Deep River Page 29

  It was Aksel, wearing a new pair of shoes and new wool trousers.

  “Fancy new clothes,” Jouka said to him in Finnish, grinning. “Matti must be paying you well.”

  Aksel nodded shyly to Aino, saying hello, and then turned to Jouka. “We just finished the Saaranpa site.” He smiled. “We’re in the money,” he said in English.

  “I’ve heard he’s using a high lead with that Chinese yarder of his.” Jouka turned to Aino. “It’s no secret. Someday Reder will find out.”

  “That’s Matti’s business.”

  “And business is good.” He drained his beer. “Hey Aksel, I’ll buy you a beer, then you can buy me two.”

  Aksel looked at Aino uncomfortably. They all knew it would be unseemly for her to go inside. “Come and have coffee with me,” Aksel said to Aino. “It’s too early to drink.”

  Jouka’s body tensed and it seemed to Aino as if he got bigger. She didn’t like where this was headed. Not only had Aksel invited her to coffee without Jouka, triggering his jealousy, but he had criticized Jouka’s drinking to boot.

  “You can drink with the men or have coffee with the women,” Jouka said.

  Now Aksel went stiff.

  She looked from Jouka, who’d thrown his shoulders back slightly, to Aksel, his brilliant blue eyes now half-hidden behind lowered lids.

  Aino felt a rising panic. The locomotive was on a downhill run with no brakes. Jouka had called Aksel out in front of her. In a culture that had no other means of showing you weren’t a slave except your manhood, Jouka’s insult required a response.

  “Right here. Right now,” Aksel said in Swedish, pointing a finger at the ground. Jouka coolly drank the rest of the beer and set the schooner on the boardwalk. He stepped into the muddy street. She wanted them to stop but knew if she intervened, they’d never forgive her.

  At this moment, a logger came out of the saloon. Turning his head back toward the dark interior he gave a sharp whistle through his teeth and shouted, “Finns against Swedes! Right outside!”

  Aksel and Jouka had moved to the center of the street, watching each other warily, both slightly crouched. Each had his puukko sheathed behind his back.

  Men crowded through the door, Swedes moving to Aksel’s side and Finns to Jouka’s. Then Jouka pulled his puukko out and there was a gasp of surprise mixed with a murmur of approval for blood sport. Aino covered her mouth in horror.

  But Jouka had taken it out only to toss it to the side of the street, which he did, looking steadily at Aksel. Aksel drew his own puukko and tossed it next to Jouka’s. The crowd murmured a mixture of admiration and disappointment.

  They began circling each other, looking for the first opening. The crowd shouted encouragement. A couple of bets were made.

  Aino couldn’t stand it any longer. She rushed in between the two, startling them.

  “Get out of here, Aino,” Jouka growled at her.

  She turned to Jouka and put her hands on his chest, but at the same time she turned her head back toward Aksel, engaging him even though she also spoke to Jouka. “You’re friends. You’ll hurt each other.” She turned to Jouka. “You’ve been drinking. I don’t want you fighting over something so stupid.”

  “We’re fighting over you,” Aksel said.

  She stepped back from Jouka and took her hands off his chest. “Don’t fight.”

  Jouka nodded and stood straight; his arms came down. Aino turned to Aksel and walked toward him. The entire street was quiet, so every word could be heard. She held Aksel’s upper arms with each hand. “You’re a fine young man, Aksel Långström. Someday you’ll find a woman worthy of you. It’s not me. Jouka and I are going to be married.”

  Jouka looked dumbfounded. The crowd gasped, then broke into shouts and cheers.

  “Jouka gets the red!”

  “Hey Jouka, did you propose or did she?”

  “You’re in for it now, Jouka.”

  Aino went to up to Jouka, stood on her toes, and looking him in the eye said, “My answer is yes.” She turned to the crowd, most of whom she knew. “The fool has asked twice before. You all know I don’t give in easy.”

  The crowd laughed and then roared approval. Someone shouted, “I’ll drink to that!” And the loggers headed back inside, laughing and jostling each other, shouting that Jouka was buying, although no one believed anyone had enough money to do something like that.

  Aksel, forgotten in the drama, stood there, hands at his sides. Jouka put his left arm around Aino’s shoulder and held out his right hand to Aksel.

