Once she even knitted a sweater she said revealed her Swedish background, for it was intricately knitted in many colors with a design featuring reindeer and snowflakes and balsam trees covered with snow. It was so beautiful I feared no one would ever wear it. Elsie did, however, wear it to school that fall “in memory of Ma,” she said. But the rest of us knew she was just showing off. That was all right with us, however. No matter how fancy the clothes Elsie wore, or how fine their house or how many cows Mr. Hauala milked, many of us still had our mothers and brothers alive. We forgave her as we counted our blessings.
During the worst of the following winter Mr. Hauala often hitched his horses to a sleigh and drove around the neighborhood picking up those of us who were school-age, wrapping us warmly in Hudson-Bay blankets and depositing us at the door of the school right on time.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, after the influenza epidemic had ebbed came the problem of school. All four of us needed school shoes, and Ronny needed school clothes. Little Eino and I got their hand-me-downs and felt grateful for them.
Usually Mother did as she had done in Finland, spinning wool so tightly and neatly she could wind it onto the circular rug-maker and weave the material out of which she could make our clothes. But that fall was different. She was different. We wondered if she missed our father, who had up and left the previous winter, riding our horse and taking with him all the money Mother had saved so carefully from the sale of her butter, cream, and milk.
She’d thought herself so wise, putting her coffee beans bag filled with coins deep into the flour barrel. But he must have caught sight of her one day, and once he knew where it was, he was gone.
Not that it was really any loss. Since Ronny had been old enough to hold an axe, he’d been our woodsman, hauling big logs from where he found them deep in the woods (using the horse to pull them home), sawing them into chunks he split and piled into our woodshed every fall so we always had plenty of wood to keep the house warm and the sauna hot for the winter. But now the horse was gone, and Ronny was operating at half-strength, and a long winter lay ahead of us, said Those Who Knew—because the beaver had built their pond-houses extra thick and the foxes’ fur had grown in heavier than usual.
But the beginning of school was approaching, and we needed to be ready. I could wear Aini’s hand-me-downs, although they’d be way too big, and Eino would drown in Ronny’s previous year’s school clothes. Ronny desperately needed new shoes, pants, and shirts, and even though Aini had insisted that she wasn’t going on to school, it was long past time for her to get dresses that fit.
To our surprise those needs were fulfilled in a surprising way.
Soon after we recovered from the influenza epidemic and before school started, Father returned, flush with money. He told Mother he had been working on the railroad. There was plenty for us to buy new school clothes, and for once Mother didn’t have to skimp on the grocery buying.
But everything else was wrong.
3: Reality and Escape
Aini had technically graduated already, and Ronny had only to repeat his eighth grade year before he, too, would be ready for high school. But Aini refused to leave even to travel the five-miles or so to the larger Alango School, which—in addition to first through eighth grades—also had the beginnings of a high school. So she stayed home to help Mother, who desperately needed the help.
My father with his a “big shot” attitude thought of himself as one of the “movers and shakers of the community.” But he was just a working man like all the rest. Somehow, however, he had found “friends” who lived in Virginia, which lay east and south of us; in Chisholm, which was almost directly south; and in Hibbing, which was just past Chisholm. In the morning he’d announce to my mother, “We are expecting some people from… wherever it was… for sauna tonight,” which meant Mother had to prepare for the sauna company. She and Aini would spend all day baking breads—sweet breads (cardamom biscuit), for which Aini had to open pods of cardamom, place the inside black bits into the corner of a dishtowel, and hit them with a hammer until they were as small as sugar or salt—and rieska (Finnish flat bread) as well as a variety of pies, depending on what was in season—blueberry, strawberry, or raspberry—or whatever she could spare from what she had put up the previous summer. Apple always for sure.
The “guests” would pay, of course, for Mother’s and Aini’s baking but never enough to cover the cost of the ingredients. Moreover, Father availed himself of the money as soon as the “guests” offered it. He always made a great to-do about refusing it, then accepted it with a smarmy kind of gratitude that made me think of a character in David Copperfield, I think or Oliver Twist, whichever had that mealy-mouthed sickeningly ingratiating Uriah Heap. That was who my father turned into by the end of the evening after treating his “guests” to a sauna (for which Mother provided the clean towels, of course), and for which Ronny worked hard to keep the kiuas filled with wood for hot water and the cool water containers filled with cold.
Sometimes Father just gave up and gave Mother’s and Aini’s hard work away without even indicating a need for payment. That usually happened after he’d had too much to drink. The fellows who came to visit never brought their wives, but they always had flasks full of alcoholic beverages. When he was sober, my father could be a very kind and thoughtful man; but when he’d had something to drink, he changed completely into an angry drunk verbally and physically cruel to my mother and to us.
Mother usually tried to stay away from him when he was drinking, but when he was “hosting” friends, she had nowhereto go. They took over the kitchen and the sauna. That left the bedroom and the barn. She was loathe to go into the bedroom for fear (I later learned) that one of the guests would follow her and expect her to give him another kind of present altogether. She also kept a sharp eye on Aini and me although I was still so scrawny and little one of them called me a heinäsirkka (a grasshopper), and the nickname stuck to my great displeasure.
