By the time Jouka left, forty thousand loggers and mill workers and over 75 percent of the logging camps west of the Cascades were out on strike. The IWWs had the moral high ground and thought they were winning.
In all wars, however, both sides think they’re right and can win.
On the first of August, a patriotic mob lynched Frank Little, an IWW organizer, in Butte, Montana. The United States Post Office refused to mail newspapers or other written material that any individual postmaster considered to be hurting the war effort. IWW strikers were jailed on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to vagrancy to obstruction of justice.
The most serious response was the Espionage Act. When President Woodrow Wilson urged a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass the act, he declared that “these creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant.” The penalty for violating the act was up to thirty years in prison or death.
Aino lived in fear. Every morning when she awoke, she didn’t know if that night she’d be sleeping in jail. Still, every morning she went to work, traveling from camp to camp, encouraging the strikers with news of other strikers, inciting their anger with stories of brutal retaliations, helping the women organize to collect and distribute food, talking doctors into treating strikers’ children for free, arguing from upturned boxes on city streets—always wording her arguments carefully so they wouldn’t run afoul of the Espionage Act—that what was being done in Europe and to workers at home under the banner of patriotism was wrong. Patriotism was being used to club labor. She was arrested twice but released after a day or two, mostly because the jails were full and she was female.
On August 15, Governor Lister of Washington—under extreme pressure from labor voters on one side and the War Department and federal government on the other—offered a compromise: an eight-hour day with nine hours of pay at the old rates, around twenty-five cents an hour. Details like safety, sanitation, sleeping conditions, and lice were left out.
“No. Don’t settle,” Aino said to the Reder loggers. She stood in the twilight just at the edge of the bunkhouses at Camp Three, having made her way on a trail avoiding the normal approach on the rail line or the well-worn trail from Tapiola. “He’s throwing you a bone so you’ll stop barking,” she went on. “You act like dogs. You’ll be treated like dogs.”
The loggers at Camp Three rejected Lister’s offer as did loggers and mill workers all over the state.
Because of the strike, Aino could get food to Matti only irregularly and infrequently. He couldn’t hunt, for fear of giving himself away. He tried trapping, running the makeshift traps at night. Fishing was out because he could be seen. Aino knew this and with every trip saw him grow leaner. In the last week of August, she decided to make a food run late at night.
Oskar Mannila, a striking mill worker, had gone to Long Island to see if he could get some clams and oysters for his family. He took blankets intending to spend the night and start early the next morning at low tide. Sitting with his back against a driftwood log, he was watching the northern lights—at this southern latitude more like a soft eerie glow than the curtain of colored light he’d watched in his native Finland. Aino unwittingly rowed up onto the beach in front of him. He knew her from her organizing efforts at his mill.
He shouted out her name, but Aino shoved off immediately, saying nothing. She rowed to where she and Kyllikki hid the boat on the mainland and set off overland for Chinook, the little town growing around the Indian village on the Columbia River’s edge. From there she took the road to Knappton and got the ferry to warn Kyllikki that Matti’s hiding place had very likely been compromised.
“How do we warn him without leading them right to him?” Kyllikki asked.
Aarni started banging a pot with a ladle and marching around the room, another pot on his head for a helmet, shouting in English, “Kill the Boche! Kill the Boche!”
“Mama, make him stop,” Suvi cried out. “He took the railroad station.”
“Aarni, please,” Kyllikki said, moving over to him. He deftly moved in the other direction.
“Kill the Boche. Kill the Kaiser.”
Kyllikki’s mother appeared at the kitchen door steadying a now toddling Pilvi, a clear they’re-your-kids look on her face.
Kyllikki had managed to get the ladle out of Aarni’s hand and he threw the pot at her before running up the stairs, “Kill the Boche!” echoing from the upstairs hall.
Kyllikki, watching the empty space at the top of the stairs, said, “He misses his father.” She turned to Aino, tears in her eyes. “I can’t stay mad at him forever.” Aino walked over and hugged her until Suvi tugged on Aino’s skirt.
“Is Mama crying because she misses Daddy?”
That made up Aino’s mind.
“If he stays where he is, he’ll go to jail and we won’t see him for years,” Aino said quietly. “If he runs again, even if he makes it to Canada, we still won’t see him. Winter’s coming. He’ll starve.”
She walked over to the window and looked across the Columbia to where mist rose from dark hills to meet the low clouds that had infiltrated from the ocean.
“I’ve got to talk to Margaret Reder,” she said quietly.
“She must hate you,” Kyllikki said. “And Matti, too.”
Aino looked at her. “She doesn’t hate me; she just thinks she should.” She paused. “Just the way I think I should hate her.”
“She wanted to be my friend. It was impossible. Still is.” She was already walking to get her coat. “But she’ll make a deal.”
When Margaret opened the front door, she was astounded to see Aino Koski. Aino was no longer the idealistic girl she’d first seen reading Lenin in Russian over ten years ago. Nor was she the young woman who’d saved her and her baby’s lives. She was now a mature woman—with considerable power. She still had that direct bearing all the Finns shared. Aino told her once it was from standing up to winter. Margaret suspected it was also from standing up to more powerful neighbors. “Aino, my God. If John sees you here, he’ll … he’ll … I don’t know. What on earth are you doing here?”
“Matti can’t hide much longer. Winter is coming. He has a wife and two children.” She looked coolly at Margaret. “I’m here to make a deal.”
