Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “What kind of test?”

  “The Lima Locomotive Works representative gives it. They build the Shays. Whoever passes gets certified. Reder says that whoever gets the best marks will get to run the lokie.” He used the logger slang for locomotive.

  “How are you going to pass a test if you can’t read the questions?”

  “Reder says he’ll ask the Lima representative to do it orally.”

  “Are you still up against the donkey punchers?”

  “Yoh,” he said in a lower voice. Then he brightened. “You know how much time I’ve been spending with Swanson on Number Two. I’ve taken it apart and put it back together at least three times. None of the donkey punchers have done that. Can do that.”

  “Maybe they don’t need to.” She watched Jouka’s face change. She’d gone too far trying to protect him.

  “Aino, I can do this. I know that lokie so well now.”

  She knelt beside him. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I know,” Jouka said. He gently stroked her hair. “I know,” he murmured. “You just couldn’t say it.”

  She put her cheek on his leg. This closeness between them, so rare.

  The Lima representative had been up to Camp Three two times already. Jouka told her he was clearly in the lead. Still, she remained worried that he was just heading for an embarrassing disappointment. Certainly, he had a way with engines and boilers. Even Matti commented on it. She wondered if she should risk talking with Margaret, but she quickly shut the thought down. She didn’t want any favors from Margaret, and if Jouka ever found out, there would be hell to pay.

  He came in for lunch on the day of the test and changed into his Sunday clothes. They were both aware that the test was going to cost them half a day’s pay. She kissed him goodbye and he headed to the dining hall where the Lima rep would be giving the test. She watched him as he made his way on the path through the slash. She looked around at the tumble of shacks; the mud; the six-to-ten-foot-high stumps dead in the ground; the litter of cables, tin cans, and broken boxes.

  She looked over at the mess hall, which reminded her of working there. That made her think of Lempi. Aino knew Lempi was being courted by Huttula—an old man like Ullakko, in his late thirties—but Lempi didn’t seem to mind his age. Aino had hoped Aksel would come to his senses, but Lempi just flat out told her she’d given up on him. Huttula was a good worker and she wanted a baby. Boys could wait. Girls couldn’t.

  She walked back inside the shack. The letter Ilmari had walked up to Camp Three last Saturday was still on top of the bureau. Word had come from a released prisoner that their father had died in a Siberian labor camp sometime around 1908. He’d lasted three years. He would be fifty-nine now. She felt like crying for the futility of it all: Finnish independence, the revolution, Jouka’s plans, Matti’s plans, the One Big Union. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. Ecclesiastes, 1:2.

  She closed the door, shutting out the mud and smell and noise and dead stumps. Now, even her best friend, Lempi, was going to get married and have children. The image of the little disguised grave by Deep River hit her. She laid her head on the table and cried.

  The test was over just before dark. She had made riisipuuro, a thick rice and cream pudding, flavored with blackberry jam, a favorite of Jouka’s. He ate it, saying nothing, and she feared the worst. When he finished, she asked, “Well? How did it go?”

  Jouka leaned back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “There wasn’t a goddamned thing on that test that I didn’t know.” He broke out in a huge grin.

  She smiled at him, greatly relieved. “Good,” she said.

  Three days later, the letter came certifying him as a qualified Shay engineer. Jouka had Aino read it aloud to him three times before he took it over to Reder’s office. Then he made a frame for it and put it on the wall just opposite the door. One night after dinner he took out his fiddle and made a song up about a brave Shay engineer, moving around in rhythm, swinging his body with the music. They both were laughing by the time he finished and together they tumbled onto the bed.

  Reder paired Jouka with Dale Swanson for three days on the old locomotive, then moved Swanson to the machine shop, leaving Jouka on his own until mid-April when the Shay was scheduled to arrive. He tasked Jouka with training his best donkey puncher on the old locomotive, freeing Jouka for the new Shay.

  Moving huge logs to water is extremely difficult. Moving a thirty-five-ton Shay locomotive from water to railroad tracks is more difficult.

