Deep River Page 53

  Then Aino knew. She shouted, “No! No! Goddamn you, Aksel Långström. You can’t do this.” She turned her attention to plead with Jouka. “You can’t listen to Ilmari. The doctor told us to use aspirin to break Eleanor’s fever. The doctor from Ilwaco, not the quack from Knappton Mills.”

  Jouka walked slowly over toward Aino. “She’s my daughter, too.”

  “He doesn’t even know her,” she moaned to the sheriff.

  “He’s the father,” the sheriff said grimly. “What the father says goes. It’s the law.”

  “I’m the mother,” she shrieked. She frantically grabbed a chunk of wood from near the fire, only to have her hand caught by Aksel before she could hurt anyone. Aksel held her, letting her kick him and scream, but she could no more break free than could a mouse from an eagle’s talons.

  Jouka went into the hut and came out several minutes later. “My child will stay under the care of her uncle and this Indian woman,” he said to Cobb.

  Aino screamed at them. “You arrogant, superstitious bastards are going to kill my daughter.”

  “Well, boys, in the state of Washington, the father has custody,” Cobb said. “We’re through here.”

  Just before he disappeared on the trail, he turned. “I hope to hell that baby lives.”

  Still being held by Aksel, Aino relaxed her body a little and felt him reciprocate. “I want to see my daughter,” she said quietly. Aksel looked at Ilmari, who looked at Jouka. Jouka nodded.

  Ilmari looked at Aksel, who released her. “My child dies, I’ll kill you and Ilmari and Jouka,” she said in a low, even voice. She meant every word.

  “We all hope she lives,” Aksel replied calmly.

  She pushed past Jouka, saying nothing, and entered the shelter. A small fire glowed beneath a smoke hole in the low ceiling. Vasutäti was sitting next to Eleanor, singing softly. Aino touched Eleanor’s forehead and pulled her hand back sharply. “She’s burning with fever.” Aino started to wail. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “A small fever is good,” Vasutäti said in English. “It kills the little animals that cause sickness.”

  Aino stood there, helpless, feeling the calm gaze of the Indian woman. Then Vasutäti picked Eleanor up and handed her to Aino. Aino immediately clasped Eleanor close to her bosom. Eleanor began to reach a hand out, her mouth seeking the familiar breast.

  “It’s good if child sucks,” Vasutäti said.

  Aino looked at her questioningly. “She’s weaned. No milk.”

  “No milk is OK. She feel better. Big help for her live.”

  Ilmari quickly left. Aino unbuttoned her blouse, put Eleanor’s mouth to her nipple, and once more felt the insistent sucking of her baby.

  For the first time in days, it seemed that everything might just work out. Then she realized Vasutäti had suggested nursing as much for her as for Eleanor. She looked at the old woman, who simply nodded at her, smiling. Our secret, she seemed to say.

  Eleanor’s fever broke late in the afternoon. Holding Eleanor, Aino slowly turned around and around, her eyes closed, savoring the child’s now comfortably warm little body. When she opened her eyes, Ilmari and Vasutäti were looking at her, smiling.

  “I—” Aino didn’t know what to say. “I can be so stubborn,” she said, holding back tears, her jaw trembling. Ilmari and Vasutäti both nodded their heads, accepting her halting apology.

  Aino was too relieved to notice Aksel and Jouka quietly leading their horses away.

  21

  Aino stayed at Ilmahenki until the next Friday. She gave Eleanor a last kiss and handed her to Alma. It hurt to leave her, but it was better than leaving her in that dingy downstairs apartment with strangers.

  All the way to Astoria, her mind was on the quarterly Saturday night membership meeting. A proposal to hire new workers but just pay them wages and not allow membership was on the table. Many current members saw it as a way to increase their own share of the co-op’s surplus. She was utterly opposed. It defeated the entire purpose of a co-op. Labor was only a “factor of production,” and there was a “labor market” where prices, called wages, were bid up and down, only because the culture saw people the same way it saw machines.

