Song of Sampo Lake

by William Durbin

  “I’d be willing to work with him at first,” Wilho offered, “to show him the ropes.”

  “But you haven’t been on that crew for a whole year,” Hilda said.

  “If they want strong fellows,” Wilho said, flexing his skinny biceps and making the girls giggle, “I’m the man for the job.”

  As winter drew on, it seemed as if Matti had barely washed off the red iron dust from one shift when it was time to go underground again. Matti missed Kuopio more every day. This time of year back home a skating rink was cleared on a bay of Lake Kallavesi. Music played from a bandstand, and Matti and his good friends Paavo and Juha skated by moonlight or by torchlight. A bonfire was lit for warming chilled feet. Sleigh bells echoed up and down the shore. At least now Matti could look forward to the end of his days in the mine. Wilho and Timo had been working on the raise crew for a month. Their increased salaries meant that both families would be homesteading by summer.

  At dinner one night Wilho said, “It’s finally going to happen, isn’t it?” He gave Hilda a hug.

  “Wilho’s been ready for a year,” Hilda said. “He teases me about not wanting to leave my house behind to go and live in the woods. Last spring I said, ‘Let’s wait till summer.’ Yet when summer arrived, I decided that we needed to save up for one more winter.”

  Though Wilho waited quietly for the day when he would have his farm, on each shift Father told Matti how he would build his sauna, plow his own patch of dirt, and be free of greedy landlords and Russian rulers. As he swung his hammer, Father said, “Take that, Mr. Bobrikov,” and “Take that, Mr. Czar.”

  In the middle of a dull morning, Father waved for Matti to stop working. “Listen.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  The power drills in the newer workings near Timo and Wilho’s crew had gone silent. Just then they heard a shout.

  “Timo,” Father breathed, grabbing the candle from the wall and starting down the drift. Matti jogged after Father and clambered up a manway ladder.

  The site of the rockfall was dust and confusion. A dozen miners shouted in Finnish and Slovenian and English. Father yelled, “Timo!”

  “Over here,” Timo called. His next words turned Matti’s heart cold: “It’s Wilho.”

  Through the settling dust Matti saw Timo kneeling with men scrambling to uncover Wilho’s legs. Wilho moaned weakly as Father and Matti helped toss the smaller rocks aside. Father whispered, “Good Lord.”

  A three-foot-long slab of rock angled across Wilho’s back. A man wedged a lining bar under one end of the slab and pried, but Wilho let out a terrible groan.

  “No, no,” Father cried out in Finnish, “if you lift one side, it presses down the other.”

  Father motioned with his hand to show how the rock was tipping. Matti did his best to translate Father’s warning into English. Father showed the other men how to lift straight up as Matti translated. Father said, “Yksi, kaksi, kolme” and Matti repeated, “One, two, three.”

  The miners heaved with all their strength. Matti’s arms trembled as the edge of the slab cut into his fingers, but he managed to help lift the rock clear.

  Father and Timo eased Wilho onto his back. The brim of his helmet was crumpled, and a thin trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was the day of Wilho’s funeral.

  Matti felt numb. Since Wilho’s accident, Matti had been wishing he could turn back time and wake up on a still morning in Finland. If only Aunt Hilda and Uncle Wilho were living next door like they used to. If only he could sit down at his grandmother’s long, dark table and taste her fresh viili, yogurt. If only he could look out her window on the pine-covered hillside of Puijo and its tower. If only he could see the blue waterway of Kallavesi, the granite church, and the shining new town hall.

  The bitter weather and the bright light of Soudan made things even more unreal. It was cold enough in Minnesota to freeze spit in midair, yet Matti was continually amazed at the light. Winters in Finland were one long gray twilight, but here the midday air was bright and blue. The sun sparkled off the snowbanks and the windows, and the wind whirled up rainbows of snowflakes.

  But what good was sunshine when Wilho was dead? When Matti spent all his waking hours underground? Matti’s shift at the mine the day after Wilho’s death left him shaking inside. He didn’t want to go back, but it was keep working or starve.

