Snow Falling on Cedars (19 page)

He’d remembered, too, that the Japanese man had worked for him years before, part of a crew that put in his raspberries in 1939. Ole remembered him pounding home cedar posts for raspberry canes, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, shirtless, swinging a maul. He must have been sixteen or seventeen.

He remembered seeing him early in the morning, too, swinging a wooden sword in the fields. The boy’s father, he remembered, was Zeneechee, something like that. He never could pronounce it.

On the porch he’d asked Kabuo about his father, but the man had long passed away.

The Japanese man had asked about the land then, and asserted his wish to buy the seven acres his family had once held.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t for sale,’ Liesel had said. ‘It’s already been sold, you see. Somebody else came by this morning. I’m sorry to tell you, Kabuo.’

‘Yes,’ said Ole. ‘We’re sorry.’

The Japanese man had stiffened. In a moment the politeness
went from his face so that Ole could no longer read him. ‘It’s sold?’ he said. ‘Already?’

‘Yes,’ said Liesel. ‘Just like that. We’re sorry to disappoint you.’

‘All of it?’ asked the Japanese man.

‘Yes,’ said Liesel. ‘We’re very sorry. We didn’t even have time to take our sign down.’

The stiff expression of Kabuo Miyamoto’s face didn’t change even for a second. ‘Who bought it?’ he said. ‘I want to talk to them.’

‘Etta Heine’s son Carl,’ said Liesel. ‘He came by around ten o’clock.’

‘Carl Heine,’ the Japanese man answered, with a hint of anger in his voice.

Ole had suggested that Kabuo Miyamoto go to see Carl Heine about the matter. Perhaps something could be worked out.

Liesel shook her head and wrung her hands in her apron. ‘We’ve sold it,’ she’d repeated apologetically. ‘Ole and Carl shook hands, you see. We accepted earnest money. We’re bound to our agreement. It’s sold, you see. We’re sorry.’

The Japanese man had stood then. ‘I should have come earlier,’ he said.

The next day Carl had come by again – Liesel phoned him about Kabuo Miyamoto – to take the sign down from the barn. Ole, leaning on his cane, stood below and told him about the Japanese man’s visit. Carl, he remembered, had been interested in the details of it. He nodded his head and listened closely. Ole Jurgensen told everything – the way the politeness had gone out of the Japanese man, the unreadable Japanese expression on his face when he heard that the land he coveted had been sold. Carl Heine nodded again and again and then came down from the ladder with the sign. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ he’d said.

After the noon recess was called that day Kabuo Miyamoto ate lunch in his cell, as he had seventy-seven times. The cell was one of two in the courthouse basement and had neither bars nor windows. It was big enough for a low military surplus bunk, a toilet, a sink, and a nightstand. There was a drain in the corner of its concrete floor and a foot-square grate in its door. Other than this there were no openings or apertures through which light could seep. A naked bulb hung overhead, and Kabuo could turn it on and off by screwing and unscrewing it in its socket. Yet before the first week was over he’d discovered in himself a preference for darkness. His eyes adjusted to it. He was less troubled by the closeness of his cell walls with the naked light put out, less conscious that he was jailed.

Kabuo sat on the edge of his bunk with his lunch perched in front of him on the nightstand. A peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, two carrot sticks, a mound of lime gelatin, a tin cup of milk, served on a cafeteria tray. At this particular moment his light was on. He’d turned it on in order to see what he was eating but also in order to look at his face in a hand-held shaving mirror. His wife had said he looked like one of Tojo’s soldiers. He wanted to see if this was so.

He sat with his tray just in front of his knees, confronting his reflection in the hand mirror. He could see how his face had once been a boy’s face and how on top of this was laid the face of his war years – a face he was no longer surprised to see, though it had astonished him greatly in the beginning. He had come home from the war and seen in his own eyes the disturbed empty reaches he’d seen in the eyes of other soldiers he’d known.
They did not so much seem to stare right through things as to stare past the present state of the world into a world that was permanently in the distance for them and at the same time more immediate than the present. Kabuo remembered much in this manner. Under the surface of his daily life was a life he lived as if underwater. Kabuo remembered how under the helmet of the soldier on the wooded hillside, underneath the steady droning of the bees, it had turned out to be a very young boy he had shot directly through the groin. When Kabuo approached from one side the boy had stared up at him and spoke through clenched teeth in tremulous German. Then the boy panicked and moved his hand toward his gun, and Kabuo shot him one more time in the heart at point-blank range. Yet still the boy refused to die and lay on his back between two trees while Kabuo stood five feet away, frozen, his rifle shouldered still. The boy held his chest in both of his hands and exerted himself to raise his head from the ground, at the same time gathering himself to take a breath, and sucked in the hot afternoon air. Then he spoke again, between his teeth, and it was clear to Kabuo that he was begging, pleading, that he wanted the American who had killed him to save him – he had no choice but to ask him for this, nobody else was present. All of it was too much, and when the boy stopped talking his chest twitched a half-dozen times and blood ran from his mouth and down his cheeks. Then Kabuo went forward with his rifle and squatted beside the German boy, on his right, and the boy put his hand on Kabuo’s boot and shut his eyes and gave out. The tension stayed in his mouth for a while, and Kabuo watched until it faded. The smell of breakfast soon rose from the German boy’s bowels.