“You have a nerve to think there will ever be a deal. Your brother nearly killed my husband and you’ve done everything in your power to kill our business.” She noticed that Aino was wearing her glasses. That happened only when her guard was down.
“We can talk out here or inside,” Aino said.
Margaret remembered why she used to like this woman so much. However, she would not give in to that. “Neither place,” Margaret replied. “We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“We do, and you know it.”
Margaret opened the door and stood aside.
When John Reder came home Margaret met him on the porch. “Aino Koski is in the kitchen,” she said.
“Goddamnit, Margaret …”
Margaret put one index finger up and then put it to her lips. “Outside.”
The wind was backing off to the northwest where the sky was turning a brilliant orange. Upriver, the clouds glowed soft pink. Reder had his back against the porch railing, his arms folded. She took a deep breath. “She wants you to drop the charges against her brother.”
Reder exploded, as she knew he would. “Drop charges? I’ll have that son of a bitch hung. You tell her to get out of our kitchen or I’ll—”
“John.” Margaret moved in front of the door. “I won’t throw her out of the kitchen before you talk.”
“I’ll have the sheriff—”
“What? Ransack her other brother’s house?”
“That had to be done.”
“I understand that. Doesn’t that make you even?”
“No, by God, it doesn’t. I’ll have that hotheaded bastard in jail if I have to turn this county upside down. I’ll have Pinkertons—”
She put her hands over her ears. He went silent.
“John, we’re on the edge of financial ruin. The big boys, Weyerhaeuser, Simpson, Bloedel … they can weather the storm.”
“I can’t make a separate deal,” Reder said. “They’d ruin us instead of the Wobblies.”
“She knows that,” Margaret said. “She’s not asking for a separate deal.”
Reder was silent. Then he said, “What’s she asking for?”
“She’s confirmed that the War Department is putting as much pressure on the owners to settle as it’s putting pressure on the Justice Department to round up Wobblies under the Espionage Act. There’s going to be another offer. The unspoken alternative is that if both sides don’t come to terms, the federal government will step in and nationalize the whole industry.”
“That’s socialism.”
“Ironic, isn’t it.”
Reder didn’t laugh. “You still haven’t told me what she’s offering.”
“Aino will forcefully and publicly argue to return to work. Then, she’ll move across the river and cease all organizing activities north of it.”
Reder said nothing. Margaret was used to this. Wheels were turning.
“One more thing, John. You did break a beer bottle over his head.” She saw that this hit home. One of the many things she loved about him was his innate sense of justice. It’s what got him nearly cuckoo over private-property rights—and it was what made him respected by laborers and owners alike.
“OK,” he said. “But her brother moves south of the river with her. He promises never to log in Chinook, Wahkiakum, or Nordland Counties.”
“Won’t work.”
Reder was taken aback.
“She won’t deliver until he’s home,” Margaret said.
“I can’t gamble on that.”
“If she doesn’t deliver, you have him arrested. A word-of-mouth deal with a Wobbly will mean nothing to the courts. She’ll be taking the gamble, not you.”
He pondered on that. “OK.” He smiled. “That son of a bitch is the best logger I’ve ever seen. And he learned it all from me.”
Aino retrieved Matti on August 30. After coffee at Ilmahenki, he walked over to Suvantola. It smelled of neglect. There were mouse droppings on the floor and kitchen counter. He returned outside and saw the ruined garden. He was seized with an ache for Kyllikki that was palpable. It was like a vacuum in his heart and stomach, pulling him toward Astoria.
He said goodbye to Ilmari at the mill. Then he went to the house to say goodbye to Rauha. He found Rauha castigating Kullervo for something. When Kullervo walked away, he said, “Go easy on him, Rauha.”
“I don’t know why I ever let you talk me into hiring him.”
“Because no one else in the county will work for you.”
She walked away angry, leaving Matti with a slight smile on his face. Welcome home.
He caught up to Kullervo and said, “Don’t mind her.”
Kullervo had grown tall and filled out since logging the Klawachuck.
“She’s a bitch. Worse than my mother, and I’d kill my mother if I knew where she was.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Kullervo gave him a look that chilled him. He thought back on the many times he, Aksel, and Jouka had patched up the boy’s bruised and broken skin.
“You need to go easy on each other.”
“Maybe I’ll join the army.”
“Don’t. It’s not our fight.”
“But we’re in it.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Us. Americans.”
“Well then,” Matti said. “We are stupid to be over there. I don’t see any German gunboat steaming up Deep River.” Matti looked around him at the forest-covered hills; at Deep River, placid in the summer; at smoke coming from the chimney of his brother’s house as Rauha made supper.
“I heard about your fight,” Kullervo said. “Too bad you didn’t kill the bastard.”
“No. It was too bad I knifed him. My family’s uprooted. I have to start all over again in Oregon.”
“Let me work for you.”
Matti felt sorrow for the little whistle punk he’d met a decade ago, but even he wouldn’t hire the rangy twenty-year-old time bomb. “Let me get something going. We’ll talk.” He watched Kullervo’s eyes go to the ground. He knew. “Got to go,” Matti said, trying to cover the awkwardness. “I haven’t seen my wife in months.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Kullervo said with a smile. He got quiet. “Someday I hope to find a woman like your wife.”
“You and every sane man.”