One morning was especially bad. When I got up after finally falling asleep to drunken singing and crazy, loose, often vulgar talk, the kitchen floor was strewn with male bodies, obviously still dead drunk.
“That’s it,” Mother told Father when he came out of the sauna, having gone back in and fallen asleep in the dressing room. “I absolutely refuse to take any more of this. Either you quit this drinking and carousing or you leave.”
“ME! LEAVE!” Father shouted. “You’re the one who’ll be leaving. No God damn woman is going to tell me what to do.”
To our great distress, he followed her when she came back into the house and headed for the knife drawer.
Mother grabbed little Eino and took off running, urging Aini and Ronny and me to run as fast as we could across the field to Kivimaki’s place. Father chased us, throwing kitchen knives at my mother and at us. Thank God he was still so drunk his aim was off. We made it to Kivimakis’ safely. That time Mother almost refused to go back to the house, but we couldn’t stay at Kivimakis’. They had a little store in front of their house, but there was only a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom upstairs, and they already had four children.
I’ve spoken about Father’s behavior after he returned home, but I’ve not told everything that happened. There was worse… even worse… than the events I’ve described so far.
It started when Aini graduated from eighth grade and began to help Mother with the baking and the housework and cooking and even the barn work when Father wasn’t there. She was always the good girl, the good daughter, the one who minded her elders and was never smart-mouthed or intentionally nasty. Unlike me. I have to admit I was vociferous about Father’s behavior—to him and to Mother. It earned me many a beating with Father’s razor strap and many a “punishment” from Mother. Her “punishments” usually involved extra house-work, which I never minded because I could memorize poetry while I was working. It brought me
great pleasure and made whatever work I was assigned to go faster and smoother—without the level of discomfort that would have earned it the word “punishment.”
When Father told Aini and Mother in the morning that there would be guests that night, I had been heard to ask, “Are they more men who come here just to drink and have a sauna? Do they pay Mother and Aini for all of the work they have to do to prepare everything for them?”
At that, Father boxed my ears—sometimes so hard they were still ringing when I got to school. But I didn’t care. I hated him and his friends with a loathing that was only accentuated once the “gentlemen” arrived.
I once told Mr. Reid from Virginia to “wipe your shoes when you come into this house. Mother works very hard to keep it clean.”
And I had told Mr. Shapiro from Hibbing that he should “bring your own towel to use to dry yourself after you finish your sauna. It’s back-breaking work for Mother to keep everything washed and dried—especially during the winter.”
Moreover, when one of the gentlemen looked at Mother with what I considered a salacious glance, I told him to “leave my mother alone. She has already been working since dawn to satisfy your demands. Don’t make her work even harder, and don’t make any ‘special’ demands on her.”
That time, once the men had left and Father struggled to stand, too inebriated to hold himself upright, he had grabbed me by the shoulders and shaken me so hard my neck had ached for days. But I didn’t care. And I refused to stop.
The very worst time, however, involved Aini. She was a slender, very pretty girl with brown hair she kept braided, but sometimes she wrapped the braids around her head, to form a kind of crown. The man who spoke to her wasn’t one of Father’s “town friends.” He was a country bachelor who had taken to coming to “visit” when Father was home, looking for some free drinks and a handout. His name was Tommy Bessemer. He told Aini, “You look especially lovely tonight. How would you like to earn some extra money? All I would ask is that you be kind to an old man and allow him to see your hair down. I’ll bet it reaches your waist.”
“No!” I protested. But Aini, who liked compliments and enjoyed earning special attention, complied, pulling her hair out of its braids and letting it lie loose down her back.
“Ahh, lovely,” Tommy commented, running his hand down from the top of her head to her waist, stroking her hair. “You should always wear it like this.”
I sat back, studying him with anger primed to erupt.
“Now, how about if you and I just go into the bedroom and spend a little bit of time together—just you and me. You are such a beautiful girl, I’ll bet that you are really beautiful under all of those clothes,” and his hand moved to the buttons of her blouse high on her neck.
Standing up, I moved quickly between them and said (very angrily and forcefully), “You take your dirty hands off of my sister right now, or I’ll make you sorry you ever touched her.”
“Why…” he looked down at me, all innocence, “all I was doing was paying your sister a compliment. That’s all. Right, guys?” He looked around the kitchen at the four men sitting in various states of drunkenness in chairs.
“Rii… ght…” The word dragged out insolently.
All of a sudden, Aini realized what he had suggested. Her face turned a bright red, and she sank back, as far from Mr. Bessemer as it was possible to get in that small room. She didn’t dare make a move toward the bedroom. That might have been interpreted as an invitation.
Looking desperately at me, she asked, “Would you like some coffee? Mother and I made a special pulla just for you to enjoy tonight.”
“The enjoyment I’m seeking has nothing whatsoever to do with what I put in my mouth,” and then he grinned as if he had made a joke. “Unless what goes in is something soft and pink!”
