Aino tried to keep that in mind when she took Eleanor back to Astoria a month later in July. Ilmari had telegraphed Jouka and Matti about the birth, and she’d gotten letters from both. Jouka’s was written by his commanding officer, who added his own note of congratulations. Jouka sent home almost his entire paycheck. He was now a sergeant, running a locomotive hauling logs to a mill in Port Angeles and making more money than he ever made working for Reder.
At the new mill site, the men were polite, but it was clear that Eleanor didn’t fit in. She would cry without regard for the mill’s operation. Aino had to supervise the loading of the railcars, carrying Eleanor. If a railcar didn’t show up or went astray, it required walking into town to the SP&S rail station, carrying Eleanor. Despite his romantic idea that Aino was a millionaire, she thought ruefully, Ilmari didn’t calculate the debits against the credits. Another irony, she thought: a committed communist thinking about a baby in terms of debits and credits. Even though the workers owned the mill, it was in a capitalist economy. When the debits outweighed the credits too long, the law closed you down. Caught up in the system, people inevitably started thinking in terms of hours at work, debits and credits, assets and liabilities, instead of Eleanor’s pretty mouth. Alvar suggested she wean Eleanor and look for a babysitter. He gave her three months, pointing out that if it weren’t a co-op and she weren’t an officer, she’d have to quit her job. Jouka, after all, was making good wages.
Coming back to the mill from the SP&S freight office, where she’d begged the manager for more railcars, made scarce by the war economy, she paused to nurse Eleanor, looking at the huge Youngs River estuary where it joined the Columbia just at the west end of the Astoria hills. She could see smoke from the Hammond Mill to the west. A shipbuilding factory had started just a half mile down Youngs River from the co-op mill, working on a large order for wooden minesweepers for the navy. She saw two freighters moving up the channel to Portland. It was all so busy—and yes, efficient. But it wasn’t like farming, where Ilmari and Rauha and now Alma could raise their children with the rhythms of nature—and humans. Alma worked her tail off, but she worked figuratively and often literally alongside her husband. She thought in terms of good crops or hard winters, not debits and credits. There were no time clocks on Deep River.
Aino looked north across the Columbia, but it was too wide for her to see the old Chinook village. Then she looked south to where the co-op’s new mill stood between the railroad and Youngs River. Logs bobbed in the river, waiting to be hauled into the mill. Rudimentary buildings, open on all sides, with corrugated steel roofs to shelter the saws and conveyers, were surrounded by a large yard that held stacks of lumber, sorted by length and dimensions. She could see the men hauling newly sawed lumber off the green chain, the final phase of the intricate conveyer system that moved a log and then a cant through the various saws that turned it into lumber. Green lumber was heavy and wet. It had been part of a living tree just days ago. On the other side of the yard were the railroad tracks on which she stood. Logs in from the river—lumber out to build houses or barracks—money in to pay for the logs with some left over for the workers. At the base of it all—timber. The forest was like a giant farm that nobody had planted and nobody replanted. From this immense cycle of pay and get to get and pay, here she was standing on a railroad track that just a few years before didn’t exist, looking down the track to the new mill, looking across the Columbia to the hills that hid Deep River from view, feeling like a leaf in a roaring creek in full flood with the war, heading where?
She gently popped Eleanor’s mouth from her nipple and resettled her in the carrier.
She could just go to Deep River, lead a quiet life raising her daughter. But they needed her at the mill. She was useful, even important. Secretary of the co-op. Half of her made fun of the corporate title, but the other half was proud. She’d been instrumental in forming that bunch of buildings, saws, and conveyer belts. The men even used that word, “instrumental.” She thought about Alma saving flour sacks so she could make the children’s undergarments. She thought about the times when she, Kyllikki, and Rauha would sit with the coffeepot on, making socks for their husbands and children. Then she thought how here in Astoria, all she had to do was walk a few blocks to a store and buy what she needed already made.
Years later, she would always remember that moment of standing between Deep River and the co-op. Just as planetary conjunctions occur only for a moment and then years go by before the two planets once again align, so it is with life’s major decisions. You can’t just change your mind to make it good; you must wait for the next conjunction. Aino chose to keep walking toward the mill.
After Aino and Eleanor left, Ilmari went to see Vasutäti.
“Thank you for coming, you know, that day.”
“I like new wife. Good head.”
Ilmari smiled. He knew Vasutäti wouldn’t acknowledge the thanks.
“Alma. She’s a good woman.”
“A good woman wants a good man,” Vasutäti said, but there was wistfulness in her voice.
She served him some soup and indicated that he should meditate, which he did. When he’d first started learning from Vasutäti, Ilmari knew she was a shaman, just like the old ones in Suomi. He, however, had thought that the lessons would be about magic herbs and magic incantations. Vasutäti didn’t like magic. She said it existed, but she never practiced it. Instead, she made Ilmari focus on sitting still and breathing—for hours. He’d practiced daily before bed—until Rauha died.
He broke the meditation and found Vasutäti watching him closely. She grunted, disappeared into her shelter, and returned with some dried mushrooms in her hand. He recognized them: they were a common variety, easily found in meadows where elk and increasingly cattle grazed.
“What’s this?” Ilmari asked.
“If you had just like these in Finland, maybe Finns not have so much sisu when not needed.” She laughed her ethereal elvish laugh.
“Now serious,” she said suddenly. “You have mind strength; many practice sessions not thinking. So now we take risk.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Not dangerous for the body, dangerous for the mind. You weren’t ready until now.”
