I spend long nights talking with my grandfather, whom I call Papa. We rage and speculate; we try to plumb the depths together. Over the years we have become close friends, able to share our most intimate thoughts.
“Lemminkainen sings me to sleep. Oh, what a nice voice he has,” Papa says, sitting on my shoulder. Lemminkainen and the mythic heroes of Finnish legend are now Papa’s friends.
“Oh, that coffee smells good.” Papa is as real as the steam rising from my cup. He dances on my head. “The land of spirits is an insufferable place. Sometimes I feel as if I still have my skin, and it is being torn away by ants.”
Papa sometimes tells me what his death was like. “I looked up, redwood bark inches from my nose, blue at the corners of my eyes, a mountain of wood dropping on me.”
Sometimes he cries at that part, but goes on: “I never felt the tree hit me, you know, but the pain was in my soul. I’d rather die a thousand times alone than once with loved ones. I went like a ball rolling off a table. What hurts is to look back.”
“They’re putting me back together, you know.” By now I’ve guessed this is his sacred lie. “They’re firing the Sampo. The birchwood is burning. Steam is rising into the cold, somewhere in Suomi.”
“ ‘Suomi,’ ” Papa says, “means ‘swamp’ in your modern talk.” He sits on my head, puts his hands on my ears, sings a dirty song in swamp talk.
Swamp talk sounds like nothing on Earth. “Rakkanaka. Moiless-kavak-kavak-aak, lumpa puu-lio-lio.” Papa gets it from his friends: Lemminkainen, the competent; Kullervo, the troublesome; Illmarinen, the practical; and Vainamoinen, who keeps his own way.
They dwell in Tuonela, which is where Papa seems to be, at least some of the time.
He always laughs after singing to me in swamp talk. “I feel like Kullervo when I say that. Peeking under red wool skirts. Oh, ho!” For a flash, he has red apple cheeks framing a wide smile. His cold eyes spark, icily. He claps, holds his belly, and fades off to wherever he goes.
Papa has long, white hair, smooth as clouds. Smoother, because you can’t touch it. I’ve tried. It parts where the hand passes through. He never brushes his hair, but lets it float about his wide head.
He died, technically, thirty years ago, just as he describes. By the time I was old enough to think, he was with me, thinking in my head, speaking to me, showing up whenever he wanted to or could.
He’s changed over the years. He used to be tall as a tree and strong as an ox team. “I’m pullin’ 230,000 tons,” he told me in a dream we once shared. “Over the ridge and down the gulch.” He was the brute beast, as well as the wood being pulled. How can I explain this? Papa was everywhere.
“I’m blown in a million bits. But I’m on the list. They’re going to put me back together.”
I humor him. “Papa, I live for the day they put you back in one piece.” He likes to hear that. I see warm stuff humming in his chest, the mass of spinning webs and light he throws together when he wants a shape.
“When that happens,” I say, “Grandma will want to know, eh?”
“When that happens,” he blinks, “Grandma will be with me.”
There are certain safe points — rocks along this river, natural bridges. Once in a while, Papa and I feel the same thing the same way. Each of us knows, when it happens.
Grandma walks around town, bent low by old bones, nearsighted and frightened. She never feels safe — not even in church. Comfortable, maybe. Sure of her fate. But not safe.
She hasn’t seen much to agree with for a long time. Papa tells me she was a young sweetie. I believe him, but it’s a gesture of faith. Now, she’s frightened and old, injured by the world.
“That’s the worst part,” Papa says. “She was strong, but she got wore down. And then I ended up in this fix. I can’t talk to her at all. The things I have to put up with — I could talk all day.”
He does sometimes. He pays no attention to where I am, what I’m doing. He clings to my shoulders like a squirrel on a limb. He sings and whispers. Tells jokes, tells tall tales. Expects me to be interested in what happened a lifetime ago, while I’m up to my neck in what’s happening how.
“Oh, those were the days. The tall trees climbing out of the sea, the wild, blue wind, the fishing. The salmon runnin’ up rivers. You could walk the water on their backs. Oh, we ate ’em fresh and we ate ’em smoked.” I sometimes detect the smell of salmon when he’s near.
I do have concerns of my own. I can’t shut Papa out of my head, but I get my job done even if I have to work around or right through him. He tends to forget I still need to eat. His awareness is dulling. He is being pulled apart — I can feel it.
I cut firewood with chainsaw and maul for an honest living. Do you think it would help a woodcutter to have an old-time logger in his head? When it comes to finding straight madrone on a flat I can drive to, yes. But getting the actual work done is trouble. He never wants to stop telling me stories. The Kalevala from the old country and the old woods from this country have merged in Papa’s mind until he has no clue as to where he is, or what he’s doing.
I lose a lot of time listening to how Lemminkainen did this and that deed — or how old Arnie Kuvaja split timbers so smooth that ladies bare butts slid across them without getting splinters.
“In Suomi this stuff happened. In magic Tuonela. Where the wild men lived on acorns, and the bears walked upright.” He’s got the legends all confused.
I don’t know where he is going. I hardly know where he is. “I wear time like a steel shirt. I’m dropping down the flume like a hundred tons of wood. There’s nothing between me and the wide, wide river.” He comes and he goes. Sometimes, nowadays, he feels weak. I hardly believe he’s the same presence I was so in awe of when I was young. Have I grown so big?
It’s a guessing game. What fades gives its strength to what grows. Light and dark provide opposites. I’ve almost quit imagining purposes.
Papa doesn’t have much advice for me. He’d rather live in the exciting world of dreams.
I want him to stay. I need to be alone. I am afraid. If he goes, where will he go?
This he just won’t tell me. “It’s not a secret, but you wouldn’t understand.”
“Nothing new there,” I tell him. “I don’t understand what’s happening now.”
“That’s the way it is, poika. That’s just the way it is.”
“The Sampo, the Sampo, magical vessel. When will it save me? When will it make me what I was before?”
This is the kind of thing I have to deal with every day.
“Loikiolia. Puuta, puuta. Sempilii-panamoinen.” He giggles, rolls his unearthly eyes, and lets air flow freely through his nose and mouth. Papa has a structure sometimes, and lacks it at other times. He can stand on his own sometimes, and is pushed against the wall by the slightest breath of air at other times.
Lately, I’ve had the most peculiar lust for women with thick white legs, broad butts, and pink bellies — the healthy, wood-splitting type. Papa smiles when I dream of such women. He is with me when I chase them. I feel his age-old strength at the moment of bliss.
I want salmon so badly I’m selling my truck and buying a small boat.
Life means things it never did before.
I see less and less of Papa. He has fewer stories, and those he tells seem little more than re-tellings, slightly altered. He cries easily, rarely laughs.
It’s not so bad. I know now what he sees, under the wool skirts. It quickens the pulse. The seed stirs. The fire grows.
I was up in the woods the other day, looking at trees, imagining them to be stout women’s legs, planted firm and crouching. It was the perfect sort of time for Papa to show up. But he did not come.
Funny, I have something in my heart that wasn’t there before — something warm and hard and long-lasting. Papa is with me, I know it.
Lumpa puu-lio-lio.
This story originally appeared in the iconoclastic and very readable New Settler Interview (P.O. Box 730, Willits, CA 95490). We’re thankful for permission to reprint it.
— Ed.