  Aksel’s face was stone cold. He walked over to Jouka and shook his hand. He raised his own hands up, as if to take Aino’s head and pull her toward him to kiss her, but he stopped, putting them back at his sides. Addressing them both, he said, “I hope you’re happy.” He wasn’t sarcastic and it wasn’t taken that way.

  Aksel turned his back on them, picked up his father’s puukko, and walked down the street and out of town.

  32

  In September 1909, having seen what Matti and Aksel had done with Ilmari’s timber and the Saaranpa purchase, Higgins gave 200-Foot Logging a contract to log some timber he had purchased ten years earlier from a man who’d bought a large tract from the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad had been given its thousands of square miles of timber free by the U.S. government as an incentive to lay tracks. The man had logged the easy stuff and sold the rest to Higgins cheap.

  There was a reason it was cheap. The tract was way up the Klawachuck River, the next large river north of Deep River. Klawachuck meant “slow river” in Chinookan. The Indians had named it with their tongues firmly in their cheeks. The timber was on impossibly steep terrain. Impossible to most people but not Matti Koski.

  Matti and Aksel winched the cobbled-up steam donkey up the Klawachuck with new cable, no longer restricted to moving in two-hundred-foot increments. By late September, the donkey was in position. First, they built a small sauna next to a creek. They slept in it while they built a crude log cabin, cooking their meals on a fire outside because the sauna had no chimney. They got their water upstream from the cabin and shit downstream.

  Matti convinced Higgins to provide payroll. To find loggers, he posted notes in general stores and churches. He sneaked into bunkhouses, feeling like a subversive like Aino. He, however, could offer no good food and no good quarters. No one was willing to wait, like Aksel, until profits came in. He changed to saloons and whorehouses. There he found experienced loggers: experienced alcoholic loggers, experienced sex-addicted loggers, experienced half-crippled loggers, experienced loggers who’d gotten blacklisted. There was no shortage of experienced loggers. Some left after the first payday. One left before, stealing an ax as his pay.

  The brightest moment in the hiring process came when a twelve-year-old boy tugged on Matti’s shirt in a saloon in Willapa. It was Kullerikki. He’d managed to shed the diminutive, but he was still known by his nickname, Kullervo, instead of his given name, Heikki. He begged Matti for a job. Still not big enough to log, he’d been working for food and a place to sleep under the bar during the morning daylight hours. Matti said he would feed him and put a roof over his head in exchange for chores.

  Aksel and Matti worked so hard it made their days with Reder Logging look like indoor work. On some days, they could fell and buck three or four trees. Other days, they didn’t get one down. They sometimes just left larger trees that took too long to fell and were too expensive to move.

  Sometimes they would have two additional loggers, sometimes four. Some days there was no one except Kullervo. It was always Matti and Aksel working as a team. They would start by chopping out an undercut, the two of them standing on their springboards six or eight feet above the ground, swinging alternately with their axes, and then trading sides to swing with their opposite arms. Their shoulders and arms grew strong and thick. So did their calluses. After getting the undercut sufficiently deep, they would move to the other side of the tree and saw through to the undercut,
each pulling one end of a twelve-foot-long crosscut saw, cursing it when it bound, freeing it by driving wedges into the cut, greasing it with oil, and wiping their sweat from its handles. Then came the thrill.

  The saw would start to tremble. Pulling the saw clear, jumping to the ground from their springboards, they walked coolly—running could kill them—to one of several preplanned safe spots. There they watched the tree go down, hearing the wood creak, then crack, then sigh, the tree gaining momentum, falling faster and faster, the air rushing through the branches, the wood at the hinge where the saw cut had almost reached the undercut cracking and squealing with the force of hundreds of tons of wood that for several hundred years had fought against gravity and was now hurling toward the ground from where it came. The ground would shake beneath their feet and the air would vibrate as the giant met its death. Then, they would set to work with their sturdier eight-foot-long single-handled bucking saws. The huge logs would loom above them, like rounded cliff faces. If they chose the wrong place to cut, the log could roll and crush them.

