Deep River Read online

  The cabin floor now slanted even more than it had at Old Camp Two and despite Aino’s complaining about it for nearly a week, nothing was done to level it. Aino felt no one gave a damn about her having to work with a floor that made her ankles hurt by nightfall—not even Jouka. Coming home exhausted after spending fourteen hours trying not to get himself killed while negotiating steep hillsides, brush, and slash, Jouka didn’t have a lot of sympathy and resented her for somehow making it all his fault.

  One day, Aino attempted to put some tall wildflowers in a jar on the floor, where Jouka could see them when he came home. The hem of her skirt touched them and they tipped over. She screamed with frustration at the mess, leaving it there for Jouka to see when he got home.

  “He pays you nothing and we’re supposed to be grateful for this—this lopsided kennel,” Aino steamed.

  “Go stay with your brother, then,” Jouka said. “I’ll happily go back to the bunkhouse. At least there’d be someone there at night.”

  A sudden feeling of fear that he’d leave her swept tightly across Aino’s chest and settled into her stomach. She started adding up the times she’d been gone. Twice to Portland to the IWW hall; twice up to Nordland, where they met in a private home; once to Willapa. Then there was the Astoria trip, which had embarrassed him more than the others. He’d made his own breakfast but had forgotten to make his lunch, so everyone knew Aino wasn’t at home taking care of him.

  When fear struck, the only option for Aino was taking the offensive. “You’d get more drinking done,” she said tightly.

  But Jouka was a Finn, too, and a fight between a Finnish couple was like a fight between glaciers. Only the occasional sound of the cracking of ice revealed the power of the opposing forces.

  “I’d get better sex,” Jouka said.

  “Go get it then.”

  Aino reached into the unfinished wardrobe and threw Jouka’s clothes on the floor.

  “Might as well be in a pile,” Jouka said. “They’re never ironed.”

  Aino walked over to the stove, picked up the flatiron resting there, and threw it on top of the pile.

  Jouka walked over to the shelf above the stove, took the tobacco can that held all their cash, and threw it on top of the pile, daring her to pick it up. “I work fourteen-hour days for that,” he said.

  Aino picked up the half-empty bottle of whiskey and tossed it on the pile without saying a word.

  “It will keep me warmer than you do.” Jouka said.

  “Get out.”

  “I will.” Jouka picked up his clothes, with the bottle and the cash box among them, and walked out the door.

  Aino came to the door and threw a can at his receding back. “And you can grease your own boots.”

  Jouka bent down and picked it up. “You’ve greased my boots three times. Other men’s wives grease them several times a week. But you’re off with your red friends. At least, when you were midwifing, you brought in some money.”

  Aino went inside, slamming the door behind her.

  Jouka drank the rest of the bottle in the bunkhouse that night and worked the next day with a horrible hangover. That same morning, Aino pulled out the small purse that she hid beneath the shack and caught the steamer for Ilwaco at Knappton. At Ilwaco, she caught a ride to Nahcotta on the Ilwaco Railway, a narrow-gauge railroad whose timetable had to coordinate with the tides. From Nahcotta, on the east side of the peninsula, she paid for passage on the Shamrock to Willapa, where she knew Wobblies who worked in the sawmills.

  After a few days, the wives began to make clear she was welcome for a night or two of speeches, but not more.

  Four days later, on Saturday, she spent the last of her money for the boat to the Deep River landing where she talked her way onto a small steamboat carrying building supplies for Higgins’s new hotel in Tapiola. She decided to walk to Ilmahenki before heading on to Camp Three. When she arrived, Ilmari said, “You just missed Jouka.”

  “He came looking for me?”

  “No. He came to help with the milking.”

  Ilmari rarely used sarcasm. It hammered his anger home.

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “Willapa.”

  “He loves you and he’s a good earner.”

  “What? And I’m a fool?”

  “Yoh.”

  * * *

  Rauha, definitely showing the baby expected in October, fed Aino some warm, freshly made bread, which made her feel even worse. She knew Jouka would be playing at the dance in Knappton that night but couldn’t face him.

