Deep River Page 49

  On the third Sunday in June, Kyllikki walked to Aino’s basement flat, leaving the children with her mother. Aino was slow answering her knock, so Kyllikki opened the door a crack and called Aino’s name.

  “Hätähousut,” Aino’s voice came from inside. She heard Aino grunt and the bedsprings squeak. She walked in.

  Dishes were unwashed. The air was damp. There had been no fire in the woodstove for some time. Aino was sitting on the edge of the bed in her night shift, bending backward on her elbows. The sheets on the bed looked as worn-out as she did.

  “Are you OK?” Kyllikki asked.

  “Sure, sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Oh, maybe because you’re eight months pregnant.”

  Aino grunted.

  She launched herself to her feet. Kyllikki noticed that her breasts were larger and seemed to rest on her distended abdomen. Aino pulled off her night shift, slipped on a light cotton undershift, and reached for her support corset. She pulled up on her belly and settled it into the pouch of the corset, then turned her back to Kyllikki, who started lacing it. She turned Aino around. “Feel OK? Not too tight?”

  Grunting a reply that Kyllikki took to mean it felt OK, Aino reached for her skirt, pulling it up over her belly. The front of the skirt hung way higher than the back. Aino pulled the back to the same level, but that exposed too much of the back of her legs. She let the skirt drop back. It occurred to Kyllikki that someone ought to make clothes that fit pregnant women so at least the hems stayed even.

  “It kicked a lot last night,” Aino said.

  “Probably a dancer like her mommy and daddy.”

  Aino laughed. “Were you at Suomi Hall last night?”

  “Ei,” Kyllikki said, no. “There’s no men. Besides, I promised Matti.”

  “Why does he care? It’s not like you’re going to run off with someone.”

  “It’s sort of a bargain between us. You know, about the puukko.”

  “He took it to Nordland,” Aino said. “I’d say you’re free to go dancing.”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “You’re just afraid of his temper.”

  “He’d never hurt me.”

  “I know that,” Aino said.

  Kyllikki nodded, then she said, “I’d hurt him.” They both laughed.

  Kyllikki bustled around the tiny apartment, washing the dishes, stripping the bed, and putting the sheets to soak in the washtub, while Aino gamely went outside and split firewood.

  “Maybe you should be doing the cleaning and I’ll split the wood,” Kyllikki shouted to the street level where the wood was stacked against the house’s side.

  “It’s summer. Don’t need much,” she heard Aino reply.

  “It’s summer in Astoria,” Kyllikki shot back and heard Aino laugh. It was good to hear. Aino was too quiet, clearly bone weary. Jouka was making good wages. Why she pushed herself with this co-op idea made no sense—and it worried Kyllikki.

  When Aino returned, a load of kindling in her arms, Kyllikki said, “Father says the new head rig is coming by barge next week. His bank manager told him you people bought the head rig from a Scappoose bank that foreclosed on a company whose mill burned down. Doesn’t that mean you’ve got the money? Why are you still pushing?”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “Is that why you’re here? To tell me to stop pushing?”

  “Aino, come to our house or go to Ilmahenki. What if the baby comes early?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Oh, yes. Dr. Midwife.” Kyllikki said. “Has it occurred to you that you’re not in charge? This baby will come when it wants, not when you want.”

  “Did you come here to tell me that or to stop pushing?”

  As much as Kyllikki loved her, Aino could be infuriating. “Aino, Father says the co-op is launched. What is this, this obsession?”

  Aino was uncharacteristically slow to answer. “Poverty makes desperate workers compete for jobs. That leads to low wages and more poverty. To break free, they need to share in the wealth they produce. This co-op will break some of us free in Astoria. That’s the obsession.”

  Kyllikki didn’t know whether to scream at Aino or admire her.

  “We all die,” Aino went on softly. “Organizations don’t.”

  “Organizations are abstractions, made up of people who die and who can be ignorant, greedy, cruel, and selfish. Why is this organization going to be so different that you’ll risk killing your baby?”

  “You sound like Aksel.”

  “Aksel’s right.” The two women were locking eyes. Then Kyllikki softened. “You know he’s in the fighting, don’t you?”

