Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  Fishermen of lesser skill than Aksel, although no less hardworking, found it increasingly difficult to make payments on their loans. The Fishermen’s Protective Union, organized years earlier primarily to help the families of drowned fishermen, launched numerous complaints about price fixing. Almost every lawyer in town represented a cannery, so the union could find no one to take the case. The lawyers who would didn’t know anything about antitrust laws.

  The fishermen grew desperate. In the fall of 1931, the Fishermen’s Protective Union called for a strike.

  26

  Aksel said no to the strike and its waterborne picket line. “I’m independent. I’ll sell what I catch. I never joined that union.” They were on a night drift on the Washington side off Holy Water, so named because of the little pioneer Catholic church on the shore. The Aino’s masthead light formed a small pool in the darkness around the boat as it rocked gently in the swell. Tiny sparkles, created by the light reflecting from delicately falling mist particles, winked at them from the darkness beyond. Aino had glimpsed a set of running lights, green and red, heading south across the river in the direction of Warrenton and then disappearing in the misty darkness, but now it felt as if they were all alone in the world, rocking, rocking. Rising up with the swell, Aino felt the weight of her stomach pushing down toward her pelvis, her buttocks pressing on the fish box where she sat, her legs dangling into the net room. Then the boat would go downward and her stomach would gently rise toward her heart. Aksel stood at the bow where he had attached the net to a belaying pin on the starboard side next to the net roller. She could see the glow of his cigarette and occasionally his face, lit orange red when he pulled in another lungful of smoke.

  As good as Aksel was, they were barely making it. The payments owed on Louhi’s loan were relentless. If they couldn’t make these, they would lose the boat. Thankfully, she’d taken Louhi’s advice and set some of the loan money aside. With this strike, however, that money would be gone in three months. The lease payments on the house were equally relentless. Not making the lease payments would mean living on the boat, with its smell of engine oil and constant rocking. But that required still having the boat. If they wouldn’t cross the picket lines, they couldn’t sell their fish—and there was no other work, anywhere.

  “I’ll go to Louhi. She’s family.”

  “No,” Aksel said calmly. “If we sell what I catch, you won’t need to see her.”

  “At three cents a pound, we’ll have to catch every fish in the river.”

  “We only need to fill the fish box.”

  He was so unflappable, just like her brothers. She hovered somewhere between pride and being furious with him. “Yes, you can,” she snapped. “What about those who can’t? Their families go hungry at three cents a pound.”

  He struck another match and in its flare his face was white. The flare died as he lit another cigarette. “If they can’t feed their families, it’s not my doing.”

  “You were born with the gift.”

  “I developed that gift through hard work. I slaved my entire adult life to finally use it and”—he hesitated, stopping short of what he was going to say—“and here we are again.” He stomped off to the other side of the boat.

  She knew he’d never say it directly. “Here we are again” was about her strike at Reder’s costing Jouka everything. She also knew that Aksel couldn’t be coerced by the threat of losing her love—and she loved Aksel more than anything else, even justice.

  She made her way over to where Aksel was looking at the river, standing on the deck of the net room. She stood next to him, looking at the river they both loved. She said softly, “I hurt Jouka for a cause I believed in. I wish I hadn’t.”

  Aksel took a long pull and then looked down at the glowing tip cupped in his hand. “I know,” he said. He threw the cigarette into the water and put his arm around her. She snuggled her head into the side of his chest. The only sounds were the water of the great river lapping against the Aino’s hull and, in the far distance, the sound of a bell buoy as it rocked in a swell.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  She did.

  “Ordinary people,” he said, “the little guy and his wife, will be thrown out of cannery work up and down the river. Truckers will be put out of work. Restaurants and butcher shops won’t have any fish. The price of fish will skyrocket and ordinary working-class housewives won’t be able to buy.” He gave her time to think about the chain of interrelated events. “The cannery owners will call for the National Guard. The politicians will be able to call the Guard out because they’ll say you’re hurting the little guy—and you are. And that’s what they’ll tell the voters. It doesn’t mean the strike is wrong. Just that you need to see beyond the self-righteous us versus them. Politics is just war by another means. And there’s no glory in war.” He turned away from her and took a long pull on his cigarette, looking into the darkness. “Believe me.”