Kabuo sat in his prison cell now and examined his reflection carefully. It was not a thing he had control over. His face had been molded by his experiences as a soldier, and he appeared to the world seized up inside precisely because this was how he felt. It was possible for him all these years later to think of the German boy dying on the hillside and to feel his own heart pound as it
had as he squatted against the tree, drinking from his canteen, his ears ringing, his legs trembling. What could he say to people on San Piedro to explain the coldness he projected? The world was unreal, a nuisance that prevented him from focusing on his memory of that boy, on the flies in a cloud over his astonished face, the pool of blood filtering out of his shirt and into the forest floor, smelling rank, the sound of gunfire from the hillside to the east – he’d left there, and then he hadn’t left. And still there had been more murders after this, three more, less difficult than the first had been but murders nonetheless. So how to explain his face to people? After a while, motionless in his cell, he began to feel objective about his face, and then he saw what Hatsue did. He had meant to project to the jurors his innocence, he’d wanted them to see that his spirit was haunted, he sat upright in the hope that his desperate composure might reflect the shape of his soul. This was what his father had taught him: the greater the composure, the more revealed one was, the truth of one’s inner life was manifest – a pleasing paradox. It had seemed to Kabuo that his detachment from this world was somehow self-explanatory, that the judge, the jurors, and the people in the gallery would recognize the face of a war veteran who had forever sacrificed his tranquillity in order that they might have theirs. Now, looking at himself, scrutinizing his face, he saw that he appeared defiant instead. He had refused to respond to anything that happened, had not allowed the jurors to read in his face the palpitations of his heart.

Yet listening to Etta Heine on the witness stand had moved Kabuo to bitter anger. He had felt his carefully constructed exterior crumbling when she spoke to the court so insultingly about his father. The desire had come over him to deny what she said, to interrupt her testimony with the truth about his father, a strong and tireless man, honest to a fault, kind and humble as well. But all of this he suppressed.

Now, in his jail cell, he stared into the mirror at the mask he wore, which had been arranged by its wearer to suggest his war and the strength he’d mustered to face its consequences but
which instead communicated haughtiness, a cryptic superiority not only to the court but to the prospect of death the court confronted him with. The face in the hand mirror was none other than the face he had worn since the war had caused him to look inward, and though he exerted himself to rearrange it – because this face was a burden to wear – it remained his, unalterable finally. He knew himself privately to be guilty of murder, to have murdered men in the course of war, and it was this guilt – he knew no other word – that lived in him perpetually and that he exerted himself not to communicate. Yet the exertion itself communicated guilt, and he could see no way to stop it. He could not change how his face arranged itself while he sat with his hands on the defendant’s table with , his back to his fellow islanders. In his face, he knew, was his fate, as Nels Gudmundsson had asserted at the start of things: ‘There are facts,’ he said, ‘and the jurors listen to them, but even more, they watch you. They watch to see what happens to your face, how it changes when witnesses speak. For them, at bottom, the answer is in how you appear in the courtroom, what you look like, how you act.’

He liked this man, Nels Gudmundsson. He had begun to like him on the September afternoon when he first appeared at his cell door carrying a folded chessboard beneath his arm and a Havana cigar box full of chess pieces. He’d offered Kabuo a cigar from his shirt pocket, lit his own, then brought two candy bars out of the box and dropped them on the bunk beside Kabuo without acknowledging that he had done so. It was his way of being charitable.

‘I’m Nels Gudmundsson, your attorney,’ he said. ‘I’ve been appointed by the court to represent you. I – ’

‘I didn’t do it,’ Kabuo had said. ‘I’m not guilty of anything.’

‘Look,’ said Nels. ‘I’ll tell you what. We can worry about that later, all right? I’ve been trying to find someone with the free time to play chess for fifty years now, even more. Seems to me you just might be the fellow.’

‘I am,’ said Kabuo. ‘But – ’

‘You were in the service,’ said Nels. ‘My guess is you play a mean game of chess. Chess, checkers, rummy, bridge, hearts, dominoes, cribbage. And what about solitaire?’ added Nels. ‘Solitaire might be the thing for you in here.’

‘Never liked solitaire,’ Kabuo answered. ‘Besides, a guy who starts playing solitaire in jail is just asking to get depressed.’

‘Never thought of that,’ said Nels. ‘We’ll have to get you out of here, that’s all there is to it.’ He smiled.

Kabuo nodded. ‘Can you?’

‘They’re not budging just now on anything, Kabuo. You’re here until your trial, I think.’

‘There shouldn’t even
be
a trial,’ said Kabuo.