  The bunkhouse was deserted when she walked into camp, as was the henhouse. Only Alma Wittala, standing on the porch of the new mess hall, saw her coming. Alma gestured for Aino to join her. She was setting out coffee when Aino knocked on the side of the open door.

  “Sit down,” Alma said, not unkindly but with the authority of the queen of the mess hall. Aino sat down.

  “My husband says you and Jouka are fighting over who greases his boots.”

  Aino looked down at the table. Put that way, it seemed so trivial. She said, “It’s not about the boots.”

  Alma nodded sympathetically. Then she said, “Are you so unhappy?”

  Aino’s lip started to tremble. She hid it with her coffee cup.

  “Put the cup down, Aino,” Alma said. Aino put it down and was met by Alma’s warm blue eyes, almost soft violet in the lantern light. “He’s a good logger and a good man. You give him a child and he’ll stop drinking.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “He’ll be a family man. That’s more than a married man. You’ll be a mother. Neither of you will have time for selfishness about who’s on top.”

  Aino went to the bunkhouse and found Jouka’s caulk boots and clothes. She also found the cash box under the mattress. He had spent none of the money. She carried everything home, made bread, greased his boots, and put the boots by the door where he would see them.

  She waited, watching by the window, all Sunday morning. Some of the loggers had gone to Tapiola for services at Ilmari’s church and she heard them talking as they pumped the speeder back up to camp. Jouka was sitting with them. She opened the door and stood in the doorway, waiting for him to see her. When he did, he stopped talking. They looked at each other for half a minute as the speeder was pumped onto a spur. The other loggers jumped off and headed for the bunkhouses. Jouka stood there, tall and straight. Aino’s pulse was in her throat.

  Then Jouka gave her that big grin of his, shook his head as if in wonder, and came toward her. She rushed inside, hung her apron on the peg, and poured the waiting coffee into a cup. She ladled the already made pannukakku batter onto the already heated skillet and its custardy aroma filled the small cabin as Jouka walked in the door. She looked over her shoulder at him. “How was church?” she asked.

  Jouka laughed out loud. He threw his violin onto the bed and hugged her off her feet.

  For several weeks, there was an era of good feelings. Aino stayed home. Jouka knew that Rauha’s due date in early October had some influence on this, but he hoped that there was more to it, that Aino truly loved him and cared for him. When news came of a big IWW rally to be held in Nordland on October 15, he could feel her rising impatience. She expressed this as impatience for Rauha’s delivery. He knew better but said nothing.

  Then, on the first of October, a bomb was set off, killing twenty-one newspaper workers in Los Angeles, and another bomb partially destroyed the Llewellyn Iron Works in the same city. The IWW was blamed. This sent Aino into high gear. The era of good feelings was over.

  Aino traveled nearly every day to make speeches trying to prove that it wasn’t the IWW, making it clear that the IWW condemned violence. Still, some men tore up their cards, which represented weeks of her hard work. Loggers were increasingly afraid to have the cards. Owners could rifle through loggers’ belongings because the loggers were on the owners’ property. If they found a red card, the logger was fired. Aino was constantly e
xchanging new cards for cards that could barely be read, because loggers kept them in their pockets while they worked. She’d joke with the men about the owners’ at least having to stop short of groping in pockets.

  When Ilmari galloped up on his horse shouting that Rauha was in labor on October 9, Jouka sadly watched Aino’s back until she, Ilmari, and the horse disappeared in the trees. He knew that there’d be no keeping her from Nordland. Now that Rauha’s baby had come, Aino would go.

  Ilmari named the girl Helmi, for the beautiful amber of the Baltic.

  When Aino arrived in Nordland, she noticed groups of sullen men watching her from in front of the saloons. They weren’t workingmen. She felt a twinge of fear.