  Aino was silent, her mind moving rapidly through images of Aksel at war, the civil war in Finland—Helsinki.

  “They won’t bring in the Guard,” she said quietly.

  “They did in Centralia.”

  “That’s because shooting and killing happened.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.” He was looking into the darkness. Quietly, he said, “Every fishing boat has a rifle onboard to kill sea lions or sharks that get in its nets or anyone corking its drift. These men don’t work for wages. They aren’t workers. Every fisherman is the king of his own country. Some will strike. Some, like me, won’t. It’ll be war, fisherman against fisherman.”

  She felt a chill.

  “You’ll risk getting killed crossing a picket line?”

  “When I was bootlegging,” he said, not looking at her, “I risked getting killed for excitement and money, trivial things compared with taking care of you and Eleanor.” He turned to her. “Yes, I’ll risk getting killed to sell the fish I catch. No one will stop me. Not even you.”

  “Don’t do it for me.”

  “Do you want to keep the boat?”

  She wanted to answer no, but she couldn’t do it honestly. The boat was theirs, not just his. It was Eleanor’s, too. It was what could get her to college. It was the family boat. The Aino was worth more than fighting injustice.

  She sat on the fish box, leaned back against the cabin, aching with the sadness of it all.

  Five hundred fishermen joined the strike. Aino agreed not to picket and Aksel agreed not to cross the picket lines. Both knew it meant risking the boat. They would move to the Aino if they lost the house. If they lost both, they’d move to Deep River. There was always shelter and food because of family.

  Within days, independent fishermen with mouths to feed, bills to pay, and loan payments to meet began slipping by the striking fishermen to deliver their catch, enduring the curses and threats. Aksel knew many of them.

  On a raw, windy day in mid-October, Aksel’s prediction came true. Alfred Tolverson lost his temper and fired his rifle across Gregory Wycliffe’s bow to stop him from selling his fish. Wycliffe turned back.

  Three hours later he returned with four other boats. None of the strikers on the floating picket line were prepared for what they saw: five boats, two or three men to each boat, all armed with rifles held grimly at the ready.

  Aino and Aksel watched from the wharf. Aksel looked at Aino, the set of his face and the grimness of his eyes communicating exactly what he intended to do. She nodded her head in agreement. Aksel hobbled full tilt for the Aino and was starting the engine when Aino climbed down the ladder right after him.

  The Aino headed for the diminishing space between the oncoming boats and the little flotilla of strikers at full throttle, the bow wave peeling off her gracefully curved hull. Aksel threw her into reverse, gunning the engine to bring her to a complete stop. The Aino rocked in the slight chop, her engine idling, the line of oncoming fishermen bearing down on her, the picketing fishermen behind her. Aksel pulled himself up
to the gunwale so everyone could see him.

  The oncoming fishermen cut their engines. Both lines of boats rocked in the water, all filled with men aiming rifles at each other.

  Aksel knew these men. Neither side would blink.

  He ducked into the cabin and then climbed clumsily to its top. He raised one hand high above his head. That hand held a Thompson .45-caliber machine gun.

  Aino gasped. “Where did you get that?”

  “From the old days,” Aksel answered, rotating with the Thompson above him, making sure both lines of boats saw it. “I stashed it with Matti,” he said without looking at her. “Along with some other stuff.”

  Then he shouted, “This fires eight hundred and fifty rounds per minute. I have four drum magazines and every magazine has one hundred bullets.” He paused. “I will shoot anyone who opens fire, no matter which side he’s on.”

