Deep River Page 35

  Kyllikki stood up abruptly. “No. Neither do I,” she said. “He’s no killer. It was three to one and they had baseball bats.”

  Her father now stood up saying, “He could’ve run.”

  Matti turned around. There was cold fury in his eyes. Oh, God, his sisu was up and so was her father’s. She glanced at her mother with a pleading look.

  Hilda Saari placed herself between Matti and her husband. “Don’t either of you move or say a word.” Then, to Kyllikki’s horror, her mother left the room.

  All three stood, silent. She felt her heart hammering.

  Then her mother returned. She held a puukko that Kyllikki had never seen before out in front of her and walked slowly over to her father. Whatever she was saying to him, she was saying it without words. They were just looking at each other.

  “You’ve kept that?” he asked. “All these years?”

  She nodded slowly.

  She watched some struggle play itself out on her father’s face. Then it softened. “Go put it away,” he said quietly. Her mother looked at him with love, nodded, and left the room. He was still struggling with something when she returned.

  “Why don’t we all sit down,” Hilda said.

  “No,” her father said. He straightened and addressed Matti. “I’m glad you didn’t run. I wouldn’t have either.” He paused. “Didn’t.”

  Kyllikki looked at him. She knew this was all he was ever going to say about whatever it was.

  Then he smiled and reached out his hand to Matti. “But that puukko of yours cost me one hundred dollars to pay the hospital bill, another fifty dollars each, and one hundred dollars for the man you nearly killed.”

  Matti shook his hand. “I shouldn’t have sat outside your house eating that picnic,” he said. “It was childish.”

  Something passed between them. Kyllikki didn’t know what exactly, but it was something like a secret handshake. Matti; seeing that knife; her father saying, “Didn’t.” It was all done without explicit words, but suddenly it was as if they were on the same team.

  Both men sat down. It was over. They started talking about lumber prices and the growth prospects of Astoria and the lower Columbia region. She looked down at the promise of the new child. She had to laugh at herself. She had a long way to go before she could ride like her mother.

  Reder Logging shut down at Christmas because of snow and mud and Jouka visited Aino in the Nordland jail on Boxing Day. He brought an orange and some pulla that Lempi had baked for her. He was subdued. He said he’d had Christmas dinner at Ilmahenki, but Matti and Kyllikki had gone to Astoria for Christmas with the Saaris. After struggling for an hour to make conversation, he left.

  Aino spent twelve more days in jail, each day a battle against memories. She held on, sustained by the righteousness of her cause and the support of so many comrades in jail with her.

  Ashamed of the way the city was handling the situation, many citizens started to pressure the city council to back off. Drummond rallied business owners who were seeing sharp decreases in sales. They put additional pressure on the council. When the city treasurer pointed out the costs of jailing so many people, the councilors crumbled. On January 7, 1912, they repealed the ordinance banning speech and assembly and even paid some money to the IWW for shutting down its hall.

  It was a complete triumph.

  Aino, however, returned to a family that was embarrassed and an unhappy husband. Jouka, who had always supported the cause, didn’t make a scene. He just said, “Why can’t you be a normal wife?” and then came back long after dark on Sunday, smelling of whiskey.

  Aino vowed to focus on the marriage.

  7

  Focusing on the marriage did not mean giving up reading the Industrial Worker, the IWW’s newspaper. In March, Aino read that on January 1, 1912, while she was in jail, twenty-five thousand women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike against the American Woolen Company under IWW leadership. They were followed by eighteen thousand textile workers in Lowell. The state legislature had passed a law reducing the workweek from fifty-six hours to fifty-four hours and the mill owners retaliated by lowering wages to make up for the lost production. The state militia was called out. The usual mass arrests and beatings soon followed.

  When the IWW attempted to transfer the children of the striking workers to sympathetic homes in Philadelphia, both the mothers and the children were assaulted and beaten to stop the evacuation. One of the beaten women miscarried. When Aino read that, she sat on the edge of the bed, her head bowed down in her hands, for nearly ten minutes. Slowly the sorrow for the woman and the lost baby turned to anger and resolve. She took out her anger on the woodpile.

