Answering that question, among many, kept Aino organizing. Freed from the pregnancy and freed from working long hours in the dining hall, she began widening her contacts with other Wobblies, as IWWs were increasingly being called. All spring she’d tried to keep up her duties at home, leaving only for a day or two three or four times a month to help sign up new members. She knew that it was hard on Jouka, and she felt a little guilty about it. Jouka came home in the dark, ate dinner, and collapsed into bed, only to get up the next morning in the dark. He rightfully expected breakfast and a packed lunch.
She would ask Lempi or some of the other wives who were more sympathetic to the Wobbly cause to check in on Jouka. She felt burdened, not by Jouka, but by a system that kept wages just high enough to keep her and Jouka alive, both working constantly but unable to save anything. Exhausting as organizing was, she saw the One Big Union as the only way out for her and Jouka and everyone like them.
Membership was a key component of union power. Even at Reder Logging, despite all her efforts, only a third of the loggers secretly carried the IWW’s red card. From members came money and money was what sustained strikes. She’d learned this the hard way at Camp Two. She’d also learned that striking against a single owner was far less effective than striking an entire industry.
Month after month, sleeping on the floor at fellow Wobblies’ homes, talking her way on to boats for free rides, occasionally splurging on a rail ticket, but mostly doing a great deal of walking, she signed men up to carry the red card of the One Big Union.
Aino kept up with events through Työmies (the Worker), a Finnish-language labor newspaper printed in Hancock, Michigan, which several of the Finns in camp had pitched in to get. Several others had jointly subscribed to the Industrial Worker, the IWW newspaper printed in Spokane. The papers passed from hand to hand, becoming tattered and torn with use, but they provided the only countervailing voice to the capitalist-controlled press. The news was rarely good. Sometimes Aino felt so oppressed by it—by the overwhelming odds labor faced—that she wished she didn’t have to read it. Sometimes it made her just damned mad and got her sisu up.
Women conquered their fear, just like the men. The men could not let fear of death or crippling stop them from providing for their families. The women could not show their fear for their men or their fear of the very real consequences for them and their children of death or crippling, lest it weaken the men’s resolve. The dangers of logging were faced with a united and silent front.
In late June, a logger named Hendrickson lost an arm. Aino had helped Mrs. Hendrickson deliver her fourth child just four months earlier. Now she was helping her move out of the company shack. The Hendricksons, all six of them, were moving to Portland, hoping there would be work for a one-armed man or that Mrs. Hendrickson could get domestic or cannery work.
Aino got home from the Hendricksons’ after Jouka that evening, so dinner was late. Jouka, as usual, was ravenously hungry. Although he said he fully understood Aino’s wanting to help the Hendricksons, she felt his resentment. Knowing that the resentment was to a large measure left over from previous neglect didn’t abate her own annoyance with Jouka’s seeming indifference to anything except his stomach.
“How can you just sit there, eating? Hendrickson’s arm is gone and they’re going to be starving in Portland. Reder and all the other owners take no responsibility.”
“He’s the one who stuck his arm where it shouldn’t have been stuck.”
“So, it’s his fault?”
“Yoh.” Jouka took in another bite of stew. “Logging’s dangerous. Hendrickson knew that when he signed on.”
“He didn’t sign on to be so exhausted three-quarters of the way through the day that he can’t think straight.”
“Being tired isn’t an excuse.”
“No! It’s a cause!”
Jouka stopped eating. Looking at his plate, as if explaining to a child, he said, “If we don’t log as fast as we can, Reder Logging goes out of business. Reder Logging goes out of business, we don’t eat. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
He started to eat again. Aino put her hand over his bowl. He looked up at her.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she said.
He put his hand on hers, took it up, and kissed it. “Aino, I’m a good logger. It won’t happen to us.”
Aino looked over her shoulder through the window. Down the railroad tracks she could see several bundles of the Hendricksons’ belongings waiting to be loaded on the next train out.