  Gregory Wycliffe yelled back: “Aksel, we don’t want trouble with you. We just want to sell our fish.”

  “Wycliffe,” Aksel called back: “Those men on strike have families to feed, just like you. Some of them, me included, have loans to pay on their boats. We’re all making sacrifices.”

  “You sell your fish, you won’t lose your boat.”

  “You sell your fish, we lose the strike, you goddamned scab,” Tolverson shouted at Wycliffe.

  That brought rifles up.

  “Listen, all of you,” Aksel shouted. It was hard to sound calm, shouting. He fired a burst into the air. That brought silence.

  “Rifles will do nothing but kill fishermen while cannery owners get richer,” Aksel said.

  Aino scrambled to join Aksel and grabbed his arm, excitement on her face. “Listen. I have an idea,” she whispered. In her eyes she had the fierce look that she usually carried into battle. “I don’t think I’m crazy.”

  She raised her voice, turning her head as she did, so both sides could hear her. “Listen to me! What makes sense for all of us is to pull together!”

  She knew it was a lame start, but she hadn’t had time to think of anything else. “Aksel and I have been thinking.” Aksel gave her a quick glance. She elbowed him. “If we had our own cannery and our own label we could tell the cannery owners to go to hell. We’ll sell our catch to the people after we can it. We’ll form a fishermen’s co-op and bypass the canneries.”

  “I don’t even own my boat,” a man shouted. “How in hell are we going to own a canning factory?”

  “By all of us chipping in.” She turned to the striking fishermen. “There are over five hundred fishermen on strike around here. If we get two hundred of us to do this and if everyone contributes one hundred fifty or two hundred dollars, we can raise thirty or forty thousand dollars. Surely that’s enough to buy some used canning machinery.”

  Aksel looked at her with surprise. She looked up at him, hopeful, apprehensive. She hadn’t thought it through at all. He said quietly, “I’m impressed.”

  Someone shouted, “How are you going to get that many people to agree?”

  “Tycho Finneman,” she called back. “What do you think Lena would say if I asked her over coffee: ‘Would you like to see Tycho dead in a fishermen’s war or would you like to own a little piece of a canning factory that will guarantee you’ll never have to strike again?’”

  “She’d let someone shoot the dumb son of a bitch,” one of the union fishermen yelled. There was laughter. Rifles were being lowered.

  Tycho yelled back, “She’d say, ‘Where’s the money to feed the kids if we give it to the co-op?’”

  “I know you’ll have to dig deep. But now is the time. Sacrifice and dig now and get off this eternal merry-go-round of working for wages. Owning things gives us far more power than withholding our labor. Plus, a co-op takes all the surplus from the machines it owns and distributes it equally.”

  She let that sit.

  “Suppose one of us is lazy or no good,” another fisherman shouted. “Does he still get the same as the rest of us?”

  “We can work out the details later, but one way is to keep track of how many pounds each brings in. You can be paid by the pound before the distribution. You’ll still be your own men. You want to work hard, you get more. You invest in better gear, you get more. You want to loaf, you get less. You get to decide.”

  “What do we live on until this co-op starts selling our fish?” another man shouted back.

  “If the Chinook Indians can live on salmon so can we.” She turned so she could take all the boats into her view. “Most of us came from the old country. We’ve all seen real starvation. Don’t you think two hundred determined women can find enough food in the woods and in their gardens to supplement what fish you men bring in? If we organize and share, only a tenth of you will need to fish to feed all of us. The rest can hunt, help forage, and maybe find odd jobs. We can pool the food. The issue before us is will … we … organize?” She paused to emphasize the words. “Or will we fall apart, even kill each other, and watch the owners squeeze us until we don’t have enough gas to pass wind?”

  She knew she had them when they all laughed, strikers and nonstrikers.

