Aino could feel Ullakko watching her as she washed the dinner dishes. She wasn’t at all worried that he would harm or even frighten her; he wasn’t that sort of man. She just wished he wouldn’t moon at her with those sad blue eyes of his. An image of Voitto waiting for her by the old church in the darkness, the glow of his cigarette, a memory of the feel of him through all their winter clothes as they hugged. She looked at the plate in her hand. She looked at her hand, red and raw from harsh soap and hot water. It had been five days since she’d read the letter and she’d thrown herself into her work at Ullakko’s to bury the pain. She understood Ullakko’s longing, but he was an old man and life was hard. She saw the police storming into Raitanen’s house where Voitto was hiding. She had given them Raitanen’s name. Fighting anguish and anger, she slammed a plate down on the counter next to the sink a little harder than she’d wanted to. Ullakko moved his head back a little in surprise. She sighed. “It’s getting dark,” she said, turning to him. The September days were getting shorter. “I’d better get going.”
“Yoh,” he said.
Aino took off her apron and hung it on the wall in the ensuing but not unexpected silence. The kitchen was gloomy with only the waning light coming through the window. No need to waste kerosene until it was too dark to see. The little five-year-old came running into the kitchen and hugged Aino’s knees. She buried her face in Aino’s long skirt and then looked up at her. “Take me with you. Take me with you.”
Aino touched the little girl’s hair, then stood straighter and went for her coat. The little girl trailed after her, no longer grasping her skirt. Aino put on her hat and went to the mirror to make sure it was on properly. She saw her face with her glasses and frowned at it. “It’s too far for a little girl to walk and besides, you’ll miss bedtime,” she said. She knew the girl hadn’t expected any other answer.
Her big sister came in the room. “Quitting time,” she said in English.
“Qvit-ting time,” Aino repeated.
“It means it is time to stop working,” the girl said in Finnish. “I quit,” she went on, “means ‘I won’t work anymore.’”
“I qvit. You qvat. They qvut.”
The girl laughed, adding to Aino’s frustration with this language that was so different from Finnish. This girl had probably never read anything besides that stupid Sears Roebuck catalog, Aino thought darkly.
“I quit. You quit. They quit,” she said.
“Qvit, qvit, qvit? It’s a stupid language. It’s no wonder the Norwegians pick it up so fast.”
The girl laughed at the joke and Aino felt better.
Ullakko went to the kitchen window and looked outside. It was raining, and the heavy clouds were bringing darkness on fast. He turned to her. “I’ll go with you. I kept you here too long.”
She was heading for the door. “No need. I’m fine.” She did not want to owe him any favors. It was bad enough being his servant.
“No, no, no. No problem,” He said. He put a fresh candle in the square glass-enclosed lantern and lit it. Aino waited impatiently. There was no stopping him from coming.
They walked silently on the dirt road, the quavering light of the lantern just reaching the dark forest at their sides, to be lost in the darkness behind them. They came out of the tunnel of the forest and they saw the dim light of a candle showing through a farmhouse window across a cleared field. Ullakko finally spoke. “It gets dark early,” he said.
Aino raised her eyebrows, imploring the heavens, but he couldn’t see her doing it. “It’s nearly November,” she said, not wanting to be impolite.
“Yoh.”
The road went into a patch of alders and brush. She heard rustling. Just last week Ilmari killed a cougar that had been prowling around his cattle. Suddenly, in spite of herself, she was glad Ullakko had come along.
When they got to Tapiola, faint light from the warehouse by the boat landing softly lit the dirt street. “You don’t need to come any more,” she said. “It’s only a mile and you need to get back and put the little ones to bed.”
Ullakko held the lantern up to see her face. It illuminated his own, along with his yearning blue eyes at the same time. “Really, I’ll be fine.”
Ullakko nodded and smiled at her. He handed her the lantern. “Here, you take this.”
She refused the first time, but on the second offer she took it, secretly glad he’d let her have it. It meant he’d walk back in the dark, but then he was a man.
“Keep it,” he said. “I mean it’s yours. You’ll need it now that the days are getting shorter.”
