Deep River Page 20

  He did come, as did the other loggers. Aino, speaking in Finn with Jouka translating into English, tried to make them see that if they didn’t protest a simple matter like poor living conditions with one voice, they’d stay forever in wage slavery.

  “We’re not slaves,” someone said.

  “You’re right,” she answered. “You’re not slaves. You’re well-fed, trapped animals who are kept ignorant that there’s a better way.”

  There were murmurs of disapproval at being called animals.

  She backed off, conceding with a hand gesture that she might have gotten a bit hyperbolic.

  “Look at it this way,” she said, almost pleading with them. “Every dollar Reder got that he didn’t work for, some logger worked for a dollar that he didn’t get.”

  Again, she saw heads nodding. Still, the meeting broke up with no action.

  A week later, Aino’s frustration with the loggers’ reluctance to act came to a head one night when she was sitting on the big porch. Her face lit by lanterns from inside, she rounded on her brother and his two friends. “You call yourselves men. Men are dying in Finland to get their rights.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Matti replied.

  Aksel surprised them all by coming suddenly to his feet. “I’m sick of political parties, unions, business, and government. They all kill people.” He walked away, leaving the three others watching him disappear into the night.

  “He’s not afraid to speak his mind,” Matti murmured.

  “He’s a class traitor,” Aino said.

  Feeling he had to get away by himself, Aksel walked to the Knappton docks on Sunday. The great river sloshed beneath the splintered planks at full flood. Seagulls, floating momentarily above the water, dived for bits of fish and garbage, flapping skyward to land on pilings or wharves where they immediately fought with other seagulls trying to take the food away. With the food gone, the big western gulls, dark gray on their backs and brilliant white beneath their four-foot wingspans, flapped back into the air struggling to reach cruising altitude. There they went into their graceful glide, moving twenty to thirty miles an hour above the water, eyes searching. The big runs were done for the winter. Nets were draped across net racks, and fishermen stood weaving new mesh with flat wooden net-splicing needles, talking, shouting good-natured insults to each other or merely lost in the ever present, working the needle, making new mesh squares.

  Aksel quietly watched an older man smoking a pipe as he worked. Neither said anything. Aksel picked up a splicing needle, full with twine, walked over to a large tear in the man’s net, and started to mend it. The man watched from the corner of his eye, occasionally taking the pipe in his hand to puff it back into active burning.

  “Feels good,” Aksel said in Swedish, laughing a little. “I used to hate it, my hands freezing, working with my father and my brother, before the ice broke.”

  “And now they’re in the old country and you’re here,” the man said, also in Swedish.

  Aksel nodded. He looked at the leaden sky, feeling the cold on his hands as he worked the damp net. “Yes,” he said, looking all the way to Finland. His father would be mending net alone.

  The man took out a tobacco pouch and refilled his pipe, then turned to Aksel. “Alvar Carlson,” he said. “Everyone calls me Cap.” He sat down on a large cable drum and nodded toward another nearby. Aksel lit a cigarette and started asking Cap questions. Where do the salmon wait in slack water? Which side of the channel do they favor? If the wind changes, then what? What do they fetch a pound? And finally, how much does one of these boats cost? At the answer, Aksel sighed. It would take years with what he made in the woods.

  “You can work for one of the canneries,” Cap said, fiddling with the pipe bowl, not looking at Aksel. “They own the boats and pay you by the pound.”

  “Never,” Aksel said.

  Cap studied him. “Never? You work in the woods; you get a dollar a day no matter how much timber you send to the mill. If you’re good, become a top boat, the more you catch the more you make.”

  “I want my own boat.”

  “Fair enough.” Cap tapped out the ashes, still glowing, on a wide crack between planks and they floated in the gathering darkness to the darker water.

  * * *

  When Aksel reached the bunkhouse, several of the loggers were reading IWW pamphlets; others were arguing about what was in them. Matti handed him one.

  “Where did this come from?” Aksel asked.

  “You need to ask?” Matti answered. “Aino brought a bunch back from Astoria and then sent away for more from Portland.”

