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The Alpine Obituary

Page 12

by Mary Daheim


  Vida accepted the statement as an apology and resumed looking at the family tree. “That takes care of Lars for the moment. What about Jonas?”

  “That’s what I was going to say earlier,” Max said, looking away. “He’s a bit of a mystery.” He removed the lid from the shoe box. “I haven’t gone through all of these postcards and letters yet.”

  Vida gazed at Max from over the rims of her glasses. “Who else in your family is interested in a newspaper piece?”

  “Uncle Jack and Aunt Helene,” Max responded. “My cousin, Fred, and his wife, Opal. My other cousin, Doug, over in Leavenworth. They thought it’d be appropriate. It’s a new century, so much has changed, especially in the timber industry. The fact is, as far as the Froland part of the Iverson descendants goes, the line ends with me.”

  Vida offered Max a sympathetic look. “You still could remarry, Max. You’re only—what?—fifty?”

  Max smiled faintly. “I never wanted to be married to anyone except Jackie. Even after almost fifteen years without her, I still don’t.”

  “That’s a shame,” Vida declared, then added, “I was somewhat older when I was widowed. But I must confess, I always felt that if I found someone else, it would be like replacing Ernest. Somehow, I couldn’t do that.” Abruptly, she turned away.

  I intervened to change the subject. “Why don’t you leave the letters and such here, Max? Vida and I can sift through them later to see what might be usable for the article. We’re not going to muckrake, I promise.”

  Max grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t really think you were.”

  “It’s a reflex reaction on our part,” I explained. “Journalists always jump on a story’s worst aspect, especially if there’s any mystery to it.”

  “I understand,” Max said. “Let me show you some of the photos. Assuming, of course, you’d want to use any of them.”

  “Oh, we love family pictures,” Vida asserted, once again her usual self. “Our readers do, too. Let’s see them.”

  Max opened the first album and turned it so Vida and I could study the photos. “Some of these are quite old,” he said. “I don’t know how they’ll reproduce.”

  “Buddy Bayard can work with old pictures,” I said. “He’s very good at tweaking them to register well.”

  Max gave a nod. “This,” he said, pointing to a portrait that took up the album’s first page, “is my grandparents’ wedding photograph. Trygve met Olga in his hometown of Trondheim, Norway, when she was only fourteen. He came to America to work in the Minnesota north woods. By the time he’d saved up enough money to go back to Norway and marry Olga, he’d decided they should move further west, to Washington State. This picture was taken in Trondheim where they were married in 1891.”

  In the sepia-tinted portrait, Trygve Iverson—or Iversen, as he was then known—was a bear of a man with a heavy beard and piercing eyes. Olga, who was seated in front of her groom, looked as if she might have been pretty when she smiled. But people didn’t smile much in photos of that era. Olga appeared sturdy enough to out duke a musk ox.

  “That’s a lovely veil,” Vida remarked. “Handmade, I should think.”

  I sensed that Vida was hard pressed to give a compliment. The white veil and the bouquet of lilies were the only indications of wedding finery. Olga’s dress was dark and quite plain. The suit that Trygve wore looked too tight for his husky frame. Judging from their expressions, the couple looked like they had scheduled back-to-back root canals instead of celebrating a wedding.

  “What do you remember about them?” I asked as Max flipped the page to a grouping of old snapshots.

  “Nothing.” Max wore a half-smile. “They both died long before I was born. Grandpa Tryg wasn’t much older than I am now when he passed away. Grandma outlived him by over twenty years. It’s family lore that they both died of broken hearts.”

  Abruptly, Vida looked up from the photos she’d been studying. “How so?”

  Max shrugged. “I’m not sure about Grandpa. With Grandma, it was Uncle Burt’s death during the war in North Africa. She died a year to the day that he was killed.”

  “That was Burt Iverson,” Vida said softly. “He married a woman named Foster, didn’t he?”

  “Aunt Jo,” Max responded. “She’s still alive. I think she moved to a nursing home in Port Angeles where their daughter lives. Marjorie—I don’t know her married name—was not quite two when Uncle Burt died. Aunt Jo remarried one of the Bergstroms.”

