A tractor at last breached a hole in the seawall, and a few men began to go through. All of them were shot immediately. Ishmael was commandeered to help dig free a half-track that had been deposited on Betio by a tank lighter and had promptly buried itself. He dug on his knees with an entrenching tool while the man beside him threw up in the sand before lying down with his helmet across his face and fainting. A radioman from K Company had set up against the seawall and was railing loudly about interference; every time battleship guns were fired offshore even the static died out, he complained. He couldn’t raise anybody.
Ishmael realized, in the early afternoon, that the sweetish smell coming at him from off the beach was the odor of dead marines. He, too, vomited, then drank the last of his water. As far as he knew, no one else in his squad was even alive anymore. He had not seen any of them in over three hours, but he had been given a carbine, an ammo pack, and a field machete by a crew of cargo handlers moving down the wall with resupply orders. He fieldstripped the carbine – it was full of sand – and cleaned it as carefully as he could under the conditions, sitting against the base of the seawall with his steel helmet unstrapped. He was sitting there like that with the trigger assembly in hand, dabbing at it with the tail of his shirt, when a new wave of amtracs came up on the beach and began drawing mortar fire. Ishmael watched them with interest for a while, men spilling out and falling to the sand – some dead, some wounded, some screaming as they ran – then lowered his head and, refusing to look, went back to cleaning his carbine. He was still there, huddled in the same place with his carbine in hand, his machete in a sheath that hung from his belt, when darkness fell four hours later.
A colonel came down the beach with his entourage, exhorting the noncoms and junior officers to re-form and improvise squads. At 1900 hours, he said – less than twenty minutes from now – every man there was going over the top; anyone who stayed behind would be court-martialed; it was time, he added, to act like marines. The colonel moved on, and a Lieutenant Doerper from K Company asked Ishmael where his squad was and what the hell he thought he was doing dug in by himself against the seawall. Ishmael explained how he had lost his equipment going over the gunnel of an LCP and how everyone around him had died or been wounded; he didn’t know where anyone was. Lieutenant Doerper listened impatiently, then told Ishmael to pick out a man along the wall, and then pick out another, and then some more, until he had himself a squad formed, and then to report to the command post Colonel Freeman had set up beside the buried half-track. He had, he said, no time for bullshit.
Ishmael explained matters to two dozen boys before he’d gathered enough of a squad. One boy told him to go fuck himself; another claimed to have an incapacitating leg wound; a third said he’d be along in a minute but never moved. There was gunfire coming from off the water suddenly, and Ishmael surmised that a Jap sniper had swum out and was manning the machine gun left behind on an amtrac destroyed in the lagoon. The seawall was no longer safe.
Moving down the wall, staying low and talking rapidly to people, he came at last on Ernest Testaverde, who was returning fire over the coconut logs with his gun held high and his head down. ‘Hey,’ said Ishmael. ‘Jesus.’
‘Chambers,’ said Ernest. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
‘Where is everybody?’ asked Ishmael. ‘What about Jackson and those guys?’
‘I saw Jackson get hit,’ Ernest answered. ‘All the demolitions guys and the mine detector guys got hit coming up onto the beach. And Walter,’ he added. ‘And Jim Harvey. And that guy Hedges, I saw him go down. And Murray and Behring got hit, too. They all got hit in the water.’
‘So did Hinkle,’ said Ishmael. ‘And Eric Bledsoe – his leg came off. And Fitz – he got hit on the beach, I saw him go down. Bellows made it, but I don’t know where he is. Newland, too. Where are those guys?’
Ernest Testaverde didn’t answer. He pulled at his helmet strap and set his carbine down. ‘Bledsoe?’ he said. ‘You sure?’
Ishmael nodded. ‘He’s dead.’
‘His leg came off?’ said Ernest.
Ishmael sat down with his back to the seawall. He did not want to talk about Eric Bledsoe or remember how he had died. It was difficult to know what the point would be of talking about such a thing. There was no point to anything, that was clear. He couldn’t think straight about anything that had happened since the landing craft had ground onto the coral reef. The situation he found himself in now had the sodden quality of a dream in which events repeated themselves. He was dug in against the seawall, and then he found himself there again, and again he was still dug in beneath the seawall. Occasionally a flare lit things well enough so that he saw the details of his own hands. He was weary and thirsty, and he could not really focus, and the adrenalin had died inside of him. He wanted to live, he knew that now, but everything else was unclear. He could not recollect his reason for being there – why he had enlisted to fight in the marines, what the point of it was. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Bledsoe’s dead.’
‘Goddamn it,’ answered Ernest Testaverde. He kicked the first log in the seawall twice, then a third time, then a fourth. Ishmael Chambers turned away from him.
At 1900 hours they went over the seawall along with three hundred other men. They were met by mortar and machine-gun fire from straight ahead in the palm trees. Ishmael never saw Ernest Testaverde get hit; later he found out, on making inquiries, that Ernest had been found with a hole in his head roughly the size of a man’s fist. Ishmael himself was hit in the left arm, squarely in the middle of his biceps. The muscle tore when the round entered – a single round from a Nambu machine gun – and the bone cracked jaggedly into a hundred splinters that were driven up against his nerves and veins and lodged into the meat of his arm.
