When Matti left home in the summer of 1904, he had fled inland. Avoiding towns, taking on odd jobs at farms for food, he moved steadily north, the land becoming increasingly forested and then increasingly barren as the forest gave way to reindeer country. After several months, he crossed an unmarked border into Norway. At Hammerfest, a lively center where Lapps, Finns, Swedes, Russians, and Norwegians all came together to trade with each other and the wider world, he talked his way on to a boat headed for England, not using and not telling anyone about the money he’d sewn into his clothes. There, he used part of it to buy passage to Boston, near where he found work in a shoe factory in Fitchburg. As soon as he’d earned enough for a train ticket, he set out for his brother’s farm on Deep River.
As Matti was leaving Boston, Ilmari was climbing over the trunk of a huge, newly felled Oregon oak. He had spent most of the summer clearing ground for more pasture by felling the smaller trees and drilling fire holes deep into the larger ones. It pained him, but alfalfa didn’t grow in shade.
Ilmari had named his farm Ilmahenki, after Ilmatar, the spirit of the air. It stood on the south bank of Deep River, twelve miles by river east of its mouth on Willapa Bay. About a mile downstream was the nascent settlement of Tapiola, which, in the dreams of John Higgins, who’d established a general store next to a natural landing site at the edge of tidewater, would someday become a thriving valley town.
The house was surrounded by newly planted apple trees and hay fields, wrested from the forest through labor that equaled that of any Russian penal colony. The fields were dotted with cattle that grazed around piles of limbs and smoldering seven-foot-high stumps, which were slowly disappearing because of the drilled holes into which Ilmari stuffed hot coals that he relentlessly tended day and night. It was also the way he’d felled the enormous old-growth hemlocks and Douglas firs, many twelve or fourteen feet in diameter. He let fire do his work, while he plowed and planted between the massive trees and stumps. He’d have starved if he’d tried to clear them before planting.
Slow and majestic beating of large wings caused him to look upward, and he watched an eagle descend onto a branch of one of the light-barked alder trees he had left standing by the river to remind him of the birch trees in Finland. The eagle ruffled itself slightly and then remained still, its eyes intent on the river. Ilmari tried to imagine what the river looked like through the eagle’s eyes. The sun, usually hidden by clouds in June, warmed his back as he lost track of himself, just being with the eagle and the alders and the river. A flicker of white belly feathers caught his eye as another bird flashed against the edge of the dark forest. Long white feathers with black ends formed what looked like stripes on the bird’s tail, which flared wide, slowing the bird’s speed so it could perch on the limb of a Douglas fir. It turned its head toward him and a prominent yellow beak identified it as a yellow-billed cuckoo. Ilmari’s neck hair rose. He once again got the feeling, the one other people didn’t get, the feeling he couldn’t explain. The yellow-bill normally lived east of the Cascade mountains. Someone was coming. Maybe two. The eagle and the cuckoo.
Ilmari’s house had grown from a single lean-to cabin to the bottom floor of a planned two-story farmhouse that he hoped someday would shelter a wife and children. The interior of the house had no furniture other than a raised platform he used as a bed in the single bedroom, a kitchen table and four chairs, and an ornate red-velvet couch a mill owner, short of cash, had offered in lieu of payment. It had taken Ilmari two days to haul it home, first by steamer to the mouth of Deep River and then by his flat-bottomed rowboat. Ilmari took it good-naturedly when his friend Hannu Ullakko kidded him about the yet unknown woman he hoped to entice with the couch.
The couch stood on a hard-packed dirt floor in an otherwise empty living room with a river-stone fireplace and chimney. In the kitchen, however, Ilmari already had laid a floor of clear Douglas fir planks, upon which he proudly set a large wood-burning kitchen stove built from various scrap parts he picked up for next to nothing. He’d placed the stairs to the incomplete second story in the kitchen, because he knew that the kitchen would be the warm center of the family and where the children could dress on cold mornings. He also envisioned a wife sitting before the fireplaces, should fortune smile on him. Single Finnish girls, even single Scandinavian girls, even any girls at all were rarer than cash.
