Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “She’s fine.”

  “I’m going to get her as soon as I’m settled.”

  “Well, get settled soon.”

  The way he said it took her aback. It sounded nonjudgmental, but she knew he was delivering a message about the direction she’d chosen. Before she could think of a response, he walked away to join his friends. She boarded the train for Portland, alone.

  PART FIVE

  1919–1932

  Prologue

  Leaving himself on his bed, Ilmari walked to Deep River and waded out from the shore. The tide was ebbing fast, running past Stanley Point and Long Island, where Matti had found refuge; passing Needle Point where it was joined by the waters of the Klawachuck and the three Nemahs; past Goose Point, which sheltered the mouths of the Palix and the Niawiakum; and then past Leadbetter Point, where the waters joined with the water of the Willapa and the Cedar and where the fresh water of the land met the salt water of the sea. He went with the power of the many rivers and was swept into the deepest of waters. Then, growing afraid, he struggled against the current, but when he grew tired, he sank into the darkness and drowned.

  There, deep in the ocean, the Salmon People came and took him to their village beneath the ocean, a village that looked like the villages of the Chinook and the Chehalis, the Clatsop and the Clatskanie, the Cowlitz and the Tillamook. They did not use their bodies, for they had left those behind for the human people and the animal and bird people to eat.

  Ilmari joined them. Now he belonged to the Salmon People.

  When they reached their village, he heard a child crying. The child was at the breast of its mother, but the mother looked up at Ilmari with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes and he felt her deep sadness because she had no milk. He watched the returning Salmon People enter their own lodges, but he saw that the lodges were no longer strong. The cedar-bark roofs needed repair and the smoke from the cooking fires, instead of rising into the clear air-like water above, seeped down from the smoke holes and lay along the paths and the meeting places where it stung the eyes and burned the nasal passages.

  He entered a dancing ground in the village center and an old man and an old woman, elders of the Salmon People, invited him to sit before them. The old woman said her people’s milk would not flow until the bones of her people were returned to the sea. The old man said the lodges would not be made strong until the entrails of his people were returned to the sea. And Ilmari understood that his people should not take more than they needed from the Salmon People, lest their gift be withdrawn. The old woman said the women’s milk would not flow until her people’s eggs could be planted in clean gravel. The old man said the smoke would not rise above the village unimpeded until his people’s children could return to the sea unimpeded. And Ilmari understood. As a woman dips water from a stream for her use but the stream flows on, so too must flow the cycle of the Salmon People.

  Then Ilmari heard children laughing and he walked to where a stream within the ocean flowed past the village and children of the Salmon People swam and splashed and laughed, moving like flashes of sunlight on the water. The old woman said, “Look closely.” And Ilmari looked beneath the surface of the water and saw that the children were missing feet or hands. “If you hunger, you may eat our children, but if you do not return their bones and entrails with respect, they will be reborn crippled and eventually they will die, and you will have eaten a child who can never be replaced.”

  Ilmari stayed the winter with the Salmon People, learning their lore. When it was again spring and time for them to return to their birthplaces in the small creeks that flowed over the rocks into the deep currents of the great rivers, he swam, too, for he now belonged to them.

  He swam to the opening at the end of the long north-running peninsula. The Great River had carried sand ground from the rocks of the mountains to the sea. The sea had carried it north and dropped it there, forming the bay that his former people called Willapa. Now, smelling Deep River, he found its mouth, and then smelling Ilmahenki, he found the beach in the slack water. There, Vasutäti caught him in her net.

  When she pulled him from the river, she saw his dark eyes and broad chest and knew it was him. She took him to her campsite and held him, singing to him, until he began to shed his skin. On the third day, he was again human. She sat him down before her and said, “I will not stay with you much longer. You must remember what I have taught you.”

  He walked to Deep River with her and stood at her side looking across to Ilmahenki and the smoke from the stove where Alma made breakfast for his children and he was filled with longing to cross the river and join them. Then he saw a huge salmon, an old tule who had fought the battle upstream to spread his milky sperm and now, spent, drifted slowly with the current, his flesh turning red and soft with decay, back toward the sea. He saw it was his own soul. He turned to Vasutäti, who nodded solemnly and handed him a spear. He thrust the spear into the old salmon and Ilmari died, as we all must.