Four hours later, when the light came up, he became aware of two medical corpsmen kneeling beside the man next to him. The man had been hit in the head, it seemed, and his brains were leaking out around his helmet. Ishmael had maneuvered behind this dead man and taken the sulfa pills and a roll of bandages from the medical kit at his belt. He’d wrapped his arm and had used the weight of his body to keep his blood from spilling out. ‘It’s okay,’ one of the corpsmen told Ishmael. ‘We’re bringing up a litter team and a squad of bearers. The beach is secured. Everything’s fine. We’re going to get you shipboard pronto.’
‘Fucking Japs,’ said Ishmael.
Later he lay on the deck of some ship or other, seven miles out to sea from Betio, one boy in the middle of rows and rows of wounded, and the boy on the litter to his left died from the shrapnel that had pierced his liver. On the other side was a boy with buckteeth who’d been shot squarely in the thighs and groin; the blood had soaked his khaki pants. The boy could not speak and lay with his back arched; every few seconds he groaned mechanically between forced, shallow breaths. Ishmael asked him once if he was all right, but the boy only went on with his groaning. He died ten minutes before the bearers came around to take him down to surgery.
Ishmael lost his arm on a shipboard operating table to a pharmacist’s mate who had done only four amputations in his career, all of them in the past few hours. The mate used a handsaw to square up the bone and cauterized the stump unevenly, so that the wound healed more slowly than it would have otherwise and the scar tissue left behind was thick and coarse. Ishmael had not been fully anesthetized and awoke to see his arm where it had been dropped in a corner on top of a pile of blood-soaked dressings. Ten years later he would still dream of that, the way his own fingers curled against the wall, how white and distant his arm looked, though nevertheless he recognized it there, a piece of trash on the floor. Somebody saw him staring at it and gave an order, and the arm was scooped up inside a towel and dumped into a canvas bin. Somebody else pricked him once again with morphine, and Ishmael told whoever it was that ‘the Japs are … the fucking Japs … ’ but he didn’t quite know how to finish his words, he didn’t quite know what he meant to utter, ‘that fucking goddamn Jap bitch’ was all he coul
d think to say.
17
By two o’clock on the first afternoon of the trial, snow had covered all the island roads. A car pirouetted silently while skating on its tires, emerged from this on a transverse angle, and slid to a stop with one headlight thrust into the door of Petersen’s Grocery, which somebody opened at just the right moment – miraculously – so that no damage was done to car or store. Behind the Amity Harbor Elementary School, a girl of seven bending over to pack a snowball was rammed from behind by a boy skidding down a hill on a piece of cardboard box. She broke her right arm – a greenstick fracture. The principal, Erik Karlsen, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat her down next to a steam radiator before going out to run his car engine. Then, gingerly, peering out through the crescents of glass his defroster had carved from the icy windshield, he drove her down First Hill into town.
On Mill Run Road Mrs. Larsen of Skiff Point ran her husband’s De-Soto into a ditch. Arne Stolbaad overloaded his wood-burning stove and ended up with a chimney fire. The volunteer fire department was called out by a neighbor, but the pumper truck driver, Edgar Paulsen, lost traction on Indian Knob Hill and had to halt to put on tire chains. In the meantime Arne Stolbaad’s chimney fire expired; when the firemen showed up at last he expressed to them his delight at having burned clean the flue creosote.
At three o’clock five school buses left Amity Harbor with their windshield wipers batting ice from the windshields and their headlights casting into the snowfall. High school students walking home hurled snowballs at them; the South Beach bus slid off the road shoulder just beyond Island Center. The schoolchildren climbed out and walked home in the snow-storm with Johnny Katayama, the bus driver, escorting them from behind. As each child turned off toward home, Johnny handed him or her a half stick of spearmint gum.
A boy on a sled that afternoon broke his ankle against the base of a cedar tree. He had not quite understood how to make the thing turn, and the tree had come up on him suddenly. He’d put his foot out to ward it off.
A retired dentist, old Doc Cable, slipped hard on the way to his firewood shed. Something in his tailbone twisted when he went down, so that Doc Cable winced and curled fetally in the snow. After a while he hauled himself up, lurched inside, and reported to his wife through clenched teeth that he’d injured himself. Sarah put him on the couch with a hot-water bottle, where he took two aspirins and fell asleep.
Two teenagers engaged in a snowball-throwing contest from the dock at Port Jefferson Harbor. The point was to hit a mooring buoy at first, then a piling on the next dock. One of the teenagers, Dan Daniels’s son Scott, took a three-step running start, threw out to sea, then pitched headlong into the salt water. He was out again in five seconds, steam rising off his clothes. Running home, racing through the snowfall, his hair froze into icy tufts.
The citizens of San Piedro made their run on Petersen’s and cleared the shelves of canned goods. They brought so much snow into the store on their boots that one of the box boys, Earl Camp, stayed busy all afternoon with a mop and a towel, cleaning up after them. Einar Petersen took a box of salt from his shelf and spread its contents outside the door, but two customers slipped despite this. Einar decided to offer free coffee to shoppers and asked one of his checkers, Jessica Porter – who was twenty-two and cheerful looking – to stand behind a folding table and serve.
