Their death-mark’d love
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
When Matilda gets to the hospital, a nurse leads her to a man in a bed and tells her that it’s Sol. A chunk of hanging rock came down on him, the nurse says. His skull is broken. It won’t be long.
The man’s head is wrapped in thick bandages. The face is cut up. Bruised and misshapen. Could be anyone, Matilda thinks, but when she leans over to examine his hands, she knows for herself who it is. Three crooked fingers on the right, broken years ago when a new man misjudged a hammer strike and came down on Sol, who was holding the steel. Two fingers missing on the left. She can’t remember when that happened. One day, they were gone. Maybe she was having a baby and didn’t notice at the time. Maybe Sol told her and she forgot. Maybe he never said. Men don’t talk about accidents.
She sits down next to Sol’s bed, takes out a bag of knitting, and settles herself to wait. The yarn and the blue bruises on her husband’s face are the only color in the room, aside from her own faded calico dress. The wooden chair, the iron bedstead, the little table are all painted white. White cotton curtains separate the beds. The sheets are white as well, and so are the ghostly faces of the other men in the ward, for they live their lives more than a mile underground and see sunlight for no more than a few hours on Sunday afternoons in summer and less than that in winter. They are all hurt or sick, but they lie still. Though they have opinions about Sol Kivisto and the one-man drill, they leave his wife alone.
Strange, she thinks, how you can live with someone for years—make his meals, wash his clothes, share his bed, have his children—and still know so little about him.
Sol was a presence, right from the start. Silent, even for a Finn. Just . . . next to her, standing at the rail as the ship steamed away from Ostrobothnia. Away from everything they’d ever known.
She spoke first, quoting Scripture. “ ‘So this is the great and wide sea wherein are things innumerable, both small and great beasts.’ ”
“Leviathan,” he said. That was in the next verse. He, too, knew the Book.
“Matilda Luoma,” she said, to introduce herself.
“Solomon Kivisto,” he said.
There followed many days and nights on the great, wide sea without another word from Sol, but sometimes they ate at the same long table or glanced at each other in passing. And surely it was not mere chance that he appeared at her side again as land slid into view on a clear June afternoon in 1898.
Staten Island, green between a blue sea and a blue sky.
“Amerikka,” she whispered. Beside her, Sol nodded.
Fear struck her then, though no good Finn would ever show it. On the ship, she’d had shelter and food. Now, like a newborn babe, she would be thrust into the unknown. No mother to care for her—just her brother, Artur, who’d sent money for her voyage. He had promised there’d be work for her, cooking and doing laundry for miners in Calumet, so she had put her trust in the Lord and her brother, and bought the ticket.
“Do you know . . . where is Michigan?” she asked Sol.
He was older. Thirty, maybe. She felt like a sapling, whipped by wind and fear. He seemed like a tree. Tall, strong, unbending.
“West,” he said, lifting his chin toward the setting sun.
He meant to go to the Minnesota iron fields, but she told him about the Calumet copper mines.
My fault, she thinks. I should’ve let him go to Minnesota.
Now the nurse says Sol will never wake up. Never move again. Never speak. Dry-eyed, she tries to remember her husband’s voice, so rarely used. Already, the memory of it is fading, but she can still listen to the sound of his breathing. She closes her eyes and pretends that she is in bed beside him.
This is a nightmare, she tells herself. Morning will come. We will wake up together, at home.
Footsteps approach. She opens her eyes and sees James MacNaughton standing at the foot of Solomon’s bed. The general manager of Calumet & Hecla is not a large man, but he holds himself very erect. Impressive and impassive, he is perfectly dressed, and he has removed his bowler hat out of respect.
“Mrs. Kivisto, your husband was a man of vision,” she hears him say in slow, clear English. “He understood that industry today requires new thinking and new methods. He was a man of courage who stood up to union pressure. The company is grateful. In this time of trouble, the company wants you to know that you should not worry about the future.”
There is more, but she is too astonished to take it in, apart from this one fact: she and her children will always have a place to live. The company house will be their own someday. James MacNaughton himself has promised her that.
When he leaves, she sits still, dumbfounded.
Annie Clements and James MacNaughton, she thinks. Both on one day.
Without warning: tears, at last. She has been prepared for tragedy. Unexpected kindness is more than she can bear.