Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  Several men and two women asked her why she was sitting there. She told them that she was waiting for her uncle Ilmari.

  Just before dark, she heard someone walking behind her and she turned her head. It was Ilmari-setä. She knew he would come. He did.

  When Aino found Eleanor gone, she ran through the poikataloja, searching the rooms. Within minutes, the bachelors who were off work joined the search. She ran to the police station and the word went out. When the rest of the bachelors got off work, they formed an organized search, fifty men covering every street.

  Mielikki arrived around midnight, having talked a gillnetter into taking her across the river, and told her that Eleanor was safe at Ilmahenki. Aino quivered between relief and despair. She’d gone to the police and all the bachelors in the poikataloja had joined the search. She thanked all the bachelors and she and Mielikki walked over to tell Kyllikki and Matti that Eleanor was safe. Aino pleaded with Kyllikki to mind the poikataloja for a couple of days and she and Mielikki took the first trip across the river in the morning.

  Aino saw Eleanor coming from the barn with a wicker basket of eggs and rushed up to her, nearly breaking the eggs when she hugged her close. Eleanor returned the hug, as best she could.

  At supper, Aino watched Eleanor eat as if every bite would be the last she would see. Eleanor, focusing on her stew, drinking her winter milk, less creamy than the spring and summer milk, asking Ilmari to cut off a slice of rieska for her, buttering it with care, was unaware of her mother’s aching heart.

  That night after the children went to bed, Aino asked Alma and Ilmari how much they would require in cash to feed Eleanor. Alma protested they needed nothing, but Ilmari said five dollars a month and Aino was grateful. Ilmari and Alma would hardly notice what Eleanor ate, but Ilmari knew Aino needed to send that five dollars every month to keep herself connected to Eleanor as well as hold her head up.

  The next morning Aino packed her overnight bag in the dark. She heard the rooster cry, imagining him seeking the dawn and not finding it. Rain drummed on the thin single-pane windows. An occasional gust of wind rattled them. Ilmari started the fire and Alma soon had mush and coffee going. Aino wondered if she could face saying goodbye to Eleanor, who was still sleeping. Maybe she should slip away. She watched Alma laying out the mush bowls and spoons for the children. They would walk to school in Tapiola in the dark. When they came home the girls would help Alma, churning butter, making balls for knitting from wool skeins, cleaning up after meals. Jorma would help with the cattle. He was learning how to blacksmith. Here, Eleanor counted. In the city she was just an added mouth. Here on Deep River, Eleanor had Alma, Ilmari, and her cousins. Here on Deep River, there was no stigma of divorce, no red versus white; there were no hours spent alone without friends while her mother worked. This time, what was truly good for Eleanor filled Aino with aching sadness.

  She lit a candle and climbed the stairs to where the girls were sleeping. Eleanor was curled up next to Helmi, her auburn hair in nighttime pigtails loosely tangled with Helmi’s yellow pigtails. Outside, the rooster crowed again.

  “Eleanor,” she whispered, touching her gently. “Eleanor, Äiti’s going.” Eleanor stirred and opened her hazel eyes.

  Rubbing her face and gently untangling her pigtail from Helmi’s, Eleanor sat up. Aino hugged her awkwardly with one arm, still holding the candle. She pulled back, looking into Eleanor’s beautiful little face. “Last chance. Do you want to come with me?”

  Eleanor looked down at her chest and shook her head no.

  “Well, then, you be a good girl for Alma-täti and Ilmari-setä. Be a good worker.”

  Tears welled up from Aino’s eyes. She reached out for Eleanor once more and smothered her hair and face with kisses. Then she stood and whispered, “I’ll come whenever I can.”

  Eleanor looked solemnly up at her, her face reflecting the candlelight, and nodded.

  Aino held herself together until she reached the plank road to Knappton. She’d believed she was being a good mother but in truth had not been thinking of Eleanor’s happiness at all. Eleanor left her. Now she was leaving Eleanor, but this time it was for Eleanor’s happiness, truly. Aino howled in anguish, no less seeking the dawn than the rooster.