At Fisk’s Hardware Center the citizens of San Piedro bought snow shovels, candles, kerosene, kitchen matches, lined gloves, and flashlight batteries. The Torgerson brothers sold out their supply of tire chains by three o’clock, as well as most of their ice scrapers and antifreeze. Tom pulled ditched cars free with his freshly painted two-ton wrecker, Dave sold gasoline, batteries, and motor oil and advised his customers to go home and stay home. Dozens of islanders stopped in to listen while Dave pumped their gas or put on their tire chains and made grim predictions about the weather. ‘Three-day blow,’ he’d say. ‘Folks’d better be ready.’
By three o’clock the branches of the cedars were loaded down with snow. When the wind came up it blew right through them, whirling flurries to the ground. San Piedro’s strawberry fields became fields of white, as untouched and flawless as desert. The noise of living things was not so much muted as halted – even the seagulls were silenced. Instead there was the wind and the collapse of waves and the withdrawing of the water down the beaches.
Everywhere on San Piedro Island a grimness set in, accompanied by a strained anticipation. Who knew what might happen now that a December storm had started? The homes of these islanders might soon lie in drifts so that only the sloped roofs of the beach cabins would show and only the upper stories of the larger houses. The power might fizzle when the wind blew hard and leave them all in darkness. Their toilets might not flush, their well pumps might not draw, they would live close to their stoves and lanterns. Yet on the other hand the snowstorm might mean a respite, a happy wintertime vacation. Schools would shut down, roads would close, no one would go off to their jobs. Families would eat large breakfasts late, then dress for snow and go out in the knowledge that they’d return to warm, snug houses. Smoke would curl from chimneys; at dusk lights would come on. Lopsided snowmen would stand sentinel in yards. There would be enough to eat, no reason for worry.
Still, those who had lived on the island a long time knew that the storm’s outcome was beyond their control. This storm might well be like others past that had caused them to suffer, had killed even – or perhaps it might dwindle beneath tonight’s stars and give their children snowbound happiness. Who knew? Who could predict? If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest – like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without any effort, remaining what it was implacably – was out of their hands, beyond.
When the afternoon recess was over that day, Alvin Hooks called Art Moran again. The sheriff had left the courtroom for two and a half hours in order to contact the volunteer fire department and to call out his volunteer deputies, men who could be counted on in times of trouble. Generally their role was to keep order at the Strawberry Festival and other public occasions; now they would divide up the island terrain according to the locations of their homes and businesses and assist those stranded on the roads.
Art fidgeted in the witness stand for the second time that day. The snowstorm, just now, preoccupied him. He understood that Alvin’s case necessitated his appearing twice at the trial, but on the other hand he wasn’t glad about it. He’d eaten a sandwich during the fifteen-minute recess, sat in Alvin’s office with a piece of wax paper laid across his knees and an apple on the edge of the desk. Hooks had reminded him to tell his story methodically, to pay attention to those minor details that might seem to him irrelevant. Now, on the witness stand, pinching the knot of his tie together and checking the corners of his lips for crumbs, Art waited impatiently while Alvin asked the judge to admit four pieces of rope into evidence. ‘Sheriff Moran,’ Hooks said at last. ‘I have in my hand four lengths of rope of the sort fishermen use for mooring lines. May I ask you to inspect them, please?’
Art took the pieces of rope in his hand and made a show of looking at them carefully. ‘Okay,’ he said after a moment.
‘Do you recognize them?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Did you refer to these pieces of mooring line in your report, Sheriff Moran? Are they the same four referred to in your report?’
‘Yes, they are. They’re the ones I wrote about in my report, Mr. Hooks. These are them.’
The judge admitted the lines as evidence, and Ed Soames put a tag on each. Alvin Hooks put them back in Art’s hands and asked him to explain where he’d found them.
‘Well,’ said the sheriff. ‘This one here, marked with an A, came from the defendant’s boat. It came off the port side cleat, to be exact, third cleat up from the stern. It matches all his other mooring lines, you see? Matches ’em all except the one on the port side cleat second up f
rom the stern. That’s this one here, the one marked B – that one was new, Mr. Hooks, but the rest were worn. They were all three-strand manila lines with a bowline knotted into one end, pretty well worn down, too. That’s how Mr. Miyamoto kept his mooring lines – bowlined and pretty well worn out, except the one. It was brand-new but had the bowline in it.’
‘And the other two?’ asked Alvin Hooks. “Where did you find them, sheriff?’
‘I found them on Carl Heine’s boat, Mr. Hooks. This one here – the one marked C’ – the sheriff held the line up for the benefit of the jury – ‘is exactly the same as every other line I found on Mr. Heine’s, the deceased’s, boat. You see here? It’s a three-strand manila rope in new condition with a fancy eye braided in at one end – braided in by hand, Mr. Hooks, the way Carl Heine was known to do them. All his lines were braided up in loops, none of them had bowlines.’