  The news continued to be grim. The striking women in Lowell had refused to pay fines levied on them by the courts, many going to jail with babies in their arms. The brutality brought national attention and a Senate investigation.

  Aino, keeping to her vow to focus on Jouka and the marriage, read the news, simmering, but she stayed home. This combined with Jouka’s natural good nature had things back on an even keel.

  There was good news in March. On Thursday, March 14, the American Woolen Company settled. On that same Thursday, hundreds of sawmill workers went on strike in Nordland, asking for a 25 percent wage increase to two dollars and fifty cents per day. Aino knew that this was at least in part because of her efforts to sign up members. She wanted desperately to be there, but Matti and Kyllikki’s baby was due any day. She was stewing, torn between her own marriage, Kyllikki’s delivery, and just packing up and leaving for Nordland, when the dreaded constant tooting, signaling an accident, cut through the air of Camp Three. Women came out of their front doors, some holding small children or babies, others drying their hands on their aprons. The constant clatter of the logging operations ceased. Silence.

  It was nearly four, the tenth hour of work, when fatigue dulls judgment and reflexes, breeds carelessness and inattention to detail. This is the most likely time for the choker bell to come out of its socket and several tons of bucking logs to go free from the main line and slam against a stump—or a man. This is also when it is most likely a cable isn’t slackened soon enough or a small fray in the cable goes unnoticed and within minutes causes a cascade of breaking wire, until the line snaps and hundreds of pounds of steel crack through the sky like a bullwhip, its flying tail lashing through brush, cutting small trees—or a man.

  Aino saw Lempi standing at the door of her new shack across the rail line and about a hundred yards toward the bay side. Lempi gave a tentative wave and Aino waved back. After another five minutes came the toot of the steam whistle and the operation started up again, slowly gaining speed until once more the distant clatter, shouts, whistles, and crash of falling trees and giant logs bucking their way to the landing filled the evening air. The women went inside, preparing dinner, each wondering if her husband would be the one not to come home.

  At quitting time, Aino watched the body coming to camp on top of the wood box just behind the cab. Jouka was in the cab and Aino sighed with relief. The train stopped. Women gathered below the load as two loggers dragged the body off the engine, trying to achieve some sort of solemnity as they laid it on the ground.

  It was Huttula. His head was a bloody pulp, his face nearly unrecognizable, the result of a flying cable. The women turned in relief and pity as Lempi screamed and went to her knees cradling Huttula’s mutilated head.

  Aino ran to squat down beside her. Lempi was kissing Huttula’s face. She turned to look at Aino. Smearing the blood on her hands over her own face, she looked up at the gray sky and howled like a wounded animal.

  That cry ended any doubt in Aino’s mind about leaving home. She told this to Jouka bluntly, her anger barely under control. He understood. To fight her would feel petty and selfish, but he wished it were otherwise.

  Jouka helped sell Huttula’s tools and Aino helped Lempi pack. Lempi would not go back to the henhouse. Nor could she afford the rent for the shack, fifty c
ents a day. Finished with the packing, Aino sat with Lempi on the stoop of the empty shack under a somber April sky and waited for Jouka to come by with the train. When he arrived with a full load of logs, he hopped from the cab and walked along the line to where Lempi and Aino stood with Lempi’s bag. He took it without a word and started back to the engine.

  Aino walked silently with Lempi, following Jouka. He tossed the valise into the arms of his firemen and waited for the two women.

  Lempi, Aino, and Kyllikki decided Lempi’s best bet was Astoria. The canneries hired women to pack salmon, paying them by the can. The work involved extremely sharp knives in the hands of women driven to pack as many cans a day as they were physically able to. If a woman was fast enough, she could earn fifty to seventy-five cents a day, and she was sure to make at least forty-five cents if her legs held out and she wasn’t too inept with a knife. Chinamen previously did the work, but they had been driven from town because they worked for even lower wages than the women and, besides that, were dirty, smoked opium, and associated with criminal tongs called Provident Societies that kidnapped white girls and sold them into slavery.

