The crew soon settled in: fed by Kyllikki, coached by Aksel, and motivated by Matti, not only by example. Kyllikki was breastfeeding Suvi, who by August was robust and healthy, living in plain air, and adored by thirteen men. On August 1, 1912, Rauha provided Suvi with a boy cousin, Jorma. Aino was there to help along with Kyllikki who took on Mielikki, three and a half, and Helmi, now nearly two.
Jorma’s christening was on August 11. After the service, everyone was invited to Ilmahenki for coffee.
Rauha’s curtains hung straight in open windows with an occasional gentle movement from a lazy air current. Deep River flowed sparkling and well contained, rocks unseen in the spring now showing along its edges.
When the nonfamily guests left, there was an afternoon miracle. All the children went down for their naps simultaneously. Aino found herself at the kitchen table with Rauha and Kyllikki, who’d come in from the show with Matti and Suvi. The men were sitting on the riverbank, smoking and talking, suspenders off their shoulders.
“So, Aino, when’s it going to be?” Rauha asked.
“When’s what going to be?” Aino answered. She knew full well but had learned that playing dumb about questions she didn’t want to answer gave her time to think of answers she usually didn’t want to give. She glanced at Kyllikki, suddenly feeling alone, the dark one next to these two fair women. At the christening, she had noted with some pleasure that Rauha’s brilliant yellow hair had turned darker.
“A baby,” Rauha answered. She wasn’t one to be circumspect. Then, neither was Aino.
“When we want to.”
Everyone silently sipped coffee. Then Kyllikki, trying to be kind, said, “You know you can’t put it off much longer.”
“If there isn’t some other problem,” Rauha said.
“What do you mean by that?” Aino shot back.
“You know he’s been seen carousing around when you’re away.”
“So, he drinks a little with his friends after dances. Jouka likes to have fun.”
Another awkward silence.
“Maybe, you know …” Kyllikki offered. “If you were home more often.”
“Then, what?” Aino retorted. “We would make love more often and that’s what’s stopping the baby?”
The sharp answer peeved Kyllikki, who was only trying to help. “You have to spend time together,” she said tightly.
“We spend plenty of time together.”
“So then, maybe it’s something else,” Rauha said, glancing at Kyllikki. “Maybe he can’t, you know.”
Kyllikki quickly shot back: “That’s private business.”
“Sure, but people are talking.”
“What about?” Aino asked.
“Well,” Rauha said, primly setting her cup in its saucer with both hands. “You are gone a lot. They wonder if maybe there’s trouble.”
“There’s no trouble,” Aino said.
Rauha gave her a come-on-I’m-no-fool look.
Aino was tired of always defending herself. It was none of anyone’s damned business whether she would have a baby, whether she and Jouka were getting along, or what her absences and his late-night drinking meant. She was most tired of always being the one at fault.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it. But with my sisters …” She managed to get tears in her eyes. “I just don’t know what to do. He comes home drunk and I try to be there ready. And, well, I hate to say this. Don’t you dare say anything. But Jouka does have trouble.”
Rauha looked as though she had just been fed steak. Kyllikki gave Aino a what-are-you-doing look.
“I’ve tried. I’ve really tried.” She was getting into the role. “He starts off OK, but … Don’t you dare say this to anyone, even my brothers. Promise me.”
A murmur of “We promise” followed, with a nodding of heads in sympathy.
“I’ve heard that oysters are good,” Kyllikki said.
“I think it’s something in his head,” Aino said. “You know that he used to go to Astoria and Nordland before we were married.”
“What man didn’t,” Rauha said.
The men came back into the house, smelling of cigarette smoke and sweat. Shirts and Sunday coats went back on, babies were picked up by the women, and formal goodbyes were said.
As Aino and Jouka walked back to Camp Three in the evening stillness, the strip of sky above them dark blue against the nearly black green of the shadowed treetops, Jouka asked, “What were you women talking about?”
“Oh, you know, girl talk. It drives me nuts,” Aino said, suddenly feeling deeply ashamed of herself, ruining her walk home in the summer twilight.
