Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
A strong man’s body can keep breathing for a long time. When Solomon Kivisto dies at last, a shudder goes through Calumet, like the small earthquakes you can sometimes feel when dynamite detonates below. Standoffish in life, Sol had no friends; famous in death, his name is now on every tongue.
The miners of the Copper Country have been arguing about the union for years, but things have changed since Sol Kivisto’s accident. It doesn’t matter that Sol wasn’t using the one-man drill when he got hurt. His death is making the others think. A one-man is lighter than the old drills, but it’s still a hundred and fifty pounds. Using one is like wrestling a bear. Only the biggest men could work that weight alone, hour after hour, day after day.
With a two-man drill, you’ve got somebody to spell you when your arms are numbed and buzzing. If your own head-lamp goes out? Your partner’s still got light, and you can finish the shift. If there’s a cave-in, he can pull the rock off you and run for help, or get you to the surface for one last look at the sky.
The “widow-maker.” That’s what they’re calling the one-man down in the dark privacy of the tunnels and drifts and stopes. And those who never considered joining the union are talking about it these days. That organizer from out west? Charlie Miller—that’s his name. Gotta admit he’s honest, Michigan miners are telling one another. He’ll say straight out that some union bosses are as greedy and corrupt as the mine operators. He’ll tell you true: Some of those bastards just want to be big shots. Some of them have run off with a union bank account. But Western Federation of Miners has elected Charlie Miller president of the union—twice! They sent him here to organize the Copper Country because they trust him with their dues and the strike fund. Because he’s one of them. He’s not some city boy in a suit. He understands what it’s like underground. He knows with his back and his bones that mining is harder work for longer hours than you ever thought a mortal man could do. Hammering above your head into the roof of a stope. Shoveling ore on your knees. Opening a drift off a tunnel, bent over, for twelve hours a shift, day after day after day. He’s heard screams echo in darkness as dense as the rock itself. He’s seen hands blown off, feet crushed, thigh bones snapped like matchsticks under half a ton of rock . . .
“Stand together or die alone,” Charlie says. “That’s the working man’s choice.”
“I’m in.” That’s what Michigan miners are deciding—one at a time, and then in pairs, and then in threes, and fours, and fives. That’s what they say when they show up at the union office—in pairs and threes and fours and fives—to talk to Charlie Miller. And in the tunnels and in the saloons and on the street corners, they’re asking one another, “Which side are you on, eh? Are you with us or against us?”
* * *
The knell has rung at Bethlehem Church, summoning the congregation to aid the bereaved. The women are cooking and looking after the Kivisto kids while Matilda and her sister-in-law wash Solomon’s body and dress it in his Sunday suit. The men are out back, building Sol’s coffin. Planing the boards neatly. Collecting pine shavings to make a fragrant bed for the corpse. Tacking a white linen cloth to the inside of the box to conceal the curls of softwood.
There will be no funeral photograph. That much has been decided—it’s a matter of expense—but there’s another question. Closed or open? Open is tradition. Then again, the children shouldn’t see the mashed blue-and-white face . . . Well, the oldest boy could. Not the little ones. Bad dreams.
“Let ’em see,” Matilda’s brother says. The believers don’t drink, but Artur Luoma is kommunisti, and he’s been at the vodka. “Let ’em see what the bosses done.”
“Bosses got nothing to do with it,” Eevert Jarvenpa mutters. Artur makes everything into a union fight. “Sol was helping me with a support. Roof caved, is all.”
“And why’d the roof come down? Because they’re taking out the stone pillars and cheating the wood. Because they’re dragging the last bit of ore out of the stopes. That drift should have been closed a year ago!”
Sol’s son Jaaki is staring down at the face in the box. Head down. Angry and bullish. Drunk, too, for the first time in his young life. “You’re man enough to go below,” his uncle Artur told him, handing him a glass. “So you’re man enough to drink.”
“I’ll tell you why they want that drill,” his uncle is saying now, jabbing a stubby half-gone finger toward Eevert Jarvenpa.
“They gotta cut costs, Art! Price of copper’s going down and—”
“There’s always some damn excuse, but you know the real reason? The real reason is, they want every man alone. They want every mother’s son off in his own little piece of the dark where we can’t talk to each other and we can’t get organized!”
