The Artisan's Journal

A Box Addressed Twice

The box from Michigan had two names on it, and only one of them was Tove's.

The first was printed in block capitals with a felt pen, the way a person writes when she has been told the post office machines cannot read cursive: TOVE MIKKELSEN, and under it the farm road number east of Elk Horn, Iowa, and the zip code. The second name was written smaller, in the upper corner where a return address would go, in an old woman's slanting hand, taught in a Hancock schoolroom in the 1940s and never changed since. It said: For Toivo's girl.

The mail carrier had left it on the porch of the farmhouse on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and Tove's mother had carried it inside and set it on the dryer and not said anything about it. Tove found it there at a quarter to six on Saturday morning, when she came in through the mudroom in the dark to borrow her father's insulated gloves.

She knew the handwriting. Everyone in the family knew Mummu's handwriting, because Mummu still sent birthday cards with a five-dollar bill folded inside, even to Tove's father, who was fifty-eight. But a box was different. Mummu did not send boxes. Boxes cost money to mail from the Upper Peninsula, and Aili Rautio had lived eighty-six years without spending money she could keep.

Tove picked it up. It was long and narrow, the length of her forearm and then some, and lighter than it looked, and something inside shifted with a soft wooden knock.

"It's for you," her mother said from the kitchen doorway. Lea Mikkelsen was in her robe with a mug of coffee and her reading glasses parked in her hair. "It came yesterday. I didn't open it."

"I can see that."

"I mean I didn't want to." Her mother turned back toward the stove. "You're going to be late for the mill. Take a thermos. Verner says the wind is coming around to the northwest."

---

Verner was right. By the time Tove parked on Main Street, the wind had come around and was pushing a thin, dry snow sideways past the streetlights, the kind of snow that did not fall so much as travel through. It hissed against the windshield. It gathered in the seams of the sidewalk and moved on.

Above her, against a sky just turning from black to the color of skim milk, the windmill stood with its four long sails still and its cap pointed into the weather. It was a Danish smock mill, eight-sided and shingled, the tallest thing for miles, and for Julefest the volunteers had strung white lights along the sail frames, so that it looked drawn in light on the dark.

It had been built in 1848 in a town called Nørre Snede, in the middle of Jutland. In 1975 the people of Elk Horn had bought it, every timber and gear, and taken it apart, and numbered the pieces, and shipped them across the ocean, and in February of 1976 the numbered pieces had arrived in a town of six hundred people who then put it back together by hand. Tove had heard the story so many times as a child that it had stopped sounding remarkable. Lately it had started sounding remarkable again. She was a cabinetmaker. She knew what it meant to take a thing apart and put it back so that it still worked.

Verner Jessen was already inside the low building at the foot of the mill, where the æbleskiver stand had been set up: long tables, a bank of burners, and twelve cast-iron pans, each with seven round hollows like an egg carton made of black metal. Verner was seventy-eight and had made æbleskiver at Julefest for longer than Tove had been alive. In a red apron over his barn coat, he was wiping the pans with a paper towel dipped in melted butter, one hollow at a time.

"You brought gloves," he said, without looking up. "Good. Take them off."

"I just got here."

"You'll want your hands. This year you learn the needle."

Tove had worked the stand for six Julefests. She had made change and poured coffee and dusted the finished ones with powdered sugar. She had never been allowed near the pans. The pans were Verner's, and before that they had been his mother's, and before that, he said, they had been a lot of people's.

He handed her a steel knitting needle. It was long and thin and slightly bent near the point.

"My mother used a fork," he said. "I tried a fork. Too fat. The knitting needle is better. My wife's. She never knitted with it, so it's had a good life here."

---

The batter was already made, a pale thick cream in a steel bowl as big as a washtub, with the whipped egg whites folded in so that it held a little air. Verner filled a hollow in the first pan to the top with a ladle, and the next, and the next, seven of them, moving fast. The butter hissed. He waited. Tove watched the edges of the batter go from shiny to dull.

"Now," he said, and slid the knitting needle in at the edge of the first hollow and turned the half-cooked ball a quarter turn, so that the raw batter in the middle spilled down into the hot iron and the cooked edge rose up like the rim of a cup. He did it to all seven. Then he went back to the first and turned it again, and the ball began to close on itself, a sphere forming out of a puddle, and then again, until the first one sat in its hollow round and golden, the size of a small apple.

"That's it," he said. "Turn it before it's ready. Then turn it again. If you wait until it looks ready, it's too late."

"How do you know when it's before ready?"

Verner looked at her the way people in Elk Horn looked at the weather. "The edge," he said. "Watch the edge."

She watched the edge. Her first seven were lopsided, two of them burned on one side and raw inside, one of them split open like a baked potato. Verner ate the split one himself, standing, with his fingers. Her second seven were better. By her fourth pan she had stopped waiting for the edges to look ready and started turning when they looked almost ready, which turned out to be what he meant, and the balls came round under the needle, quarter turn, quarter turn, a small shove, closed.

"There," Verner said. "Now you have to do it nine hundred more times before noon."

The doors opened at seven. By seven-thirty the line went out the door and along the sidewalk toward the welcome center, people stamping in the cold with their hands in their pockets, families in from Omaha and Des Moines, kids in red stocking caps. The room filled with the smell of butter and cardamom and wet wool. Two girls from the high school dance group came through in costume, red skirts and white aprons, and Verner gave them each a paper boat of three for free, as he did every year.

Tove turned. Quarter turn, quarter turn, a small shove, closed. Her wrists ached by nine. By ten her shoulders ached. She did not burn any more after the first hour. Verner, at the next burner, never said anything about it, which she understood was the compliment.

---

Her grandmother came in at eleven, on the arm of a museum volunteer, and took the chair nearest the door with a pair of scissors.

Bedste was eighty-nine. She had been born on a farm outside Brande in Jutland, twenty minutes from the town where the windmill had first stood, and she liked to say that she had ridden her bicycle past it as a girl without once suspecting it would follow her to America. She had come over at nineteen, in 1956, to keep house for a Danish American family in Elk Horn, and had married a farmer named Holger Mikkelsen two years later, and had not gone back except to visit. She was small and very straight in the back, with white hair cut short and a gray cardigan buttoned to the neck, and she cut paper the way other people breathed.

Every Julefest for thirty years she had cut paper hearts and stars for children while their parents waited in line. Tove looked up from her pan and saw Bedste fold a square of red paper in half, and in half again, and cut along the fold without drawing anything first, the scissors moving in short bites, the paper turning in her other hand. She unfolded it. It was a heart with a small pine tree inside it and a bird on each side of the tree. She handed it to a boy of about eight, who stared at it as if she had pulled it from behind his ear.

"Bedste," Tove called over the noise. "Did you see the box?"

"What box?"

"From Mummu. It came yesterday."

Her grandmother's scissors stopped. "Aili sent a box?"

"I haven't opened it yet."

Bedste looked at her for a moment. Then she picked up another square of paper. "Then you open it today," she said. "Not tonight. Today. A box from an old woman, you don't leave it on a dryer."

Tove did not ask how she knew it was on the dryer.

---

She opened it at four in the afternoon at her grandmother's kitchen table, two blocks from Main Street, with the light already going blue in the window and the wind still pushing the snow sideways past the lilac hedge.

There was newspaper inside, the Houghton paper, crumpled into balls. There was a smell of cedar and of something older than cedar, a dry, sweetish smell like a closed-up attic. And there was a piece of wood.

It was the length of her forearm and a little more, pale gold in color, shaped like a long narrow wedge, wide at one end and tapering toward the other. One face was flat and smoothly finished. The other side, when she turned it over, was hollow: someone had carved out the inside of the solid block with a gouge, leaving thin walls all around, the tool marks still visible as a pattern of small overlapping scoops like fish scales. Across the wide end, five holes had been drilled into the wood in a slanting row. At the narrow end, a groove had been cut for something that was not there.

Tove knew wood. The block was alder, she thought, or something close to it, light for its size, and the carving had been done by someone who knew what he was doing and had stopped partway through. The walls were almost even. Almost. Near the wide end, on one side, they were still too thick.

Wrapped in a dish towel beside it was a flat tin that had once held pipe tobacco. Inside the tin were five steel pins, each the length of a matchstick, with a square head at one end and a small hole drilled through near the top. Under the tin was a strip of red-and-black plaid flannel, about two inches wide and three feet long, rolled up tight like a bandage. And under the flannel was a letter, on lined paper torn from a pad.

Tove unfolded it. Bedste, across the table, put on her glasses.

The letter was in English, mostly. It said:

Tove. This is Ukki's kantele that he did not finish. He started it for you the winter before he died. You were thirteen. He said you had good hands, you would play it. Then he got sick and it went in the closet. I am selling the house. The man says end of March. I am too old for the stairs and the snow and the furnace, that is what everybody says, so I say it too. In the closet I found this. I don't know who finishes a kantele now. Maybe you do. You are the carpenter.

The loom goes or the loom stays, somebody tells me. Your mother does not answer this question.

The flannel is Ukki's shirt. I am cutting all the shirts. I don't know why I put one in the box. Maybe so you see what color.

Mummu.

Under her name, smaller, in Finnish, there was one more line. Tove could not read it.

She passed the letter across the table. Bedste read it slowly, twice. She did not read Finnish either. She set the letter down and put her hand flat on the wooden wedge, on the smooth face, where the five holes ran in their slanting row.

"So," she said. "What is a kantele?"

"It's a Finnish instrument. Like a small harp. You lay it on your lap." Tove had seen one in Ukki's living room when she was little. She remembered the sound better than the object: bright and ringing, like water running over stones. "This one would have five strings. The pins go in these holes."

"And who finishes it?"

Tove turned the hollowed block over in her hands. She looked at the tool marks inside, the small fish-scale scoops, and recognized in them a habit: every cut leaned the same way, a slight twist at the end of the stroke. Her grandfather had carved this. She had been thirteen, and she had not known.

"Maybe I do," she said.

---

Her mother was at the farmhouse kitchen table that evening, paying bills, when Tove came in with the box under her arm. Lea looked at it and looked away.

"She's selling the house," Tove said.

"I know. She told me in October."

"You didn't say."

"I didn't know how to say it." Her mother closed the checkbook. On the screen of the tablet propped against the napkin holder was the family calendar, the one her mother kept for all of them, with the farm's seed deliveries and Tove's father's dentist appointments and Bedste's birthday in May and the date of Julefest marked in red. Tove saw, because she was standing behind her, a new entry at the end of March. It said, in her mother's neat typing: Mummu, house closing. There was no note under it.

"She wants to know about the loom," Tove said.

Her mother stood up and took her mug to the sink and rinsed it, though it was empty. "The loom is older than I am," she said to the window. "It's huge. It's falling apart. Nobody weaves rag rugs anymore."

"She does."

"She's eighty-six." Lea dried her hands on the towel by the sink for longer than her hands needed. "Your father's going to bed early. You should too. Verner wants you back at six."

Tove went upstairs to the room she still kept at the farm, though she rented a small house in town now. She laid the unfinished kantele on the quilt and the tobacco tin of pins beside it and the roll of plaid flannel beside that, and sat on the floor looking at them, the way she would look at a piece of furniture someone had brought into the shop in parts.

Then she photographed all three in the light of the bedside lamp and added them to the family's shared collection, where her mother kept the old photographs and her father kept pictures of every combine he had ever owned. She made a new album. She called it Ukki's kantele. Under the first picture she wrote: Started by Toivo Rautio in Hancock, Michigan, the winter before he died. Alder, carved from one piece. Five pin holes. Not finished. Under the flannel she wrote: Ukki's shirt. Red and black. Mummu is cutting them all for a rug.

She did not know what else to say about them yet.

---

Tove's notebook. Elk Horn. Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Started this in the back of the shop book, because I don't have another. Measurements in front, everything else in back.

Æbleskiver: turn before it's ready, then turn again. If you wait until it looks done, it's too late. Verner says this is also true of sanding, marriage and soybeans.

Bedste cut a heart with a tree in it for a boy who looked at her like she was a magician. She didn't draw it first. She never draws it first.

Ukki started a kantele for me when I was thirteen. I didn't know. Alder. Five holes. The inside is carved in little scoops that all lean the same way. I could pick his gouge out of a drawer of a hundred by those marks and I never once watched him use it.

Mummu wrote one line in Finnish at the end of the letter. Nobody here can read it. Mom could, once. I didn't ask her.

Scissors Folded Twice

The cabinet shop in Harlan closed early on the Wednesdays of December, because Dale Nielsen, who owned it, had decided twenty years ago that nobody hung kitchen doors well in the dark before Christmas, and nobody had ever argued him out of it. So on the first Wednesday Tove was at her grandmother's back door by two-thirty, with sawdust still in the cuffs of her jeans and a pizza box of scrap basswood under her arm.

"Shoes," Bedste said, opening the door.

Tove took off her shoes. Bedste's house was a narrow white story-and-a-half on a corner lot, with a glassed-in porch on the south side and a kitchen where everything was clean and nothing was new. A blue Danish Christmas plate hung over the radiator, 1958 lettered around its rim, the year Bedste was married. On the windowsill above the sink sat six small wooden nisser that Farfar Holger had whittled, each with a red cap and a slightly different expression of mischief.

On the kitchen table, Bedste had laid out paper. Glossy red, plain white, a stack of the thin colored sheets that came in craft packs, and a roll of heavy white drawing paper from the art store in Atlantic. Beside the paper lay four pairs of scissors in a row, from large to small, like surgical instruments.

"Sit," Bedste said. "Today you learn to fold."

---

Tove had cut paper with her grandmother before, as a child, the way every grandchild in the family had: hearts at Christmas, snowflakes in January, wobbly chains of dolls holding hands. But she had always been given a pattern, a pencil line to follow, and she had always followed it. Bedste had never once used a pencil line.

"The fold is the drawing," Bedste said. She took a square of red paper, about six inches on a side, and folded it in half, pressing the crease with her thumbnail. "Now you have two sides that are the same. Whatever you cut on one, you get on the other. You only have to think of half."

She cut, in short, quick bites, turning the paper as she went. Tove could not tell what she was making. The scissors went in and turned and came out, and a curl of red fell onto the table, and another, and the paper in Bedste's hand shrank and grew strange, a shape with no meaning, a coastline. Then she unfolded it.

It was a tree. A single tree with a straight trunk and branches that spread in pairs, and at the end of each branch a small round leaf, and in the crown of the tree, a bird with its wing raised. Both halves matched. They had to match. They had been cut together.

"Fold twice," Bedste said, and creased a new square twice, "you think of a quarter. Fold three times, an eighth. That is how the snowflakes are. But for a tree, one fold. A tree is like a person. Two sides, one middle."

She handed Tove the second-smallest pair of scissors. They were old, steel with black enameled handles, the enamel chipped away to bare metal where a thumb had pressed for decades.

"Holger's mother's," Bedste said. "From Denmark. Don't drop them."

---

They worked through the afternoon while the light went. Tove's first tree looked like a fish skeleton. Her second looked like a fork. Her third looked like a tree, sort of, if you were kind. Bedste did not correct her hands. She only said, now and then, "Turn the paper, not the scissors," and once, "You are cutting like a carpenter. Too straight. Paper is not a board. Let it bend."

"I am a carpenter."

"Then you will be a good one at this when you stop," Bedste said.

At four-thirty she put the kettle on and brought out a plate of brown cookies, thin and spiced, the kind she made every December, and while they drank coffee she told the story she always told about the scissors, which Tove knew by heart and still wanted to hear. It was about Hans Christian Andersen, the writer, who had cut paper while he talked. He would tell the children of a house a story, his big scissors working at a folded sheet, and when the story ended he would unfold something no one expected: a ballerina, a swan, a heart with a clown standing inside it. He cut the shapes in the paper the way he cut the stories, Bedste said, without telling anyone where they were going.

"There is a heart in Odense that he wove," she said. "Paper, two colors. The oldest one anybody has. You know the kind." She reached behind her without looking and took a paper heart from a basket on the counter: two loops of paper, one red and one white, woven through each other in a checkerboard so that they made a little pocket shaped like a heart, with a handle at the top. A julehjerte. Every Christmas tree in the family had dozens.

"That one is from 1860, more or less. Andersen made it. And the children of Denmark have been weaving the same thing ever since." Bedste turned the heart in her fingers. "Nobody wrote down how. Everybody's mother shows them."

"You showed me."

"I showed you." Bedste set the heart down. "Did you show anyone?"

Tove thought about it. "No."

"Hm," said Bedste, and drank her coffee.

---

At five, Rubén came by with a box.

