Snow Falling on Cedars

  She’d met Carl Heine because she’d wanted to meet him. On San Piedro a woman with her looks could do such a thing if she did it with the proper innocence. She’d been twenty and employed at Larsen’s Pharmacy, where she clerked from behind an oak sales counter. One Saturday evening at eleven-thirty, on a hill above the dance pavilion at West Port Jensen, she stood beneath the branches of a cedar tree while Carl ran his hands up under her blouse and caressed her breasts with his fisherman’s fingers. The woods were lit with lanterns, and far below in the bay, through the interstices of trees, she could make out the deck lights of moored pleasure boats. Some of the light came to where they stood so that his face was visible to her. This was their third dance together. By now she knew definitely that she admired his face, which was large, weathered, and durable. She held his face between her hands and looked at it from a distance of six inches. It was an island boy’s face and at the same time mysterious. He’d been to the war, after all.

  Carl began to kiss her throat so that Susan Marie had to throw back her head to make room for him – him with his russet beard. She looked up into the branches of the cedars and breathed in their perfume, and he moved his lips over her collarbones and then down into the space between her breasts. She let him. She remembered clearly how she had let him, how it was not resignation as it had been with two other boys – one near the end of her senior year of high school, the other during the summer before this one – but instead intensely and deeply what she wanted, this bearded fisherman who had been to the war and on occasion, if she pressed him, spoke about it without exaggerating. She stroked the top of his head with her fingers and felt the odd sensation of his beard against her breasts. ‘Carl,’ she whispered, but there was nothing to follow that with, she didn’t know what other words she wanted to speak. After a while he stopped and pressed his hands against the bark of the cedar tree behind her so that his blunt muscled arms passed on either side of her head. He looked at her closely, with an intimacy and seriousness that did not seem to embarrass him – this somber man – then tucked a strand of blond hair in behind her ear. He kissed her and then, still looking into her eyes, unbuttoned two of the buttons on her blouse and kissed her again so that she was caught gently between Carl and the tree. She pushed back against him with the muscles of her pelvis, something she’d never done with a man before. It was an admission of her desire, a revealing of it, and it surprised her to the root of her being.

  Yet in another way she was not surprised at all to find herself, at the age of twenty, pressing herself against Carl Heine beneath a cedar above the West Port Jensen dance pavilion. After all, she had brought this about, willed it into being. She had discovered when she was seventeen that she could shape the behavior of men with her behavior and that this ability was founded on her appearance. She was no longer astonished to look in the mirror and find she had developed the breasts and hips of an attractive, grown-up woman. Her astonishment gave way quickly to happiness about it. There was a roundness and firmness to her, a clean, strong roundness, and her heavy blond hair cast a glow over her shoulders when she wore a bathing suit. Her breasts turned just slightly away from one another and brushed against the insides of her arms when she walked. They were large, and when she got over her embarrassment about them she was able to take pleasure in the fact that boys became unnerved in their presence. Yet Susan Marie never flirted. She did not let on she knew she was attractive. She went out with two boys before meeting Carl and insisted on their politeness and reserve. Susan Marie did not want to be foremost a pair of breasts, but on the other hand she was proud of herself. This pride remained with her into her mid-twenties, until she’d given birth to a second child and her breasts were no longer so important to her as the most visible locus of her sexuality. Two sons had tugged at them with their gums and lips, and her breasts appeared different to her now. She wore a bra with stiff wire along its base in order to lift them up.

