Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “I see people just fine. Jack Kerwin is my friend’s brother. I see people unjustly thrown in jail. It’s capitalists and you legionnaires that don’t see people.”

  “Ah. Now we’re ‘you legionnaires.’ That’s just what I’m talking about.”

  “People choose sides and live with the consequences.”

  “We didn’t choose a side. We drink there and tell stories.”

  The two of them sat silently.

  Aksel sighed and began talking, she felt, as if to a child. “There will be drinking. A lot of men will be armed. You are going to tell inebriated armed men that people who they consider to be traitors to their country, people who they consider to be murderers, have been put in jail unjustly. What you are really saying is that those armed men, most of whom fought a war that they believed was to make a better, more just world, a world that is safe for democracy, a world their friends died for, were on the wrong side.” He spit out the last word. “You’re going to light a fire you can’t control.”

  “I can’t believe this! The American Legion is against me. The VFW is against me. The good citizens of Astoria are against me. I come home to see you sitting smug and cozy in my room and all you’re doing here is to tell me you’re on their side.”

  Aksel was silent, collecting his thoughts. Now he spoke very carefully. “My own brother died because he chose sides. When his side came to power in Finland, they imprisoned, starved, and executed thousands of people without trial. When the other side took back the power, they did the same thing.” Aksel stood. “I’m choosing you, not because you’re on one side or the other. I’m tired of watching you expose yourself and the people you love to danger.”

  Very coolly she said, “You go to hell.”

  Aksel was on her, pulling her arms, forcing her to face him.

  “You listen to me,” he said. “You’re going to get someone killed and it could be you.”

  She wriggled free, hissing at him.

  “Aino, I don’t want you to get hurt.” Aksel was pleading, something she’d never seen him do. “Don’t go.”

  “Don’t treat me like a child.”

  “I’m treating you like a man trying to protect his woman.” He left, slamming the door.

  Aino sat down and looked at the pattern in the tablecloth for a long time. His woman.

  The next morning, she saw that Aksel’s door was open. His sheets were neatly stacked on the folded mattress; his clothes were gone. She had never seen an emptier room.

  15

  Aino went to see Kyllikki to talk out the fight.

  “But you’re still going to do it,” Kyllikki said.

  “Yoh,” Aino answered.

  Kyllikki nodded. “OK,” she said. “What are you going to wear?”

  That was the second agenda.

  “Can I borrow your green dress?”

  “It’s short.”

  “So?”

  “You need to shave your legs.”

  “Why?” Aino asked.

  “It looks better.”

  As she watched Kyllikki fill her coffee cup, she was struck by how wonderful it was just to sit with a sister and talk; her body felt happy, as when she was pregnant with Eleanor. Her brothers talked to get things done or to pass on information. She, Kyllikki, Alma—and even Rauha—talked because it was part of who they were. Woman talk could be banal, mean, and vicious, but it could also be like this talk now with Kyllikki, as if nature wanted her to do this, to bind the tribe. Here, in talk over coffee, the roots of family, not the visible leaves and branches, got tended to.

  Tending to the details of the poikataloja had changed her. Organizing was still important and she would never quit, but her attitude had changed. It wasn’t more or less important than tending to the roots over coffee.

  Men got the hard, physical things done—logging, building dams and roads, moving things that looked impossible to move. She’d always felt vaguely inferior because nature hadn’t designed her to do those things. But after these months of doing “unimportant work,” she’d come to realize that nature designed her for subtler but equally important things—that decisions about finding a new wife for a lonely brother, freeing up young girls for love, bringing together families and neighbors were as important as the things men did. Too many people—men and women both—didn’t see it or even count it. She looked at Kyllikki, who was pouring the coffee. Here was solidarity as fine as any she hoped for with the One Big Union.

  Aino went home and thought about it for a few days. Then she shaved her legs and bought a bra that showed off her breasts. She took the train to Olympia two days later, on April 30, 1926. She’d arranged to stay with Kathleen Tierney’s sister. That night, she went to Sylvester Park, which was in the center of town next to the capitol building, to get the feel of the bandstand.