Rubén Saucedo had worked at Dale Nielsen's shop for four years, since he was twenty-five. He ran the edge bander and the big panel saw and could hang a run of upper cabinets on a crooked wall faster than anyone Tove had ever met, including Dale. His family had come to western Iowa from Michoacán when he was nine, first to Denison, where his father worked at the meat plant, and later to Harlan. He was the one person at the shop who had ever asked Tove what her grandmother's papercuts meant, two Christmases ago, when she brought one in to tape to the dust collector.

He had told Tove at lunch that his mother wanted to send something to Bedste. Now he stood at the back door, stamping snow off his work boots, holding a flat cardboard box that had once held printer paper.

"Shoes," Tove said, before Bedste could.

He took off his shoes. In the kitchen he set the box on the table among the curls of red paper and lifted the lid. Inside, layered between sheets of newspaper, were banners of colored tissue paper. He drew one out and held it up by the string along its top. It was a long sheet of bright pink tissue, cut through with a pattern so fine it looked like lace: a border of scallops along the bottom, a field of tiny flowers and leaves, and in the center, two birds facing each other across a heart. When Rubén held it up to the window, the last daylight came through the cuts and lay on the linoleum in a pink shadow pattern.

"Papel picado," he said. "My mom cuts them. For Christmas, for the Virgin's day, for baptisms, quinceañeras, Day of the Dead. Everything." He laid the banner gently on the table in front of Bedste. "She saw the one Tove put on the dust collector. She said, tell the abuela, I want to trade."

Bedste had put her glasses on. She leaned over the pink tissue without touching it. She looked at the birds and then at the scallops and then at the tiny flowers, one after another, the way Tove had seen her look at the newspaper obituaries, slowly and completely.

"How does she fold it?" she asked.

"She doesn't fold it." Rubén grinned. "That's the thing. She stacks it. Fifty sheets of tissue, sixty, all on top of each other, with a paper pattern on top. Then she uses little chisels. Like, metal punches, all different shapes. And a hammer. On a lead board, so the chisels don't get dull." He made the motion with his hands, a punch held upright, a small hammer coming down. "Tap, tap, tap. When she's done, she has fifty the same."

Bedste sat back. "Chisels," she said.

"And a hammer."

"Fifty at once." Bedste looked at the scissors in her own hand, the old black-handled pair from Holger's mother. "I cut one at a time. Two halves, but one at a time."

"She said you'd say that." Rubén laughed. "She said, the Danish way is for the person who gets it. The Mexican way is for the whole street."

Tove waited for her grandmother to be offended. Bedste had opinions about many things, and paper was high on the list. But Bedste was smiling.

"She is right," she said. "For the street, you need fifty." She pushed a stack of red paper across the table toward Rubén. "Sit. You show me the birds. I show you a heart. Then you take some to her."

He sat. For an hour, in stocking feet, the three of them cut paper at Bedste's kitchen table while it grew dark outside. Rubén could not fold to save his life; his first Danish heart came out with one lobe twice the size of the other, and Bedste made him keep it. But he could draw, quickly and well, and when he sketched the two facing birds from his mother's banner on a scrap of white, Bedste took the scrap and folded it down the middle between the birds, and cut, and unfolded a single heart with two birds facing across it, a Danish heart with a Michoacán pattern inside, and passed it across to him.

He held it under the stove hood light.

"She's going to frame that," he said. "She's going to put that next to the TV."

---

After Rubén left, with a stack of hearts in the printer-paper box and a promise to bring his mother for coffee after New Year, Bedste sat for a while looking at the pink papel picado laid flat on her table.

"Tove," she said. "Get the drawing paper. The big roll."

Tove brought it. Bedste unrolled a length of it, maybe three feet, and held the ends down with the sugar bowl and the salt shaker.

"For your mother," she said. "By summer. I have been thinking."

"About what?"

"A stamtræ." She used the Danish word and then, seeing Tove's face, translated. "A family tree. Cut in paper. One big piece. Some families in Denmark have them on the wall, very old ones, cut by somebody's great-aunt. The names go in the branches." She smoothed the paper with her palm. "I can cut the Mikkelsen side. Holger's people, my people. I know every name. I have known them for seventy years."

"And Mom's side?"

Bedste was quiet for a moment.

"Your mother's side, I don't know," she said. "I met Aili two times. At the wedding, and once when you were a baby, and that was so long ago, we didn't talk, we smiled. I know Toivo played music. I know they had a sauna. I know your mother left that town at eighteen and almost never goes back." She looked at Tove over her glasses. "That is not enough to cut a branch."

"I could ask Mom."

"You could." Bedste rolled the paper back up, slowly. "Or you could ask the one who knows."

Tove took out her phone. The family tree that her mother had started years ago, beside the photographs and the calendar, had been mostly Mikkelsens until now. The Danish side went back to a farm in Jutland in the 1700s, thanks to a cousin in Copenhagen and the genealogy center down the street at the museum. On the Rautio side there were three names: Toivo, Aili, Lea. Above Aili, a single empty box with a question mark. Above Toivo, the same.

She showed Bedste.

"There," her grandmother said. "That is a tree with no roots on one side. In paper, it falls over."

---

That night Tove sat at the kitchen table of her rented house on Washington Street with the unfinished kantele, the tin of pins and the plaid flannel in front of her, and read Mummu's letter again. The last line, the one in Finnish, she had typed into a translation program on her phone the night it came. It had given her: Do not tell your mother I am afraid of the stairs.

She had not shown that to anyone.

She looked at the alder wedge for a long time. The thick spot near the wide end. The five slanting holes. She had a week of vacation days she had not used, and Dale had said in the first week of December, as he said every year, that January was dead and anyone who wanted to take time off should take it then. She had a car with new snow tires. She had a grandmother in Michigan who was afraid of the stairs and did not want anyone to know.

She picked up her phone and called the shop's voicemail and left a message for Dale that she would explain on Monday. Then she opened the family calendar and, after a long while, added an entry in the first week of January. She did not write a destination. She wrote: Tove, gone north.

---

Tove's notebook. Elk Horn. First Wednesday of December.

The fold is the drawing. One fold, you think of half. A tree is like a person: two sides, one middle.

Bedste says I cut like a carpenter. Too straight. Let the paper bend.

Rubén's mother cuts fifty at once with chisels and a hammer, for the whole street. Bedste cuts one at a time, for the person who gets it. They are going to have coffee. I would pay to watch this.

Andersen's woven heart, 1860. Nobody wrote down how to weave one. Everybody's mother shows them. Bedste asked if I had shown anyone. I haven't.

The Rautio side of the tree has three names and two question marks. Bedste says in paper it would fall over.

Mummu's Finnish line: Do not tell your mother I am afraid of the stairs.

The Almond in the Rice

On Christmas Eve the Mikkelsens ate at Bedste's, as they had every year since Farfar Holger died, because Bedste said she was too old to be a guest at her own family's Christmas and too old to stop cooking it.

The snow had come for real on the twenty-second, eight inches of it, and then the sky had cleared and the cold had dropped down hard behind it, so that by the evening of the twenty-fourth the town was a bowl of blue light under a half moon. The windmill, three blocks away, stood with its sails lit. Tove's father parked the pickup at the curb with its nose in a drift, and the three of them came up the shoveled walk carrying covered dishes, their breath going up in front of them like steam from a kettle.

Inside, the house smelled of roasting pork and duck fat and red cabbage cooked with vinegar and currant jelly. The windows were fogged. Bedste had been cooking since noon and would not let anyone in the kitchen except to carry plates, and so Tove's father, Anders, a big quiet man who farmed eleven hundred acres of corn and beans northeast of town, stood in the living room admiring the tree he had cut and set up himself, as he did every year, as if someone else had done it.

The tree went to the ceiling. It was hung with nothing bought. There were woven paper hearts, red and white, dozens of them, some so old the paper had gone soft as cloth and the red had faded to pink. There were strings of tiny Danish flags, red with the white cross, looped from branch to branch, and straw stars. And there were candles. Bedste still put twenty real candles on the tree in clip-on holders and lit them once a year, on this night, for about half an hour, while Anders stood beside the tree with a wet sponge on a stick, the way his father had done before him.

---

They ate at six. Roast pork with the skin scored and crackled hard as toffee, roast duck, potatoes boiled and then browned in a pan of melted sugar and butter until they were glazed and sticky, the red cabbage, a boat of brown gravy, a dish of pickled cucumbers. Lea had brought the green beans, because Lea always brought the green beans, and nobody ate many of them, and every year Lea pretended to mind.

They talked about the farm and the price of beans and whether Verner would really retire from the æbleskiver stand this year. They did not talk about Michigan. Tove watched her mother not talk about it. Lea laughed at the right times and asked Bedste the right questions about the duck and helped carry plates, and in between, when nobody was speaking to her, she looked at the window over the radiator, where the dark glass gave back the room.

Then Bedste brought out the risalamande.

It came in the big glass bowl with the scalloped rim, a cold pudding of rice cooked in milk and folded with whipped cream and chopped almonds and vanilla, with a pitcher of hot cherry sauce on the side. Bedste set the bowl in the center of the table and stood over it with the serving spoon raised.

"One almond," she said, as she said every year. "Whole. Who finds it, keeps quiet until the bowl is empty. Then they get the prize."

Everyone knew the rules. Everyone said them anyway, along with her, the way people mouth the words to a song they have heard a hundred times. Somewhere in that bowl of chopped almonds was one almond that had not been chopped. Whoever found it was supposed to hide it in a cheek and go on eating as if nothing had happened, while everyone else kept eating until the bowl was scraped clean, and only then show it and claim the mandelgave, the almond gift. In Bedste's house the mandelgave was always the same: a pig made of marzipan, pink, with a red bow around its neck.

Tove found it in her third spoonful. She felt it with her tongue, smooth and whole among the bits, and froze for half a second, and then kept her face exactly as it was. She tucked it into her cheek. She ate. She asked her father for the cherry sauce.

Across the table, her mother was watching her. Lea's eyes narrowed, and then a corner of her mouth went up, very slightly. She said nothing. She took a second helping. So did Anders, groaning. So did Bedste, who at eighty-nine could still eat risalamande like a farmhand. They ate until the bowl was clean and the cherry sauce was gone, and then Bedste set down her spoon and looked around the table.

"Well?"

Tove took the almond out of her cheek and set it on the tablecloth.

"Ha," said her mother, and pointed at her. "I knew it. Third spoon. You stopped chewing."

"I did not stop chewing."

"You stopped chewing for one second. You've done it since you were four." Her mother was laughing now, for the first time all evening, really laughing, with her head back. "Your Ukki used to do the same thing with his face when he was holding a good hand at cards. He'd go completely still. Like a deer."

The table went quiet for a moment. It was the first time Tove had heard her mother say Ukki's name since the box came.

Bedste got up and went to the pantry and came back with the marzipan pig on a saucer and set it in front of Tove with ceremony.

"Your prize," she said. "Don't share it. Nobody ever shares it."

---

After the dishes, Bedste lit the candles on the tree.

She did it herself with a long match, one candle at a time, from the bottom branches to the top, while Anders stood ready with his sponge on a stick. Then Lea turned off the overhead light. The room went gold. The flames stood up straight and still in the warm air, twenty small points, and the paper hearts turned slowly on their threads, and the little Danish flags threw their shadows on the ceiling.

Then they held hands.

Tove had done this every Christmas Eve of her life and had never once felt anything but faintly ridiculous and entirely happy. The four of them made a ring around the tree, Bedste and Anders and Lea and Tove, close enough that they had to be careful of the candles, and walked around it slowly, and sang. Bedste started each song in her high, thin, steady voice, in Danish, the old songs about the tree and the candles and the nisse in the barn waiting for his porridge, the songs her mother had sung outside Brande. Anders sang in a bass that knew the tunes and half the words. Lea sang the words, all of them, in a Danish she had learned from her mother-in-law over twenty-eight Christmases, with a careful accent that got a little better every year. Tove sang about two lines in four and hummed the rest.

When they had gone around the tree for the length of four songs, Bedste stopped and let go of their hands, and pressed her palms together.

"Now," she said. "Before I forget. Tove, the telephone."

Tove looked at her.

"The recording thing. That you showed me for your mother's words." Bedste meant the family's word list, where Lea had been collecting Danish words with recordings for years, mostly holiday words and kitchen words, the dozen or so phrases everyone in the family knew. "I want to sing the nisse song into it. All the verses. Your father only knows two."

"I know three," Anders said.

"You know two and a half." Bedste looked at Tove. "But first you ask me. Out loud. So it is clear. I am not a radio."

Tove opened the list and held up the phone. "Bedste," she said. "Can I record you singing the nisse song, for the family to keep?"

"Yes," said Bedste, very formally. "You can." And she sang it, all six verses, standing by the burning tree in her gray cardigan, with her hands folded at her waist like a girl in a school concert, in the voice that had not wobbled once in eighty-nine years, and when she finished she said, "There. Now it is right," and blew out the first candle.

---

The phone rang while Anders was snuffing the last of them.

It was Lea's phone. She looked at the screen and went still, just as she had said at the table that Tove went still, and Ukki before her. Then she answered it and walked out through the kitchen onto the glassed-in porch and shut the door behind her.

Tove could see her through the glass. Her mother stood in the cold porch with her arm wrapped around her middle and the phone at her ear, and the moonlight on the snow outside made her into a silhouette. She talked for a while. She listened for a longer while. Once she put her hand over her eyes. Tove could not hear words, only the tone: short sentences, careful, like a nurse giving instructions. Lea had been a school nurse in Harlan for twenty years. She knew how to talk to someone she was worried about without letting them hear the worry.

When she came back in, her face was arranged.

"Mummu says Merry Christmas," she said. "She says she got the card."

"How is she?"

"She's fine." Lea sat down on the arm of the sofa. Then, after a moment, as if she had decided that a lie told on Christmas Eve in front of a tree was more than she could manage: "She fell. In November. On the back steps. She didn't break anything. She didn't tell me until now because she said I would make a fuss."

Nobody said anything.

"She says the neighbor boy shovels. She says the girl who rents upstairs helps with groceries. She says she's fine." Lea looked at the tree. "She says she's cutting up all of Dad's shirts."

"For the rug," Tove said.

Her mother turned and looked at her. "What rug?"

"She's weaving a rag rug. Before she leaves the house. That's why she's asking about the loom." Tove held her mother's eyes. "She's weaving it for you, Mom. It's in the letter. Not in the English part."

Lea did not ask her what the Finnish part said. She sat on the arm of the sofa, phone in her lap, and studied her daughter for a long moment, and Tove understood that her mother knew perfectly well what was in the Finnish part of a letter from her own mother, whether she had read it or not.

---

Later, when Anders had gone to warm up the truck and Bedste was wrapping leftovers in foil at the counter, Lea came and stood next to Tove at the sink.

"Your calendar," her mother said quietly. "The first week of January. Gone north."

"Dale gave me the month. I have the vacation days."

"It's eight hundred miles. In January. Over the top of Lake Superior."

"Along the bottom of it. I looked at the map."

Her mother almost smiled. "She won't let you help her. You know that. She'll say she's fine. She'll make you sit and drink coffee and eat nisu and tell you she's fine, and then she'll go out to the woodpile in the dark when you're asleep."

"Then I'll be awake."

Lea dried a glass that was already dry. She set it on the shelf.

"The loom has a broken lamm," she said, after a while. "On the left side. Lamms are the bars under the shafts that the treadles tie to. It's been broken since I was a girl. Dad wired it together with a piece of copper. It holds, mostly. If you push the third treadle too hard it slips." She set down the towel. "Tell her I said so. She'll pretend she didn't know."

"Do you want to come?"

Her mother shook her head, quickly, the way you brush away a fly.

"Take the snow shovel out of the barn," she said. "The aluminum one. And Dad's old parka. The Carhartt with the hood. It's in the mudroom closet. It's ugly, but you won't be cold in it." She was halfway to the door when she stopped. "And Tove. If she asks you to take a sauna, take a sauna. Don't argue about it. Just go."

---

Tove's notebook. Elk Horn. Christmas Eve, late.

Found the almond on the third spoon. Mom says I stopped chewing. Mom says Ukki went still like a deer when he held a good hand at cards. First time she's said his name since the box.

Bedste sang all six verses of the nisse song into the word list. She made me ask first, out loud. "I am not a radio." She sang it standing up with her hands folded.

Mummu fell in November and didn't tell anyone.

Mom knows the loom. She knows the left lamm is wired with copper and the third treadle slips. She hasn't touched that loom in thirty-eight years and she knows which treadle slips.

Marzipan pig: not shared. Nobody ever shares it.

Packing list: aluminum shovel, Ukki's Carhartt, the kantele, the pins, the gouges from the shop, sandpaper, Bedste's black-handled scissors (she says take them, she says I will need to cut something up there, she won't say what).

