Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  On August 15, Governor Lister of Washington—under extreme pressure from labor voters on one side and the War Department and federal government on the other—offered a compromise: an eight-hour day with nine hours of pay at the old rates, around twenty-five cents an hour. Details like safety, sanitation, sleeping conditions, and lice were left out.

  “No. Don’t settle,” Aino said to the Reder loggers. She stood in the twilight just at the edge of the bunkhouses at Camp Three, having made her way on a trail avoiding the normal approach on the rail line or the well-worn trail from Tapiola. “He’s throwing you a bone so you’ll stop barking,” she went on. “You act like dogs. You’ll be treated like dogs.”

  The loggers at Camp Three rejected Lister’s offer as did loggers and mill workers all over the state.

  Because of the strike, Aino could get food to Matti only irregularly and infrequently. He couldn’t hunt, for fear of giving himself away. He tried trapping, running the makeshift traps at night. Fishing was out because he could be seen. Aino knew this and with every trip saw him grow leaner. In the last week of August, she decided to make a food run late at night.

  Oskar Mannila, a striking mill worker, had gone to Long Island to see if he could get some clams and oysters for his family. He took blankets intending to spend the night and start early the next morning at low tide. Sitting with his back against a driftwood log, he was watching the northern lights—at this southern latitude more like a soft eerie glow than the curtain of colored light he’d watched in his native Finland. Aino unwittingly rowed up onto the beach in front of him. He knew her from her organizing efforts at his mill.

  He shouted out her name, but Aino shoved off immediately, saying nothing. She rowed to where she and Kyllikki hid the boat on the mainland and set off overland for Chinook, the little town growing around the Indian village on the Columbia River’s edge. From there she took the road to Knappton and got the ferry to warn Kyllikki that Matti’s hiding place had very likely been compromised.

  “How do we warn him without leading them right to him?” Kyllikki asked.

  Aarni started banging a pot with a ladle and marching around the room, another pot on his head for a helmet, shouting in English, “Kill the Boche! Kill the Boche!”

  “Mama, make him stop,” Suvi cried out. “He took the railroad station.”

  “Aarni, please,” Kyllikki said, moving over to him. He deftly moved in the other direction.

  “Kill the Boche. Kill the Kaiser.”

  Kyllikki’s mother appeared at the kitchen door steadying a now toddling Pilvi, a clear they’re-your-kids look on her face.

  Kyllikki had managed to get the ladle out of Aarni’s hand and he threw the pot at her before running up the stairs, “Kill the Boche!” echoing from the upstairs hall.

  Kyllikki, watching the empty space at the top of the stairs, said, “He misses his father.” She turned to Aino, tears in her eyes. “I can’t stay mad at him forever.” Aino walked over and hugged her until Suvi tugged on Aino’s skirt.

  “Is Mama crying because she misses Daddy?”

  That made up Aino’s mind.

  “If he stays where he is, he’ll go to jail and we won’t see him for years,” Aino said quietly. “If he runs again, even if he makes it to Canada, we still won’t see him. Winter’s coming. He’ll starve.”

  She walked over to the window and looked across the Columbia to where mist rose from dark hills to meet the low clouds that had infiltrated from the ocean.

  “I’ve got to talk to Margaret Reder,” she said quietly.

  “She must hate you,” Kyllikki said. “And Matti, too.”

  Aino looked at her. “She doesn’t hate me; she just thinks she should.” She paused. “Just the way I think I should hate her.”

  Kyllikki was puzzled.

  “She wanted to be my friend. It was impossible. Still is.” She was already walking to get her coat. “But she’ll make a deal.”

  When Margaret opened the front door, she was astounded to see Aino Koski. Aino was no longer the idealistic girl she’d first seen reading Lenin in Russian over ten years ago. Nor was she the young woman who’d saved her and her baby’s lives. She was now a mature woman—with considerable power. She still had that direct bearing all the Finns shared. Aino told her once it was from standing up to winter. Margaret suspected it was also from standing up to more powerful neighbors. “Aino, my God. If John sees you here, he’ll … he’ll … I don’t know. What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Matti can’t hide much longer. Winter is coming. He has a wife and two children.” She looked coolly at Margaret. “I’m here to make a deal.”