  8

  Aino worked, visiting Eleanor throughout the spring and summer whenever she could. It was hard, prosaic, daily work that was never finished and never varied, but it was essential to the lives of everyone living there. She counted. Here was no great cause—other than earning room and board and Eleanor’s keep. However, why wasn’t this as great a cause as any? Who passed judgment on whether causes were great or small? Yes, there were no great debates, like syndicalism versus socialism. There were only small ones. Should she order navy beans or pinto beans? Should she try to move Ojala, who’d lost his leg to a flying cable, to the ground floor? Should she let him stay until he could get a job? The tasks were set before her—every morning, ever the same—like seeds spilled across a board that she had to sort, and after having them sorted into various piles by the end of the day, she awoke to find them scattered again, and again she set about sorting. There was no goal. There was no end point. There was just this daily living, this daily sorting of seeds that was the very life of the poikataloja and the men who lived there. She lived like a circle instead of a line. Since what she was doing didn’t matter in terms of power, politics, and history, it didn’t matter what she was doing. It felt peaceful.

  She finally confirmed her citizenship at the courthouse. She’d been married to an American citizen for over fifteen years. A month later, she turned in her divorce papers and her divorce was granted.

  Most of the bachelors at the poikataloja were in their late teens and twenties. They came to her for help with writing letters, advice on what color tie to buy to go with a new shirt. Some paid her a nickel to grease their boots, darn a sock, or patch a shirt. They talked to her some nights like a surrogate mother and other nights like an intriguing divorcée.

  She worked under the single electric ceiling light late into the night, reconciling accounts, making lists for tomorrow’s shopping, repairing her own clothes. She found herself writing letters home for her boys, as she came to think of them, in Finnish and Swedish.

  Aino used her mending money to buy gifts for Eleanor but soon learned the gifts made her cousins envious, so she began taking something for every child. Eleanor was happy. Aino realized that the happier Eleanor was, the more joy it brought herself.

  Eleanor responded. She talked more with Aino on her visits. She shared more of her life at Ilmahenki. It was clear, however, that Ilmahenki, not Astoria, was home.

  Spring moved into summer. Lumber prices had been falling since the summer before and the single men moved out of town, looking for work somewhere else. Aino and Kyllikki both had to spend time advertising, talking to prospective boarders.

  She began to submit articles to Toveritar, the Finnish-language women’s socialist newspaper, and within a few weeks had a weekly column explaining different aspects of Marxist theory. The paper circulated only in Astoria and nearby towns and she knew that the women cared more about recipes than Marxist theory—so one day she added a recipe and did mental gymnastics to relate it to Marxist theory. It elicited positive letters to the editor. She gradually changed the column to one called Recipes for Working Families, which included food recipes focusing on cost and nutrition but also “recipes” for raising families with social consciousness with object lessons that were increasingly brought to her attention by readers.

  After three months of dry summer weather came nine months of wet winter weather and then three more months of dry weather and the beginning of another nine months of wet. New boarders came as old boarders left. Squash in the summer, turnips and rutabagas in the winter. Apples in the fall, fresh fat cream in the spring. Socks darned, trouser knees patched, letters written, breakfasts and dinners cooked, plates and pots washed, sandwiches made for lunch buckets, toilets cleaned, dances at Su
omi Hall, and every week another column for Toveritar. Time seemed to stand still, punctuated by holidays that themselves seemed to never change, and Aino, now thirty-seven, sorted the seeds of a woman’s life.

  That Christmas she had small gifts for everyone, which she toted aboard the General Washington in a large canvas shopping bag. The sun had just set, leaving orange-pink traces. A nearly full moon was rising far up the river, pale white in a sky that stretched, darkening, into empty space. She felt the vibration of the boat’s deck and then she sensed the vibration moving into the river and the river flowing from the moon, flowing to the sea, flowing through her. She, small and alone, was yet part of this vast animated soul of a river, a flowing, vibrating, moving stillness.

