“I’ll be…,” Father said, blowing the black specks out of his hand. “This must be caterpillar manure. It would take millions.”
While Father finished harnessing the mules, Matti picked up one of the caterpillars. It had a black back marked with an even row of white dots. A pale blue stripe ran down its sides. As it crawled across Matti’s hand, its tiny mouth parts opened and closed.
“What’s so interesting?” It was Timo, arriving an hour late.
“Just some hungry worms,” Father said, shaking Timo’s hand. “You want to plow or pick rocks?”
Timo chose to drive the team. Though Timo looked as rough as he had the week before, he didn’t whine much until they hit a bad patch of ground. After they uncovered a half dozen rocks in a row, Timo threw down the reins and said, “There’s more boulders than dirt in this field.”
“Timo sounds as crabby as that character from the store that you told me about, Matti,” Father said. “What was his name? Karl something?”
“Karl Gustafson.”
“Maybe we should change Timo’s name to Crabby Karl.”
Timo cursed and said, “Let me try that lining bar.”
In the next hour Timo took a turn with the lining bar and then the shovel before he switched back to driving the team again. Matti decided that if he had a choice, he would rather do the work himself than put up with Timo’s grumbling.
When Timo and Father walked down to the lake to get a drink, Matti trotted over to the ash swamp and cut another pole. He hadn’t given up on his lever idea yet. Knowing that ash was nearly as strong as oak, he trimmed and topped the tree and dragged it back to the field.
“Are we going to pole-vault over the field or plow it?” Timo asked. Father chuckled and told Timo about Matti’s previous try.
Ignoring their laughter, Matti fitted the tip of his ash pole under the boulder that Father had given up on the other day, and he placed another, shorter piece of ash crossways at the edge of the hole to act as a fulcrum. To Matti’s relief the boulder rolled up, and with a little help from Father, out of the hole.
“Would you look at that,” Father said, patting Matti on the back. “Wilho always told me you were smart as a whip. I should have listened to him.”
“The round ones are always easy to roll,” Timo scoffed.
“It’s smart to use your brain instead of brawn.” Father beamed at Matti. “The Kalevala teaches us that the one who triumphs is ‘he who has the greater knowledge.’”
“Spare us the poems, Father,” Timo said, picking up the reins and starting the mules.
When they stopped for lunch, Matti gathered a handful of caterpillars and brought them to the crow for a snack. Father said, “Your crow can finally earn his keep.”
Though the crow always ate the bugs and worms that Matti fed him, when he saw the caterpillars, he hopped away.
Father shook his head. “He’ll be useless forever.”
“That’s the truth,” Timo said.
“At least he’s not as useless as these caterpillars,” Matti said.
“Bugs are another matter,” Father said. “I guarantee you that some critter is lunching on these right now.”
Matti promised himself that he would prove Father wrong. What animal would ever eat the repulsive caterpillars?
All day and all night the caterpillars munched away. Leaf bits fell from the trees like jagged green snowflakes. Caterpillars fell into Matti’s oatmeal. They crawled down his shirt, and their silk strands caught in his face and hair. In a week they had doubled in length and chewed the popple and birch half-bare.
As much as Matti disliked the caterpillars, Mrs. Winston hated them even more. When he arrived at the store the following Saturday, Matti was surprised to find her out on the porch. “This is war, Matti Ojala,” she said. Her hair was tied back with a kerchief and she wore a plain cotton dress for a change. “I’m getting rid of these filthy worms,” she said, pausing to squash a cluster with her broom, “if I have to mash every one myself.”
“Dearest,” Billy pleaded as she swept more caterpillars off the porch. “There’s no stopping those worms. Killing a few of them is like trying to melt a glacier with a blowtorch.”
She stomped her foot down in front of his boot. “There’s one less for us to worry about.”
Though Matti normally had a strong stomach, the sound of the caterpillar being smashed under her shoe made him queasy. Billy wrinkled up his nose, too, and turned away. “We’d better check that flour bin, Matti,” he said.