  Then he awoke, as we all do.

  1

  The next day in Portland, November 12, 1919, Aino read the headline: MASSACRE IN CENTRALIA. WOBBLY HUNG. MORE ARRESTED. Her heart pounding, she read that Jack Kerwin was arrested and charged with murder along with many others. The young soldier, Wesley Everest, was lynched. The legionnaires had broken into the jail and hanged him from the Chehalis River Bridge. The paper said he shot a deputy named Hubbard while trying to escape across the Skookumchuck River.

  The last paragraph said the police were looking for a female accomplice in the murders of the five legionnaires. She had been seen with Everest several times, the last time fleeing with him from the Roderick Hotel. She felt her stomach lurching with fear.

  She couldn’t stay in Portland and she was afraid to go home. All she could think of was to flee to Chicago where the IWW was large and active, where she could find comrades to hide her. She ran to her rooming house to gather her things, not knowing if she would ever see Eleanor again.

  Just before Christmas, Kyllikki and Matti received a letter postmarked Detroit with no return address. One day later, Alma and Ilmari received an almost identical letter. Alma read it first and then passed it over to Ilmari who read it, said nothing, and went to do the milking.

  After the children, including Eleanor, were put to bed, Alma sat down with her knitting. She was working on a sweater for Eleanor. Ilmari picked up his carving; he was working on a cedar salad bowl. They usually had these fifteen or twenty minutes together before going to bed themselves. No use wasting the kerosene and time doing nothing practical.

  “Why won’t she tell us where she’s living? I don’t think it’s Detroit,” Alma said, at the same time keeping count of her knit-and-purl stitches. She watched Ilmari as he carefully made a wood shaving curl with a new gouging tool, hollowing out the bowl from a single block of fine-grained cedar. She knew he was thinking, not ignoring her.

  “She got into trouble with the police in Finland, you know,” Ilmari finally said.

  “Yoh.”

  “She’s frightened.”

  “Yoh.”

  They both continued working.

  “Do you think she’s in Detroit?” Alma asked.

  “No. She’s in Chicago.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t think that,” he said.

  Well, Alma thought, that makes it clear. She’s in Chicago.

  After another long silence Ilmari asked, “Do you mind having Eleanor?”

  “No. I love her.”

  “We might have her a long time.”

  “Yoh.”

  Spring came but was very different from Alma’s and Ilmari’s memories of it’s arrival in Finland. There, the water would start to trickle in the afternoons and freeze again at night on the deeply frozen rivers. Around Deep River, snowfall was unusual by March. Only on rare occasions would ice form across the river. Spring was about more daylight and getting things done.

  Nature’s colors came earlier in Deep Riv
er than in Finland and lasted longer. By February, the dark-green branches of the conifers would start to show tiny chartreuse feathers of new growth, bright yellow-green jewels like earrings on the tips of the branches. Blue-violet lupine and starbursts of purple camas came into view. The low, muddy ground near rivers and streams pushed up the dark leaves and yellow cornucopia flowers of skunk cabbage. Then, most secret and special, the first glorious trillium raising its delicate but brilliant white petals from dark humus, braving the still-cold rain of early March, announced that winter was not yet vanquished but would be vanquished once again.

  In April, the promise fulfilled, new vines and bushes seemed to grow as you watched them. In May, the pale yellow-orange and watery salmonberries ripened. In June, translucent red huckleberries. In July, deep-red thimbleberries, used by little girls to color their lips, and with wonderful tiny seeds to chew into mash. Finally, in August, the blue Cascade bilberries, wild strawberries, and three varieties of blackberries: wild mountain, evergreen, and Himalaya.