  At the IWW hall, workers were coming in from the mills and logging camps in the hills north and east of Nordland and up the Chehalis River. Aino got a stack of pamphlets and immediately began to recruit. She loved it. She was helping the union grow and it felt good to banter with the men, arguing with them, hearing them laugh at her witty retorts and admiring her. She’d made a wool suit with Rauha’s help and she knew it fit perfectly.

  In the late afternoon, she saw Joe Hillström coming from the train station. She couldn’t help feeling a flutter of excitement, standing a little taller, sensing his gaze. She met his shining eyes proudly. He nodded his approval, flashed her a grin, and disappeared into the hall. She unconsciously smoothed her skirt over her bottom.

  The rally started at seven in front of the saloons. All around them were recently deputized policemen, citizens who hated the IWW, and thugs hired by owners, all under the eye of Chief of Police Bill Brewer.

  Hillström was magnificent, witty, inspiring, and daring. However, when he started lampooning the government, Chief of Police Brewer had what he needed. He shouted, “Clear ’em out.” The police and hired thugs waded in.

  Aino refused to run. A deputy stood in front of her, smiled, and struck her right shoulder with an ax handle. She went down to her knees in pain, raising her arms to ward off the next blow, an agonizing crack of the ax handle against her forearm. The deputy ran off. Using only one arm, she tried to get up, but she went down again face-first in the reeking sawdust when another deputy slugged her across her back. He kicked her head. If she hadn’t been facedown in the mud, the blow could have snapped her neck. Dazed, she was barely conscious of being handcuffed with her arms behind her, jerked to her feet, and herded into a small corral next to a high-walled cattle chute behind a slaughterhouse. It reeked of blood and the watery shit of frightened animals. The last thing she remembered was two men trying to climb the high fence and being clubbed back into the pen.

  She came back to consciousness with her head in Hillström’s lap, her arm and back aching, her wrists raw from the handcuffs. She looked up into his face, which was swollen and bruised. There was dried blood beneath his nose.

  “Welcome back to the land of the free and the home of the brave,” Hillström said gently in English.

  Aino rolled back from his lap, placing herself beside him, her back against the wall of the slaughterhouse. “Could be worse,” she said. “They could have thought we were communists.”

  Hillström laughed. Then he sobered and said, “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Me, too.” She took in an unexpected quick breath, then consciously released it.

  Hillström looked at her quizzically. “Where?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Finland,” making it clear she didn’t want to talk.

  They fell asleep, leaning their heads together, slumped against the wall.

  Aino woke up shivering in a cold rain. It woke Hillström. Opening his coat, he pulled Aino in next to him. She felt his heat. It felt good.

  She touched his left knee with her right hand, a silent thank-you. He put a hand on top of hers. She did not pull her hand away.

  3

  She could hide her bruises from everybody except Jouka. When he first saw them, he went very quiet. He gently put his hand on the bruise on her arm, then withdrew it. Looking her in the eye he said, “Now, are you really done?”

  She couldn’t answer him and said nothing.

  Winter in the Deep River valley settled in, weeks of cold rain and short days. Christmas at Ilmahenki was a bright spot. Both Matti and Aksel came down from the Klawachuck. Midnight services with candles at the little church were followed by ginger cookies and glögg, sweet hot wine punch garnished with raisins and slivered almonds. Ilmari objected to having alcohol in the house, but he was overruled by everyone else. He didn’t seem to mind too much. Jouka and Ilmari played until four in the morning, Jouka getting increasingly inebriated until he collapsed asleep in the corner, his fiddle on his chest and his bow in his hand. Aino put a blanket over him and crawled into bed with Ilmari and Rauha.

  January was worse than December. It brought a wet sluggish snow that made Aino long for Suomi. It gave Ilmari more time to see Vasutäti.

  Throughout that January, Jouka would come home soaked through, his boots leaving puddles overnight from water that seeped out of the leather. In the morning, he put them on over dry socks, which turned wet within minutes. In early February, however, Jouka came home with a ray of sunshine.

  He burst open the door to the shack, the inrushing cold air making the kerosene lantern waver and Aino jerk back from the list of IWW card carriers she was updating to send to Portland.

