Deep River

by Karl Marlantes

  LÖRDAGSVALSEN

  Near dark, on a gray day in March 1969, Aino sat quietly in the armchair she and Aksel had purchased when they were just married. She looked out on the great river through the picture window of the ranch-style house they’d built in the 1950s. Aksel was gone over three years now. The surgeon general’s warning about cigarettes came too late for him. He was buried on Peaceful Hill next to Kullervo, Heppu, and Yrjö. The last two were killed in logging accidents at ages forty-nine and sixty-three respectively. Jens was still active with the American Legion in Neawanna, where he was the driving force behind Neawanna Kids Incorporated and the Legion baseball team. She smiled to herself. For many years now, three bouquets would be placed anonymously on the four graves on Armistice and later Veterans Day. She was pretty sure she knew who did it.

  She missed small things about Aksel. How he would grin and foam his mouth at her when he was brushing his teeth. His smell when he was sweating. The heat of his body when she was cold at night. How he cut his rieska backward, holding it against his chest. Breadcrumbs on the kitchen counter. She even missed hearing his artificial leg thumping up the stairs from the basement where he built so many toy boats with Eleanor’s two young sons.

  The spring Chinook would be running, but the Chinook were a third of the size they had been when she and Aksel launched the Aino. The June Hogs, evolved to survive the immense journey to their spawning grounds at the headwaters of the Columbia and the Snake, had been made extinct by the watershed’s more than sixty dams. The river was now a series of warm lakes. Its only remaining wild stretch ran through the nuclear waste storage site at Hanford, Washington.

  The old Philco radio was tuned to KAST so she could catch the Scandinavian Hour on Saturday mornings and the news. Something caught her attention and drew her back from the river. A young woman with a beautiful clear soprano was singing a song about Joe Hill. Aino listened, then got up to walk closer to the radio.

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night as alive as you and me.

  Says I to Joe, you’re ten-years dead. I never died, said he.

  Aino turned the radio off.

  She put her coffee cup and saucer into the kitchen sink and clicked off the kitchen light. Click on. Click off. Easy light in exchange for Aksel’s leg. Two-by-fours in exchange for dead loggers.

  She shrugged into her overcoat and tied her old wool scarf on her still-thick but silvering hair. She walked into the front yard and looked west where a line of lighter gray showed where the sun was setting. Car lights winked on the huge bridge that replaced the ferries. The car lights left the bridge on the Washington side, some going east and some going west. The eastbound traffic’s taillights disappeared where the General Washington had rounded the point to reach the Knappton docks. All that remained of Knappton were exposed pilings, moving in the gentle lapping of the river like loose teeth.

  What remained of Tapiola was Ilmari’s church, a few homes, and a combination gas station and grocery store.

  Aarni, Matti and Kyllikki’s oldest son, was coming to pick her up to go to the dance at Suomi Hall. He’d been the military attaché to Finland in the late 1940s and retired from the army in 1962. He was now running 200-Foot Logging. They would be celebrating Aino’s eighty-first birthday in the social hall. Matti and Kyllikki would be there as well. Aino had now lived a year longer than her mother, Maíjaliisa, who’d died in 1938 at age eighty, spared the horrors of the war with Russia that started in 1939.

  The gray band of light to the west had faded further, bringing out the lights of the Astoria waterfront, much diminished, since most of the canneries had closed. She could just make out the large buildings of the Scandinavian Cooperative Packing Company, which was sold to Van Camp Seafood in 1961 for a good price.

  She felt a little lonely but content. Her mind turned to what she was going to wear tonight. She walked back into the house to get ready, humming “Lördagsvalsen.” She’d had a full life.

  Author’s Comment

  Before there was a Finland, there was The Kalevala. This collection of ancient songs from the shamanic past slept in the hearts and souls of Finns in the land they call Suomi. For centuries, Suomi dreamed of itself through the icy overtones of a vibrating kantele string or the songs of two old ones, who sang face-to-face, grasping each other’s hand and shoulder, as they had learned from the old ones who went before them.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, The Kalevala came to Finnish consciousness primarily through the collection efforts of a medical doctor, Elias Lönnrot. Lönnrot was stationed in the eastern and most isolated part of the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, called the Kaleva District. He grew to love the old songs he found there, preserved out of reach of the encroachments of modern civilization. He noticed that the songs often shared the same characters, so he published these songs in the form of a single epic poem. This was in 1835 when the Finnish people suffered under Russian domination. The publication of The Kalevala was an important part of the awakening of the Finns, playing a key role in the revival of the Finnish language, which was under pressure from both Swedish and Russian. The revival of Finnish led to a greater identity as an autonomous people. This eventually led to nationhood and independence amid the turmoil of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