“Organized to pay dues for strike funds way the hell out in Colorado or Wyoming or someplace? Is that what you want? What’s that got to do with us?”
“Plenty! And if you’d read a newspaper once in a while—”
“Newspapers!” Eevert snorts. “They just put ideas in fools’ heads—”
“You calling me a fool, Eevert?”
As the argument gets louder, young Jaaki’s silence is more noticeable. Nearly as big as his old man was, Jaak has said nothing all this time. Now he turns and goes into the house. When he comes back, Eevert and Artur are still at it, though they shut up when they see Jaaki and Matti.
Matt is ten, and he’s crying: soundless, wrenching sobs that have left his face as colorful as his father’s, only blotched with red instead of blue. Jaaki’s got him by the shoulder, propelling him toward the coffin. With one arm, Jaak lifts the younger boy off his feet. With the other hand, he grabs Matt’s neck and forces him to look at the face in the box.
“Open your eyes!” Jaaki says, low and fierce. “Open them!” When Matti does, Jaak tells him, “Me first. Then you. Then Waino.”
Jaak lets the kid go and stalks off into the darkness.
“Good Finn,” Eevert Jarvenpa observes, watching Jaak go. “Tough as nails.”
“Matti!” his uncle Artur snaps. “Control yourself.”
The little boy pulls in a shuddering breath. “Sisu,” he says. “Sisu.”
* * *
Eva Savicki knows there will be no weeping at Solomon Kivisto’s funeral. Finns make no display of distress in the face of hardship. Sisu, they call it. Guts, that means. Grit. Endurance. Not even little kids are supposed to cry.
This is a degree of self-mastery Eva Savicki admires but cannot yet claim for herself. Her family is from Poland so she’ll have to learn sisu if she is to be Jack Kivisto’s wife someday. She’s working on it.
She thought she’d never stop crying when her father was buried. Then little Wanda died of diphtheria. The worst was when her mother died. Eva still has awful dreams about the blood and that stillborn baby, like a small blue doll. She and Kazimir moved in with their father’s brother. Uncle Tomek was glad to get them, too, because his wife had taken their kids and left him and he’d never told the company. Because he didn’t want to move into a dormitory again. Now, if anybody asks, Eva and Kaz will count as his children.
Back when Eva kept crying all the time, Uncle Tomek hit her and told her to shut up because he worked hard and didn’t want to come home to all that noise. So she does her best to be a good housekeeper for him. Because she likes thinking about how she’ll have her own household someday. Because she likes thinking about how she’ll do these chores for Jack.
For Mr. Kivisto’s funeral, she pulls her dark blue dress over her head, startled when the buttons refuse to close over her bosom. Annie Clements has explained about things happening down below, but until this moment Eva wasn’t aware of just how much more she sticks out in front. I’m too old for pinafores anyways, she thinks. I should make a skirt and a couple of shirtwaists at school.
Right now, though? She has to wear something.
At the back of the wardrobe there’s a black dress that used to be her mother’s. It’s the one thing every grown woman in the Copper Country has: a funeral dress. Her mother’s scent still clings to the fabric, and wearing it brings back the familiar sense of stunned emptiness. She holds her breath and, this time, she does not cry. Sisu, she thinks.
The black dress will fit better after a few quick stitches to bring in the waist, so she takes it off and gets out the sewing basket. Of course, she doesn’t really have a right to be wearing black to the Kivisto funeral. Because she’s not a relative. Even so, to be perfectly honest, it’s exciting to leave that schoolgirl frock on the bed, and she hopes Jack will notice. She hopes he’ll understand the silent message she is sending him and the family she dreams of joining. I have suffered loss, too. I know how you feel. I will stand by you. The union will stand by you.
Eva will be going to the funeral with Annie Clements. Tomek Savicki may have taken his niece and nephew under his roof, but the Western Federation of Miners has enfolded Kaz into its brotherhood, and the Women’s Auxiliary is Eva’s family now. Big Annie makes a special point of looking after the orphans. Eva goes to every meeting, so she can help with all the projects.