Close to the house was the first thing Ilmari had built: the low, six-by-eight-foot chimneyless sauna made of logs, dug in against a gentle hill and covered with turf. Once it was completed, he’d slept on its two-foot-wide stair-step benches and cooked on its kiuas, not much more that a pile of round river rocks heated during the day by burning the slash from tree clearing. When the day’s work was done, he would let the smoke out and stay warm next to the hot stones throughout the night. Every Saturday evening, without fail, he heated the kiuas until some of the rocks glowed. Throwing water from Deep River onto the stones, he filled the sauna with löyly, the sacred cleansing steam, and remembered Suomi.
“Yes, yes, someone is coming,” Hannu Ullakko said. “So is Christmas.” Ullakko lifted the saucer onto which he’d poured his coffee and sucked the coffee in through a sugar cube that he held between his lips.
Ilmari smiled. He expected no other reaction from his recently widowed friend.
The two often met on Sunday afternoon to have coffee together. Sunday was the day of rest, but neither took more than a couple of hours. Only God could get His work done in six days.
Ilmari had borrowed money from Ullakko, who owned a prosperous dairy farm, to build a blacksmith shop that stood just downstream from Ilmahenki, close to the river. Ilmari didn’t like being in debt, but he liked even less cutting his timber, which many did to get much-needed cash. For Ilmari, timber was wealth that grew every day. It could be looked at and smelled. Ilmari didn’t trust banks, and holding wealth in the form of paper seemed foolish.
Farmers around Tapiola needed blacksmith work and Ilmari’s business had grown with each new logging operation and sawmill. Still, Ilmari was diversifying, ever aware that good fortune would eventually turn to bad. He paid for two Hereford cows and the stud fees to breed them. Loggers loved beef but hated it canned. Beef cattle also meant he wouldn’t be tied to twice-daily milking, other than tending one or two cows for his own milk and butter. Ullakko, too, had prospered, not only selling dairy products to the camps but also turning his hay into a cash crop to feed the enormous appetites of the oxen the logging companies used to drag the logs to the edge of water where they could be floated to a mill. Ilmari, however, had repaired two of the new steam donkeys. He knew that the price of hay would plummet.
They were in Ullakko’s kitchen, whittling large cooking spoons out of cedar with their puukkos, the male equivalent of knitting. No one was idle, ever. From skilled hands and a sharp puukko came tools and artifacts of all kinds: duck decoys and fishing lures, knobs and handles, kitchen utensils, gate latches. When there wasn’t an immediate need for something useful, Ilmari worked on a nativity crèche and a kantele with more strings than the one he used now. The coffeepot empty, the friends broke up. Ilmari didn’t bother with a kerosene lamp to find his way to Ilmahenki. The sun set around eight, but the long-lingering July days didn’t bring full dark before ten, long after his bedtime. Dawn and the next day of work came around four in the morning.
He said goodbye to Ullakko and set out for Ilmahenki. He passed the grave of Ullakko’s wife, buried next to a copse of dogwood. Ullakko had asked him to read the burial service. The nearest pastor was in Astoria, and although he came often, he couldn’t always do so.
Just half a mile from Tapiola, Ilmari passed a huge lightning-struck snag, over twenty feet tall, whitened with age and scarred black from fire. Ilmari thought of God’s wrath, striking down from heaven. Why would God make a man prosperous enough to lend someone money and then take away his wife and baby? Why would He give and then take away Ilmari’s own baby brother and two sisters? Why was there hell? He thought of burning, screaming with pain, forever. How could God be so cruel? But he had sent Jesus to save him, so he wasn’t cruel. He was just. He decided to stop thinking, because no one should question God.
When he reached Ilmahenki, he saw a figure standing on the far bank, barely observable against the wall of the forest that covered the high hills across Deep River to the north of Ilmahenki. It was Vasutäti, the name given to the old Indian woman by the Finnish immigrants. It meant “Aunty Basket.” Every two or three weeks Vasutäti made the rounds of the farms and logging camps selling her handwoven baskets. She was the last of the Ini’sal Indians, a small tribe of Chinookan-speakers who had lived on Deep River until they were decimated by European diseases.
Ilmari hesitated, then raised his hand in a tentative greeting. She stood there for a moment and then she, too, slowly raised her hand. It seemed to him that the distance between them, the river itself, shrank to nothing and he was captured by dark solemn eyes. Then the woman turned into the forest and disappeared.
He continued toward the house in the twilight, puzzling over the incident. In a surge of longing, he imagined a wife coming to the door to greet him.
