That Christmas was remembered as perhaps the best one ever by almost everyone. Ilmari had returned to the church a week after Mielikki’s funeral and one month later he was back on the church council. He never talked about his absence and no one asked. He believed Jesus was God, so he could honestly say he was a Christian. He felt no need to tell others that they were God, too. Thus the whole family attended the Christmas Eve candlelight service, together for the first time in years. Helmi had come home from Portland where she had undertaken a business and secretarial course. Her prospects looked good, but the prospects were all in Portland and she would have to choose to leave Ilmahenki permanently. Business was good for everyone. Matti had made a toast to “the roaring twenties,” and even Ilmari had joined in, although with apple juice.
On December 26, Aino and Aksel were packing when Eleanor came over to Aino and looked up at her. “Are you going away for long, Äiti?” she asked.
Aino went to one knee. “Not long. I’ll come whenever I can. For sure, I’ll be back for New Year’s.”
Eleanor said softly, “New Year’s must be a lot of fun in Astoria.”
Aino’s heart started beating in her throat. “Do you want to come to stay with us for New Year’s Eve in Astoria?”
Eleanor nodded yes.
21
Eleanor welcomed 1928 at Suomi Hall with her mother, Aksel, and her aunt Kyllikki and uncle Matti. Her cousin Suvi—fifteen, a sophomore at Astoria High School, and in Eleanor’s eyes sophisticated and beautiful—was there along with her brother, Aarni. An eighth grader at John Jacob Astor, Aarni was OK when he was alone with just Eleanor. Her favorite cousin was Pilvi, eleven, who was like a big sister. She mostly ignored Toivo, a year younger than her and a child. She and Pilvi constantly watched Suvi to see which boys asked her to dance, commenting on the old Finn ladies dressed in their finest but with no sense of style whatsoever and sneaking coffee to keep themselves awake for the New Year. At midnight they went into the cold night air, carrying pots and pans, ladles and serving spoons and beat them all together, howling at the waxing half-moon darting into and out of rugged scudding clouds—blown by the last breath of a fierce southwest storm that had flooded streets, toppled trees, and sent logs bursting from rafts down the rivers and creeks all over the county.
Her mother asked if she would like to stay and go to school in Astoria. While she wanted clothes like Suvi and ice cream and movies whenever there was a spare nickel, memories of cruelty from the other children and the freedom and usefulness she felt at the farm won her over. Deep River was home.
Matti and Kyllikki said Aksel and Aino could continue to make the poikataloja home for free, but Aksel said no. He was earning a living and they could rent their own place. So, he and Aino found a little house in Uppertown that had been made into a duplex and they signed a one-year lease. It was only blocks from Aksel’s wood yard and a mile and a half from the poikataloja, which Aino quite enjoyed walking to once she could do it in daylight. She was OK at night but was always happy when Aksel walked her home. She knew Aksel wasn’t as happy as she was. When spring Chinook started running in March, she would sometimes catch Aksel staring at the river, smoking a cigarette.
With new houses all over and these new huge buildings called skyscrapers in the east and even in San Francisco and Portland, all of which required lumber, the logging business was booming. Matti and Kyllikki sold the ship chandlery business just a year after Kyllikki’s father died because Matti said he wasn’t a shopkeeper and knew nothing about it. The money paid off the loan for the poikataloja. They kept the shoe store, primarily because Kyllikki felt she knew about shoes and her mother felt useful working half days.
The heating business always slacked off around May, giving Aksel more time in the wood yard to build inventory for the next year, while still supplying the constantly growing demand for wood to fuel cooking stoves that went into the growing number of houses. Astoria’s population had nearly doubled from eight thousand when Aino first saw it to over fifteen thousand now. They made their lease payments every month and had enough left over to buy a Philco radio as a Christmas present to themselves.
