Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  “They sent you to jail with the others? How did you get out?”

  “They charged me with obstructing justice and assault. I did my time, two years.”

  After talking for a while, Aino started feeling nervous. “I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to get the bus. It leaves in twenty minutes and I need to buy tickets.”

  “You have some money then?” Tierney asked.

  “Well, enough just to get where I’m going to and back.” She felt terrible lying.

  “Look, Aino. You know me. I’m no bum, just been out of work. Came here on a rumor they were hiring over to Ilwaco.” He shrugged. “Wasn’t true. But they said maybe the next week. Wasn’t true, either.”

  She made sympathetic noises.

  “I just need enough to get across the river and maybe a little food. I can ride the rails to Portland, then home to Centralia.” He smiled. “Of course, if you could help out with a little money for food. I haven’t eaten in two days, except some apples. Those watery Yellow Transparents they grow around here. Salmonberries, you know.”

  “I hear St. Mary on Grand helps out with food. Also, the Finnish and Norwegian Lutherans.”

  Tierney’s face no longer showed an affable familiarity. “Aino, I hear you’re working for your brother, managing his boardinghouse with Aksel. He’s that Swede who along with his friends got you out before the National Guard came in. We hear he’s got his own business in Astoria. You must be doing OK.” He laughed. “Not too bad for an old Wobbly.”

  She smiled and felt sick at heart—for him and for what she knew was coming.

  “You know, I haven’t worked for six months. Maybe just, you know, a little something for the Mrs. and the kids. We sure as hell would appreciate it.”

  She could see how it hurt his pride to ask, and it made what she was going to say to him even more difficult. “What you say is true, but the business is barely feeding us. And the management job pays the equivalent of room and board.”

  “Yeah. OK.” She watched Tierney’s expression move to sullen resentment.

  “It’s just … I have a kid, too, you know,” she said. “And Aksel, well he lost his leg.” She suddenly felt anger. Why was she apologizing? She needed the money for Aksel—her husband. “No. I’m sorry. I can’t.” She’d always asserted herself positively, saying yes. Saying no felt every bit as powerful.

  Tierney raised himself to his full height and spit on the ground next to her shoe. She looked at the spit sadly and then at him. Then she turned her back on him and walked away.

  Aino could see that Louhi had done well during Prohibition, moving into the corner office on the top floor of the Seaforth Hotel, newly built in 1926. Because hers was the only office, except for one on the ground floor labeled MANAGER, she assumed Louhi owned the Seaforth—or a large part of it.

  Louhi was civil when she greeted Aino. There might even have been a hint that she was happy to see her.

  Aino sat the sokerikakku on Louhi’s desk. “My mother taught me.”

  “So did mine,” Louhi said. There was sadness in her voice. Sokerikakku, a difficult spongy sugar cake, demanding lots of practice, strict precision, and loving tutelage, was the challenge and triumph of generations of Finnish women.

  Louhi was speaking Finnish and it made Aino feel more confident. She hated this insecurity in her. She had faced down sheriffs with rifles and vigilante thugs with ax handles and now she sat across the desk from a small but still very attractive woman in her late fifties or early sixties, her brother’s mother-in-law, trying not to show she was quivering inside. It was, of course, because much was at stake—Aksel’s happiness.

  Louhi called for coffee and her secretary brought in a delicate china set with cream and sugar bowls and slices of korpu, a very dry zwieback cinnamon toast, good for dunking. The korpu competed with the cake and Aino felt outmaneuvered before she started.

  “We can have both,” Louhi said with a knowing smile.

  Aino forced a smile. She and Louhi drank several sips, dunking their korpu without speaking. Aino could see Louhi looking at her over the rim of her cup with amusement. Aino carefully set her own cup in its saucer and asked Louhi for a loan for a fishing boat. Louhi asked how they thought they could pay it off, given Aksel had lost his leg.

  “I’m going to help him.”

  “And he’s OK with that?”

  “He doesn’t know yet.”

  Louhi stood and walked over to the window. She could see the docks on the Chehalis River from it. She talked while still looking out the window. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  Louhi humphed. “And out of shape.”

