Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  He lived but would walk with a considerable limp for the rest of his life.

  Over the next week, they sold all of their inventory. Then Aksel took the other truck to Nordland where he asked Louhi to broker a peace.

  “You killed two of them,” she said. “And you wounded two more. They won’t be in a peaceful mood.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Eight. They said there were twelve of you.” Louhi shook her head, smiling.

  “Jens will never walk right again.”

  Louhi took that in. “Do you quit?”

  “We quit.”

  “OK. Let’s keep them thinking there are twelve of you. The Seattle boys are mad but they’re not stupid. They’ll happily take over your turf without having to fight twelve damned good fighters for it.”

  The Bachelor Boys were out of the bootlegging business.

  10

  The week after the Bachelor Boys’ last fight, Mielikki complained again about the tooth, an upper bicuspid. Two days later, she was running a fever, but no one thought it was related to the toothache; it seemed to be just a touch of flu. The next day, she couldn’t get out of bed. Ilmari came in at lunchtime and put wet towels on her forehead. He tousled her blond hair, thinking for a moment about Rauha. Then Alma came bustling into the room with some hot chicken soup and he felt Mielikki would be OK. He went back to the mill.

  Around three in the afternoon, Mielikki’s fever soared and she was covered in sweat. As the sun was setting, she grabbed Ilmari’s hand when he put another wet compress to her forehead. He knew then that he would lose her. He fell to his knees beside the bed, holding her hand to his face, kissing it again and again. She looked at him with her clear blue eyes, smiling at him, loving him. He lay down beside her on the bed, her small left hand held between his two large blacksmith hands. That’s where Alma found him, lying on his side, looking at Mielikki’s beautiful face.

  Once again, Ilmari made a coffin, working alone through the night. Occasionally, tears would hamper his work and he would walk outside into the cool night to regain control. He reflected, breathing deeply, listening to Deep River running to the sea, how God’s ways were unknowable and terrible. He remembered Vasutäti telling him to grow up. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face-to-face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. Maybe, maybe not. For now, he had the task that God had set before him.

  He finished the coffin and was sitting next to it when he looked up to see three of the women from the church, Ruusu Pakanen, Linna Salmi, and Lilo Puskala, standing quietly in the rain outside the barn door. Tears flooded into his eyes and he wiped them away. “Come in. Come in,” he said.

  Ruusu took his hand. “We’re so sorry,” she said.

  “Won’t you bury Mielikki next to her mother?” Lilo asked.

  Linna added, “We all want you to have her funeral in the church.”

  Aino arrived from Astoria with Matti, Kyllikki, and their children. Louhi got there several hours later. They all assembled in the living room, along with members of Alma’s family, the Vanhatalos and Wirkkalas, and they paid their silent farewells to Mielikki, who lay in the open coffin in her church dress holding a bouquet in her hands. Ilmari had tied in her hair a blue ribbon that had belonged to her mother. The children sat quietly, those who had them wearing their shoes, all of them in their church clothes, all bravely holding back tears. The pallbearers—Ilmari, Matti, Ullakko, Aksel, and two of Alma’s brothers—carried the coffin to the old wagon. Everyone followed the horse-drawn wagon to the church on foot. No one could imagine putting Mielikki in a motor-driven truck.

  At the funeral in the little church, when it was Aino’s turn to view the body, she had an urge to kiss Mielikki’s face. Instead, she touched her over her heart. For a moment, she thought Mielikki was breathing. Then, the illusion left her. She was bewildered by the pain of life, by the utter finality of death that cut off all future possibilities, leaving her with the paltry few possibilities she’d made manifest in her brief time knowing Mielikki, somehow never imagining that there wouldn’t be time enough later. She lifted her hand and glanced over at Eleanor, who was sitting with her cousins: stoic, bearing the pain as they all must. She straightened her shoulders and joined her brothers.