  “Yes,” Vida said. “I knew that. But your aunt wasn’t from Alpine, was she?”

  Max shook his head. “No. She was from Everett, I think. I didn’t know her very well. For some reason, my grandmother never liked her.”

  “Why not?” Vida asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Max replied, casting a wary eye on Vida.

  I was looking at the pages of old snapshots. I saw Tryg and Olga standing in front of a small frame house with tulips and daffodils blooming by the picket fence. Olga held a baby draped in a fringed blanket. Someone with fine printing skills had labeled the photo with a gold pen. “Per Iversen, two weeks old, May 14, 1892.”

  “I think,” Max said, following my line of sight, “that was taken in Port Townsend. My grandparents lived there until they moved to Alpine many years later.”

  “In 1914,” I said, remembering the mention of the Iversons’ arrival in Alpine. I took a last look at the picture of the young couple with their baby. Vida had told me that Olga never really learned to speak English. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to come to America but couldn’t resist Trygve’s entreaties. It couldn’t have been easy for a girl probably still in her teens to leave the familiar circle of family and friends behind in Norway. I wondered if she’d been happy in her new life.

  Max looked surprised. “So you’ve been reading up on the family already?”

  “Well,” I replied, trying to recover from my slip of the tongue, “we often do background checking when an old-timer like your father dies.”

  “Tell me,” Vida said, leaning her elbows on the table and addressing Max, “why did the family change the spelling of their last name?”

  Max looked blank. “It was always Froland. F-r-o . . .”

  “No, no,” Vida interrupted, shaking her head. “The Iversons. It was originally spelled with an e.”

  “Oh.” Max rubbed at his beard. “I found Pa’s birth certificate when I was going through his things the other day. His mother, Karen Iverson, had spelled it with an o.”

  “I’ve always thought,” Vida continued in a musing tone, “that the s-o-n was more of a Swedish spelling than Norwegian.”

  “Generally, yes,” Max said, “but there are exceptions. Border crossings, and all that,” he added with a wink.

  I’d resumed looking at the photos. They were typical— adults posing in their Sunday best, more babes in arms, kids riding horses, kids playing ball, kids under a Christmas tree. The second album started out the same way, though there were no new babies and the kids were getting bigger. Trygve and Olga were bigger, too.

  Halfway through the snapshots, the backdrop changed. Now they were in Alpine. I could see Mount Baldy in the background, a small frame house above the railroad tracks, the bunkhouses below. One large photo was familiar. It showed the entire population of Alpine on the mill’s loading dock with the American flag they’d won for selling the most Liberty Bonds per capita in the state of Washington.

  I turned the page. Three men identified as Per, Lon, and Oscar stood in front of an enormous fallen cedar tree. Per, I assumed, was Trygve and Olga’s firstborn. He was a tall, strapping young man, and unlike his parents in their wedding portrait, Per was grinning at the camera.

  There were more photos taken in the woods, but it was the one on the facing page in the lower right-hand corner that grabbed my attention.

  It was a snapshot of a rope dangling from a railroad trestle.

  September 1916

  The first face that Frank Dawson saw belonged to
Harry Geerds, who was leaning out of the big locomotive. Harry looked grim, his ruddy cheeks smudged with coal and his broad shoulders slumped. Even before Harry’s brakeman had come to a complete stop by the water tower, men began to jump from the slow-moving boxcars.

  “Goddammit,” Harry shouted to Frank and the others, “I didn’t want to bring this bunch to Alpine, but I don’t have much choice.”

  “Don’t worry,” Frank called back. “We’ll make short work of them.”

  One of the new arrivals had already commandeered a packing crate and was standing on top of it. He was a tall lean man with a black scruffy beard and black scruffy clothes to match. In one hand he held a small red book. At least two dozen other men surged around the bearded newcomer, many also holding a similar red book.

  With a dignified calm, Carl Clemans approached the group. “Is that your leader?” he asked one of the newcomers.

