Song of Sampo Lake

by William Durbin

  “You’re a walking haystack.” Anna giggled. “All we can see is two little feet.”

  “Save your laughter, Miss Anna,” Father said. “You’re next.”

  When the hauling was done, they piled the hay in waterproof stacks. Starting at the bottom, Father laid short poles on the ground. Then he set a tall pole in the middle and laid the hay in one direction so that it would shed water. Wilho even tried to help by dropping a few strands on top.

  The girls were good helpers, but as they got more tired, they walked slower and slower. On her last trip Anna’s legs gave out, and she sat right down in the middle of the path. When Kari saw Anna disappear under the hay, she laughed until she fell down, too.

  It was hot and still on the evening they finished the last haystack. After they were done, the girls shook out their dresses and did what Kari called an “itch dance.” Then they all went swimming.

  Though the water near shore was lukewarm, out deeper it was still cool enough to make Matti shiver. While the girls splashed in the shallows, Matti floated at the edge of a drop-off. Even as his shoulders relaxed in the sun, his legs felt the prickling of the dark cold below. The scent of dew mingled with fresh-cut hay, and a loon called across the lake.

  Matti looked back at the shore. Wilho crowed from the peak of the sauna roof and flapped his wings. Matti smiled. With its single curtained window their log sauna looked like a toy house set on a needled carpet under the tall red pine. For a moment the girls were quiet enough for Matti to hear the crackling of birch bark and kindling as Mother stoked up the stove in her outdoor kitchen. Woodsmoke rose in slow black puffs and clung to the lower branches of the pine before it drifted up and away. When Mother waved at Matti, he was so relaxed that he could barely lift one lazy hand to wave back.

  Through late summer the family raced to store up enough food to last the winter. They canned berries and wild plums and green beans. They dug up their potatoes, carrots, and rutabagas for winter storage. Mother put up dozens of jars of chokecherry and pin cherry jelly. Father and Matti each shot a deer, and Mother canned the venison along with the suckers and northerns that Matti regularly brought from the fish trap.

  The job that Matti dreaded most started after they’d butchered the last deer. It began when Mother asked Matti if he would walk her to the store so that she could do some shopping. Though Mother usually waited for Matti to pick things up when he went to work, this time she wanted to shop for herself.

  When they got to the store, Billy was carrying a bucket of lard and a package to a wagon for Ester Olafson. He set his load down and greeted Mother. “So nice to see you again, Mrs. Ojala.” Then he introduced her to Mrs. Olafson. Matti did his best to translate while Mother and Mrs. Olafson chatted about their homesteads. As the ladies were bidding each other goodbye, Matti glanced into the store and saw that Clara Winston was wearing her green dress.

  He took a chance and interrupted. “If you tell me what you want, Mother, I can run in and get it for you.”

  Mother looked surprised at Matti’s impoliteness, and she was about to say something until she turned and saw Mrs. Winston standing in the doorway, wearing her brooch.

  Matti knew that some ladies would have ducked back inside or tried to cover up that brooch, but Mrs. Winston never blinked. “Good morning, Mrs. Ojala,” she called, standing tall and proud. “How nice of you to stop by and visit.” Matti translated.

  And Mother, standing just as tall and proud, said “Good morning” right back as Mrs. Winston welcomed her into the store.

  Mrs. Winston asked about the girls, and Mother commented on the lovely weather. They spoke so fast that Matti stumbled with his translating, but that gave them something to chuckle over. And they made him blush when they agreed that he was a fine young man.

  Mother finally got to her shopping list. “Would you have a bottle of lye?”

  “Not soap making,” Matti groaned.

  “Get ready to stir,” Mother said. “You’re lucky that you don’t have to make the lye by hand out of ashes.”

  “So that’s why you wanted to do your own shopping today,” Matti said, and both women chuckled.

  On the way back home Mother said, “Mrs. Winston is a very pleasant lady, Matti. You’re lucky to be working for such nice people. And that Billy is absolutely charming.”

  “You said that the first time you met him.”