  “You have a nerve to think there will ever be a deal. Your brother nearly killed my husband and you’ve done everything in your power to kill our business.” She noticed that Aino was wearing her glasses. That happened only when her guard was down.

  “We can talk out here or inside,” Aino said.

  Margaret remembered why she used to like this woman so much. However, she would not give in to that. “Neither place,” Margaret replied. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”

  “We do, and you know it.”

  Margaret opened the door and stood aside.

  When John Reder came home Margaret met him on the porch. “Aino Koski is in the kitchen,” she said.

  “Goddamnit, Margaret …”

  Margaret put one index finger up and then put it to her lips. “Outside.”

  The wind was backing off to the northwest where the sky was turning a brilliant orange. Upriver, the clouds glowed soft pink. Reder had his back against the porch railing, his arms folded. She took a deep breath. “She wants you to drop the charges against her brother.”

  Reder exploded, as she knew he would. “Drop charges? I’ll have that son of a bitch hung. You tell her to get out of our kitchen or I’ll—”

  “John.” Margaret moved in front of the door. “I won’t throw her out of the kitchen before you talk.”

  “I’ll have the sheriff—”

  “What? Ransack her other brother’s house?”

  “That had to be done.”

  “I understand that. Doesn’t that make you even?”

  “No, by God, it doesn’t. I’ll have that hotheaded bastard in jail if I have to turn this county upside down. I’ll have Pinkertons—”

  She put her hands over her ears. He went silent.

  “John, we’re on the edge of financial ruin. The big boys, Weyerhaeuser, Simpson, Bloedel … they can weather the storm.”

  “I can’t make a separate deal,” Reder said. “They’d ruin us instead of the Wobblies.”

  “She knows that,” Margaret said. “She’s not asking for a separate deal.”

  Reder was silent. Then he said, “What’s she asking for?”

  “She’s confirmed that the War Department is putting as much pressure on the owners to settle as it’s putting pressure on the Justice Department to round up Wobblies under the Espionage Act. There’s going to be another offer. The unspoken alternative is that if both sides don’t come to terms, the federal government will step in and nationalize the whole industry.”

  “That’s socialism.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it.”

  Reder didn’t laugh. “You still haven’t told me what she’s offering.”

  “Aino will forcefully and publicly argue to return to work. Then, she’ll move across the river and cease all organizing activities north of it.”

  Reder said nothing. Margaret was used to this. Wheels were turning.

  “One more thing, John. You did break a beer bottle over his head.” She saw that this hit home. One of the many things she loved about him was his innate sense of justice. It’s what got him nearly cuckoo over private-property rights—and it was what made him respected by laborers and owners alike.

  “OK,” he said. “But her brother moves south of the river with her. He promises never to log in Chinook, Wahkiakum, or Nordland Counties.”
>
  “Won’t work.”

  Reder was taken aback.

  “She won’t deliver until he’s home,” Margaret said.

  “I can’t gamble on that.”

  “If she doesn’t deliver, you have him arrested. A word-of-mouth deal with a Wobbly will mean nothing to the courts. She’ll be taking the gamble, not you.”

  He pondered on that. “OK.” He smiled. “That son of a bitch is the best logger I’ve ever seen. And he learned it all from me.”

  Aino retrieved Matti on August 30. After coffee at Ilmahenki, he walked over to Suvantola. It smelled of neglect. There were mouse droppings on the floor and kitchen counter. He returned outside and saw the ruined garden. He was seized with an ache for Kyllikki that was palpable. It was like a vacuum in his heart and stomach, pulling him toward Astoria.

  He said goodbye to Ilmari at the mill. Then he went to the house to say goodbye to Rauha. He found Rauha castigating Kullervo for something. When Kullervo walked away, he said, “Go easy on him, Rauha.”

  “I don’t know why I ever let you talk me into hiring him.”

  “Because no one else in the county will work for you.”

