Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  Aino poured two cups and they sat down at the table.

  “I want to be friends,” Aino said.

  “Me too.”

  “I lost my sisters.”

  “I lost my brother when I was six.”

  Aino nodded, saying nothing.

  Then Kyllikki said, “Matti told me what happened.”

  “Did he tell you anything else?”

  “That you lost your love.”

  Aino nodded, a barely perceptible nod. They drank their coffee without talking.

  When they both had finished, Kyllikki said, “Matti told me that you’re a midwife.”

  “I learned from my mother.”

  “This is awkward.”

  “What is awkward?”

  “I don’t exactly know what to do. You know, about … that. I … well … I didn’t have time to talk to my mother.”

  Aino watched Kyllikki blush. She touched her hand. “Nature will find a way. And if she doesn’t, Matti will.”

  Kyllikki laughed a full-hearted, earthy laugh and Aino joined in.

  “Do you want to have a baby?” Aino asked.

  “Certainly, yes. Why do you even ask? Isn’t that what happens when you get married?”

  “Oh dear, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  Matti and Kyllikki were married two days later, the earliest they could get Pastor Hoikka across the river. Aino stood by Kyllikki as matron of honor, with Aksel the best man, feeling that this was as close as he’d ever get to Aino and an altar.

  For their wedding gift, Ilmari and Rauha gave the newlyweds an acre on Deep River at the northeast corner of Ilmahenki. Matti, Aksel, Jouka, and Ilmari all pitched in to build their new sauna the next Sunday. Safely sheltered in the sauna, Matti and Kyllikki began building their new house on the first of June, 1911. Because the house sat on a shallow bend in Deep River where the current slowed, they named it Suvantola, for the slack water.

  5

  Summer for Aino and Jouka meant more daylight to get more chores done. Aino was darning one of Jouka’s wool socks by the window, while he was outside splitting firewood, stacking it in long parallel rows covered by chunks of bark. There, it would dry over the next year. Dry wood burned hotter and reduced creosote buildup, which led to chimney fires. The shack required no heating in summer, so wood was needed just for cooking until at least October. She heard Jouka shout a hello and the murmur of his and a woman’s voice. Then she heard the striking of his splitting maul start again and almost immediately a knock at the door. It was Lempi. She had a wicker basket of three different colored yarns and a half-finished sweater in it. She’d come to talk.

  Aino got Lempi coffee and Lempi knitted while Aino darned. Sitting at the table in the Sunday quiet—with no screeching steel cables, no rumbling railcars outside the door, the husbands safe for the day, her friend Lempi wanting to bring up whatever it was—she felt calm joy.

  “More coffee?” she asked Lempi in Finnish.

  “I’m good. Thank you,” she answered in English.

  It was good Lempi refused. She wouldn’t have to make a second pot for Jouka’s Monday morning cup. They could afford an extra Sunday pot of coffee now that Jouka made good wages running the locomotive, but old habits, especially ones involving money, die slowly. She realized Lempi had been talking to her. She recalled the words that she had unconsciously recorded in her mind, recovered, and responded as if she’d been listening all along. “Huttula asked you to marry him?”

  Lempi nodded, a smile on her face.

  “And …?” Aino asked.

  “I said yes.”

  So, Aino thought, she couldn’t wait for Aksel. Probably wise. Aksel was a loner at heart.

  “I know he’s old,” Lempi said quietly, interpreting Aino’s lack of an immediate response as disapproval. “But he’s making two and a quarter a day now on the steam donkey and he even told me he loves me.”

  He was making almost as much as Jouka, Aino thought, then rebuked herself mentally. It was insidious. Here she was comparing scraps from under Reder’s table with her best friend. If any of them would just put their noses above the tabletop, then they would see the truth—a table groaning with more food than the few diners could possibly eat in a week or even a month.

  “Yes, but he still pays Reder a dollar and a quarter for room and board,” Aino said.

  “We’ll be able to get a company house.”

  Aino looked up and all around the small one-room shack with exaggerated disdain.

