Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  Three weeks after Christmas, Aino read in the Astorian that Joe Hill had been arrested for murdering a grocer and the grocer’s son in Salt Lake City. He’d been found wounded on that same night and the prosecution claimed he was shot by the dying son. Aino argued vehemently that Hillström had been framed by the capitalists and their stooges in the legal system. Hillström claimed someone else shot the two men and his wound was the result of a dispute about a woman whose name he didn’t want to reveal. That certainly seemed credible to Aino. It did not to a jury. On July 8, 1914, Hillström was sentenced to death.

  She worried about the IWW’s growing reputation for violence. The horrible mining wars in Colorado and northern Idaho years ago between Bill Haywood’s Western Federation of Miners and the owners had been punctuated with dynamite and killing. Many of the miners joined the IWW with Big Bill, bringing their reputation with them.

  She fought this temptation to violence herself. People were rightly angry. She was angry. She carried one scar on her forehead and another on her right shoulder, where she had fallen to the man beating her with an ax handle in Nordland. But in Nordland and at all the other free-speech fights, the IWWs had folded their arms in accordance with the strongly held belief that although violence was the basis of every political state in existence, it had no place in the foundation or superstructure of the IWW. So far, she and the union had remained true to this ideal, but they had failed to communicate this. The bosses and their newspapers had successfully labeled the IWWs as violent anarchists, creating a false image that fed people’s fear and undermined popular support for the cause. The American people, she mused, espousing an ideology of rugged individualism, the mythology of “Don’t Tread on Me,” were as twitchy as chipmunks.

  She suspected that Joseph Hillström unconsciously wanted to be a martyr. It would suit his romantic temperament, which is what likely got him into jail in the first place, fooling around with that woman. She laughed under her breath; it also beat hard work. Then she felt ashamed of herself for thinking such things. Hillström had heart and his heart was in the right place, no matter his flaws.

  She was overtaken by sadness and empty loss. They were going to kill Hillström whether he had killed someone or not.

  The specter of violence also haunted the international news. The arms race in Europe that Matti had predicted grew throughout the spring. On June 28, Gavrilo Princip, a radical anarchist, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, fueling anger in Europe and fear of mad and violent anarchists in America.

  On Sunday, August 2, Aino was sitting in the afternoon sunshine on the beach in front of Ilmari’s house knitting a hat, her naked nieces and nephews jumping into and out of Deep River. She heard a horse galloping and turned from the river, shading her eyes, following with her ears the hoofbeats coming from the forest. Higgins burst into view. He reined up next to the men helping with the winter wood supply. Kyllikki and Rauha were chatting on the porch in the shade, also knitting, preparing for winter. “The Germans have sent the Belgian foreign minister a letter,” he shouted. “They claim France is about to attack Germany by crossing through Belgium and Germany has to enter Belgium to defend itself. It’s a load of nonsense. It means war between England and Germany.”

  Kyllikki and Rauha ran toward Higgins with their knitting and balls of yarn in their hands. Aino watched Matti’s and Ilmari’s faces light up; she knew about their purchase of the timber rights to several hundred acres of spruce near the south end of Willapa Bay. Excited, Matti asked Higgins, “Where is Finland?”

  “The same place as Ireland,” Higgins replied. “On paper, Ireland will fight alongside England, but the people won’t be gulled. Both of those bastard monarchies will be hard-pressed to get good Irishman and Finns to do their dirty work for them, by Jesus.”

  “No need to swear,” Ilmari said.

  Aino joined the group, trailed by naked, dripping children. “It will be the same in England, France, and Germany,” she said. “No workingman will kill a fellow worker for a war between capitalists over imperialist greed. This war will be over in a week.”

  Higgins looked at her, sadly. “I don’t think so, my proud firebrand.” He rode off, leaving the men to speculate among themselves what war would mean for logging, sawmilling, and farming, never slacking on putting the wood away. The women returned to the shade, Aino with them. She sat down on a crate, holding a skein of wool between her raised hands while Kyllikki wound it into a ball. Kyllikki gently shook her head at her, looking into her eyes. “Higgins is right on this one, Aino,” Kyllikki said. “Patriotism trumps class.”