  The man, who had bright red hair under his shabby cap, raised a fist. “We’re all leaders!” The others, including another dozen or more who had descended from the freight cars, chorused the same reply.

  Someone handed a red flag to the man on the packing crate. As he unfurled the banner, the Wobblies waved the little red book and raised their voices in song:

  “The people’s flag is deepest red,

  It shrouded oft our martyred dead;

  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold

  Their life blood dyed its every fold.”

  “Bullshit!” cried Tom Bassen, the woods foreman. “Get back on that train and get the hell out of Alpine!”

  Shouts of “Commies!” “Reds!” and “Traitors!” rent the smoky September air as more millworkers and loggers poured onto the platform.

  But the man with the scruffy beard and the scruffy clothes had a powerful voice that carried above the hostile Alpiners’ shouts. “Don’t be fools!” he cried in an accented voice. “You’re being gypped! You should join your Everett brothers and strike! You work for greedy capitalist pigs who will drain you of your lifeblood!”

  “No! No!” several of the men responded. “Not us! Not here!”

  Frank, with his brother-in-law, Tom Murphy, stood back a few yards from the other mill workers. “Why did they come here?” he murmured. “There are plenty of other camps where the conditions are bad. But not with Carl. He’s fair and generous.”

  Tom nodded. “I know that. We all know that. But I guess these wild-eyed radicals don’t.”

  Close to fifty I.W.W. members had now exited from the train. Harry Geerds wasted no time in starting up the locomotive again. “Good luck!” he called from his engineer’s perch. Slowly at first, then gathering momentum, the freight continued on its eastern journey.

  “The fat cats who own the mills and the woods and the camps don’t want to give you a fair shake!” the bearded man declared, still waving the red banner. “We working stiffs got to stand together! Solidarity forever!”

  As he paused to catch his breath, a small object hurtled through the air. It caught the man on the cheek, just above the line of his beard. He staggered slightly, then glared in the direction from which the missile had been thrown.

  A rock, Frank thought. Along with everyone else, he turned to see who’d struck the Wobbly speaker. No one stepped forward. The men who were in the vicinity all looked around, too.

  “Cowards!” the speaker cried, as a trickle of blood ran down his cheek. “You’re fools and you’re cowards!”

  Shouts went up from both sides; scuffling broke out. And then real blows were exchanged.

  The caboose had just passed by the loading dock. At least a dozen fistfights spilled over onto the now-vacant tracks.

  Tom Bassen held up a two-by-four. “Okay, men, let’s go!”

  The rest of the workers who had not yet joined in the melee surged forward. Even Carl Clemans had discarded his navy blue suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He held no weapon but led the charge from the loading dock ramp with at least sixty men right behind him.

  Tom Murphy wielded a baseball bat. He was first-generation Irish from New York State, and knew what it was like to be treated as an inferior. He’d come west to seek his fortune in the Yukon, but the golden dream had eluded him. Now he had a wife and two children, and no damned rabblerousers were going to spoil the claim he’d staked to a better life in Alpine.

  Frank Dawson also picked up a baseball bat, but his gaze wasn’t fixed on the violence directly in front of him. Instead, he looked up the hill a few yards, then shook his head. He thought he knew who’d triggered the brawl. Frank turned just in time to see a fierce Wobbly descend on him with a pine club. Frank ducked, fell to the ground, and rolled over. The club hit so close to his nose that he could smell the wood’s sweet scent.

  Someone—Frank thought it was one of his other brothers-in -law, Louie Siegel—was grappling with the man who’d swung the club. Louie was no more than average height but built like a bull. With his baseball bat, Frank clubbed the Wobbly on the shoulder. He fell with a loud yelp of pain. Exchanging satisfied glances, Frank and Louie waded into the mob. Louie was armed only with his fists; Frank swung the baseball bat at every unfamiliar face.

  Some of the intruders were already on the run. Carl Clemans led the pursuers, shouting courage to his men. The Wobblies had picked up weapons of wood from the loading dock, but most were discarded as they ran for their lives.

  Frank was panting by the time they reached the trestle. Several of the radicals jumped from the near end, rolling down the hillside and into the brush and berry bushes that had sprung up where the trees had been clear-cut.

