Snow Falling on Cedars

  ‘I know it’s caused you trouble,’ Ishmael said. ‘But don’t you think the snow is beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful coming down?’

  The boughs in the fir trees hung heavy with it, the fence rails and mailboxes wore mantles of it, the road before him lay filled with it, and there was no sign, anywhere, of people. Hisao Imada agreed that it was so – ah, yes, beautiful, he commented softly – and at the same moment his daughter turned swiftly forward so that her eyes met Ishmael’s in the mirror. It was the cryptic look, he recognized, that she’d aimed at him fleetingly on the second floor of the courthouse when he’d tried to speak to her before her husband’s trial. Ishmael still could not read what her eyes meant – punishment, sorrow, perhaps buried anger, perhaps all three simultaneously. Perhaps some sort of disappointment.

  For the life of him, after all these years, he couldn’t read the expression on her face. If Hisao wasn’t present, he told himself, he’d ask her flat out what she was trying to say by looking at him with such detached severity and saying nothing at all. What, after all, had he done to her? What had she to be angry about? The anger, he thought, ought to be his own; yet years ago now the anger about her had finished gradually bleeding out of him and had slowly dried up and blown away. Nothing had replaced it, either. He had not found anything to take its place. When he saw her, as he sometimes did, in the aisles of Petersen’s Grocery or on the street in Amity Harbor, he turned away from seeing her with just a little less hurry than she turned away from seeing him; they avoided one another rigorously. It had come to him one day three years before how immersed she was in her own existence. She’d knelt in front of Fisk’s Hardware Center tying her daughter’s shoelaces in bows, her purse on the sidewalk beside her. She hadn’t known he was watching. He’d seen her kneeling and working on her daughter’s shoes, and it had come to him what her life was. She was a married woman with children. She slept in the same bed every night with Kabuo Miyamoto. He had taught himself to forget as best he could. The only thing left was a vague sense of waiting for Hatsue – a fantasy – to return to him. How, exactly, this might be achieved he could not begin to imagine, but he could not keep himself from feeling that he was waiting and that these years were only an interim between other years he had passed and would pass again with Hatsue.

  She spoke now, from the backseat, having turned again to look out the window. ‘Your newspaper,’ she said. That was all.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The trial, Kabuo’s trial, is unfair,’ said Hatsue. ‘You should talk about that in your newspaper.’

  ‘What’s unfair?’ asked Ishmael. ‘What exactly is unfair? I’ll be happy to write about it if you’ll tell me.’

  She was still staring out the window at the snow with strands of wet hair pasted against her cheek. ‘It’s all unfair,’ she told him bitterly. ‘Kabuo didn’t kill anyone. It isn’t in his heart to kill anyone. They brought in that sergeant to say he’s a killer – that was just prejudice. Did you hear the things that man was saying? How Kabuo had it in his heart to kill? How horrible he is, a killer? Put it in your paper, about that man’s testimony, how all of it was unfair. How the whole trial is unfair.’

  ‘I understand what you mean,’ answered Ishmael. ‘But I’m not a legal expert. I don’t know if the judge should have suppressed Sergeant Maples’s testimony. But I hope the jury comes in with the right verdict. I could write a column about that, maybe. How we all hope the justice system does its job. How we hope for an honest result.’

  ‘There shouldn’t even be a trial,’ said Hatsue. ‘The whole thing is wrong, it’s wrong.’

  ‘I’m bothered, too, when things are unfair,’ Ishmael said to her. ‘But sometimes I wonder if unfairness isn’t … part of things. I wonder if we should even expect fairness, if we should assume we have some sort of right to it. Or if – ’

  ‘I’m not talking about the whole universe,’ cut in Hatsue. ‘I’m talking about people – the sheriff, that prosecutor, the judge, you. People who can do things because they run newspapers or arrest people or convict them or decide about their lives. People don’t have to be unfair, do they? That isn’t just part of things, when people are unfair to somebody.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Ishmael replied coldly. ‘You’re right – people don’t have to be unfair.’