  Susan Marie knew within three months of marrying Carl that she’d made an excellent choice. In his grave, silent veteran’s way he was dependable and gentle. He was gone nights fishing. He came home in the morning, ate and showered, and then they got into bed together. He kept his hands smooth with a pumice stone, so that even though they were fishermen’s hands they felt good stroking her shoulders. The two of them moved from position to position, trying everything, the sunlight just behind the pulled shade, their bodies moving in morning shadow but plainly visible. She found she had married an attentive man whose pursuit as a lover was to ensure her satisfaction. He read all her movements as signs and when she was close to coming retreated just enough so that her excitement became more desperate. Then it was necessary for her to put him on his back and rock high with her spine arched while he, half-sitting now, his stomach muscles clenched, stroked her breasts and kissed them. She often came this way, in control of her sensations, guiding herself along Carl’s body, and Carl timed matters so as to begin to come while she was and thus carry her back up so that when she was through she did not feel satisfied and was compelled to press on toward a second coming that the pastor at the First Hill Lutheran Church could neither approve nor disapprove of because – she felt certain of this – he had no idea that it was possible.

  Carl would sleep until one o’clock in the afternoon, then eat again and go out to work on the property. He was happy when she told him she was pregnant. He did not stop making love to her until she asked him to stop at the beginning of the ninth month. Sometime after their first son was born Carl bought his own boat. When he named it for her she was pleased and came aboard, and they took the baby out into the bay and west until the island was nothing but a low black line on the horizon. She sat on the short bunk nursing their son while Carl stood at the wheel. She sat there looking at the back of his head, his short, tousled hair, the broad muscles in his back and shoulders. They ate a can of sardines, two pears, a bag of filberts. The baby slept on the bunk, and Susan Marie stood on a pallet board piloting the boat while Carl, behind her, massaged her shoulders and the small of her back and then her buttocks. She gripped the wheel more tightly when he lifted her skirt and slid her under-pants out of the way, and then, leaning forward against the boat’s wheel and reaching back to slide her hands along her husband’s hips, she shut her eyes and rocked.

  These were the things Susan Marie remembered. In her estimation of it, their sex life had been at the heart of their marriage. It had permeated everything else between them, a state of affairs she sometimes worried over. If it went bad, would they go bad? Somewhere down the road, when they were older and less passionate, when their desire for one another had staled and worn out – then where would they be? She didn’t even want to think about that or to mull how one day they might have nothing except his silence and his obsession with whatever he was working on – his boat, their house, his gardens.

  She could see her husband and Kabuo Miyamoto walking the border of the property. Then they went over a rise out of view, and she leaned downstairs again.

  In twenty minutes’ time Carl returned alone, changed into a fresh T-shirt, and hunkered down on the front porch with his head in his hands.

  She came out with a cup of coffee in each hand and sat down next to him, on his right. ‘What did he want?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ answered Carl. ‘We had some things to talk about. Nothing much. No big deal.’

  Susan Marie handed him a coffee cup. ‘It’s hot,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘All right,’ said Carl. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I made him some,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I thought he was going to stay.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Carl. ‘It’s a long story.’

  Susan Marie put her arm around his shoulder. ‘What’s the problem?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ sighed Carl. ‘He wants seven of Ole’s acres. He wants me to let Ole sell them to him. Or sell them to him myself. You know, step out of his way.’

  ‘Seven acres?’

  ??
?The ones his family had. He wants them back. That thing my mother talks about.’

  ‘That,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I had a feeling it was that when he showed up. That,’ she added grimly.

  Carl said nothing. It was like him at a moment like this not to say very much. He did not like to explain or elaborate, and there was a part of him she couldn’t get to. She attributed this to his war experiences, and for the most part she let it be, this silence of his. But it irritated her at times.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ she asked now. ‘Did he go off angry, Carl?’

  Carl set down his coffee. He leaned his elbows against his knees. ‘Damn,’ he answered. ‘What could I tell him? There’s my mother to think about, you know her, I have to think about that business. If I let him get back in out there … ’ He shrugged and seemed hapless for a moment. She saw the lines the sea wind had etched at the corners of his blue eyes. ‘I told him I’d have to think it over, have a talk with you. Told him how upset my mother was with him – ’bout his dirty looks and mean faces. He froze when I brought that up. Real polite, but frozen. Wouldn’t look at me no more. Wouldn’t come back up to the house for coffee. I don’t know, I guess it was my fault. We got into a scrap, I guess. I couldn’t talk with him, Susan. I just … didn’t … know how to do it. I didn’t know what to say to him … ’

