Aino worked, visiting Eleanor throughout the spring and summer whenever she could. It was hard, prosaic, daily work that was never finished and never varied, but it was essential to the lives of everyone living there. She counted. Here was no great cause—other than earning room and board and Eleanor’s keep. However, why wasn’t this as great a cause as any? Who passed judgment on whether causes were great or small? Yes, there were no great debates, like syndicalism versus socialism. There were only small ones. Should she order navy beans or pinto beans? Should she try to move Ojala, who’d lost his leg to a flying cable, to the ground floor? Should she let him stay until he could get a job? The tasks were set before her—every morning, ever the same—like seeds spilled across a board that she had to sort, and after having them sorted into various piles by the end of the day, she awoke to find them scattered again, and again she set about sorting. There was no goal. There was no end point. There was just this daily living, this daily sorting of seeds that was the very life of the poikataloja and the men who lived there. She lived like a circle instead of a line. Since what she was doing didn’t matter in terms of power, politics, and history, it didn’t matter what she was doing. It felt peaceful.
She finally confirmed her citizenship at the courthouse. She’d been married to an American citizen for over fifteen years. A month later, she turned in her divorce papers and her divorce was granted.
Most of the bachelors at the poikataloja were in their late teens and twenties. They came to her for help with writing letters, advice on what color tie to buy to go with a new shirt. Some paid her a nickel to grease their boots, darn a sock, or patch a shirt. They talked to her some nights like a surrogate mother and other nights like an intriguing divorcée.
She worked under the single electric ceiling light late into the night, reconciling accounts, making lists for tomorrow’s shopping, repairing her own clothes. She found herself writing letters home for her boys, as she came to think of them, in Finnish and Swedish.
Aino used her mending money to buy gifts for Eleanor but soon learned the gifts made her cousins envious, so she began taking something for every child. Eleanor was happy. Aino realized that the happier Eleanor was, the more joy it brought herself.
Eleanor responded. She talked more with Aino on her visits. She shared more of her life at Ilmahenki. It was clear, however, that Ilmahenki, not Astoria, was home.
Spring moved into summer. Lumber prices had been falling since the summer before and the single men moved out of town, looking for work somewhere else. Aino and Kyllikki both had to spend time advertising, talking to prospective boarders.
She began to submit articles to Toveritar, the Finnish-language women’s socialist newspaper, and within a few weeks had a weekly column explaining different aspects of Marxist theory. The paper circulated only in Astoria and nearby towns and she knew that the women cared more about recipes than Marxist theory—so one day she added a recipe and did mental gymnastics to relate it to Marxist theory. It elicited positive letters to the editor. She gradually changed the column to one called Recipes for Working Families, which included food recipes focusing on cost and nutrition but also “recipes” for raising families with social consciousness with object lessons that were increasingly brought to her attention by readers.
After three months of dry summer weather came nine months of wet winter weather and then three more months of dry weather and the beginning of another nine months of wet. New boarders came as old boarders left. Squash in the summer, turnips and rutabagas in the winter. Apples in the fall, fresh fat cream in the spring. Socks darned, trouser knees patched, letters written, breakfasts and dinners cooked, plates and pots washed, sandwiches made for lunch buckets, toilets cleaned, dances at Suomi Hall, and every week another column for Toveritar. Time seemed to stand still, punctuated by holidays that themselves seemed to never change, and Aino, now thirty-seven, sorted the seeds of a woman’s life.
That Christmas she had small gifts for everyone, which she toted aboard the General Washington in a large canvas shopping bag. The sun had just set, leaving orange-pink traces. A nearly full moon was rising far up the river, pale white in a sky that stretched, darkening, into empty space. She felt the vibration of the boat’s deck and then she sensed the vibration moving into the river and the river flowing from the moon, flowing to the sea, flowing through her. She, small and alone, was yet part of this vast animated soul of a river, a flowing, vibrating, moving stillness.
Christmas Eve was wonderful. Alma had outdone herself preparing the food. Her niece, Sylvie, had come by to help with the pies and other baking, which puzzled Alma a little, but then she wasn’t going to turn down the help. Even Aksel stopped by, leaving candy he said he’d bought in Portland. He, however, seemed preoccupied, saying vaguely that business wasn’t as good as it used to be. Kyllikki told Aino that when Matti came back from the sauna, he said that Aksel had a new scar.
The only slight imperfection in an otherwise near-perfect Christmas was that Mielikki got a toothache when she ate some of Aksel’s candy. Ilmari said he would be happy to yank the tooth with pliers, making Mielikki blanch. Alma came to her rescue, saying her father might be a good blacksmith but was no dentist. Everyone laughed.
Of course, the cattle didn’t know it was Christmas, so Ilmari stood up from the table and excused himself to check on them.
Outside, far above the stillness, in air so high above the earth there was no warmth, he heard the honking of geese flying south, the last of them getting out before winter. He stood quietly, waiting. The honking got louder until he saw the first of the huge undulating chevron, like a giant heart, pulsing in the sky. He watched a single goose, suddenly an individual, hurrying to regain its place in the whole. It disappeared into the flock, a single goose no more, but the flock continued. For nearly an hour, he watched individual chevrons, obviously insistent on some destination far from Deep River because the leaders were keeping them so high. Then, as mysteriously as they’d come, they were gone.
Then he heard it: wind stirring the tops of the trees two hundred feet above the edge of the hard-won pasture, like the sound of rapids in a distant unseen canyon, a sibilant echo of air and forest beings. He looked across Deep River and saw the tops of the trees moving wavelike in the ominous-feeling air. Cold dread seized him, and a dark spirit passed over him like the wings of the Angel of Death.
Its next visit would be soon. On that visit, it would not fly over Ilmahenki like the geese.