  Some of the giants produced forty-foot logs so heavy they would defeat the old steam donkey. When that happened, they would laboriously auger holes into the log, forming a line down its length. They would then tamp pieces of dynamite into the holes and set them off simultaneously with electric blasting caps. The straight-grained old-growth logs split beautifully, halving the load on the donkey.

  They both carried dynamite in their back pockets and kept blasting caps close by. If it was too hard to get a choker cable around a log, they would blast a hole underneath it and bring the choker through the hole. They could also be crushed doing this. If they misjudged placing the blasting caps they could lose a hand. Misjudging the powder charge could kill them.

  Once the choker was hooked to the main line, Matti would handle the steam donkey, watching Aksel’s hand signals. If Matti jerked the cable too hard or loaded it beyond tolerance, the cable would snap. Several tons of steel rope would whip through the air. Another way a logger could die.

  Using block and tackle, sniping the forward edges of the logs so they would skid along the ground easier, sometimes cutting small trees to make corduroy roads across difficult spots, constantly repositioning the steam donkey and resetting the blocks to get different angles, they moved the logs to the Klawachuck. There, just before rolling the logs into the water Kullervo would mark the ends with the 200-Foot Logging flottningsmärke, the Roman numeral for two hundred, CC, hammered into the wood using a steel stamp like a cold branding iron.

  33

  On December 10, Matti and Aksel hiked out to the bay and caught a boat for Willapa. They had been invited to Aino and Jouka’s wedding the next day at the office of the justice of the peace. It surprised no one that Aino had refused a church wedding.

  Jouka’s mother and two of his sisters were there. His brothers were logging and couldn’t get the time off. Ilmari, Rauha, Matti, and Lempi stood as witnesses.

  After the ceremony, as the Shamrock steamed south for the mouth of Deep River, Jouka stood at Aino’s side. He hugged her in close to him, protecting her from the wind-driven drizzle. She would occasionally look up at him and smile, as was expected, but as she watched the shoreline pass by, all she could see were stumps and abandoned and rotting oysterman shacks dwarfed by piles of oyster shells twelve to fourteen feet high. They disembarked in the dark, even though it wasn’t yet five, and the wedding party walked the eight miles back to Ilmahenki in the rain.

  Waiting for them were Jouka’s band; Reder loggers; neighbors, most of whom were members of Ilmari’s church; the girls from the henhouse; and even Ullakko and his children. Rauha and Lempi had prepared coffee the previous day, as well as sandwiches, cookies, and loaves of pulla or nisu, the traditional sweet cardamom bread. The henhouse girls gave Aino a real silk scarf. Lempi added the personal gift of a rolling pin, joking that it wasn’t just a kitchen tool but could be used occasionally to knock some sense into Jouka. Then Lempi grew serious. “Oma lupa oma tupa,” she said, meaning, loosely, “My kitchen, my castle.” It really meant no one messed with a Finnish woman in her own kitchen, including her husband. “Now, I give you a tool of a mature woman and wife,” Lempi said. Then she grinned. “Girlhood is over.”

  Jouka’s band members had all chipped in on a bottle of rye whiskey, from which each took a swig before they started to play.

  About an hour into the gathering, Aksel somewhat awkwardly presented Aino with a set of large spoons and ladles he’d carved.

  At the end of a break, when the band started to reassemble, Aino saw Aksel speak to the accordion player. The man nodded. He did a quick flourish to get everyone’s attention. “We have a request for a waltz,” he announced. Before Aino had time to even think about it, Aksel was in front of her. “May I have a dance with the bride?” he asked politely. She turned to Jouka, who smiled broadly. She was glad to see that he was genuinely happy Aksel had come. She was also glad that the bottle of rye whiskey had been stoppered and Jouka wasn’t drinking. Ilmari would have thrown them both out. She turned to Aksel and offered her hand. “Of course,” she laughed. “But it won’t be the Grizzly Bear. Not at Ilmahenki.”

  It was “Lördagsvalsen.” Aksel guided her to the center of the living room floor. Rauha had sanded the planks and removed the braided rag rugs. Off they went on the magic circle path.

  They danced in silence for a moment. “Do you remember?” Aksel asked. “Midsummer night?”

  “We were children. You’re so sentimental,” she said, kidding him.

  “Yes.” He blinked several times. “I am sentimental. Our first dance.”