  Aino looked into her old friend’s sad blue eyes. “Good luck to you, Lempi. I’ll come see you.”

  “Sure. Astoria’s not so far.”

  Neither said anything else. Then they heard Jouka clearing water from the cylinder cocks. “I guess Jouka has to get the load down to tidewater,” Lempi said with a wan smile.

  “Yoh.”

  “Aino?”

  “What?”

  “I’m two months pregnant.”

  Aino was in a frenzy of indecision over whether to go to Nordland to help with the strike, or stay to help deliver Kyllikki’s baby, which was due imminently. Kyllikki and the baby came through, solving the problem. A girl, Suvi, was born on March 17, 1912. The birth was normal—terrifying, painful, long, and filled with joy. Aino saw Kyllikki through it with aplomb and left for Nordland the next day to throw herself into recruiting and organizing the wives to distribute food and medicine.

  The strike widened to neighboring towns. Having seen the tactic of deputizing solid citizens turn ugly, the mayor of Nordland instead deputized city employees, ordering them to break up the strike, figuring they’d do as they were told. Most employees quit, leaving the city stranded, with the opposite outcome from what the mayor wanted. Angry citizens formed a citizens committee. They trashed the IWW hall and arrested strikers at random, taking them into the forest and clubbing them senseless. Aino and the other women made bandages, collected iodine, and tended to the wounded who were lodged with local strikers. The citizens committee upped the pressure by forcing 150 strikers into boxcars to deport them, injuring scores more in the melee. Sympathetic railroad workers intervened, refusing to move the deported workers, unless they were Finns and Greeks, who had a reputation for being more radical than other ethnic groups. After that, the vigilantes focused on “non-Americans,” deporting several hundred, many split from their families. When she was accosted, Aino barely escaped, cursing them soundly in Swedish.

  Finally, the pain on both sides began to tell and an agreement was made. The mill owners raised wages to two dollars and twenty-five cents per day and promised to give preference in hiring and pay to native-born Americans. Aino was shaken by the way the American-born workers had turned on the Finns, convincing her more than ever of the need for solid funding for strikes. She committed herself to organizing, focusing on increasing membership and the consequent cash flow.

  The people at Camp Three were mostly sympathetic to the cause of the IWW, but they were also increasingly sympathetic to Jouka, who had clearly been abandoned by his wife.

  Aino traveled a lot that spring, her reputation for successful recruiting growing along with the IWW’s growing membership. Just by being a healthy woman she attracted more potential members than any male recruiter did, and once she had them in front of her, the combination of her quick wit, ability to explain the workingman’s situation, and passion won many over. Portland headquarters could now pay for train and boat tickets. Coming back from one of her trips by train, she set out to find Lempi. She located her in a women’s boardinghouse. They talked until long after dark, a single candle lighting Lempi’s small room. Aino slept next to her that night, both giggling occasionally about stories from the old days.

  There was a sad undercurrent. Lempi was alone in a tiny room without a child. Aino suspected she had gotten an abortion. Aino never asked her.

  8

  On Sunday, March 31, Matti and Kyllikki traveled to Astoria to show her parents Suvi, with an additional item on the agenda.

  “Go on, tell him,” Kyllikki said to Matti, rocking Suvi gently in her arms.

  Matti turned to her father. “If there’s war in Europe, everyone knows lumber prices will go up. But there’s something less obvious. Airplanes are starting to be used for artillery spotting and reconnaissance. Someone’s going to use other airplanes to shoot them down. Then the other side’s going to want to build airplanes to shoot those airplanes down.” He paused, letting her father catch on to the implications. When Emil Saari nodded, Matti went on. “They’re all made from spruce.”

  “Yoh,” her father said evenly.

  “I need a loan for a new yarder. It would double our speed getting logs to the landing. With that rusted tin-can yarder I’ve got now, we’ll stay a two-bit gyppo outfit no matter how high the prices.”

  “But that wood will aid our enemies,” Hilda Saari broke in. “Germany’s our only hope to break free of Russia.”