  He trailed off. She recognized it as one of his moments, thought it over, and held her tongue. It had never been very clear to her if Carl and Kabuo were friends or enemies. This was the first time she had seen them together, and it seemed to her – it was her impression – that there remained some measure of kind feelings between them, that after all this time they held inside at least the memory of their friendship. But there was no way, truly, of telling. It could be that their cordiality and hand-shaking had been nothing but stiff formality, that underneath they hated each other. She knew, anyway, that Carl’s mother had nothing but ill feelings for all the Miyamotos; she sometimes spoke of them at the dinner table on Sundays, rattling on obsessively. Carl generally fell silent when she did, or agreed with her in a perfunctory fashion, afterward dismissing the subject. Susan Marie had grown accustomed to these dismissals and to Carl’s reluctance to speak about the matter. She was accustomed to it, but it pained her, and she wished she could clear it all up right now, while they sat together on the porch.

  The wind came up and tossed the tops of the alders, and she felt the odd fall warmth in it. Carl had told her more than once – he’d repeated it just the other day – how since the war he couldn’t speak. Even his old friends were included in this, so that now Carl was a lonely man who understood land and work, boat and sea, his own hands, better than his mouth and heart. She felt sympathy for him and rubbed his shoulder gently and waited patiently beside him. ‘Damn,’ Carl said after a while. ‘Anyway, I guess as far as you’re concerned I could hand the whole business over to him and let him do what he wants with it. I guess you don’t want to move out there anyway.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful here,’ replied Susan Marie. ‘Just look around for a minute, Carl.’

  ‘Look around out there,’ he said. ‘That’s sixty-five acres, Susan.’

  She understood that. He was a man who needed plenty of space, a vast terrain in which to operate. It was what he’d grown up with, and the sea, despite its size, was no substitute for green fields. Carl needed room, far more room than his boat could offer, and anyway in order to put his war behind him – the Canton going down, men drowning while he watched – he would have to leave his boat for good and grow strawberries like his father. She knew this was the only way for her husband to grow sound; it was what made her willing, ultimately, to follow him out to Island Center.

  ‘Supposing you sell him his seven acres,’ Susan Marie said. ‘What’s the worst your mother can do?’

  Carl shook his head emphatically. ‘It doesn’t really come down to her,’ he said. ‘It comes down to the fact that Kabuo’s a Jap. And I don’t hate Japs, but I don’t like ’em neither. It’s hard to explain. But he’s a Jap.’

  ‘He’s not a Jap,’ Susan Marie said. ‘You don’t mean that, Carl. I’ve heard you say nice things about him. You and he were friends.’

  ‘Were,’ said Carl. ‘That’s right. A long time ago. Before the war came along. But now I don’t like him much anymore. Don’t like how he acted when I told him I’d think it over, like he expected me to just hand those seven acres to him, like I owed it to him or – ’

  There was a boy’s cry from the back of the house then, a cry of pain instead of argument or upset, and Carl was already moving toward it before Susan Marie could stand. They found their older boy sprawled on a flagstone with his left foot gripped in both his hands; he’d sliced it open against the sharp edge of a strut on the overturned wheelbarrow beside him. Susan Marie knelt and kissed his face and held him closely while his foot bled. She remembered how Carl had looked at the wound, tenderly, transformed. He was no longer a war veteran. They’d taken the boy in to Dr. Whaley, and then Carl had gone off fishing. The two of them hadn’t discussed Kabuo Miyamoto again, and Susan Marie soon recognized that the subject was somehow forbidden. It was forbidden in her marriage to open up her husband’s wounds and look at them unless he asked her to.