Every time she thought she’d come even with him, he did some other kindness that put her right back in the hole again. She thanked him and took the road to Ilmari’s. She could sense him watching her as she moved in her small circle of light into the darkness. She didn’t want to turn around and give him any ideas. She passed the old snag on the north side of town without really seeing it, thinking about Voitto, thinking about the coming revolution.
Upon reaching Ilmahenki, she stopped and blew out the candle, feeling the spirit of the air after whom Ilmahenki was named moving all around her. Off in the distance, with only the faintest light from a candle showing through a window, she heard Ilmari playing the kantele and singing. She stood there, the wind rustling the few remaining birch and alder leaves, the slow response of the Douglas fir boughs seeming to move with Ilmari’s song. A fine mist had started falling, cooling her face. She became aware of the smell of her damp wool skirt. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed with love for her brothers, here with her in this dark forested land with its distantly separated spots of light. An ache rose in her heart for Finland and her family, and then her whole body ached for Voitto. But that ache turned quickly to revulsion. It seemed as if that stool leg was still there between her legs. In her mind’s eye, she pictured herself hanging there, heard herself saying the name Raitanen.
Now weeping, looking into the darkness above, imagining Voitto listening to her, she whispered, “I will never betray you again.” She didn’t say it aloud, but she felt then that she’d never marry another. She would dedicate herself to the revolution. She saw herself undergoing a novitiate, renouncing the world, expiating her guilt.
She breathed deeply to stop herself from crying. She could not, however, stop the trembling that now seized her as it had been doing at unexpected moments ever since she arrived in America. She remembered her sisu.
By the time the Elna crossed the equator, Aksel was a skilled seaman. He’d come to like the solitude of the crosstree so far above the decks and would sit there when he could, watching for whales, seabirds, anything to break the monotony and get away from the cramped quarters belowdecks. He also went there when he was terribly homesick. He would look east, trying to imagine flying across South America and then the Atlantic like a seabird, flying straight home to see his mother, father, and sisters and, hopefully, Gunnar. He could see Gunnar smiling at him and tousling his hair with a big callused hand. Maybe it turned out all right. He could not know because he always moved ahead of any mail. Where would his parents send a letter anyway?
When the Elna reached San Francisco in October, Aksel was the best top man of the crew.
The skipper allowed them only enough American dollars to have a hell of a time ashore while the ship was being unloaded. Giving them what they were owed before they got back to Stockholm would only invite desertion. Aksel hit the saloons with the rest of them but soon proved not as able in this particular seaman’s skill. He was throwing up bad food and worse beer after just five hours.
He made his way to the docks and was dry heaving over the water when the mate and a couple of Aksel’s new friends came up behind him, laughing. Although mildly intoxicated, they seemed unimpaired. Aksel rose stiffly, taking his hands from his knees. He looked at them darkly.
“Hey, Aksel. We got something for you.” There were muffled laughs.
“What?”
“Something you’ve never had before.”
“I can’t eat a goddamned thing.”
Laughing, they frog-marched him back toward the center of the town.
The interior of the brothel was dark. Kerosene lamps set in sconces barely illuminated the unpainted walls of clear redwood boards.
The mate was talking to the woman who supervised everything. They looked at Aksel, both smiling. Money was handed over and the woman walked to where Aksel was sitting at a card table, his back to it so he could see every passing girl.
The supervisor asked a question.
Aksel shook his head. “No English,” he said. He saw his friends averting their eyes, suddenly looking at their drinks, smiles on their faces.
The woman reached to take Aksel’s chin in her hand. “How old? One, two, three, four.”
Aksel caught on and brightened. He spread both hands wide, then showed seven additional fingers. The woman laughed and showed him fourteen with her fingers. He blushed.
She led him up the stairs to a single bed in a small room, then walked out, closing the door.
After he had waited about ten minutes, a woman, maybe in her early twenties, her eyes older than her face, walked in. She was wearing a cream-colored silk robe, tied with a red cord with tassels at both ends. She said hello to him in Swedish. Aksel fell in love.
She wore silk stockings held up the old-fashioned way with a ribbon that went around her thighs and not with the little wire loops and straps that attached to the corsets that he’d seen in advertisements in Stockholm. Between the top of her stockings and the bottom of her corset, just peeping out and then disappearing with the flow of her chemise, he saw her pubic hair. He was embarrassingly erect.
“Lie down,” she said in Swedish.