Over the Lift Bridge

She left Elk Horn at four in the morning on the third of January, with the kantele wrapped in a moving blanket on the back seat, the aluminum shovel in the trunk, and a thermos of Bedste's coffee wedged between the seats, and she drove north in the dark through a country so flat and white that the only way to tell the road from the fields was the reflectors on the fence posts.

By the time the sky went gray she was past Des Moines and headed up Interstate 35 toward Minnesota. By ten she was in the Twin Cities traffic, and by one she was coming down the long hill into Duluth with the whole of Lake Superior opening out below her like a second sky, gray and enormous and steaming in the cold. Where the open water met the air at twenty below, a sea smoke rose off it in long white curtains. Tove pulled over at a gas station just to look. A man filling a pickup at the next pump saw her looking and said, without being asked, "Wait till you get to the Keweenaw," and drove off.

She crossed into Wisconsin and then into Michigan as the light went. The Upper Peninsula, in the dark, was trees. Black spruce and balsam close on both sides, snowbanks higher than the car, and every few miles a town that was a gas station and a bar and a sign for pasties. The radio faded between country music and a man reading high school hockey scores. Once, near Bruce Crossing, it snowed so hard that she drove at twenty-five behind the faint pink taillights of a plow.

Then the towns got closer together, and there were signs for Houghton. She came down a last long hill toward water and saw, below her, the lights of two towns facing each other across a channel: Houghton on the near side, its campus buildings lit in long rows along the shore, and on the far side, climbing a hill so steep it looked like a wall, Hancock, its houses stacked one above another in the dark like seats in a theater, their windows yellow, their roofs heavy with white.

Between the two towns, across the channel, lay the bridge.

---

She had crossed it before, as a child, on summer visits, and had not thought of it since. Now she saw it the way a carpenter sees a structure. It was a lift bridge, a long low steel deck with a tall tower on either side of the middle span. When ships came through in summer, the whole middle span rose between the towers like an elevator. In winter it sat low, and the channel under it was white with ice, with a single black lane down the middle where something had broken through.

Her tires drummed on the steel grating of the deck. Then she was on the Hancock side, at the bottom of the hill, and the streets went up from the water at angles she would not have believed if she had not been driving them: straight up, past brick storefronts and buried front steps, past a sandstone building on Quincy Street with a dark tower and a sign she could not read in the snow. She remembered, as she climbed, that it had been the college, and that the college had closed.

Mummu's street was the steepest of all. Tove put the car in low gear and crept up it between snowbanks so tall that the houses on either side showed only their upper windows and roofs, like ships half sunk in a white sea. Halfway up, on the left, a narrow driveway had been shoveled down to the gravel, and at the top of it stood a two-story house with green trim and a steep roof, and every light on the ground floor was on.

Before Tove had turned off the engine, the side door opened, and a woman stood in it with the light behind her.

---

Mummu was smaller than Tove remembered. She stood in the doorway in a wool skirt and thick stockings and a cardigan the color of oatmeal, with a cane in one hand and the other on the door frame, and she watched Tove climb out of the car and stretch her back and pull her bag from the trunk, and did not call out, and did not come down the steps. The steps were salted and shoveled. They were also steep and iced at the edges, and Tove understood, looking at them, why her grandmother stayed at the top.

"Well," Mummu said, when Tove reached her. "You came."

"I said I would."

"People say." Mummu stepped back to let her in. "Come. Take off your boots. Sit. You must be froze."

Her voice was exactly as Tove remembered it from phone calls, the voice of the Copper Country, flat and musical at once, with the Finnish under it like a second floor. Her eyes were very pale blue and very sharp. Her white hair was braided and pinned in a crown, and her hands on the cane were large for her size, with swollen knuckles, the hands of a woman who had worked with them every day.

The kitchen was small and hot. A wood cookstove stood against one wall beside the electric range, and Mummu had a fire going in it, and on the back of the stove a blue enamel coffeepot was keeping warm. On the table was a braided loaf of sweet bread under a dish towel, golden and shiny on top, scattered with crushed sugar. The room smelled of cardamom and woodsmoke and coffee, and over the window above the sink hung a strip of woven cloth with a border of small red crosses and diamonds.

"Nisu," Mummu said, lifting the towel off the bread. "You remember?"

"I remember."

"You were six. You ate half a loaf and threw up on the porch." Mummu cut a thick slice and put it on a plate and poured coffee into a cup on a saucer, and set them both in front of Tove, and sat down across from her with her own cup, and watched her eat the way Bedste watched people eat, as if the eating were a test and she was grading it.

The bread was soft and dense and tasted of cardamom and butter and something faintly like orange peel. Tove ate the whole slice. Mummu cut another one and put it on the plate without asking.

"Your mother is well?"

"She's fine. She said to tell you the left lamm on the loom is wired with copper and the third treadle slips."

Mummu put down her cup. For a moment she looked at Tove without any expression at all.

"She remembers that," she said.

"She remembers that."

Mummu picked up her cup again. "Ha," she said. That was all. But she said it in a way that made Tove think of her mother laughing over the almond, with her head back.

---

The loom was in the front room.

There was no other room big enough. The front room of the house, which in other houses on the street would have been a parlor, had become, at some point decades ago, the loom room, and nobody had ever tried to change it back. It held a sofa pushed against one wall, a radio on a side table, a basket of yarn and three paper grocery bags full of cloth, and the loom.

Tove had expected something big. It was bigger. It was a floor loom of dark, heavy wood, as wide as a double bed and nearly as tall as Tove herself, a great open box frame of square posts and crossbeams joined with wooden pegs. From the top hung four wooden shafts strung with hundreds of wire heddles, like four combs with very fine teeth. At the front hung a heavy beater with a steel reed set into it. Six treadles ran along the floor, worn pale in the middle where feet had pressed them. Warp beam at the back, cloth beam at the front, and between them, nothing. The loom was empty. No threads ran across it. It stood in the lamplight like the skeleton of something that had once been alive.

Tove walked around it slowly, touching it, reading the wood with her fingertips. The wood was maple, she thought, heavy and close-grained, darkened almost to walnut with age and hands. The joints were mortise and tenon, pegged with square wooden pins driven into round holes, the old way. Somebody had cut every one of them by hand.

"My father made it," Mummu said, from the doorway. "In nineteen thirty-eight. Before I was born. For my mother. Out of maple from the woods behind the Quincy mine." She came in slowly with her cane and stood beside the loom and put her hand on the breast beam, the heavy front bar where a weaver leans. "He was a miner. Then the mine closed, and he was a carpenter. Like you."

Tove knelt and looked under the loom. On the left side, under the shafts, one of the horizontal bars that connected the treadles to the shafts had been broken in the middle and splinted with two strips of wood and a wrapping of bare copper wire, wound tight and twisted off with pliers. The copper had gone green-brown with age.

"Your mother told you that," Mummu said.

"Ukki fixed it."

"Ukki fixed it in nineteen seventy-nine. He said, I fix it properly in summer. Then for thirty-five summers he went fishing." Mummu lowered herself onto the sofa beside the bags of cloth. "So. You fix it properly. Then we weave."

"We?"

"I can't do the treadles anymore. The knees. And the beater is heavy. And the warp. Putting on the warp, you need young arms." Mummu reached into the nearest grocery bag and pulled out a handful of cloth strips, wound into a loose ball, plaid and denim and faded floral cotton. "But I can tell you what to do. And I can cut. I am very good at cutting."

---

Someone came down the stairs fast, the way people come down stairs they know by heart.

She was a young woman about Tove's age, small and dark-haired, in a puffy purple coat with the hood up and a backpack over one shoulder and snow on her boots. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs when she saw Tove, and pushed back her hood, and smiled with her whole face.

"You're the granddaughter," she said. "You're the carpenter. I'm Nandini. I live upstairs. Aili told me you were coming and I didn't believe her because nobody comes here in January on purpose."

"Nandini is from India," Mummu said, in the tone of someone announcing that a guest is from Chicago. "She studies snow."

"I study how snow behaves on roofs. Load and drift. For engineering." Nandini perched on the arm of the sofa without taking off her coat. "Which is why I'm here, honestly. Where else would I go? We get two hundred inches a year. It's a laboratory with a Pizza Hut." She looked at Tove with frank curiosity. "You drove from Iowa today? In one day?"

"Fifteen hours. There was snow."

"She's crazy," Nandini told Mummu happily. "Like you." Then, to Tove: "Aili's teaching me Finnish. I'm teaching her to make chai. She thinks it needs more sugar. I think she's right, which is embarrassing."

Mummu looked pleased and pretended not to. "She is from Mysore," she said. "Mysuru, now. Very hot place. She came here to be cold." She said it as though this was the most reasonable thing a person could do.

"I wanted snow," Nandini said. "My whole life. I saw it in a film when I was eight. Now I measure it for a living. My mother thinks I've lost my mind."

"Your mother is a sensible woman," Mummu said, and got up, slowly, to put more wood in the stove.

---

Tove slept that night in a small bedroom off the kitchen that had once been a pantry, under three wool blankets and a quilt, with the wood stove ticking as it cooled on the other side of the wall. Before she slept she opened the family's map, the one her mother had started with the places the family came from: a pin outside Brande in Jutland for Bedste, a pin in Elk Horn, a pin on the farm. In the Upper Peninsula there was a single pin, on Hancock, with no photograph.

She added one. She had taken it from the car at the top of the driveway, before she turned off the headlights: the green-trimmed house half buried in snow, every window on the ground floor lit, and in the side door a small woman with a cane and a crown of white braids, standing at the top of the steps she was afraid of. Under it Tove typed the date and: Mummu's house, Hancock. She waited at the top of the steps.

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. Third of January, very late.

Lake Superior smokes in the cold. A man at a gas station in Duluth told me to wait till the Keweenaw.

Mummu's loom: maple, 1938, made by her father out of trees from behind the Quincy mine. Mortise and tenon, square pegs in round holes. Six treadles. Four shafts. The left lamm is splinted and wired with copper. Ukki, 1979: "I fix it properly in summer." Thirty-five summers of fishing.

Nandini studies snow on roofs. She came here to be cold. Mummu thinks this is reasonable.

When I told her what Mom said about the lamm, she said, "She remembers that." Then she said, "Ha."

Saturday Steam

Mummu called it sauna night, and she said the word so that it rhymed with "how," and on the first Saturday Tove made the mistake of saying it the other way.

"Saw-na," Mummu repeated, with distaste, as though Tove had tracked something in on her boots. "That is how they say it in the hotel in Minneapolis. With the plastic bench and the electric heater and the sign that says fifteen minutes." She was sitting at the kitchen table in the late afternoon, cutting a pair of old blue work pants into strips with a pair of enormous shears. "Here we say sow-na. Like a pig. A sow. Say it."

"Sow-na."

"Good. Now you go start the fire. It takes two hours. You are late already."

---

The sauna stood at the back of the lot, where the hill behind the house leveled off for a few yards before it climbed again into birch and spruce. Ukki had begun it in the summer of 1960 and finished it the next year, the year he married Mummu, out of cedar logs he cut and peeled himself, and in sixty-five winters it had settled into the ground like a stump. It was small, with a low roof furred in snow, a black stovepipe, and one small window. A narrow trench had been shoveled to it through snow that came up to Tove's hips. Someone had shoveled it that morning. Tove suspected it had not been the neighbor boy.

Inside there were two rooms. The first was the dressing room, the pukuhuone, Mummu called it, with a bench along one wall, pegs for clothes, a rag rug on the floor, a stack of towels on a shelf, and a wooden bucket. The second room, through a low door, was the sauna itself: a small dark space with tiered benches of smooth pale wood along two walls, the top bench so close to the ceiling that a tall person sitting on it would have to bend her neck. In the corner squatted the stove.

It was a box of welded steel plate, black and scaled with rust, with a firebox door at the bottom and, on top, a deep steel basket heaped with stones the size of fists. Kiuas, Mummu called the stove. The stones were from the shore of Lake Superior where Ukki went to fish, and he had chosen every one, and thrown away any stone that rang when he tapped it with another, because a stone that rang had a crack and would split in the heat.

Tove built the fire as her father had taught her for the farm's woodstove, a bed of crumpled newspaper and birch bark, kindling split thin as fingers, and then three split logs laid in a loose triangle. Birch bark burned like it had been soaked in kerosene. In an hour she was sitting in the dressing room in Ukki's old Carhartt with the door between the rooms open, feeding the fire every fifteen minutes, watching the light through the small window go from gray to blue to black, and feeling the heat come out to her through the doorway in a slow tide.

It was very quiet. Out here, behind the house, the sound of the town did not reach. She could hear the fire. She could hear the snow on the roof shifting as the warmth came up through the logs. Far off, somewhere down the hill, a truck engaged its plow blade with a long scrape.

---

At seven Mummu came out along the trench with her cane in one hand and a basket on her other arm, and Nandini behind her carrying two thermoses and a bag of towels.

"You let it get hot," Mummu said approvingly, standing in the dressing room doorway with her face turned toward the inner room like someone checking the weather. "Good. Two hours. Now we wait a little for the stones."

"How long?"

Mummu shrugged. "Until the stones are ready."

"How do you know when the stones are ready?"

Her grandmother looked at her with the same patience Verner had shown at the æbleskiver pans, the patience of an old person explaining something to a young one who was asking the wrong question.

"You will know," she said. "Your Ukki said, the stones tell you."

From the basket she took out a bundle of dried birch branches tied together at the stems with string, the leaves still on them, gone olive green and brittle. She put it in the wooden bucket and poured hot water from one of the thermoses over it, and the dressing room filled at once with a smell Tove would carry with her for years: green, sweet, sharp, like a forest after rain in June, like summer opened inside a box.

"Vihta," Mummu said. "Birch. We cut them in July, when the leaves are new, and we tie them, and we put them in the freezer. Then in January you have July." She tapped the bucket with her cane. "Your Ukki cut these. The last ones. Twelve years in the freezer. I was saving. Tonight, I think, is the night."

---

She did not go into the hot room. Her knees, she said, and her heart, which the doctor said was fine and which she said was eighty-six years old. Instead she sat on the bench in the dressing room with the door open, wrapped in a big towel over her clothes, and conducted the sauna from the doorway the way Bedste conducted Christmas from the head of her table.

Nandini and Tove undressed and wrapped themselves in towels and climbed onto the top bench in the hot room. The heat was dry and enormous. It came off the stove in waves Tove could see, ripples in the air like the air above a highway in July. Her skin tightened. Her breath shortened. Beside her, Nandini made a small sound of pure happiness.

"In Mysuru, in April, it's like this outside," Nandini said. "Except no birch. And nobody throws water on anything."

"Now," said Mummu from the doorway. "The kauha. The ladle. Dip it in the bucket. Throw the water on the stones. Not a lot. Half."

Tove dipped the long wooden ladle into the water bucket and leaned toward the stove and tossed half a ladle onto the stones.

The stones hissed. Then they roared. A cloud of steam burst up off them, invisible almost at once, and rolled across the ceiling and came down on the two of them on the top bench like a hot wet blanket thrown over their heads. Tove gasped. The heat went into her ears, her nose, the backs of her knees. For a few seconds she could not think at all. Then it passed through her and settled, and she found she was breathing again, slowly, deeply, and that her whole body had gone loose, as it did in the shop at the end of a long day when she finally sat down.

"That," said Mummu from the doorway, with deep satisfaction, "is löyly."

"What?"

"Löyly. The steam. When the water hits the stones and comes up. That is löyly. English doesn't have it. Steam is from a kettle. Löyly is this." She said the word again, slowly, with two sounds in it that Tove had never made in her life, the round ö that sat somewhere between an o and an e, the y that was not an English y at all but something you made by saying ee with your lips pushed forward. "Löyly. My mother said, a sauna without löyly is just a hot room with a bench."

Nandini said it. She got it almost right on the first try. Tove said it and got it wrong three times, and Mummu made her keep saying it until the fourth time, when Mummu grunted, which Tove took to mean it would do.

"Again," said Mummu. "Throw again."

---

They threw again, and again. Mummu talked from the doorway, the way some people talk in a car, more easily for not facing anyone. She said that every Finnish family who came to the Copper Country to work in the mines built a sauna first and a house second, and some of them lived in the sauna through the first winter, the whole family, because a log sauna was quick to build and easy to heat. She said that in the old days women gave birth in the sauna, because it was the cleanest place on the farm. She said that you did not shout or argue in the sauna, because there everyone was the same, without clothes or money. She said that Ukki had proposed to her in this sauna, or rather in the dressing room of it, in 1960, before it was even finished, when it was only three walls and a stove.

"He said, I am building a sauna. I need somebody to throw the water." Mummu snorted. "That was the whole proposal."

"And you said yes."