  Aino bristled. Louhi laughed.

  “Hell, woman,” she said. “We all get out of shape. We just don’t all of us try and go gillnetting.”

  “I can do it.”

  “Maybe for three or four years.” Louhi stayed at the window and spoke without looking at Aino. “That man of yours gave me hell, him and his little army unit.” She seemed to be talking to herself more than to Aino. “Did you know they shot the hell out of a bunch of Seattle boys? I offered him a job. We could have sewed up everything west of the mountains. But that independent son of a bitch wouldn’t have it.” Louhi chuckled.

  This was news to Aino, but she kept quiet, hoping.

  Louhi looked her right in the eye. “You’ve both got spunk; I’ll give you that. And that man of yours can stand on his own two feet better than any man I know and do it with one leg.” She sat at her desk and pulled out a large checkbook, the checks printed on perforated paper that allowed for tearing them off and leaving a stub behind for record keeping.

  “I’m going to loan you the money,” she said, picking up a fountain pen. “I bet on people. It’s what I’m good at. I spent my life providing things that do-gooders and politicians all say people shouldn’t have.” She laughed. “Excepting, of course, themselves.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Get this clear,” Louhi said. “I know Drummond cheated Aksel out of his money. You may feel he has some sort of moral claim on it. Neither I nor the bank ever owed him a goddamned thing.”

  Aino called on centuries of Finnish ability to mask feelings to control her outrage at this woman smugly agreeing to lend her and Aksel money that was Aksel’s in the first place. She knew that she could rage self-righteously and with good cause against the injustice of it all, but she also knew she’d never get the money if she did.

  Louhi was looking at her with a sort of detached curiosity, as if this were some sort of experiment and Louhi was just waiting to see which way the mouse would move given the stimulus. She swallowed. “Believe me, I understand that the law sometimes has nothing to do with morals.”

  Louhi nodded her head, approving. Then she went businesslike. “I’ll loan you the amount Aksel had in his account, bank paper rate plus five percent.”

  “OK.”

  “How much can you put down on the boat? I want you to have skin in the game.”

  “I have one hundred dollars.” Aino started to open her valise.

  “You give that to the boatbuilder, not to me.”

  “Oh.”

  Louhi laughed. “Communists,” she said. “God bless you, you are ignorant sons of bitches.”

  Aino forced a smile.

  “I’ll amortize it over ten years. You’ll pay me monthly. You miss a payment, you pay a ten percent penalty on what’s owed. You miss two payments, I get the boat.”

  They looked at each other.

  “And keep a little back. That way if times get hard, you’ll have a few months’ cushion.”

  Aino nodded. She hadn’t thought of that.

  “Deal?” Louhi asked.

  “Deal,” Aino said.

  They stood and shook hands. Instead of feeling joy, Aino felt defeated.

  Louhi regarded Aino for a long moment. “You don’t like feeling powerless, do you.” Louhi moved to look out of the window again. She turned to Aino. “Powe
r is the ability to reward or punish. It comes in different currencies: sex, giving or withholding; violence, actual or threatened. The best is money.”

  24

  Aksel waited anxiously for Aino. Her note said that she’d be back in three days and not to worry but said nothing about where she was going or why. It was now the third day.

  He spent the morning splitting wood, working out his anger over her refusal to support his plan and his anxiety because she was gone. The whole day, whenever he saw one of the two ferries returning to Astoria, he would drive the wagon back to the duplex in hopes that she’d be there. He made the scheduled deliveries and now sat in the new easy chair, his wooden leg stretched before him.

  He heard footsteps and his heart picked up speed. He came to his feet just as Aino opened the front door. He thought there could be no sweeter joy than being reunited with a much-missed loved one.

  She finally wriggled loose from him, laughing, and hung her coat and hat on the coat tree. He carried her valise into the bedroom. When he returned, she had her purse on the kitchen table and was pulling out documents.

  “What’s this? Where did you go?”

  She looked at him and he could feel some sort of triumph in her. “I went to Nordland.”

  “Nordland?”

