouka that evening, so dinner was late. Jouka, as usual, was ravenously hungry. Although he said he fully understood Aino’s wanting to help the Hendricksons, she felt his resentment. Knowing that the resentment was to a large measure left over from previous neglect didn’t abate her own annoyance with Jouka’s seeming indifference to anything except his stomach.

  “How can you just sit there, eating? Hendrickson’s arm is gone and they’re going to be starving in Portland. Reder and all the other owners take no responsibility.”

  “He’s the one who stuck his arm where it shouldn’t have been stuck.”

  “So, it’s his fault?”

  “Yoh.” Jouka took in another bite of stew. “Logging’s dangerous. Hendrickson knew that when he signed on.”

  “He didn’t sign on to be so exhausted three-quarters of the way through the day that he can’t think straight.”

  “Being tired isn’t an excuse.”

  “No! It’s a cause!”

  Jouka stopped eating. Looking at his plate, as if explaining to a child, he said, “If we don’t log as fast as we can, Reder Logging goes out of business. Reder Logging goes out of business, we don’t eat. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

  He started to eat again. Aino put her hand over his bowl. He looked up at her.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she said.

  He put his hand on hers, took it up, and kissed it. “Aino, I’m a good logger. It won’t happen to us.”

  Aino looked over her shoulder through the window. Down the railroad tracks she could see several bundles of the Hendricksons’ belongings waiting to be loaded on the next train out.

  2

  In August, Aino was loading her own belongings onto a train. Reder decided to take advantage of the long days and warm weather to move the camp to better timber above Grays Bay. The dishes, cups, and glasses had all been carefully packed in crates with straw to protect them from the shaking that was to come. The closet Jouka built on his Sundays off had been laid sideways on the floor, filled with bedding and clothes. The kitchen table was turned upside down and chairs were lashed inside the upturned legs along with the chamber pot, washing basin, and water pail. The wedding picture, carefully wrapped in towels to protect the glass, lay on the floor covered by the mattress, itself covered by the upside-down bed.

  Blocks and steel cables were strung from a makeshift boom and connected back to a steam donkey. Jouka and Huttula, pulling on steel cables hanging from the butt rigs, set chokers around the four ends of the two parallel logs upon which the little shack sat. Jouka gave a signal, answered by a toot from the donkey, and the lines went taut, pulling the little house right up into the air. Huttula and Jouka joined two other loggers standing by with a cable looped around the middle of the log nearest the train track right beneath the front door and guided the house to the waiting railcar. Another signal for slack and the house was placed on the car and the train moved forward to pick up the next house.

  That afternoon, Aino sat on the stoop of her shack’s open front door, feet dangling, and watched the stumps and slash slide by. As the train rumbled across the high trestle, she caught a last glimpse of the old camp, empty rectangles of darker earth now marking the place where the shacks had stood among the jumble of bleached slash and stumps. Occasionally, at a long bend, she could see all the shacks, each on a railcar,
moving in a long line. She gazed at the skyline of the denuded ridge to the north of the old camp. As far she could see the forest was gone, replaced by slash and straggler trees too small to bother with.

  Soon, the train was moving through dense old-growth forests, first downhill in gentle switchbacks, then uphill in more switchbacks, recrossing what she presumed to be the same stream, until the train arrived at the new camp surrounded by huge trees. The mess hall had already been built, as had the new henhouse, and she could see Lempi and the other flunkies hard at work preparing the first meal in the new camp.

  Reder’s Camp Three had been born, eight miles southeast of what would soon be called Old Camp Two. New rail line had been laid from the new camp a little over a mile to a small bay that Reder had named Margaret Cove, a heretofore quiet and unnamed backwater on Grays Bay, which was on the Columbia River’s north side, a few miles upstream from Knappton. The log booms would grow until ready to be towed to a mill.

  As soon as the steam donkey unloaded the shacks and placed them helter-skelter, wherever somewhat level ground could be found, the loggers set up the donkey to the west of camp on a small hill and began yarding in the huge logs the felling crews had already laid down. Three days later, the operation boomed in high gear, whistles blowing, cables screeching, exposing the dark, secret places of the ancient forest to the harsh daylight of modernity.