Focusing on the marriage did not mean giving up reading the Industrial Worker, the IWW’s newspaper. In March, Aino read that on January 1, 1912, while she was in jail, twenty-five thousand women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went on strike against the American Woolen Company under IWW leadership. They were followed by eighteen thousand textile workers in Lowell. The state legislature had passed a law reducing the workweek from fifty-six hours to fifty-four hours and the mill owners retaliated by lowering wages to make up for the lost production. The state militia was called out. The usual mass arrests and beatings soon followed.
When the IWW attempted to transfer the children of the striking workers to sympathetic homes in Philadelphia, both the mothers and the children were assaulted and beaten to stop the evacuation. One of the beaten women miscarried. When Aino read that, she sat on the edge of the bed, her head bowed down in her hands, for nearly ten minutes. Slowly the sorrow for the woman and the lost baby turned to anger and resolve. She took out her anger on the woodpile.
The news continued to be grim. The striking women in Lowell had refused to pay fines levied on them by the courts, many going to jail with babies in their arms. The brutality brought national attention and a Senate investigation.
Aino, keeping to her vow to focus on Jouka and the marriage, read the news, simmering, but she stayed home. This combined with Jouka’s natural good nature had things back on an even keel.
There was good news in March. On Thursday, March 14, the American Woolen Company settled. On that same Thursday, hundreds of sawmill workers went on strike in Nordland, asking for a 25 percent wage increase to two dollars and fifty cents per day. Aino knew that this was at least in part because of her efforts to sign up members. She wanted desperately to be there, but Matti and Kyllikki’s baby was due any day. She was stewing, torn between her own marriage, Kyllikki’s delivery, and just packing up and leaving for Nordland, when the dreaded constant tooting, signaling an accident, cut through the air of Camp Three. Women came out of their front doors, some holding small children or babies, others drying their hands on their aprons. The constant clatter of the logging operations ceased. Silence.
It was nearly four, the tenth hour of work, when fatigue dulls judgment and reflexes, breeds carelessness and inattention to detail. This is the most likely time for the choker bell to come out of its socket and several tons of bucking logs to go free from the main line and slam against a stump—or a man. This is also when it is most likely a cable isn’t slackened soon enough or a small fray in the cable goes unnoticed and within minutes causes a cascade of breaking wire, until the line snaps and hundreds of pounds of steel crack through the sky like a bullwhip, its flying tail lashing through brush, cutting small trees—or a man.
Aino saw Lempi standing at the door of her new shack across the rail line and about a hundred yards toward the bay side. Lempi gave a tentative wave and Aino waved back. After another five minutes came the toot of the steam whistle and the operation started up again, slowly gaining speed until once more the distant clatter, shouts, whistles, and crash of falling trees and giant logs bucking their way to the landing filled the evening air. The women went inside, preparing dinner, each wondering if her husband would be the one not to come home.
At quitting time, Aino watched the body coming to camp on top of the wood box just behind the cab. Jouka was in the cab and Aino sighed with relief. The train stopped. Women gathered below the load as two loggers dragged the body off the engine, trying to achieve some sort of solemnity as they laid it on the ground.
It was Huttula. His head was a bloody pulp, his face nearly unrecognizable, the result of a flying cable. The women turned in relief and pity as Lempi screamed and went to her knees cradling Huttula’s mutilated head.
Aino ran to squat down beside her. Lempi was kissing Huttula’s face. She turned to look at Aino. Smearing the blood on her hands over her own face, she looked up at the gray sky and howled like a wounded animal.
That cry ended any doubt in Aino’s mind about leaving home. She told this to Jouka bluntly, her anger barely under control. He understood. To fight her would feel petty and selfish, but he wished it were otherwise.