‘Alvin Hooks would disagree,’ said Nels. ‘He’s putting his case together. He’s serious about murder in the first degree, and he’s serious about asking for the death penalty. We should be, too – we should get serious. We have a lot of work to do, you and I. But first, what about chess?’

The death penalty,
Kabuo said to himself. He was a Buddhist and believed in the laws of karma, so it made sense to him that he might pay for his war murders: everything comes back to you, nothing is accidental. The fear of death grew in him. He thought of Hatsue and of his children and it seemed to him he must be exiled from them – because he felt for them so much love – in order to pay his debts to the dead he had left on the ground in Italy.

‘You sit on the bunk,’ he said to Nels, trying to calm himself. ‘We’ll draw up the nightstand for the board.’

‘Fine,’ Nels said. ‘Just fine.’

The old man’s hands fumbled setting up the chess pieces. They were darkly spotted, and the skin, translucent in appearance, was prominently veined.

‘White or black?’ Nels asked.

‘Advantages to both,’ replied Kabuo. ‘You choose, Mr. Gudmundsson.’

‘Most players prefer to open,’ Nels said. ‘Why is that, anyway?’

‘Must see some advantage in going first,’ said Kabuo. ‘Must believe in taking the offensive.’

‘And you don’t?’ inquired Nels.

Kabuo took up a pawn in each hand and put them behind his back. ‘Best way to settle the problem,’ he said. ‘This way, all you have to do is guess.’ He held his closed fists in front of Nels.

‘Left,’ the old man said. ‘If we’re going to leave it to chance, left is as good as right. They’re both the same, this way.’

‘You don’t prefer it?’ asked Kabuo. ‘You prefer white? Or black?’

‘Open your hands,’ Nels answered, and tucked his cigar in between his teeth high up on the right side – dentures, it occurred to Kabuo.

As it turned out, the first move was Nels’s. As it turned out, the old man never castled. He had no interest in an endgame. His strategy was to give up points for position, to give up men in the early going in return for an undefeatable board posture. He’d won, even though Kabuo could see what he was doing. There was no fiddling around. The game, quite suddenly, was over.

Kabuo set the hand mirror on his tray of food now and ate half of the lime gelatin. He chewed down his carrot sticks and what remained of his sandwich, then poured out the tin cup of milk and filled it twice with water. He washed his hands, removed his shoes, and lay down on the jail bed. After a while he stood up again and turned the lightbulb in its socket. Then in the darkness the accused man lay down again, shut his eyes, and dreamed.

He dreamed without sleeping – daydreams, waking dreams, as had come to him often in his jail cell. In this manner he escaped from its walls and roamed in freedom along San Piedro’s wood paths, along the verges of its autumn pastures crusted over with skins of hoarfrost; he followed in his mind certain remnants of trail that gave out suddenly in blackberry riots or in fields of unexpected Scotch broom. In his thoughts were vestiges of old skid roads and forgotten farm paths that bled into vales of
ghost fern and hollows filled with skunk cabbage. Sometimes these trails faded at mud bluffs overlooking the sea; other times they wandered down onto beaches where thick cedars, sapling alders, and vine maples, toppled by winter tides, lay with the tips of their desiccated branches buried in sand and gravel. The waves brought seaweed in and draped it across the downed trees in thick oozing skeins. Then his mind moved outward, and Kabuo was at sea again, his net set, the salmon running, and he was standing on the foredeck of the
Islander
with the breeze in his face, the phosphorus in the water brilliant before him, the whitecaps silver in the moonlight. From his bunk in the Island County Jail he felt the sea again and the swells under his boat as it rode over the foam; with his eyes shut he smelled cold salt and the odor of salmon in the hold, heard the net winch working and the deep note of the engine. Rafts of seabirds rose off the water, making way in the first misty light with the
Islander
bound for home on a cool morning, half a thousand kings in her hold, the whine of wind in her rigging. At the cannery he held each fish in his hands before tossing it up and over the side – lambent chinooks, lithe and sleek, as long as his arm and weighing a fourth what he did, slick, glassy eyes held open. He could feel them in his hands again while overhead the gulls flew tangents. When he put off and motored for the docks the gulls followed on high with their breasts opened to the wind. Then he was amid a flock of gulls while he swabbed the deck of the
Islander.
He heard their squawking and watched them circle low, angling for scraps, while Marlin Teneskold or William Gjovaag shot at them with a side-by-side so that the gulls settled out on the water. The gun’s report echoed from the hills of Amity Harbor, and then Kabuo remembered what he had missed this year: the birch and alder going golden, the red autumn hue of the vine maples, the rust and russet colors of October, the cider press, pumpkins, and baskets of young zucchini squash. The smell of dying leaves in the motionless gray morning as he shambled up onto the porch after a night’s fishing, and the full, fine growth in the cedar trees. The
scritching
sound of leaves underfoot; leaves mashed
into paste after rains. He’d
missed
fall rains, the water dripping along the knobs of his spine and mixing with the sea spray in his hair – things he hadn’t known he’d miss.