Snow Falling on Cedars Read online

  San Piedro had too a brand of verdant beauty that inclined its residents toward the poetical. Enormous hills, soft green with cedars, rose and fell in every direction. The island homes were damp and moss covered and lay in solitary fields and vales of alfalfa, feed corn, and strawberries. Haphazard cedar fences lined the careless roads, which slid beneath the shadows of the trees and past the bracken meadows. Cows grazed, stinking of sweet dung and addled by summer blackflies. Here and there an islander tried his hand at milling sawlogs on his own, leaving fragrant heaps of sawdust and mounds of cedar bark at roadside. The beaches glistened with smooth stones and sea foam. Two dozen coves and inlets, each with its pleasant muddle of sailboats and summer homes, ran the circumference of San Piedro, an endless series of pristine anchorages.

  Inside Amity Harbor’s courthouse, opposite the courtroom’s four tall windows, a table had been set up to accommodate the influx of newspapermen to the island. The out-of-town reporters – one each from Bellingham, Anacortes, and Victoria and three from the Seattle papers – exhibited no trace of the solemnity evident among the respectful citizens in the gallery. They slumped in their chairs, rested their chins in their hands, and whispered together conspiratorially. With their backs only a foot from a steam radiator, the out-of-town reporters were sweating.

  Ishmael Chambers, the local reporter, found that he was sweating, too. He was a man of thirty-one with a hardened face, a tall man with the eyes of a war veteran. He had only one arm, the left having been amputated ten inches below the shoulder joint, so that he wore the sleeve of his coat pinned up with the cuff fastened to the elbow. Ishmael understood that an air of disdain, of contempt for the island and its inhabitants, blew from the knot of out-of-town reporters toward the citizens in the gallery. Their discourse went forward in a miasma of sweat and heat that suggested a kind of indolence. Three of them had loosened their ties just slightly; two others had removed their jackets. They were reporters, professionally jaded and professionally immune, a little too well traveled in the last analysis to exert themselves toward the formalities San Piedro demanded silently of mainlanders. Ishmael, a native, did not want to be like them. The accused man, Kabuo, was somebody he knew, somebody he’d gone to high school with, and he couldn’t bring himself, like the other reporters, to remove his coat at Kabuo’s murder trial. At ten minutes before nine that morning, Ishmael had spoken with the accused man’s wife on the second floor of the Island County Courthouse. She was seated on a hall bench with her back to an arched window, just outside the assessor’s office, which was closed, gathering herself, apparently. ‘Are you all right?’ he’d said to her, but she’d responded by turning away from him. ‘Please,’ he’d said. ‘Please, Hatsue.’

  She’d turned her eyes on his then. Ishmael would find later, long after the trial, that their darkness would beleaguer his memory of these days. He would remember how rigorously her hair had been woven into a black knot against the nape of her neck. She had not been exactly cold to him, not exactly hateful, but he’d felt her distance anyway. ‘Go away,’ she’d said in a whisper, and then for a moment she’d glared. He remained uncertain afterward what her eyes had meant – punishment, sorrow, pain. ‘Go away,’ repeated Hatsue Miyamoto. Then she’d turned her eyes, once again, from his.

  ‘Don’t be like this,’ said Ishmael.

  ‘Go away,’ she’d answered.

  ‘Hatsue,’ said Ishmael. ‘Don’t be like this.’

  ‘Go away,’ she’d said again.

  Now, in the courtroom, with sweat on his temples, Ishmael felt embarrassed to be sitting among the reporters and decided that after the morning’s recess he would find a more anonymous seat in the gallery. In the meantime he sat facing the wind-driven snowfall, which had already begun to mute the streets outside the courthouse windows. He hoped it would snow recklessly and bring to the island the impossible winter purity, so rare and precious, he remembered fondly from his youth.

  2

  The first witness called by the prosecutor that day was the county sheriff, Art Moran. On the morning Carl Heine died – September 16 – the sheriff was in the midst of an inventory at his office and had engaged the services of the new court stenographer, Mrs. Eleanor Dokes (who now sat primly below the judge’s bench recording everything with silent implacability), as an aide in this annual county-mandated endeavor. He and Mrs. Dokes had exchanged surprised glances when Abel Martinson, the sheriff’s deputy, reported over the newly purchased radio set that Carl Heine’s fishing boat, the Susan Marie, had been sighted adrift in White Sand Bay.