  Christmas Eve was wonderful. Alma had outdone herself preparing the food. Her niece, Sylvie, had come by to help with the pies and other baking, which puzzled Alma a little, but then she wasn’t going to turn down the help. Even Aksel stopped by, leaving candy he said he’d bought in Portland. He, however, seemed preoccupied, saying vaguely that business wasn’t as good as it used to be. Kyllikki told Aino that when Matti came back from the sauna, he said that Aksel had a new scar.

  The only slight imperfection in an otherwise near-perfect Christmas was that Mielikki got a toothache when she ate some of Aksel’s candy. Ilmari said he would be happy to yank the tooth with pliers, making Mielikki blanch. Alma came to her rescue, saying her father might be a good blacksmith but was no dentist. Everyone laughed.

  Of course, the cattle didn’t know it was Christmas, so Ilmari stood up from the table and excused himself to check on them.

  Outside, far above the stillness, in air so high above the earth there was no warmth, he heard the honking of geese flying south, the last of them getting out before winter. He stood quietly, waiting. The honking got louder until he saw the first of the huge undulating chevron, like a giant heart, pulsing in the sky. He watched a single goose, suddenly an individual, hurrying to regain its place in the whole. It disappeared into the flock, a single goose no more, but the flock continued. For nearly an hour, he watched individual chevrons, obviously insistent on some destination far from Deep River because the leaders were keeping them so high. Then, as mysteriously as they’d come, they were gone.

  Then he heard it: wind stirring the tops of the trees two hundred feet above the edge of the hard-won pasture, like the sound of rapids in a distant unseen canyon, a sibilant echo of air and forest beings. He looked across Deep River and saw the tops of the trees moving wavelike in the ominous-feeling air. Cold dread seized him, and a dark spirit passed over him like the wings of the Angel of Death.

  Its next visit would be soon. On that visit, it would not fly over Ilmahenki like the geese.

  9

  The bootlegging business wasn’t so good. By early March 1925, the Seattle cartel, which had been immune to problems with the Seattle police because its boss was a former police lieutenant, was coming under increasing scrutiny by a fanatical branch of the FBI, an organization that apparently was impervious to bribes. Liquor continued to flow from Canada across isolated beaches and bays into the hands of customers, but because of increased federal pressure the smugglers were asking for more money to deliver. Local law enforcement at the retail end, aware of the margins the bootleggers were making, had upped the price of protection. Aksel was paying Louhi nearly double what he’d been paying her when he started the business.

  He was getting squeezed on the demand side as well. Some buyers reacted to the higher prices by driving to Portland, loading up their cars, and smuggling the liquor into the Bachelor Boys’ turf, putting the Boys into the role of customs agents. In addition, many people were becoming adept at making bootleg beer or whiskey themselves. Although nowhere near the quality of smuggled alcohol, it got people safely drunk at half the price. Ironically, the Bachelor Boys found themselves trying to shut down illegal stills, mostly through intimidation but sometimes through confrontation that ended in gunfire. These firefights were short. Still operators weren’t gangsters; they were farmers and loggers making money on the side. No one was killed in these fights, but Aksel got winged before Christmas and in February Heppu got a bullet that went through his right upper arm. It had exited without serious bleeding, the usual cause of death, but he was out of commission for over a month.

  Just before April, Aksel was summoned to Nordland.

  Louhi wasted no time. “Seattle gave notice that they’ll only sell me liquor I retail myself. They know about our deal and they also found out about some of my other wholesale deals.” She humphed. “Their margins are getting tight and they’re consolidating. In short, cutting out the middleman. That’s me and you.”

  Aksel nodded his head. He knew it had been coming and he was more vulnerable than Louhi. Through her saloons, she was a major retailer in her own right and far more nuanced in the human end of the business, mainly political. One of the costliest lessons of his life was not having asked Louhi first about doing something illegal, like depositing under an assumed name.

  “You’ve got three options,” Louhi said. “You go to work for the cartel, you go back to logging, or they’ll come gunning for you. You know the ship from Vancouver leaves in two days. If you don’t stop the order, the Seattle people will find out and assume you’re challenging them.”

  “So, it’s war or working for wages,” Aksel said.

  Aksel relayed the business news to the Bachelor Boys the next day. Louhi needed their decision in a week.