  At breakfast that day Mother urged everyone to quit. “Isn’t losing Wilho enough?” she pleaded.

  “You know there’re no other jobs, Helmi,” Father said.

  “I’d rather have my boys begging in the streets than dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all Father said as he picked up his lunch pail and led Matti and Timo out the door.

  Matti sometimes wondered how Mother and Father had ever decided to get married when they were such opposites. This morning he had secretly wished that Mother could convince Father to stay home.

  When they climbed into the miners’ cage, every creak of the machinery made Matti hold his breath. A bell sounded and the cage dropped down. The cold smell of rusting steel and cable grease blew in with the wind that rushed through the open door. The light of a candle in an upper drift blurred past. If a cable snapped they would plunge a thousand feet, a more merciful end than Wilho had suffered.

  The bell rang a second time, and the cage stopped. Matti’s legs felt wobbly. As the miners started down the drift toward their work sites, a mule snorted on the tracks behind them. Matti was so startled that he dropped his lunch pail. Timo started to tease him, then stopped and touched Matti’s shoulder. “Take care.”

  The dim light recalled the frost-rimmed reflections that had glowed in the train windows on the first evening they arrived in Soudan. The snowbanks were piled so high on both sides of the tracks that it seemed as if they had ridden past America and gone all the way to Lapland.

  As much as Matti missed Uncle Wilho, he worried more about Aunt Hilda. She blamed herself for Wilho’s accident instead of pointing to the unsafe conditions in the mine. “We had plenty saved for our homestead,” she said over and over, “but it was never enough for me.”

  “Hilda,” Mother said, “it wasn’t your fault.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Accidents just happen.”

  “I was greedy, Helmi,” she said. “I was so afraid we’d have to do without. I might just as well have dropped those rocks on top of poor Wilho myself.”

  Matti had never seen Mother fail to calm his aunt. He could tell that it hurt Mother when Hilda refused to listen.

  By the time of the funeral it had “warmed up” to fifteen below zero. The church bell tolled as a hearse pulled by two black horses carried Wilho’s coffin from the house to the Finnish Lutheran church. Since Matti was a pallbearer, the undertaker had issued him a pair of black gloves and a mourner’s scarf. Aunt Hilda wore a black dress and veil. Wilho’s words, We’ll be there before you know it, echoed in Matti’s head. Who would have thought that Wilho’s “there” would be a plain wooden coffin in a cold wooden church?

  Through the service Matti studied the nickel plate on Wilho’s coffin that read “At Rest.” Between the hymns and prayers Matti listened to the mine at work: The engine house reeled in cable as the ore was lifted, the crusher rumbled and clanged, and the steam shovel dumped ore on the stockpile.

  As the minister read a Bible verse, Matti stared at Wilho’s waxen face, which was marred by only the smallest of bruises. Suddenly his uncle’s white hair began to tremble. For a moment Matti thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then he saw Wilho’s folded hands were moving. Was Wilho about to pull off his all-time greatest joke by sitting up in his coffin and saying, “How’s that for a fine trick, eh, Matti?”

  Matti was ready to shout when he noticed that the windows and the floor were shaking, too. They had blasted up at the mine. Though it lasted only a few seconds, everyone in the
church felt the vibration. The minister paused to cough and wipe his brow. Aunt Hilda turned ghost white. Timo shut his eyes and drew a deep breath.

  As the congregation tilted their heads to look up the hill, Matti was furious. Couldn’t United States Steel stop blasting their precious ore long enough to let a funeral happen in peace? No! Never!

  The next morning Matti was glad to see that Aunt Hilda finally seemed more like herself. “How’s my Matti?” she said when he walked into the kitchen and gave her a hug. She set down the coffeepot. “I’ve decided to move back to Finland.”

  The whole family sat silent.

  Then Mother said, “It’s too soon, Hilda. You should think it over. At least wait until—”

  “My mind is made up. The insurance payment from the mine along with our savings will leave me more than enough to be done with this godforsaken town forever.”

