Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  We filled the housebound time with preparations for Thanksgiving and Christmas—studying the new Sears & Roebuck Winter Catalog. (The old ones had been relegated to the outdoor toilet where a page served the purpose of toilet paper.)

  Considering how large I was, we figured I must have gotten pregnant on our wedding night and the baby would be born sometime early in February.

  By Thanksgiving, my tummy was larger than the chicken Mother fixed, and by Christmas, I was almost too big to lie comfortably in bed anymore. Arvo set pillows up against the head of the bed for me to lean on. We had continued to make love until it became just too hard for me to manage. Since then we had contented ourselves with a lot of touching, holding, pressing, and rubbing. So I guess we really didn’t quit making love at all—even toward the end.

  During all of that time, Arvo stayed by my side as much as he could, always there to support me and to offer a helping hand or an arm. Of course, it was winter and so the farm labor had been reduced to milking the cows, feeding the chickens and the pigs, for by November we had piglets, too, and taking care of the horse. He had a lot of time to spend with me. We played checkers and the marble game. He taught me to play pinochle, and we kept a running total of who owed whom money. (By January, I owed him $5.35.)

  Karl taught Arvo some basic carpentry skills, and he made a cradle—not as fancy as the one Karl had made—but very special nonetheless. And he was working on a rocking chair for me.

  In the evenings, I read aloud to him from the books I loved, and he became accustomed to—if not enamored of—my love of poetry and by the number of poems I had memorized. I even talked him into doing a little bit of memorization, too, and for a few nights we competed, but I was so obviously a winner that we declared it a draw and settled for my reading. I explained to him about William the Conquerer and the Battle of Hastings and then read Ivanhoe aloud, explaining the parts he didn’t understand and giving him hints about the real identity of the Pilgrim.

  Our Christmas that year was extra-special. Arvo and Ronny had found a perfect balsam tree in the woods when they were hunting that fall. About a week before Christmas Eve, they cut it and dragged it toward the house. Once they had it in the yard, they called to Mother and me to come to see. We exclaimed, “It’s perfect!” And it was. Although we had very little money, we managed to give presents to each other. We had ordered gifts from the Sears & Roebuck catalog with the $10.00 we had gotten from the dance. Ronny was delighted with the really good, new axe we bought him; and Eino was in heaven when he received his first puukko (or knife). We had thought long and hard about what to get Mother and finally decided on a lace fichu she could wear with her good black dress. She cried when she opened up that present!

  For each other, we had decided the cradle would be our gift, but Arvo had ordered me a new book he had heard about through the teacher at the Prairie Star school, which was still open for the young ones. He had made a special trip to ask her for the title of a new book she thought I would enjoy. She had asked about my reading habits, and he had told her about my books of poetry and the novels I had read and reread. She had suggested an old book by Jane Austen. The title was Pride and Prejudice.

  I devoured that book and read it aloud to everyone who’d listen, trying to do voices as Tellervo and I had done.

  I had also splurged and bought Arvo a new pair of overalls. “It’s not as wonderful as what you bought for me,” I said, somewhat sadly, “but you really really need them.”

  He said he was delighted and gave me a kiss for thanks.

  We had opened our gifts on Christmas Eve after lighting the candles on the tree, which stood in a corner of the living room. It’s a sign of how cold that winter became that the water we had set it in froze during the first night it was inside. Thank God Ronny and Arvo had propped it up so it was standing straight when we got downstairs that morning. I had made paper chains—small circles of paper woven into other small circles—as we had done when I was in school—and we had strung popcorn and cranberries on thread—enough so the tree held swags of both. We thought it beautiful, and it was. I wish now that I had been able to take a picture of it, but such wonders had not yet reached Korvan Kylla.

  Karl, Aini, and Ernie joined us for Christmas Day dinner, which was really a feast. Arvo had managed to shoot a wild turkey just a week before. Mother had stuffed it with bread crumbs mixed with onion, butter, and herbs. (She had dried parsley, sage, basil, and oregano at the end of their seasons.) Ronny had peeled the potatoes, which Mother had Arvo mash because “He has the strongest arms,” she said. Into the oven also went sweet potatoes, which we had purchased from the neighbors’ store, with homemade bread and pulla, of course. We had also canned green beans, which she cooked on top of the stove in butter, too, and since there were still a lot of jars of blueberries on the shelves, we had blueberry pie for dessert and pumpkin pie and apple pie that Mother had made out of dried apples.

  Everything was delicious. We all fit around our kitchen table although Ronny and Eino had to bring a bench in from the sauna dressing room to put on one side so we would all have places to sit. We crowded together, but that was half the fun.

  Little Ernie was tied onto two of my thickest books, set one atop the other, and he was big enough to eat a bit of “real” food. He had really just learned to talk, and we loved to ask him questions just to hear his answers.

  Afterward we sat in the living room with the candles on the tree lighted and a pail of water ready lest they set something on fire. Of course, nothing bad happened that day. Or the next or the next. It was as if we were living a charmed life. We were all so happy. Ronny and Eino had begun to treat Arvo like their older brother, and Mother had always treated him like a son.