  “She shouldn’t be fooling around with them. They use dynamite.”

  “So do loggers.”

  “Yoh, for logging.”

  Aksel flopped down on his bunk. He picked up a handful of dank straw and held it out to Matti. Then he smiled, dropped it on the floor, and rolled over to face the wall. He had fishing boats on his mind.

  Aino was thinking about crybabies—and haircuts.

  Monday, after work, she set up a chair and lantern on the dining hall porch and cut Matti’s hair. As loggers walked by, she told them she’d cut theirs for a nickel. That night, she did three more haircuts, all the while getting the loggers to talk about how they felt about the bunkhouse conditions. The problem wasn’t the loggers’ not caring that they lived in damp straw, slept two to a bunk on nights too cold for them to sleep alone, lived with lice, and couldn’t get Reder to even let one logger off work a half hour early. They cared plenty. They just wouldn’t show it.

  On Tuesday night, she did six haircuts. On Wednesday, she did eight. With each new haircut, Aino casually mentioned the feelings of the previous loggers and their names. When one would voice an opinion about the bad conditions, she asked him if he’d ever talked to Huttula about it.

  The loggers soon figured out what she was doing, but it didn’t matter to them. They’d have walked to Knappton and back just to feel her hands on their heads. Nor did it matter to Aino. Her model was the Salvation Army. It, too, knew that unemployed men were there for the food, not the good of their souls.

  Aino would stagger back to the henhouse when she closed shop. Some nights, she felt she was trying to change the course of an ocean liner by pushing on its bow. She knew she was trying to overturn centuries of conditioning, knowing one’s place in the social order, learning not to complain, learning to endure, learning to keep one’s mouth shut.

  By midweek, loggers started talking to Huttula, who now had evidence that the men really did want change. He went to Reder on Friday after work asking for fresh straw every week and warm bunkhouses when work was done. Reder refused.

  Then, nature waded in on Aino’s side. The November rains, the first of the long rainy season, hit on Sunday afternoon, November 11. The rain slashed through the cracks in the crude board-and-batten bunkhouses, forcing some loggers to move from their bunks to the floor. Rain still fell on them through leaks in the shake roof and loggers went to work tired—and grumpy. The rain often hit them horizontally as they worked. High above, limbs creaked and groaned as the trees, many now exposed on one side because of the previous logging, whipped back and forth. Some limbs, the size of small trees, broke and came crashing to the ground. Loggers worked with one eye on the dangerous cables or the unsteady logs and the other looking upward, ears tuned for the telltale crack from above that set eyes searching for the danger and minds racing to decide whether to run or stand still.

  The storm passed but not the rain. It settled in under low, oppressive clouds, soaking the ground. It created mud, which in turn created more danger. Logs would slide when they shouldn’t and wouldn’t move when they should. Hands slipped on wet steel cable. Springboards, eight or ten feet above the ground, became slippery. Hat brims drooped with the weight of water, and wool long johns, shirts, and trousers tripled in weight. At night, men wrung out their clothes, but many could not find room to hang them on the inside clotheslines, so clothes remained in
piles, wet. They went on wet in the morning. The caulk boots soaked up water, becoming heavy and squishy to the touch. Putting on wet socks and boots in the dark slowed dressing considerably, so the usual hurried breakfasts became sprints to fuel up and get to work on time. Anger at Reder’s intransigence rose.

  Huttula went to Reder again on Thursday, November 15. Reder told him he didn’t want to hear about it and walked away. Now, Huttula was mad.

  Sensing her moment, Aino called for a meeting Sunday afternoon.

  Aino stood nervously by one of the railcars, going over her points, fearing no one would come. She pulled her coat closer around her, feeling the rain, light but steady where it touched the parts of her face and head not covered by her head scarf. She’d chosen the time and place carefully. Sunday, Reder was always in Knappton. After Saturday night, most of the loggers were broke, and this made them more amenable to talk about fairness and wages.

  Without her glasses, Aino thought she saw Matti and Jouka coming from the bunkhouse, along with maybe ten other loggers. When they joined her, she asked, “No Aksel?”