  Apprehension briefly flickered across Aino’s face. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “Jens Lerback, you know, from Camp Three. He wrote to his mother and said he saw Aksel.” She walked over to look at Aino and Jouka’s wedding picture. “Jens is in the fighting, too,” she said. “I’m glad Matti is logging. No fighting and so far, no Spanish flu at their camps.”

  Both women were silent at the mention of the pandemic. It was generally not spoken about, as it held even more terror than the fighting. No one knew its cause or its cure, and it was spreading everywhere.

  “It’s killing more of our guys than the Germans,” Kyllikki went on. “You must feel lucky that Jouka’s with Matti.”

  “Lucky our men are gone because of a capitalist war that pits workers against workers?”

  Kyllikki could take no more. “It’s always capitalists, toadying politicians, One Big Union. Aino, get down to reality. A reality for which you should feel everlasting gratitude that Matti and Jouka are logging instead of fighting like Jens and Aksel. Gratitude that you’re not Jens’s mother. That you’re not Jens.”

  Aino was biting her lip. Kyllikki didn’t know if it was because she was angry or ashamed. She didn’t care. What was at stake was clear.

  “You are risking killing your baby.” She grabbed her shawl and opened the door. “A live, human baby, Aino. Not an abstraction.” She slammed the door.

  Two days later, Aino was at Ilmahenki. And it was a good thing, because on the evening of June 22, just four days later, she went into labor, two weeks early.

  Laying out Aino’s midwife kit on the kitchen table—stethoscope, suction bulb, scissors, forceps, two metal trays, thermometer, safety razor and blades, cords, clamps, urinary catheter, and some sort of arm cuff that measures blood pressure that she didn’t know how to use—Alma kept reminding herself that she had already delivered two healthy babies of her own and she had Aino to talk her through the process. If Aino could talk. When she was sure no one could hear her, Alma would pray in a whisper, “Please, dear Lord, make it all right” over and over. It calmed her.

  Aino was fully dilated at midnight. Ilmari, quiet as usual, was standing at the bedroom door looking in on them. He’d just finished carrying Mielikki to her bed. She’d wanted to stay up for the birth and Ilmari and Alma both thought it would be a good experience for her, but she had fallen asleep. The way things were going, Alma thought, it may have been a blessing.

  “All the children are asleep,” Ilmari said.

  “Good,” Alma said. She looked at him for a moment, as if on the verge of asking something, swallowed unconsciously, and returned to dabbing Aino’s head with a wet cloth.

  Ilmari went to Aino, who was lying on the bed covered in sweat. He touched her forehead and looked at Alma. Alma shrugged her shoulders, her face solemn.

  Aino cried out as another contraction hit her.

  Ilmari turned to Alma. “What do you think?”

  “She’s going to be all right,” Alma said. She gave a plucky smile.

  Two hours later, Aino was still in agony and nothing was moving. Ilmari squeezed Alma’s shoulder and walked out, saying nothing.

  Alma wanted to scream at him, but she had to deal with Aino, whose eyes were rolling. She grabbed a wet cloth and rushed to put it on Aino’s forehead, talking
to her, trying to soothe her. Oh God. Maybe it wasn’t going to be all right.

  Alma could clearly see light outside the window when she heard footsteps on the porch in spite of Aino’s cries of pain. The door opened to the morning, revealing Ilmari and Vasutäti.

  Vasutäti dropped several bundles of herbs and roots on the kitchen table. She turned to Ilmari. “Build a really hot fire. Boil two small pots of water.” She turned to Alma. “It will be all right,” she said.

  Alma wanted to hug her.

  Vasutäti was at Aino’s side, then at the end of the bed, looking up at her vulva, then palpating her womb, feeling for the baby. Aino let out another scream.

  Vasutäti smiled at her. “Now, you use sisu.” Aino clamped her jaw tight, her eyes bulging. Vasutäti turned to Alma. “Help me get her up.”

  “Get her up?”

  “Get her on her feet. Earth pulls baby down. If Aino lies down, hole in Aino not where earth can pull baby. You help her up.”