Mindful of looking grown-up, she walks down Fourth Street to Annie’s house as sedately as she can. Which isn’t easy because her shoes are a bit too small and it’s hard to walk nicely when your toes are squashed. She has a moment of dread—What if I get as big as Annie?—but Jack Kivisto is going to be tall, too. So they’ll be like Mr. and Mrs. Clements, who are a handsome couple, even if Mr. Clements isn’t very nice.
Mr. Clements won’t be going to the funeral. He never does. There’s a burial every week, and if you take a day off to attend one, your pay is docked. He doesn’t go to church on Sunday, either. He’s probably in bed now, Eva figures, so she sneaks around to the back door and knocks softly.
“I checked at the union office first thing this morning,” she whispers when Annie appears. “Mr. Miller says that Sol Kivisto is the greatest union organizer Calumet has ever seen! Three hundred new men in the past two days! We’ve got almost half the miners signed up now and . . . What?”
Brown eyes serious, Annie is standing still, so tall she fills the door frame. “A man is dead, Eva. Wait until he’s in the grave for talk like that.”
Eva flushes, and her face gets hotter when Annie notices the black dress.
“It’s Mama’s. Mine doesn’t fit anymore. Besides, Jack Kivisto is a schoolmate,” Eva says, providing the explanation a little too quickly because she worked it out ahead of time, in case somebody asked. “I want to be kind to him. Like you were when my parents died. Maybe Jack will join the union like Kaz did. If people are kind to him. Right?”
“No union talk today, eh?” Annie says. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. Let me get my coat.”
* * *
To Annie Clements, Eva’s little romance seems sweet but one-sided. Still, it’s hard to guess what goes on in any boy’s mind. With Finns like Jack Kivisto, it’s even harder. How can you tell when a Finn isn’t shy? the old joke asks. He stares at your feet, not his own. And then there’s the one about the Finn who loved his wife so much, he almost told her.
They set off for the funeral together, Annie trying to shorten her stride so Eva can keep up. The second time the girl falls behind, Annie stops and looks back, taking in the ill-fitting dress and the awkward gait of a growing child whose toes are turning under.
Annie herself has had to send away to Sears Roebuck to get shoes large enough for her own feet since she was eleven. “The Auxiliary should start a shoes and clothing bank,” she murmurs. “Give something, take something . . .”
“No union talk today,” Eva says solemnly.
“Brat,” Annie says, but she puts her arm around the girl for a quick embrace.
Bethlehem Church is already full when they get there. Some people belong to the church and piously attend any service. Some have come to support the widow and orphans. Some are there for the refreshments afterward. All of them have wordlessly divided themselves, like the families of the bride and groom at a wedding. Union on the left, behind Artur Luoma. Independents on the right, behind Sol’s widow and her children.
“Go on,” Annie whispers, lifting her chin toward the right. “We’ll split the difference.”
Alone now, settling into a pew at the back of the church, Annie tries to remember the first funeral she attended. Was she four? Five, maybe. Not much older than little Pria Kivisto. And so many since then . . .
Week after week, year after year. A thousand or more, it must be. Hard to tell them apart. But she does recall the first one she went to all by herself. She was nine. She’d heard her father talking about the dead man at supper. He was new. Inexperienced. Froze with fear and ignorance when the shout came to run. Crushed by a collapse. Annie skipped school the next morning and went to the Requiem. Trying not to be noticed, she sat in the back and wept for him. For his loneliness. For his friendless death.
“Why would you skip school?” her mother demanded when the teacher came to tell her that Annie had been truant.
Annie wasn’t sure, but she answered anyway. “He deserved some tears. He didn’t have anyone to cry for him. So I did.”
“Ain’t none of your business,” her mother said, but Annie has made it her business ever since, mourning for the dead men who weren’t well known: the newcomers, the greenhorn immigrants, the single men laid in company graves for lack of anyone caring to do more. Though there are always a lot of people at a union man’s burial, she also attends when the miner wasn’t union but left a family behind, for she knows what it is to be a wife whose husband won’t join.
Her father wanted Joe to sign up before the wedding, but Joe is contrary. Suggest? He’ll dig in and pull away like a mule. Push, and you’ll pay. Joe likes to think of himself as management because he’s a crew boss. Big and strong and skilled as he is, Joe Clements is as likely as any other miner to leave a widow behind him, and that’s why a miner’s wife is often willing to join the Auxiliary, even if her husband won’t sign up with the union: for companionship, for purpose, and for mutual aid when the worst happens.
