Two weeks after the Reders’ daughter was born, Matti and Ilmari were ready to move the donkey. In the bunkhouse on Saturday night, June 1, Matti told Jouka and Aksel that he and Ilmari could use some help packing the haul-back line, grease, additional blocks, and wire to the site.
“I’m not doing much tomorrow,” Jouka said.
“I’ll help,” Aksel said.
Matti was a little surprised at their eagerness.
The next day the three of them walked from Reder’s Camp to Ilmahenki. When they got to Ilmari’s shop, Jouka asked, “How’s Aino?”
“Ask her yourself,” Matti replied. “She’s at the house.”
Jouka smiled and walked off. Cocking his head sideways and raising his eyebrows, Matti looked at Aksel. Aksel looked at the ground. Then, without a word, he followed Jouka. Ilmari also followed, smiling, proud that these two young men were vying for his little sister.
When Aino saw Jouka coming, she scooted quickly into the house, going to the mirror on the kitchen wall to get her hair in order. She put her glasses in her apron pocket. Then, she put them on again and took her apron off. Then she thought better of that and put the apron back on. When she started again to take off her glasses, she saw another figure following behind the figure she guessed was Jouka. It was Aksel. She smiled.
Aksel and Jouka came in, taking their hats off, followed by Ilmari. The three standing together, two tall and fair, one not so tall but dark and broad of chest, made the kitchen feel cramped. She took their hats and motioned them to the table. The three men sat, saying nothing, while Aino poured the coffee and cut each a slice of pulla.
“Come to help Matti with the wire rope?” Ilmari asked after everyone had taken a sip and a bite.
“Yoh,” Jouka replied. Aksel just nodded.
There was more silence while the men chewed. Aino knew they were friends, but she could almost feel the air quivering. It made her anxious and simultaneously terribly pleased with herself. Finally, Aino asked, “How’s it going at camp? Reder keeping to the bargain?”
“Yoh,” Jouka replied.
Aino waited to see if anything would follow. It didn’t. She looked at Aksel. “The savings for the boat coming along?”
“Yoh,” Aksel replied.
And so it went, until Matti poked his head in the door and Aksel and Jouka left. A nice Sunday chat.
Jouka came along to help again the next Sunday as well. Aksel had taken off for Astoria the night before and no one expected him back. This time, Aino was hoeing the garden weeds when she heard Jouka clear his throat. She startled, then turned to face him, fighting the urge to take her glasses off. She was self-aware enough to know that she was vain, but there was no need for Jouka to know. She left them on.
Jouka took the hoe from her. “Kiitos,” she said. She followed behind him, pulling the uprooted weeds.
He stopped after a while and faced her. “You weren’t at the dance last night.”
“Busy.”
“Too busy to dance? Aino …” He gestured around him, questioning why she would stay home.
“I was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Aino could feel Jouka struggling between genuine interest and some sort of jealousy.
“I was at the Astorian Suomalainen Sosialisti Klubi.”
“And you walked home at night? Alone?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time, but no. I stayed in the new ASSK hall.”
“Alone?”
“Jouka. It is all perfectly legitimate.”
“People will talk.”
“People talk no matter what I do.”
“So, why not do things people won’t talk about?”
“Like?”
“Like come to the dance at Knappton next Saturday. I won’t be playing. There’s a band from Astoria.”
“People will talk about that, for sure.”
“Yes, but that kind of talk is expected. Matti can come. It’ll all be legitimate.”
Aino paused. She looked at Jouka solemnly. “Jouka, I’d love to go, but I’ve committed to making a speech in Willapa.”
“A speech?”
“What? I can’t talk?”
Jouka got flustered. “No …” He started hoeing, fiercely. She followed, weeding.
Jouka turned to her. “Is it because of Aksel Långström?”
“Nooo,” Aino said. “He’s my little brother’s friend. He’s a kid.”
“He doesn’t look like one.”
Aino didn’t respond.
“Matti says you’ll be twenty next March,” Jouka said.
“How am I supposed to take that little piece of information that I already knew?”
Jouka looked at her, as if she were doing something to hurt herself. “I turned twenty-two in April,” he said.
“I like you, Jouka, but this stops now.”
Looking into her eyes, pressing his lips together, Jouka dropped the hoe at her feet and walked off, leaving Aino trembling.
* * *
Jouka joined Matti and Ilmari as they walked to the donkey site. Ilmari had patched the hole in the steam tube and now the three began the backbreaking work of replacing the lost water with creek water. They reeved the cable through two blocks and Matti ran one of the blocks, paying out the wire rope as he went, to a stump, attaching it with a hook choker looped back on the standing line. They greased every moving part.