He sighed and went in. The house had no curtains at the window, no cupboards to hold Sunday dinner dishes, and no furniture other than the red couch and utilitarian wood chairs. The knitted wool cap that his mother had made him six years earlier hung tattered on the wall. A good wife would have been embarrassed to let him out in public with such a rag on his head. He glanced at the dirt floor, devoid of the ubiquitous rag rugs that Finnish women seemed to turn out in endless profusion, all the while catching up with their neighbors, gossiping, or just quietly weaving them before bed by the embers of the evening cooking fire. If he’d tossed a pebble in the center of that house, its fall would have echoed off the walls and in his heart for hours.
He didn’t feel like going to sleep. Maybe sighting the yellow-bill meant someone to love was coming, someone who would love him back.
He took his kantele from the nail where it hung in its soft leather bag and walked to the river, using only the pale light fading in the west. Kerosene was expensive. Idly he started to strum the chords to “Beautiful Savior.” King of creation. Son of God and son of man. He tried to feel what that meant through the music. Son of God and son of man. He softly sang this phrase over and over. Then he went silent, listening only to the chords sung by the vibrating strings of the kantele. He began to pluck a single string, matching his voice to it with a simple, single, open vowel sound. He could hear four overtones from the single humming kantele string and he focused on matching the overtones from his voice to those of the string. Over and over. No thought. Just over and over, he matched his voice to the rich and complex vibrations. Over and over. He felt his way to the sound between the overtones, the sound the ear cannot hear.
Suddenly, light! Light flooded Ilmari’s mind, its brilliance obliterating everything around him, yet making everything clear. Every tree, every leaf, stood alone yet was part of an all-pervading fluctuating light that condensed to form it and then expanded to condense again into another object. The light swept through him like a storm hitting the coast after passing over three thousand miles of open sea, bending the tops of the Douglas firs and cedars, wrenching hemlocks, alders, and Oregon oaks from the earth.
Ilmari became aware of the sound of the river and opened his eyes to early dawn. In the east, in a luminous sky, Venus shone next to red Aldebaran, both still outshining the gathering light of the rising sun. He saw them as if for the first time with the clarity of someone newly birthed. He staggered into the house holding the kantele to his chest, weeping. He sat on his bed and stared at the wall. He knew there would be no sleep. The cattle needed tending; the cow needed milking.
* * *
He pondered the vision all that day, not knowing what to make of it. Maybe God wanted something from him. When Jesus appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus, Saul became Paul and brought Christianity to the Roman Empire. He, however, was no Paul. He thought about going to see Pastor Hoikka in Astoria but decided against it. Hoikka would probably think he’d been visited by the Devil. The Devil—people thought of Satan as some sort of bad person, just as they thought about Jesus as some sort of good person. What he experienced last night was beyond anything so small as a person. As if this something humans called God could be reduced to something they could grasp, like a father in the sky. Was Jesus really God? Was God really God? He tried to put the thought away. Maybe it came from the Devil. What had happened last night was ungraspable but experienced. What was he to do with this experience? He prayed for an answer, but no answer came.
Then there was the visit from the eagle and the cuckoo.
Ten days later, on a rainy fall afternoon, Ilmari looked up from his forge to see the figure of a man silhouetted in the door of the smithy.
“Yes?” he asked in English, letting the bellows ease.
The man walked up to him. In the light of the glowing charcoal Ilmari recognized Matti’s face. Matti’s body was totally unfamiliar. So, Matti was the eagle. They shook hands. “So, you’ve come,” Ilmari said.
“Yoh,” Matti replied.
That night, he made up a bed for Matti in the sauna and went to his own bed pondering how a brief unthinking act like Matti’s could set someone on a previously unknown path, his life forever changed. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye … we shall be changed.” Maybe Paul was referring not only to life after death.
Before putting the lamp out, Ilmari opened his Bible, as he always did. This entire week he’d been reading Matthew. He liked Luke better for the stories, especially for the Christmas story, but there was something more plain and fundamental about Matthew. It appealed to Ilmari’s practical side, which was always battling the part of him that kept searching for meaning in what is not seen but could be understood at least by him, even if he could never explain it. Like the experience with the kantele. Something similar had happened three times before, ever since he’d seen angels as a kid when his sisters and brother died. As far as he could tell, no one else had experiences like this and they were of no practical use.
Then it was there, in Matthew, chapter 16, as clear as MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. “And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Here was a clear practical response that could balance out these occasional, often frightening experiences of his. He decided to build God’s church in Tapiola and then fell asleep.