  “That’s just before the shipment from Vancouver,” Jens said. “We’ve already paid half of it. That’s money we’ll never recoup.”

  “That ship leaves Vancouver tomorrow,” Aksel said. “We don’t stop it and take the loss, Seattle will know and assume we’re still in business.”

  “Are we going to let these bastards in Seattle push us around and steal our money?” Jens asked.

  The discussion didn’t go on much longer after that. The other Bachelor Boys’ blood was up and so was their pride—three Finns and a Norwegian. When the vote was taken, it was four against one. By the next evening, the ship literally had sailed.

  * * *

  Its destination was a beach near the mouth of the Niawiakum River, just south of the marshlands of the estuary. Second-growth timber, already over thirty years old, came right down to the water.

  The Bachelor Boys parked the trucks close to the beach. It was raining the soft misty rain that felt as though one had walked into an atomizer spray. Gray turned to black.

  About midnight they heard the motor of a tug. As arranged, Yrjö signaled with a flashlight from a small promontory at the south edge of the beach. The tug was moving very slowly, pushing the barge, feeling its way down the bay, a man at the barge’s bow throwing a lead line.

  Aksel smelled the tidal flats to their north and the marshland of the estuary, pungent in the cool mist. Then he saw a light wink twice and Yrjö signaled back. The sound of the motor rose as the captain brought the bow of the barge in to the left of Yrjö’s light. There was a soft sliding impact and the barge came to rest on the beach.

  They went to work, shifting the load of gravel to uncover the hatches, then struggling from the barge to the beach, each man carrying two cases. Aksel knew that he should have set one of the boys back toward the road as security, but faced with the need to rapidly unload the cargo he didn’t—an understandable choice but a mistake.

  They all saw the brilliant white flashes and heard the whip-crack sonic booms of the bullets before they heard the gunfire. They were on the ground, Aksel and Heppu going underwater, when the hammering air-pulsing sounds of rifles and Thompson submachine guns hit their ears. One crewman and Jens went down. The engine on the tug revved up and crewmen were scrambling to climb aboard as the captain backed the barge off the beach.

  The Bachelor Boys, with no verbal command, formed a line perpendicular to the beach and parallel to the line of fire coming from the trees to take the attackers under fire without s
hooting each other. It saved their lives.

  Jens screamed that he was hit but could still shoot and kept shooting. Aksel fired quick bursts from the Thompson and the other three coolly fired their Springfields, taking aim at the flashes of light. The ambushers’ fire slackened. Aksel shouted at Heppu and Kullervo to crawl forward with him. Yrjö, who was on the far end of the line, crawled in the direction of the road. Using the darkness as cover, he rose to a crouch and scrambled toward where he’d seen the flash that indicated the end of the ambushers’ line. He reached the tree line and slowly worked his way toward the flank of the ambushers’ line. He saw a face light when the man’s rifle went off. He fired his own, ejected and chambered, and fired again. There was no more firing. He stumbled on the body in the dark, put a bullet in the man’s head to make sure he wouldn’t come after him, and moved toward the next flashes.

  Aksel knew what Yrjö was doing the instant he heard the two rifle shots. He loaded another drum and directed a short burst of fire just ahead of Yrjö’s advance. There were another two cracks and flashes from the right side and then silence. The gunfire from the left of the ambush was now sporadic. There was another single shot from the right side. Then the firing stopped completely. All they could hear were the muffled shouts of men running for their lives, never having expected such a disciplined reaction.

  Yrjö signaled the letter Y for his name with his flashlight. Aksel, Kullervo, and Heppu joined him. They shouted for Jens, but there was no answer.

  “You find him,” Aksel told Heppu. “We’ll cover.”

  Heppu took the flashlight and, covering it down to a sliver with his hand, found Jens unconscious and bleeding badly from near the hip. He ripped Jens’s trousers down and got his belt right up in Jens’s crotch and then twisted it around his thigh using a stick to turn it as tight as he could. Aksel and Heppu joined them, and the three of them hauled Jens to the Ford and got him to a doctor in Willapa.