  Looking out over the park in the darkness, the cold drizzle on her face, she imagined the crowd and went through the carefully prepared speech, whispering it, making sure that her English was flawless even if her accent wasn’t.

  On May Day morning, she washed her hair and carefully put it up. All the younger women were bobbing their hair. She didn’t feel like doing it, despite all the talk about emancipation and ease. She liked her hair long. She carefully ironed Kyllikki’s dress and attached the brooch Jouka gave her when she had Eleanor. She shined her new shoes. She’d bought them wholesale at the Saaris’ store. The two-inch heels made her look taller and her legs longer—important now that legs were showing so much.

  Kathleen was scheduled to go on at two in the afternoon, so Aino would have half an hour before she had to yield the bandstand to the Sons of Norway dance competition. She noticed nearly as many women present as men—so different from the old picnics at Tapiola. Ilmari had once said, “Build them houses with feather beds and the women will come.” Companies still had logging camps with bachelor bunkhouses, but the tiny shacks by the railroad tracks had curtains in the windows and there were plenty of feather beds in the cities and towns.

  Lots of Finns were present. She couldn’t tell whether they were reds or whites. They were all drinking sima, a lightly fermented and just slightly alcoholic drink made from brown sugar, lemons, and yeast. There was a prayer by a local minister followed by a speech by the mayor, all about Americanization. Then there was a local politician talking about the contributions of American labor and the Finnish and Scandinavian communities.

  While listening to the speeches, Aino became increasingly aware of men wearing VFW and American Legion overseas caps starting to assemble in front of the bandstand. Her butterflies grew. The speech before hers, also about Americanization, delivered by the local commander of American Legion Post 3, was met with loud applause and some cheers. Several legionnaires standing by her gave her a look. She felt a tingle of fear, a memory of wheel spokes, billy clubs, boots, and ax handles.

  An official came onstage and announced that Kathleen Tierney couldn’t make it and Aino Kaukonen, a veteran of the free-speech fights before the war, was going to say a few words on the Bill of Rights. Aino winced at the reference to free-speech fights. The announcer had intended to set her up as a Wobbly.

  She straightened her dress, patted her hair, reset her hat for the tenth time, took off her glasses, and mounted the stairs.

  “Go back to Russia, you red bitch,” someone shouted.

  “Yeah. Go back where your Bolshevik buddies are creating the workers’ paradise.”

  She had heard worse. She glanced around for the cops. She saw six of them, in pairs, nightsticks at their belts. It wasn’t anything like the free-speech fights with dozens of cops and scores of recently deputized citizens encircling the crowds. Still, the mayor had planned for trouble.

  She drew herself up straight. She began with the 112 Wobblies imprisoned under the Espionage Act. That number had been 113, but Big Bill Haywood had escaped to Russia.

  She continued, “The jury deliberated fifty-five minutes.” She let the shortness sink in. “Judge Lan
dis gave fifteen of the men twenty years in Fort Leavenworth prison; another thirty-three, ten years; the rest up to five years.”

  “They should be hung for treason,” someone shouted. “Jail’s too good for ’em.”

  Her first instinct was to engage the heckler in debate, but then she kept to the prepared speech and launched into the specific case of the seven Wobblies unjustly imprisoned in Washington.

  A legionnaire started singing “God Bless America.” Others joined him, drowning out her words. People who’d been picnicking were joining the crowd. The policemen, their nightsticks at the ready, looked around nervously.

  “Please, please.” She raised her hands for quiet. “I have a right to speak.”

  The singing grew in volume. Kathleen promised there would be lots of support, but any supporters were by far outnumbered.

  Someone threw a chicken bone. She ducked. She stood up again, straight and tall—and alone.

  “Please,” she said again, as loud as she could. “Let me speak.” The singing swelled along with laughter. She was providing entertainment. The crowd pushed against the bandstand. It would be only minutes before someone leaped onto the stage.