  Matti sank into a chair and stared at his aunt. Not only had he lost Wilho, but now Hilda also. His duty was to help his family with their homestead dreams, yet one part of him wished that he could get on a ship with Hilda and never come back.

  CHAPTER 4

  A month later Matti was walking up the street when he heard a scream coming from Aunt Hilda’s back door: “Go away! Go away!”

  Matti ran behind the house to find a horse standing with his head over the kitchen table, switching his tail back and forth. Kari yelled, “Go away!” while Anna waved a dish towel in the horse’s face and squealed, “Shoo, horse. Shoo.”

  Just as Matti was about to grab the horse by the mane, Hilda stepped through the opposite doorway and burst out laughing.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Hilda,” Anna said. “We opened the door and that big horse just shoved his nose in behind us, and—”

  “It’s all right, girls. When the bugs get bad, these poor animals try to find shelter wherever they can.”

  Matti laughed, too, mostly because he was so glad to see Aunt Hilda smiling for a change. Hilda continued to laugh as Matti pushed the kitchen table to one side and struggled to turn the horse around. The animal wanted to go anywhere but out the door. The girls looked ready to cry.

  “It’s not your fault.” Hilda gave them a hug.

  Matti slapped the horse on the rump and sent it scampering. There was a pasture at the edge of town for livestock, but a few stray animals were always wandering around town. Matti couldn’t blame the horse for trying to hide. The bugs had been terrible since the first rains, when the weather had turned from winter to summer with no pause for spring.

  “I certainly hope the men come to shovel up that mess soon,” Hilda said, wrinkling her nose at the smell from the alley. “You’d think they would clean up the garbage more than once a year.”

  Matti nodded. Only a week ago the snow had vanished. The roads became mudholes and a stench rose from the outhouses and alleys, where slop pails had been dumped all winter. Flies swarmed and clouds of mosquitoes bred in the stagnant puddles that stood all over town.

  After the excitement of the horse was over, Aunt Hilda and the girls went outside to work in the yard. Matti walked upstairs to his family’s attic bedroom and found Mother staring into her trunk, unaware of the recent commotion. The hand-carved trunk had been a wedding gift from her grandfather.

  Mother was touching the hem of her favorite blue dress. When she saw Matti, she quickly dabbed at the corner of her eye with a hanky. Though Father often got misty-eyed, Mother rarely cried. “You’re home already,” she said. Grandmother’s ruby brooch was in her hand. “I was going through some of my things.” She wrapped the brooch in a cloth and slipped it back into the trunk.

  Mother’s other prized possession lay before her: the bellpull from her father’s home. A porcelain bell painted with gilt and delicate blue flowers was tied to a green velvet rope. This bell had hung in a corner of her home when she was a young girl. One pull on the velvet cord would call a servant.

  When Matti was small, he often asked Mother why she didn’t have servants anymore. She avoided his question, but as Matti got older he eventually learned why. Mother had grown up in the coastal city of Rauma. Her father was a successful lace merchant. But after the death of his wife, he turned to gambling and drinking. Mother’s life of silk dresses and silver tea services faded.

  “Please don’t tell your father that you’ve seen me like this,” Mother said as she gave Matti a hug. “I never expected all this after we’d had such great hopes.”

  “I know,” Matti said.

  Wilho’s death was difficult for Mother. She missed him keenly, and had to comfort Hilda while also dealing with Timo. On the Saturday after the funeral, Timo stopped at a saloon and never came home for supper. Mother was uneasy, but Father insisted that “a little socializing” would do him good.

  Later that night Matti woke to the sound of Mother crying in the kitchen. “How could you drink?” she kept saying to Timo, slumped in a chair. “After what your grandfather did to Hildy and me?”

  From that night on Timo spent most of his free time visiting the bars. If Mother tried to talk with Timo about it, Father said, “Let the boy be.”

  Mother joined the local temperance society, the Pohjan Leimu or Northern Light. She also turned to her faith, and the teachings of a man named Lars Laestadius. Though Father teased her about Laestadians being so strict that they were “opposed to smiling,” Mother shared their belief that drinking and gambling were evil, and that dressing in bright colors and looking into mirrors showed a vanity that displeased God. That was hard on Kari and Anna, who loved to tie pretty ribbons in their hair.