  When the laughter died, Aksel, the tommy gun now held at his side and pointing downward, raised his voice to the would-be strikebreakers. “You all know I didn’t want to strike.” He turned to the striking fishermen. “But we tied the Aino up because we refused to cross the picket lines.” He laid the tommy gun down on the top of the cabin. “Let’s put the rifles down.”

  Tolverson, who seemed to be an unelected leader, laid his rifle down on the stern cockpit deck where it could no longer be seen. Soon, all the rifles were down.

  Aksel waited to get everyone’s attention again. “Let’s meet at Suomi Hall at seven tonight. Call a truce for one day. Strikers”—he turned to the picketers’ boats—“you, too. Choose how many need to stay on the picket line.”

  In the ensuing long silence, only the sound of exhaust burbling in the water from a few boats that hadn’t turned off their engines could be heard.

  “OK, Långström,” one of the strikers yelled. “If you’re so committed to this co-op idea, you tell us how you get a full fish box when most of us come in half full.”

  Aino stiffened. The most closely guarded secret a successful fisherman had was where and how he caught fish.

  “It’s a deal, Halverson,” Aksel finally replied. “If this co-op idea goes, Aino and I will be in it one hundred percent. We share the profits. The more fish you catch, the more profit for me and everyone else.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Halverson answered. He started his motor and swung his boat away from the group.

  “What are we supposed to do with the fish in our boats?” Finneman shouted.

  One of the strikers yelled back: “We could sure use some at our house.”

  At seven, Suomi Hall filled with fishermen. Wives came as well, many of them bringing what they had in the way of biscuitti or other bread. Some immediately got busy making coffee in the hall’s large pots. Aino drew up a simple plan, explaining how a co-op worked, what would be required to make it work. Tolverson and a union fisherman named Alatalo were elected co-chairs. Aino was elected secretary.

  There were objections and questions and some arguments as well.

  “Why not just sell to the canneries while we’re building our own?” someone asked.

  Aino took it on. “We will only have so much processing capacity. That means we can only have so many fishermen. There will be more fishermen out there who can’t join than can. They’re our brothers. Their wives are our sisters. We won’t scab.”

  “There’s another reason,” Aksel said in his quiet voice that made everyone listen him. “All those canneries will be our competition. If we help break the strike by selling to them, the price stays at three cents a pound, peanuts. That means we could only compete if we pay ourselves peanuts.”

  There was no more talk about selling to the canneries.

  * * *

  In
winter, when the fishing was poor, the union fishermen would sacrifice the least. The temptation to settle the strike at any price, however, would be immense when the river was teeming with salmon in March. For those who’d joined the co-op, if the co-op wasn’t running when the spring Chinook came in, it would be likely to fail. Most of the members, like Aino and Aksel, were gambling all their savings and probably what they had borrowed from relatives on its success. The cannery owners knew all this. They would do whatever they could to delay or stop the co-op’s opening. The owners also knew that if they didn’t settle with the union fishermen, they, too, would miss the spring Chinook. That was 40 to 60 percent of their revenue.

  The owners’ first move wasn’t long coming. Gerald Gleason, who had worked his way up from managing the Knappton cannery of Knappton Packing, was now general manager, responsible for four plants. He showed up at the second organizing meeting at Suomi Hall.

  He knew most of the fishermen. He remembered Aksel and shook his hand. Aksel wanted to shout the name Cap Carlson in his face but wondered if Gleason even remembered having left Carlson to rot.

  The fishermen were uneasy. Alatalo gaveled the meeting open. “We’ll dispense with the minutes. I think our visitor has something to say and then will probably want to leave.” Mutterings of approval met Alatalo’s intonation of want to leave.

  Gleason was unfazed. He stood. “We’re not seeking trouble,” he began. “We want to settle this strike at a fair wage.” Mutterings grew to hostile words. Alatalo gaveled the meeting quiet.

  “I’m here to save you the trouble of trying to start this thing. More competition will not do any of you fishermen any good. It will just lower the price of salmon, which means we owners will be forced to lower what we pay you.”