  Alma did as she was told. Aino didn’t fight, didn’t say a word, just kept her jaws clamped. Vasutäti put one of the roots she had brought between Aino’s teeth and she clamped down on it hard.

  “We hold her now. Let earth pull baby.”

  The two women supported Aino, who went into a squat, her knees spread wide. Vasutäti kept repeating some word in her language, which Alma could only think must mean push—and Aino obviously thought the same.

  Aino bit right through the root. She spit it on the floor, rose slightly, then squatted again and pushed.

  The baby’s head crowned. Vasutäti shouted at Ilmari, saying, “You help hold.” As soon as Ilmari was in place to help Alma, Vasutäti put her hands on the baby’s head and beamed at Aino, saying the Indian word for push over and over. And Aino came through. And the baby came through. It was a beautiful little girl—Jouka and Aino combined—with auburn hair and light eyes, maybe blue, maybe hazel.

  Vasutäti made sure the baby was breathing and then began to gently rub the vernix into her skin. She put the little girl up against one of Aino’s swollen breasts, and the bud-like lips were soon tight around Aino’s nipple. After the little girl had drunk her fill, Aino, exhausted and glowing, settled her in the crook of one arm.

  Ilmari had come quietly into the bedroom. Aino looked up at her brother. She had never felt so proud in all her life. After all the deliveries, hers, her mother’s, at last, here she was, through the trial and found worthy. She moved so Ilmari could see his niece. “I’m naming her Eleanor.”

  “Good American name.”

  Aino looked down at her daughter’s tiny face. Inexhaustible love was pouring from her entire body straight into Eleanor’s eyes and heart. Ilmari touched Eleanor’s forehead—then her little bright-red lips. He looked at Aino with his dark soulful eyes. “Would you give her away, ever, even for a million dollars?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then you’re a millionaire.”

  16

  Aino tried to keep that in mind when she took Eleanor back to Astoria a month later in July. Ilmari had telegraphed Jouka and Matti about the birth, and she’d gotten letters from both. Jouka’s was written by his commanding officer, who added his own note of congratulations. Jouka sent home almost his entire paycheck. He was now a sergeant, running a locomotive hauling logs to a mill in Port Angeles and making more money than he ever made working for Reder.

  At the new mill site, the men were polite, but it was clear that Eleanor didn’t fit in. She would cry without regard for the mill’s operation. Aino had to supervise the loading of the railcars, carrying Eleanor. If a railcar didn’t show up or went astray, it required walking into town to the SP&S rail station, carrying Eleanor. Despite his romantic idea that Aino was a millionaire, she thought ruefully, Ilmari didn’t calculate the debits against the credits. Another irony, she thought: a committed communist thinking about a baby in terms of debits and credits. Even though the workers owned the mill, it was in a capitalist economy. When the debits outweighed the credits too long, the law closed you down. Caught up in the system, people inevitably started thinking in terms of hours at work, debits and credits, assets and liabilities, instead of Eleanor’s pretty mouth. Alvar suggested she wean Eleanor and look for a babysitter. He gave her three months, pointing out that if it weren’t a co-op and she weren’t an officer, she’d have to quit her job. Jouka, after all, was making good wages.

  Coming back to the mill from the SP&S freight office, where she’d begged the manager for more railcars, made scarce by the war economy, she paused to nurse Eleanor, looking at the huge Youngs River estuary where it joined the Columbia just at the west end of the Astoria hills. She could see smoke from the Hammond Mill to the west. A shipbuilding factory had started just a half mile down Youngs River from the co-op mill, working on a large order for wooden minesweepers for the navy. She saw two freighters moving up the channel to Portland. It was all so busy—and yes, efficient. But it wasn’t like farming, where Ilmari and Rauha and now Alma could raise their children with the rhythms of nature—and humans. Alma worked her tail off, but she worked figuratively and often literally alongside her husband. She thought in terms of good crops or hard winters, not debits and credits. There were no time clocks on Deep River.

