Deep River Read online

  Jouka had been asked to join the band. She watched him come in with the other musicians, all loggers or mill workers, carrying their precious instruments. She’d heard that Jouka made his violin himself, working on it Sundays. Jouka took the last quick drink and tossed the empty bottle over thirty feet into the river in a graceful fluid motion. He jumped onto the stage rather than going up the four stairs at its end. He looked toward Aino and smiled, making her feel as if he were about to play just for her; she was unaware that every girl standing next to her felt the same way.

  Turning to his fellow musicians with a quick, “Yksi, kaksi, kolme,” he started the night with “Finska Polka.” No girl was left alone or given any rest unless she fled to the room reserved for the women. On one of these trips, Aino saw a girl rub something red on her lips with her forefinger. She’d heard about whores and loose women in cities like Astoria, but it shocked her they’d allow someone like that into a dance with decent hardworking people.

  She got only one dance with Jouka.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Ilmari arrived at the Tapiola landing towing a small raft behind his rowboat. On the raft was a well-wrapped and securely strapped Estey reed organ that had journeyed by rail from Brattleboro, Vermont, to Portland and then on to Willapa, where it was loaded on the Reliable. It was unloaded on the Deep River pier, where it sat for a full day before word reached Ilmari to fetch it.

  On Sunday evening, the twenty-fifth of August, Ruusu Pakanen opened services with a rousing and forcefully pedaled “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” while Pastor Hoikka swept up the aisle resplendent in his new vestments. A large painting of Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha, a fitting testimony to the value of women in the church, hung behind the altar.

  12

  In June, Aksel had a letter from home confirming his fears. Gunnar had indeed died in the raid. The family had been unable to recover the body for burial.

  Aksel quit his job.

  By mid-September he stood on a creosoted wharf looking at the Columbia River. Salmon-canning factories lined the riverbank in both directions as far as he could see. On the river itself were hundreds of small two-ended gill net boats with lateen sails. Fourteen miles to the west was the Columbia River bar, two miles of maelstrom where the river hit the Pacific and the site of over six hundred shipwrecks. He’d been told that on clear days, to the east you could see Mount Saint Helens, a snowcapped volcano with the same symmetrical beauty as Mount Fuji. On this typical day, however, all but the immediate hills were hidden from view beneath a flat ceiling of soft gray. He could just make out the smoke rolling from the wigwam burners and boilers of two sawmills at Knappton, six miles across the river from him. His destination, Tapiola, lay hidden behind the steep hills to the north of the town.

  Seeing the river, watching the wind fill a sail, and smelling the fish guts thrown into the water from the canneries, Aksel longed to be fishing. The Chinook salmon runs, however, were coming to an end, leaving only winter steelhead and not much chance of work. With San Francisco rebuilding after the huge quake in April, sawmills were operating at full tilt and logging companies were hiring. He couldn’t face being tied to a sawmill production line, so logging would have to get him the money for his own boat.

  Aksel shouldered his rucksack and paid fifteen cents for passage on the General Washington, which plied its daily rounds between Knappton, small landings upstream on the Washington side, and Astoria. He landed at Knappton with four dollars and sixty cents left from his earnings in Bandon. He heard the faint, far-off whistle of a logging train and was told the train belonged to Reder Logging, and John Reder was hiring.

  Aksel set off along a trail that headed north into the hills. He was told to turn left at the first trail that looked well used. He did and hit the Reder rail line where he caught a ride on the next train going up to Reder’s Camp.

  He was hired to chop and split wood for the steam donkeys—seventy-five cents a day, a bunk, all he could eat in twenty minutes, and a chance to move up, starting the next morning. Of course, money would be deducted from his pay for room and board.

  Aksel was directed to one of the bunkhouses. The place was gloomy and empty except for one man on his bunk, obviously with a high fever. All the other loggers were working. The clammy air smelled of wet wool blankets, tobacco, and unwashed men. A pig was rooting around scraps thrown next to a potbellied woodstove, and he shooed it out. The bunk was bare planks. He saw a pile of hay in one corner and picked some up. It was limp, damp, and had the slightly sweet scent of decay. He heard rustling. A rat disappeared under the hay. He carried several armloads to his bunk. He leaned his hand against the top bunk, then quickly jerked it away. A flea had hopped on it. He brushed it off but couldn’t see it in the gloom to crush it on the floor.