  “Look at them go!” Tom Bassen shouted, pointing at the enemy in retreat. “Solidarity, my ass!”

  “Chicken shits!” cried Vern Farnham, leaning on his club.

  Frank saw Carl Clemans a few feet away. The mill owner’s gaze was fixed on the fleeing Wobblies. There were tears in his eyes as Tom Bassen shook his hand.

  “That’s the end of them around here,” Tom declared, his voice hoarse.

  Carl attempted a smile at his foreman. “I hope so. But they’re not entirely wrong, you know. They’re just not right for Alpine.”

  Dusk was falling as Frank and the others headed back to the mill. At the loading dock, he noticed patches of blood seeping into the rough planks. Looking around, he saw that some of it had come from his friends and fellow workers. A cut here, a slash there, and bruises that were discoloring almost before his very eyes. But spirits were high. A battle had been fought, a victory won.

  Frank looked again at the place on the hill where his attention had been drawn just before he’d almost been clubbed. No one was there now. But earlier, in the path from where the sharp object had been thrown, he had seen two figures standing together and jeering.

  Frank had instantly recognized Jonas Iversen, and his own nephew, Vincent Burke.

  Chapter Eight

  I FORCED MY voice to sound casual as I pointed to the snapshot of the rope hanging from the trestle. “What’s the significance of this shot?”

  Max leaned over to look while I heard Vida’s sharp intake of breath. She coughed rather loudly to mask her surprise.

  “Goodness,” she exclaimed, “I hope I’m not catching cold.” For emphasis, she took a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose in a loud, buglelike manner.

  “I don’t know what this picture represents,” Max finally said after studying the photo. “I can’t see anybody in the background beyond the trestle and the rope, can you?”

  I couldn’t either, though upon closer inspection, I realized that this photo wasn’t taken from the exact same angle as the one that had been enclosed in the threatening letter to Marsha Foster-Klein. The lettering under the snapshot didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know: It read GN TRESTLE OVER SKYKOMISH RIVER.

  I flipped the page. Another wedding portrait, this time of Per and Susan Iversen. The setting was a church, probably in Ballard, according to the write-up Vida and I had read in The B
labber. The couple looked much less solemn and considerably better looking than Trygve and Olga. There followed more kids, more babies, more Christmas trees, and an eight-by-ten photo of a group gathering, probably in the social hall. THANKSGIVING DAY DINNER, 1917 read the caption. The diners appeared well fed and reasonably well dressed.

  “May we keep these?” I asked, fingering the two older albums.

  “Of course,” Max replied with a smile. Now that I noticed, he was better looking than his great-grandparents, too. The only resemblance I saw—besides the beard—was in his eyes. Like Trygve’s, they were very keen.

  Vida had her hands on the other, newer albums. “May we keep these as well?”

  “Go ahead,” Max said.

  Vida pulled one of the albums in front of her and turned to me. “I have to show you a picture of Max’s late wife, Jackie. She was such a beautiful girl.” She glanced at Max. “Do you mind?”

  Max shook his head, then reached out to slip a finger between two of the last pages. “Our wedding photo is somewhere around here.”

  Vida found it immediately. It was in black-and-white, taken at First Lutheran in front of the altar. Max wore a beard even then. Of course it was the Seventies when so many men sported facial hair. He was thinner and looked very handsome—and happy—in his tuxedo.

  “Jackie,” Vida interposed, “was Neeny Doukas’s niece. You remember him, of course.”

  I did. Neeny had been involved in the very first homicide I’d encountered in Alpine. He’d been in the real estate business, and the firm he founded still bore his name.

  If Neeny had been a homely old coot, Jackie was his polar opposite. She was a dark-haired beauty whose vibrancy showed through in the photograph. Indeed, she was movie-star gorgeous, and looked like someone I’d like to know— when I got over resenting her good looks.

  Despite not having known her, Jackie’s image brought tears to my eyes. “Lovely,” I murmured, then steeled myself to look straight at Max. “I don’t know what to say.”

 

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