"I said, the stones are too small. Then I said yes."

When the heat was too much, Mummu sent them out. Not into the dressing room. Out of the building entirely, through the outside door, in their towels, barefoot, into the snow. Tove stood on the threshold looking at the black night and the white yard and the thermometer by the door, which said nine below zero, and thought very clearly that her grandmother had lost her mind.

"Go," Mummu said behind her. "Roll. Then come back. Your mother did it at four years old. Go."

Nandini went first. She ran out into the dark yard with her towel flying and threw herself down full length in the snow beside the path and lay there on her back, steaming, screaming with laughter. Tove followed her. The snow was so cold it did not feel cold. It felt like nothing, and then it felt like fire, and then she was on her back in it looking up at more stars than she had ever seen over Iowa, with the steam pouring off her skin into the frozen air in a cloud, and her heart pounding, and her whole body buzzing like a struck bell.

They ran back in. The heat of the sauna closed over them like water. Mummu, in the doorway, was laughing so hard she leaned on the frame.

---

Afterward, in the dressing room, in dry clothes and wool socks, red-faced and slow, they ate.

Mummu had brought sausages, thick ones from a butcher in Calumet, wrapped in foil, and she had Tove lay them on top of the hot stones of the kiuas to cook while they dressed, which made the hot room smell of sizzling fat and birch. There was the nisu, sliced. There was a jar of lingonberry jam that a cousin had sent from Finland. There were the two thermoses: one of coffee, which Mummu poured into small cups, and one of chai, which Nandini poured into the same cups after the coffee was drunk.

Mummu held a sugar cube between her front teeth and sipped the coffee through it, as, she said, her own mother had done and every old woman in the Copper Country had done when she was a girl. Then she tried Nandini's chai, which was thick with milk and cardamom and ginger, and held the cup under her nose for a long moment.

"Cardamom," she said. "Same as nisu."

"Cardamom's from India," Nandini said. "From Kerala, mostly. Down south of where I grew up. Every Finnish grandmother in this town is using my grandmother's spice."

Mummu took this in with dignity. "Then your grandmother has good taste," she said, and drank the chai, and asked for more sugar.

When they walked back to the house along the trench, Mummu between them with a hand on each of their arms, the cold did not touch them. Tove felt the heat still coming off her body for an hour, like a stone taken from the stove. At the back steps Mummu stopped and looked up at the house, at its dark windows and the icicles along its eaves, and then back at the sauna, whose small window glowed red from the dying fire inside.

"Sixty-five years," she said, to no one in particular. "Every Saturday."

Then she went up the steps, carefully, one at a time, with both of them holding her arms.

---

Before bed Tove opened the family's list of words, the one that had Bedste's nisse song in it and her mother's kitchen Danish, and made a new section. She sat on the edge of the bed in the old pantry and called through the wall into the kitchen, where Mummu was banking the cookstove for the night.

"Mummu. Will you say some sauna words for me to keep? Into the phone?"

There was a pause on the other side of the wall.

"Which words?"

"Löyly. Kiuas. Vihta. Sauna. The right way."

Another pause. Then the kitchen door opened, and her grandmother stood in it in her nightgown and cardigan, with her braids down for the night, long and white over her shoulder. She took the phone from Tove and held it a little away from her face, the way people do who did not grow up with telephones in their hands.

"Löyly," she said into it, slowly, as if speaking to someone a long way off. "Kiuas. Vihta." She looked at Tove. "And the Saturday. Lauantaisauna. Saturday sauna." She said it, and handed the phone back. "There. Now when I am gone, they can hear how it is supposed to sound. Not like Minneapolis."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. First Saturday.

Sow-na. Like a pig.

Kiuas: the stove. The stones are from Lake Superior. Ukki threw away any stone that rang when he tapped it, because a ringing stone has a crack.

Löyly: the steam when water hits the stones. Mummu says English doesn't have it. She is right. I have no English word for what happened to my body.

Vihta: birch branches cut in July and frozen. "Then in January you have July." These were Ukki's last ones, twelve years in the freezer. She used them tonight.

Proposal, 1960: "I am building a sauna. I need somebody to throw the water." She told him the stones were too small and then said yes.

Cardamom is from India. Every Finnish grandmother in Hancock is using Nandini's grandmother's spice.

Rags with Names

Before anything could be woven, the lamm had to be fixed, and before the lamm could be fixed, Tove had to find a piece of maple in Hancock in January.

She found it at a lumberyard down by the canal on the Houghton side, where a man in a hooded sweatshirt that said HUSKIES across the chest sold her a short length of hard maple out of the offcut bin for four dollars and asked what she was building. When she told him, he said his grandmother had had a loom like that in Chassell, and that when she died nobody wanted it, and it went to the dump. He said it plainly, the way people up here said most things. Then he gave her a second piece for free, "in case you mess up the first one."

She did not mess up the first one. She took the broken lamm out of the loom on Mummu's kitchen table on Tuesday morning, unwinding Ukki's copper wire turn by turn and laying it aside in a coil, and traced the old bar onto the new maple with a carpenter's pencil. She cut it with a handsaw on two kitchen chairs pushed back to back, and shaped it with a block plane and a spokeshave she had brought from the shop, while Mummu sat across the table cutting rags and watching every stroke. Then she drilled the holes for the cords at exactly the spacing of the old ones, measuring three times.

"Your Ukki would have taken one afternoon," Mummu said.

"It's taken me one afternoon."

"He would have taken one afternoon thirty-five years ago." But she held out her hand for the old copper wire and wound the coil tighter and slipped it into her cardigan pocket, and Tove saw that she was keeping it.

---

On Wednesday they warped the loom.

Tove had not known there were so many steps between a cone of cotton thread and the first throw of a shuttle. Mummu explained them from the sofa, in a mix of English and Finnish that grew more Finnish the more technical it got, and Tove did them.

First the warp had to be measured. Mummu had a warping board on the wall behind the door, a big wooden frame studded with pegs, and Tove wound the white cotton warp thread around the pegs in a long zigzag, back and forth, counting each pass, until there were three hundred and twenty threads in the bundle, each one six yards long. Loimi, Mummu called the warp. The threads had to cross over each other at one end in a figure eight, the cross, so that their order would be kept. "You lose the cross," Mummu said, "you lose your mind. I have seen it."

Then the bundle came off the board in a long chain and went onto the loom, wound onto the warp beam while Nandini, home from the lab, held the chain taut at the far end of the room. Then each of the three hundred and twenty threads had to be pulled through the eye of a wire heddle, in an order Mummu called from the sofa: one, two, three, four. Then through the steel reed, two to a slot. Pirta, she called the reed. Then tied in bundles at the front, each to the same tension, which Mummu checked by having Tove run her flat palm across the warp and tell her where it was soft.

It took two days. Tove's back hurt in places she had not known she had. Her fingers were sore from the cotton. On the second evening, when the last bundle was tied and the warp lay across the loom from back to front in a single smooth white plane, taut as a drumskin, gleaming under the lamp, Mummu got up from the sofa with her cane and came and stood at the front of the loom and laid her hand on it, palm down, and moved it slowly from left to right.

"Good," she said. "Even." Then, more quietly, in Finnish, something Tove did not understand.

"What did you say?"

"I said, my mother would say it is even." Mummu took her hand away. "She never said it to me. Not once. She always found a soft place."

---

The rags were in the grocery bags.

There were seven of them now, lined up along the wall of the loom room, each one stuffed with strips of cloth about an inch and a half wide, cut on the straight of the grain, rolled into balls the size of grapefruits or wound loose in skeins. Mummu had been cutting since October. She had cut the way she did everything, without fuss and without stopping, at the kitchen table every evening while the radio played the news from Marquette.

Tove sat down on the floor among the bags on Thursday night and began to take the balls out one by one and lay them on the rug, sorting by color, as she would sort hardware. Red plaid. Blue denim. A faded green cotton with a pattern of tiny white anchors. Brown corduroy. A white and blue striped ticking. A gray wool so soft it felt like a cat. Pink. A dark navy with a thin red stripe.

"Who was this?" she said, holding up the navy.

Mummu looked at it from the sofa. "Your Ukki's work pants. From the county. For plowing."

Tove held up the red plaid. "And this is his shirt. The one you sent."

"Three of his shirts. He had nine of that one. He bought it in a store in Calumet in 1971 and when it wore out he went back and bought the same one. For forty years. When the store closed he was angry for a month." Mummu reached down into the nearest bag and pulled out a ball of the pale green with white anchors and held it in her lap. "This is me. An apron. I wore it when your mother was little."

Tove looked at the ball of green in her grandmother's lap, and at the seven bags, and at the hundreds of balls she had not yet unrolled.

"Mummu," she said. "Every one of these is somebody."

"Of course," Mummu said. "What else would it be? You think I buy rags?"

---

That was how the collection started.

Tove did not plan it. She photographed the navy work pants, rolled up, beside the red plaid, because she liked the colors together under the lamp. Then she asked who the brown corduroy had been, and Mummu said it was a jacket Lea had worn in high school, a jacket Lea had loved so much that she wore it until the elbows went through, and then Mummu had patched the elbows with leather from an old purse, and Lea had worn it two more years. Tove photographed the ball of corduroy. The gray wool turned out to be a blanket that had come from Finland in 1923 in Mummu's mother's trunk, worn so thin you could read through it, cut into strips and saved in a box for sixty years for a rug she never wove.

"Sixty years," Tove said.

"She was waiting for the right rug." Mummu shrugged. "Then she died. So I waited. Now it is the right rug."

Tove opened the family collection on her phone, the one that held Bedste's papercuts and her father's combines and Ukki's unfinished kantele, and made a new album beside the kantele. She called it Mummu's rug. She photographed each ball of rags, one at a time, on the rug of the loom room under the lamp, and under each photograph she wrote who it had been. Navy work pants: Ukki, county road commission, plowing. Red plaid: Ukki, a store in Calumet, nine shirts in forty years. Brown corduroy: Mom's high school jacket, elbows patched with leather from Mummu's purse. Gray wool: Finland, 1923, saved sixty years for a rug nobody wove.

It took her until midnight. Mummu stayed up the whole time, though she had said at nine that she was going to bed. She told Tove about each ball of cloth as it came out of the bags, sometimes a sentence, sometimes a long story. A pink cotton dress Lea had worn to a dance in ninth grade and had refused to wear ever again after a boy laughed at it. A striped shirt of Mummu's brother Arvo, who had gone to Detroit to work in the car plants in 1958 and come home to visit every summer until he died. A child's denim overalls, patched four times, that had been Lea's, and before Lea a cousin's, and before that nobody remembered whose.

Near the bottom of the last bag, Tove found a ball of cloth wrapped separately in a plastic bread bag. She took it out. It was dark blue, almost black, a fine smooth wool with a satin stripe along one edge, and it had been cut into strips with great care, the edges perfectly straight.

"What's this one?"

Mummu did not answer at first. Then she said, "Ukki's suit."

"His good suit?"

"The only suit. He wore it to our wedding. He wore it to your mother's high school graduation and to her wedding in Iowa. Then he wore it one more time." Mummu looked at the ball in Tove's hands. "I kept it in the closet for twelve years. In October I cut it. It took me one night. I cried the whole time and I cut very straight."

Tove held the ball in her two hands. She did not photograph it right away. She sat with it on the rug for a while, and then she set it carefully back in its bread bag, and put it on the top shelf of the bookcase, apart from the others.

"Where does it go in the rug?" she asked.

"You decide," Mummu said. "You are the one weaving."

---

On Friday they began.

Tove sat on the loom bench, which was a plank on two short legs that put her at the height of the breast beam, and set her feet on the treadles, and Mummu sat on a kitchen chair pulled up close beside her, so close their shoulders nearly touched, and told her everything twice.

The rag strips had to be joined end to end into a long continuous strand, with a small slit cut near each end and one strip pulled through the other. Then the strand was wound onto a long flat wooden shuttle, a stick with a notch cut in each end, the sukkula. You pressed a treadle with your foot. Two of the shafts rose and two fell, and the warp threads split into two layers with a gap between them, the shed. You threw the shuttle through the gap, from one side to the other, letting the strand of rags unwind behind it. You pulled the beater toward you, and the reed pushed the rags tight against the cloth. You changed feet. The warp threads crossed and locked the rags in place. You threw the shuttle back.

The first rows were all wrong. Tove pulled the rags too tight and the edges of the rug drew in like a waist. She beat too softly and the rags lay loose and lumpy. She beat too hard and the beater banged against the breast beam with a crack that made Mummu wince. But by the end of the afternoon she had six inches of rug: a band of navy, Ukki's work pants, then a stripe of red plaid, then gray, the old Finnish blanket, then navy again. The colors lay in the white warp like stripes in a field seen from the air.

Mummu made her stop and look. Then she made her feel the edges with her fingertips, the selvages, to find where they pulled in. Then she made her undo the last two rows and redo them.

"The edges tell everything," Mummu said. "In the middle, anybody can cheat. On the edge, everybody sees."

Tove undid the two rows. She threw the shuttle again, left foot, right foot, beat, and this time she let the rags lie in the shed in a shallow arc before she beat them, the way Mummu showed her, a little hill of slack that the beater would press down, so the edge did not pull. The edge stayed straight.

"There," said Mummu. Then, after a while, watching Tove's feet: "Your mother did that. The little hill. I didn't teach her. She just did it. Eight years old."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. Second week of January.

New lamm, hard maple, four dollars at a lumberyard by the canal. The man gave me a second piece in case I messed up. His grandmother's loom went to the dump.

Mummu kept Ukki's copper wire in her pocket.

Warp: loimi. Reed: pirta. Shuttle: sukkula. 320 threads, six yards. "You lose the cross, you lose your mind."

Her mother never once said the warp was even. She always found a soft place.

Seven bags of rags. Every one of them is somebody. "You think I buy rags?"

The gray wool came from Finland in 1923 and waited sixty years in a box for a rug that didn't get woven. Now it's the right rug.

Ukki's suit is in a bread bag on the top shelf. Mummu says I decide where it goes.

The edges tell everything. In the middle, anybody can cheat.

Mom made the little hill at eight years old without being taught.

Alder and Tuning Pins

Reino Kangas lived in Calumet, twelve miles up the peninsula, in a house built for a mine captain in 1899, and he worked in what had been the carriage barn behind it, and he did not answer his telephone.

"He never answers," Mummu said. "You just go. If the smoke is coming out of the barn, he is there."

So on the third Monday of January, Tove wrapped the kantele in its moving blanket and drove north out of Hancock, up the long grade of Quincy Hill. The road climbed past the shaft house of the old Quincy Mine, a tall dark building of corrugated iron standing alone on the ridge with its steep roof slanting down toward the hole it had once stood over. The mine had closed in 1945. The shaft went down more than a mile and a half, Mummu had told her, at an angle, following the copper underground toward the lake, and her father had worked in it until the day it closed. Now it was a museum in summer and a dark tower in winter, and snow lay on its roof in a white slab.

Beyond the ridge the land opened out into a white plateau of fields and second-growth woods and old mine rock piles humped under the snow like sleeping animals. Then Calumet, a few blocks of tall red sandstone buildings with arched windows, built in a copper boom for a city of many thousands and now standing in the snow like a stage set whose audience had gone home. Some storefronts were bright with coffee and antiques. Many were dark.

Reino's house was on a side street lined with big frame houses gone gray. Smoke was coming out of the stovepipe of the barn.

---

He was eighty-one and nearly as tall as the barn door, with a white beard cut square and a flannel shirt buttoned to the throat and a pair of half-glasses on a cord around his neck. He opened the door before she knocked.

"You're Toivo's granddaughter," he said. "Aili called."

"She said you never answer."

"I never answer the telephone. I listen to the messages." He moved aside. "Come. Take off your coat. It's hot."

It was hot. A barrel stove roared in the middle of the old barn, and around it, on benches and shelves and hanging from nails in the walls, were kanteles. Tove counted fourteen before she stopped counting. Small five-string ones like hers. Larger ones with ten or eleven strings and tops of honey-colored spruce. And by the window a concert kantele the size of a small table, with dozens of strings and a row of metal levers, built for a player in Minneapolis who had died before it was finished.

The barn smelled of wood shavings and hide glue and smoke. On a long workbench under the window lay a half-carved block of wood held in a vise, and a set of gouges in a canvas roll, and a small brass plane no longer than Tove's thumb.

"Show me," Reino said.

---

She unwrapped the kantele on his bench. He did not touch it at first. He put on his half-glasses and leaned over it and looked at it from every side, the way Bedste had looked at Rubén's mother's papel picado, slowly and completely. Then he picked it up and turned it over and looked into the hollow, at the small fish-scale scoops of the gouge.

