When Aino returned from Centralia in mid-August, Jouka was working. All he said when he came home was: “You’re back.” He said nothing about Centralia and Aino wanted nothing said.
By the end of September the heady feeling from the strikes of spring and summer was gone. The lumber market was turning down. Owners were less motivated to settle. When strikes were called, the IWW organizers found it difficult to get men for the picket lines. Too many of the loggers, itinerant and single, simply moved.
On the second Sunday of Advent, December 7, 1913, the family gathered at Ilmahenki. Ilmari had lit the candle of hope on the Advent wreath the Sunday before and was now lighting the wreath’s second candle. “Today we light the Bethlehem candle of preparation for the celebration of the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” he said softly. As the candle came alive, it lit his usually solemn face, which, like that of a child, was filled with wonder at the miracle of fire and the hope of returning light.
Aino looked at Jouka, whose blue eyes reflected the candle flames, and then at the faces of her family, shining out of the darkness. Even the little children were grave and thoughtful, watching the wavering candlelight grow stronger. She saw little Helmi’s eyes stray over to the warming cupboards above the stove, which concealed a pie Rauha had made using apples from the cellar dug into the hill on the other side of the sauna.
Aino thought about her parents and snowy Christmases back in Finland. She thought of her father, dying who knows where, like many who had gone forward alone, so the rest could follow better off than before.
She said softly, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord … Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.”
“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,” Ilmari continued. “And all flesh shall see it together.” He smiled at her. “You still remember your catechism.”
“It was beaten into me,” Aino said with a laugh. “Literally.”
Her brothers laughed. No one who failed to get the lesson right escaped Pastor Jarvi’s loving hand.
Matti managed to say through a biscuit in his mouth, “So, Isaiah was a Wobbly?”
Aino and the others laughed. “Well, at least a Marxist,” she quipped back at him. “He prophesied the coming classless society.” This begat more chuckles. She loved them all.
After the meal—the dishes washed and dried, everyone drowsy—Aino put on her coat and scarf and grabbed the galvanized bucket of kitchen scraps, saying she was going to the compost pile. After turning the compost to oxygenate it, she walked to the river. She watched the roiling water, in full flood after the fall and winter rain, remembering lighting the Advent candles and the glow on her mother’s and father’s faces that Christmas before they lost her brother and sisters; remembering kissing Voitto in the falling snow; thinking of Hillström, of Aksel. Maybe Aksel and Lempi? Huttula was close to forty when he died. She was twenty-four and childless. Do you defeat death by giving birth? Would a child fill this emptiness? Was that just another delusion?
She turned the compost pail upside down and sat on it, tucking her skirt tight against her ankles. She wondered if Vasutäti was sitting alone in front of her little shelter. She must have been married when she was younger. Ilmari had told her Vasutäti lost all her children to measles. So much for the bearing of children as the answer to death.
Aino picked up a stick and threw it awkwardly from her sitting position into the dark river where it was whisked downstream and lost in the churning current. On its way to the ocean, she thought. You die. You’re buried. You leak horrible liquids and it all ends up in the ocean. We’re small sticks torn from the tree of humanity by the storms of winter. She wished she had Ilmari’s faith. Delusions, she thought. She laughed out loud with no mirth.
She stood and looked at the glow from Ilmari’s house in the late-afternoon gray. Why was she always outside, looking in? It would be dark in an hour and a half. Jouka had brought their lantern, so the seven-mile walk to Camp Three wouldn’t be quite so frightening. The forest still scared her. To Jouka, Matti, and the others like them, it held no mystery at all. They just turned it into logs.
Three weeks after Christmas, Aino read in the Astorian that Joe Hill had been arrested for murdering a grocer and the grocer’s son in Salt Lake City. He’d been found wounded on that same night and the prosecution claimed he was shot by the dying son. Aino argued vehemently that Hillström had been framed by the capitalists and their stooges in the legal system. Hillström claimed someone else shot the two men and his wound was the result of a dispute about a woman whose name he didn’t want to reveal. That certainly seemed credible to Aino. It did not to a jury. On July 8, 1914, Hillström was sentenced to death.