Matti’s English was getting better, but he was still confused by some of the strange words that Billy used. When Billy was adjusting a shelf later that morning, he stood back and complained that it was “catawampus.” When Matti looked at him funny, he said, “It’s just another way of saying something’s crooked.”
That same day Billy said some people were “straight shooters” and others “heels.” Mrs. Winston explained that it had nothing to do with either marksmanship or boots. She also translated two of Billy’s expressions: “the whole kit and caboodle” and “take it with a grain of salt.”
Mrs. Winston continued her war on the worms throughout the day. At quitting time she called Matti to the back counter and asked, “Could you do me a favor?”
Matti hoped it didn’t have anything to do with caterpillars.
“Would you drop this off at Black Jack’s cabin on your way home?” she said, handing him a sack. “He loves licorice.”
Matti agreed, but he could barely keep his mouth from falling open. Mrs. Winston was sending candy to Black Jack!
When Matti knocked on Black Jack’s door, he wasn’t surprised by the gift. “Clara’s my sweetie,” he said as Matti set the package on his shaving-littered table.
The cabin was an even bigger mess than Matti remembered. Wood chips and sawdust were piled ankle deep under the table. His spittoon looked as if it hadn’t been emptied in a month. The same coffeepot and stew kettle stood unwashed on the kitchen range.
As Black Jack picked up a rasp and a carving knife from a stool so that Matti could sit down, Matti noticed a thin spruce panel lying on the table. The wood was cut in a graceful arc, and beside it was an open catalog that showed an assortment of carving tools and a diagram of a stringed instrument. “You’re building a violin?”
Black Jack nodded. “It’s going mighty slow. I couldn’t afford to buy any fancy tools, so I built a forge out of an old cream separator and made them myself.” He picked up a little hooked blade and a thickness gauge. “See,” he said, holding them next to the picture in the catalog, “they’re a perfect match. I’m even making all the parts by hand. I’ve cut the sound post setters from the tips of an old hayfork, and I’ve got a book of formulas for mixing the stains and varnishes.”
“When did you learn to play the violin?”
“I picked it up on my own,” Black Jack said. “My father was a great fiddler. If he heard a song once, he could play it. On winter evenings he’d hold me on his lap and let me pull the bow across the strings while he did the fingering. His violin was the one thing that my mother set aside for me. But when I went to live with my uncle, he sold it to pay for my keep.”
Louhi started barking. “He must be ready for his supper,” Black Jack said. “Would you care for a bowl of stew?”
Looking at the blackened pot out of the corner of his eye, Matti said, “Maybe some other time.”
“Suit yourself,” Black Jack said, picking up the violin panel. “But don’t forget to check your fish trap on the way home.”
Though Matti hadn’t caught a fish in the creek all week, he was happy to bring two fat northerns home to Father for supper.
CHAPTER 15
The morning finally arrived when Father and Matti left to pick up Mother and the girls. The day before, Father had made a door for the sauna and measured the window opening so that he could buy a sash in town. The road had dried out so well since spring that it took less than three hours to drive to Soud
an.
Anna and Kari squealed when they saw them. They set down the dishes that they were packing into a wooden crate and ran forward to greet Father. Since Matti hadn’t seen the girls in such a long time, he’d forgotten how much Kari acted like Aunt Hilda and how much Anna took after Mother.
Anna and Kari wrinkled up their noses as they hugged Father and Matti. When Mother got close, she frowned, too.
“What’s wrong?” Father asked.
Mother cleared her throat. “Have you gentlemen by any chance taken a bath lately?” she asked.
“Our sauna chimney won’t be finished for a while,” Father said.
“So you haven’t had a bath this whole time?”
“We dip in the lake every evening,” Matti said.
“Do you use soap?” Anna and Kari were holding their noses.
“What’s soap?” Father gave Matti a dig in the ribs and leaned forward and kissed Mother.
She pushed his unshaven cheek away. “The first order of business will be to take a razor and a washcloth to you wild men. For now, how about a little breakfast?”