  When he let them out beside the Imadas’ mailbox he felt that somehow he had gained the upper hand – he had an emotional advantage. He had spoken with her and she had spoken back, wanting something from him. She’d volunteered a desire. The strain between them, the hostility he felt – it was better than nothing, he decided. It was an emotion of some sort they shared. He sat in the DeSoto and watched Hatsue trudge away through the falling snow, carrying her shovel on her shoulder. It occurred to him that her husband was going out of her life in the same way he himself once had. There had been circumstances then and there were circumstances now; there were things beyond anyone’s control. Neither he nor Hatsue had wanted the war to come – neither of them had wanted that intrusion. But now her husband was accused of murder, and that changed things between them.

  23

  The coast guard lighthouse on the rocks at Point White was a tower built out of reinforced concrete that rose a hundred feet above the sea. In the thirty years before it went up, eleven ships came aground at the point – two mail steamers, seven timber schooners, a Norwegian freighter, and a four-masted bark with a cargo of Newcastle coal on board, inbound for Seattle in a windstorm. There was no sign of them at all anymore – they’d broken up and, over the years, washed away into the ocean. There was only a jumble of barnacle-encrusted sea rock and a view of the water stretching to the horizon, unbroken, gray, and blurred in the distance at the place where the ocean and the sky met.

  On occasions when the tide ran exceptionally high, waves washed perilously close to the lighthouse, dashing its base with salt-tinged algae, which clung to it now like sea moss. Underneath the lighthouse’s copper dome lay sixteen reflecting prisms and four projecting lenses floating in a bath of mercury. The coast guard kept the clockworks greased, and the lenses revolved twice each minute. And yet there were still accidents, despite everything. There seemed no way to prevent them. In a thick fog the light could not be seen and boats continued to come aground. The coast guard installed sounding boards along island beaches and anchored numbered buoys at intervals in the shipping channel, and these measures seemed sufficient to islanders until the next accident came along. A tug towing a diesel ferry from San Francisco broke up on the rocks a mile to the north; then a tug towing a barge full of peeler logs; then a salvage steamer working out of Victoria. News of such wrecks was received by islanders with a grim brand of determinism; it seemed to many that such things were ordained by God, or at any rate unavoidable. They came out in large numbers in the aftermath of a shipwreck to stand on the beach and stare in awe at the latest foundering vessel; some brought binoculars and cameras. Old fishermen with time on their hands built bonfires out of driftwood and warmed themselves while the sea made breaches in the hulls of ships that had come hard aground. There was much discussion and finger pointing. Working without a single hard fact, islanders drew a variety of conclusions: pilot error, pilot inexperience, misread charts, crossed signals, fog, wind, tide, ineptitude. When after days a ship broke apart, or the pieces of it sank, or a salvage company gave up in despair after off-loading one twenty-fifth of its cargo, islanders watched blankly with their mouths hard-set and shook their heads once or twice. For a week or so they spoke cautiously of what they’d seen, and then it faded out of the realm of the discourse they shared together. They thought of it only at private moments.

  Ishmael Chambers, in the last light of day, found himself seated in the office of the lighthouse chief petty officer, a large man named Evan Powell. The place was lit by kerosene lanterns and heated by a cast-iron wood stove. Outside a generator powered the lighthouse, so that each thirty seconds the beacon flashed against
the glass of the office window. Petty Officer Powell kept an immaculate desk – a calendar blotter, twin upright pen stands, a nearly full ashtray, a telephone. He sat back in a reclining desk chair with a lit cigarette between his fingers, scratching his face and coughing. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he explained to Ishmael hoarsely. ‘I’m not firing on every cylinder right now. But I’ll help you out if I can, Mr. Chambers. You need something for your newspaper?’

  ‘I do,’ said Ishmael. ‘I’m putting an article together on this storm. I’m wondering if you have archives of some kind, weather records from way back, maybe, something I could take a look at. Go through old logs, something like that, try to make some comparisons. I can’t remember a storm like this one, but that doesn’t mean it never happened.’

  ‘We do a lot of record keeping,’ Petty Officer Powell replied. ‘The lighthouse has been here longer than the coast guard – I don’t know how far back there’s reliable information – anyway you can have a look, if you want. There’s more stuff around than you’d ever want to get into. I’d be interested in seeing what you find out.’