Then the moment came. The three stood looking at the iron monster, saying nothing. Matti lit the fire. This time only a little rust flaked off as the boiler expanded. They watched it tensely, Matti throwing wood into the firebox, building steam pressure. Two large steam pistons began to hammer back and forth, moving drivers, smaller versions of those found on a steam locomotive, one on each side of the donkey. Ilmari climbed onto the machine, grabbed the five-foot-long steel gear lever, and gave Matti a grim look. He threw his weight against the friction clutch that linked the axle of the single drum to the main shaft being spun by twin drivers. Screaming in protest at being wakened from its long sleep, the yarder drum bucked briefly and then began turning.
The three of them looked at each other and said nothing.
Matti gave two pulls of his fist for an imaginary whistle and Ilmari gave two toots back from the tarnished brass whistle, then put tension on the line.
The line lifted off the ground, quivering with the strain. With a belch of steam the old donkey lurched from the mud accumulated around the two large skids bolted beneath it. The donkey bucked and squealed in protest, but it moved. Matti ran to clear obstacles as it jerked toward the fixed block. When the donkey closed on the block, Matti removed the block from the stump and reset it another two hundred feet closer to the bay. Grunting with the strain, pulling the cable to unwind it from the donkey’s drum and attaching it to the reset block, they started the next leg.
Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1907, the occasional midwife job kept up Aino’s contribution to Ilmari—along with cooking, cleaning, milking, mending, knitting, and tending the vegetable garden. In late September, Aino was bundling the hay in the field, moving behind Ilmari, smooth and steady with the scythe. He’d been in the forest with Vasutäti the whole day before and Aino had lit into him because he’d left her with all the work.
As always, Ilmari took criticism as he took praise, which is to say without affect. He said he was sorry, got out his whetstone, and started sharpening his scythe. His eyes, however, were seeing something hers didn’t see.
It was a typical late-September day, the sun out, the air cool, but she could almost feel the rain gathering itself out to sea. Ilmari said there were two seasons here, not four. The wet season would start in October and go through June, succeeded by the dry season, which went through September. She remembered following behind her father and Ilmari, Matti following her, gathering sheaves with her mother, just before Ilmari left for America, helping her mother weave the hay into stacks that would shed the rain and snow. She remembered Suomi, its birches and lakes, rolling hills, icy still rivers in deep winter, the sun low in the south casting blue shadows from cozy houses onto the snow and the smell of pines and wood smoke. She paused to look at Ilmari’s tiny purchase of civilization in the vast forest where rain-swollen streams, hidden from view by trees too large and close together to see through or by salal taller than a man and too thick to penetrate, ran unseen to wide tidal rivers. The farms here, unlike the tidy farms at home, seemed more like survivors in a battlefield of stumps and slash, just waiting to be reclaimed by the forest that rolled unconquered and impenetrable, all the way to the other side of the Cascade mountains. She wanted desperately to return to Suomi.
Her brothers were focused on the here and now. Sunday by Sunday, two hundred feet at a time, the length of the main cable, Ilmari and Matti yanked, bucked, and hauled the donkey to Willapa Bay, just south of Long Island. They built a raft around the yarder and, through several more weeks of nearly superhuman effort, managed to get an A-frame set in the mud exposed at low tide. They hoisted the donkey into the air, so it hung beneath the A-frame like a fat spider, and at high tide lowered it to the raft and towed it to the mouth of Deep River behind a hired tug. Again, using the yarder to pull itself, they moved the raft to Ilmahenki.
The entire journey took five months of Sundays, but by November 1907, Matti and Ilmari were ready to start logging. Their first piece of business was to negotiate with Higgins to buy more cable on credit. The Koski brothers’ collateral was their promise of sawmill-ready logs, because they had timber and a working yarder on-site.
Logging was less about cutting down trees than about moving them. Ideal logs were four to eight feet in diameter and up to forty feet long. These logs weighed over twenty tons. The bigger logs, if left at forty feet, could weigh more than fifty tons, requiring that they be cut to thirty-two-foot or even sixteen-foot lengths. To move a log from where the tree was felled to water deep enough to float it required bravery, brute strength, and endurance. More important, it required extremely creative engineering. It quickly became apparent that Matti was a natural engineer. He’d solve the most difficult problems of angles, slopes, and gravity with secondhand jerry-rigged equipment made by Ilmari, and with hand tools. If he had had the opportunity to go to school, he would have been building bridges and skyscrapers, but work like that would have bored him.
Jouka and Aksel agreed to help on Sundays for a dollar a day in cash plus the sandwiches that Aino provided along with coffee. They logged the easy trees close to the river first, a mixture of spruce, western red cedar, Douglas fir, and hemlock, the last of which they worked around because hemlock wasn’t worth much. As they moved farther from Deep River, the logging got tougher. They made corduroy skid roads from smaller logs to move the bigger ones. Ideal-size trees, four to six feet in diameter and easier to move, were plentiful. There were plenty of eight- to ten-footers, but they took a gamble on those, as there was a higher risk of rotten cores and other defects. The giants, twelve feet across or more, were predominately the Sitka spruce, but included cedar and Douglas fir. It could take two weekends just to get one of these giants down.