  The Shay had arrived by barge, towed and pushed by river tugs to where it now sat, gently moving with the remnant of swell from the wide main course of the Columbia in Margaret Cove.

  Jouka stood next to John Reder like an anxious father, looking at the black giant, its boiler already fired and its steam up, soon his to run. The rail line had been completed from the new show to Margaret Cove and now the final piece of track was being finished. Set on pilings, it led right onto the barge.

  Reder looked at Jouka. He had chosen to supervise the transfer himself. Jouka understood. If this transfer from barge to rail line went badly, it could bankrupt Reder Logging and end the job of Jouka’s dreams. He climbed into the cab.

  The locomotive had been set on rails on the barge. The barge’s rails had to be lined up perfectly with the shoreline rail spur. Cables had been rigged on both sides of the barge’s bow, which had been winched tight to the shoreline, as insurance in case some vagary of wind or tide forced the barge out of line. This, however, was only some insurance against the barge drifting horizontally. The Columbia River had swells. Even though Margaret Cove was sheltered from the main channel of the river, the remains of swells washed up against the beach, making the barge subject to vertical movement should a large swell come into the bay and lift the stern or, worse, move the bow vertically. One slip, one faulty rigging job, one bad or misunderstood signal, one cable snapping, one large swell and the locomotive could go plunging into the deep bay, taking Jouka with it.

  Reder looked at Jouka. “Here we go,” he said. He started off toward the boom where he could see everything better.

  Jouka peered out the right cab window and then the left, watching the rigging crew manning the cables.

  Reder, looking at the river, timing the swell, gave a vigorous hand signal. Jouka, slowly eased steam into the pistons. He tried to become part of the locomotive instead of just being on it. The Shay quivered. More steam. The Shay moved. Barge crewmen on both sides gave him the signal that the wheels of the Shay’s leading bogie had moved onto the land-linked track. Now, came the critical moment. The front of the locomotive hit track on the temporary pilings, taking weight off the barge and causing it to move upward. If Jouka didn’t get across the juncture between barge and pilings fast enough, it would be his first and last time at the throttle of a locomotive, maybe his last time ever. He added power and speed.

  The nimble Shay hit the rail line on the pilings at about ten miles per hour, which seemed to Jouka like a hundred. He heard a cheer from the barge crew behind him at the same time he felt the difference in motion beneath him. He was on the pilings now, hoping they had been placed firmly enough so the rail line wouldn’t move as it bore weight. Within seconds, he hit tracks on solid ground. His felt a wave of relief and satisfaction. His heart was pounding. He’d done it.

  He stopped the engine and gave a long shrill toot on the whistle. Reder ran down the temporary tracks and climbed into the cab. He pounded Jouka on the back and grabbing the lanyard of the whistle pulled a series of short toots, grinning like a schoolboy.

  * * *

  Over the next two days, as the same procedure unloaded the railcars, Jouka brought the engine up to full pressure several times and then ran it by itself all the way up the line.

  The felling and yarding operations were already running at full speed when Jouka brought the first train of empty cars to the landing. With a long blast on the engine’s whist
le, the first load started to the cove where the temporary spur had been replaced by logs laid side by side, perpendicular to the rail line and going down underwater in the bay. These logs formed a sturdy ramp for other logs to be rolled from tiltable car decks to go smashing into the water, raising spectacular fountains.

  Jouka lay on the whistle all the way down to the water, bringing in the first load.

  4

  For Matti and Aksel, the months of hard, relentless work on the Klawachuck and some occasional blowouts in the whorehouses and saloons of Nordland came to an end in March 1911. They’d logged the show out. Aksel’s boat fund had grown but was still not large enough. He refused to follow Matti’s advice and get a loan. For his part, Matti had something else in mind. He figured he had enough money to get married.