  “So I did. It’s hard to explain. He looks like a typical woodsman, but there’s something in his manner. He has a way of giving a woman his full attention that makes her feel”—she paused to think of the right word—“special.”

  As soon as they got back to the cabin, Mother filled her largest iron pot with chunks of deer tallow. After it melted down, she poured the warm fat into a crock and carefully added lye and water. Then she handed Matti a wooden spoon. Matti knew the routine all too well. He had to stir without stopping— Mother wanted no lumps in her soap—until the gooey mess in the jar got stiff enough to support his spoon. Though Anna and Kari both offered to help, Matti couldn’t take a chance on them spattering themselves with lye. Matti had burned his hand once, and he was careful to stir very slowly. The job was tedious, still, Matti was grateful that the deer tallow didn’t smell as bad as the hog fat they’d rendered back in Finland.

  It took nearly two hours for the soap to thicken. Matti’s wrist ached as if he had been peeling logs all morning. He helped Mother pour the mixture into shallow dishes to cool, and was ready to go help Father when Mother said, “Since we’ve got the pot all greasy, we may as well do one more batch.”

  Matti moaned.

  All summer long Mother had written down the family expenses in a notebook. Every Friday she showed Father some numbers before she got her coin purse and counted out money for Matti’s Saturday shopping. Father always waved his hand and said, “Go ahead.” Mother’s face showed that she didn’t always agree, but she’d give Matti her shopping list. Things were so costly at the store that even with Matti’s discount the money didn’t go far. The biggest expense was canning jars. Mother bought a case nearly every week. When Matti hauled the jars home in his packsack, he had to be especially careful. Once he tripped and broke a half dozen, which he replaced with his own money.

  The last two projects that Father and Matti completed before winter were the root cellar and the mule barn. Father planned on making the barn big enough to store Aunt Hilda’s furniture under better cover than a tarp once the weather turned bad.

  They built the cellar on a hillside, exposed to the full afternoon sun. It was easy digging until they hit the rocks.

  “Rocks, rocks,” Father mumbled, cursing as he reached for the pick, “every blessed way you turn on this farm.” Matti hid his grin. For once Father wasn’t reciting a poem about the honor of digging in the dirt.

  Two broken shovels and a day and a half later, Matti and Father had finally dug a deep enough hole. They set timbers for the walls and built shelves for canning jars and bins for their root crops. To seal the cellar from the weather, they laid boards and birch bark on the roof and shoveled three feet of dirt over the top. Father’s good spirits returned by the time they hung the inner and outer doors. “She’s locked as tight as the magic Sampo in Louhi’s castle,” Father said, referring to the gold grinding mill in the Kalevala that the hero Väinö sailed north to capture. “Remember the bronze door that the evil witch Louhi secured with nine locks?”

  “You’ve never let me forget,” Matti said. “And over the years the Sampo grew roots out under the earth, the ocean, and the mountains, making it a challenge for Väinö to win it back.”

  “Yet he taught that witch a lesson and dug the Sampo up.” Father nailed the last hinge in place and stepped back to admire his work.

  “But in the end Louhi attacked Väinö’s ship, and he lost the Sampo in the sea,” Matti said.

  “Don’t forget that Väinö’s loss was humankind’s gain,” Father said. “For when the broken fragments of the Sampo washed ashore, th
ey brought wealth and prosperity to our people.”

  “Let’s hope Sampo Lake yields us the same fortune,” Matti said.

  “If a man works hard enough, he can make his own magic.”

  The mule barn ended up being more of a loafing shed, or a three-sided building with a flat roof. It, too, faced south, and they hung a tarp across the sunny side for a door.

  Once the crops were harvested, Matti had to begin another job he’d been dreading. He was careful not to bring up the subject, but one morning as he was getting ready to go to the Saaris’ and pick up the milk, Mother said, “You’d better bring your English book with you today, Matti. It’s time that you start those lessons we promised.” Groaning, he grabbed his knapsack and English grammar book. For once he wished Aunt Hilda had never sent him that book.