"Alder," he said. "Good. Toivo liked alder. Light, and it sings." He ran a thumb along the inside wall near the wide end, where Tove had noticed it was too thick. "He didn't finish the carving. Here, and here. Two, three millimeters too heavy. He would have taken it down." He set it on the bench, hollow side up. "Then the top. Spruce. Thin as a cracker. Then the pins, here, at the wide end. Then the vaarna, the bar, at the narrow end, where the strings tie. Then the strings."

"Can I do it?"

Reino looked at her over the glasses. "Are you asking me if you can, or if I will let you?"

"Both."

He considered this. "Aili says you are a cabinetmaker."

"Kitchens, mostly. Some furniture. I do the hand-cut joints when anybody wants them, which isn't often."

He held out his hand. "Let me see your hands."

She held them out. He took them in his own, which were enormous and dry and stained at the fingertips, and turned them palm up and looked at them and pressed the pads of her fingers with his thumbs, one at a time, the way a doctor checks for swelling. Then he let go.

"Okay," he said. "You carve. I watch. When you are about to ruin it, I say stop. Maybe I say it in time."

---

He did not let her touch Ukki's kantele that day. Instead he gave her a practice block, a piece of alder the size of a loaf of bread, and a gouge from his canvas roll, and set her at the far end of the bench to hollow it while he worked at his own.

"Toivo's gouge," he said, when she looked at the one he handed her. "He left it here the last time he came. I kept it. You should have it."

The handle was ash, dark and polished from use, with a small notch cut near the end where a thumb rested. The blade was curved like a fingernail. Tove set it against the alder and pushed, and the wood curled up ahead of it in a thin pale ribbon, and she felt the cut end with a small twist of the wrist, the way the steel wanted to go. She looked down at the scoop she had made. It leaned slightly to the left. Exactly like the ones in the hollow of Ukki's kantele.

"The gouge does that," Reino said, without looking up from his own work. "He ground it a little crooked. Forty years ago. Never fixed it. Said he liked it."

They worked through the afternoon. Reino talked while he carved, about kanteles and about Toivo and about the old country, in the same plain, unhurried way Mummu talked from the sauna doorway. He said the kantele was the oldest instrument the Finns had, older than the fiddle or the accordion, so old nobody knew when it began. He said that in the Kalevala, the old poem of songs that a country doctor had gathered from singers in the forests of Karelia in the 1800s, the first kantele was made by the old singer Väinämöinen from the jawbone of an enormous pike, with strings of hair from a horse, and that when he played it every creature in the forest came out to listen, and even the old man himself wept, and his tears rolled into the sea and turned to pearls. Later, Reino said, the pike-bone kantele was lost in the sea, and Väinämöinen made a second one out of birch, and strung it with hair a girl gave him from her head.

"So that is the first two," he said. "Then everybody else made them out of whatever was in the woods. Alder, birch, pine, spruce. Five strings, for the old songs. The old songs only had five notes."

"Why five?"

"Why does a hand have five fingers?" Reino shrugged. "The old songs went up and down in five steps. You can sing the whole Kalevala in five steps. The singers sat across from each other with their hands joined, rocking, one singing a line and the other singing it back. Five notes. For a thousand years." He held up his gouge and looked at the edge in the light from the window. "Then the Russians and the Swedes and the church brought in other music, and people wanted more notes, so more strings. Ten. Fifteen. Thirty-six." He nodded at the big concert instrument by the window. "That one can play anything. A waltz. A tango. Anything on the radio. But the five-string, it still only plays the old way."

---

Toward evening, he took Tove into the house for coffee. The kitchen was enormous and cold, built for a mine captain's family and a cook, and Reino lived in one corner of it near the stove, with a table and two chairs and a radio and a calendar from a hardware store in Lake Linden. On the wall above the table hung a photograph, in a frame, of a group of men and women at a long table outdoors with kanteles in front of them, squinting into the sun.

"Kantele camp," Reino said. "Up at Eagle Harbor, on the lake. 1984. The college ran it, that summer, and a couple more. Suomi College, it was called then, before it was Finlandia." He found a face with his finger. "There. Toivo."

Tove leaned close. Her grandfather was younger than she had ever seen him, maybe forty-eight, with dark hair and a mustache and a plaid shirt, red and black, sitting on a bench with a five-string kantele across his knees and his head turned to say something to the man beside him, who was laughing. The man beside him was Reino.

"He played well," Reino said. "Better than me. I build better. He played better. He played by ear. He couldn't read music at all." He tapped the frame. "The college made recordings, that summer. Somebody came with a tape machine and recorded everybody who would sit still. Old people singing, people playing. For the archive." He set down the coffee pot. "You should ask at the Heritage Center. On Quincy Street. If the tapes are anywhere, they're there."

"I thought the college closed."

"The college closed. Spring of '23." Reino's mouth tightened. "A hundred and twenty-seven years. Gone. Everybody up here thought the archive would go too. A lot of us didn't sleep for a while." He poured. "Then a foundation bought the building and the archive. The Finnish American one, out of California, the national one. Took it over the next winter. They opened it again in the spring. The gallery, the archive, everything." He shook his head, as if he still did not quite believe it. "So it's there. Go see Merja. She knows where everything is. Tell her Reino sent you, and she'll find it twice as fast, because she'll want to tell me she did."

---

Driving back down Quincy Hill in the dark, Tove pulled into the empty parking lot at the old mine and turned off the engine.

Below her, Hancock lay on its hillside in yellow lights, and across the frozen white channel, Houghton, and between them the towers of the lift bridge, lit in blue. Behind her the shaft house stood against the stars. She sat with the heater running and the kantele on the passenger seat in its blanket, and Ukki's gouge in her coat pocket, and she thought about a man who could not read music sitting by Lake Superior in the summer of 1984 with a crooked gouge and a five-string kantele, playing the old songs by ear in five steps, while somebody pressed record.

She opened the family calendar on her phone. On the last Saturday of January, Mummu had told her, there was a festival on Quincy Street, Heikinpäivä, for the middle of winter. Tove put it in. Under it she wrote: Heritage Center. Ask Merja about 1984 tapes.

---

Tove's notebook. Calumet. Third Monday of January.

Reino Kangas, 81. Fourteen kanteles in a carriage barn. Does not answer the telephone. Listens to the messages.

He pressed my fingers like a doctor. "You carve. I watch. When you are about to ruin it, I say stop. Maybe I say it in time."

Ukki's gouge is ground a little crooked. Forty years. He liked it that way. My first cut with it leaned left, exactly like the cuts inside my kantele.

Five strings because the old songs had five notes. The singers held hands and rocked and sang a line back and forth. You can sing the whole Kalevala in five steps.

Kantele camp at Eagle Harbor, 1984. Ukki is in the photograph, laughing at something Reino said. Somebody recorded everyone who would sit still. Finlandia closed in the spring of 2023. The archive survived. Ask Merja.

The Tape in the Archive

Heikinpäivä fell on the coldest Saturday of the month, which Mummu said was the point.

"Heikki's day is the middle of winter," she said, at breakfast, buttering rye toast. "The bear turns over in his sleep. Half the winter is gone. Half the hay is gone. The farmers in Finland went out to the barn and counted the hay, to see if it would last." She bit the toast. "Here we don't have hay. So we have a parade."

Nandini drove them down the hill in her small red hatchback, with Mummu in the front seat wrapped in a coat of dark fur that had been her mother's and a knit hat pulled down to her eyebrows, and Tove in the back with the folding chair and the thermos. Quincy Street had been closed to cars for six blocks. Both sides were lined with people in parkas, stamping, steam going up from their mouths. Under the street names on the signposts, Tove noticed for the first time, there were second signs in Finnish, blue on white: the street was katu, the avenue was something longer.

There was a market of tents and folding tables in the lot beside the old college building, where people sold knitted mittens and wooden spoons and braided loaves of nisu wrapped in plastic and pasties in paper bags, still steaming. A man played an accordion with his gloves cut off at the fingertips. And at the far end of the street, on the snow of the Quincy Green, there was a line of people with kicksleds.

Tove had never seen a kicksled. It was a light chair on two long thin steel runners, a frame of wood and pipe with a seat in front and a handlebar behind, and you stood on one runner and kicked with the other foot, like a scooter, and the sled ran ahead of you on the packed snow. In Finland, Mummu said, old women used them to go to the store. Potkukelkka. Kick-sled. "Your mother won a race on one in nineteen eighty-two," Mummu said, settling into her folding chair at the edge of the green near the finish. "Girls under fourteen. I still have the ribbon."

"Mom raced kicksleds?"

"Your mother did everything, before." Mummu pulled the fur collar up around her ears. "Then she was fourteen and she did nothing. That is how it goes."

---

Nandini signed them up for the adult race before Tove could object. They were paired as a team, which meant that one of them sat on the seat while the other kicked, and then halfway down they switched. A volunteer in an orange vest lined them up beside six other teams at the top of the green, a pair of brothers in matching red snowsuits, two college boys in Michigan Tech hockey jerseys over their coats, a husband and wife in their sixties who had clearly done this many times and looked at the rest of the field with pity.

Somebody fired a starter's pistol that turned out to be a cap gun. Tove kicked. The sled leapt forward on the packed snow, much faster than she expected, with Nandini on the seat in front of her shrieking in a mix of English and Kannada. The course ran away ahead of them down the long slope of the green. The crowd along the ropes roared. Halfway down they were supposed to switch, and Tove braked by dragging her foot, and the sled skidded sideways, and they both fell off into a snowbank to a cheer louder than any the winners got.

The couple in their sixties won. The college boys came second. Tove and Nandini came last, by a margin the announcer described over his loudspeaker as "historic." Mummu, at the finish line in her fur coat, was laughing so hard that two strangers leaned over to ask if she was all right.

"Your mother," Mummu said, when Tove reached her, wet to the waist with snow, "would be ashamed."

"I'll tell her you said so."

"Tell her." Mummu wiped her eyes with the back of a mitten. "Tell her I said, you kick like an Iowan."

---

The Finnish American Heritage Center was in an old building farther along Quincy Street, at the edge of the market. Inside it was warm and quiet. There was a gallery with paintings hung for a winter show, and a bookstore, and at the end of a hallway a set of doors with a sign that said Archive.

Merja Salo was about forty-five, small and fast-moving, with silver-framed glasses and a lanyard and a sweater with a pattern of reindeer. When Tove said Reino's name, she rolled her eyes so expressively that Tove laughed.

"He called you," Tove said.

"He left me a message. Reino doesn't call people. He leaves messages for people who then have to call him back, and he doesn't answer." Merja held the door to the archive. "Come. I found it already. I'll never hear the end of it."

The archive was a long room of steel shelves and gray archival boxes and filing cabinets, lit by fluorescent tubes, with a reading table in the middle and a window at the end that looked out over the frozen canal. It smelled of paper and dust and the faint vinegar smell of old film. Merja led Tove to the table, where a single box was waiting, and lifted the lid.

Inside, in plastic sleeves, were cassette tapes. Dozens of them. Each was labeled in faded typewriter type on a white sticker: a name, a place, a date. Eagle Harbor, July 1984. Calumet, August 1984. Hancock, June 1985.

"The college ran a folk music project for a few summers," Merja said. "Kantele camps, singers, fiddlers. A young woman from the music department went around with a tape recorder. When the university closed, this whole collection came very close to going somewhere none of us could reach." She said it lightly, but she put a hand flat on the lid of the box as she said it. "Here."

She drew out a sleeve. The label said: Toivo Rautio, Hancock. Kantele, speech. Eagle Harbor, July 14, 1984.

"There's paperwork too," Merja said, and drew out a folder. Inside was a single typed page, a release form, with the college's name across the top and a few short paragraphs saying that the person recorded agreed to let the recording be kept in the archive for study and for the community, and that the family could request a copy at any time. At the bottom, in blue ballpoint, in a large careful hand, was a signature: Toivo Rautio. And under it, in the same hand, smaller: Play it for my girl someday.

Tove looked at the line for a long time.

"I can make you a copy," Merja said gently. "Digital. It'll take a few days to do it properly. But if you want to hear it now, I have a player."

---

The player was an old portable cassette deck with a pair of headphones. Tove put them on. Merja pressed the button and went to the far end of the room, to the window, and stood with her back to the table.

Hiss. A clatter, as if a microphone had been knocked. A woman's voice, young, asking, "Is it on? Okay. Can you say your name for me?"

Then a man cleared his throat, and said, in a voice Tove had not heard in twelve years and recognized in the first syllable, "Toivo Rautio. From Hancock. I plow the roads for the county." A pause. "In winter. In summer I fish. And I make these."

He sounded younger than she remembered. He sounded like her mother. The flat, musical Copper Country English, Finnish running under it, and something else, a lift at the ends of his sentences that she had never noticed in Lea and now could not stop hearing.

The young woman asked him where he learned the kantele. He said from his uncle, in Toivola, who had brought one from Finland in a sack of rye flour so customs would not take it. He laughed, telling it. The woman asked him what he would play.

"An old one," Toivo said. "My mother's. No name. She sang it when she carded wool. She said her mother sang it. No words that I remember. Just the tune." A pause. "My girl is fourteen now. She won't talk Finnish anymore. Not to her mother, not to me, not to nobody. The kids at school, you know. So I play this one so somebody has it. Maybe later she wants it."

Then he played.

It was a small tune. Five notes, going up and down, the way Reino had said the old songs went. It began low and climbed three steps and fell back, and climbed again, a little higher, and fell, and turned around on itself and came home. It was not sad, exactly. It was steady, like work, like a hand going back and forth across a carding board, like a shuttle through a shed. Under the melody, Toivo let the low strings ring, so that each note sat on a soft hum, like the hum of a power line under a meadowlark. It lasted a little over a minute. Then he played it again, slower, and at the end he let the last note ring until it was gone, and there was a long hiss, and then the sound of the waves of Lake Superior coming in on stones somewhere behind the microphone.

"Thank you," said the young woman's voice.

"Kiitos," said Toivo. "That means thank you. You can put that on the tape too."

---

When Tove took off the headphones, Merja was still standing at the window.

"I'm sorry," Tove said. "I didn't think I would."

"Everybody does," Merja said, without turning around. "Every single one. I've been doing this nineteen years. I've played tapes for grandchildren from four countries. Everybody does." She returned to her chair and slid a box of tissues across to Tove without comment. "Your mother. She's the girl?"

"She's the girl."

"Does she know?"

"No." Tove wiped her face. "She doesn't know it exists."

Merja nodded slowly. She put the cassette back in its sleeve and the release form back in its folder and closed the lid of the box.

"The copy will be ready Tuesday," she said. "I'll put it on a drive for you. And I'll keep the original here, in the cold room, with the release. That's what he signed for. Kept for the community, copied for the family." She looked at Tove over her glasses. "And Tove. When you have the copy, play it for your grandmother first. Before you do anything else with it. Some people in this building would tell you it's the archive's job to decide who hears what first. They're wrong. It's hers."

---

Mummu listened to it on Tuesday night, at the kitchen table, with the headphones too big on her small head over her white braids, with the woodstove ticking and Tove and Nandini sitting very still on the other side of the table.

She did not cry. She closed her eyes when she heard his voice say his name. She opened them when he said, my girl is fourteen now. When the tune began, her right hand on the oilcloth of the table began, very slightly, to move: back and forth, back and forth, a small motion of the wrist, the motion of a woman drawing a carding board across a lap full of wool.

When it was over, she took off the headphones and set them on the table and sat for a while without saying anything.

"Too fast," she said at last. "He always played it too fast for company. When it was only us, he played it slow."

She got up and went into the loom room. Tove heard the bench scrape. Then, after a while, she heard Mummu humming: the same five notes, low, slow, going up and falling back, while the loom was silent and Mummu's hand, Tove knew without looking, moved back and forth along the breast beam, over the rug, over Ukki's work pants and Ukki's plaid shirt and the gray wool from Finland, as if she were carding them.

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. Heikinpäivä and after.

Heikki's day: the middle of winter, the bear turns over, half the hay is gone. Here we have a parade.

Kicksled: potkukelkka. Mom won a girls' race in 1982. We came last. "Historic." Mummu says I kick like an Iowan.

Street signs in Finnish under the English. Katu.

The tapes are safe. Merja says the collection came very close to going somewhere none of us could reach. She put her hand on the box when she said it.

Ukki signed a release in 1984. Under his name: Play it for my girl someday.

His mother's carding tune. No name. No words. Five notes. "My girl is fourteen now. She won't talk Finnish anymore. So I play this one so somebody has it."

Mummu says he played it too fast for company. Slow when it was only them.

Kiitos. He told the girl with the tape recorder to put that on the tape too.