Bread and roses, Annie thinks. You need both. You need more than bare survival.
She has a year-old newspaper clipping—yellowed and curling—pinned to the wall next to her cupboard: a grainy, gray photograph of young women marching, banners held high, proclaiming, “WE WANT BREAD BUT ROSES, TOO!” Money men called that frivolous. Working people understood. Some in this world have more than they can ever need or use or spend or enjoy. Why shouldn’t we get just a little extra, just a little more than bread alone? Massachusetts mill workers stood up to the owners and, by God, they won—because they stuck together. They formed a union, and they went on strike. It was a terrible hard winter, but after four months, the mill owners raised wages all across New England.
Why not here? Why not in the Copper Country?
Because men like her husband won’t join the union. Not yet, anyway.
So Annie scrapes and scrimps, like all miners’ wives. She gardens, canning the fruit and vegetables, brining pickles. She raises chickens and rabbits in the backyard. She keeps a pig in a fenced sty on the edge of town and slaughters the hog in the fall, putting up potted meat, smoking ham and sausage. When her father was killed, her mother went up to live in Copper Harbor with Maritza’s family, leaving Annie to take over doing laundry and scrubbing floors for three ladies over in Laurium, where the big houses are. Even with all that—and with Joe’s salary and with the Giannellis’ rent—there’s never enough for anything extra. The Clementses have no kids to feed, but Joe eats three times what another man might call a good meal. His boots and gloves and coveralls and clothing all cost more because she can’t find anything secondhand that would fit a man so big. There’s always a bill coming due—the rent, the coal, gas for the lights. There’s always something broken—a tooth, an ax handle, a bone. There’s always some sudden need. She’s still paying off her youngest brother’s casket.
“We are the two biggest, strongest people in this town,” she cried when Joe complained about her household management. “I’m a workhorse. You’re a crew boss. If we can’t make enough money to get even a little ahead, what hope is there for anybody? It doesn’t have to be this way! The union can make things change!”
“Those bastards just want the dues money” was Joe’s opinion, and he wasn’t alone. Even if they didn’t think the union was a swindle, a lot of miners were too strapped for cash to come up with the dues, no matter how low the union set them. Many were afraid to risk retaliation by the company. Most, she suspected, were simply too tired to show up for meetings after work. But there were more funerals than meetings. The price of getting a little more rest was always a woman’s grief. So a few years ago, Annie and a few friends began to talk about wives and daughters and sisters and mothers coming together to form a Women’s Auxiliary, whether their men joined the union or not.
Of course, in Calumet “somebody should” often turned into “Annie will.” So when the Women’s Auxiliary of Local 15 of the Western Federation of Miners was officially inaugurated, the members made Annie their president. Her advantage, if you could call it that, is also her great sorrow: she doesn’t have kids, and it’s beginning to look like she never will. She has more time to organize things and run the meetings.
Now the Federation has sent a new organizer to Calumet. Charlie Miller has a lot of experience, and he thinks the union should wait two more years before considering a strike for safer working conditions. That’s probably sensible, and yet . . .
Two years! she thinks. A hundred more miners killed. How many hands and feet crushed? How many broken arms and legs? How many more widows and orphans will there be if we wait two years to call a strike?
The minister enters the nave.
The congregation’s murmuring quiets.
And in the silence, she comes to a decision. Somebody has to do something, she thinks, and that means it’s up to me.
* * *
Like Annie, Eva sits at the back of the nave. She’s Catholic, and this is her first time in a Protestant church. There are a lot of unfamiliar songs, but a very handsome young minister leads the hymns. He has a lovely voice and Eva closes her eyes, the better to imagine herself standing before him in a year’s time, with Jack Kivisto at her side. She is thinking about wearing a crown of flowers in her hair when it occurs to her that Father Horvat will not approve of her being married by a Protestant. Her eyes open wide at the thought; then she tells herself that Jack doesn’t seem as devout as his parents. Maybe she can get him to convert to Catholicism. And to the union.