  ‘Abel said the net was all run out and drifting along behind,’ Art Moran explained. ‘I felt, well, concerned immediately.’

  ‘The Susan Marie was on the move?’ asked Alvin Hooks, the prosecutor, who stood with one foot perched on the witnesses’ podium as if he and Art were talking by a park bench.

  ‘That’s what Abel said.’

  ‘With its fishing lights on? Is that what Deputy Martinson reported?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘In daylight?’

  ‘Abel called in nine-thirty A.M., I believe.’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Alvin Hooks asked. ‘Gill nets, by law, must be on board by nine o’clock – is that right, Sheriff Moran?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said the sheriff. ‘Nine A.M.’

  The prosecutor swiveled with a faintly military flourish and executed a tight circle over the courtroom’s waxed floor, his hands against the small of his back neatly. ‘What did you do then?’ he inquired.

  ‘I told Abel to stay put. To stay where he was. That I would pick him up in the launch.’

  ‘You didn’t call the coast guard?’

  ‘Decided I’d hold off just yet. Decided to have a look myself.’

  Alvin Hooks nodded. ‘Was it your jurisdiction, sheriff?’

  ‘It’s a judgment call, Mr. Hooks,’ Art Moran said. ‘I felt it was the right thing to do.’

  The prosecutor nodded one more time and surveyed the members of the jury. He appreciated the sheriff’s answer; it cast a favorable moral light on his witness and gave him the authority of the conscientious man, for which there was ultimately no substitute.

  ‘Just tell the court your whole story,’ Alvin Hooks said. ‘The morning of September 16.’

  The sheriff stared at him doubtfully for a moment. By nature Art Moran was an uneasy person, nervous in the face of even trivial encounters. He’d come to his vocation as if driven ineluctably; he had never formed the intention of being sheriff, yet, to his astonishment, here he was. In his liver-colored uniform, black tie, and polished shoes he looked inevitably miscast in life, a man uncomfortable with the accoutrements of his profession, as if he had dressed for a costume party and now wandered about in the disguise. The sheriff was a lean figure, unimposing, who habitually chewed a stick of Juicy Fruit gum (though he wasn’t chewing any at the moment, mostly out of deference to the American legal system, which he believed in wholeheartedly despite its flaws). He’d lost much of his hair since turning fifty, and his belly, always undernourished in appearance, now suggested a shriveled emaciation.

  Art Moran had lain awake the night before fretting about his role in this trial and remembering the sequence of events with his eyes shut, as if they were occurring in a dream. He and his deputy, Abel Martinson, had taken the county launch into White Sand Bay on the morning of September 16. The tide, steadily on the rise, had turned about three and a half hours before, at six-thirty; by midmorning sunlight lay like a glare over the water, warming his back pleasantly. The preceding night a fog as palpable as cotton had hung suspended over Island County. Later it gently separated at the seams and became vast billows traveling above the sea instead of a still white miasma. Around the launch as it churned toward the Susan Marie the last remnants of this night fog sailed and drifted in shreds of vapor toward the sun’s heat.

  Abel Martinson, one hand on the launch’s throttle, the other on his knee, told Art that a Port Jens
en fisherman, Erik Syvertsen – Erik the younger, he pointed out – had come across the Susan Marie adrift off the south side of White Sand Point with her net set and, it appeared, no one on board. It was more than an hour and a half past dawn and the running lights had been left on. Abel had driven to White Sand Point and walked out to the end of the community pier with his binoculars dangling from his neck. Sure enough, the Susan Marie lay drifting on the tide well into the bay on an angle north by northwest, he’d found, and so he’d radioed the sheriff.

  In fifteen minutes they came abreast of the drifting boat and Abel turned back the throttle. In the calm of the bay their approach went smoothly; Art set the fenders out; and the two of them made fast their mooring lines with a few wraps each around the forward deck cleats. ‘Lights’re all on,’ observed Art, one foot on the Susan Marie’s gunnel. ‘Every last one of ’em, looks like.’