Ice on the Steps

In the first week of February, the students across the canal stayed up all night building things out of snow, and Nandini did not come home for two days.

"Winter Carnival," Mummu explained, unsurprised, when Tove came down on Thursday morning to find the upstairs door still shut and no boots on the mat. "At the college. Every year. They make statues. Big ones. All night Wednesday, with buckets and shovels and hoses, and in the morning the judges come." She was at the stove, frying eggs in a black iron pan. "When I was a girl we walked over the old bridge to see them. Before this bridge. The old one turned sideways on a pivot like a gate."

Nandini came home Thursday afternoon, gray-faced and euphoric, with ice in her eyebrows, and slept fourteen hours. On Friday evening she insisted that they all go across and see what her lab group had built. So they drove over the lift bridge into Houghton in the blue dusk, with Mummu bundled in the front seat, and parked as near as they could to the campus, and walked slowly along the shoveled paths between the dormitories and the fraternity houses, where the statues stood.

Tove had seen ice sculptures at weddings, swans melting on buffet tables. This was something else. In front of every residence hall and club house stood a structure of packed snow the size of a house, carved and smoothed and painted with food coloring, lit from below with colored floodlights. A castle with a drawbridge. A dragon coiled around a pine tree. A moose reading a newspaper. The surfaces, sprayed with water and glazed into ice, gleamed in the lights like porcelain.

Nandini's group had built a bridge. It was a scale model of the Portage lift bridge in snow, twenty feet long, its two towers standing up white against the dark, its middle span raised between them as if for a passing ship, held up, Nandini explained, by an internal skeleton of nothing at all, only snow packed so tight and carved so carefully that it carried its own weight.

"That's load," she said, pointing at the towers. "That's drift. We calculated the whole thing. If it's still standing on Sunday, I get to put it in my dissertation."

Mummu stood in front of the snow bridge for a long time, her hand on Tove's arm.

"My father would have liked this," she said. "He was a timberman in the mine. He built the supports, underground, for the tunnels. He said the whole trick of it was to know what wanted to fall and to give it a reason not to." She looked up at the raised snow span. "This one has a reason."

---

It happened the next morning.

Tove had been sleeping hard, as she did now, worn out from the loom. She did not hear Mummu get up in the dark. She did not hear the back door. She woke at a quarter to seven to a sound she could not place, a short sharp sound like a board cracking, and then nothing, and then, very faintly, through the wall of the old pantry, her name.

She was out the back door in her socks before she was fully awake. The light was just beginning, gray and blue, and the cold took her breath. Mummu was lying at the bottom of the back steps in her nightgown and cardigan and her husband's old barn coat, on her side, in the snow beside the trench to the sauna, with the ash bucket from the sauna stove overturned beside her and a gray fan of ashes across the white. Her cane lay three steps above her. Her face was very white and her mouth was set.

"Don't," she said, as Tove reached her. "Don't pick me up. Wait."

Tove knelt in the snow. Her socks were soaked through instantly. "Where does it hurt?"

"The wrist." Mummu's voice was perfectly steady. "The left. I put out my hand. I heard it." She breathed. "Nothing else. I think. The hip is fine. I can feel my feet. Wait."

Tove waited, kneeling in the snow beside her grandmother, with her hand on Mummu's shoulder through the barn coat. She had taken a first aid course for the shop. She knew not to move someone who might be hurt in the back or the hip. She also knew that an eighty-six-year-old woman lying on snow at fifteen below would get cold faster than anyone could fix anything. She shouted for Nandini, and Nandini's window flew up overhead, and Nandini looked down once and vanished, and thirty seconds later came out the back door in her purple coat with her phone at her ear and an armload of blankets.

"Ambulance is coming," she said. "Eight minutes. They said keep her warm and don't move her unless we have to."

They tucked the blankets around her where she lay. Mummu let them. She lay with her eyes open looking up at the sky over the sauna roof, which was going from gray to pale gold, and her left arm held against her chest with her right hand.

"I was taking the ashes," she said. "From last Saturday. I always take the ashes on Saturday morning. Sixty-five years. The step was fine yesterday."

"I know."

"The step was fine." Mummu closed her eyes for a moment. "Don't tell your mother."

"Mummu."

"Don't tell her until we know what it is. Then tell her." Mummu opened her eyes and looked at Tove. "Then you can tell her I was stupid. She will say it anyway."

---

It was broken. The bone just above the wrist, cleanly, in a way the young doctor at the hospital on the hill in Hancock called good news, because it would set without surgery. They set it that afternoon and put it in a heavy cast from her knuckles to her elbow, and kept her overnight because of her age, and because her blood pressure had been strange in the ambulance, and because, the doctor said kindly, she had been lying in the snow at fifteen below, and he wanted to be sure.

Tove called her mother from the hallway outside the room at a little after two. Through the hallway window she could see the white channel of the Portage below and the towers of the lift bridge and, across the water, the campus where the snow bridge stood.

Lea answered on the second ring. She was at the grocery store in Harlan; Tove could hear a cart rattle and the checkout beeping, and then the wind as her mother stepped outside.

"She's okay," Tove said first, because that was what her mother would have said. "She fell on the back steps this morning, carrying the sauna ashes. She broke her left wrist. Clean break. They set it. She's in a cast. They're keeping her one night. Her hip's fine. Her head's fine. She talked to the doctor about the weather for ten minutes."

There was silence on the line.

"She said to tell you she was stupid," Tove added. "She said you'd say it anyway."

Her mother made a sound that was almost a laugh and was not.

"Which hospital?"

Tove told her.

"Is she awake?"

"She's asleep. She was awake. She made the nurse bring her coffee. Real coffee. The nurse brought it."

"Of course she did." Another silence. Tove heard her mother sit down. "Tove. The steps. The back steps. Were they iced?"

"There was ice at the edge of the third one. I salted them yesterday. It must have melted in the sun and frozen again in the night."

"It does that," Lea said quietly. "It always did that. The third step. Dad used to put a board over it in February." Then, in a different voice: "Is she going to be able to stay alone? After? Until the closing?"

"I'm here."

"You're there until when? Dale's not going to give you March."

"I'll ask him."

"Tove." Her mother's voice was very tired and very even. "I'm asking whether I need to come."

Tove stood at the hallway window looking at the bridge.

"I don't know," she said. "I think that's your question, Mom. Not mine."

---

The messages started that evening.

Tove had posted one line on the family's private page, the one the whole family shared, the Danish cousins in Copenhagen and the Mikkelsens in Iowa and the scattered Rautios and their in-laws in Detroit and Duluth and Seattle, the page where her mother put pictures of the farm and Bedste's birthday cake and where, for years, Mummu's name had appeared only in birthday reminders. She wrote: Mummu fell on the back steps in Hancock this morning and broke her wrist. She is okay. She is in a cast. She made the nurse bring her real coffee.

By nine there were thirty replies. Bedste's was first, dictated to Tove's father and typed by him, in his careful two-finger way: Aili. Get well. Do not carry ashes. Ask the young people. That is what they are for. Grethe. A cousin of Mummu's in Duluth wrote in Finnish. Rubén, whom Tove's father had added at Christmas so he could see the papercuts, wrote: My mom says your grandmother should get a railing. Verner Jessen, who was also not family and had been added by Bedste, wrote: Turn before it's ready. Then turn again. Get well, Mrs. Rautio.

Tove read them out loud to Mummu the next morning, in the hospital room, while a nurse took Mummu's blood pressure for the fourth time and declared it fine.

Mummu listened to every one. When Tove read Verner's, she frowned.

"Who is Verner?"

"He makes æbleskiver at the windmill in Elk Horn. He taught me at Julefest."

"What does it mean? Turn before it's ready?"

Tove explained the pans, the batter, the knitting needle, the quarter turns.

Mummu thought about it for a while, propped up on her pillows with the cast in her lap like a white log.

"That is good advice," she said finally. "For pancakes. And for falling." She closed her eyes. "Tell him thank you. Tell him in Danish, if you know how."

"Tak."

"Tak," Mummu repeated, testing it. "Short. Like kiitos with the middle taken out."

---

When they brought her home on Sunday, Tove carried her up the back steps.

She did not ask. She simply got out of Nandini's car and went around to the passenger side and lifted her grandmother out, the way she would lift a cabinet carcass she did not want to scratch, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and Mummu, who weighed perhaps a hundred and ten pounds in her fur coat and cast, said a short sharp word in Finnish and then said nothing at all and let herself be carried. Tove went up the steps one at a time, slowly, past the third step, where she had laid a plank and nailed a strip of rubber stair tread to it that morning, and through the back door into the warm kitchen, and set her grandmother down in her chair by the woodstove.

Mummu sat with her cast in her lap and looked at the kitchen as if she had been gone a year.

"The rug," she said.

"It's fine. It's where we left it."

"I can't cut now. With one hand."

"I'll cut."

"You will cut crooked." Mummu leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. "Your mother cuts straight. She always cut straight. Straighter than me." She was quiet for a while. "Did she say she is coming?"

Tove sat down across the table. She had been waiting all weekend to be asked.

"She hasn't said."

Mummu nodded, as if this were the answer she had expected.

"Then we weave," she said. "Bring me the shears. I can hold the cloth with my knees. You cut, and I watch, and I tell you when it is crooked."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. First week of February.

Snow bridge. Mummu's father the timberman: know what wants to fall and give it a reason not to.

Saturday morning. Third step. Ash bucket. Left wrist, clean break. She lay in the snow and said, "Don't pick me up. Wait." Then: "Don't tell your mother until we know what it is."

Mom knows the third step. Ukki put a board over it every February. I put a board over it this morning. Too late, by one day.

Thirty messages on the family page by nine o'clock. Verner wrote, Turn before it's ready. Mummu says that is good advice for pancakes and for falling.

Tak. Kiitos with the middle taken out.

I carried her up the steps. She said one word in Finnish and then let me.

Mom hasn't said.

Löyly for Two

Lea came on the Tuesday, on the afternoon flight from Chicago, a small jet that dropped out of a gray sky onto the one runway of the county airport on the plateau above Hancock, through snow blowing sideways across the tarmac.

She had not told anyone she was coming until Monday night, and then she had told Tove only, in a text message of six words: Landing Tuesday 3:40. Don't tell her.

Tove did not tell her. She drove up to the airport alone at three, past the white fields and the dark spruce, and stood inside the glass doors of the little terminal with her hands in the pockets of Ukki's Carhartt, and watched her mother come down the airstairs in a long navy parka with the hood up, carrying a single bag, and walk across the blowing tarmac with her head down, and come in through the doors, and push back her hood.

Lea looked at her daughter. Then she looked at the coat.

"That's Dad's," she said.

"You told me to bring it."

"I know I did." Her mother put out a hand and touched the brown canvas of the sleeve, at the cuff, where it was frayed. "He wore it plowing. Every winter. It smelled like diesel and Juicy Fruit." She took her hand back. "It still does, a little. Did you notice?"

"I noticed."

They stood in the small terminal without moving while the other passengers went around them.

"How is she?" Lea said.

"Mad about the cast. Mad she can't cut. She's teaching me to cut with my knees, or her knees, I'm not sure which. She ate a whole plate of eggs this morning and complained they were too soft." Tove picked up her mother's bag. "She asked Sunday if you were coming. I said I didn't know."

"I didn't know," Lea said. "Until Monday at lunch. I was sitting in my office with a kid who'd thrown up in gym class, and I thought, she's eighty-six and she's lying in the snow and I'm in Harlan holding a bucket." She pulled her hood back up. "Let's go. Before I change my mind."

---

Mummu was in the loom room when they came in, in her chair beside the loom with the cast propped on a pillow and a ball of rags in her lap, and she did not get up, because she could not get up quickly, and because, Tove understood later, she had heard the car and the two sets of boots on the back steps and had decided she would not be found standing.

Lea stopped in the doorway.

Mother and daughter looked at each other. Tove, behind Lea, could see both faces. She saw that they were the same face, thirty years apart: the same pale eyes, the same long jaw, the same way of holding the mouth very still when the mouth wanted to do something else.

"Mama," Lea said.

"You came," said Mummu. Then, after a moment: "You cut your hair."

"Eight years ago."

"It was long, before."

"It was long when I was here last. Eight years ago."

Mummu looked at her daughter's hair for a while, as if it were a piece of cloth she was deciding whether to use.

"It's good short," she said. "You look like my mother."

Lea came into the room. She did not hug her mother; they were not a family that hugged, Tove realized, watching, not on the Rautio side. She crouched beside the chair and looked at the cast, and then, gently, with a nurse's hands, took Mummu's left hand in hers below the edge of the plaster and pressed each fingertip in turn and watched the color come back.

"Can you feel that?"

"Of course I can feel that."

"Wiggle them."

Mummu wiggled them, with an expression of great forbearance.

"Okay," Lea said, still crouching, still holding the hand. "Okay." And then she bent her head, so that her forehead almost touched the edge of the cast, and stayed like that for a few seconds without saying anything, and Mummu looked down at the top of her daughter's short hair and did not say anything either. Then Lea stood up and said briskly that she was going to look at those back steps, and went out through the kitchen, and Tove heard the back door open and close.

Mummu looked at the ball of rags in her lap.

"She looks like my mother," she said again, to Tove, very quietly. "I didn't know that until now."

---

Lea could cut straight. It was true. She sat at the kitchen table that evening with Mummu's big shears and a stack of Ukki's old undershirts and cut strips an inch and a half wide without a ruler, without a line, without hesitating, faster than Tove and straighter than Mummu, and dropped each strip in a pile at her elbow, as if her hands were doing it without her.

"Where did you learn that?" Tove asked.

"Right here. This table." Lea did not look up. "Every winter evening from the time I was six. She cut, I cut. We listened to the radio. We didn't talk. We cut." She reached the end of a shirt and started another. "When I was twelve I told her to stop talking to me in Finnish. In front of my friends. Then at home too. I said it was embarrassing. The kids at school called us Finlanders like it was a disease. They called Dad's music hillbilly harp. They imitated the way she talked at the grocery store." The shears went through the cotton with a long sound like tearing paper. "So I told her to stop. And she stopped."

"Completely?"

"The next day. Like a door closing. She never said one more word of Finnish to me, not one, not for forty-four years. Not when I left for Des Moines. Not at my wedding. Not when you were born. Not at Dad's funeral." Lea laid down the shears. "I wanted her to argue. I was twelve. I wanted her to say no. And she just did what I said. And I was too proud to take it back, and she was too proud to offer, and then I was eighteen and gone."

From the loom room, where Mummu had gone to sit in the dark with the radio, came the sound of the news from Marquette, low.

"Mom," Tove said. "There's a tape."

---

She played it for her mother at ten o'clock that night, in the old pantry bedroom with the door shut, on the laptop, with the headphones.

She had thought about it all afternoon. Merja had said: play it for your grandmother first. She had. And when Tove had asked Mummu, on Monday night, whether it was all right to play it for Lea if Lea came, Mummu had been quiet for a long time and then said, "He signed the paper for her. Not for me. Of course."

So Tove sat on the bed beside her mother and pressed play and looked at the wall.

She knew the moment her mother heard his voice say his name. Lea's whole body went still. Tove knew the moment she heard, my girl is fourteen now, she won't talk Finnish anymore. Lea's hand came up over her mouth and stayed there. And Tove knew when the tune began, because her mother's other hand, lying on the quilt, began very slightly to move, back and forth, a small motion of the wrist. The same motion as Mummu's. Carding.

When it was over, Lea took off the headphones and held them in her lap.

"I know that," she said. "I know that song. I didn't know I knew it." She looked at Tove with an expression Tove had never seen on her face. "She used to hum it when she cut. At the table. Every night. After I told her to stop the Finnish, she kept humming that. It doesn't have words. So it wasn't Finnish. So it was allowed." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "She kept humming it. For six years. Every night. And I never once thought about why."

---

On Saturday, Lea lit the sauna.

She did it without asking. Tove came out the back door at four in the afternoon to start the fire and found the stovepipe already smoking and her mother in the dressing room in jeans and a sweater, splitting kindling on the chopping block with Ukki's hatchet, quick and sure.

"I've got it," Lea said. "Go do something else."

"Are you taking a sauna with her?"

Lea set another stick on the block and split it. "She can't go in the hot room. Not with the cast. Not with her heart."

"She can sit on the low bench. With the cast in a bread bag. Nandini looked it up. The doctor said it's fine if she's careful and doesn't stay long. I asked."

Lea split another stick.

"You asked the doctor about the sauna."

"Mom told me," Tove said, "that if Mummu asks me to take a sauna, to take a sauna and not argue." She leaned in the doorway. "I'm not arguing."

Lea looked at her for a long moment. Then she put down the hatchet.

"Go inside," she said. "Tell her it's ready at seven. Tell her to bring the vihta."