That summer had been one of the best in memory. The North Pacific High had settled into its dry season position off the coast and the line of multiple breakers shone brilliant white in the clear sky and steady northwest wind. Inland, sheltered by the coastal hills, the air lay warm and cozy in the river valleys. All along the trails and new roads around Tapiola, blackberries had changed from their hard green of June to softer and plumper red by the end of July. They now hung juicy and black, vines drooping with their weight. Women and children filled buckets and old coffee cans to the brim with them for pies or to be eaten at breakfast with cream. A few late red huckleberries winked out from the undergrowth and blue huckleberries grew in profusion in the sunlit logged-off areas. Little boys with blue-smeared faces went from farm to farm selling them for five cents a pound or hounded Higgins to stock his grocery store with them.
Until this night, Aksel had enjoyed the weather like everyone else. However, walking back to the show by himself, he felt uneasy. He wasn’t hearing the usual rush of the creeks. He knew there had been less rain than usual. He didn’t know why. It was because when Matti had made his deal with Al Drummond in April, El Niño had already arrived.
Keeping his counsel, Aksel said nothing until one morning in late August. He was up before dawn, the morning air cool but lacking humidity. Dew didn’t even form on the steel cables or the saws. He fired the donkey’s boiler. Then he waited for Matti, sitting on one of the skids, smoking, while the steam pressure rose.
When Matti arrived, Aksel threw the butt of his cigarette into the firebox. “We need to talk.”
“After work,” Matti said.
“Now.”
Matti jumped up on the donkey and pulled on the whistle. He was ready to work. Where was everyone else? “What?” he asked.
“We’ve got a lot of logs to move and the creeks are going dry,” Aksel said.
Matti’s face darkened. Aksel knew he was forcing Matti to face what Matti already knew. “It’ll rain,” Matti said.
Aksel looked pointedly at the clear sky, then gestured at the large number of logs yarded in various spots. “I talked with Old Cap Carlson at Knappton. He’s fished the river for years. He says that after a first summer that’s drier than normal, the fall will be drier than normal, too.”
“Cap says that, huh?” Matti said.
“Cap says that.”
Aksel lit another cigarette, took a draw, and handed it to Matti. “If we don’t get rain we won’t make the deadline. You need more help.”
Matti took a deep drag and handed the cigarette back to Aksel. “I’m out of money.”
“I’ll get it logged.”
“Will you get it moved?”
Matti was quiet, thinking. “I’ll offer the crew a bonus, a big one, when we sell the logs.”
“We’re already working summer hours. Push these loggers any harder and they’ll start making mistakes. Remember what happened when Reder started highballing?”
Matti grunted.
Aksel pressed on. “You need more loggers.”
Matti sat quietly, his lips moving just slightly in and out, a sign he was thinking hard. Aksel waited. No sense in prompting a Finn.
Matti climbed to the ground. “Come with me,” he said.
Matti took him downstream. “We’ll build it right here,” he said.
Aksel looked around. Two hills came close to the stream at this point. They had small trees on their slopes, not worth logging.
“It’ll have to be plenty high to back the water all the way up to where we’re logging now,” Aksel said, knowing exactly what Matti had in mind.
“No higher than we can build it.”
“We,” Aksel said, pointedly. “We are on the absolute edge.”
“I only need a week and enough money for five loggers.” Matti looked hard and steadily at Aksel.
“No!” Aksel said. “Goddamnit, Matti. Not my savings.”
“I’ll give you double back.”
Aksel walked over to another viewpoint. Matti joined him. Aksel was feeling the old excitement he first felt in the redwoods. Like what a poker player must feel before a high-stakes game, he thought. Double his poke and he would have his boat within a year. He also knew an additional source of labor that Matti’s pride wouldn’t allow him to hire.
“Double and a half,” Aksel said.
“Deal.” They shook hands.
That evening Aksel walked the nine miles to Ilmahenki in the twilight and then walked to Camp Three in the dark.
Ilmari showed up before dawn with an ax and a crosscut. He was soon followed by Aino, carrying a pack made from a burlap sack. It was stuffed with clothes, blankets, a few kitchen utensils, and bars of good soap. Jouka couldn’t leave work. Rauha had stayed at Ilmahenki with the children to supervise the sawmill, her chore workload doubling so her husband could help his brother.