  “A fight with the Russians.”

  She smiled, trying to keep things light, but was touched by sadness. They had danced this waltz together before they lost Gunnar and Voitto.

  Aino wished the reception could go on all night but for the wrong reason.

  * * *

  They arrived at the hotel in Knappton just after midnight, Jouka only slightly tipsy from finishing the last of the rye on the way. Neither Aino nor Jouka had ever stayed in a hotel before. The bed had enough room around it to get in on either side and was covered with crisp, dip-starched sheets and solid wool blankets under a light brown bedcover with eyelets and lace trim.

  Aino’s brief feeling of enchantment turned to dread at the sound of the door closing behind her. The memory of the closing cell door started her trembling.

  Jouka, thinking it was bridal jitters, took her gently in his arms. She stayed there, trying to calm her breathing as he kissed her. Then, he began fiddling with the buttons on the dress she had made with Rauha’s help and Rauha’s sewing machine, a gift from Louhi.

  “No. No, Jouka. Let me.” She gently pushed him back and went to her valise of green canvas covered with red roses. She pulled out the cotton nightgown she’d ordered from Sears Roebuck, again with Rauha’s help, just for the occasion. She held it up to him and peeped at him over its top. She nodded toward the door and he smiled. She went down the hall to the privy. She sat on the narrow bit of wood between the bench’s edge and the hole that opened to the river below. She was trembling fiercely, trying to focus on Jouka, who she knew was a good man, but she could not.

  She remembered her sisu. Straightening her shoulders, fighting down the urge to cry, she stepped out of her dress. She loosened her corset strings, unhooked the corset busk, and stepped out of her petticoat. She left on her new open-crotch cambric drawers, edged with nearly an inch of lace. She still hadn’t succumbed to the odd custom of American girls who wore closed undergarments. She and Lempi had often joked about the trouble they went through to pee. She slipped the nightgown over her head. Then from her toiletry bag she took one of several balls she’d made of carefully dried and powdered cow dung, honey, and sodium carbonate. Feeling the cool river air against her bottom, she inserted the pessary into her vagina, pushing it as close to her cervix as she could. Her body heat would cause the mixture to melt and run, coating her vag
inal walls as well as forming a barrier to the cervix itself. She wondered briefly if she should swallow the Queen Anne’s lace seeds, also in her toilet bag, but worried that they might make her nauseated. Taking the poisonous seeds afterward might be more effective.

  She’d thought about asking Jouka if he had a condom, but he’d wonder why. They were married. Didn’t she want children? She returned to their room, worried that when it was over he would notice that there was no blood. She crawled between the damp sheets, fighting dread.

  When he drew her in close to him, she tensed. He pulled back. She forced out a smile and loving words. This was Jouka’s marriage bed, too, and none of it was his fault.

  As soon as Jouka finished, he wanted to do it again. She excused herself, shyly saying there was a little blood to take care of, thanking the darkness for covering her lie. She inserted another pessary and returned. When the third pessary disappeared, she began to worry. She’d never imagined someone wanting to do it four times in a row. She realized that she’d never imagined Voitto doing it at all. As Jouka came for the fourth time, exhausted and sleepy she just stared at the ceiling. He saw this. His face flickered. Embarrassed, maybe even a little humiliated, Jouka rolled off on his side facing away from her. They remained like that for over half an hour, until Aino carefully touched him on his shoulder as if to apologize. She spooned next to him tucking her knees behind his knees and they fell asleep just as the gray of morning began to lighten the room.

  The newlyweds awoke to the sound of people in the hall. Aino carried her clothes to the common washroom to dress. She washed her face and put her hair up before slipping on her chemise and corset. Tugging at the strings behind her back, she caught her image in the mirror. There she was, as usual—glasses, thick black hair up in a chignon, the plain cotton corset supporting her breasts—but she felt that something had forever changed. As a girl, she had dreamed of her wedding night, of her new husband gently undressing her, of giving herself to him wholly and finally becoming a woman. She pulled the loops tight and tied them. She pressed the cool cotton of the chemise against her vulva. Then she straightened herself. It hadn’t worked out as she had dreamed. What she’d wanted to give, and what Jouka thought she’d given him, had long ago been taken from her.