  When the last of the viewers was seated, Ilmari rose. He moved to the coffin and looked up toward the ceiling of the church. His deep voice quavering, his words coming slowly and in short phrases, yet penetrating every heart in the church, he spoke to Mielikki as if she were standing across a small field from him. “I see you … looking over your shoulder … holding out your hand to me.” He was looking beyond the ceiling. “Because of you … I lived in sunshine, no matter how dark the day … My love follows you, but I must remain.” Then he straightened his back. He looked down at her face and touched her cheek. Then, he walked with slow dignity to take his seat with his family. As he did, he looked on all the members of the little church, seated solemnly before him. He knew then that he no longer had to look for God, as if God were somewhere up in the sky. He knew Vasutäti was right. Ruusu Pakanen playing “Beautiful Savior” on the organ, Abraham and Tuuli Wirkkala, Antti and Linna Salmi, Matti and Henni Haapakangas, Lilo and Kalle Puskala—all tributaries of the waterfall of God.

  At the graveside on Peaceful Hill, family and friends walked by, each in turn gently tossing flowers onto Mielikki’s coffin, which had been lowered into the grave. Ilmari, who’d waited until the last flower was delivered, knelt and reaching down into the grave carefully laid several sheaves of basket wands on top of the many flowers. He stood and looked at the hills surrounding the little valley, knowing that Vasutäti’s knowledge, which she had passed on to Mielikki, was now lost, returned to the earth.

  His eyes brimming with controlled tears, he took the shovel and tossed dirt into the grave. The dirt hit the coffin and flowers with a short, scattered thump.

  One by one, the people of the Deep River valley walked by, each adding a shovelful or a handful of earth until the coffin, the flowers, and the basket sheaves were lost from sight.

  Ilmari wanted to walk back to Ilmahenki alone. Mielikki his dead daughter. Mielikki, her namesake, his dead sister. Suomi, ordered, placid summers and fierce winters. Here, wild, cool summers and cooler winters. Rauha. He found himself looking at the old snag. It had once been nearly three hundred feet tall; then one day everything changed. The tree became a snag. Eventually, the snag would decay, fall to the ground, and become a nurse log for new trees. The new trees would grow, some to be three hundred feet tall, some to perish for lack of sunlight, and maybe someday there might even be another lightning strike and another snag. He’d first seen the snag as something dead. Now, he saw constant change and life everlasting.

  11

  Aksel and the Bachelor Boys came to the funeral. As was the custom, coffee, cake, and biscuitti were served at Ilmahenki. There, the women of the family talked about children, people at the funeral they hadn’t seen for a while, who was seeing whom and where it might lead, and a kitchen in Astoria that ran completely on electricity, including the stove. The men talked logging and lumber. Matti had an idea of how to power different, more efficient yarders with diesel engines, which had been perfected during the war. He’d already converted two steam donkeys from wood to oil by mounting big oil tanks on the back of the skids and eliminated two men, no longer needing anyone to cut and split wood.

  Matti had put most of his and Kyllikki’s savings into the stock market and the market had gone up. He figured he could sell some of his stock at a good profit and use that money to buy the new diesel and necessary components for the new yarder and still leave him with more money in the stock market than he’d originally invested. If it all went as planned, it would be like getting a new, more efficient yarder for free. What a country this was.

  Matti made up his mind to put money behind his ideas when Jens Lerback answered his question, “What are you up to these days?” by saying,
“Not much, looking for a new line of work.” Jens already had a reputation for gasoline engines. It wouldn’t take him long to get up to speed on diesels. He’d had some sort of accident and walked with a decided limp. One arm wouldn’t rise above the level of his shoulder, but Matti had no doubts he could run a yarder. Heppu Reinikka and Yrjö Rautio were known to be good loggers. Matti knew that Aksel was the finest high rigger on the long-log side of the mountains, even with a shoulder wound. As for Kullervo, he was a hard worker and the experience of the others could mitigate his hearing problem. Anyway, it clearly was a package deal.

  He offered the Bachelor Boys fifty cents an hour for an eight-hour day. They would need to move to the Oregon side of the river, because of Matti’s deal with Reder.

  They went outside to talk it over. No one talked. Aksel and Jens lit two cigarettes, took deep drags, and passed them on in different directions. Heppu took a deep drag on one and blew the smoke upward, looking at the clouds. “It’s fair wages,” he said. Looking at the burning end of his own cigarette, Yrjö said, “I swore I’d never again be a wage slave,” and he passed it to Kullervo.