  When Matti arrived, Mrs. Saari seated her boys around the kitchen table. Their names were Ukko, Ahti, and Tapio, and they were six, seven, and nine years old. Matti pulled out his book. “Let’s start with …” Then he stopped to think.

  How could he make learning fun? His time at the Soudan School had been torture. The teacher had called him Matthew instead of Matti, and whenever he spoke Finnish, even if it was only an accidental thank you, she rapped him on the knuckles with a ruler.

  After a long pause Matti turned to Mrs. Saari and said, “Would you have a wooden box top?” Matti remembered Mother’s story about how her own school didn’t have enough money to buy slates, so they practiced their spelling in a sand-filled tray.

  “Yes,” she said, “but—”

  “And a stick,” he added. “We need a stick, too.”

  Little Ukko’s eyes got big.

  “What’s wrong?” Matti said.

  “Are you going to beat us, Matti?”

  “No.” Matti laughed.

  After Mrs. Saari found a wooden box top, Matti and the two younger boys went outside and filled it with clean sand while Tapio whittled a pencil-sized stick with his jackknife. Matti set the tray back on the table and handed Ukko the stick. Then he guided the little boy’s hand to spell U K K O.

  “Do you know how to read that word?” Matti asked.

  Ukko shook his head.

  “Those letters spell your very own name,” Matti said. Ukko smiled so proudly that Ahti and Tapio were both anxious to take a turn with “Matti’s writing box.”

  Matti breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps playing schoolmaster wouldn’t be quite so bad after all.

  CHAPTER 22

  As flocks of birds passed by on their way south, Matti noticed that Wilho became restless. One by one the songbirds disappeared, leaving only the chickadees and nuthatches behind. One evening a raft of bluebill ducks settled on the lake. Wilho sat on a boulder at the water’s edge and studied the ducks for a long time.

  Later that same day a flock of crows flapped along the ridge behind the farm. When they called toward the lake, Wilho flew to the top of a dead pine and stared after them. Wilho kept his perch all through supper. Just before dark he flew down to see if Matti had saved a snack for him.

  “You don’t have to worry about that bird flying south,” Father said. “He would miss your mother’s cooking too much.”

  Once Matti’s “school” was up and running, Mrs. Saari invited him to bring Anna and Kari along. The first time Anna and Kari gave an answer in exactly the same words, Matti thought nothing of it, but the boys just stared.

  “It was like two people talking with the same mouth,” Ukko said.

  As soon as Mrs. Winston found out that Matti was teaching the Saari boys, she donated some storybooks and old newspapers for reading material. Anna and Kari liked the storybooks best, but the boys begged Matti to read stories out of the Tower Weekly News. Little Ukko, who wanted to be a policeman when he grew up, quickly learned to identify crime stories by their exclamation points. Matti started to read an article entitled “Wanted in Tower,” but he stopped when he discovered the subject was a murderer named George Barlich, otherwise known as the Austrian Axe Man. He knew Mother wouldn’t want him to read the little ones such a story, so he picked an article about new passenger train service instead. But Mrs. Saari told Matti to use whatever the boys found interesting. They spent the rest of the morning spelling words like murder and axe and trial in their sand trays. On the way home Kari and Anna promised not to tell Mother.

  When Mother came along with Matti and the girls, the boys were careful to read wholesome stories. But she and Mrs. Saari chatted so much that Mother didn’t seem to notice Matti’s lessons. One morning the ladies were recalling their hometowns back in Finland. Matti was surprised when Mrs. Saari asked Mother to name the thing she missed most about Kuopio, and she said, “Our local ski hill.”

  “Whyever?” Mrs. Saari asked.

  “The slopes of Puijo are all color and movement. The people are so totally alive racing down toward the city with their bright caps and their scarves flying back in the wind.”

  “I miss the life of my village, too—simple things like folks mingling at the market and the fair,” Mrs. Saari said.

  “At least we have them.” Mother nodded toward the busy spellers at the table.