  Petty Officer Powell fell forward in his chair and carefully snubbed out his cigarette. He picked up the telephone and, dialing a single number, drew a handkerchief out of his pocket. ‘Who’s this?’ he said gruffly into the receiver. ‘I want you to see if you can find Levant. Find Levant and tell him to come down here. Tell him to bring a couple kerosene lanterns. Tell him I need him right away.’

  He put his hand over the receiver mouth, blew his nose, and looked at Ishmael. ‘How much time you got?’ he said. ‘I can spare Levant to help you out for a couple of hours, tops.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Ishmael. ‘I don’t want to trouble anybody here. Just point me in the right direction.’

  Evan Powell slipped his hand from the receiver. ‘Smoltz,’ he said. ‘Get Levant. Tell him I need him right away. Find Levant for this.’

  He hung up and blew his nose one more time. ‘There’s no shipping in this weather,’ he said. ‘We raised Neah Bay an hour ago. We figure the snow isn’t going to let up until tomorrow afternoon.’

  The radioman named Levant arrived. Levant was tall enough to be a basketball player, six five or six six, with a large Adam’s apple and tightly curled black hair, and he carried a lantern and a flashlight. ‘This man here is Ishmael Chambers,’ Petty Officer Powell explained. ‘He runs the newspaper down in town and needs to take a look into our weather records. I want you to set things up for him, get him squared away, help him out. Give him what he needs, set him up a couple lanterns.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Levant said.

  ‘Don’t miss your radio watch over it,’ Powell said. ‘There’s two hours before you’re on.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Ishmael. ‘Just point me in the right direction. I don’t want to take anybody’s time.’

  Levant led the way to the records room on the second floor, which was stacked floor to ceiling with wooden crates, file cabinets, and stacked duffel bags. It smelled of brittle paper and of mimeograph ink and had not been dusted recently. ‘Everything’s dated,’ Levant pointed out, finding a place for a lantern. ‘That’s how we do things – by dates, mainly. Radio transmissions, shipping log, weather reports, maintenance – everything’s in here by date, I guess. There’s a date on everything.’

  ‘You have a radio watch?’ Ishmael asked. ‘Are you the radioman?’

  ‘I am now,’ Levant said. ‘I have been for the last couple months or so – last guys got transferred, I moved up.’

  ‘Is there a lot of record keeping with your job? Docs a radioman contribute to all of this?’

  ‘There’s a guy shorthands all the radio transmissions,’ Levant explained to him. ‘He writes ’em up, files ’em, they end up here in a cabinet. And that’s all they’re good for, seems like. They just take up space, is all. No one pays any attention.’

  Ishmael picked up a manila folder and turned it toward the lantern light. ‘Looks like I’m going to be awhile,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go about your business? If I need something I can find you.’

  ‘I’ll bring another lantern,’ Levant replied.

  He was alone then with the fog of his breath in the lantern light and the crates of maritime records. The room smelled of salt water and snow and of the past – it was full of the scent of lost days. Ishmael tried to concentrate on his work, but the image of Hatsue in the backseat of his car – her eyes meeting his in the rearview mirror – carried him away into his memories.

  The first time he’d seen her after the war she’d tried, he recalled, to be amiable, but he had not been capable of accepting this. He’d stood behind her with his milk and crackers, waiting in line at Petersen’s. He’d stood in silence, hating her, and she’d turned toward him with a baby on her shoulder and said with a detached formality that she was very sorry to have heard about his arm, how he had lost it in the war. She was, he remembered, as beautiful as ever, a little older and harder around the eyes, and it hurt him to look at her face and at her hair, which she wore in a braid down her back. Ishmael stood there looking pale and ill – he had a cold and a mild fever – with the sleeve of his mackinaw coat pinned up, his milk and crackers clutched in his hand, and stared long and hard at Hatsue’s baby while the grocery checker, Eleanor Hill, pretended not to notice that Hatsue had spoken of what others, including Eleanor, would not acknowledge – that Ishmael was missing an arm. ‘The Japs did it,’ Ishmael said flatly, still staring hard at the baby. ‘They shot my arm off. Japs.’