  He walked outside into a light drizzle. John Reder had told him all he could eat. After climbing the uneven steps to a wide porch on the west side of the mess hall and cookshack, he looked inside. At first, he thought he must be imagining it. He had often thought about the dark-haired girl he’d danced with on Midsummer’s Eve. The girl turned and he saw her face and the glasses. It was her, Aino Koski! Of course, he’d been told there were lots of Kokkola people here, so he shouldn’t be surprised. Still, she was the first person he saw from home. The long winter, the hard, long walk up the coast, the miserable green chain in Bandon had all been spent to reach one goal—her. He rushed inside, calling her name.

  Aino couldn’t help smiling. Here was that kid from the Midsummer’s Night dance, over two years ago, Gunnar Långström’s little brother. He must have grown four inches taller and two inches wider in the shoulders since she last saw him. His onrush slowed. He stopped short of her, his enthusiasm losing out to shyness.

  “Hyvää päivää,” he said, greeting her formally in just slightly Swedish-accented Finnish. “Do you remember me, Aksel Långström? The Midsummer’s dance?”

  “Päivää,” she answered more informally. “Sure, I do.”

  He smiled as though she’d just given him Christmas dinner. There was something about him that she just had to like.

  An awkward silence followed. Aino looked over her shoulder at the door into the large kitchen to see if Alma was there. Lempi and another girl who were setting the long tables glanced at Aksel, trying to look as if they weren’t looking. Lempi was setting the opposite side of the table from where she was standing, making it easier to glance at Aksel unobtrusively without having to turn her head. It made Aino smile. She turned back to Aksel, wondering if he noticed. It didn’t seem so. He was looking at his shoes, which were nearly unwearable.

  Pressured by the need to return to work, they quickly caught up, Aino telling Aksel about her journey to America, about Matti working at Reder’s Camp, about Ilmari’s farm. Aksel told Aino about shipping aboard the Elna and the long walk north. Aino wondered if Aksel knew about Gunnar’s death but was afraid to ask. Aksel didn’t mention anything.

  Matti and Aksel recognized each other the moment Matti walked into the bunkhouse. They shook hands.

  “Food’s on,” Matti said in Finnish, nodding toward the mess hall.

  Aksel followed Matti into the darkness. The crews worked until the light failed. A child, around eight or nine years old, tagged in just behind Matti. Matti tousled the boy’s filthy hair and laughed. “Kullerikki, meet Aksel. He’s from my home place.” He turned to Aksel. “His real name is Heikki Ranta. He’s a whistle punk.”

  Kullerikki meant little Kullervo, a maddened tragic character from The Kalevala. Aksel saw that the boy’s left ear had been torn and then healed. There was a scar beside his right eye. The boy trudged on determinedly beside them. Clearly, he’d adopted Matti.

  They arrived at the mess hall along with dozens of other loggers, some coming from one of the four bunkhouses, many streaming in immediately from work, some jumping off railcars, most walking. There was hardly a word spoken. Matti immediately started taking huge quantities from serving plates an
d bowls that were rapidly passing by them and soon had his plate covered and heaping. Aksel scrambled to follow suit, noticing that Kullerikki had filled his plate as much as had Matti.

  “So, how long have you been here?” Aksel asked, chewing on a chunk of stew meat.