  Sometimes late at night, he commented on that to me, whispering, “I love your mother. Don’t get me wrong. I love you most of all—more than anything in this world—but she comes a close second,” he teased. His mother had been—not much of a mother—at least it didn’t sound as if she had been from what he told me. And he really appreciated Mother as did I.

  For the last few months, I had been relegates to “easy house-hold duties”—washing dishes, washing the separator (darn it!), giving the furniture a light dusting. No scrubbing of floors or washing of clothes for me, Arvo had decreed, and Mother had agreed.

  By January, I was all baby. There seemed to be nothing left of me except that tummy. I had difficulty walking, sitting, lying down, moving at all. It was as if the baby were intent on making me miserable because he/she kicked endlessly. Arvo loved to put his hand on my tummy to feel the kicking. “He’s going to be a football player,” he predicted. And he turned out to be correct. But also basketball and baseball, two of Arvo’s other loves.

  Arvo told me that he had been walking by the football field in Virginia one day soon after he had quit school when a football came flying at him. He had caught it and thrown it back. It had sailed over the heads of all of the players except the one in the opposite end zone. The coach had come running up to him, asking him to join the team, but Arvo would have none of it. “Nope,” he had told him, “I’m going to leave Virginia and go to live with my sister.”

  No amount of promises or offers could change his mind, but in later years he often looked back on that day with some regret. He would have loved to have been a part of a team.

  Years later, he turned out to be the best shooter on the Alango Co-op Basketball Team, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  By late January it was clear the baby was getting ready to come. I basically sat, knitting and reading, because even walking had become a chore. Arvo had insisted I use the “chamber pot” Mother so detested. He emptied it himself, sanitizing it and replacing it on a newspaper in the corner of our bedroom.

  Finally, during another bad snowstorm, the time arrived for the baby to be born. But the birth. Ah, the birth.

 
That is a story unto itself.

  21: Nonny

  My labor pains had started late on January 30, but I just had a backache and felt some discomfort—more than usual—but no clear pattern of the pain. That began at some point during the night. The spasms woke me up, crying, and I called for Mother.

  She came upstairs in a hurry, but told me it was early times yet and I should just try to sleep. Arvo could keep track of the contractions and let her know when they came about five minutes apart.

  They kept coming and coming, at first one every ten minutes then one every eight minutes, but then everything stopped for a while, and I fell back asleep, happy it wasn’t quite time yet.

  By dawn, however, they were coming very quickly, one after another, and each one was so hard and so painful I felt like screaming.

  Mother told me to get up and try to walk. Arvo could support me. That lasted about five minutes when the pain made me double over—to the extent that it was possible—and each one hurt worse than the one before.

  In the meantime, Mother had sent for Irma, who came later that morning. “You’re doing fine,” she told me. “The first birth is always the hardest and takes the longest.”

  She pulled up my nightgown and checked my bottom. “Not yet,” she told me.

  By early afternoon of the thirty-first I was in so much pain I couldn’t even cry. I just moaned, and the contractions continued—every five minutes then every three minutes then back to every five minutes.

  Irma told me to hang on to Arvo or onto a length of clothes-line she had tied to the end of the white iron bedstead. “Just pull on the line or push against Arvo every time you feel a contraction.”

  Between pushing and pulling, I was soon exhausted, and when Irma checked me late that afternoon, she said, “You’re not quite ready yet.”

  “How much longer?” I panted, going almost crazy from the pain.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “It seems as if it’s going on a little… too… long.” Her voice sounded worried, and that made the spasms hurt even more.

  It had started to snow that morning. By evening the drifts in the yard had reached at least up to the top of the woodshed. Arvo walked downstairs with her, and they talked for a while in the kitchen, their voices very low.

  Mother came up again, held up my nightgown, and surveyed the situation. She shook her head. “I can’t see the head yet,” she said.

  By that time the contractions had become so severe I was actually screaming. Writhing in the bed, I begged Irma and Mother to make them stop. “Do something!” I pleaded.

  By nightfall, both Mother and Irma were conferring downstairs. I could hear their voices but everything was secondary to the excruciating pain. I felt as if I were being cut in two, and I screamed, “Help me! Please!”

  Arvo came to my side, used the washcloth that Irma had set near a basin of cool water on the bedside table, wiped my face, and leaned over to kiss me.

  “I can’t stand this anymore!” I screamed.

  I heard him pacing back and forth across the kitchen and living room. “I can’t get out. There’s no way with all of this snow.”

  “If we had only known earlier,” Irma was telling him in a hushed voice that I heard as if she were screaming, “we would have sent you for the doctor. But who was to know?”

  Who indeed! The words slipped out between screams. “Please, please, help me!” I begged Mother and Irma, who alternately sat by me and walked around.

  The pain went on and on… forever… I was sure I was going to die, and I wanted to! I wanted anything that would stop these endless rounds of pain, one following the other with no respite.

  At last, when Irma lifted my nightgown, she said, “I can see the head! Now it’s time for you to push! PUSH! PUSH! PUSH!”