  “I’m a logger, Mrs. Saari, not a politician.”

  “But you’re a Finn!”

  “I’m an American,” he replied.

  “Your father gave his life for Finnish independence!”

  “Please,” Kyllikki said. “We’re talking business here.” It was at this moment that one of her breasts started leaking.

  “But the business will hurt Finland!” her mother cried, looking to her husband for help.

  Emil Saari took a deep breath. “If America sides with Russia, we side with Russia.”

  “If that means we’re nothing but money-grubbers, then by God I—”

  “Hilda.” She stopped talking. “All Finland ever did for us,” Emil said, “was freeze us in the winter, starve us in the summer, and draft our boys in the spring and fall.”

  “The Russians drafted our boys.” She walked to the kitchen muttering, “Business, business, business.”

  “She’s a patriot,” Emil said.

  “A Finnish patriot,” Kyllikki said.

  “Maybe Aino has it right,” Matti said. “Patriotism is a con job. I don’t care if the lumber goes to the English or the Germans. Patriotism just cuts the market in half.”

  “Yes,” Kyllikki said. “But without that ‘con job’ there’d be no war and no rise in spruce prices.”

  Both Mr. Saari and Matti looked at her, momentarily stopped.

  “Patriotism exists,” Matti said. He turned to Emil Saari. “We can make money on spruce.”

  “But we’ll be making profits from war,” Kyllikki said.

  Matti turned to Kyllikki. “What governments do is none of my business, which means none of our business.”

  Kyllikki made no reply.

  Matti and Emil Saari agreed to a loan of five thousand dollars, four for the yarder and associated equipment, another thousand for working capital. Emil had only part of it, but he agreed to talk to Jamison, the manager of the Astoria branch of the First National Bank of Oregon. He put it in writing. Matti signed and looked at Kyllikki with triumph in his eyes. She felt a sudden apprehension. She gave Matti an encouraging smile despite her misgivings. She’d never take a risk like the one he was taking. That’s one reason she married him.

  * * *

  Three days later, Matti was in Nordland with its stench of smoke from a dozen mills, garbage floating around the docks, tidal flats gone to cesspools, and half-rotted sawdust paving the streets. Rauha
’s town. More important, Rauha’s mother’s town.

  He took a deep breath, sighed, and made his way to Louhi’s office, which was across from the Bank of Nordland, upstairs in a two-story wood building with a dry goods store and a butcher shop on the ground floor. When she opened the door after his knock, her face was impassive, so he didn’t know if she was happy to see him or not.

  “I’m in town to bid on a logging job. I thought I’d say hello.”

  Louhi motioned him to a chair. He shut the door and sat down, balancing his new fedora on his knee.

  “Coming up in the world,” she said. “Businessman’s fedora, a coat that fits, and wanting to bid. Congratulations. You’ve arrived. How is Rauha?”

  “She’s fine. She wanted me to say hello.”

  “And so, you’re doing that for her?”

  “No.”

  It was no mystery where Rauha’s ice came from.

  “I heard you got married.”

  “Yoh.”

  “A sweet little thing from Astoria.”

  “Yoh.”

  Louhi laughed. She went to a sideboard. “You drink?”

  “Sometimes. Not much.”

  “Wastes money?”

  “Yoh.”

  She opened a bottle of rye and poured two glasses. Handing one to Matti she said, “This one is on me, so drink up.”

  He looked at her, looked at the glass, raised it in a toast to her, and said, “Kippis.” He emptied it with one gulp. She matched him and asked if he wanted another. “No, thank you,” he said.

  “Even if it’s free?”

  “Nothing’s free.”

  She laughed again, took his glass, stoppered the bottle, and then sat back down at her desk. “You know, Matti Koski, I might even come to like you someday.”

  At this, he laughed.

  “So, Rauha could have written a letter. What do you want?” Her face was polite but revealed nothing. What a poker player she must be.

  “I’m bidding on a contract on a section of land above Grays Bay. It’s owned by Al Drummond. Rauha says you know him.”