  Aino looked north across the Columbia, but it was too wide for her to see the old Chinook village. Then she looked south to where the co-op’s new mill stood between the railroad and Youngs River. Logs bobbed in the river, waiting to be hauled into the mill. Rudimentary buildings, open on all sides, with corrugated steel roofs to shelter the saws and conveyers, were surrounded by a large yard that held stacks of lumber, sorted by length and dimensions. She could see the men hauling newly sawed lumber off the green chain, the final phase of the intricate conveyer system that moved a log and then a cant through the various saws that turned it into lumber. Green lumber was heavy and wet. It had been part of a living tree just days ago. On the other side of the yard were the railroad tracks on which she stood. Logs in from the river—lumber out to build houses or barracks—money in to pay for the logs with some left over for the workers. At the base of it all—timber. The forest was like a giant farm that nobody had planted and nobody replanted. From this immense cycle of pay and get to get and pay, here she was standing on a railroad track that just a few years before didn’t exist, looking down the track to the new mill, looking across the Columbia to the hills that hid Deep River from view, feeling like a leaf in a roaring creek in full flood with the war, heading where?

  She gently popped Eleanor’s mouth from her nipple and resettled her in the carrier.

  She could just go to Deep River, lead a quiet life raising her daughter. But they needed her at the mill. She was useful, even important. Secretary of the co-op. Half of her made fun of the corporate title, but the other half was proud. She’d been instrumental in forming that bunch of buildings, saws, and conveyer belts. The men even used that word, “instrumental.” She thought about Alma saving flour sacks so she could make the children’s undergarments. She thought about the times when she, Kyllikki, and Rauha would sit with the coffeepot on, making socks for their husbands and children. Then she thought how here in Astoria, all she had to do was walk a few blocks to a store and buy what she needed already made.

  Years later, she would always remember that moment of standing between Deep River and the co-op. Just as planetary conjunctions occur only for a moment and then years go by before the two planets once again align, so it is with life’s major decisions. You can’t just change your mind to make it good; you must wait for the next conjunction. Aino chose to keep walking toward the mill.

  After Aino and Eleanor left, Ilmari went to see Vasutäti.

  “Thank you for coming, you know, that day.”

  “I like new wife. Good head.”

  Ilmari smiled. He knew Vasutäti wouldn’t acknowledge the thanks.

  “Alma. She’s a good woman.”

  “A good woman wants a good man,” Vasutäti sai
d, but there was wistfulness in her voice.

  She served him some soup and indicated that he should meditate, which he did. When he’d first started learning from Vasutäti, Ilmari knew she was a shaman, just like the old ones in Suomi. He, however, had thought that the lessons would be about magic herbs and magic incantations. Vasutäti didn’t like magic. She said it existed, but she never practiced it. Instead, she made Ilmari focus on sitting still and breathing—for hours. He’d practiced daily before bed—until Rauha died.

  He broke the meditation and found Vasutäti watching him closely. She grunted, disappeared into her shelter, and returned with some dried mushrooms in her hand. He recognized them: they were a common variety, easily found in meadows where elk and increasingly cattle grazed.

  “What’s this?” Ilmari asked.

  “If you had just like these in Finland, maybe Finns not have so much sisu when not needed.” She laughed her ethereal elvish laugh.

  “Now serious,” she said suddenly. “You have mind strength; many practice sessions not thinking. So now we take risk.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Not dangerous for the body, dangerous for the mind. You weren’t ready until now.”

  Ilmari knew this was a threshold in his tutelage. The old people, who kept the old ways, talked of journeys with spirit animals—journeys from which some never came back to their ordinary senses and from which no one returned unchanged. He was afraid.

  Sensing this, Vasutäti said, “Now is time for sisu.”

  He held out his palm. She put the mushrooms in it, closed his fingers on them, and then closed her hands over his. She nodded, encouraging him. He swallowed the mushrooms.

  “I’ll be with you,” she said. “If you get in trouble, I’ll pull you out. Just like I did from fancy car.” She laughed, her deep brown eyes sparkling with love.

  He was building a fishing boat that he launched onto a gray choppy sea. He sailed and sailed, heading ever northward, sailing, until he landed on a rocky beach. He pulled the boat up onto the shore. He knew he was to meet someone here. So, he sat still, just as with the no-thinking practice.