---

Tove did not go into the sauna that night. She stayed in the dressing room on the bench by the stove door, in the Carhartt, and fed the fire.

Through the closed door between the rooms she heard the hiss and roar of water hitting the stones, and then the slow quiet after it. She heard her mother's voice, low, and her grandmother's voice, lower. For a long time she heard only English, in short sentences, the way the two of them talked at the kitchen table: about the steps, about the cast, about the farm in Iowa, about the price of heating oil. Then there was a long silence. Then the hiss of the stones again.

Then her grandmother said something in Finnish.

It was a short sentence. Tove did not understand it. There was no answer. The fire ticked in the stove beside her. She sat very still.

And then her mother answered. In Finnish.

It was slow and halting and much too careful, the Finnish of someone who had not said a word of it aloud in forty-four years and was reaching for each word on a high shelf in the dark. It was two sentences, maybe three. Tove recognized one word only: kiitos.

Through the door, her grandmother said nothing for a while. Then she said something back, very quietly. Then there was the sound of the ladle in the bucket, and water on the stones, and the long roar of the löyly going up and rolling across the ceiling and coming down over the two of them in the dark.

Tove put another split of birch in the firebox and closed the door and sat with her hands between her knees and did not try to understand any more.

---

Later, in the kitchen, with the coffee and the nisu and Nandini's chai, Mummu sat in her chair by the woodstove with her braids down and her face red from the heat and the cast in its bread bag on her lap, and Lea sat across from her, and they did not talk about what had been said. They talked about whether the nisu had too much cardamom. Lea said it did. Mummu said it did not. Nandini said, as an Indian, that there was no such thing as too much cardamom, and was overruled by both.

At eleven, when Lea had gone up to bed in her own old room under the eaves, Mummu asked Tove to bring the phone.

"The thing for later," she said. "Your mother showed me once, years ago, at Christmas, on the telephone. You write a letter, and it sits until the day."

Tove opened the family's letters for later, where Bedste had put a letter for each grandchild to be opened on their wedding day, and Tove's father had put one for Tove when she turned thirty that she had never been allowed to see.

"I can't write," Mummu said, lifting the cast. "So you write. I say. In Finnish. You write it how it sounds. It doesn't matter how you spell it. She will know."

"Who is it for?"

"For your mother. For when she is sixty." Mummu folded her good hand over the cast. "Four years. Maybe I am here, maybe not. If I am here, I read it to her myself. If not, she reads it."

So Tove held the phone and her grandmother spoke, slowly, in Finnish, looking at the stove, and Tove typed the sounds as best she could, letter by letter, guessing at the vowels, with no idea what any of it meant. It took ten minutes. At the end Mummu said one word in English: "Done." Tove set the letter to open on Lea's sixtieth birthday and locked it and turned the phone over on the oilcloth.

"Don't read it," Mummu said.

"I can't read it."

"Good," said Mummu. "Then you won't."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. Second week of February.

Mom came. Six-word text. She touched the cuff of Ukki's coat in the airport and said it smells like diesel and Juicy Fruit. It does.

Mummu: "You look like my mother. I didn't know that until now."

Mom cuts straight without a line. Every winter night from age six at this table. They didn't talk. They cut.

At twelve Mom told her to stop speaking Finnish. She stopped the next day. Forty-four years. Mom wanted her to argue.

The carding tune has no words, so it wasn't Finnish, so it was allowed. Mummu hummed it at the table every night for six years.

Mom lit the sauna. I fed the fire. Through the door, Mummu said something in Finnish. Mom answered in Finnish. I heard kiitos. That's all I'm writing down.

Letter for later, in Finnish, spelled however it sounded, for Mom's sixtieth. I can't read it. Mummu says good.

A Star in the Soundboard

Lea stayed eleven days. On the last one she sat at the loom.

She had not touched it all week. She had cut strips at the kitchen table every evening, and fixed the railing on the back steps with Tove, and driven Mummu to the clinic to have the cast checked, and sat in the loom room on the sofa in the evenings with a book she did not read, watching Tove weave. Twice Tove had offered her the bench. Twice her mother had shaken her head.

On the morning of her flight, while Mummu was still asleep, Tove came out of the pantry bedroom and heard the beater. Thump. A pause. The soft drag of the shuttle through the shed. Thump. She stayed where she was, in the kitchen doorway.

Her mother was on the bench in her nightgown and a sweater, with her bare feet on the treadles, weaving a stripe of brown corduroy. Her own high school jacket, the one with the elbows Mummu had patched with leather from an old purse. She threw the shuttle and laid the rags in the shed in a shallow arc, the little hill, and beat, and changed her feet, and threw it back, and her feet knew the treadles in an order Tove had needed a week to learn.

She wove four inches. Then she stopped and sat with her hands on the breast beam, looking at the brown stripe in the rug, which lay now between a band of Ukki's red plaid and a band of the pale green apron with white anchors that Mummu had worn when Lea was small.

"There," she said, without turning around. She had known Tove was there all along. "That's me. Between the two of them. That's about right."

---

The spruce came from Reino, in a long flat box, on the first of March.

He drove it down from Calumet himself in a pickup older than Tove, and carried it into Mummu's kitchen and laid it on the table and opened the box with the air of a man revealing a ring. Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a single board of spruce about the length and width of the kantele body and no thicker than a pencil, pale cream, with grain lines so straight and close that it looked ruled.

"Split from a log, not sawn," Reino said. "Engelmann. From Montana. Thirty years in my barn. I was saving it." He tapped it with his fingernail and it rang, a short high note. "Toivo picked it out. In 1993. He said, someday I need a top for something good. I said, I keep it for you. So." He shrugged his enormous shoulders. "I kept it for him."

Tove could only nod.

"Now you plane it," Reino said. "Thinner. It's too thick. It needs to move when the strings pull. Like a drum. Too thick, it doesn't sing. Too thin, it cracks." He took a chair at the end of the table and folded his arms. "Go slow. I'm watching."

She went slow. She had taken the inside walls of the alder body down over the past two weeks, with Ukki's crooked gouge, a fraction of a millimeter at a time, tapping the body with her knuckle and listening, as Reino had taught her, until the thick place at the wide end was gone and the whole body gave back the same dull, open note wherever she tapped. Now she planed the spruce with the small brass plane from his bench, a stroke at a time, long and even, the shavings coming off it so thin she could read newspaper through them. Every few strokes Reino held up a hand, and she stopped, and he took the board and flexed it gently between his palms and held it to his ear and tapped it.

"More," he said. And then, much later, "Almost." And then, after a single last stroke: "Stop."

---

The soundhole was the part she had been thinking about for a month.

Every kantele in Reino's barn had one, a small opening in the top, sometimes round, sometimes a carved rosette, sometimes a star cut into the wood like a cookie cutter. It let the sound out of the hollow body. On the old ones, Reino said, the maker cut whatever he liked. A cross, a heart, a sun. Some had their initials. Some had a pattern their grandfather used.

In the third week of February a letter had come from Elk Horn. It was in a stiff brown envelope, addressed in Bedste's upright hand, and inside, between two sheets of cardboard, were a short note and three papercuts.

The note said: Tove. You said the kantele needs a hole for the sound. I don't know about kanteles. But I know about holes. Here are three. Pick one. Grethe.

The papercuts were small, each about the size of a playing card, cut from white paper and laid flat on black cardboard so that the pattern showed. The first was a heart with a tree in it, like the one Bedste had cut at Julefest for the boy who stared. The second was a snowflake, folded eight times, fine as lace. The third was a star with eight points, and inside the star, a circle, and inside the circle, a small bird with its wing raised.

Tove had laid the three of them out on the kitchen table in a row and studied them. Then she had shown them to Mummu.

Mummu had looked at the star with the bird for a long while.

"In my mother's weaving," she said finally, "there was a star like that. Eight points. On the edge of a table cloth. For a wedding. It's in the box in the closet." She looked up. "Your other grandmother doesn't know that."

"No."

"She picked it anyway." Mummu touched the edge of the papercut with one finger of her good hand. "Use that one."

---

Tove did not draw it on the wood. She folded it.

She took a piece of thin paper and folded it twice, the way Bedste had taught her at the kitchen table in December, and cut the star from the folded paper with the black-handled scissors that had been Farfar Holger's mother's, scaling Bedste's star down to the size of a large coin. She cut it twice and threw both away. The third time the points came out even, and the bird inside the circle came out with its wing up, and both halves matched, because they had been cut together. She unfolded it and glued it lightly to the face of the spruce with a dab of hide glue, near the wide end, where Reino tapped his finger and said the hole should go.

Then she cut through the paper into the wood with a knife.

It took her a whole evening, with Reino gone back to Calumet and Mummu in her chair by the stove and Nandini at the table with her laptop, writing her dissertation on snow loads and occasionally reading a sentence out loud to see if it made sense. Tove used the smallest knife she had, a carving knife from the shop with a blade no longer than the first joint of her thumb, and the tip of Ukki's gouge for the round places, and she went slower than she had ever gone with anything. The spruce was so thin that if she pushed too hard it would split along the grain, all the way across the board, and there was no second board. Thirty years in a barn.

The points of the star came first. Then the circle. Then, last, the bird. She cut it out of the middle of the circle as a hole, so that when the light came through it would be a bird made of light, the way the bird in Rubén's mother's papel picado had been a bird made of light on Bedste's kitchen floor.

When she was done, she soaked off the paper with a damp cloth and held the spruce up to the lamp over the table.

A star of light lay on the oilcloth. Inside it, a ring. Inside the ring, a bird.

Mummu leaned forward in her chair. Nandini stopped typing.

"Danish," Mummu said, looking at the shadow. "From your other grandmother." Then, after a moment: "And Finnish. From my mother's table cloth." She sat back. "And Iowa. From the carpenter."

Before bed Tove photographed the spruce on the oilcloth with its star of light and added it to the album called Ukki's kantele. Under it she wrote: Top, Engelmann spruce, picked by Ukki in 1993. Star from Bedste. Bird from both.

---

Reino came back on Saturday to watch her glue the top on.

They did it on the kitchen table, with the woodstove banked low so the room would stay steady, and a pot of hide glue warming in a water bath on the back of the range, and a dozen small clamps and a stack of cork-faced blocks to spread the pressure. Tove brushed the glue onto the edges of the alder body. Reino held the spruce. They set it down together, lining up the edges, and Tove went around the whole outline with the clamps and the cork blocks, tightening each one a quarter turn at a time, alternating sides, as she would clamp a cabinet face frame, until a thin bead of glue came out evenly all around.

Then they waited. Twenty-four hours.

On Sunday she took off the clamps and trimmed the edges flush and rounded them with a file and sanded them by hand until Reino ran his thumb along them and said nothing, which, she had learned by now, meant yes.

On Monday she set the pins. Ukki's five steel pins, from the tobacco tin, into the five slanting holes at the wide end, each tapped in with a small hammer until it held so tight she could not turn it with her fingers and could just turn it with the tuning key Reino gave her. At the narrow end she fitted the vaarna, a short steel rod set into the groove Ukki had cut, where the strings would anchor. Then the strings, steel, thin as hair at one end of the set and a little heavier at the other, each looped around the vaarna at the narrow end and run up across the soundboard to the wide end and wound onto its pin.

Reino tuned it. He did not use a tuner. He plucked each string and turned its pin with the key and listened and turned again, his head tilted, his eyes half closed. Then he handed it to her.

"Five notes," he said. "The old way. Now you play."

---

She did not know how to play. She knew one tune. She had listened to it perhaps two hundred times since Merja gave her the copy, on the drive to Calumet and in bed at night and on the loom bench with one earbud in, until the five notes went up and down in her head when she was falling asleep.

She laid the kantele across her knees, the narrow end to her right, the way she had seen Ukki hold it in the photograph at Reino's. Mummu put down her coffee cup. Reino folded his arms.

Tove plucked the lowest string. It rang, longer than she expected, and under it the whole body of the instrument rang too, very softly, a hum she could feel in her legs. She plucked the next string up, and the next. Then she found where the tune began, low, and climbed three steps, and fell back.

It was slow. She did not know how to do it fast. She went up three steps and back, and up again a little higher, and back, and turned it around and brought it home, one note at a time, letting each one ring under the next because she did not know how to stop them.

When it was over, nobody said anything.

Then Mummu said, very quietly, "Slow."

"I'm sorry. I don't know how to play it faster."

"No," Mummu said. "Slow. That is how he played it when it was only us."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. First week of March.

Mom wove four inches of her own corduroy jacket on her last morning, barefoot. Between Ukki's shirt and Mummu's apron. "That's about right."

Reino's spruce: Engelmann, split, thirty years in his barn. Ukki picked it out in 1993 for "something good." Reino kept it for him.

Too thick, it doesn't sing. Too thin, it cracks.

Bedste sent three papercuts and wrote, "I don't know about kanteles. But I know about holes." She picked the star with the bird. Mummu's mother wove the same star on a wedding cloth. Bedste didn't know.

I folded it, the way she taught me. Cut through the paper into the spruce. The bird is a hole. With the lamp behind it, it's a bird of light.

Mummu: Danish, and Finnish, and Iowa.

Five pins, one vaarna, five strings. Reino tuned it by ear.

Dale says I can have March if I bring the kantele to the shop when I'm back.

I played the carding tune. Slow, because I don't know how to play it fast. Mummu said that's how he played it when it was only them.

Numbering the Loom

The buyers came to see the sauna on the third Saturday of March, because Mummu had told the real estate agent she would not sign anything until they had.

Their names were Tunde and Folake Bankole. He taught structural engineering at the university across the canal, and knew Nandini, which was how he had heard about the house before it was listed. She was a nurse at the hospital up in Laurium. They had two teenage sons, both hockey players, and had come to the Keweenaw from Houston four years earlier, and Folake said, standing in the back doorway in a brand-new parka with the price tag still dangling from one zipper, that she had not been warm since.

"Then you need the sauna," Mummu said. "Come."

She walked them down the trench herself, with her cane in her good hand and the cast tucked inside her coat, and showed them everything Tove had learned in January: the birch bark and the kindling and the three split logs in a loose triangle, the two hours, the stones from Lake Superior, the ladle and the bucket. She opened the freezer on the back porch and showed them the last bundles of birch, tied in July. She told them about the stones that rang. She said, sow-na, like a pig, and made them both say it.

Tunde, who had been in saunas in hotels and had considered himself, he admitted afterward, something of an expert, said it wrong twice. Folake got it right the first time.

"She listens," Mummu told Tove later, approvingly. "He builds bridges. Bridge men never listen. My father was the same."

Before they left, Mummu stood in the dressing room with the two of them and put her good hand flat on the cedar wall.

"Every Saturday," she said. "Sixty-five years. If you don't use it, it gets sad. The wood gets sad. You understand? It needs the löyly."

Folake looked at the wall, and then at the old woman, and nodded seriously.

"Every Saturday," she said. "We'll try."

"Don't try," Mummu said. "Do." Then, more gently: "In July, cut the birch. When the leaves are new. Tie them with string. I'll show the boys."

---

The rug came off the loom four days later.

It was nine feet long. Tove had woven the last band on the Sunday before, alone in the loom room in the early morning, with Mummu asleep and Nandini at the lab. She had taken down the bread bag from the top shelf of the bookcase and untied it and unrolled Ukki's suit, the dark blue wool with the satin stripe, cut so straight by Mummu in October, and wound it onto the shuttle. She had thought for two months about where it should go. In the center, as the heart of the rug. At one end, as a border. Scattered through, a strand here and there. In the end she put it at the far end, the end that would come off the loom last: a wide dark band, six inches, with a thin stripe of the red plaid shirt on either side of it, like a man in his good suit standing between two of his everyday shirts.

"Why there?" Mummu asked, when she saw it.

"So it's the last thing we weave," Tove said. "And the first thing you see when you unroll it."

Mummu looked at the band for a long time.

"Yes," she said.

Now Tove cut the warp. She took Bedste's black-handled scissors and cut across the white threads behind the last row, close to the heddles, one bundle at a time, and as she cut, the tension went out of the loom with a long sigh of relaxing wood, and the rug came loose from the back beam and lay slack across the front. Then she unwound it from the cloth beam, turn by turn, and Nandini caught it as it came, and between them they carried it into the kitchen, the only room with a floor long enough, and unrolled it from the woodstove to the back door.

It was a long field of stripes, crossways, in the colors of a family. Navy and red plaid and gray. Pale green with white anchors. Brown corduroy. Pink, the dress Lea would never wear again after a boy laughed. The blue-and-white striped ticking of a feather mattress from Mummu's childhood. The faded denim of a pair of overalls three children had outgrown. Great-uncle Arvo's Detroit shirt. Ukki's work pants from the county. And at the end, by the door, the dark band of the suit between its two red stripes.