  “It’s better than the henhouse,” Lempi said.

  “I suppose so. If you prefer smelling long johns”—she nodded toward Jouka’s underwear hanging from a line above the stove—“to drying menstrual rags.”

  “Oh, Aino …” They both laughed. Then they looked at each other, the steady sound of Jouka and his maul coming through the single open window. “Aren’t you happy for me?”

  Aksel hung in the air between them, between the sounds of the maul. A girl had to make choices.

  “He’s a good man,” Aino said. “He will be a good provider.”

  “Yes,” Lempi said, instead of “yoh.” She hesitated. “Would you be my matron of honor?”

  “Is it going to be a church wedding?”

  “Well, Huttula is a Lutheran.”

  “What about you?”

  “Of course, I am. Oh, Aino, I know what you think about religion, but I just never imagined my wedding any other way and certainly not in some government building. I’m not like you, that way. No one is,” she added.

  “Oh, Lempi. Of course I’ll be your matron of honor.”

  She and Lempi smiled at each other. Aino certainly didn’t feel a need to be more demonstrative. “Big white dress and all?” Aino asked.

  “Well,” Lempi said. “That is another question.”

  They decided a suit would have more use than a bridal dress, even one that could be remade into a day dress. The suit would take Lempi’s savings, but then all her savings would go directly to something just for her and not have to be spent on joint things like dishes or bed linen. That could all come out of Huttula’s savings—if he had any. They both speculated that he did, because he hardly ever went to Nordland or Astoria and didn’t drink.

  They set the wedding for four thirty in the afternoon of Sunday, October 3, so people would be off work and Pastor Hoikka would have time to get across the river.

  Sitting in the little church on the day of the wedding, about to watch Lempi marry Huttula, Aksel knew it was his own fault. He’d stayed stupidly in love with Aino when Lempi would have married him in a heartbeat.

  Ruusu Pakanen started the Bridal March from Lohengrin on the little organ and everyone rose to face the back of the church.

  Lempi stood beside her favorite uncle, who worked in a mill in Westport and had come to give her away. She wore a new suit and a beautiful new hat. Huttula was standing at the altar with his brother from Bellingham. As Lempi went by Aksel in her slow, stately walk, her eyes flickered from Huttula to him, then went quickly back to Huttula.

  Two weddings now at the wrong end of the church, Aksel thought. He’d been smiling at Lempi, not knowing if she’d seen him. He wondered if she had any regrets like his. Huttula was old but a good man in a less dangerous job. Huttula could very well live to see his and Lempi’s grandchildren.

  Lempi reached the end of the aisle and her uncle went to his place at the front left pew. Pastor Hoikka motioned them all to be seated and the ceremony began. “Dearly beloved …”

  Aksel wasn’t listening. He was looking at Aino and Lempi standing together, standing up there with Jouka and Huttula. That’s when he remembered Lempi asking him about his swamping ax. What a fool he was. She didn’t give a damn about the ax. He wanted to bolt from the church in his shame and misery. Shame for being so stupidly callous about Lempi’s feelings for him and hurting her. Misery, this terrible loneliness, when it could have been otherwise, simply by opening his heart to Lempi.

&nb
sp; 6

  After the wedding, Aino refocused on her letter-writing campaign, doing it during what wealthy people called spare time. For Aino, it was sleep time. Since being jailed in Nordland, she had tried to get off two letters a night once Jouka fell asleep. She’d written over five hundred letters, urging other Wobblies and sympathizers to come to Nordland on November 22 to exercise their constitutional rights to assemble and to speak freely. At two cents a letter, that was over a week of Jouka’s wages. This concerned her more than it did Jouka.

  As the word about the next free-speech fight got out to Wobblies, it of course got out to the good citizens of Nordland. The Nordland city council, reacting to people’s fears, quickly passed an ordinance shutting down the IWW Meeting Hall and prohibiting the IWW—and only the IWW—from speaking or assembling on city streets. The council also deputized several hundred “prominent and professional” men to protect the town. Jouka urged Aino not to go. Louhi increased her beer inventory.