“We’ve got to get going,” Father said, but when he saw the disappointment in Matti’s face, he said, “You go ahead.”
“I saved you a treat,” Mother said as she reached for the butter crock. Matti smiled as she took a spoon and dropped a big eye of butter into a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Matti hadn’t tasted butter for a month.
As Matti ate, Mother said, “I just got a letter from Hilda. She’s doing as well as we could expect. She’s taken a room at our old neighbors the Koskelas’ and says that she doesn’t miss America a bit. One good sign was that her letter sounded angry. She hates the Russians so much that she said she’d sign up as a soldier herself if there were ever half a chance to fight them.”
Father frowned suddenly. “Is that lazybones Timo still asleep?” he asked. Stepping toward the stairs, he yelled, “Timo, get yourself out of the sack!”
“Leo,” she interrupted him. “Timo isn’t here.”
“Don’t tell me he’s still out gallivanting. I’ll teach him—”
“He moved out last week.”
“What?”
Mother nodded. “He said he was sick of being treated like a child, and he wanted to be out on his own.”
Father paced to the window and stared up the hill at the head frame above the main shaft. “He’s staying on at the mine?”
“And he’s taken a room at Mrs. Korpi’s boardinghouse.”
“That ungrateful pup.” Father still stared out the window.
Matti couldn’t believe Timo’s selfishness. How would they break all that ground and build their log cabin without his help? The one time the family really needed him, he had walked away.
“He did leave half of his last paycheck,” Mother said, “but I haven’t seen him since.”
“After all the work,” Father said. “How could he ever—”
“He’s young, Leo. Perhaps we need to give him time.”
“But what good is a farm without a son to pass it on to?”
What about me? Matti thought as he loaded the last box onto the wagon. Aren’t I a son, too?
Just then Kari came around the corner with a storybook in her left hand, and a huge yellow cat tucked under her arm. He was so long that his tail dragged on the ground.
“What’s this?” Father asked.
“It’s Yrjo.”
“Yrjo the cat?” He pretended to frown. “Where are you taking him?”
“To our homestead,” Kari said as Anna nodded.
“He’s too big to fit into our wagon,” Father teased.
“He can ride on my lap,” Kari said.
“Or my lap,” Anna said as she petted Yrjo’s ears.
Father sighed loudly. “We’ll just have to take the moocher with us, then.”
“What’s a moocher?” Kari asked.
“That’s another name for a cat,” Father said.
* * *
On the trip back to the homestead, Matti drove the wagon while Mother and Father chatted about their farm. The girls rode in back and kept an eye on Mother’s dishes. Father went on about Timo, still not believing that his son—“a serpent’s tooth,” he called him—could be so ungrateful.
When Mother first glimpsed Sampo Lake, she clapped her hands. “Our very own lake?”
“Almost,” Father said. “We share it with one neighbor, Black Jack.”
As the girls climbed out of the wagon and started toward the lake, Matti’s crow swooped down from the branches of a red pine. Matti expected him to land on his shoulder, but he dove toward the girls instead. Kari screamed as the bird pecked at her hair ribbon. Yrjo jumped out of her arms and dove under the wagon. The crow pulled Kari’s bow loose and flew to the tree with his prize.
Father and Matti laughed, but Kari ran crying to Mother.
“He’s only a pet,” Matti said, but Kari was crying too hard to hear him. When she finally settled down, the crow flew back and landed on Matti’s shoulder. Kari and Anna both squealed.
“He won’t hurt you,” Matti said.
Kari blinked away her tears and stared. When Anna tilted her head, the crow tipped his head, too, and stared at her.
“What a wise bird,” Mother said. The crow landed on her shoulder and pecked at her hair comb. “Oh no you don’t,” she said.
The girls giggled as the crow glided to the ground.
“What’s his name?” Mother asked.
“I haven’t named him yet.”
“Such a fine trickster deserves a special name.” She smiled. “How about Wilho?”
For a moment everyone was silent. Then Father nodded. “He’s certainly clever enough.”
