Summer for Aino and Jouka meant more daylight to get more chores done. Aino was darning one of Jouka’s wool socks by the window, while he was outside splitting firewood, stacking it in long parallel rows covered by chunks of bark. There, it would dry over the next year. Dry wood burned hotter and reduced creosote buildup, which led to chimney fires. The shack required no heating in summer, so wood was needed just for cooking until at least October. She heard Jouka shout a hello and the murmur of his and a woman’s voice. Then she heard the striking of his splitting maul start again and almost immediately a knock at the door. It was Lempi. She had a wicker basket of three different colored yarns and a half-finished sweater in it. She’d come to talk.
Aino got Lempi coffee and Lempi knitted while Aino darned. Sitting at the table in the Sunday quiet—with no screeching steel cables, no rumbling railcars outside the door, the husbands safe for the day, her friend Lempi wanting to bring up whatever it was—she felt calm joy.
“More coffee?” she asked Lempi in Finnish.
“I’m good. Thank you,” she answered in English.
It was good Lempi refused. She wouldn’t have to make a second pot for Jouka’s Monday morning cup. They could afford an extra Sunday pot of coffee now that Jouka made good wages running the locomotive, but old habits, especially ones involving money, die slowly. She realized Lempi had been talking to her. She recalled the words that she had unconsciously recorded in her mind, recovered, and responded as if she’d been listening all along. “Huttula asked you to marry him?”
Lempi nodded, a smile on her face.
“And …?” Aino asked.
“I said yes.”
So, Aino thought, she couldn’t wait for Aksel. Probably wise. Aksel was a loner at heart.
“I know he’s old,” Lempi said quietly, interpreting Aino’s lack of an immediate response as disapproval. “But he’s making two and a quarter a day now on the steam donkey and he even told me he loves me.”
He was making almost as much as Jouka, Aino thought, then rebuked herself mentally. It was insidious. Here she was comparing scraps from under Reder’s table with her best friend. If any of them would just put their noses above the tabletop, then they would see the truth—a table groaning with more food than the few diners could possibly eat in a week or even a month.
“Yes, but he still pays Reder a dollar and a quarter for room and board,” Aino said.
“We’ll be able to get a company house.”
Aino looked up and all around the small one-room shack with exaggerated disdain.
“It’s better than the henhouse,” Lempi said.
“I suppose so. If you prefer smelling long johns”—she nodded toward Jouka’s underwear hanging from a line above the stove—“to drying menstrual rags.”
“Oh, Aino …” They both laughed. Then they looked at each other, the steady sound of Jouka and his maul coming through the single open window. “Aren’t you happy for me?”
Aksel hung in the air between them, between the sounds of the maul. A girl had to make choices.
“He’s a good man,” Aino said. “He will be a good provider.”
“Yes,” Lempi said, instead of “yoh.” She hesitated. “Would you be my matron of honor?”
“Is it going to be a church wedding?”
“Well, Huttula is a Lutheran.”
“What about you?”
“Of course, I am. Oh, Aino, I know what you think about religion, but I just never imagined my wedding any other way and certainly not in some government building. I’m not like you, that way. No one is,” she added.
“Oh, Lempi. Of course I’ll be your matron of honor.”
She and Lempi smiled at each other. Aino certainly didn’t feel a need to be more demonstrative. “Big white dress and all?” Aino asked.
“Well,” Lempi said. “That is another question.”
They decided a suit would have more use than a bridal dress, even one that could be remade into a day dress. The suit would take Lempi’s savings, but then all her savings would go directly to something just for her and not have to be spent on joint things like dishes or bed linen. That could all come out of Huttula’s savings—if he had any. They both speculated that he did, because he hardly ever went to Nordland or Astoria and didn’t drink.
They set the wedding for four thirty in the afternoon of Sunday, October 3, so people would be off work and Pastor Hoikka would have time to get across the river.
Sitting in the little church on the day of the wedding, about to watch Lempi marry Huttula, Aksel knew it was his own fault. He’d stayed stupidly in love with Aino when Lempi would have married him in a heartbeat.
Ruusu Pakanen started the Bridal March from Lohengrin on the little organ and everyone rose to face the back of the church.
Lempi stood beside her favorite uncle, who worked in a mill in Westport and had come to give her away. She wore a new suit and a beautiful new hat. Huttula was standing at the altar with his brother from Bellingham. As Lempi went by Aksel in her slow, stately walk, her eyes flickered from Huttula to him, then went quickly back to Huttula.
Two weddings now at the wrong end of the church, Aksel thought. He’d been smiling at Lempi, not knowing if she’d seen him. He wondered if she had any regrets like his. Huttula was old but a good man in a less dangerous job. Huttula could very well live to see his and Lempi’s grandchildren.
Lempi reached the end of the aisle and her uncle went to his place at the front left pew. Pastor Hoikka motioned them all to be seated and the ceremony began. “Dearly beloved …”
Aksel wasn’t listening. He was looking at Aino and Lempi standing together, standing up there with Jouka and Huttula. That’s when he remembered Lempi asking him about his swamping ax. What a fool he was. She didn’t give a damn about the ax. He wanted to bolt from the church in his shame and misery. Shame for being so stupidly callous about Lempi’s feelings for him and hurting her. Misery, this terrible loneliness, when it could have been otherwise, simply by opening his heart to Lempi.