  I couldn’t push. All of my energy was gone. It had been torn to pieces as I had been torn to pieces by the endless terrible horrible awful pain.

  “Please try!” Mother begged. Suddenly Arvo was there next to me, leaning over me, holding my hands, holding my shoulders, telling me with all of his love to try to push.

  I tried. Mother and Irma whooped! “Now keep on!” they urged.

  Again I tried. Using what little strength I had, I tried. Gradually, slowly, I felt a release, a tear in my bottom, but behind it a release—a moment without pain.

  “Push again! Do it once more for me!” Arvo pleaded.

  So I did. From somewhere deep within me I found a strength I thought I had lost during the long hours and days that had gone before. I pushed!

  Suddenly, Irma and Mother were running for cloths, for scissors, for a needle and thread, although I had no idea of what they were doing. All I knew was that the pain was gone. Blessedly, wonderfully, marvelously gone! One more good push, and it was over! Finally! It was over!

  “You have a beautiful baby boy,” Mother announced proudly, putting a squirming chunk of bloody mass into Arvo’s waiting arms, where he wrapped a towel around it, and kissed its nose.

  “Really?” I asked, unsure of anything except the blessed surcease of pain.

  “Yes, look at him!” Arvo put the bloody mass of baby on my tummy.

  “Is he all right?” I asked, fearing he would be somehow damaged.

  Mother was crying, “He’s perfect! Look! He has all of his tiny fingers and toes, and he has a mass of brownish hair and… wait… blue eyes!”

  I held him against me until either Mother or Irma took him away to bathe him and dress him in “swaddling clothes” and to clean me up before they gave him back to me. I put him to my breast, where he nuzzled a little and then turned his head and began to suck. I laughed. It was the strangest feeling! Like being made love to but different.

  “You’re still bleeding a little bit. I need to massage your uterus,” Irma said, reaching over me to do so. She massaged me, rubbing up and down, until thankfully the bleeding lessened and then became what she called “normal.” I had no idea of what normal was, nor was I really aware of her sewing my bottom so entranced was I by this small being.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” I asked Arvo.

  “He’s the most beautiful baby there ever was.” He grinned a goofy grin.

  “I want Milma to Christen him, to do a Baptism ceremony.”

  “Anything you want.” Arvo would have given me the moon and stars had they been within his grasp at that moment.

  “In the church,” I added, unconsciously getting my own way, because everyone was so pleased and so relieved.

  “And we did it without a doctor!” Irma said to Mother. They hugged each other, and then Arvo and finally leaned over to hug me.

  “I’m not sure how you found the strength at the end to push,” they told me later. “But thank God you did. We had been afraid…”

  They left it at that. They never did express the depth of their fears to me, but I was to learn from Aini, of course, how close I had come to not making it.

  She told me, “You are very lucky to be alive. And so is the baby. What are you going to call him?”

  We had spent a lot of time discussing names—thinking of some variation of Marie had it been a girl, and Erick since it was a family name in Arvo’s family and his father’s name, but we wanted the baby to have his very own name, too, so we chose “Werner,” which Mother changed to “Nonny” almost right away.

  So Werner Matthew Mattson came into being at 4:30 a.m. on February first, after more than two days of hard labor.

  “No more babies for you,” Aini had announced during his Baptism. She and Karl had agreed to be his Godparents.

  “Well…” I answered, “they say that the second birth is always a lot easier.”

  So it proved to be.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  Little Nonny caused us no end of grie
f while he gave us so much joy! Once he got a prune pit stuck in his throat. Arvo got so upset, he dropped him, and the prune pit flew out of his mouth.

  Another time, when I had laid him outside on a blanket while I hurried to hang out a load of clothes, I found him lifting a piece of chicken poop, studying it, and “Oh no!” I screamed. He looked up at me, dropped it, and grinned. He had his father’s goofy grin that made me smile every time he used it.

  We were the happiest of families during that second year of our marriage. The pig had piglets, and we had butchered the sow that fall and had the hams double-smoked and bacon made. Mother and I had rendered enough lard to make pies all winter, and Arvo and Ronny had cut up and smoked most of the meat, the parts Mother and I didn’t can. The pork proved to be a delicious staple to our meal all that winter and the following.

  The horse Arvo got from Mr. Hauala, for his work on the threshing machine, proved invaluable when it came time to plant potatoes and other vegetables. Arvo simply drove a plow behind the horse, which did most of the work. And, we had a horse to pull the wagon to attend the Alango Unitarian Church, which held services every fourth Sunday of every month except July and August.

  To me my baby was all-in-all. I loved lying down to nurse him. He turned his head toward my breast like a little bird. I’ll never forget the first time he slept through the whole night. That morning Arvo and I had almost bumped into each other in our rush to check on him. He was still asleep—the best baby in the world.

  His grandmother agreed. She too loved to hold him, to change him, to bounce him on her lap as he grew, and to sing Finnish songs for him. Anytime I was worried—about whether he was ready for “real food”—heavily mashed—and whether I was nursing him correctly, Mother reassured me. “You’re doing exactly as you’re supposed to be doing,” she told me over and over again.