  Everyone voting on everything had started to bother her. Voitto had once told her that it was dangerous to let a group of fools make important decisions—and it got more dangerous the more fools there were. That was why, he said, Lenin made the party the vanguard of the proletariat. She didn’t like that either. A few powerful party members making decisions for the workers were no different from a few wealthy owners making decisions for the workers. She laughed at herself. She wanted everyone to vote but vote her way.

  When Aino reached the mill in the afternoon, Alvar Kari nervously told her that there was talk, mostly among the wives, that a divorced woman shouldn’t be on the board. She knew it was Alvar’s kind way of saying that if the co-op were to be in good standing in the community, it shouldn’t have an adulterer who abandoned her baby and who was a member of a traitorous radical organization on its board. The wives of the board members were invited to discreet coffee klatches by concerned women over the next two weeks. Then the coffee klatches were expanded to the wives of key workers. Aino chose to leave.

  Per the bylaws, the co-op would refund Aino’s original membership contribution and retained patronage—over a ten-year period. She left with nothing, feeling enormous anger about the unfairness of it all.

  She stopped by Matti and Kyllikki’s little house in Uniontown on her way home. Kyllikki, strands of hair sticking to her sweaty face, was washing clothes with Pilvi.

  “Why aren’t you at the mill?” Kyllikki asked as Aino walked in. “Pour yourself some coffee.” She indicated the stove and went back to pounding the clothes with a solid round stick in a large galvanized tub of water she kept reheating with water from the big kettle on the woodstove. She had all the windows open. Pilvi, who had her own little stick, was pounding away at the tub with Kyllikki.

  “I quit before I was voted off the board. I’m a disgraced woman.”

  Kyllikki stopped pounding. “Gossiping hypocritical old biddies.” She smashed the washing stick down hard, startling Pilvi. Aarni came in with another load of kindling for the firebox. “Why don’t you go see if Billy Haskins can play,” Kyllikki said. Aarni bolted out of the house with Kyllikki shouting after him: “And if he can’t, go find Suvi at school and … Do you want a nickel?” Aarni came back in a flash. Fishing out two nickels from the penny jar on the shelf above the stove, Kyllikki said, “And tell Suvi to take you both to Roth’s for a phosphate.” She paid the bribe and he went running down the street. Pilvi looked between her mother and aunt, not quite sure how to react to seeing her brother and sister get a nickel. Kyllikki picked her up and set her at the table, whispering in her ear, “If you can sit here like a big girl and not interrupt us, I’ll let you have some girls’ coffee with a sugar cube.”

  “Talk,” she said to Aino, having cleared the way for action.

  “The drumbeat was it didn’t look good for the co-op to have a divorced, unpatriotic Wobbly on the board.”

  Kyllikki took that in, then asked, “Did it have anything to do with Hillström?”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Yes, but it’s today’s news.”

  The two sat in silence, taking it in, Pilvi looking wide-eyed, sensing something but keeping quiet.

  “I’m going to Portland,” Aino said. “There’s serious work to do.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been wasting my time with that stupid co-op.”

  “I hardly call creating jobs for thirty men and having Eleanor wasting time.”

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  As soon as the words were out, Aino felt a shift in Kyllikki to something deep in her core. It was a mother bear standing firm over her cubs. It was deep roots that allowed the grass to move with the wind, but never lose its grip on the earth. It was Kyllikki’s powe
r, so different from Matti’s power.

  “How you look at things determines where you’re standing to look.”

  “I don’t need a lecture.”

  “No. You need a kick in the rear.” Kyllikki leaned across the table. “You have a child and you almost lost her. And you want to leave her again?”

  Aino bristled. “I’ll send for her as soon as I’m settled.”

  “Aino, you might find this hard to swallow, but sending for her isn’t the issue. Putting her second is the issue.”

  “Letting her stay with her uncle and aunt for a couple of weeks isn’t putting her second.”

  “Stop dreaming!” Kyllikki slapped her hand on the table, making the dishes rattle. Pilvi’s eyes grew wider. “The Wobblies are done. Finished. The government, the owners, and the people, Aino, the people, see you as traitors. Your leadership is all in jail. It’s a wonderful dream, Aino, One Big Union, but it’s a dream butting up against reality. The AF of L has it right.”