Ilmari knew this was a threshold in his tutelage. The old people, who kept the old ways, talked of journeys with spirit animals—journeys from which some never came back to their ordinary senses and from which no one returned unchanged. He was afraid.
Sensing this, Vasutäti said, “Now is time for sisu.”
He held out his palm. She put the mushrooms in it, closed his fingers on them, and then closed her hands over his. She nodded, encouraging him. He swallowed the mushrooms.
“I’ll be with you,” she said. “If you get in trouble, I’ll pull you out. Just like I did from fancy car.” She laughed, her deep brown eyes sparkling with love.
He was building a fishing boat that he launched onto a gray choppy sea. He sailed and sailed, heading ever northward, sailing, until he landed on a rocky beach. He pulled the boat up onto the shore. He knew he was to meet someone here. So, he sat still, just as with the no-thinking practice.
He waited for a long time. Then the trees moved with a sighing of the wind. His heart began to pound. He tried to still his fear. The trees moved, and he heard the understory crackle with the passing of some great body.
Emerging from the woods, taller than the trees yet smaller than a child, a figure stood before him. Ilmari was filled with awe and fear. Fir trees grew on the giant’s shoulders, the haunt of squirrels and owls, oaks grew from his brows, hemlocks grew like whiskers on his chin, and his teeth were like cedar trees.
He knew it was Antero Vipunen, the god of the forest. He wanted to run but remembered Vasutäti telling him now was the time for sisu and he sat, trembling, rooted to the ground. Antero Vipunen thundered, “Slave to humanity, rise up from the ground, from sleeping so long.” He took Ilmari’s right wrist and attached it with a rope woven from cedar bark to a young birch tree. Then he attached the left wrist to a second birch, and then his feet to two others. With a wave of his hand, the birches began to lean away from each other. Ilmari tried to keep from squealing with the pain and fear, but the pain and fear grew as the birches leaned farther away, pulling him in four directions. He screamed, trying futilely to fight the birches back to avoid being torn into four pieces.
Then Vasutäti was there—Vasutäti as he’d never seen her before, Vasutäti naked and young, her skin smooth, her body slender—her eyes sparkling with love.
“Now, you must hold the center,” she said gently, stroking his forehead. “Now you must hold still and not fight the birches. Now you need sisu. Now you do not-thinking.”
He breathed. He breathed in agony and fought panic. He breathed, trying to remember his father and mother. He looked into Vasutäti’s eyes, as if the love there were a rope, pulling him from drowning in the pain, pulling at his navel like an umbilical cord attached somewhere in the heavens, attaching him to some vast sky placenta that covered the earth with blood and strength and life.
Then, focusing on the love in Vasutäti’s eyes, he accepted the pain and consigned himself to being torn apart.
The pain ceased. The birches stood upright and still. Antero Vipunen, terrible of strength, terrible of manly beauty, stood before him. Vasutäti stood behind Ilmari and whispered, “Now you ask him questions.”
To ask a question? What question? To know. He wanted to know the secret of existence. He asked, “How does the universe work?” And Antero Vipunen said, “The wind chases the wind.” And it made wonderful, beautiful sense. He understood, truly. Then he asked, “How did it all start?” And Antero Vipunen said, “If nothingness is something, then nothingness exists. Nothing exists, always.” And Ilmari wept with the terrible beauty of it all.
He awoke next to the fire, under a full moon that couldn’t be seen but whose pale light filtered through the trees. The Vasutäti he’d always known was ladling crawdad stew into a bowl. He ate ravenously.
“You were with the forest god,” she said. “We have a different name for him.”
“How do you know that?”
She laughed. “Do you not remember? I was there.”
He was silent for some time. “Antero Vipunen. We call the forest god Antero Vipunen.” He fell silent, taking several more spoonfuls of stew. “He told me something, something that answered my question, really, really answered it and I understood, but now it doesn’t make any sense.” She waited for him. He said softly, “He said the wind chases the wind.” He looked up at her, helpless. “It’s like having an enormous shattering dream, but when you wake up you’re struck dumb and can’t tell it to anyone.”
“It’s like that.”
“Is he real?”
“As real as Jesus.”
“Do you mean Antero Vipunen is real or that Jesus isn’t?”
She smiled at his obvious consternation. “God is like a rushing waterfall. If you stand in it and try to drink, you will be smashed into the rocks and lost downstream. Antero Vipunen and Jesus are also God, but they are the slow streams at the waterfall’s base that allow us to drink.”
Ilmari wept. He’d lost the awe and the beauty of Antero Vipunen’s answer and here he was—again—nowhere special.
Vasutäti touched him tenderly on his cheek. “I too am sad to leave the world where I am beautiful for you. In this world, I am too old to make children, to give you pleasure.” She laughed. “Too old to give me pleasure.”
“How old are you, Vasutäti?” Ilmari asked.
She smiled the smile that helped the sun rise. “Same as you.” She laughed. And when Ilmari understood what she was saying, he laughed, too.
“I’ve never asked. What is your real name?”
She smiled. “Mowitch. It means deer.”
They were silent for a while. Then Ilmari said, “I was frightened.”
“An appropriate response.”
“If I go there again, will you be there?”
Vasutäti motioned for Ilmari’s empty bowl. She set it aside, then held out both her hands to him. He hesitated, then joined their hands. She looked up and he followed her gaze to where the near-white moon danced with the branches of the firs and the scudding clouds. They watched it together for a time, then she squeezed his hands and looked into his eyes. “If we’re ever apart,” she said, “know I’ll be looking at the same moon.”