  “Not this time,” Aino said.

  “Every time,” Kyllikki answered. “Patriotism makes us all feel like one people. Class divides us.”

  “Marxism is changing that.”

  Kyllikki began singing, “We’ll have pie in the sky when we die.”

  Aino threw the skein at her.

  13

  The business cycle bottomed out in December, but spruce prices kept rising, as Matti had predicted. French and English purchasing agents combed the Pacific Northwest. Two-Hundred-Foot Logging was making money. Then, a series of bad storms in February shut even Matti down. Aksel asked for a few days off.

  After two nights at the Lucky Logger, Aksel decided to go to the Saturday night dance at Suomi Hall. When he reached the reception room at the top of the stairs, he saw Lempi talking with two other women at the far end by the kitchen window counter. Their eyes met. The distance between them vanished.

  Lempi was clearly no longer the girl he’d first known at Reder’s Camp. Her eyes spoke of sorrow—and depth into which he felt himself plunging.

  Lempi looked away first. The other women looked at Aksel, made a quick appraisal, and then quickly looked at Lempi to try to guess the relationship by the expression on her face. One of them whispered into Lempi’s ear.

  Good old Lempi, Aksel thought. It had been three years since Huttula had died. She had probably been right here in Astoria all along. Everything came clear; he knew he was going to marry her.

  Six weeks later, he proposed. She agreed, provided he quit logging.

  Two days after the wedding, Aksel went to Knappton and found Cap Carlson at the docks washing out his boat’s fish box. Cap was alone, raising Aksel’s hopes. Maybe he needed a boat puller, so called because the job involved pulling the boat forward under the heavy net, the only way to get it back into the boat, while the captain focused on untangling the salmon.

  Carlson looked up. His smile, warm and broad, showed a couple of gaps where decayed teeth had been pulled.

  “By golly, Aksel,” he said in English. “What brings you to Knappton?”

  Cap started hauling on the stern line, which ran through a pulley on the wharf and then above the boat to another pulley attached to a piling opposite the boat’s bow. Aksel climbed down the ladder and waited for the boat to get close, his feet only two rungs above the water. He jumped nimbly to the deck.

  “This calls for a smoke,” Cap said in Swedish. He pulled out his pipe and Aksel rolled a cigarette. It was only after they had their first long pulls that Aksel answered Cap’s question in Swedish.

  “I got married.”

  “Who to?”

  “Huttula’s widow, Lempi.”

  “That was a tough one,” Cap said. He drew a long pull on the pipe. “I didn’t know Huttula.” They were both respectfully silent. “I remember her,” Cap went on, “when she first came to work up at Reder’s. Thirteen or so. Orphan girl.”

  “She hasn’t had it easy,” Aksel said. Again, the calm silence, smoke rising to the wharf above them. “She’s a good worker and she’s a good dancer.”

  “What more could you want?” Cap said.

  Aksel laughed. “I’m happy.”

  “So, you came to Knappton just to tell me wedding news?”

  “I wondered if you could take me on as a boat puller until I learn the river and then help me get a cannery boat.” />
  “I thought you and Matti Koski were doing OK in the logging.”

  “Lempi doesn’t want me to log.”

  “Huttula,” Cap said.

  “Ja.” Aksel waited while Cap thought things through.

  “Ja. OK,” Cap said.

  * * *

  Cap took Aksel to meet the Knappton supervisor, Gerald Gleason, a man known on both sides of the river for his callousness and ability to get things done. It was mid-May, the very end of the spring Chinook run. Gleason wasn’t encouraging. “How do I know he can fish?” he asked, ignoring Aksel.

  “He grew up fishing.”

  “Where?”

  “The Gulf of Bothnia,” Aksel answered. “Like Cap.”

  “That ain’t the Columbia.”

  “I’m good at finding fish. I can handle a boat.”

  “You vouch for him, Carlson?”

  “Ya, you bet.”