  The girls were so excited about mastering English that they often continued their lessons at home. Mother would join in, too, as Matti pointed to the window, the door, and the stove, and the girls said the English name together. To make the game more fun, Matti would point faster and faster. “Floor, ceiling, bucket,” the three ladies called out. “Pencil, paper, table, cup…”

  The fun ended when Father walked in and said, “Matti, talk like a man.”

  Matti was glad that the work on the farm had slowed, now that he was so busy with tutoring and clerking. One Saturday Black Jack showed up at the store late in the afternoon. “I need to stoke up my stewpot, Mutti Boy,” he said. “How’s your supply of potatoes?”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Mattson.” Clara Winston half-curtsied. “Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  “I decided to bring some pretty flowers for a pretty lady,” Black Jack said as he handed her a bouquet of fall flowers and bowed as low as his bad leg would allow.

  “I thought your priority was your stewpot,” she said.

  “Mutti Boy,” he said, “how do you say ‘A man needs to feed his eyes as well as his stomach’ in English?”

  When Matti translated for him, Mrs. Winston smiled. “I’m flattered, sir.”

  Matti shook his head. How could such a crude and dirty fellow have a sweet side? Whenever Matti decided that Black Jack was a complete pig, he surprised him. Jack visited with Mrs. Winston and Billy until quitting time, then he turned to Matti and said, “Are your potato-carrying muscles still in good shape?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Matti said with a chuckle, swinging the gunnysack onto his shoulders. “Lead the way.”

  As Matti trudged down the path behind Black Jack, he caught an odor of stale tobacco and unwashed clothes. It was a mistake to be walking downwind. All he could do was hang back by Louhi, who smelled a whole lot better. For some reason Black Jack wasn’t whistling as he normally did.

  Just as Black Jack was about to turn onto the path that led to his house, he stopped and stared to the south. “I feel a powerful storm brewing down that way,” he said. Matti couldn’t understand what he meant, because the sky was perfectly clear. “I see a terrible wind. A wall of water. People screaming…”

  Louhi whined softly, and Matti knelt down to pet him as Black Jack’s voice trailed off. The rest of the way to his cabin, he was silent, and once Matti carried his potatoes inside, Black Jack thanked him and said good night.

  But just as Matti turned to go, Black Jack said, “And Matti—”

  “Yes.”

  “You make sure you keep a close eye on that little Anna.”

  Before Matti had a chance to ask for an explanation, Black Jack had closed his cabin door.

  The next morning the sky was unbroken blue. Matti forgot about Black Jack’s foreca
st until the following Saturday at the store. He was totaling up a grocery order when a fellow sitting by the potbellied stove looked up from the paper and said, “That sure was some storm down in Texas. They say it was the worst in the history of America.”

  Matti walked over and looked at the paper. A hurricane had hit a town called Galveston, Texas, and over six thousand people had drowned. The storm blew ashore last Saturday, the very day Black Jack had his strange feeling.

  “What’s wrong?” Billy asked.

  “Would you think I was crazy if I told you Black Jack knew that storm was coming?”

  Billy shook his head. “Nothing would surprise me. Everyone in these parts can tell you stories about his predictions. I’ve seen him stand right here and say that one day men will be driving sun-powered carriages and riding ships off to the stars.”

  The man with the paper nodded. “I’d believe just about anything where that Spirit Jack is concerned. Last summer he was out at my farm and he looked to the south and said, One day that hillside will be a city of lights.’ Since there’s nothing out there but woods, I would’ve figured he was as crazy as a coot if I didn’t know him better.”

  CHAPTER 23

  After the hay was stacked and the crops were stored in the root cellar, Matti assumed that the field work was done for the year.

  On a calm morning when the leaves on the birch and popple had turned bright gold, and Matti was looking forward to a rest, Father checked the wind and said, “This would be perfect weather for burnbeating.”

  “No,” Matti moaned.

  “We won’t be able to break any new ground this fall,” Father said, “but we can at least get a few more trees out of the way.”

  Father made “out of the way” sound as simple as whisking the ground clean with a broom, but Matti knew there were at least a hundred trees in the patch of woods that Father had chosen.