  ‘He ain’t here,’ replied Abel.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said Art.

  ‘Went over,’ Abel said. ‘I got this bad feeling.’

  Art winced at hearing this. ‘Let’s hope not,’ he urged. ‘Don’t say that.’

  He made his way just abaft of the cabin, then stood squinting up at the Susan Marie’s guys and stays and at the peaks of her stabilizer bars. The red and white mast lights had been left on all morning; the picking light and the jacklight at the end of the net both shone dully in the early sun. While Art stood there, pondering this, Abel Martinson dragged the hatch cover from the hold and called for him to come over.

  ‘You got something?’ Art asked.

  ‘Look here,’ answered Abel.

  Together they crouched over the square hold opening, out of which the odor of salmon flew up at them. Abel maneuvered his flashlight beam across a heap of inert, silent fish. ‘Silvers,’ he said. ‘Maybe fifty of ’em.’

  ‘So he picked his net least once,’ said Art.

  ‘Looks like it,’ answered Abel.

  Men had been known to fall into empty holds before, crack their heads, and pass out even in calm weather. Art had heard of a few such incidents. He looked in at the fish again.

  ‘What time you figure he put out last night?’

  ‘Hard to say. Four-thirty? Five?’

  ‘Where’d he go, you figure?’

  ‘Probably up North Bank,’ said Abel. ‘Maybe Ship Channel. Or Elliot Head. That’s where the fish been running.’

  But Art already knew about these things. San Piedro lived and breathed by the salmon, and the cryptic places where they ran at night were the subject of perpetual conversation. Yet it helped him to hear it aloud just now – it helped him to think more clearly.

  The two of them crouched by the hold a moment longer in a shared hiatus from their work. The still heap of salmon troubled Art in a way he could not readily articulate, and so he looked at it wordlessly. Then he rose, his knees creaking, and turned away from the dark hold.

  ‘Let’s keep looking,’ he suggested.

  ‘Right,’ said Abel. ‘Could be he’s up in his cabin, maybe. Knocked out one way or t’other.’

  The Susan Marie was a thirty-foot stern-picker – a standard, well-tended San Piedro gill-netter – with her cabin just abaft of midship. Art ducked through its stern-side entry and stood to port for a moment. In the middle of the floor – it was the first thing he noticed – a tin coffee cup lay tipped on its side. A marine battery lay just right of the wheel. There was a short bunk made up with a wool blanket to starboard; Abel ran his flashlight across it. The cabin lamp over the ship’s wheel had been left on; a ripple of sunlight, flaring through a window, shimmered on the starboard wall. The scene left Art with the ominous impression of an extreme, too-silent tidiness. A cased sausage hanging from a wire above the binnacle swayed a little as the Susan Marie undulated; otherwise, nothing moved. No sound could be heard except now and again a dim, far crackle from the radio set. Art, noting it, began to manipulate the radio dials for no other reason than that he didn’t know what else to do. He was at a loss.

  ‘This is bad,’ said Abel.

  ‘Take a look,’ answered Art. ‘I forgot – see if his dinghy’s over the reel.’

  Abel Martinson stuck his head out the entry. ‘It’s there, Art,’ he said. ‘Now what?’

  For a moment they stared at one another. Then Art, with a sigh, sat down on the edge of Carl Heine’s short bunk.

  ‘Maybe he crawled in under the decking,’ suggested Abel. ‘Maybe he had some kind of engine trouble, Art.’

  ‘I’m sitting on top of his engine,’ Art pointed out. “There’s no room for anyone to crawl around down there.’

  ‘He went over,’ said Abel, shaking his head.

  ‘Looks like it,’ answered the sheriff.

  They glanced at each other, then away again.

  ‘Maybe somebody took him off,’ suggested Abel. ‘He got hurt, radioed, somebody took him off. That – ’

  ‘They wouldn’t let the boat drift,’ put in Art. ‘Besides, we’d a heard about it by now.’

  ‘This is bad,’ repeated Abel Martinson.