  On an early Sunday morning in May, Ilmari decided to visit Vasutäti. Mielikki, now eleven, grabbed an unfinished basket, so she could get Vasutäti to solve a particularly difficult problem with a pattern. She’d long ago moved on from her first fumbling attempts with a child’s hands. Even Vasutäti had told Ilmari that the girl had a gift for weaving. Ilmari knew that Vasutäti was teaching Mielikki everything she knew about weaving. Helmi, nine, and Jorma, seven, came as well, leaving Alma with Eleanor.

  The children scampered barefoot on the moist needle fall of the previous winter, the girls hunting for trilliums—mostly past, but occasionally a late one could be found—and Jorma hunting for food. Sheep sorrel, its soft trifold leaves tasting like little bursts of lemon candy, or young fiddlehead ferns, with their musty asparagus-like flavor—or the occasional squeal of delight at finding a good licorice root—kept them all chatting and happy. They all loved visiting Vasutäti, and Ilmari loved taking them.

  About halfway to Vasutäti’s campsite clouds darkened the sun. The children hardly noticed. In these forests, the passing of the sun into and out of clouds barely registered on the forest floor. But Ilmari felt this one more than he saw it, and it chilled him.

  He picked up his pace and Jorma started to lag. Ilmari swung him up onto his shoulders.

  Mielikki hurried up beside Ilmari. “Why are we going faster, Isä?” she asked.

  Ilmari stopped. He looked down at her and smiled. “Good question,” he said. He looked off into the darkness of the deep forest. “No good reason to hurry. No reason at all.”

  Mielikki’s hands suddenly went to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. Ilmari nodded slowly at her and put a finger to his lips. Then he knelt in front of her and hugged her. When he stood up again, she was struggling against crying. He laughed and tousled her hair. “Vasutäti would say now is not the time for sisu.”

  Ilmari crawled into the little bark-covered shelter and in the dim light could see Vasutäti lying on her beloved bearskin blanket in her deerskin ceremonial dress with the Hudson’s Bay beads she’d sewn on it herself when she was young. Her hair was combed and flowed unbraided over her chest, adorned with a single owl feather over her right ear. Her twinkling eyes and merry laugh flooded his memory. She was dressed for a wedding, not a funeral.

  2

  Business was good for the Bachelor Boys in May 1922. A single day working on whistlers earned the equivalent of five days’ pay for logging. They’d work only when the money ran out. Right now, they were flush and girls at the dances were wearing skirts that showed their knees when they spun.

  All five of them had washed, shaved, and walked to Tapiola. There was a buzz when they walked into a dance. The girls would look at them quickly, look away, start whispering to each other, fuss with their hair, and smooth their skirts or dresses. The Bachelor Boys knew people said they were bootlegging. Wanting to take advantage of the rumors and also protect their source of income, they kept the elk bugler business secret. They, however, were unaware of a downside to this strategy. Not only did the local girls think they were bootleggers, but bootleggers from Nordland thought so too.

  When Aksel walked into the dance hall above Higgins’s, his eyes—always scanning—stopped on five well-dressed men, not loggers. His eyes went back to the girls. Tapiola now had a high school with twenty girls in it and several of the older ones were here, too young for him and the other Bachelor Boys but still nice to look at.

  At the next break, Aksel and Jens were smoking by the stairwell when Kullervo came over to them with three giggling high school girls in tow. Yrjö and Heppu were talking with their current partners on the dance floor. Aksel and Jens rolled their eyes at each other before turning and smiling politely.

  “They wanted to meet you,” Kullervo said in English. He’d been drinking, and he introduced the girls with a broad possessive hand motion that made Aksel smile. “Sylvie, Martha, Sandra, these are Aksel and Jens, two of my business partners.” The three girls giggled. Aksel made a slow bow and Jens followed suit. Sylvie, obviously the leader of the pack, smiled and went into a perfect curtsy, coming up with her eyes sparkling, looking straight at Aksel.

  “We’ve always wanted to meet you,” she said.

  Aksel looked at her more closely. “I think we’ve met before,” he said, a little uncertainly.

  “You’ve seen me before, but we’ve never met.”

  Aksel looked at her, exaggerating puzzlement.

  “I’m Sylvie Wirkkala. Alma Wittala is my mother’s sister.”