  Sitting on the doorsill, pulling off his caulk boots, he said, “Reder’s going to buy a Shay!” He turned to look at her, excitement on his face

  “OK, what’s a Shay?” she asked, smiling. She knew full well it was a type of logging train engine but didn’t want to deprive Jouka of whatever it was about one that excited him.

  He grinned, turned around, and continued pulling off his caulks. “It’s a locomotive that uses a gear to move the power from the main shaft to the drive wheels instead of using reciprocating arms like what we have now.”

  “I assume that’s good.”

  “You bet it’s good.” He grunted and tugged his second boot off. “It can take sharper curves and go up steeper inclines. Saves lots of money building tracks.” Jouka came over to the table, leaned over her, smelling her hair and holding her shoulders. “I’m going to learn how to run it. I’ll be the engineer.” He moved to the sink, where he poured water into a bowl and splashed his face and hands.

  “Did Reder give you the job?”

  “No, no. Not yet. And I’ll probably be up against the donkey punchers, because they already know steam. But no one knows how to run a Shay or even more important how to fix one.”

  “Why not give the job to Dale Swanson?”

  “You heard he had that blackout last month.”

  “Yoh.”

  “He’s getting old. Reder thinks it’s his heart. Reder will sell Old Number Two and put Swanson in the machine shop.”

  “Just like that. One blackout.”

  “He’s not going to risk a new Shay on an old man.” He poured coffee and sat down. His clothes were starting to steam and were still covered with dirt and duff.

  “You need to change clothes.”

  “No. You don’t understand. An engineer can get double what I’m making now. He works out of the rain. It’s like an indoor job!”

  “You need to change your clothes.” She looked up at him as she was unbuttoning his shirt. “How are you going to learn how to run the Shay? Give me your shirt.”

  Jouka slipped his suspenders down and unbuttoned his wool shirt as he talked. “I’m going to order books about it.”

  “Jouka,” she said. “You can’t read. What foolishness is getting into you?”

  He stood up and now hopping on one foot tugged off his trousers. “Aksel told me once … when we were both in the bunkhouse … the technical manuals have pictures and diagrams. You don’t need to know how to read.”

  “Aksel’s a dreamer and you know it.”

  “But, Aino, I saw the technical drawings for Old Number Two. Swanson let me look at t
hem and …” He walked over to the stove and handed her his trousers, which she hung next to his shirt. There was no use washing them, she thought. They’d only be dirty again the next day. Jouka was still talking. “I understood them! Just looking at the drawings. Aino, I understood.”

  She’d never seen him as animated and she was happy for him, but she feared that his bubble would be burst by harsh reality. She couldn’t imagine learning anything from a book without being able to read words. All the donkey punchers were Finns from Finland, which Jouka wasn’t. They could all read.

  “Your long johns are wet, too,” Aino said.

  Jouka turned his back and pulled his arms from the top of the long johns and then pulled the rest from his feet. He handed the long johns to Aino and stood there naked, looking at her.

  She had to smile at him. “Get dressed, for heaven’s sake.”

  He got his other pair of long johns out of the bureau and put them on as she fired up the stove.

  “Aino,” he said. “I can make headway. I know I can.”

  A month later the diagrams for the Shay arrived along with two books on steam engines. Jouka cleared the table after dinner every night and pored over the diagrams, occasionally asking Aino to read something. He sometimes crawled into bed after midnight, getting only four hours of sleep before heading back to work at 4:30. He constantly sketched machine pictures from memory, looked at diagrams, and then corrected the sketches. He still played at the Saturday dances, but he was home right afterward, needing to sleep so he could get up with the light on Sunday and keep at the books. He’d stopped drinking.

  One Sunday evening Aino returned after dark to find Jouka at the table with the kerosene lamp. He looked up at her when she came in the door. Something had changed in his face these past couple of months. There was a maturity she hadn’t seen before—or maybe it had just arrived. She hadn’t even got her coat off when he said, “There’s going to be a test.”