  “We’ve got to change reality! Lenin has it right.”

  “You can’t serve God and mammon. Jesus had it right.”

  “Matthew, chapter six, verse twenty-four,” Aino said sarcastically. “Don’t preach to me about money. You and Matti are trying to get rich as fast as you can. If Astoria had a country club, you’d join it.”

  “Mammon’s not just about money, Aino. God’s about love and mammon’s about the ten thousand petty things that get in love’s way. Yes, money’s one of them, but the expression is the love of money is the root of all evil, not money itself. And if you tell me you love the IWW, I’m telling you that you’re fooling yourself. You can’t love an ideal. You can only love people.”

  “Oh, great, you love concrete things, not ideals. So, do you love this?” Aino indicated the room all around her. “Concrete things like your washtub of dirty clothes, your dances on Saturday nights, your little house on the hill. My ideal is making history. You and your things … you’re going nowhere.”

  Aino immediately knew she’d overstepped—again. It had been mean. She watched Kyllikki struggle for control and then gain it.

  Aino sighed. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Aino, Aino,” Kyllikki was shaking her head. “We’re all going to the same place, Aino, the grave. All that you or any of us will take with us is love.”

  “No one takes anything to the grave.”

  “You need to choose either Eleanor, your living, breathing daughter, or the IWW.”

  “I can do both.”

  “It’s not the doing, Aino. It’s the attitude or priorities. It’s the …” She was searching for words and although Finnish was her first tongue, her adult vocabulary was English. “It’s like the position you choose to see things from, your stance in life. Matti can be motivated to make money because he loves logging or because he loves money or because he loves his family. The logging’s the same.” Kyllikki smiled affectionately thinking of Matti. “He got over money when he nearly killed Reder and, but for you, would have gone to jail.”

  “Right there! John Reder can throw poor people in jail or throw you and Matti out of Chinook County with impunity because of this rotten-to-the core system.”

  “Poor people all over Russia and Finland have been thrown in jail because of the rotten-to-the-core system you reds came up with.”

  “Yes, people are angry on both sides, but communism is about helping others, while capitalism is all about helping yourself.”

  “Isms!” Kyllikki nearly spit the word. “Socialism, communism, capitalism. All isms are about words and people worship the words the same way other people worship God.”

  “One Big Union isn’t an ism. Direct action isn’t an ism.”

  “Helping your friend, caring for your child, that’s direct action. The isms just wrap the desire for power, money, and security in pretty words.” Kyllikki gave a tired sigh. “Who’s going to run Finland if the reds take over? Who’s going to run the One Big Union, Aino? Grow up.”

  Aino shot to her feet. Pilvi pulled her girls’ coffee up tight to her chest. “I choose the IWW.” Aino was nearly spitting, trembling.

  “You get on that train to Portland instead of the boat to Knappton and you’ll regret it the rest of your days.”

  “Don’t talk to me about regret.” Aino reached into the washtub and pulled up one of Matti’s long johns, the water streaming from it. “This is the life you chose.” She dropped the wet long johns back into the tub and stalked out the door.

  22

  Aino took the first train to Portland. She walked to the IWW hall on Burnside Street and rented a room from a fellow Wobbly. That night, she wrote to Ilmari and Alma, saying she would come for Eleanor as soon as she got settled.

  She found part-time work waiting tables where she got one good meal a day. She joined the effort to organize the workers in the sawmills just downstream on the Willamette River. It was an uphill grind. Even though the Wobblies had championed and won the eight-hour day, many of the mill workers held a simmering resentment against the Wobblies for striking in America’s hour of need.

  This issue of patriotism brought her to her feet at the last weekly meeting in October. “We need to show we are not un-American,” she said. “We need to be at every Armistice Day parade, any celebration with those who served during the war in uniform.”

  “All you’re doing is pandering to nationalism,” someone pointed out.

  “No one pandering to anybody,” she shot back. “Wobblies obeyed the draft and fought in the war, whether they believing in it or not. People need to know that. We must make clear we are not against the United States.”