The fringe was still loose. Mummu sat in a kitchen chair at one end with her good hand and Nandini sat on the floor at the other, and they tied the warp threads off in groups of six, in square knots, close to the last row of weaving, so the rags would not slide off. Mummu tied with one hand and her teeth. Nandini tied with both hands and complained that it was harder than calculating drift. Tove tied the middle.

When the last knot was pulled tight, Mummu sat back and looked down the length of the kitchen floor.

"Good," she said. "Even." Then, after a while: "My mother would find a soft place."

"Is there one?"

"No," said Mummu. "She would find one anyway."

---

Tove photographed the rug that afternoon, end to end and band by band, and added the pictures to the album beside the photographs of each ball of rags, so that every stripe on the finished rug could be traced back to its garment and every garment to its person. Under the whole rug she wrote: Woven on Mummu's mother's loom in Hancock, January to March. Warp tied on by Tove with Nandini. Cut by Mummu, and by Lea in February, straighter. Woven by Tove, with four inches by Lea, the brown corduroy. Last band, Ukki's suit. Fringe tied by Mummu one-handed, Nandini and Tove. For Lea.

Then she went back into the loom room and looked at the loom, standing empty again, with its shafts hanging still and its warp beam bare, exactly the way it had looked on the night she arrived.

The closing was in a week.

---

She called Bedste that evening.

Her grandmother answered on the fourth ring, as she always did, because she believed answering on the first ring made you look like you had nothing to do.

"So," Bedste said. "The loom."

"The loom. It has to come apart. It won't fit through any door in this house in one piece. It didn't come in in one piece. Mummu says her father built it in the room."

"Then you take it apart."

"I know how to take it apart. I'm scared I won't know how to put it back together."

There was a pause on the line. Tove could hear the kitchen clock in Elk Horn ticking behind her grandmother's breathing.

"In 1976," Bedste said, "I was thirty-eight. Your father was eight. In February, the trucks came to Main Street with the windmill. In pieces. Hundreds of pieces. Beams, gears, the shaft, the cap, boards for the walls, the sails in parts. All laid out on the snow. And every piece had a number painted on it. Before they took it down in Denmark, somebody went around and put a number on every piece, and wrote the numbers in a book, with drawings. Where each piece went. What was next to it." She paused. "Your Farfar was on the crew. The men put it up again, all spring and summer. I made coffee. Many women made coffee. That is how it was. Three hundred people, maybe. Nobody in Elk Horn knew how to build a Danish windmill. But they had the numbers."

"So I number it."

"So you number every piece. Every peg. Every bar. Before you take out one thing, you number it. You write it in a book, with a drawing. What is next to what." Bedste's voice was very firm. "And you take pictures, the way you do now. On the telephone. From every side. Before, and while."

"And then it goes back together."

"Then it goes back together," Bedste said. "The mill grinds flour. Fifty years. It goes around. The numbers are still on the beams inside, if you know where to look. I show you when you come home."

---

She numbered it the next morning.

She used a roll of blue painter's tape from the hardware store in Hancock and a black marker, and she began at the front left post and went around the loom clockwise, piece by piece. The breast beam was 1. The left front post was 2, the right front post 3. The beater was 4, and its reed 4A, and the two pivot pins that held it 4B and 4C. The four shafts were 5 through 8, and every one of their hundreds of wire heddles came off and was threaded onto a stick and tied in bundles and labeled with its shaft. The new maple lamm, which she had made in January, was 11. The old broken lamm, which she had kept in the corner of the pantry wrapped in a towel, she labeled 11-old, and packed beside the new one.

Every square peg got its own number, and as she knocked each one out, it went into a numbered envelope. Thirty-two pegs. Thirty-two envelopes.

She sat on the floor with the shop notebook across her knees and drew the frame from the front, the side and the top, every number where its piece belonged. She photographed every side before each piece came off, and again after. Nandini held the far ends of the long beams as they came loose. Mummu sat on the sofa and watched every peg come out and every bar come down, and did not say a word the whole morning, and once got up and went into the kitchen for a long time.

By two in the afternoon the loom was a stack of dark maple timbers on the floor of the front room, each with its blue tape, and a cardboard box of envelopes, and a stick of heddles, and a coil of old copper wire that Mummu brought back from the kitchen and put on top of the pile.

"Ukki's," she said. "It goes too."

---

Tove's notebook. Hancock. Last weeks of March.

The Bankoles. He builds bridges and doesn't listen. She's a nurse and listens. Mummu made them both say sow-na. "Don't try. Do."

Rug: nine feet. Ukki's suit at the far end, the last thing woven and the first thing you'll see unrolled. Between two red plaid stripes, like a man in his good suit between two everyday shirts.

"Good. Even. My mother would find a soft place." There isn't one. "She would find one anyway."

Bedste, 1976: the windmill arrived in hundreds of pieces with a number painted on every one and a book with drawings. Farfar was on the crew. Bedste made coffee. Three hundred people put it back up. Nobody in Elk Horn knew how to build a Danish windmill. They had the numbers.

Loom numbered 1 through 47. Thirty-two pegs in thirty-two envelopes. 11 and 11-old. Ukki's copper wire on top.

Two Midsummers

The ice went out of the Portage in the second week of April, and Mummu watched it go from her new window.

The apartment was on the hillside at the east end of Hancock, in a long brick building for older people with an elevator and a dining room and no stairs at all, and her window on the third floor looked straight down across the rooftops to the canal. For a week after the closing the channel was a gray field of rotten ice, cracked into plates, with black water showing in the seams. Then one morning a south wind came up warm out of Wisconsin, and by noon the plates had begun to move, slowly, all together, grinding against each other with a sound Tove could hear through the closed glass, sliding east under the lift bridge toward the open lake.

"Breakup," Mummu said, from her chair at the window. She had the rug across her knees, rolled, though it was not hers to keep. "Every spring. When I was a girl we bet nickels on the day. Your Ukki always lost."

The apartment was small and bright and smelled of new carpet. Mummu had brought her kitchen chair, the blue enamel coffeepot, Reino's photograph of the kantele camp at Eagle Harbor, which he had insisted she take, and the copper wire, which Tove had taken back off the loom pile and given to her in a small cloth bag. The rest had gone to the Bankoles, or to cousins, or to the Heritage Center, where Merja had received Mummu's mother's wedding table cloth with the eight-pointed star along its edge with both hands, like an infant, and promised to put it in the cold room beside Toivo's tape.

"So they are together," Mummu had said. "Good. He liked that cloth."

---

On her last Saturday in Hancock, Tove went back up the hill to the old house.

The Bankoles had asked her. Folake had texted on Thursday: We're lighting it ourselves Saturday. First time. Would you come check we're doing it right? Bring your grandmother if she wants. So Tove brought her grandmother, in Nandini's car, up the steep street between snowbanks that had shrunk to gray ridges, and they sat in the dressing room of the sauna on the bench, the old woman and the young one, while Tunde Bankole, the bridge engineer, laid the fire.

He laid it wrong. He laid it the way he would have built a bridge, a square of logs stacked like a crib, with the kindling on top. Mummu watched him in silence. Then she said, "Tunde."

"Ma'am?"

"Triangle. Bark on the bottom. You are not building the Golden Gate."

He laughed, and pulled it apart, and built it again the way she told him. The birch bark caught at once.

They stayed for the first löyly. Mummu sat on the lowest bench in the hot room, in her slip, with her wrist in its brace and her braids pinned up, and Folake on the top bench, and the two Bankole boys in swim trunks on the middle one, enormous and polite and terrified. Folake threw the water. The stones roared. The boys gasped. Mummu closed her eyes and breathed in the steam as if she had been underwater for a month.

"There," she said. "Now it knows you."

Then the boys ran out and threw themselves into the last of the old snowbank behind the sauna, yelling, and Mummu laughed at them from the doorway until she had to sit down.

---

Tove drove home on the Monday, with a rented trailer behind the car and the loom inside it in forty-seven numbered pieces, packed in moving blankets. The rug was rolled in plastic on the back seat. The kantele, in its blanket, rode in the front, on the passenger seat, belted in.

At the end of the street, before she turned down toward the bridge, she stopped the car and looked back up the hill. The green trim. The steep roof. Smoke from the sauna stovepipe, faint, because Folake had texted that morning to say they were going to try it on a Monday, just to see. Then Tove drove down through Hancock and across the lift bridge, the steel grating drumming under her tires, the channel below her open now and blue and full of light, and up the long hill out of Houghton, and south.

---

The loom went back together in the old summer kitchen at the farm, a one-room building beside the farmhouse where Anders's grandmother had once canned tomatoes in August, with whitewashed walls and a cement floor and windows on three sides.

It took two Saturdays in May. Tove had the shop notebook open on a sawhorse, with the drawings, and her phone propped beside it with the photographs. Rubén held the long beams. Verner Jessen, who had heard about it from Bedste, came out from town on the first Saturday with a mallet and a coffee can of his own wooden pegs, in case any were lost, and none were, and he stayed all day anyway. Anders brought a level. Bedste came out on the second Saturday and sat on a kitchen chair in the doorway in her gray cardigan and called out numbers.

"Seven," she said, reading from the notebook. "Next to six. Then eight."

"I know, Bedste."

"I know you know. I like to say it."

Thirty-two pegs came out of thirty-two envelopes and went back into thirty-two holes. The new lamm, 11, went where it belonged, and the old one, 11-old, went on a nail on the wall above the loom, with Ukki's copper still wrapped around its splint. The breast beam went on last, and Tove set her palm on it and pushed, hard, and it did not move.

Lea had not come out to the summer kitchen all morning. She came at three, when it was done, and stood in the door beside Bedste's chair, and looked at her grandfather's loom, her mother's loom, standing whole on a cement floor in Iowa with the May light coming in on three sides.

"It looks smaller," she said.

"It's the same size."

"I know." Lea came in and walked around it, the way Tove had walked around it the first night in Hancock, touching it. She knelt and looked at the new lamm and the old one on the wall. Then she stood up. "It looks smaller because I'm bigger. Last time I stood next to it I was eighteen and furious." She put her hand on the breast beam. "I'll warp it. Next week. I remember how."

---

Mummu came on the twenty-second of June, on two airplanes, from Hancock to Chicago and from Chicago to Omaha, where Lea met her at the gate with a wheelchair she refused to sit in. The cast had been off for nearly three months. Her wrist was thin and pale and ached in the rain, she said, and could still hold a pair of shears.

She had not been to Elk Horn since Lea's wedding in 1998. She asked to see the windmill before she went to the farm. Anders drove her down Main Street and parked at the foot of it, and she sat in the front seat with the window down and looked up at the eight shingled sides and the four long sails turning slowly in a light west wind, creaking, grinding the season's flour, and said nothing for a long time.

"In pieces," she said finally. "Tove told me. With numbers."

"In pieces," said Anders. "My dad helped put it up."

"My father would have liked that," Mummu said. "He built the supports in the mine. He said the trick is to know what wants to fall."

Bedste was waiting for them at the farm. She stood at the top of the porch steps in a blue summer dress and her gray cardigan, though it was eighty-five degrees, and watched Mummu climb out of the car and come slowly up the walk with her cane. The two old women had met twice in twenty-eight years and smiled at each other across a reception hall.

At the bottom of the steps, Mummu stopped and looked up.

"Grethe," she said.

"Aili." Bedste came down one step. "You have the rug?"

"Lea has it. It's hers."

"Good," said Bedste. Then: "I have something to show you. Inside. It needs your names."

---

It was on the dining room table under a sheet of glass: the papercut family tree, three feet wide, cut from a single sheet of heavy white paper and laid on black. A trunk at the bottom, folded down the middle the way all Bedste's trees were folded, two sides and one middle. On the left, the Mikkelsen branches, cut by Bedste over the spring in her small sure bites, every name lettered in black ink on a small leaf: Holger and Grethe, their parents on the farm outside Brande and the farm east of Elk Horn, their parents, and theirs, back to a farm in Jutland in the 1700s.

On the right, the Rautio branches, cut by Tove in May with Holger's mother's scissors, a little straighter than Bedste's, like a carpenter's. Toivo and Aili. Toivo's parents, who had come from near Kauhava, in Ostrobothnia, in 1910, to work in the mines. Aili's parents, who had come in 1923 with a gray wool blanket in a trunk. Toivo's uncle in Toivola, who had brought a kantele across the ocean in a sack of rye flour. And Aili's brother, Arvo, who had gone to Detroit to make cars.

Mummu had given the names to Tove in April, one at a time, at the window of the new apartment, and Tove had written them on the family tree on her phone first, filling in every empty box that had sat with its question mark for years, and then cut them into paper.

In the middle, where the two sides met, at the top of the trunk, a single leaf said Lea and Anders. And above it, alone at the very top, one small leaf: Tove.

Mummu stood over it, one hand on the back of a chair, and was quiet.

"You cut this?" she asked Bedste.

"Half," said Bedste. "Tove cut your half."

Mummu bent close to the right side. She found her mother's name, and her father's, and touched the glass over each. Then she straightened and said, in English, to Grethe: "Tak."

Bedste blinked. Then, carefully, in an accent Tove had never heard her use: "Kiitos."

---

On the evening of the twenty-third, the Danish midsummer, they built a fire.

Anders had piled brush in the pasture behind the summer kitchen all week, and at ten o'clock, when the long June light had finally gone violet over the cornfields, he lit it. Neighbors came out from town. Verner came, and Rubén with his mother, Doña Licha, who brought a string of pink papel picado and hung it from the summer kitchen eaves, where it stirred in the warm wind and threw small lace shadows in the firelight. Nandini, who had flown in for three days, stood at the edge of the firelight watching the sparks go up into an Iowa sky full of fireflies.

Bedste sang the midsummer song. She stood near the fire in her blue dress, with her hands folded at her waist, and sang it alone in Danish, the old song about loving one's land and keeping the midsummer fire, the one every Danish child learns, and the Elk Horn neighbors who knew the tune hummed along, and Verner, who knew the words, sang the last verse with her in a cracked baritone.

Then Mummu came out of the farmhouse. She had gone in at dusk and had not said why. She came slowly across the yard on Lea's arm, carrying two young birch saplings, each as tall as she was, cut that afternoon from the windbreak along the road. She stood one on each side of the summer kitchen door and leaned them there, against the whitewashed wall, with their bright leaves trembling.

"Juhannus," she said. "In Finland, tomorrow. Birch at the door, so summer comes in." She looked at the papel picado on the eaves above the birches, and the fire in the pasture, and the loom through the open door, warped and waiting, with a band of Ukki's red plaid already woven on it in Lea's hand. "Here, I think, tonight is fine."

Tomorrow was also her birthday. Eighty-seven. Lea had made a page for it on the family's private site, where everyone could leave wishes, and by that night there were sixty of them: from Copenhagen and Duluth and Seattle, from Merja Salo at the archive, from Reino Kangas, who had never written anything online in his life and wrote, in capitals, HAPPY BIRTHDAY AILI. THE TOP IS HOLDING. And from the Bankoles in Hancock, a photograph: the sauna, smoke rising from its stovepipe into a long northern dusk, and under it, We cut the birch today. The boys tied them. Every Saturday.

---

Late, when the fire was down to coals, Tove brought out the kantele.

She sat on an upturned bucket near the embers, with the instrument across her knees and its narrow end to her right. Lea sat in the grass beside Mummu's chair. Bedste had her chair on the other side. The light of the coals came up red through the star in the soundboard and laid a small red star with a bird in it on Tove's jeans.

She played the carding tune. Slowly, the only way she knew. Five notes, climbing three steps and falling back, climbing a little higher and falling, turning on themselves and coming home.

Halfway through, she heard her mother begin to hum it. Then her grandmother. Then, a beat behind, getting the shape of it from the others, Bedste.

---

Tove's notebook. Elk Horn. Midsummer night, very late.

Breakup: the Portage ice went east under the bridge in plates. Ukki always lost the nickel bet.

Mummu to Tunde: "You are not building the Golden Gate." Now the sauna knows them.

Forty-seven pieces, thirty-two pegs, two Saturdays. Verner brought spare pegs. We didn't need them. 11-old hangs on the wall with Ukki's copper on it.

Mom: "It looks smaller because I'm bigger." She warped it herself.

Mummu said tak. Bedste said kiitos. I have never heard Bedste make that face.

The tree stands up now. Both sides have roots.

Birch at the door, papel picado on the eaves, a Danish fire in an Iowa pasture, a Finnish tune on alder and spruce with a Danish star in it.

Three women hummed the carding tune by the coals. One of them never heard it before tonight.

Next: a five-string for Mom. Reino says he has another board. He says he was saving it.