  She saw people at the edge of the crowd looking toward the street. A big deep-burgundy, four-door 1923 Oldsmobile Sports Touring car with black trim, solid burgundy wheels, and black leather seats swerved off the street onto the grass of the park. Suddenly, the crowd grew silent as the Bachelor Boys, all in their uniforms, stepped out of the car. People knew a big expensive car when they saw one, and they knew what kind of men drove such a car, especially if there were five of them in it at the same time.

  Aino watched Aksel, Kullervo, Jens Lerback, and Heppu Reinikka wearing their American Legion caps and Yrjö Rautio wearing his VFW cap walk calmly onto the bandstand to stand in a line to her right.

  Aksel stepped forward slightly. “Fellow citizens, fellow veterans,” he began. His English was now very good though still lightly accented. “I’m not a speech maker. I only ask you two questions. For what did we fight and for what did many die, if not the right to speak freely?” He paused. “Are men who faced German fire really afraid of words?”

  He paused amid a murmur of agreement.

  “Let this woman speak. She has fought, more than most, for that right. Not just for herself, but for all of us.”

  He turned to the Bachelor Boys, gave a nod of his head toward the steps, and the five men calmly left the bandstand. Aksel didn’t even look at Aino. The five nonchalantly settled on the fenders and running boards of the big Buick to listen. The crowd stopped looking at them and turned to Aino.

  Aino took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and finished her speech. At the end, there was loud applause from some, but the majority were silent.

  She looked for Aksel, but the big Buick and the Bachelor Boys were already out on the street and pulling away.

  When Aino got back to Astoria late the next afternoon, she found a small box and a note on the kitchen table. The note read, “For Miss Sisu.” Inside the box lay a beautiful, dainty lace handkerchief. She couldn’t imagine anyplace in town that would sell such a thing. Aksel must have bought it when he was in France and kept it all this time.

  16

  Aksel pitched a lean-to by the river on a narrow rocky beach close to Tongue Point. The beach was sheltered from view by salal and salmonberries growing under alders that had sprung up after the old-growth trees had been cut down in the 1880s. He joined a small tent city of itinerant loggers, hoboes, sailors—merchant and navy, American and otherwise—who’d jumped ship or whose contracts had expired and who chose not to sign on again. Although June gloom had set in, the occasional rain was light. Astorians called the month Juneuary. The ground above high tide was slippery with mud or river slime only for a day or two after a real rain, but otherwise solid, if not dry. Bluebacks were running and a short walk took a man into good deer hunting. So, mingled with the smell of cigarettes, bootleg whiskey, and alder smoke came the good rich smell of venison on a spit or salmon pressed to cedar boards and arranged to roast in a circle around the fire. An old rowboat had been beached there and Aksel used it more than most.

  Matti had moved Aksel to running the diesel yarder, a physically easier job. This left him with enough energy to fish at night and most of the day on Sundays. Whenever he hooked into a particularly nice salmon or sturgeon, he cleaned and butchered it into steaks and dropped some off for Matti and Kyllikki’s family as well as his friends still at the poikataloja. On occasion, he left a nice cut in Aino’s sink but only when she wasn’t around.

  * * *

  One Sunday in July, Kyllikki invited Aksel to stay for her special fish-head stew after he dropped off a beautiful fourteen-pound summer-run steelhead.

  “Where’d you get the fish?” she asked casually. His Sunday clothes smelled like wood smoke.

  “Up by Tongue Point, just off the railroad trestle.”

  “Long way upriver for a rowboat,” she said easily.

  Aksel hesitated and then said, “Oh, you know fishermen. We’ll go anywhere and tell no one.”

  She knew something was amiss.

  That evening, she put her young ones to bed and told Matti and the older children that she was going to visit Aino-täti for some just-woman time and she walked to the poikataloja. The gloom of the morning and afternoon had been driven off and the river stood clear in the late summer evening all the way to Cape Disappointment at the north side of its mouth. The air smelled of tide flats and woodstoves. The sun seemed to hang suspended above the river’s mouth over the unseen ocean as if reluctant to set, as if not wanting to end one of the year’s longest days.