  Matti indicated the others with nods of his head. Aksel looked around. No one talked. They all just ate, as fast as they could. He reddened a little and put his mind to the task at hand. He kept glancing around, trying to catch a glimpse of Aino. She ignored him. All the girls were extremely busy. Fifteen minutes later, stomach pressing against his waistband, he followed Kullerikki and Matti into the dark. Faint light from a kerosene lamp in their bunkhouse guided them to its door. Long wool underwear hung from nails and wires, vying for space by the stove, which was cracking and expanding from the sudden heat in its belly. It was burning thick slabs of bark that the loggers carried back from the show. The bark would be replaced by alder before they slept. Matti picked Kullerikki up from beneath his armpits and tossed him up to the third bunk where he soon situated himself, sitting on its edge with legs dangling, kicking gently. Matti reached for a large piece of finely grained cedar on his bunk, took out his puukko, sat on the rough boards of the floor, and started carving a large bowl.

  Within half an hour everyone in the bunks slept. Aksel watched the red light from the cracks in the stove door flickering on the ceiling.

  * * *

  They awoke in the dark. Most of the loggers went to the four- and six-hole outhouses, but some just shit behind stumps next to the bunkhouse. There was no sunrise. Objects just gradually emerged as gray grew lighter around them. Walking with Matti the mile to the logging show after breakfast, Aksel felt the same tension he had felt before going up the mast for the first time, fear and excitement: fear that he’d not make the grade, excitement at realizing that if he made it, he’d be one of those lean taciturn men, a man who could hold his head up in any company anywhere.

  But first came making the grade.

  They put him to work splitting wood to fuel the steam donkey’s boiler, just as Matti had done.

  Hauled up to the side of the landing, a single log, about three feet in diameter, lay at an odd angle, its chopped top pointing skyward just over the edge of the flattened ground where much larger and more profitable logs were being stacked and sorted. Aksel used a wide-faced ax to take off the limbs, then, with a six-foot-long crosscut saw, he reduced the tree to rounds. The rounds got hauled, rolled, pulled, and cursed up to the landing where he split them into cordwood, roughly eighteen inches long and eight inches wide.

  By midmorning, Aksel wanted to quit. Of course, that was unthinkable. Aksel’s hands, work-hardened since he was a boy, still blistered from the nine-pound splitting maul and eight-foot-long bucksaw. His worn-out shoes couldn’t grip the wood and he fell awkwardly off logs, barking his shins and scraping his arms and thighs. Still, he kept the monster fed and the donkey puncher, the man running the monster, happy. No breaks.

  At noon, he heard four short blasts of the donkey whistle and the cables went slack. Men, many until now unseen, began to emerge from the line of uncut trees and work their way across the slash, moving like acrobats from log to springy limb to stump top, all coming toward the landing. Hearing a short toot behind him, Aksel turned to see the log train puffing slowly up the grade from Reder’s Camp. Sitting on one of the empty cars, their legs dangling, were two girls, one of them Aino. Happiness burst into his body. They were sitting next to steaming pails of stew, beans, and stacks of sandwiches. Lunch. God be praised.

  Twenty minutes later Aksel was back at work.

  And it went like that endlessly. The boiler was a fiery bottomless pit. It seemed a thing alive, its glowing red mouth devouring everything he cut and split, spewing excess steam, driving the cable drums that pulled the huge logs to the loading boom that put them on the railcars. When dark fell, he dragged himself back to the dining hall and then into bed, asleep instantly in his sweat-stained and slightly bloody wool long johns. The loggers awoke before daylight and took down their stiff clothes from the lines strung above them. Since Aksel was the greenhorn, he emptied the piss pots under the bunks into the slash next to the bunkhouse. Every day, he and Matti wolfed down breakfast in near silence, then walked or caught an empty railcar to the show. There they resumed working as if the night hadn’t intervened.

  Unlike other loggers—who had job titles like choker setter, faller, bucker, and rigger—Aksel had no title. He wasn’t a logger and the loggers let him know it, including Matti, which annoyed him. He’d like to see Matti reefing sails a hundred feet above the deck.

  In the early afternoon of his fourth day, Aksel heard a sound like a giant steel kantele string snapping. From the corner of his eye he saw the end of a one-inch mainline cable whipping across the top of the slash and slamming into a stump with such force it exploded bark into the air as though the stump had been hit with an artillery round. Then he heard seven long, shrill toots coming from Kullerikki yanking on the whistle wire.