Because the Chinese had been forced to California, the salmon-canning factories always had jobs for women on a piecework basis. Every morning and evening, women could be seen moving in small groups, their hair under white kerchiefs, long white aprons covering their clothes, chatting and talking on the way to and from the factories, while the men went out daily for the fish or into the woods to feed the sawmills.
The slowdown in business in 1927 had turned around. The good times rolled. The economy roared, the stock market soared, the trees fell, and the money flowed in. Matti and Kyllikki paid off their house, and their savings—in the form of bank deposits and stocks and bonds—grew with the economy.
Then in the late summer of 1929, lumber prices started falling again. Matti, who had bought two stands of Douglas fir and another three trucks with free money from the stock market, suddenly found sawmills backing out of orders or delaying payment. He laid off eight men in early September. He laid off another eight at the end of the month.
22
On Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the good times stopped rolling.
Business in Astoria didn’t die on the day of the crash. Wild tales, however, abounded of men in New York and Chicago jumping from skyscrapers, the concrete forms and interiors of which only months before had been a major market for the lumber from Matti’s logs.
Over the months following the stock market crash, the initial financial panic settled into gloom and a business depression all over the country. Trees already cut had to be left in cold decks on the show sites because mills refused delivery.
Most of Matti and Kyllikki’s wealth vanished with the stock market crash. Matti had kept some of the wealth in cash in two bank accounts. One of the banks failed, cutting the cash savings in half. Kyllikki tried not to show fear but failed. Matti showed none, but Kyllikki knew he was hiding it. He’d spent more than a decade building the business back. Now, cash was going out faster than it was coming in. Banks were making no working-capital loans. For several nights, Kyllikki sat down with Matti and the account books.
Matti and Kyllikki put the poikataloja up for sale. There were no buyers. Loggers and mill workers all over the county were being laid off, and every week the poikataloja had another empty room with the mattress folded on the cot. The residents had declined from thirty-five to eight, only five paying full rent. What Matti and Kyllikki had considered to be a solid asset was close to worthless. Aino agreed to continue to work for the right to take home a share of the poikataloja food.
Days of tense worry passed as they read the paper, talked to mill owners. In March, Matti closed two sides and let everyone go. This left two of Matti’s three yarders and the equipment that went with them sitting silently next to piles of undelivered logs; 200-Foot Logging was down to Matti, the Bachelor Boys less Aksel, Matti’s two best loggers, and the diesel yarder that Jens both ran and repaired. In April, 200-Foot Logging couldn’t make payroll. Matti reverted to what had built the company in the first place. He promised everyone a generous share of the profits when they came in. He put up the Bachelor Boys in the poikataloja for free. The other two loggers were married, and he paid them enough to make rent and fed them and their families at the poikataloja.
Word got out that some families were living at the poikataloja for free, their children sleeping on the floor. Desperate men and women started to knock on Matti and Kyllikki’s door. It didn’t seem fair to charge rent to the few who were paying it, so Matti and Kyllikki gave everyone free rent. Whenever a room came open, there were several families on a waiting list wanting to take it.
Word came to city hall that families were living in intolerable conditions. The City of Astoria sent the police. The police talked to the families. The police talked to the mayor. The families stayed. Matti was asked to join the Astoria Rotary Club. He did.
On Deep River, I
lmari put the sawmill on a single six-hour shift. Business revenues shrank to about a quarter of what they used to be. When he wasn’t running the head rig, he did any blacksmithing that came his way. Horses still needed shoes. Machinery still broke down. He’d even had a couple of jobs modifying truck bodies. To make up for money spent on oxygen and acetylene used by the new oxyacetylene welding torch, Ilmari reverted to doing any blacksmith work he could the old-fashioned way, with Alma helping keep the kiln hot and oxygenated by pumping the bellows. Alma’s main job, however, was food, the old-fashioned way: hard work in the garden, baking from scratch, canning meat and vegetables. She was also good at setting baited hooks, periodically checking on them for a fish, and keeping the alder fires in the smokehouse going, so she could preserve what they couldn’t immediately eat.
