After Aino turned him down, Aksel had avoided Ilmahenki, other than for an occasional visit to the sauna or for a meal. He didn’t want to look as though he was sulking. Aksel decided to put into action the idea he’d had while on the spar tree on the Saaranpa show, and he boarded the General Washington for Astoria.
He walked into the smoky warm interior of the Lucky Logger to set his plan going. The pianist was playing what the Americans called a rag—a syncopated mesmerizing beat underlying a catchy melody line that seemed to never end, just constantly move. It moved just like the country: forward.
Karen, his favorite, was also the best dancer in the house. That night, she taught him the latest dance that had come north with some sailors from San Francisco, the Grizzly Bear.
Aksel returned from Astoria on Sunday with more than a hangover. In the bunkhouse, he handed Jouka a piece of sheet music. “It’s called ‘Frog Legs Rag.’”
Jouka looked at it. “I don’t read music, but this looks hard.”
“What about your piano player?”
“He can read music, but this will look hard to him, too.”
“Give it to him and see what he says.”
The next Saturday, March 27, the dance was at Tapiola. As Aksel hoped, Aino came along with Ilmari and Rauha, who even at five months pregnant had all the men’s attention. The unwritten code allowed married women to dance with others. Aksel now understood one primary assumption that underlay the code. Other than waltzing, where the partners held each other apart in a stiff frame, the old-country dances involved only hand-holding. The Grizzly Bear was intimate.
When the band struck up “Frog Legs Rag,” people stood momentarily puzzled on the dance floor, then slowly moved toward the walls. Aksel took a deep breath and walked up to Aino. She was standing next to Lempi.
“May I have this dance?” he asked Aino.
Aino looked at Lempi, then back at Aksel. “What do you dance to this … this … music?”
“It’s called the Grizzly Bear. I’ll teach you.”
She gave him her hand. Lempi’s face was as cold as a Finnish winter.
Aksel began the side-to-side lumbering motion of the dance, moving his feet in a sideways hop, combining a rise on his toe and a thumping heel drop to mark the beat. Aino awkwardly tried to copy him. He showed her again. She copied him again, this time smoothly. He took her out on the floor. Doing the crazy lurching imitation of a bear, he held her tight to his chest. Aino bent her head back and laughed.
Jouka kept playing the fiddle, staring at them, a hard, cold stare.
“Jouka doesn’t like you dancing with me,” Aksel said.
“Jouka doesn’t like me dancing like this with anyone.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed.
A couple of women started hissing and shouting: “For shame. For shame.”
Aksel could see them turning to their husbands, making out “Stop them” and “Do something” with their lips. The husbands hesitated. Then a woman stamped her foot and said something quite heated to her husband. Pointing at Aino, she shouted, “Whore.”
Jouka stopped playing. The other musicians stopped. The room went silent. Aksel saw Aino’s eyes tear up and felt her trembling. “You take that back,” he said to the woman. She looked to her husband.
“She will not,” he said.
Aksel guided Aino gently toward the wall, his eyes on the man, sizing him up, trying to think how he was going to take him. Before he took a step, Jouka barreled into the man whose wife had slandered Aino. The man’s friends joined to defend him. Aksel charged in, Matti and Ilmari right behind him.
The women backed up against the walls, some aghast, some enjoying themselves. They’d all seen fights before. The rules were clear but unspoken: no kicking a man when he was down, no choke holds, and certainly no knives or other weapons.
Lempi was holding her fists to her mouth. Aino was standing straight with her shoulders back.
The fighters were getting tired. Two or three minutes were exhausting, even for these aerobic machines, and some of the older, married men took the opportunity to start moving between fighters. Another unwritten rule: when the fight was over, it was over and no hard feelings.
Jouka was standing over the man whose wife had called Aino a whore. The man’s face was as bloody as Jouka’s, but his nose was broken and Jouka’s wasn’t. Someone gently moved Jouka back and offered the man on the floor a hand, watching Jouka carefully. Still breathing hard, Jouka looked over to where Aino and Lempi stood. One eye would soon be black and swollen and his knuckles were raw. Aksel was bent over, breathing hard as well, clearly trying to recover from a punch or kick to his abdomen. He, too, looked over at Aino and Lempi, then painfully straightened.
Jouka strode over to Aksel and just as Aksel drew himself upright, slugged him with a right cross to his head, sending him back to the floor. Aksel managed to get to his knees, trying to shake his head clear. Jouka headed outside.
Lempi started toward Aksel, but Aino caught her arm. “Let him get up on his own.”