  Their marriage, she understood after Carl was gone, had largely been about sex. It had been about sex right up to the end, until the day Carl went out of her life: that morning, while the children slept, they’d shut the bathroom door and pulled the latch and taken off their clothes. Carl showered, and Susan Marie joined him when the stink of salmon had been washed down the drain. She washed his large penis and felt it harden in her fingers. She put her arms around his neck, locked her feet at the small of his back. Carl held her up with his strong hands clenching the muscles in her legs and leaned the side of his face against her breasts and took to licking them. They moved that way, standing up in the bathtub with the water pouring over them and Susan Marie’s blond hair pasted to her face and her hands clutched around her husband’s head. They washed each other afterward, taking their time about it in the friendly way of certain married people, and then Carl got into bed and slept until one in the afternoon. At two, having eaten a lunch of fried eggs and Jerusalem artichokes, canned pears and bread spread with clover honey, he went out to change the oil in his tractor. She saw him from the kitchen window that afternoon gathering early windfall apples and dropping them in a burlap bag. At three forty-five he came up to the house again and said good-bye to the children, who were seated on the porch drinking apple juice and eating graham crackers and rolling pebbles back and forth. He came into the kitchen, wrapped himself around his wife, and explained that unless the fishing was excellent he was coming home early the next morning, would be home, he hoped, by four A.M.. Then he left for the Amity Harbor docks, and she never saw him again.

  21

  Nels Gudmundsson stood at a distance from the witness stand when it was his turn to question Susan Marie Heine: he did not want to appear lecherous by placing himself in dose proximity to a woman of such tragic, sensual beauty. He was self-conscious about his age and felt that the jurors would see him as disgusting if he did not distance himself from Susan Marie Heine and appear in general detached from the life of his body altogether. The month before, Nels had been told by a doctor in Anacortes that his prostate gland had become moderately enlarged. It would have to be removed surgically and he would no longer be able to produce seminal fluid. The doctor had asked Nels embarrassing questions and he had been forced to reveal a truth about which he was ashamed: that he could no longer achieve an erection. He could achieve one briefly, but it would wither in his hand before he had a chance to take pleasure from it. The bad part was not really this so much as it was that a woman like Susan Marie Heine inspired a deep frustration in him. He felt defeated as he appraised her on the witness stand. It was no longer possible for him to communicate to any woman – even those his own age he knew in town – his merit and value as a lover, for he
no longer had this sort of worth and had to admit as much to himself – as a lover he was entirely through.

  Nels remembered as he watched Susan Marie Heine the finest years of his sex life, now more than a half a century behind him. He could not quite believe that this was so. He was seventy-nine and trapped inside a decaying body. It was difficult for him to sleep and to urinate. His body had betrayed him and most of the things he once took for granted were no longer even possible. A man might easily be embittered by such circumstances, but Nels made it a point not to struggle unnecessarily with life’s unresolvable dilemmas. He had indeed achieved a kind of wisdom – if you wanted to call it that – though at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world. Anyway, the kind of wisdom younger people sought from old age was not to be acquired in this life no matter how many years they lived. He wished he could tell them this without inviting their mockery or their pity.

  Nels’s wife had died from cancer of the colon. They had not gotten along particularly well, but nevertheless he missed her. Occasionally he sat in his apartment and wept in order to empty himself of self-pity and remorse. Occasionally he attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate in the hope of rediscovering that lost part of himself he deeply, achingly missed. He was convinced at rare moments that he could succeed and that his youth was still buried inside of himself. The rest of the time he accepted this as untrue and went about the business of consoling himself in various unsatisfying ways. He liked to eat. He enjoyed chess. He did not mind his work and knew himself to be quite good at it. He was a reader and recognized his habit of reading as obsessive and neurotic, and told himself that if he read something less frivolous than newspapers and magazines he might indeed be better off. The problem was that he could not concentrate on ‘literature,’ however much he might admire it. It wasn’t that War and Peace bored him exactly, but rather that his mind couldn’t focus on it. Another loss: his eyes provided him with only half a view of the world, and reading caused his neurasthenia to flare up and made his temples throb. His mind, too, was failing him, he felt – although one could not be sure of such a thing. Certainly his memory was not as good as it had been when he was younger.