  She unfolded several legal-size sheets, put the documents on the table, and then put a check on top of them. He picked it up. It was drawn on the bank that took his money for the exact amount taken.

  “You got my money back? For the heating business? How did you do it?” He reached out to kiss her, but she pulled away, smiling.

  “Not so fast.” She handed him the legal-size papers. “It’s a loan.”

  “A loan? But it’s my money.”

  She sighed. “As I learned in Nordland, not anymore.”

  Aksel went grim.

  “Just read the terms,” she said. He looked at her, wondering what was up, and then started glancing quickly through the terms. He stopped, his mouth open. He looked at her with amazement. “It says here the collateral is a boat.”

  Aino grinned.

  Aksel threw down the papers and grabbed her, whirling her around. “The boat! The boat!” he repeated. He kissed her until she pulled her head back. “You need to sign it,” she said.

  He went back to the documents. On reaching the last page he looked up at her, pointing to her signature.

  “Yes. I already signed it. That’s why we have the check. You need to sign, too, and we mail one copy to Louhi.”

  “The old witch,” Aksel said, shaking his head. He hugged her again, reread the terms, and then laughed out loud.

  Aino had poured them coffee. She set it in front of him, smiling with the joy he obviously felt. Aksel leaned back in his chair, like the captain he was finally going to be again, and said, “Hell, it was illegal money in the first place. Now I have to earn it like an honest man.” Then the joy suddenly faded as he remembered he had a wooden leg, which would slow him down in rough weather, make it difficult to keep his balance, make it impossible to get quickly from the stern to the bow in an emergency. He wasn’t sure he could do it. Finding the fish was one thing, getting a hundred-plus-pound salmon, writhing with the strength that could propel it to Wyoming, into the boat was quite another. He looked at his wooden leg and then at her in despair.

  “I’m going to help you,” she said. “You’re the captain. I’m the crew. Until we can afford a boat puller.”

  “But … what do you know about fishing? You can’t pull a boat through rough water. Some of the salmon could be as big as you are. We hit rough water and you’ll never be able to get the net in.”

  “Not by myself.” He saw that rising posture of hers, as she came to her full five feet, four inches. “And you can’t do it by yourself, either.”

  He sat silent on a kitchen chair, the loan agreement still in his hands. Then he rose and clumped his way to the dresser where he kept paper and a fountain pen. He returned with the pen, set the loan agreement on the table, and signed it. He grinned at her. “It looks like we’re partners.”

  25

  Aksel went to see Einar Karlsson, the man who’d made his wooden leg. Einar was the owner of Karlsson Boats, a designer and builder of good reputation in a market where all the buyers were boat savvy and could probably build the boats themselves if they wanted to invest in the tools. Einar and Aksel settled on a classic double-ended design, allowing the boat to slip between waves from either direction when tied to a long net. Einar had a source for Port Orford cedar, a subspecies of western cedar with remarkable boatbuilding qualities. The boat would be a carvel-built hull of Port Orford cedar planks placed on ribs of white oak. The deck, too, would be Port Orford cedar. Aksel insisted on choosing every plank and timber and came to the boatyard morning and evening. Einar liked him, so he tolerated Aksel’s being pickier than he’d allow most customers to be. But also the boatbuilding business was as bad as the lumber and every other business, and Einar had already decided that with sales and production down, he would take his time. For decades, fishermen talked about having a “Karlsson depression boat” like violinists talking about having a Stradivarius.

  He named her the Aino. She had a four-cylinder Ford tractor motor that Aksel found in Rainier through a classified ad. On the day she was launched, Aino smashed a bottle of bootleg wine across the bow and she slid into the Columbia River stern first, Aksel at the wheel.

  He brought the Aino around, the engine almost idling, and the boat’s namesake scrambled down the ladder from the wharf and into the empty net room, the open bow where the huge gill net would be folded. Aksel helped Aino negotiate the narrow ledge between the little cabin and the gunwales, and she somewhat awkwardly managed to get her feet in the stern. Aksel headed the Aino toward her home in Alderbrook, careful not to run her too hard until he was sure everything worked. He motioned for Aino to take the wheel. She stood on a box he had pushed beneath it. She could barely see forward above the top of the cabin, but she felt a wild excitement as the wharves and houses of Astoria streamed by the Aino‘s starboard side. The Aino, she thought, named after her. She felt absurdly happy.