She worried about the IWW’s growing reputation for violence. The horrible mining wars in Colorado and northern Idaho years ago between Bill Haywood’s Western Federation of Miners and the owners had been punctuated with dynamite and killing. Many of the miners joined the IWW with Big Bill, bringing their reputation with them.
She fought this temptation to violence herself. People were rightly angry. She was angry. She carried one scar on her forehead and another on her right shoulder, where she had fallen to the man beating her with an ax handle in Nordland. But in Nordland and at all the other free-speech fights, the IWWs had folded their arms in accordance with the strongly held belief that although violence was the basis of every political state in existence, it had no place in the foundation or superstructure of the IWW. So far, she and the union had remained true to this ideal, but they had failed to communicate this. The bosses and their newspapers had successfully labeled the IWWs as violent anarchists, creating a false image that fed people’s fear and undermined popular support for the cause. The American people, she mused, espousing an ideology of rugged individualism, the mythology of “Don’t Tread on Me,” were as twitchy as chipmunks.
She suspected that Joseph Hillström unconsciously wanted to be a martyr. It would suit his romantic temperament, which is what likely got him into jail in the first place, fooling around with that woman. She laughed under her breath; it also beat hard work. Then she felt ashamed of herself for thinking such things. Hillström had heart and his heart was in the right place, no matter his flaws.
She was overtaken by sadness and empty loss. They were going to kill Hillström whether he had killed someone or not.
The specter of violence also haunted the international news. The arms race in Europe that Matti had predicted grew throughout the spring. On June 28, Gavrilo Princip, a radical anarchist, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, fueling anger in Europe and fear of mad and violent anarchists in America.
On Sunday, August 2, Aino was sitting in the afternoon sunshine on the beach in front of Ilmari’s house knitting a hat, her naked nieces and nephews jumping into and out of Deep River. She heard a horse galloping and turned from the river, shading her eyes, following with her ears the hoofbeats coming from the forest. Higgins burst into view. He reined up next to the men helping with the winter wood supply. Kyllikki and Rauha were chatting on the porch in the shade, also knitting, preparing for winter. “The Germans have sent the Belgian foreign minister a letter,” he shouted. “They claim France is about to attack Germany by crossing through Belgium and Germany has to enter Belgium to defend itself. It’s a load of nonsense. It means war between England and Germany.”
Kyllikki and Rauha ran toward Higgins with their knitting and balls of yarn in their hands. Aino watched Matti’s and Ilmari’s faces light up; she knew about their purchase of the timber rights to several hundred acres of spruce near the south end of Willapa Bay. Excited, Matti asked Higgins, “Where is Finland?”
“The same place as Ireland,” Higgins replied. “On paper, Ireland will fight alongside England, but the people won’t be gulled. Both of those bastard monarchies will be hard-pressed to get good Irishman and Finns to do their dirty work for them, by Jesus.”
“No need to swear,” Ilmari said.
Aino joined the group, trailed by naked, dripping children. “It will be the same in England, France, and Germany,” she said. “No workingman will kill a fellow worker for a war between capitalists over imperialist greed. This war will be over in a week.”
Higgins looked at her, sadly. “I don’t think so, my proud firebrand.” He rode off, leaving the men to speculate among themselves what war would mean for logging, sawmilling, and farming, never slacking on putting the wood away. The women returned to the shade, Aino with them. She sat down on a crate, holding a skein of wool between her raised hands while Kyllikki wound it into a ball. Kyllikki gently shook her head at her, looking into her eyes. “Higgins is right on this one, Aino,” Kyllikki said. “Patriotism trumps class.”
“Not this time,” Aino said.
“Every time,” Kyllikki answered. “Patriotism makes us all feel like one people. Class divides us.”
“Marxism is changing that.”
Kyllikki began singing, “We’ll have pie in the sky when we die.”
Aino threw the skein at her.