  The squealing and clatter died. He looked across the landing and saw the head push, the man in charge, pointing at something, other men gathering and looking. Soon four men were brush dancing across the slash. He climbed to the top of the log he’d been working on and could just make out a small group of men, one of them tending to a man on the ground. He averted his eyes. Looking up at the gray clouds, he forced his gaze back to the downed man. The man had been nearly cut in half by the flying cable.

  The four-man crew reached the site and after a brief discussion began the slow journey back to the landing with the mutilated body. Matti and another choker setter had been sent to find the end of the broken main line and Aksel could see them struggling to pull it up so it could be spliced with the end of the cable still attached to the donkey. Every foot of cable weighed two pounds.

  From behind Aksel came a shout in English. It was the head push. “Goddamnit … don’t … all day … good …”

  Aksel went back to work. Over the next several hours, he watched three men, who after struggling to pull the broken cable to overlap with the other broken end were finally joining the two ends by rolling a long splice in the cable, a terribly labor-intensive project involving marlinespikes, hammers, and lots of twisting, unraveling, and rewinding. Finally, one of them shouted and waved a hand at Kullerikki, who blasted three short toots. The donkey engineer eased hissing steam into the yarder’s pistons, engaged the friction on the main drum to link it through gears to the driving pistons, and the big drum started winding the cable back. The rigging crew, who had been put to work somewhere else, came running back. The main cable went taut. Kullerikki’s whistle piped two shorts and the smaller haul-back line went taut. The roaring, squealing, piping, tooting, moving, smashing, and shouting returned as if nothing had happened.

  The body lay next to the steam donkey where it remained until the shift ended.

  The body was then loaded onto an empty railcar. No one knew the man’s family or even exactly where he came from; some friends said Tennessee, others said Alabama. No matter, in cases like this Reder always paid for burial.

  13

  Barely a word was spoken at supper that night. Men went without something rather than asking for it aloud. They were philosophical about loggers getting killed; it happened—frequently. Still, respect needed to be shown. Aino, however, wasn’t at all philosophical about loggers getting killed; it might be her brother. Finished for the night, she found Matti and Aksel outside their bunkhouse, both smoking. The little whistle punk, Kullerikki, was sitting with them, also smoking.

  “Do you want a cigarette?” Matti asked.

  She knew that he knew she’d refuse. “It cuts your wind.”

  “It keeps us alert.” Matti said, taking a long pull. Aino knew he was showing her that she was no longer the big sister telling him what was good for him. Aksel made room for her to sit but still had said nothing.

  “How did the man die?” she asked.<
br />
  “Cable broke,” Matti said.

  “Why did the cable break?”

  “It broke because the load exceeded the breaking strength.”

  Two loggers came out of the bunkhouse door and stood there, listening.

  “Did anyone check the cable?” Aino asked.

  “Aino, back off. Huttula said the lead log on the turn hit something, it put too much strain on the line, and it broke. End of story.”

  “Somebody is responsible.”

  “What? Do you want to go fire some dumb swamper because he didn’t prepare a perfect skidway?”

  “If he didn’t do his job, yes. But who’s responsible for having to haul the logs out so fast that no one has the time, not just to prepare the skidway, but to check the equipment?”

  “You want me to say ‘John Reder,’ don’t you?”

  “Only in part. John Reder has to pull the logs out fast so he can make a profit.”

  “Because if he doesn’t, he goes out of business,” one of the previously silent loggers said.

  “If the working people owned the logging companies,” Aino answered, “there’d be time for safety inspections and no need to make a profit. We need lumber to build houses. We don’t need to kill people to make profits.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone,” Aksel said.

  “And Reder always pays for the burial,” the other logger said. “He’s under no obligation to do that.”

  Since the conversation was in Finnish and, other than cards, there wasn’t much in the way of entertainment, several more of the Finnish loggers had come outside. Aino was suddenly aware that she had people listening to her, and she had something to say. She stood up and faced the small group of loggers.

  “Which would you prefer, free burials or no burials?”