  On November 20, Aino pressed her blouse and long skirt, took in her coat a little at the waist, and left for Nordland. She got off the boat on November 22 wearing her good shoes, which were soon wet with mud and damp sawdust from the streets. She immediately began buttonholing loggers and mill workers outside the saloons and barbershops, handing out leaflets, urging them to attend the rally that night on Crane Street. One of the speakers was to be Joe Hill, Hillström’s latest pseudonym. Aino could never think of him as anything other than Joe Hillström.

  The citizens of Nordland were scared. Wobblies had been arriving by train, climbing illegally onto the cars, hanging from the iron rungs that formed the ladders up the sides of the boxcars, clinging to the floors of the flatbeds, huddled on the narrow plank walkways that ran down the center of the roofs of boxcars.

  Chief of Police Brewer, basking in his role as protector of civilization, passed out the usual ax handles and wooden wheel spokes to other recently deputized protectors of civilization.

  Aino felt like a nesting robin beneath a circling hawk.

  The afternoon of the rally, the hawk struck with ruthless efficiency. Hillström, still singing, was frog-marched to jail by four police officers. Angry men grabbed Aino’s bundle of red cards, ground them into the mud, and dragged her to jail as well, but not before beating her with ax handles and billy clubs.

  Thrown into a cell by herself, Aino was flooded with memories of the prison in Helsinki, hanging by her wrists from the ceiling, shivering with cold. She backed into a corner of the Nordland cell, clamping her jaw against the pain from the beating, fighting the urge to crumple to the floor in a fetal position. Then she heard the singing coming from the other cells at a volume that sounded as though each cell held several men. Aino walked to her cell door, put her hands on the bars, and joined in as loud as she could sing.

  By nightfall, the jail was overflowing. She was now packed in with twelve others, including Hillström. Sympathizers pushed sandwiches through the outer window of the cell but were soon driven away.

  When there was no more room to house more of the arrested Wobblies, the deputized citizens simply started dragging men out of jail and beating them. They would herd these men—or if the men were unconscious, throw them—into wagons and haul them out of town, telling them that if they came back it would be even worse for them. They came back.

  Louhi watched the whole affair somewhat philosophically, noting that when you have power, you don’t want anything to change, and when you’re powerless, you can’t change anything. She stopped her philosophical musing when Belle Sorenson, the manager of Tannika House, came to her with declining sales figures. Louhi sent for Drummond.

  “Goddamnit, Al, it’s plain bad for business. Three-quarters of this town is male and if my arithmetic is still good that makes at least half of the men single. But now three-quarters of them are out there singing songs and making sandwiches for a bunch of communist rabble-rousing antibusiness …” She controlled her temper. “No one’s screwing. Bar receipts are in the shit house. They’re all high and mighty about One Big Union and solidarity with these communist …” She caught herself. “Al, you need to carry two arguments to the city council. First, the city is acting illegally. Don’t think these Wobblies can’t bring in some highfalutin do-gooder lawyers to take the city to court. And the city will lose. It screwed the Wobblies out of their right to have a meeting place. That’s unconstitutional. Then the city screwed them again by making ordinances about where they can gather and give speeches on the streets. That’s also unconstitutional.”

  “OK,” Al said, a little bemused. “Why this sudden concern for the Bill of Rights?”

  “Because those stupid knuckleheads in the city council, and that includes you, don’t see that if we double these workers’ wages, we double our profits. Where in hell are eight or ten thousand single men going to spend that extra money? They sure as hell aren’t buying encyclopedias and Bibles.”

  Aino spent Christmas in jail.

  Matti and Kyllikki, with considerable trepidation, went to spend Christmas in Astoria.

  It had taken Kyllikki’s mother several months to get her father to agree to let “that goddamned Koski” into the house. Matti had stood his ground firmly, saying, “He can come to my house if he wants.”