  Matti decided against looking for a bride in Nordland because, as Aksel said, it was nothing but sawdust, shit, and hookers. So, they decided on Astoria, which Rauha said was filled with salmon packers who smelled like fish guts in addition to sawdust, shit, and hookers. Matti took heart from Aino, however, who said there were more Finnish girls there than anyplace else on the lower Columbia and surely he would find someone.

  As Matti walked off the General Washington he smelled the creosote on the thick timbers that formed the streets and the pitchy tang of smoke from burning sawdust. Fishing boats swung easily on lines tied fore and aft to wharves and pilings. Astoria thrived on lumber, plywood, and salmon. The population had grown to more than seven thousand. Salmon-canning plants lined the river from Youngs Bay on Astoria’s west side to Tongue Point on its east. The plants were interspersed with smoking wigwam burners and stacks of lumber and plywood waiting to be loaded on one of the many waiting ships. Like Knappton, Astoria was built on pilings.

  Matti had a plan. Women shopped.

  He began by wandering up and down Commercial Street, where there were shops in abundance. He lasted about five minutes in Grimson’s Ladies Apparel, unable to answer the saleslady’s questions about his wife’s size and what color she wore. Lunch at Moberg’s Café proved futile, because he just sat at the counter, afraid to talk to any number of apparently single women who were sitting together at tables. He tried standing in front of girls walking down the street and tipping his hat, but got only puzzled or annoyed looks.

  By three in the afternoon, he became convinced the plan had failed. Women shopped, but he was hopelessly inept at shopping for women. The General Washington‘s last departure was at 4:30, so to avoid a fruitless trip, he decided to buy new caulk boots. The sign on the Tenth Street shop read: SAARI SHOES. Even he knew enough English to know the name was unfortunate, and it made him smile. In the display window another sign read: BUY ONE PAIR AND GET A SAARI SHOES WOODEN NICKEL FOR 10% OFF YOUR NEXT PURCHASE. He walked through the half-glass door, ready to do business.

  The blond girl behind the cash register looked at him with soft green eyes. She smiled and the room became three shades lighter.

  “Can I help you?” She asked in flawless unaccented American. His heart sank.

  “I wanting good shoes for verking. Caulk boots … for …” He trailed off, embarrassed because he didn’t speak good English, and because he had a Finnish accent as broad as the hindquarters of a cow in June.

  In unaccented Finnish the girl asked, “Are you looking for ones that just cover the ankles or ones that go up over the calves?”

  He became aware that his mouth was open and he shut it. He looked at his shoes.

  She cocked her head just slightly and with a twinkle in her eye said, “You’re definitely Finnish.” She wore a green cotton dress that had a pattern of small tastefully scattered pale-red roses and closed at the back with mother-of-pearl buttons. She had a slender figure and a graceful curve to her hips.

  She motioned him to follow her to where boots were displayed on individual shelves on the wall. Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “You still want to buy boots?”

  He lurched forward, feeling entirely clumsy and totally in love.

  Back aboard the General Washington he couldn’t stop admiring his new dress shoes. His new caulks were in a bag along with his old dress shoes. He hoped the new caulks he bought Aksel would fit—and the dance shoes he’d bought Aino. He had no idea what he could possibly spend the fourth Saari Wooden Nickel on.

  It took Matti several weeks to get his affairs in order and the yarder back to Ilmahenki, but the day Jouka landed the Shay, Matti was on the General Washington, his clothes in a carpetbag and all the cash from the Higgins job pinned to his long underwear. He checked into a poikataloja, a boardinghouse catering to single Finnish men, and worked up another plan—a full-frontal assault.

  Matti’s initial intelligence gathering determined Kyllikki Saari had graduated from Astoria High School the previous year, which made her eighteen or nineteen. Her father and mother, Emil and Hilda Saari, had arrived in Astoria when she was three; this explained her unaccented American. Emil Saari owned Saari Shoes, as well as Saari Marine Chandlery, the name of the business he had owned in Kokkola before he sold it and took his pregnant wife and young daughter to America. He wanted his children to grow up with all the rights and freedoms of the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence—copies of which he kept on the wall behind the cash register at the chandlery. Hilda Saari delivered a son who died of influenza when he was three. The Saaris had no more children. Whoever married Kyllikki Saari was marrying not only a beauty but an heiress, although the word “heiress” had a different connotation in Astoria, Oregon, from in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Matti’s opening move was walking into the shoe store and asking Kyllikki if he could take her for coffee.