  She walked away angry, leaving Matti with a slight smile on his face. Welcome home.

  He caught up to Kullervo and said, “Don’t mind her.”

  Kullervo had grown tall and filled out since logging the Klawachuck.

  “She’s a bitch. Worse than my mother, and I’d kill my mother if I knew where she was.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Kullervo gave him a look that chilled him. He thought back on the many times he, Aksel, and Jouka had patched up the boy’s bruised and broken skin.

  “You need to go easy on each other.”

  “Maybe I’ll join the army.”

  “Don’t. It’s not our fight.”

  “But we’re in it.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Us. Americans.”

  “Well then,” Matti said. “We are stupid to be over there. I don’t see any German gunboat steaming up Deep River.” Matti looked around him at the forest-covered hills; at Deep River, placid in the summer; at smoke coming from the chimney of his brother’s house as Rauha made supper.

  “I heard about your fight,” Kullervo said. “Too bad you didn’t kill the bastard.”

  “No. It was too bad I knifed him. My family’s uprooted. I have to start all over again in Oregon.”

  “Let me work for you.”

  Matti felt sorrow for the little whistle punk he’d met a decade ago, but even he wouldn’t hire the rangy twenty-year-old time bomb. “Let me get something going. We’ll talk.” He watched Kullervo’s eyes go to the ground. He knew. “Got to go,” Matti said, trying to cover the awkwardness. “I haven’t seen my wife in months.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Kullervo said with a smile. He got quiet. “Someday I hope to find a woman like your wife.”

  “You and every sane man.”

  7

  When Matti knocked on the Saaris’ door, Hilda Saari opened it. She called out, “Kyllikki, your children’s father is here.” She left him there.

  Kyllikki came from the kitchen, wiping her hands with a towel. Before she said anything, Suvi, now five, burst through the door from behind her, squealing with pleasure. She was up in Matti’s arms, kissing him repeatedly on his cheeks, when Aarni, now three, came through the door, a wooden spoon in his hand. Matti put Suvi on the floor and stood tall, reaching out to Aarni. Aarni pointed the spoon at him, said, “Bang,” and ran back into the kitchen.

  “You’re dead,” Kyllikki said, looking at Matti.

  Matti opened his arms to her. She folded hers. Suvi, clinging to Matti’s trousers, alternated between looking at Matti and looking at her mother.

  “If it wasn’t for the children …”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Never. Never again, with the puukko.”

  “Never again.”

  Matti began to move into the doorway, but Kyllikki didn’t budge. “Never again, cheat on a business deal, cheat on anyone.”

  Matti looked down at his shoes. He looked into her eyes. “Never.”

  “Suvi,” Kyllikki said. “Show your isä his bed.” She walked back into the kitchen. Suvi looked up at her father, smiled somewhat tentatively, and then led him by his hand down into the basement.

  For Matti, starting again from the bottom took on a whole new meaning.

  * * *

  Four days after Matti’s homecoming, on September 5, 1917, the Justice Department raided forty-eight IWW halls across the United States using the Espionage Act for its authority. In Chicago alone, the department indicted 160 IWW leaders for “interfering with the war effort.” All faced long prison sentences; those born in other countries faced deportation.

  Stories circulated in newspapers about strikers being financed by German gold and being organized by German spies. Thugs were hired to beat strikers on the picket lines. Local police forces arrested strikers under any number of pretexts. As the numbers of arrested strikers rose, the authorities resorted to building bull pens to hold them, as they’d done during the free-speech fights. False stories were published in newspapers saying that strikes were being broken and loggers returning to work elsewhere, so strikers would lose heart. Union halls were ransacked. Angry citizens threatened strikers’ families. One striker in Troy, Montana, was burned alive in jail.

  Aino knew that she was performing a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, she had to deliver a settlement for Reder to keep Matti free. On the other, she did not want to sell out the strikers, throwing months of fear and hardship under the wheels of the capitalists’ and the federal government’s freight train. She needed a way for both sides to claim victory. After considerable thought, she knew her course.