  Before this awakening, Finnish mythical heroes were unknown, repressed by the Catholic Church of the Swedes and the Orthodox Church of the Russians. There was no Thor, no Freya, not even a Peter the Great or Catherine the Great. There was no Finland. As the yearning for a revival of the Finnish language grew, the knowledge of the heroes of The Kalevala grew. The sonorous names of these shamanic heroes of prehistory became part of the common language and many children are still named for them: steadfast old Väinämöinen, the lonely sage; his brother, Ilmarinen, the smith who forged the magic Sampo; Joukahainen, the celebrated minstrel of the Northland; Aino, the woman who stands alone, refusing to be married against her will; handsome, passionate, and arrogant Lemminkäinen; the sorceress Louhi, the mistress of the Northland; and many others. When Finns emigrated to America around the turn of the last century, these mythic heroes came with them.

  The Kalevala has no overarching narrative structure and this novel is not a retelling of The Kalevala but rather a tale highly influenced by it. I’ve cut and combined many characters, the most painful being old Väinämöinen, who I combined with Ilmarinen, the smith, in the character Ilmari Koski.

  For the sake of the story, I’ve condensed history in Finland somewhat. Russian troops were less a factor at the turn of the twentieth century than around the time of the World War I. Aino’s part of Finland was predominantly “white,” that is anticommunist, during the civil war that followed independence. As in most civil wars, atrocities were committed by both sides, leaving much bitterness. When I was a child in the 1950s, my grandmother, very much a “red,” wouldn’t allow me to play with children whose grandparents were whites.

  I tried to set the novel in accurate history. Where I strayed, it was because of either my choice to sacrifice history for story or my ignorance. I apologize in advance to historians. The American setting is the southwestern corner of Washington state, where my Finnish relatives first settled in the 1890s and I spent much time as a child. The novel’s Deep River is based on the Naselle River. Tapiola is based on my childhood memories of the town of Naselle, then a thriving logging town, now long gone except for two churches, a grocery store, and a few houses. Nordland is inspired by Aberdeen, Washington, a town known in its day for wildness. Nordland is based on The Kalevala’s Pohjola, which means “the Northland.” It is a place of evil and darkness where the witch-woman shaman Louhi dwelled with her daughters. I’ve combined Raymond and South Bend, Washington, into the novel’s Willapa. There is a real Deep River just east of Naselle. I simply liked the name for my novel. My apologies to locals who would prefer historical accuracy to artistic license.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped with the creation of Deep River. I would
foremost like to thank my secret-weapon editor and cheerleader, my wife, Anne.

  I am blessed to have my publisher, Grove Atlantic, and my enormously skilled editors, Morgan Entrekin, Allison Malecha, Brenna McDuffie, Susan Gamer, and Paula Cooper Hughes. Risto Penttilä, Anders Eklund, and Marcus Prest furnished much-appreciated comment on the parts set in Finland. My gratitude to Bryan Penttila and George Nelson for their help on early logging, Eric Erickson for early sawmilling, and Reverend Gregory Neitzel and John and Jerry Alto for help with Columbia River gillnetting. I am particularly grateful for the many hours I spent with the late Rae Cheney talking about her childhood on a Montana farm in the 1920s. Further thanks to Marie Cooley of Fitting Room Corsets in Seattle for her advice on period fashion, and Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman for inviting me into their Victorian home in Port Townsend and sharing their thoughts on daily life at the turn of the twentieth century. Karl VanDevender boosted my spirits with early and constant encouragement. Karl, Josh Nogar, and Bo Sheller provided medical advice.

  Many friends read drafts and provided helpful feedback. I would particularly like to thank Ed Grosswiler and LuAnn Lange for their early careful reading and detailed commentary. I would also like to thank Peter and Treacy Coates, Katherine Fitch, Mike Harreschou, Vicki Huff, Helen Odom, and Ken Pallack. My warm thanks to Cheri Lerma, of Cheri’s Cafe in Cannon Beach, Oregon, for putting up with me when I was writing in a full booth during busy times while only ordering coffee.

  My thanks to Sloan Harris and Heather Karpas at International Creative Management for constant encouragement and advice, both literary and business, and finally, my assistant, Halley Johnson, and Alexa Brahme at ICM for their much-appreciated support.

  I want to acknowledge my great debt to and my gratitude for my grandparents, Axel and Aina Silverberg and Leif Erickson, as well as my great-uncles and great-aunts, all immigrants to the Lower Columbia region. They were loggers, fishermen, farmers, cannery workers, and hardworking and loving wives and mothers. I learned much working beside them in my childhood. I only wish I’d appreciated it back then as I do now.

  About the Author

  Karl Marlantes is the author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War and What It Is Like to Go to War. He is married and has five adult children and three grandchildren. He grew up in a small logging town on the Oregon coast and fished commercially with his grandfather as a teenager.