  Aksel grinned. “I saw you talking to her at Higgins’s.”

  “And we didn’t meet.”

  Aksel chuckled. “So, now we meet.”

  Sylvie looked at her friends for help, but none was forthcoming. Amused, knowing why the girls wanted to meet them, Aksel waited. Finally, Martha burst out, “Are you really bootleggers?”

  “Martha,” Sylvie said, embarrassed by her bluntness.

  Martha looked back at her and then repeated to Aksel, “Well, are you?”

  “If I said no, you’d think I was lying,” Aksel answered. “If I said yes, I could end up in jail.”

  The girls looked at each other, not knowing quite how they should take the comment.

  Aksel took in the flirting with a smile. Then he shook his head. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Almost seventeen,” Sylvie answered.

  Aksel nodded slowly, still smiling. “I’m thirty.”

  Sylvie’s face showed exaggerated disappointment. “Oh,” she said. “We thought you were more mature.”

  Aksel and Jens both laughed out loud.

  The band started playing and Kullervo, who’d all this time held Sandra’s hand, took her out to the floor. This left the four of them looking awkwardly at each other.

  “Oh, OK,” Aksel said. He looked at Jens, who looked at the ceiling. He held his hand out to Sylvie. She took it, raised it above her head, and twirled beneath it. Jens and Martha followed them onto the floor.

  All three girls were good dancers, but Sylvie was very good, a delight to lead, responsive to the slightest signals. She and Aksel danced another dance and then Aksel, concerned that she might be misinterpreting signals he was trying not to send, escorted her off the floor. She was clearly disappointed. Sensing this, Aksel said, “You’re a wonderful dancer. You’re sixteen.”

  “I know,” she said, then looked up at the ceiling in mock despair. “It just was never meant to be.”

  Aksel started to leave her. “It’ll only be ten years,” she said quickly to his back.

  He turned back to her, puzzled.

  “You know the old-country formula,” Sylvie said. “If the girl’s half the man’s age plus seven, it’s ideal to marry and have children.”

  Aksel took half his age in ten years, added seven, and got twenty-seven, which was seventeen plus ten. The girl was quick.

  “It’s twelve years for a sixteen-year-old,” he said.

  “I can wait
.”

  “You’d only have to wait three years for Kullervo. He’ll turn twenty-two next week.”

  “I’d have to be as crazy as people say he is.”

  Aksel laughed.

  Sylvie looked pointedly toward the dance floor where Kullervo and Sandra were slow dancing. “She’ll only have to wait two years. She’s already seventeen, but I don’t think she wants to wait.”

  Although the words came out of Aksel’s own mouth, they took him completely by surprise. “Some people wait a lifetime.”

  The sudden overwhelming sadness made him look away from her to hide the tears rising in his eyes.

  Kullervo came over with Sandra hanging on his arm, followed by Jens, who was politely but firmly escorting Martha off the floor. Aksel and Jens thanked them for the dances and were leaving when Martha blurted out. “Why do you live in the woods?”

  “Who told you we live in the woods?” Aksel asked.

  “Everyone knows it,” she said, looking to Sylvie for support. “We even know you’re up on the North Fork.”

  “Hmm. Famous, are we?” Aksel said. He turned to Jens. “Why do we live in the woods?”

  Jens smiled, shook his head, and shrugged his shoulders. Aksel turned back to the girls. “You see. We don’t know.”

  “Is it because you’re wolves and can’t live with domesticated dogs?” Martha asked.

  There was a silence. Jens said, “Never thought of it like that.”

  Then Sylvie said in her even, quiet voice, “It’s also like an animal that goes off to lick its wounds, isn’t it?”

  Jens found someone else to dance with and Aksel went outside to smoke. Leaning against the wall, he became aware that the five strangers had followed him out. They surrounded him. Adrenaline started flowing, but he knew action would only lead to pain. “Can I help you boys?” he asked.

  “Yeah, squarehead. You can.” The man who spoke was heavyset and had a diamond stickpin holding his tie to his shirt. “You and your pals can get out of our turf.”