After the service, the mourners walk the two miles to Lake View Cemetery. There are people along the route who stand on the sidewalks and watch. In town, too, you can see the way Calumet divides. Nobody yells, “Serves him right!” when the coffin wagon passes, but some faces say it plain as day. Others look away or cross themselves. There but for the grace of God . . .
Solemn and silent, Jack, Matt, and Waino stay close to their mother. As far as Eva knows, Mrs. Kivisto has not shed a tear. Stone-faced, she holds her youngest child in her arms. “Why my isä in a box?” Pria keeps asking. “Why he in dere, Äiti ?”
E-sah. Ay-tie. That must be Finnish for “papa” and “mama,” Eva thinks. That’s what my children will call Jack and me.
Even though there will be awful blisters on her feet, Eva goes the whole way. When they finally get to the Finnish section of the graveyard, she edges away from Annie Clements and moves up toward the Kivistos.
The hole has been prepared, the ground raw in the sunlight. There are some hymns. The coffin is lowered on ropes. That’s when little Pria panics. “Don’t!” she cries. “Don’t put him down dere!” Eva wants to go to the child and comfort her, but Jack elbows Matti, who snaps, “Control yourself, Pria!” She’s only little, Eva thinks. Don’t be mean to her! But Pria quiets instantly, her whole body stiff with the effort. Sisu.
The grave is filled quickly, dirt shoveled onto the coffin by miners accustomed to clearing ore fast. Everyone drifts off to Centennial Hall for the meal. There will be a lot of fish: pickled, stuffed, and pan-fried. Black breads and pastries. Gallons of coffee, the beverage that fuels every Finn above the age of nine. Outside, behind the hall: a great deal of vodka.
During the dinner, Eva keeps an eye on Jack, hoping to get a word with him, wanting to tell him how sorry she is, but shy about it. She tries to stay near, then hesitates when she sees him leave. Maybe he needs the privy and it’s not nice to notice, so she stands by a window to see where he goes and to marvel at the way the sunlight brightens his white-blond hair.
It seems at first that he means to join his uncle Artur and the union men, who are passing a bottle around, but he moves past them and keeps walking: down the street, into the wasteland beyond Calumet. Her feet are killing her now, and only a bad girl would go off with a boy by herself. Eva knows she shouldn’t follow him. She does anyway. Grasshoppers whicker out of her way as she hobbles through the high, weedy grass in her too-small shoes.
Jack stops on a small rise. Both of them stand still, facing west, toward one of those blazing summer sunsets that last for hours before darkening to what she thinks must be the deepest, most beautiful blue in the whole world, though she has lived her whole life in the Copper Country and really wouldn’t know.
She waits to say something, but Jack has heard her footsteps.
“Go away,” he says without turning.
Eva knows what it’s like to grieve for a father. “I—I just thought you shouldn’t be alone.”
He looks at her. “Are you stupid?” he asks, his voice rough. “I came out here because I want to be alone!”
“Well,” she says with biblical inspiration, “it’s not good for a man to be alone.” I will be your helpmate, she thinks; instead she says, “I’m sorry about your father.”
“I hated him when he was alive, and I hate him worse now.”
She is startled, and he sees that. Belligerent, he wants to shock her, and he does. “I hate my mother, too. She made the deal, but I’m the one who’s buried alive! Fifty years,” he mutters. “I was going to be a machinist! I was going to get out of this shithole! Well, Matti’s ten, and when it’s his turn, I’m going to get on a train, and I’ll never look back, and I don’t care what anybody thinks. It doesn’t have to be me. As long as one of us is underground, we can live in that stupid house. After fifty years, it will be our very own,” he says, making his voice high, like his mother’s.
Eva stands there, frowning, not understanding anything except the part about him wanting to leave Calumet. Then it hits her: what “fifty years” means. She tries to think when the house will belong to Jack’s mother. In 1963? Will Mrs. Kivisto even be alive then?
The solution comes to her, sudden and obvious. “Jack, you’ve got to join the union! You don’t have to leave! We’ll fight for better wages here and—”
“Go to hell! And stay away from me.”
Stunned and confused, she almost cries, but controls herself.
“Sisu,” she whispers as the boy she loves stalks away from her. “Sisu.”