  They all kicked at the ground, passing the cigarettes along, squinting in the smoke.

  Finally, Aksel said, “If you work for Matti Koski you aren’t a wage slave; you’re a logger.”

  They all took that in, passing the cigarettes along until they’d smoked them to the point of burning their fingers. Jens flipped a smoking butt away, shaking his fingers where it had burned him. “I’m in if you’re in,” he said to all of them.

  Everyone looked at Aksel. He nodded his head and they went back inside.

  It didn’t take Jens long to figure out how to hook up a diesel to power the big cable drums of the old steam donkey. He removed the boiler and the steam pistons and bolted down the diesel in the boiler’s place. Then he linked the drive shaft of the old cylinders to the diesel’s power takeoff. Everything else remained the same, except the throttle.

  The Bachelor Boys moved to Svensen, Oregon, a settlement close to Matti’s new show. They and the new diesel yarder were in operation three weeks after Mielikki’s funeral.

  There was only one thing wrong with the new workforce: they were out of shape. No one had given it a thought, especially the Bachelor Boys. By midmorning on their first day, everyone was thinking about it. Hands had grown soft along with muscles. Reflexes were still fast, but not lightning fast—and in the woods lightning fast saved your life.

  At first Matti worried a bit; then it got downright funny. They all had the brains of loggers, but the bodies of shoe clerks. He watched Yrjö and Heppu wolf down a large lunch and then walk somewhat stiffly back to the show. A huge log temporarily hung up, then jerked over the obstacle and came hurtling right at them. They both sprinted for a shallow dip in the ground and threw themselves into it as the log careened over their heads and up the hill to the landing. The sprint had been too much for them. They both poked their heads up from the indent with vomit on their chins and shirts. Matti laughed out loud, drawing a middle finger from Heppu.

  A lot had changed in the high-rigging game since Aksel had last done it. Now, high climbers had spurs, much like those worn by electric linemen, only with way longer spikes. The extra length was needed to penetrate the thick unstable bark to reach solid wood. The flip line was a rope with a steel core, a safety measure against a badly aimed ax stroke that had been learned the hard way. Harness and saddle combinations of varying designs had also been invented.

  He flipped the line, it caught, and he dug in his spikes. At the first limb, his hands were shaking from the exertion and beginning to blister. He was breathing heavily. He steeled himself for the job ahead and took a moment to regain some strength by holding closer to the trunk.

  From far below he heard Matti holler, “Rig it, Aksel. Don’t make love to it.”

  He moved.

  When the tree narrowed to about three feet, he began sawing. Sweat stung his eyes. He was gasping. His shoulder ached from the wound he never talked about.

  There was a light cracking sound. The top of the tree began to move. Aksel dropped down quickly, jamming his spikes into the trunk. In a slow majestic fall, the top swept past him, falling away, growing smaller and smaller. The delimbed spar suddenly lurched to the side, then came whipping back, its speed vastly accelerated with the tension of the entire trunk, moving nearly twenty feet before whipping back in the other direction. It was like being on a mainmast in the highest wind imaginable, only three times higher up.

  He slowly made his way to the ground, then staggered off to get the small 50-pound block they would use to haul up the massive 350-pound bull block that would do the real work.

  When he finished the day, his hands bleeding, his feet aching, he was totally spent. He hadn’t felt like this since his first day at Reder Logging. He would have preferred to be back in combat.

  Aksel and the other Bachelor Boys piled into the Oldsmobile. They all lit cigarettes. They carefully drove the Oldsmobile over ruts and potholes and through the mud to their boardinghouse in Svensen, where they collapsed in their cots without taking off their clothes. It was a stiff and sober crew that arrived the next morning.

  In three months, as Matti had expected, they were all fully productive—and each about fifteen pounds lighter.

  12

  Walking to work in the dark on Wednesday, January 6, 1927, with Oregon mist drifting from leaden skies, Kyllikki’s father, Emil Saari, died of a heart attack. He was buried on Sunday in Pacific View Cemetery, located just below the mouth of the Columbia River on a hill overlooking a small lake nestled between two lines of sand dunes. Beyond the westernmost dune line, the rolling surf of the Pacific Ocean thundered onto a beach stretching for seventeen miles, unbroken by a single home or river, from the mouth of the Columbia south to the little town of Neawanna, hugged in close to Neawanna Head, a promontory with thousand-foot-high basalt cliffs pushing westward from the coastline nearly a mile into the sea.