  “I suppose that would be cheaper than buying more shoes.”

  He nodded ruefully. “Yoh.” She still hadn’t answered his question.

  Finally, she broke the silence. “There’s a dance every Saturday night at Suomi Hall. I usually go.”

  “So, you won’t have coffee with me now?”

  “Yes, I won’t have coffee with you now. I don’t even know you.”

  “My name is Matti Koski.”

  “Well, Matti Koski, unless you’re buying shoes, I look forward to seeing you Saturday night.”

  Saturday night, walking up the twelve-foot-wide stairs to the second floor of Suomi Hall, Matti felt out of place. Everyone was Finnish, but at least half of these Finns were socialists and communists—Aino’s people, not his.

  The stairs ended at a large, narrow room on the east side of the building where tables held coffee, pulla and other kinds of coffee cake, and punch. The women forbade alcohol, so any drinking was done outside the building or in the tavern across Marine Drive next to Union Steam Baths, which declared itself with the sign: THE HOTTEST SPOT IN TOWN.

  He walked through large double doors and found young women chattering on the edge of a large oak dance floor. Boys and girls, age five to seven, were darting into, out of, and under red plush curtains drawn across a stage at the river end of the dance floor.

  He returned to the social room where women with faces flushed from the woodstoves in a good-size kitchen with windows facing the river served food and coffee from huge blue-and-white-flecked percolators.

  Matti went outside and around the back. Looking across the river in the waning light, he rolled a cigarette, smoked half of it, then stubbed it out, putting the remaining tobacco back into his tobacco pouch. Returning to the front of the building, he saw Kyllikki walking up the street with her mother and father.

  He took off his hat. Her eyes changed—encouraging, but the introduction was formal.

  “Mr. Matti Koski,” she said. “My father, Emil Saari; and my mother, Hilda Saari.”

  Matti shook Mr. Saari’s hand and made a slight bow to his wife. Emil Saari’s hand was strong but soft, an indoor hand. Matti felt he could crush it if he wanted. Then he looked into Mr. Saari’s eyes and the brief feeling of superiority fled. The eyes were those of a man of authority and power
.

  Matti glanced at Kyllikki. She hadn’t missed a thing. She and her mother lifted the hems of their dresses and turned to mount the steps, followed by Mr. Saari. Matti caught a glimpse of Kyllikki’s ankles and petticoat. She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled as if she knew what he was thinking. She continued up the stairs but pulled her skirt against the back of her thighs. He felt himself blush.

  When Kyllikki wasn’t dancing, she was drinking punch and talking to whichever young man brought it for her. Finally, Matti just pushed in and asked her to dance. It was the only dance he got.

  The next Saturday night, Kyllikki’s parents were coolly polite. He got only two dances with Kyllikki. At the end of the second dance he asked her out for coffee after she got off work. She said no.

  On Monday morning, he walked into the shoe store. She was there, as he expected, but so was her mother, who he had not expected.

  “Mr. Koski,” Mrs. Saari said. “How can we help you?”

  “You know I’m not here to buy shoes,” he said.

  “Yes. I do know.” She actually softened before delivering her next line. “I know you’re sweet on Kyllikki, but you need to be realistic. We expect a better life for our daughter than being married to a gyppo logger.”

  “We’re small now,” he said. “But there are a lot of trees out there and I’m good at cutting them down.”

  “Yes. We’ve asked around. You and your partner, and no one else.” She looked at him. “Go find a nice Finnish girl in Tapiola.”

  He knew that if he didn’t stand up to the mother, he would never have Kyllikki’s respect.

  “This is America. Parents don’t decide.”

  “They sure as hell do.”