  The women saw it as just another bump in the road of managing their men for their own good and went to work on it with relish. Kyllikki getting pregnant in early June had lent considerable strength to their arguments for making peace. Still, two stubborn proud men, she mused to herself, watching her husband’s face as he looked at the river, and she wouldn’t for a moment wish them to be any other way. It was like choosing to ride a spirited horse. You knew what you were in for before you got into the saddle, but you still wanted to ride. She smiled and put her hand on her increasingly round tummy. She hoped it was a girl, someone to talk with when she was doing the chores, Matti being gone from dark to dark. Matti wanted a boy, someone to go logging with. She worried about Matti constantly. Someone died in Chinook and Clatsop Counties nearly every other week fishing or logging. And she couldn’t imagine a son going logging. It really wasn’t inconsistent. Her job was protecting her children. His job was protecting her—and that included providing.

  “Why do you keep smiling?” Matti asked.

  “Just thinking about our baby.”

  Matti did not respond.

  “What’s on your mind?” she prompted.

  “I was just thinking maybe I could bid on some forty-year-old second growth. Pilings are being used building docks, and that seining ground out to the west of us must have one hundred pilings. Second-growth trees might be just the right size. Way easier logging. There’s also government money in pilings: public docks, bridges.”

  “Do you ever stop thinking about logging?”

  “In bed,” he answered.

  “That had better not be because you’re asleep.”

  She saw his pleasure in his eyes.

  When they reached her house—as she still thought of it—she noticed that her mother had put a beautiful wreath on the door. She hesitated to knock. Even she was nervous. One spirited horse she could manage. Two, with one of them still clinging to the notion that both mares belonged to him, she wasn’t so sure about.

  Her mother opened the door. She could see her father through the door of the living room, looking at the river. The foyer had been garlanded with fir boughs and holly. When they walked into the living room, she let out a little squeak and clapped her hands, beaming at her mother and the beautiful tree. It had all the old familiar ornaments in the little crèche beneath it that she had known all her life. Unlit candles were attached to its branches, waiting to be turned into light. “Oh, Mother, it’s beautiful.”

  Her mother beamed. Then Kyllikki gave her father a hug and stood back. He was stiff as a fence post and sunk in deep.

  He didn’t offer his hand to Matti. Matti stood there saying nothing.

  Her mother began bustling around, getting
her and Matti seated, asking about coffee. Her father had settled into his usual chair.

  Her mother brought coffee in silence.

  Well, Kyllikki thought, time for some gentle heels to the flanks. “Isä, I’m sorry we ran off.” She looked over at Matti, smiling. “Aren’t we, Matti?” There was not a sound from Matti. Damn him he could be stubborn and after they had talked about it and agreed. She didn’t want to use spurs. “Matti,” she said quietly.

  Matti put his coffee on the end table by his chair. “We’re sorry.”

  She allowed herself a moment of triumph, then took a breath. “But we wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t been trying to do everything you could to stop us.”

  Her father put his coffee cup down. So far, they were still both sitting. Her heart rate was picking up. This couldn’t be good for the baby. Oh dear, now what?

  Her mother broke in. “We want to apologize for that, don’t we, Emil?”

  Good old Mom. She had just reined Daddy around to face a united front. One thing her father never did was disagree with her mother in public.

  “Matti,” her mother said, “You’re going to be the father of our grandchild.” Her mother looked right at her father then. She was leaning over the horse’s neck and using the crop on both flanks. Here we go. “Emil, you apologize for sending those thugs.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “Emil.”

  “I only did it because I wanted so much more for you,” he said to Kyllikki.

  Oh, dear, she just got put back in the saddle. “I know, Daddy. I know.”

  He looked around, anything to avoid looking at a person. “I only wanted them to rough him up. Discourage him. They didn’t have any weapons and he nearly killed one of them.”

  Matti stood up. “You don’t call a goddamned baseball bat a weapon?” he said way too evenly.

  “Matti, please sit down,” Kyllikki said.

  Matti walked over to the window instead.

  “I don’t want some killer in the family,” her father said.