  She found Aino cleaning up after supper.

  “What was for dinner?” Kyllikki asked.

  “The usual stew.”

  “We had a nice steelhead stew at home tonight.”

  Oh.” Aino was now on the alert.

  “Yes. Aksel brought us a nice fourteen pounder.”

  “Nice of him.”

  “I thought so. I gave him the eyes.”

  “Nice of you.”

  Aino returned to scrubbing her pots. Kyllikki went over to the stove, picked up the two-gallon blue-and-white-speckled coffeepot to ascertain its contents, got two cups, filled them, and set them on the end of one of the long dining tables. “You going to join me?” she asked Aino.

  “Looks like it,” Aino said. She dried her hands and sat down.

  Kyllikki looked at her and saw suffering. “Aino, what happened?” she asked. “Aksel isn’t living here, is he?”

  “Does Matti know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Did Aksel tell you … anything?”

  “No. I smelled tide flats and alder smoke on his Sunday clothes this evening. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Aino said miserably.

  Aino told Kyllikki the whole story, including the fight, the May Day speech, and the delicate handkerchief from France.

  “I’ve said it before,” Kyllikki said. “You’re the smartest fool I know.”

  “I am.” Aino nodded her head in agreement. After a moment she said, “Can you make a guess where he is?”

  “From the smell, I’d say he’s living rough somewhere along the river. He said he got the steelhead off the trestle by Tongue Point, so I guess somewhere around Alderbrook.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “If you don’t act, he won’t. I guarantee it. To him it’ll feel like crawling. And it would be. Now, it’s your turn to go to him.”

  “I don’t crawl.”

  Kyllikki exploded from her seat, slapping her hand on the table. She had never been so angry with her beautiful, proud sister-in-law. “You goddamn stubborn Koski.”

  Aino started to speak.

  “You shut up and listen.”

  Aino shut up.

  Kyllikki was surprised at the fury she felt, and it came boiling out in words. “You broke that man’s heart when y
ou married Jouka. Then you broke Jouka. Then Aksel had his heart broken again when he lost Lempi and the baby. And you … you …” Words failed her.

  She sat down and leaned across the table. “Aino, this is it. That man needs his heart back and you, by God, you will go to him with your heart in your hands and you will offer it to him and if you don’t, you will live with a stone in your chest for the rest of your miserable proud life.” Kyllikki’s own heart pounded. She saw she’d actually frightened Aino. Good! Good, good, good!

  Aino opened her mouth and closed it. Her face had gone pale. It was the face of someone frightened to her core that she might have lost everything.

  Kyllikki rose and walked behind Aino. Putting her hands on Aino’s shoulders, leaning her head close beside Aino’s, she felt her magnificent black hair against her own soft blond. She nuzzled her cheek against Aino’s head just above her ear and said softly, “Go find him. I’ll finish up here.”

  Aino took her wool shawl and head scarf to ward off the chill air coming off the river. She also took a kerosene lantern. She began walking upriver, starting at Fourteenth Street where the ferry docked. Soon, she came to the end of the plank streets built up on pilings. She reached the railroad tracks and continued on them, moving eastward, looking for shanties or tents. When she spotted a little bunch of them, she would find men sitting by fires, smoking, talking in the lingering twilight. The twilight shifted north, outlining the Washington hills as the hidden sun moved around the pole. By midnight, only the faintest glow in the north showed beneath a clear night sky. Standing on a log railroad trestle she saw the embers of dying campfires across the tide flats, glowing on a beach just downstream from where Tongue Point joined the river’s south shore. After an hour of backtracking she found a way to reach solid ground. She then walked back upstream to where she’d seen the glow of the dying fires.

  Her wet shoes and stockings smelled of what the river left behind as it ebbed. She picked her way between embers and dark tents. She found two men drinking from a single bottle. They looked at her in surprise.