  They both shrugged their shoulders. “He says he hates unions and politics and this One Big Union is both,” Matti said.

  “He’s like all the other Swedes. They just do what master says as long as master throws crumbs under the table for them.”

  Matti laughed. “Hillström’s a Swede.”

  Aino shot him a dark look. Then she noticed that Jouka wasn’t smiling. Could he be jealous?

  “Hi, Jouka,” she said. “You coming means a lot to me.”

  Jouka mumbled, didn’t know where to look, so he looked at her shoes. She thought if she ever found an outgoing Finnish man maybe he’d look at her knees.

  Lighting cigarettes, the loggers squatted on their heels or leaned against the railcar. Iverson and three others climbed onto the loading boom and sat easily on it.

  She was acutely aware she was the only woman.

  Another figure approached from the bunkhouses. As he came into focus, she could see it was Toivo Huttula—a good sign. Toivo squatted down next to Matti and pulled out his pipe.

  As she’d expected, most of the loggers who showed up were Finns, but she was pleased to see a fair turnout of other nationalities. She still wasn’t confident about her English. She turned to Jouka. “Will you translate?” He nodded.

  Taking a deep breath, she reached behind her on the flatcar and held up some dank hay. “Cows sleep on better hay.” She waited a beat. “Are you men or cows?” She had carefully constructed the opening. These loggers were fiercely proud of their skill and their manhood.

  Some of the loggers laughed. One shouted back in Finnish, “At least we don’t belong to some herd like your communist friends.”

  “Wolves form a pack, not a herd,” she shot back to murmurs of approval. “Cows don’t even know they’re in a herd. They just eat grass until the master’s dog herds them to the milking barn.” Saatana, what she would give for Voitto’s speaking gift right now. “Every one of you is going to stay a cow in your wet hay, stepping on your own cow pies, unless you organize.” As plain Finn as she could make it. Silence reigned, even after Jouka’s translation for the non-Finns. Now she had to get them to understand.

  “Toivo,” she said. “What did Reder say when you asked him for fresh straw and a part-time bull cook to get the bunkhouses warm?”

  “He said no.” Laughter, followed by more laughter when Jouka translated.

  “He would never say no if it meant shutting down his operation,” Aino said.

  “You’re dreaming,” Iverson said after hearing the translation from his perch on the boom.

  “I’m not dreaming. You are,” Aino said, in English. She reverted to Finnish and addressed the others. “Do you ever wonder why someone too cheap to pay for dry straw and a part-time bull cook pays for so much good food?”

  Silence. Then, when Jouka had finished, Iverson said, “Because we’d log for someone else.”

  “And he’d end up with nobody except damned shoe clerks who don’t know anything about logging,” she added. “Right now, he’s got the best crew in the state.” The loggers nodded in approval. “And you don’t leave, because all the other outfits have the same bad living conditions and pay. And Reder and the other owners get together to keep it that way. Why do you think he goes to Nordland every few months?”

  After Jouka translated, someone shouted, “I bet Margaret would like to know the answer to that one,” to more general laughter.

  “He’s there doing what you won’t do. He’s part of a pack of owners. And because they work together, one big owner wolf pack,” she enunciated, “they keep the lid on wages and conditions. The only way to counter them is with One Big Union.” She looked around at them, engaging their eyes. “This isn’t just about straw and you know it. It’s about organizing. Safety and wages come next.”

  The loggers were quiet.

  She’d been waiting for this moment. “Straw and a part-time bull cook will barely dent John Reder’s profits. He’ll feel no pain giving us this. What we get, however, is far greater than hay. We’ll have proved that we speak with one voice and we’re no longer afraid to do so. Organize on straw now, so we can make hay later.”

  She’d worked that last line up the night before and had expected some laughs. No one said anything. Was it because she’d lost them or because she had them? Her heart raced. Now, she had to ask for action. “We must strike now,” she said in Finnish. “We striking now,” she added in English.