At that I punched him. I wasn’t very big, but I’d had a lot of fights with Ronny, who happened to be spending that night with his friend Veiko Rahikainen, and I had an idea of how to go about getting even. My fist hit his nose, which started to bleed, and he reached for me furious with a mixture of frustration and anger. When his hands grabbed me, I pushed him back so hard he fell against the edge of the wood stove, cracking his head on the edge.
He fell, senseless. Looking down at him, I was suddenly frightened. I hadn’t meant to hurt him… so much! I hadn’t meant to… what had just happened? Was he alive? Desperate, I leaned over and tried to find a pulse in his neck. Blood was streaming from the cut on the side of his head, and he wasn’t moving.
“Oh, my God,” I cried, terrified.
“Ahh,” Mr. Reid and Mr. Shapiro both said, “he’ll be all right. He’s got the hardest head in the whole state of Minnesota!”
But he didn’t move. He didn’t get up. His chest wasn’t rising and falling as it should be.
“Damn it,” Father said, “if he isn’t dead.”
“What?” the others asked, incredulous.
“Yup,” Father told them, “I think that he hit his head so hard his brains got all muddled, and he couldn’t think and just let go. He’s dead for sure.”
“Well, what’re we gonna do?” Mr. Reid asked, his voice still slurred.
“We’ve got to get rid of the body,” Father said, looking over at me with murder in his eyes. I was really going to get a shellacking over this problem.
“I know an old well… up the road a couple of miles. We could load ’im in the wagon, drive there, and dump him in. Nobody’ll find ’im, and if they do, who’s to tell how he got there!”
So drunk they were stumbling around the kitchen, they finally each grabbed an arm and a leg and dragged Tommy outside, loaded him into the back of the wagon, which was, thankfully, filled with hay.
Mother immediately began to clean up the blood.
“Help me, young lady,” she ordered. “You, too, Aini. We’ve got to get the blood cleaned up before those guys get back. If they’re sober by then, they’ll remember what happened, and then you, young lady, are in for big trouble.”
Aini said, her voice quavering, “I saw them take the bottle of moonshine with them. I don’t think they’ll be sober when they get back.”
“Nonetheless, we’ve got to get this cleaned up right away. Aini, go outside and fill a bucket with cold water. You, Maria, you dip a bucket with hot water from the stove, sliver some soap into it, and wait until Aini gets in here with the cold water. Cold water will take the stain away quicker, and then we can scrub it with hot water.”
Too terrified to move, I just stood there until Mother’s sharp voice came through to me, “Missy, you’ve been pushing those guys buttons too hard for too long. Now you got what you wanted. One of them is gone… forever. Do you realize that? You could be guilty of… murder! GET BUSY AND HELP!”
I got busy. By the time we heard the wagon heading back into the yard, the guys singing a filthy song about a “redskin lass with a nigger up her ass,” the kitchen was as clean as it had been before they entered.
Evidently they had decided to call it a night, however, because we heard a Model T Ford start up, and a horse and wagon head out the driveway, too, and then Father came into the house, and I knew I was really in for it.
My bottom hurt for at least a week after he finished with the razor strap. He must have hit me at least twenty-five times, each slap harder than the one before. The next morning I couldn’t sit down.
Nothing more was said about what had happened the night before. Not by Father. Not by Mother. Not by Aini. Not by Mr. Reid or Mr. Shapiro, although both of them kept their eyes and their hands off of Mother and Aini… and me.
As far as I know, no one ever found Tommy Bessemer’s body. Not that there was much of a search. He was just one of many old bachelors who had shacks back in the woods and lived off the land by cutting trees and selling the logs, by shooting deer, grouse, and sh
arptail for dinner no matter the season, and by running trap lines where they caught enough mink, beaver, weasel, and otter to resupply their meager financial needs. Like him, they tended to be there… and gone.
* * * * *
The sauna nights continued, and though Mother, Aini, and I were left alone, they didn’t improve in any other respect, and we hated it when they occurred. Then came the last time. Father and his guests drank and ate as they always did, but even after the other men left, Father must have received a bottle or two of moonshine in return for Mother’s work because he kept drinking all that day and the next and the next.
Mother tried to keep us away from him. Ronny and Aini did the barn work, which was usually Father’s responsibility, and Mother, Eino, and I used the separator for the fresh milk, loaded all of the milk, cream, and butter she had been saving onto a cart, and hauled it down to the end of the driveway just in time to meet the fellow from the Cook Coop Creamery. Ronny helped the driver load the milk cans onto the back of his wagon, and he paid Mother in cash as he always did with his usual compliment that her butter, cream, and milk sold faster than anyone else’s because everything was always so fresh and clean.
Father must have been watching from the window, because the minute Mother entered the house, he grabbed her by the arm, forced her hand open, and took the money from her.
“But I need that to buy groceries,” Mother protested.
“Ah, hell,” he answered, “you know how to get by on very little. That’s what you had when I picked you up off the street in Chisholm, fresh from the old country. You had nothing at all until you married me so don’t give me that ‘I need’ business. You need to keep me happy. That’s what you need to do,” and he pulled her toward the bedroom.
Gifts of the Spirit Page 4