  “You take him on as a boat puller for the blueback. Teach him the river. He can have Number Twenty-Seven if he convinces me he can handle her.” He turned Aksel. “You’ll sign a contract saying you’ll work day and night, no days off, until the run is over. We’ll pay you after the run.”

  Aksel agreed.

  The run was a delirium of struggling, slippery fish and lack of sleep. The tides ruled all. There was no starting time or quitting time. Sometimes drifts set at night or in dangerous waters caught nothing. Often, however, drifts were rich with blueback hitting the gill net at full speed, pulling down the cork line with deep thumps—the sound of money.

  At the season’s end, Gleason paid Aksel off and Aksel showed him how well he handled Cap’s double-ended gill net boat alone. Gleason was visibly impressed, and Number 27 was Aksel’s. Cap shook his hand a little sadly. “Not going to find another boat puller like you,” he said.

  Aksel and Lempi found a company shack at the south end of Knappton, just above high tide. It smelled of mudflats, dead plants, dead fish, and garbage, but Lempi soon had fresh curtains on the two small front windows—she had bleached the smoke-stained curtains and resewed them with ruffles along the edges—and, after four days of hard work on the floor and walls with apple cider vinegar, bleach, lye soap, and elbow grease, she had the interior smelling clean. She covered a large burned patch caused by a chimney fire behind the stovepipe with a baby quilt she’d made. There was an iron bed frame, a cooking stove, and a table. Lempi sewed a mattress from some sailcloth scraps, filled it with sweet-smelling straw, and made sheets from flour sacks, which were the finest woven cloth she could find.

  There were always fish to be caught, even between the runs, and Aksel soon proved he could find them. When he was home, he and Lempi would sit on the threshold, watching the tide coming in and going out, listening to the slamming of heavy boards and whine of saws coming from the mills, watching the seagulls and hell-divers doing their own fishing, feeling the great river in their bodies and souls. They both knew the gods had given them a gift. They were thankful and happy.

  Aksel renamed Number 27 the Lempi. He’d always imagined naming his boat after Aino. Now, however, for the first time in a decade, he’d stopped thinking about her. Except for not having his own boat and net, Aksel felt content. He fished the Lempi by himself, a not unheard-of decision for a man of exceptional skill and strength. Handling the boat alone in rough weather was more dangerous than having a boat puller who could double the boat’s power by adding two more oars in rough weather. But boat pullers had to be paid. Men like Aksel, with confidence in their own skill and stamina—who knew how to work with currents, weather, and tides instead of against them—saved the money. They also took the risk.

  The blueback run in June had been good with lots of June Hogs, big Chinooks spawned in Canada and Wyoming, weighing in frequently at more than 120 pounds. There was nothing, however, that could compare to the August Chinook, and that August the Chinook run was one of the best in memory. They would lie offshore by the river’s mouth, waiting for the tide to slacken its flow, and then come teeming across the bar, silver scales flashing beneath the water as the huge fish—not as huge as the June Hogs, but still weighing up to a hundred pounds—hit the fresh river water, full, fat, and strong from four years of feeding in the North Pacific, honed by evolution to carry their eggs and sperm hundreds of miles up the Columbia and her tributaries to make new life.

  In concord with the salmon, and in accord with her name, which meant love, Lempi became pregnant in August.

  Aksel learned the basics of the river quickly: the main channels, the changes in the currents with the tides, the shape of the bottom, the sandbars, where the seals and sea lions lurked, the taste and temperature of the water. He knew where the fish would be forced to swim, and with each changing tide, the edges of his sail vibrating just right, he sailed there. On many days he was top boat at the cannery.

  When he had to catch a night tide, Lempi, her long hazelnut hair in braids, fixed him breakfast of eggs and pancakes or reheated salmon stew from the day before. As they kissed goodbye in the dark, he would feel her breasts beneath her flannel nightgown against his chest. Just before he lost her from view, he would look back to see Lempi standing in the shack’s door, silhouetted by the kerosene lamp on the table behind her.