Aksel didn’t know which was the more beautiful sight, Aino and Kyllikki moving confidently in the makeshift outdoor kitchen, or Ilmari methodically tearing into one of the trees that would go into the dam. His contemplation of beauty was quickly interrupted by Matti shouting orders, rearranging work, and generally being a pain in the neck. Then Matti left to hire more crew with Aksel’s money.
Aksel heard his name called and turned to see Aino holding one bucket of water and another of warm coffee. On her back was a packboard with a flour sack tied on it. She set it down; asked him if he wanted coffee, water, or both; and pulled out from the sack a corned beef sandwich thick with butter and laced with black pepper and salt.
“Packing it out to you will save almost two hours of daylight working time,” she said. Then she laughed. “The eight-hour day doesn’t apply to the Koskis.”
Aksel wondered what it would be like to have her making sandwiches for him all the time.
The work, ordinarily hard until the dam building began, became even more intense. Matti had both hired more crew and promised a bonus when the logs were delivered. The loggers stumbled to their beds in the dark. The dam, constructed of stacked logs, grew daily. Matti spent hours at night doing maintenance on the yarder and other equipment. Aino reverted back to the rhythm of the henhouse, catching only a few hours of sleep, cooking pancakes in the dark, serving them cold at breakfast. No one minded, because she also turned out hot bacon and eggs at first light. Four or five times in the day, Aksel would hear her voice, turn, and see her standing there with coffee and water, glasses on, her hair piled above her sweating forehead.
On Saturday evenings Jouka showed up. The last weeks of September, the moon was waxing toward full and directly overhead around midnight, so he worked nearly the whole night and all day Sunday.
Rauha showed up with the children, and production in the kitchen went into high gear. The men were like boilers, the women stuffing them with food and water. The work never slackened. Aksel felt they had an intense joyous madness in the way they pushed themselves to see if it could be done. No one thought about wages.
The last tree was felled nine days before the deadline and hauled down to the reservoir, now a mile long and in places two hundred yards across. It was packed with floating logs. Aksel and Matti walked the creek between the dam and the bay, blasting potential obstacles with dynamite.
On October 25, everyone stood on the small hillside above the splash dam. Aksel and Matti had rigged dynamite in the dam’s center. Matti offered Aksel the plunger, but Aksel offered it back. Matti looked at the crowd. “Kyllikki,” he shouted.
“No,” she shouted back. “I’ve got Suvi.”
“Come on,” he pleaded.
The loggers started chanting Kyllikki’s name. Her face flushed, she turned and held out her hand to Aino. “It’ll be like launching a ship.”
Aino laughed. “No champagne from Matti.”
They both made their way to the detonator. Suvi on her hip, Kyllikki knelt next to Aino. She put her right hand on the plunger and Aino joined her with her left.
“Be sure to duck,” Aksel said quietly.
Aino whispered, “One, two, three,” and they both shoved down on the plunger.
There was a brief muffled sound, and the dam seemed to bulge outward and upward for just a split second. Then logs and pieces of logs rose into the air with a shattering roar. Water from the reservoir pushed through the center of the dam, spilling down its face. Then, the whole dam gave way. The man-made flash flood hurtled down the nearly dry streambed and with it came tons and tons of logs. The ground trembled. The water and logs together scoured the sides of the creek to bedrock. Small trees were ripped from the banks. The ground vibrated. Some of the crew had already been stationed alongside the streambed and now all those watching the blowing of the dam ran to help, carrying pike poles and peaveys. Logs jammed. Men jumped, balanced, lost their balance, were pulled to safety, but kept breaking up developing jams. The first logs reached Grays Bay, their momentum taking them majestically away from shore, to be gathered later into booms for towing.
On October 30, the last log was manhandled down the now slick flume that had once been the original creek and was added to the huge boom linked to a waiting tug.
Matti and Aksel rode the boom all the way to the mill, smoking and laughing. They wanted to be there when the logs were graded and scaled and to argue against any decision to cull one. Mill owners were notoriously hard on loggers when it came to grading and scaling.
Matti sent the tallies by mail to Drummond, along with the code for what had been taken from Reder. Two weeks later, a letter came back saying Drummond didn’t have the money, but he was good for it—trust him.