Lempi shook her arm free, clearly furious with Aino, but she stopped. She watched Aksel struggle to his feet, then she rushed to him.
The band started up again without Jouka. Aksel had disappeared.
Aino and Lempi went to the ladies’ room, a canvas screen that shielded the only mirror in the building. Aino started to put her hair back in order.
Lempi let Aino have it. “For Christ’s sake, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Serving food to loggers didn’t do much for language refinement. “Jouka’s good-looking, a great dancer, a good earner, and clearly head over heels for you.”
“I know. He proposed.” Aino said, primping in the mirror, pleased with the effect this would have on Lempi. Of course, she knew Lempi pushed her toward Jouka because Lempi liked Aksel. Aino patted something invisible into place and turned to her. “I said no. I don’t believe in marriage.”
“Right, free love,” Lempi said sarcastically.
“Why not?”
“That makes you a hussy.”
“And giving it away for a house, food, and security in marriage makes you a whore.”
“Don’t bait me. I won’t rise to that nonsense.”
When Aino returned to the dance floor, Jouka was waiting for her. Aksel was still nowhere to be seen. The band moved into the accordion player’s two standard waltzes: “Skål Skål Skål” followed by “Livet i Finnskogarna” with its lively triplets and wavelike melody.
She knew she had a gift for dancing, as did Jouka. When they danced together, they were like one beautiful body, man and woman in perfect harmony. Waltzing highlighted this. She became the sun in the center of the solar system, supported and contained by the gravity of Jouka’s strength and rhythm, the other dancers turning into circling planets. If he ever asked her to marry him when they were dancing, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to say no. She could dance with Jouka every night. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Voitto was dead. She tried to make that sound final in her mind. Dead. Jouka was a good earner. If all she had to do was keep house for Jouka, there would be no farmwork, no need to midwife. She would have time for organizing. But what if she had a child? She pushed the unromantic thoughts from her mind.
The dancing wound down about one in the morning and Aino found herself on the muddy street in front of the store and warehouse in the dim light of a kerosene lantern. With just a mile on the wagon road to Ilmahenki, she had no chance of getting lost. She’d long ago mastered walking at night, trusting some instinct that guided her by dim light above the trees. Tonight, however, with the drizzle and thick clouds, there would be no guidance. The mile to Ilmahenki felt like twenty in the cold darkness.
Jouka came down the steps. “Want me to walk home with you?” he asked.
At first, she refused. He insisted. She was glad he did.
He tucked his violin under his coat, the strap from its deerskin cover around his neck, and offered her his arm. They soon saw the light from the lantern Ilmari or Rauha had left on the porch.
Aino turned, intending to break the link between them. He reached out, taking her upper arms in his hands, and asked her to marry him—again.
Her romantic musings about marrying Jouka had become a real choice. She wasn’t ready for this. It was so much easier to keep playing with possibilities. She felt as if Lempi was in her head telling her to say yes. Did she love Jouka? It would be wrong to marry for just practical reasons. It didn’t feel like what she had felt with Voitto. Was that love or something else? She fell back on ideals to guide her, not on her heart. “Why can’t we just be friends? All this … this societal pressure about marriage. It’s just the police saying that it’s OK to do what’s OK anyway.”
Jouka recoiled and stepped back. A cloud of anger crossed his face. Then he smiled. He raised his palms to the air. “So, it’s nothing. Let’s you and I go into the bushes.”
She took a step back. Fear. Surely, he was joking.
“Come on. Let’s do it. Right now.” He bowed with a sweeping gesture toward the bushes.
Helsinki. Voitto. She brought up her sisu. “Jouka! You stop talking like that. I won’t put up with it.”
He covered her mouth and nose with one large hand while grabbing the back of her head with the other. He pulled her close to him, his lips right up against her ear, his breath on the back of her neck. She panicked, struggling, futilely trying to slap his hands away, feeling no stronger than a child. “Big talk,” Jouka whispered. “I know you don’t believe it.” He let her go. “Don’t worry. I would never hurt you.”
She scratched his face and stepped back, breathing hard, her heart pounding.
He touched his face and looked at the blood on his hand. “You keep up this political nonsense about marriage,” he said, “the only way you’ll ever make love is being treated like a whore.”
She ran to the light. Whirling around, nearly spitting, she shouted, “A free whore, goddamn you!” She ran into her big brother’s house, where she never had to make any hard decisions, like marriage. She threw herself onto the bed, burying sobs in her pillow.