The wood-fuel business in Astoria was deteriorating. People still needed to cook and heat their homes but wore heavier clothes indoors and skimped on cooking fires. Those homes with unemployed fathers, a third of Aksel’s customers, quit buying his wood altogether. The unemployed fathers foraged for downed trees and abandoned logs and cut their own firewood. Aksel dropped his prices until he told Aino that he felt he was working for free. He’d gone back to saving the tobacco from his cigarette butts.
They had signed another one-year lease on their house. Aino tried to take on as many mending jobs as she could, even going to other poikatalojas to find business, but a lot of bachelors were darning their own socks. The end of each month consisted of ever-increasing worry about the monthly lease payment, until it was paid and followed by a brief day or two of respite from the money worries. Then, the worry would start to build again until the next month ended.
During the good times before the crash, they’d managed to save a little money and vowed never to use it to make rent. It was in cans, buried in the backyard. Neither of them trusted banks. Aino mistrusted them because she thought they’d be the first of the capitalist institutions to collapse in a crisis and she had lived through several runs on banks already. Aksel had told her about being cheated of his savings by a bank in the bootlegging days by the same guy who’d tried to cheat Matti on the Grays Harbor job. She knew Drummond had disappeared. Aksel swore he had nothing to do with it and she believed him. She was less sure about the Bachelor Boys.
Aino would occasionally soothe her worries about money by telling Aksel that they could always go to the farm on Deep River. Ilmari and Alma weren’t making much money, but their farm made them less vulnerable than workers to the vicissitudes of the economy. Eleanor had food to eat and a roof over her head. Deep River was Aino’s rock. There, they wouldn’t starve. Aino knew as well as Aksel that she was saying it out loud to make herself feel better. Aksel would tell her not to worry; it would never get as bad now as when they were children in Finland. Aino knew, however, that even though Aksel never let on that he worried about the money, he increasingly went outside before bed and watched the river, the red reflection of his cigarette on the smoke that floated around his head.
After dinner one night in early May 1930, Aksel finally started to talk about what was on his mind.
“These panics always turn around. It’s called the business cycle.”
“Maybe not this time,” Aino said. She was making a rag rug. “It might just be the end of capitalism.”
“The way it ended in Russia?”
She ignored the comment and resumed braiding and sewing. Making rag rugs was when she thought best. She ripped another rag into a long strip. The individual. The group. You couldn’t make a rag rug without individual strips, but if the individual strips weren’t woven together, you still couldn’t make a rug.
She put her work down. “I don’t think you want to talk about capitalism and communism.”
“No,” Aksel said. She waited, her work in her lap.
“When this panic is over,” he started, “people won’t be going back to wood heat.”
“How do you know that?”
“People want to avoid unnecessary work.”
Aino, on full alert, waited.
“All these cars …” Aksel started and stopped. She waited. “Cars keep coming. Airplanes too. They’ll require more and more oil. It’s just like logging. Nature puts it in the ground and men figure out how to use it.”
“And the Weyerhaeusers and Rockefellers keep ninety percent of nature’s free wealth.”
“Couldn’t resist, could you?” he said, but he was smiling. “When I got here in 1905,” Aksel went on, “we thought we could never cut the forest faster than it grew. Then we invented high-lead logging, better locomotives, diesel yarders. Matti told me about a new gas-powered saw with a continuous chain of teeth. He says a two-man crew in less than an hour can fell trees that used to take two of us several days.” He paused. “We’re going to be flooded with cheap oil, same as cheap lumber.”
“So?”
“That oil gets refined into gasoline. What’s left over is too thick for anything except burning.” She looked at him. “For heat,” he said.
“It will kill our business.”
Aino felt a sinking anxiety.
“I can get in on the ground floor,” he said. “I know every customer in Astoria. We get a franchise to sell oil stoves and then,” he grinned, “we sell them the oil forever.”