  Hatsue looked at him a moment longer, then turned toward Eleanor Hill again and opened up her coin purse. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ishmael immediately. ‘I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean what I said.’ But she showed no sign of having heard, and so he put down the crackers and milk and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said a second time, but she still didn’t turn to look at him, and she moved away from his hand. ‘I’m more than sorry. I’m miserable. Do you understand? I don’t mean what I say. You can’t trust me when I speak anymore. I just say things. I – ’

  Eleanor Hill was pretending, busily, that Ishmael, a war veteran, wasn’t standing in her presence speaking the words he was speaking. It was what he’d gotten when he spoke about himself, when he’d tried to say what he had to say; there was nothing he could easily explain to anyone, and nobody who wanted to listen. There were other boys who had been to the war, and he found that on occasion he could speak to them, but that didn’t mean anything. ‘I’m sorry, Hatsue,’ he said one more time. ‘I’m sorry about everything. All of it.’

  He’d left without buying the milk and crackers. He went home and wrote an apologetic letter, explaining at length that he was not himself, that he sometimes said what he did not mean, that he wished he had never said Jap in front of her, that he would never do so again. The letter sat in his desk drawer for two weeks before he threw it away.

  Despite himself he knew where she lived and which car she drove and when he saw her husband, Kabuo Miyamoto, he felt something tighten around his heart. He felt himself grow tight inside, and for a long time he could not sleep at night. He would lie awake until two o’clock in the morning, then turn a light on and attempt to read from a book or magazine. Gradually dawn came and he would not have slept. He would go out to wander the island’s trails in the early morning, at a slow pace. Once, so doing, he came across her. She was down on the beach at Fletcher’s Bay, raking for steamer clams busily. Her baby slept on a blanket beside her, underneath an umbrella. Ishmael had come up the beach deliberately, and squatted beside Hatsue while she raked clams free and dropped them into a bucket. ‘Hatsue,’ he’d pleaded. ‘Can I talk to you?’

  ‘I’m married,’ she’d said, without looking at him. ‘It isn’t right for us to be alone. It will look bad, Ishmael. People will talk.’

  ‘There’s no one here,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I’ve got to talk to you, Hatsue. You owe me that much, don’t you? Don’t you think you do?’
>
  ‘Yes,’ said Hatsue. ‘I do.’

  She turned away from him and looked at her baby. The sun had crept up onto the child’s face; Hatsue adjusted the beach umbrella.

  ‘I’m like a dying person,’ Ishmael said to her. ‘I haven’t been happy for a single moment since the day you left for Manzanar. It’s like carrying a weight around in my gut, a ball of lead or something. Do you know how that feels, Hatsue? Sometimes I think I’m going to go crazy, end up in the hospital in Bellingham. I’m crazy, I don’t sleep, I’m up all night. It never leaves me alone, this feeling. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it. I tell myself this can’t go on, but it goes on anyway. There isn’t anything I can do.‘

  Hatsue pushed the hair from her eyes with the back of her left wrist. ‘I’m sorry for you,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want your unhappiness. I never meant for you to suffer. But I don’t know what I can do for you now. I don’t know how I can help you.‘

  ‘You’ll think this is crazy,’ Ishmael said. ‘But all I want is to hold you. All I want is just to hold you once and smell your hair, Hatsue. I think after that I’ll be better.’

  Hatsue had looked at him, hard, for a long moment, the clamming rake clutched in her hand. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You know I can’t. I can never touch you, Ishmael. Everything has to be over between us. We both have to put it all behind us and go on, live our lives. There’s no halfway, from my point of view. I’m married, I have a baby, and I can’t let you hold me. So what I want you to do right now is get up and walk away from here and forget about me forever. You have to let go of me, Ishmael.’

  ‘I know you’re married,’ Ishmael had said. ‘I want to forget about you, I do. I think if you hold me I can start, Hatsue. Hold me once, and I’ll walk away and never speak to you again.’