  Art tucked another stick of Juicy Fruit between his teeth and wished this was not his responsibility. He liked Carl Heine, knew Carl’s family, went to church with them on Sundays. Carl came from old-time island stock; his grandfather, Bavarian born, had established thirty acres of strawberry fields on prime growing land in Center Valley. His father, too, had been a strawberry farmer before dying of a stroke in ’44. Then Carl’s mother, Etta Heine, had sold all thirty acres to the Jurgensen clan while her son was away at the war. They were hard-toiling, quiet people, the Heines. Most people on San Piedro liked them. Carl, Art recalled, had served as a gunner on the U. S. S. Canton, which went down during the invasion of Okinawa. He’d survived the war – other island boys hadn’t – and come home to a gill-netter’s life.

  On the sea Carl’s blond hair had gone russet colored. He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds, much of it carried in his chest and shoulders. On winter days, picking fish from his net, he wore a wool cap knitted by his wife and an infantryman’s battered field jacket. He spent no time at the San Piedro Tavern or drinking coffee at the San Piedro Cafe. On Sunday mornings he sat with his wife and children in a back pew of the First Hill Lutheran Church, blinking slowly in the pale sanctuary light, a hymnbook open in his large, square hands, a calm expression on his face. Sunday afternoons he squatted on the aft deck of his boat, silently and methodically untangling his gill net or knitting its flaws up patiently. He worked alone. He was courteous but not friendly. He wore rubber boots almost everywhere, like all San Piedro fishermen. His wife, too, came from old island people – the Varigs, Art remembered, hay farmers and shake cutters with a few stump acres on Cattle Point – and her father had passed away not so long ago. Carl had named his boat after his wife, and, in ’48, built a big frame house just west of Amity Harbor, including an apartment for his mother, Etta. But – out of pride, word had it – Etta would not move in with him. She lived in town, a stout, grave woman with a slight Teutonic edge to her speech, over Lottie Opsvig’s apparel shop on Main. Her son called at her door every Sunday afternoon and escorted her to his house for supper. Art had watched them trudge up Old Hill together, Etta with her umbrella turned against the winter rain, her free hand clutching at the lapels of a coarse winter coat, Carl with his hands curled up in his jacket pockets, his wool cap pulled to his eyebrows. All in all, Art decided, Carl Heine was a good man. He was silent, yes, and grave like his mother, but the war had a part in that, Art realized. Carl rarely laughed, but he did not seem, to Art’s way of thinking, unhappy or dissatisfied. Now his death would land hard on San Piedro; no one would want to fathom its message in a place where so many made their living fishing. The fear of the sea that was always there, simmering beneath the surface of their island lives, would boil up in their hearts again.

  ‘Well, look,’ said Abel Martinson, leaning in the cabin door while the boat shifted about. ‘Let’s get his net in, Art.’


  ‘Suppose we better,’ sighed Art. ‘All right. We’d better do it, then. But we’ll do it one step at a time.’

  ‘He’s got a power takeoff back there,’ Abel Martinson pointed out. ‘You figure he hasn’t run for maybe six hours. And all these lights been drawing off the battery. Better choke it up good, Art.’

  Art nodded and then turned the key beside the ship’s wheel. The solenoid kicked in immediately; the engine stuttered once and then began to idle roughly, rattling frantically beneath the floorboards. Art slowly backed the choke off.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Like that?’

  ‘Guess I was wrong,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘She sounds real good and strong.’

  They went out again, Art leading. The Susan Marie had veered off nearly perpendicular to the chop and angled, briefly, to starboard. With the thrust of the engine she’d begun to bobble a little, and Art, treading across the aft deck, stumbled forward and grabbed at a stanchion, scraping his palm at the heel of the thumb, while Abel Martinson looked on. He rose again, steadied himself with a foot on the starboard gunnel, and looked out across the water.

  The morning light had broadened, gained greater depth, and lay in a clean sheet across the bay, giving it a silver tincture. Not a boat was in sight except a single canoe traveling parallel to a tree-wreathed shoreline, children in life jackets at the flashing paddles a quarter mile off. They’re innocent, thought Art.

  ‘It’s good she’s come about,’ he said to his deputy. ‘Well need time to get this net in.’

  ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ answered Abel.