  People broke into arguing. The local president banged his gavel for order. When it returned, he asked, “Your ideas, Aino?”

  “Two years back, hired thugs smashed up our hall in Centralia and beat fellow Wobblies on the street. The Centralia Wobblies have made a new hall in an old hotel. There’s going to be a big Armistice Day parade. We need to make clear solidarity with the Centralia Wobblies and show the American Legion and National Guard they weren’t the only ones over there.” She paused, afraid someone would make a wisecrack about the last time she was in Centralia. No one did.

  On the morning of November 10, 1919, she took the train north. Sitting on the left side, she could see the Columbia intermittently until it turned westward, disappearing into the Coast Mountains, rolling west to the Pacific, to the big timber and the noisy clanking operations cutting it down, to Astoria, to Knappton and the little trail, now a plank road, that led to Tapiola and Deep River.

  She reached the Roderick Hotel, serving as the new IWW hall, in the afternoon. She was pleased to see Michael Tierney and his brother-in-law, Jack Kerwin, there. Jack had logged for the Spruce Division and knew Matti.

  The place was in a furor and Aino was immediately engulfed in rumors. The American Legion would be armed. Thugs had been hired to beat up Wobblies. They were going to shoot Wobblies for being traitors. They would all be jailed like the fifteen Wobbly miners in Colorado.

  At the root of the rumors, it was always “they.” Who were “they”? The government? The capitalists? John Reder? His sheriff? Margaret Reder? Matti and Kyllikki?

  She staked out a place on the floor to spend the night and began producing leaflets for the next day’s parade. A nice kid named Wesley, still wearing his army uniform, helped her by turning the hand crank of the little printing press. He had a good sense of humor and the time passed quickly as they worked together.

  Aksel, Kullervo, Jens Lerback, Heppu Reinikka, and Yrjö Rautio were also wearing their uniforms. Many veterans did so, not for nostalgia, but because the uniform was high-quality wool and free. Feeling the need for something more exciting than fishing, hunting, and getting drunk at dances, they decided to join the festivities at Centralia. The American Legion had formed in Paris when they were still overseas. Although they weren’t members—there was no Legion post closer than Willapa or Astoria—they thoug
ht they might run into some old comrades since legionnaires were coming to the big parade from all over. They arrived on the train around seven, long after dark, and quickly found a speakeasy. The tension over the next day’s parade was palpable. The feeling of the speakeasy crowd was that the Wobblies were Bolsheviks who wanted to overthrow the United States government and needed to be run out of town. The local American Legion commander, Warren Grimm—a war hero as well as a lawyer—said they had every legal right to remain in town, even though he didn’t like Wobblies. His brother, Polly, the city attorney, agreed with him. It outraged many of the veterans. They’d fought a war to defend American freedom and values, and the law was protecting Wobblies who wanted to destroy them.

  The Bachelor Boys simply looked at each other over their drinks. It wasn’t their fight. They had formed their own society, self-sustaining and, in their opinion, superior to the one to which they had returned.

  They bedded down in a pasture by the Skookumchuck River, wrapping themselves in army surplus wool blankets and rubberized ground cloths. After the trenches, a November night in a cow pasture didn’t even seem like camping.

  Kullervo woke Aksel by kicking him gently and handing him a canteen of hot coffee. Aksel liked Kullervo but was always a little wary of him. It wasn’t just Kullervo’s explosive temper. Hell, Aksel thought, since the war they all had explosive tempers. It was also that Kullervo idolized him the way he himself had idolized Gunnar. Aksel felt the admiration was misplaced.

  “Thanks,” Aksel said in English. English was the natural default because Jens’s first language was Norwegian, Heppu’s and Yrjö’s was Finnish, and Aksel’s was Swedish. Kullervo had learned Finnish and English simultaneously.

  “The parade starts at noon,” Kullervo said. “The legionnaires will be packing live ammunition. The Wobblies are coming armed. They won’t back down the way they did in seventeen.” Kullervo was bouncing on his haunches with excitement.