  Hugging herself against the cold, Lempi would stare at the empty space Aksel left for some time before turning back into the shack. She tried to make light of her fear. Wives worried when their husbands set out alone in the dark on uncertain water to find and bring in the fish. They would break the round of cooking, laundry, gardening, tending to kids by walking to the river. There, they would peer into the distance, waving to the one or two other wives doing the same thing, looking for the boats to come back—looking for that one boat upon which rested not only their children’s lives, but, if they were among the lucky ones, their very happiness. Wives never talked about it.

  The days grew shorter, Lempi grew rounder, and soon it was Thanksgiving Day, 1915. As was customary, Ilmari said the Thanksgiving prayer from the head of the long table he’d made from Oregon oak inlaid with red alder along the edges. The children ate on temporary two-by-twelve trestles: Rauha and Ilmari’s Mielikki, nearly seven, Helmi, four, and Jorma, three; Matti and Kyllikki’s Suvi, three, and Suvi’s brother, Aarni, seven months, who lustily banged his hand on Kyllikki’s chest wanting to nurse.

  The prayer over, the conversation turned to one thing they were truly thankful for: spruce.

  “I heard there’s four or five buyers down here from the Royal Flying Corps,” Matti said. “If it weren’t for the British blockade, we’d have buyers from the Imperial German Flying Corps. The more one side builds, the more the other side shoots down.”

  “Men die in those airplanes,” Aino said.

  “They volunteered,” Matti said.

  Aino gave Matti a look that said she wasn’t going to lower herself to answer that.

  Then Rauha said, “Men die here, logging that spruce, one every four or five weeks.”

  “That’s why we need the eight-hour day,” Aino said.

  “If Aksel and I worked eight-hour days, we’d still be logging Higgins’s stand on the Klawachuck,” Matti said. Aksel nodded agreement.

  “Can I suggest,” Kyllikki said, “no war, no labor politics when we’re having Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Then Ilmari said, “Mmm,” which he did when about to speak seriously. “The Germans shoot down a British airplane; another British pilot dies,” he said, looking far beyond the walls. “The Royal Flying Corps sends another order for spruce to America. Purchasing agents dole out the order to people like me, who buy logs from people like Matti and Reder. Jouka makes good wages hauling logs to tidewater. Aino eats because of his wages, which Reder pays with money squeezed out of British taxpayers or borrowed from American banks. No one is clean.” He paused, then continued. “At the base of it all is the forest: planted, tended, and grown by none of us.”

  Jouka broke the ensuing silence. “Ilmari, you do have a w
ay with words.”

  This brought chuckles and people resumed eating and talking. Ilmari said that he’d seen a copy of the Astorian at Higgins’s and that the radical agitator Joe Hill had been executed by a firing squad in Utah.

  Aino put her fork down slowly.

  Kyllikki shot a look at Lempi.

  “Well, he murdered that grocery store man over some woman,” Rauha said.

  “They executed him because he was dangerous to capital,” Aino said. “The charges were trumped up.”

  “Remember, no war, no labor politics,” Kyllikki said brightly. She smiled and stood, collecting her plate, Lempi and Rauha rising with her, collecting dishes. Aino didn’t move.

  When the three stood by the kitchen sink, Rauha whispered, “I heard they were all over each other at Nordland and they slept in the same house in Centralia.”

  “I’m sure it was innocent,” Kyllikki said quietly. She reached for an apron.

  “You know those Wobblies always put each other up,” Lempi said.

  “I’m just saying what I heard,” Rauha said.

  “Leave her alone,” Kyllikki said. “At least think about Jouka,” she whispered, nodding toward where the men were talking.

  “And Ilmari wonders why there’s no baby yet,” Rauha said.

  Aino came into the kitchen with more plates and Rauha busily put on her apron. Kyllikki could see that Aino’s nearly black eyes were troubled and sad in her stoic face. She gave Aino an encouraging smile.

  The men were still talking logging over their coffee and cigarettes at the end of the table while the women were washing and drying the dishes, except for Kyllikki who nursed Aarni and walked him back and forth behind them, trying to get him back to sleep. With the last plate returned to the shelf next to the water pump, Aino said nature was calling and went for her coat.