  She started with the family men. All Camp Three families were short on food and, although food could be supplemented with hunting and fishing, winter loomed. The family men would support Aino against the hard-liners. In addition, she made sure that news about the constant arrests of organizers under the Espionage Act was always in front of the men—and always with the carefully worded innuendo that strikers at Camp Three would be next. On September 12, when the Camp Three strike committee met, she was pretty sure the vote on her proposal would go her way.

  “We are going to pretend we agree to the next proposal,” she said. “We make sure everyone knows we’re doing this because we’re loyal American citizens and are totally behind the war effort. If it were not for our willingness to sacrifice for the war effort, we would still be on strike.” She paused, looking at each hard-liner in turn. “Then, we’re going to work like Hoosiers and shoe clerks and eat the bosses’ food.”

  There was a moment of silence, then a few people who got the strategy laughed. As others caught on, the room started to buzz. Anyone who couldn’t log was either a Hoosier—a dumb farmer—or a shoe clerk: a city boy.

  “The bosses will know what we’re doing, but they’ll never be able to buck the pressure from the army. They’ll happily take some logs over no logs. Meanwhile, we get paid and fed by Reder.”

  There were smiles of approval, a few choice ideas about how to work like a Hoosier, and the vote went her way.

  Aino’s idea spread quickly to mills and logging camps all across the region. When the expected government offer arrived a week later, Reder’s loggers didn’t make a single protest, nor did loggers from the other camps. The big timber industry strike was “settled” under the approving eye of the United States Army. Owners had to accept so as not to appear unpatriotic; they wanted to accept to avoid losing their army contracts.

  Trees went down and logs moved to the mills, but there was a dramatic rise in fouled cables, logjams, slipping chokers, logs dropped from too high onto railcars and damaging the undercarriages, lost tools, conferences to plan how to do something that’d been done a thousand times, leisurely lunches, being unable to understand what a head push wa
nted, and inability to understand English. The owners knew what was going on, but none of them were going to buck their biggest customer, the U.S. government. And—they were making money again.

  Watching from the deck of the General Washington as the houses and steep hills of Astoria came ever closer, Aino was despondent. She’d freed Matti and she hadn’t betrayed the cause. Some concessions had been made, but they fell far short of what the loggers needed and she regretted what the strike had cost. She knew many of the imprisoned Wobblies. Public opinion, usually sympathetic to the plight of the workingmen, had turned against them as she’d predicted. The tactic of working like Hoosiers was a balancing act: the pressure had to be kept on owners, but stopping or slowing work too much would be seen as unpatriotic.

  The late-September light and crisp air, the water of the great river sparkling in the sunshine, the leaves of the oaks and alders turning yellow with the occasional brilliant red of a vine maple peeping through—all went unnoticed. Amid this beauty, she came ashore on the Oregon side, her new home, carrying the weight of the strike’s biggest cost: Jouka and her ruined marriage.

  It took her until sunset to find Jouka at the Desdemona Club, a proud workingman’s club with a sign outside offering its members coffee, tea, and fellowship. With regular monthly payments to the Astoria police and several judges, everyone could enjoy tea and fellowship without interference. Prohibition had been voted in, primarily by Oregon women. Most men didn’t give a damn about it, including the police who let the Desdemona Club alone. Half of them drank there themselves.

  The bouncer at the door was surly. There was certainly no law against women being in the club; lots of women were in the club, women of a certain type. But he knew Jouka was inside, so he let her in.

  It took a moment for Aino’s eyes to adjust to the low light of three electric bulbs just over the bar. Some of the tables still had kerosene lanterns. The smell of stale tobacco smoke and spilled beer hit her as if she were coming into a warm barn from a cold Finnish night. The open door had briefly cast bright light against the near wall, but now it was closed. Gradually she could make out the bodies and faces of the men and a few working girls. At the far end of the bar, three full and two empty shot glasses in front of him, sat Jouka, staring at the glasses. The Jouka she’d known—bigger than life—looked older and smaller, bending over his drinks as if guarding them instead of tossing them down with laughter. Her heart lurched.