  As expected, Hilda Saari put out coffee and cake for everyone at the house.

  Aksel squatted next to Eleanor, who was looking out the window at the river. Aksel was looking fine. Six months of logging could erase years of soft living. He and Eleanor watched the river together, talking quietly. Aino knew that Aksel saw Eleanor whenever he stopped at her brothers’ farms, and the brief thought occurred to her: maybe he was trying to get closer to Eleanor so he could get closer to herself. Then Eleanor laughed. Aksel grinned and Aino had the horrific thought that he was doing it just because he liked Eleanor—period. Then it dawned on her how much she liked Aksel. She fled into the kitchen to help Hilda Saari.

  * * *

  The nonfamily guests left. Aksel already had his coat on and the Bachelor Boys were at the door saying goodbye to Kyllikki and Hilda when Matti walked up to the group. “You know I have two parcels of spruce left over by Neawanna. I’ve got another diesel yarder coming in the next couple of weeks. I want you boys to run the show.”

  The Bachelor Boys looked at each other, quickly nodding their approval to Aksel. Aksel said, “We don’t mind, but it’s a long way from Svensen.”

  Before Matti could open his mouth, Kyllikki said, “You can stay at the poikataloja. We’ll give you free rooms.” She looked quickly at Matti. “And board.”

  “Wait a second … Kyllikki, I …” Matti was spluttering.

  Kyllikki touched him on the arm and with her back to the group looked up at him and made eyes toward the kitchen and then toward Aksel. Matti looked up to heaven for help. Kyllikki grinned and squeezed his arm. Turning around with a bright smile, she said, “So, it’s a deal then. You’ll do it.”

  The Bachelor Boys just looked at each other. It seemed the deal was done. Aksel suddenly caught on, started to shake his head no, and Kyllikki looked at him with that look that told a man: “This is my department. I know it’s good for you, so you might as well enjoy the ride, because you’re on it.” Aksel and Matti just looked at each other
, suppressing smiles. Sometimes being manipulated for your own good felt like being loved.

  “OK, it’s a deal,” Aksel told her. Then he turned to Matti. “Can you come outside with us?”

  Kyllikki, knowing her job was finished, smiled and went back into the house, leaving her husband and his friends to finish whatever job was on their minds.

  Aksel led Matti to the big Oldsmobile, looked around, then reached into the back seat and pulled out two very heavy army surplus duffel bags. Matti looked at them, puzzled. “If we’re going to move to the poikataloja, I’ll need you to store these for us. We can’t have them at the poikataloja.”

  “What’s in them?”

  Aksel hesitated.

  “Rifles,” Jens said.

  “Rifles?” Matti repeated.

  “And some pistols and a tommy gun,” Aksel added. “You know, from the old business.”

  “Some ammo,” Kullervo added.

  “Why not sell them?”

  “Maybe we’ll need them someday,” Aksel said. Aksel transferred one bag into Matti’s arms and the weight made Matti buckle slightly for a moment.

  “It’s not illegal,” Jens said. “It’s in the Constitution.”

  “Yes,” Matti said. “But if one of the kids finds them and then Kyllikki finds out—”

  Aksel said, “Just do it for me.”

  Two weeks later, the big Oldsmobile roared up in front of the poikataloja with the Bachelor Boys and their gear. Aino showed them to their rooms. When she held the door open for Aksel to get his suitcase through, it bumped against her right thigh. Aksel mumbled a quiet apology, but she saw his eye travel down from where the suitcase had bumped her. Hemlines were even shorter now than they’d been in Chicago. She’d bought silk stockings at Grimson’s Ladies Apparel two days earlier, and when she put them on that morning she was taken by surprise at how she wanted Aksel to notice. His eyes rose quickly to hers but took in all of her on the way up. He hadn’t looked at her like that since before Jouka—and Lempi. It was more than desire. It was delight. It was appreciation. He certainly noticed the new silk stockings.