  And they did—all of them. After hours of debate in the bunkhouses, the next morning the loggers covered the railroad tracks with the straw from their bunks. The engineers and brakemen left the locomotive on the track, boiler fires dying.

  John Reder had walked to Reder’s Camp in the dark, as he usually did on Monday morning. When he saw the straw on the track and the locomotive stopped, he simply turned around. Although forewarned by Huttula, he was still surprised. He walked back in grim determination to Knappton, where he took his .44-caliber lever-action Winchester from the coat closet.

  Margaret watched him loading the rifle. “Do you really think that’ll be necessary?”

  He slid down the spring-loading mechanism, locking it in the tubular magazine, and put some extra cartridges into his pocket. “There’s IWW pamphlets all over camp. Those sons of bitches use dynamite.”

  Margaret humphed. “Maybe, but not our loggers.” She went into the kitchen, calling over her shoulder: “You’re not going back up there without lunch.”

  He followed her into the kitchen and put his hands over her womb, nuzzling against her neck as she was making a sandwich. The more her belly grew, the more protective he grew. She smiled, then twisted a little, getting him to drop his hands.

  “Where’s this literature coming from?” she asked, focusing on her work.

  “Your friend, Aino Koski.”

  “Oh, John Reder, she’s an idealistic child, a girl. She’ll get over it by the time she’s married.”

  “She’s no child and she’s as red as a fire bucket.”

  When Reder returned to the strike scene around noon, it looked like a company picnic without food. He could see the small staff of flunkies, including Aino, standing idly on the porch of the mess hall. He climbed onto a log on the train, careful to show that the rifle’s chamber was open. He waited until everyone had gathered and was quiet.

  “Unless you’re all at work in one hour, I’ll fire every one of you.”

  Toivo walked from the crowd, picking up some straw. “We asking you to being treated with some respect.” He tossed the straw into the air and it fell to the ground in a clump. “We wanting clean straw and a part-time bull cook. We not asking for more.”

  “Toivo Huttula, have I treated you badly? Ever? Do I not give you boys the best food in southwest Washington?”

  Jouka shouted out: “Sure, but you quarter us like animals.”

  “You go to hell. You’re fired.”
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br />   Jouka laughed. He turned to the other loggers, speaking Finnish. “I’ve just been fired. I guess I won’t do any work today.” The loggers laughed. Several reached for clumps of straw and threw them up in the air. Then one of them threw a clump at Reder. Straw isn’t exactly a missile, but when the air became filled with it, all directed at Reder, it delivered the message.

  “You’re all fired,” he shouted. “Be out of the bunkhouses tonight or I’m calling the sheriff. Those bunkhouses are private property.”

  “So are pigsties,” someone shouted.

  That elicited more laughter and more straw.

  Reder stalked away. He clambered up the steps to the mess hall, brushing past the flunkies and glaring at Aino. He told the cook not to serve any food and returned to Knappton.

  Despite Reder’s orders, the loggers ate supper in the dining hall. The cook had pointed out that it was Reder’s food and Reder didn’t want to share it. Huttula had pointed out that since the loggers all paid for their food out of their wages, if their wages were zero, the payment for food should be zero. The cook called in the flunkies and dinner was served on time. He also informed Huttula that there was enough food to last about a week.

  Aino took full advantage of the strike to talk to the loggers about the IWW, why it was different from the craft unions, why it was a better way forward than the American Federation of Labor. She signed up fifteen new members by the second day of the strike. On the morning of the third day, however, the atmosphere in the dining hall was more subdued. Aino felt uneasy. They’d seen nothing of Reder or of Sheriff Cobb. Reder had disappeared from Knappton and no one knew where he went. He was clearly playing a waiting game. The loggers knew the stakes: Reder’s profits against their empty stomachs.

  On the fourth day, Thursday, all the fresh meat was gone and the staples—beans, flour, dried peas—were running low. Aino talked Matti into walking to Ilmahenki where they pleaded with Ilmari to kill a beef.

  “The strike committee will sign a note,” Aino said. “You’ll be paid back. I promise.”