“You’ve been talking to Matti. You’re not him.” She saw his disappointment, maybe in her. “I don’t mean you can’t run the business. But Matti loves business and you don’t.”
“It’s called work because we don’t do it for fun.”
“I didn’t mean you aren’t willing to work, but you don’t love the fuel business. You loved fishing and logging.”
He started pounding his wooden leg with his fist. “I can’t fish or log!” He looked at her, his face contorted with pain.
She took a deep breath. “I can’t support this, Aksel.”
“I’m doing it for you and Eleanor. Don’t you see that?”
“I see it. I’m grateful.”
He waited.
“It’ll kill you,” she said. “It’ll kill us.”
“I’m dying now!” He clubbed the open door with his fist and it banged against the wall. “The business will be dying next. You think we have choices? How many options do you think a one-legged man has?” He put on his coat and stomped out of the front door, again slamming it behind him.
She waited until she could no longer hear the thumping of his wooden leg. She assumed he wouldn’t be back for a long time; he’d taken his coat. She sat there fighting back tears. She knew that he’d given up the dream of the fishing boat not only for her and Eleanor but also because the dream had become too painful to bear. “You blockheaded Swede,” she said out loud. “You know what’s good for me and Eleanor but not for you.”
She was still for a long time, then she thought of her mother. She could almost hear Maíjalüsa telling her to stand straight and throw her shoulders back. She sat up straighter. Sisu was also about holding on to dreams.
23
Aino went to both banks in town. She used her connection to Matti and through him to Kyllikki and her father’s reputation. She shamelessly dropped the names of Rotarians and anyone she thought the bankers might know. It was of no avail. The manager at the First National Bank of Oregon was polite, even kind. He told her that with no assets as collateral, no bank would make a loan on a boat that wasn’t even built, particularly if it was being built for a fisherman with one leg, no matter how good his previous reputation. That left her only one alternative.
It took a few weeks to set everything up, getting ahead at the poikataloja as much as possible, and on Sunday, June 8, 1930, she was ready to go. Aksel was up at five, as usual, and she fixed mush and rieska with hot bacon grease and cold salmon. She also started a cake.
“What’s the cake for?” Aksel asked.
“A hen party over at Kyllikki’s,” she answered.
Aksel grunted, downed his coffee, lit a cigarette, and went
out the door. He had been subdued since her “no” to him but didn’t seem to hold a grudge, unlike her brothers who suffered the common ailment of Finnish senility, forgetting everything except the grudges.
When the cake was done, she carefully wrapped it, packed her valise with a change of underwear and stockings, and set off for Kyllikki’s.
Kyllikki had offered her coffee after agreeing to cover the poikataloja while Aino was gone. She did not ask why Aino was going to be gone for three days; Aino let her believe it had to do with Eleanor but hadn’t actually said so. Kyllikki did ask what the cake was for. Aino replied, “For an old hen.”
Aino took the ferry to Megler, carefully counting coins she had been squirreling away ever since her refusal to help with Aksel’s business idea. She had also secretly dug up one of the cans and taken one hundred dollars in five- and ten-dollar bills, half of the savings.
The Tourist II was only half-full of cars, but at least the ferries still operated, albeit on a curtailed schedule because of the business collapse. When Aino walked off the ferry on the Washington side, she was startled to hear her name called. A man walked up to her, his face unshaven, his clothes dirty. She figured him for a hobo, but how did he know her? When he got closer, she could smell him. Seemingly happy, he said, “Aino, it’s great to see you.” She couldn’t place him. Then he said, “Michael Tierney, from Centralia.”
She felt embarrassed she hadn’t recognized him. He’d been so kind to her, sharing his home. Clearly, he was out of work. She hesitated to ask about his family. He saved her the trouble. “Kathleen is still in Centralia. She and the kids are living with her mother. We lost the house when I went to jail.”
Deep River Page 66