The next day in Portland, November 12, 1919, Aino read the headline: MASSACRE IN CENTRALIA. WOBBLY HUNG. MORE ARRESTED. Her heart pounding, she read that Jack Kerwin was arrested and charged with murder along with many others. The young soldier, Wesley Everest, was lynched. The legionnaires had broken into the jail and hanged him from the Chehalis River Bridge. The paper said he shot a deputy named Hubbard while trying to escape across the Skookumchuck River.
The last paragraph said the police were looking for a female accomplice in the murders of the five legionnaires. She had been seen with Everest several times, the last time fleeing with him from the Roderick Hotel. She felt her stomach lurching with fear.
She couldn’t stay in Portland and she was afraid to go home. All she could think of was to flee to Chicago where the IWW was large and active, where she could find comrades to hide her. She ran to her rooming house to gather her things, not knowing if she would ever see Eleanor again.
Just before Christmas, Kyllikki and Matti received a letter postmarked Detroit with no return address. One day later, Alma and Ilmari received an almost identical letter. Alma read it first and then passed it over to Ilmari who read it, said nothing, and went to do the milking.
After the children, including Eleanor, were put to bed, Alma sat down with her knitting. She was working on a sweater for Eleanor. Ilmari picked up his carving; he was working on a cedar salad bowl. They usually had these fifteen or twenty minutes together before going to bed themselves. No use wasting the kerosene and time doing nothing practical.
“Why won’t she tell us where she’s living? I don’t think it’s Detroit,” Alma said, at the same time keeping count of her knit-and-purl stitches. She watched Ilmari as he carefully made a wood shaving curl with a new gouging tool, hollowing out the bowl from a single block of fine-grained cedar. She knew he was thinking, not ignoring her.
“She got into trouble with the police in Finland, you know,” Ilmari finally said.
“Yoh.”
“She’s frightened.”
“Yoh.”
They both continued working.
“Do you think she’s in Detroit?” Alma asked.
“No. She’s in Chicago.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don’t think that,” he said.
Well, Alma thought, that makes it clear. She’s in Chicago.
After another long silence Ilmari asked, “Do you mind having Eleanor?”
“No. I love her.”
“We might have her a long time.”
“Yoh.”
Spring came but was very different from Alma’s and Ilmari’s memories of it’s arrival in Finland. There, the water would start to trickle in the afternoons and freeze again at night on the deeply frozen rivers. Around Deep River, snowfall was unusual by March. Only on rare occasions would ice form across the river. Spring was about more daylight and getting things done.
Nature’s colors came earlier in Deep River than in Finland and lasted longer. By February, the dark-green branches of the conifers would start to show tiny chartreuse feathers of new growth, bright yellow-green jewels like earrings on the tips of the branches. Blue-violet lupine and starbursts of purple camas came into view. The low, muddy ground near rivers and streams pushed up the dark leaves and yellow cornucopia flowers of skunk cabbage. Then, most secret and special, the first glorious trillium raising its delicate but brilliant white petals from dark humus, braving the still-cold rain of early March, announced that winter was not yet vanquished but would be vanquished once again.
In April, the promise fulfilled, new vines and bushes seemed to grow as you watched them. In May, the pale yellow-orange and watery salmonberries ripened. In June, translucent red huckleberries. In July, deep-red thimbleberries, used by little girls to color their lips, and with wonderful tiny seeds to chew into mash. Finally, in August, the blue Cascade bilberries, wild strawberries, and three varieties of blackberries: wild mountain, evergreen, and Himalaya.
On an early Sunday morning in May, Ilmari decided to visit Vasutäti. Mielikki, now eleven, grabbed an unfinished basket, so she could get Vasutäti to solve a particularly difficult problem with a pattern. She’d long ago moved on from her first fumbling attempts with a child’s hands. Even Vasutäti had told Ilmari that the girl had a gift for weaving. Ilmari knew that Vasutäti was teaching Mielikki everything she knew about weaving. Helmi, nine, and Jorma, seven, came as well, leaving Alma with Eleanor.
The children scampered barefoot on the moist needle fall of the previous winter, the girls hunting for trilliums—mostly past, but occasionally a late one could be found—and Jorma hunting for food. Sheep sorrel, its soft trifold leaves tasting like little bursts of lemon candy, or young fiddlehead ferns, with their musty asparagus-like flavor—or the occasional squeal of delight at finding a good licorice root—kept them all chatting and happy. They all loved visiting Vasutäti, and Ilmari loved taking them.
About halfway to Vasutäti’s campsite clouds darkened the sun. The children hardly noticed. In these forests, the passing of the sun into and out of clouds barely registered on the forest floor. But Ilmari felt this one more than he saw it, and it chilled him.
He picked up his pace and Jorma started to lag. Ilmari swung him up onto his shoulders.
Mielikki hurried up beside Ilmari. “Why are we going faster, Isä?” she asked.
Ilmari stopped. He looked down at her and smiled. “Good question,” he said. He looked off into the darkness of the deep forest. “No good reason to hurry. No reason at all.”
Mielikki’s hands suddenly went to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. Ilmari nodded slowly at her and put a finger to his lips. Then he knelt in front of her and hugged her. When he stood up again, she was struggling against crying. He laughed and tousled her hair. “Vasutäti would say now is not the time for sisu.”
Ilmari crawled into the little bark-covered shelter and in the dim light could see Vasutäti lying on her beloved bearskin blanket in her deerskin ceremonial dress with the Hudson’s Bay beads she’d sewn on it herself when she was young. Her hair was combed and flowed unbraided over her chest, adorned with a single owl feather over her right ear. Her twinkling eyes and merry laugh flooded his memory. She was dressed for a wedding, not a funeral.