Up by five every morning, Aino reached Ullakko’s house by six thirty. At first, she felt dwarfed by the forest and nervous around the children. Having been the youngest girl, she had no experience with little children other than Matti, who was nearly her age. All she could remember about her baby brother, Väinö, was holding his tiny cold body. Within a few weeks, however, she began to relax. Ullakko’s children all spoke English fluently, and she began to pick up English from the oldest daughter. She even began to enjoy the walk to and from Ullakko’s. The blackberries were rapidly ripening, replacing the yellow, watery salmonberries and the few deep-red thimbleberries still around when she first arrived. She began carrying an old coffee can with a string handle threaded through two holes punched under the open rim to fill up on her way to Ullakko’s and again before she returned to Ilmari’s.
Her first blackberry pie was a disaster. Ilmari and Matti politely ate the filling, leaving the dense crust. She had no one to turn to, so was stymied about what went wrong. The next day, she remembered Maíjaliisa folding in chunks of lard. They’d had pigs in Finland, but none here, so on her second try she used butter. The brothers ate the crust. Progress.
When the blue huckleberries came in, she spent one evening picking the tiny berries until dark and came in with a full can. She was pleased to see that Ilmari waited outside the door and looked relieved when she appeared. On Sunday, the brothers said they liked the pie—the equivalent for Finnish men of a standing ovation.
* * *
In late August, Ilmari returned from Nygaard’s General Store in Knappton with a typically fat letter from Maíjaliisa. The store served as the only post office in the area.
Aino and Ilmari waited for Matti to come home Saturday night to read it, but it turned out he’d walked to a dance at Knappton and didn’t get to Ilmahenki until two in the morning. Ilmari woke her and the three siblings sat around the kitchen table, the kerosene lamp in the table’s center lighting their faces.
Aino was the best reader. The letter covered the usual late-summer farm talk: the size of the Laakkonens’ oat crop, how a new kid was growing and would be a fine milker, two pages about new babies, changing the draft flow in Laakkonens’ barn by adding another cupola so with the coming winter less condensation would be created. Then came the paragraph starting with “Aino, there is bad news …”
She stopped reading aloud. Her hand went to her throat as she continued reading to herself. She started to quiver. She looked at her startled brothers and, her hand still at her throat, stood, dropped the letter onto the table, and walked out the door. In the darkness, she fell to her knees and looked up in anguish at the cold August stars. The horror, the guilt, and the loss came out in one long, anguished cry. She put her face on the cool forest duff, and the old fir needles stuck to the tears on her face as she mumbled over and over through her sobbing, “I didn’t know.”
Inside the house, Matti picked up the letter and read it aloud to Ilmari. The young man from Kokkola, Oskar Penttilä, the one Aino called Voitto, had been in police hands for months. He had been found in Turku, just days after the raid, hiding in the home of a fellow traveler named Raitanen. The police had gone straight to the house and arrested both. Maíjaliisa conjectured that not only had the raid been compromised, but an informer had been planted in the cell. After weeks of inquiry, the Penttiläs, who were connected people, were informed that their son had died of natural causes while in prison. It was unlikely they would ever find out where he was buried.
Matti quietly put the letter on the table and looked at Ilmari. They both could hear Aino sobbing.
The night of the letter marked the moment when Aino retreated from them into a cold and secret world all her own. Her anguished guilt over betraying Voitto was channeled into icy anger toward all who opposed the revolution and hatred for whoever had betrayed them.