  One evening Mother took Matti and Timo and the girls to see a traveling Finnish preacher who was speaking at the hall in Tower, a mile west of Soudan. The preacher had a deep, thundering voice, and he wore a plain suit.

  Mother nodded politely through the whole service, and when the time came to take up a collection, she pulled out her purse and handed Anna and Kari each a coin. Timo, who was sitting next to Matti, reached into his pocket as if he were going to give some money, but he only jingled his coins instead. “Just checking to see if I have enough to wet my whistle.” He winked at Matti. “All this preaching has given me a powerful thirst.” Then before the preacher had even begun his final prayer, he said, “Give Mother my best,” and slipped out the side aisle.

  Everyone in the family dealt with Wilho’s death in their own way. While Mother prayed and Timo drank, Anna and Kari were full of questions. “Why do people have to die?” the twins asked. “Will we die soon?”

  Mother answered every question the same way: “It is God’s will.”

  Father tried to cheer them up with his teasing and storytelling. He told them how the world was a golden egg at the beginning of time, how an eagle brought the gift of fire to the world, and how a hero named Lempi wore out his skis chasing down the magical elk of Hiisi. They enjoyed the stories, but Matti could see that the girls had a hurt that needed mending.

  As soon as the girls were alone with Matti, they asked, “Why did Wilho have to die?”

  Matti wanted to tell them that God had made a terrible mistake in taking Uncle Wilho, but he could only say, “It’s a puzzle I can’t understand.”

  Matti thought of the many times he and his uncle had gone fishing on Lake Kallavesi back home. When the fish weren’t biting, Wilho would lean against a tree and laugh at Father, who paced up and down the path and rebaited his hook every few minutes. “Relax, Leo,” he’d say. “They call it fishing, not catching. The fun is in the waiting.”

  Lately Matti had trouble with waiting, too. Each day he felt their dream of owning a homestead drifting farther away. The more time Matti spent surrounded by the engine smoke and steam whistles and piles of cold, red rock, the more he felt that he would never escape the mine.

  Shortly after May Day, or Vappu in Finland, the men had just come home after the midnight shift. Father and Timo had finished their coffee and were heading upstairs to bed when Mother took Matti aside.

  Lo
wering her voice, she asked, “How would you like to help me with a little project in the morning?”

  “What sort of project?” he asked.

  She winked and motioned for Matti to take a seat. “It will be our secret.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning, Matti felt as if he had barely fallen asleep when Mother tapped his shoulder. “Are you ready for our adventure?” she whispered. Her eyes were bright. “See you downstairs.” She tiptoed away.

  Matti tossed his quilt aside and dressed as quietly as he could. The girls had already left for school, and Timo and Father were snoring on their straw ticks spread across the attic floor.

  After a cold breakfast, Mother and Matti stepped out the back door. Up the hill the main engine house sent plumes of smoke skyward. A steam shovel near the trestle dumped ore onto the stockpile, raising a cloud of fine, red dust. Matti shuddered. Every time he heard the clatter of rock on rock, it reminded him of Wilho’s accident.

  “I’m glad we’re getting an early start,” Mother said.

  Matti nodded, half asleep. He was amazed at her. Normally Mother was so cautious that Father teased her about needing to have a dollar in her pocket when she was only shopping for a dime’s worth of groceries. “So where are we going?” Matti asked.

  “Winston City,” Mother said.

  Aunt Hilda often talked about Winston City. The town was built in 1866, a wild year when gold was discovered near Lake Vermilion. But the gold rush turned from boom to bust the following year, and the prospectors left as fast as they had come.

  Their walk took them down Tower’s board sidewalks, past two dozen sleepy saloons, and out into the countryside. The day was hot and so sunny that Matti squinted in the harsh light. He tried to hold his breath whenever a horse or wagon passed, but there was no avoiding the dust. By the time they reached the abandoned town site, Matti’s hair felt gritty, and his lips were cracked and dry.