At first it made Matti sad to think of naming his crow after Uncle Wilho. But he realized he could never find a more fitting name. It reminded him of a story that Mother used to tell him about a little boy and his grandfather. After the grandfather died, his spirit visited the boy as a swan. If Wilho had chosen to join them at Sampo Lake, he couldn’t have picked a better form.
With Mother’s arrival life immediately became orderly. She clucked her tongue in disgust when she saw the dirt on the sauna floor and put Anna and Kari to work with brooms and a scrub bucket. “But we just got here,” Kari whined.
“Work before play, Miss Ruusunukke” Mother said. There were no complaints from then on, for neither of the girls wanted to be called a silly rose doll.
The sauna was so small that Mother decided to store most of Hilda’s furniture outside under a tarp until their main cabin was finished. The only things she brought inside were her trunk, her spinning wheel, the kitchen table and chairs, and the straw ticks for sleeping. She announced that the men’s camping was over and everyone would be sleeping inside. Mother also made good on her promise to trim Matti’s and Father’s hair, and she insisted that from now on washing didn’t count unless they used soap. She gave Anna and Kari a good scrubbing beside the lake, and she threatened to do the same to her two lumberjacks, as she had taken to calling Father and Matti, if they didn’t take care of themselves.
Mother set up her cookstove and her kitchen utensils under the lean-to. For the summer she would do all her cooking outside. “We’ll call it our canning kitchen,” she said. They would move the stove inside the sauna once the weather turned cold.
Rather than drinking right from shore, Mother had Matti fetch a pail of water from the lake and hang a dipper beside it. Matti also had to get two buckets after every meal for the dishes. When Matti carried up her dishwater the first time, she frowned into the bucket. “What do you see in that water, Matti Ojala?”
He looked down. “Snails?”
She nodded. “And I think I saw a small minnow. You and your father are going to have to build a dock so you can fill the buckets out in deeper, cleaner water. In the meantime, would you hike up the hill and see if you can find a rowan tree for our yard?”
Father turned to Matti and said, “Why don’
t you and Ti—” He stopped before the word Timo came out and said, “Let’s see if we can fetch one.” There was a tradition in Finland of planting a rowan, or mountain ash, in the courtyard of every new home. Though Father thought it a waste of time, he didn’t complain when it took a good part of the morning for them to find a small ash and replant it.
On her second morning at Sampo Lake, Mother turned to Matti over breakfast and said, “Who has the nearest cows?”
“I think Mr. Saari keeps cows. He’s the stationmaster.”
“We will have to pay the Saaris a call this afternoon,” Mother said. “You can show me the way.”
When Matti admitted that he hadn’t been to the Saaris’, Mother scolded him for being unsociable. After stopping to get directions from Mr. Saari, Matti found the Saari cabin was only a mile east of the tracks. Mrs. Saari was working in her garden and didn’t look up until her dog started barking. She looked amazed to have visitors. Three boys, the youngest barely tall enough to reach her apron strings, were helping her, but the moment they spotted Mother and Matti, they ducked behind the barn.
Mrs. Saari’s white-blond hair was tied back and covered with a kerchief. Her face was round and tanned, and she was so short that she barely came up to Matti’s chin. Mrs. Saari said, “I thought it was the peddler coming up the road.”
Mrs. Saari was so shy that she averted her eyes when she spoke. “Please come in and have some coffee,” she said, still looking down.
Having seen Black Jack’s cabin, Matti was nervous, but the Saari house was as clean as a hospital. The wooden floors were scrubbed to a soft shine, and sunlight streamed through blue-curtained windows.
“How bright and airy,” Mother said.
Just then one of the boys peeked through the window and ducked back down. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Saari said, “but my boys are a bit shy.”
Though the cabin was clean, it was crowded with every sort of utensil imaginable. Stone crocks stood in the corner. Pots and pans hung from hooks over the kitchen range. Rows of jars and glass bottles crowded a shelf. A spicy scent drifted from wire baskets above the stove that were filled with herbs, dried roots, and flower petals. An iron kettle with a medicine smell simmered on the stove.
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