Aksel looked around for help, but no one else was there. She pushed him gently onto his back and, straddling him with her knees, she walked herself up his legs. She held a condom in front of his eyes. “This is called a rubber,” she said, stretching it with both hands. “For obvious reasons.” She wriggled slightly to get into a better position. “Did you ever hear of syphilis?”
Aksel nodded yes.
“Did you ever hear of gonorrhea?”
Aksel shook his head no.
“It makes you pee pus and it hurts like hell when you do it.”
Aksel felt a little sick and his erection started to subside.
She got him hard again and rolled the condom on. Aksel gasped as she settled herself on him. “Easy … easy.”
Aksel exploded and then fainted.
He knew he was out only a second or two because she was still slowly withdrawing from him when he came to his senses. “If you leave here with nothing else in that square head of yours, remember this. If you don’t want to go blind, crazy, or run pus from your pecker for the rest of your life”—she pulled off the condom—“you use one of these.” She swung her feet to the floor and threw the condom into a trash can. She then matter-of-factly put the washbasin on the floor, squatted over it, and began washing herself.
“That’s it?” Aksel asked.
“That’s it, sugar,” she said. “It lasts longer the more you do it.”
The woman stood up and dried herself with a towel that hung on the wall. Then she put on her silk robe. “Your ship’s from Stockholm. I grew up there. You don’t sound like someone from Stockholm,” she said.
“Ostrobothnia.” Aksel felt as though he couldn’t say a coherent sentence. “Near Karleby.”
“Ahh. I used to work up in Nordland.” Aksel’s face went quizzical. “Way north of here. Quite a lot of your folks are there, especially around Astoria. That’s in Oregon. Of course, the majority are Finnish-speakers.”
“What do you mean, a lot?”
“Hell, sweetheart. It’s like all of Finland moved there. No work at home and the Russians drafting the boys … More work than people up there.”
“What kind of work?”
“Logging, sawmills, mostly.” She was moving toward the door. He didn’t want her to go.
“Are there fishermen in Astoria?”
“Is that what you did in the old country?”
Aksel nodded. “With my father and my …” He hesitated before adding, “big brother.”
“Well you’d need them both if you want to get into fishing up there. The river is over eight kilometers wide and when the salmon run, you can cross the river on their backs.”
Aksel looked at her askance. “Well, OK, maybe there is a little water between them.” She paused, a memory lighting her face. “But I tell you this, and this is no bullshit, they call the biggest salmon up there Chinooks. Those goddamned fish weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s nearly sixty kilos,” she said impressively. “I don’t even weigh that much.”
Aksel’s mouth was open.
“Of course you’d need your own boat to get into that game.”
Aksel made a quick calculation. “How much do you get for logging or working in a sawmill?”
“Dollar and a half, maybe a couple of bucks a day. But you eat well in the logging camps. They’ll board you, too. You pay for it, of course. But you’d never catch me in one of those fleapits they call bunkhouses. Damp straw and wet long johns.” Her voice trailed off and she looked into the distance. “I’d think twice about getting into the logging game.”
She didn’t elaborate, but Aksel knew she was talking about danger. It excited him. How could it be more dangerous than fishing or sailing?
“Do you have to speak English?”
“You don’t have to speak at all, sugar.”
All the next day, as the ship was still unloading, Aksel was in a nervous state. He couldn’t go home to Finland, at least not until Gunnar said it was all clear. Gunnar must be all right. Sweden wasn’t home. He liked the crew, mostly, but months at sea living as close to them as head lice, followed by a few days drunk and then more months at sea, didn’t seem appealing. On the one hand, he wouldn’t get paid until they returned to Sweden. On the other hand, if many of his home people lived around Astoria, maybe it would be like going home.
Soaking wet and shivering slightly in the Sunday morning darkness, his wet seabag beside him, Aksel watched the Elna‘s lights as she put out to sea. The seabag being a dead giveaway, he had slipped overboard on the harborside of the ship, not the dockside, so as not to alert anyone. The only thing that made him sad: he was leaving the first mate, who had been kind to him, short of a hand again.
When the ship was well out of the harbor, he hoisted the seabag on his shoulder and set off north. He had two dollars. He decided he could walk to Astoria. It couldn’t be too far.