"Emil Petaja - The Time Twister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

twanged with unnecessary touches that didn't quite match the outgoing Finn Mackey personality.
"I hope that silver plate and the crystal cells aren't giving you too much trouble."
Little by little the banalities brushed away like crumbs. Then it was as if Art were sitting across from
Steve, where Tony had sat a couple minutes before. Art blurted out his doings, his thoughts, in a completely
honest, ingenuous manner that irritated those social groups who prefer conversational sparring and the
artfully phoney commercial facades.
"Not hearing from Ilma had me scared, Doc! You know how much those letters meant to me! I know
Old Izza, her father. A wonderfully whacky old guy with a beard like a red fire, full to the brim with old
stories of water nymphs and wood trolls. He half believes them all, Steve. I think that is what gave Ilma her
dryad— half-shy, half-animal—aura. That and living 'way up here in this godforsaken wilderness. Then
there's Yalmar."
"What about Yalmar?" Steve murmured at the pause.
"Yalmar's as ugly as Ilma is beautiful, Steve. His back is twisted and he's got those long apish arms and
bandy legs. Guess that's why he prefers roaming the hills with his rifle to mingling with the villagers of
Hellmouth. Yalmar's absolutely awed by Ilma. Treats her like a goddess. He's quite a bit older, around
thirty now, I guess. He wouldn't even talk to Izza when the subject of her leaving to go to school came up.
He left the farm and hiked 'way up in the mountains and stayed there for weeks. Anyway, Yalmar's odd.
That's why Ilma came back to Hellmouth. That and what hap-pened. Those peculiar accidents."
Another pause and a sucking noise that followed a tapping: Art relighting his pipe.
"Get on with it, you big Finlander!"
"Let me tell you a little about this valley. It's wild up here. Wild and beautiful. And completely isolated.
What happened in the 1880s was that a Swede named Lars Swenson imported a whole boatload of Finns
from Oulu to help him build the town. Timber was needed for the mines—gold mines around Helena. Silver,
too. And copper, lots of copper. Swenson's idea was to build his sawmill way up here in the wilderness
where the timber was thickest. True, the country was hard to get up into, but so was the rest of this
Blackfoot Indian area in those days. Fish and game were plentiful and the Finns that Swenson brought in
were inured to hardships and long cold winters, being from the northern wilds, insular, and indifferent to the
whimsies of civilization. Furthermore, they were hard workers, fiercely honest, and they know lumber.
That's always been one of Finland's key industries.
"Hey! I'm sounding off like a history book! But you could write a book about how Swenson brought his
little band of immigrant Finns up here, built up the town and his sawmill 'way hell and gone in what the
Black-feet and the Shoshones call 'devil country.' He put in a narrow gauge spur line along the river to the
falls that plunges down into Swan Lake. The Finns were contented. They liked the isolation. Sometimes
young bucks would up and hike out and never come back, but the old ones stayed.
"Even after Anaconda Copper bought out all the other small mills and set up their big Bonner unit,
obviously a lot more efficient than these little one-saw outfits up in the sticks, the Hellmouth Finns stuck.
The older ones, that is. My father was one of the young ones who left when the mill shut down. Swenson's
dream had fizzled after only twenty years. Sure, the copper mines and the new building going on in the
sheltered Bitter-root valleys and around Missoula still needed lumber, but Anaconda owned all the mines
now and they could provide it faster and cheaper than 'Swenson's Folly.' ... embittered, Lars Swenson went
back to Oslo to die, broke.
"But the Finns stayed!
"There was a terrible forest fire that swept through the Hellmouth Valley in 1906. One of the worst
Mon-tana has ever seen and that's saying a lot. Dad said the sky was full of fire and the storm winds rolled
black smoke a hundred miles across country. Kids hid; they thought it was the end of the world. My father
and mother left when the mill shut down. He took a millwright job with the A.C.M. down in Bonner, then
went down to South America on a mining deal. My mother died when I was born. Dad used to tell me
about Hellmouth as it was when he was a kid. He loved it. It was a dream of his to go back some day.
Down there where it was always warm and balmy, my father would suck his pipe and talk endlessly about
Hellmouth, about how hard the winters were, but how he wanted to go back. About Old Izza Halvor and his