  Aksel was absurdly happy, too. He’d hung his new gill net weeks earlier, carefully measuring the distance he tied the net to the cork line, aware that how the net hung in the water would largely determine how many fish it would catch. He’d chosen a larger-meshed net to start, knowing if Einar built the boat in time, he would catch at least the last half of the August Chinook run—and this is what he was doing. He’d often forget himself as he saw the big fish slam into the net, sinking the cork line with a sudden pop. He’d be halfway through a sandwich, hear a fish hit, and be on his feet, sandwich thrown into the water. He’d run to the side of the boat, forgetting his wooden leg, and have to be helped to his feet by Aino. Then he’d be back in the stern, spinning the wheel, turning the boat, racing to one end of the long net or the other, filled with the sheer joy of fishing again—and with such a boat. Aino had never seen him so animated and it delighted her.

  As the Aino settled in, so did Aksel. By September he behaved much like all the other fishermen on the river, except in one way: Aksel uncannily found fish. Aino would watch him dip a hand into the river and taste the water. He’d watch the way the treetops moved and the direction of the swells, see signs of a hidden current that she couldn’t see even after he’d pointed it out. He’d poke the Aino into eddies, let her drift, then suddenly gun the engine, heading for a spot he could see as if it were marked by flashing buoys. Whenever the Aino idled proudly beneath the boxes hanging on davits at the cannery weighing stations, she was always full of fish, big fish, and they were paid for by the pound.

  By October, the Chinook run had abated, but there were still some late Chinook, steelhead, silversides, and even sturgeon to be caught. The two of them had moved into a routine, sleeping on the Aino, one of them always on watch during drifts. After they came in to deliver the catch when the boat could hold no more, Aino
would return to the house, make sure everything was in order, shop for food, bake rieska, make more viili for the next outing, prepare sandwiches, have a quick visit with Kyllikki, and haul everything down to the boat. Aksel spent almost all his time on boat and net maintenance.

  Aksel’s enthusiasm never waned. Aino’s did wane.

  They fished when the tide was right, which meant if the tide was right at two in the morning, they fished at two in the morning. The smell of engine oil and gasoline permeated the cabin and made her nauseated. She’d initially solved the problem by sleeping at the fore of the net room on a little pallet she’d arranged, but as fall moved closer to winter, the rains came, driving her inside the cabin. There, she could sleep only fitfully.

  Worse, with the deteriorating weather, the river grew rough. She got seasick. Eventually, the seasickness lessened, but it never went away. She also didn’t like hanging her rear end over the gunwales to pee and she really hated to poop that way, especially with other boats in sight—which was almost always, except at night. She tried peeing into a pot in the cabin, enduring the fumes, but after two accidents, when the Aino went up and came crashing down on a sudden swell and she missed and spilled what was already there, she went back to the gunwales. Aksel said nothing to all of this, for which she was grateful. If he had said something, made one tiny joke, the crew would have mutinied and tossed the captain overboard.

  In January, Aksel took the Aino upstream, where the river flowed between numerous islands, cutting the wind and swell and making it more likely for anyone thrown overboard to reach shore. Aino wasn’t sure he’d done it for her, but she was grateful. However, Aksel brought the Aino back closer to the bar in March, and the heaving swells made Aino ill, on top of being miserably wet and cold. Sisu and love got her through.

  * * *

  The spring Chinook run was good. The canning factories were busy. The price of salmon, however, was low and falling as the catch increased. At the start of the August run, all the canneries on both sides of the river lowered their prices from five cents a pound to three cents a pound. The prices were controlled by an organization called the Northwest Packers Association that consisted of all the canning companies on the river. One of its board members was John Reder. He’d sold his logging business some years earlier and moved his family to Portland. There he had invested his money, diversifying into different industries and serving on various boards of directors.