Jouka helped sell Huttula’s tools and Aino helped Lempi pack. Lempi would not go back to the henhouse. Nor could she afford the rent for the shack, fifty cents a day. Finished with the packing, Aino sat with Lempi on the stoop of the empty shack under a somber April sky and waited for Jouka to come by with the train. When he arrived with a full load of logs, he hopped from the cab and walked along the line to where Lempi and Aino stood with Lempi’s bag. He took it without a word and started back to the engine.
Aino walked silently with Lempi, following Jouka. He tossed the valise into the arms of his firemen and waited for the two women.
Lempi, Aino, and Kyllikki decided Lempi’s best bet was Astoria. The canneries hired women to pack salmon, paying them by the can. The work involved extremely sharp knives in the hands of women driven to pack as many cans a day as they were physically able to. If a woman was fast enough, she could earn fifty to seventy-five cents a day, and she was sure to make at least forty-five cents if her legs held out and she wasn’t too inept with a knife. Chinamen previously did the work, but they had been driven from town because they worked for even lower wages than the women and, besides that, were dirty, smoked opium, and associated with criminal tongs called Provident Societies that kidnapped white girls and sold them into slavery.
Aino looked into her old friend’s sad blue eyes. “Good luck to you, Lempi. I’ll come see you.”
Neither said anything else. Then they heard Jouka clearing water from the cylinder cocks. “I guess Jouka has to get the load down to tidewater,” Lempi said with a wan smile.
“Yoh.”
“Aino?”
“What?”
“I’m two months pregnant.”
Aino was in a frenzy of indecision over whether to go to Nordland to help with the strike, or stay to help deliver Kyllikki’s baby, which was due imminently. Kyllikki and the baby came through, solving the problem. A girl, Suvi, was born on March 17, 1912. The birth was normal—terrifying, painful, long, and filled with joy. Aino saw Kyllikki through it with aplomb and left for Nordland the next day to throw herself into recruiting and organizing the wives to distribute food and medicine.
The strike widened to neighboring towns. Having seen the tactic of deputizing solid citizens turn ugly, the mayor of Nordland instead deputized city employees, ordering them to break up the strike, figuring they’d do as they were told. Most employees quit, leaving the city stranded, with the opposite outcome from what the mayor wanted. Angry citizens formed a citizens committee. They trashed the IWW hall and arrested strikers at random, taking them into the forest and clubbing them senseless. Aino and the other women made bandages, collected iodine, and tended to the wounded who were lodged with local strikers. The citizens committee upped the pressure by forcing 150 strikers into boxcars to deport them, injuring scores more in the melee. Sympathetic railroad workers intervened, refusing to move the deported workers, unless they were Finns and Greeks, who had a reputation for being more radical than other ethnic groups. After that, the vigilantes focused on “non-Americans,” deporting several hundred, many split from their families. When she was accosted, Aino barely escaped, cursing them soundly in Swedish.
Finally, the pain on both sides began to tell and an agreement was made. The mill owners raised wages to two dollars and twenty-five cents per day and promised to give preference in hiring and pay to native-born Americans. Aino was shaken by the way the American-born workers had turned on the Finns, convincing her more than ever of the need for solid funding for strikes. She committed herself to organizing, focusing on increasing membership and the consequent cash flow.
The people at Camp Three were mostly sympathetic to the cause of the IWW, but they were also increasingly sympathetic to Jouka, who had clearly been abandoned by his wife.
Aino traveled a lot that spring, her reputation for successful recruiting growing along with the IWW’s growing membership. Just by being a healthy woman she attracted more potential members than any male recruiter did, and once she had them in front of her, the combination of her quick wit, ability to explain the workingman’s situation, and passion won many over. Portland headquarters could now pay for train and boat tickets. Coming back from one of her trips by train, she set out to find Lempi. She located her in a women’s boardinghouse. They talked until long after dark, a single candle lighting Lempi’s small room. Aino slept next to her that night, both giggling occasionally about stories from the old days.
There was a sad undercurrent. Lempi was alone in a tiny room without a child. Aino suspected she had gotten an abortion. Aino never asked her.