Snow Falling on Cedars (20 page)

In August he’d taken his family to Lanheedron Island. They’d tied off to a float, and he’d rowed them up onto Sugar Sand Beach in the skiff. His daughters stood in the surf and poked at jellyfish with sticks and collected sand dollars; then they followed the beach creek up through a dell, Kabuo carrying the baby on his right arm, until they came to a waterfall, a cascade tumbling from a wall of moss. They ate their lunch there in the shadows of the hemlocks and gathered salmonberries. Hatsue found under birch trees a half-dozen destroying angels and pointed them out to her daughters. They were pure white and lovely, she explained, but fatal to eat. She pointed out, too, the maidenhair fern nearby; the black stems, she said, retained their shine in a pine needle basket’s weave.

He’d admired her fully on that day. She collected the stems of wild ginger for seasoning rice and yarrow leaves for tea. On the beach she dug butter clams with a pointed stick, raking an arc in front of her. She found sea glass and a fossilized crab leg embedded in a concretion. She doused the baby with seawater. The girls helped Kabuo gather beach wood for a fire when evening came up. At the last of dusk they launched their skiff again. His oldest daughter hooked a true cod in the kelp beds off Lanheedron. He filleted it on the deck while Hatsue caught another on a hand line. They ate at sea – the cod, the clams, ginger rice, yarrow tea. His middle daughter and the baby slept on his bunk, his oldest daughter manned the wheel. Kabuo and Hatsue went forward. He stood with his chest against her back and his hands in the rigging until the lights of Amity Harbor came up to the south, and then he went in and repositioned the
Islander
in order to take the channel head on. His daughter leaned against him after he took the wheel from her, and he came into the harbor that way at midnight, the girl’s head against his arm.

Then he remembered strawberry fields from before Manzanar
and he was in them as he’d always been, a sea of strawberries, rows and rows, a labyrinth of runners as intricate as a network of arteries feeding on the surface of a dozen farms he knew from childhood. He was in these mounded rows, stooped and picking with the sun on his neck, low against the land in a sea of green and red with the smell of the earth and its berries rising like a mist, filling by the labor of his hands the twelve woven pine baskets in his caddy. He saw his wife before she’d married him, he saw her picking at Ichikawas’ farm, how he’d come toward her carrying his caddy and as if by accident, by happenstance, how she hadn’t seen him coming, intent on her work, bent to it, but at the last minute lifted her black eyes, lissome as ever, continuously picking – berries lay gently like red gems between her fingers – and while she met his eyes fed one of her woven pine baskets, three of which already lay full on the caddy, mounded over with ripened fruit. He’d squatted down across from her and, picking, took her in – how she squatted with her chin near her kneecaps, her hair woven tautly into a long, thick rope, the sweat against her forehead and the tendrils of hair that had escaped from their arrangement – loose strands fell across her cheeks and nose. She was sixteen. Low to the ground, folded together with her breasts against her thighs, she wore woven sandals and a red muslin summer dress, its narrow straps running over her shoulders. He saw again the strength of her legs, the brown of her ankles and calves, the suppleness of her spine, the film of sweat at her throat. Then it was evening, and he’d left the South Beach wood path to look at her home of worn cedar slats and across the fields to where she lived: fields circumscribed by tall cedar trees and lit by spindly moonlight. A kerosene lantern flickered orange in the window of Hatsue’s home, her door stood open, ajar ten inches, and an angle of lantern light spilled across her porch. Crickets and night toads, the brattle of a dog, laundry billowing on a line against the night breeze. And again he breathed in the green in the strawberry runners, the rain in the cedar duff, and the salt water. She padded toward him with a bucket full of kitchen scraps, her
sandals squeaking, moving toward the compost heap, and on her return trip she’d passed between the rows of raspberries. He watched while she held her hair back with one hand, the other moving in search of the sweetest fruit, grazing among the canes. Her heels lifted from the sandals now and then. She slid the berries in between her lips, still holding her hair, the canes rebounding in quiet arcs when she freed the berry caps from their cores. He stood watching and imagined that if he kissed her that night the taste of the raspberries would be cool in his mouth.

He saw her just as he had seen her in history class, a pencil between her teeth, one hand laid against the nape of her neck, lost behind her effusive hair. She walked through the halls with her books pressed against her breasts, in pleated skirt, argyle sweater, white bobby socks folded down crisply above the polished onyx buckles of her shoes. She looked at him and then away again quickly, saying nothing when he passed by.

He remembered Manzanar, the dust in the barracks, in the tarpapered shacks and cafeteria; even the bread tasted gritty. They’d worked tending eggplants and lettuces in the camp garden. They’d been paid little, the hours were long, they’d been told it was their duty to work hard. He and Hatsue spoke of little things at first, then of the San Piedro fields they’d left behind and the smell of ripening strawberries. He had begun to love her, to love more than just her beauty and grace, and when he saw that in their hearts they shared the same dream he felt a great certainty about her. They kissed in the back of a crew truck coming into camp one night, and the warm wet taste of her, however brief, brought her down for him from the world of angels and into the world of human beings. In this way his love deepened. Working in the gardens he would pass her by and, for a moment, slide one hand around her waist. She would squeeze his hand between her fingers, which had grown more callused and hard at Manzanar, and he would squeeze back, and they would return to their weeding. The wind blew desert dust in their faces and dried their skin and turned their hair to wire.

He remembered the expression on Hatsue’s face when he told her he had enlisted. It was not the being gone, she said – though the being gone was a horrible thing – it was more that he might not ever return, or that he might return not himself. Kabuo had not made promises to her – he could not say if he was coming back, or if he would come back the same man. There was this matter of honor, he’d explained to her, and he had no choice but to accept the duty the war required of him. At first she had refused to understand this and had insisted that duty was less important than love and she hoped Kabuo felt the same way. But he could not bring himself to agree with this; love went deep and meant life itself, but honor could not be turned from. He was not who he was if he didn’t go to war, and would not be worthy of her.

She turned from him and tried to stay away, and for three days they didn’t speak. At last he’d come to her, at dusk, in the gardens, and said that he loved her more than anything in the world and that he hoped only that she would understand why it was he had to leave. He asked for nothing else from her, only this acknowledgment of who he was, how his soul was shaped. Hatsue stood with her long-handled hoe and said that she had learned from Mrs. Shigemura that character was always destiny. He would have to do what he must do, and she would have to do the same.

He’d nodded and exerted himself to show nothing. Then he turned and walked between the rows of eggplants. He was twenty yards off when she called his name and asked if he would marry her before leaving.
‘Why do you want to marry me?’
he asked, and her answer came back,
‘To hold a part of you.’
She dropped the hoc and walked the twenty yards to hold him in her arms.
‘It’s my character, too,’
she whispered.
‘It’s my destiny now to love you.’

It had been, he saw now, a war marriage, hurried into because there was no choice and because both of them felt the rightness of it. They had not known each other more than a few months, though he had always admired her from a distance, and it seemed
to him, when he thought about it, that their marriage had been meant to happen. His parents approved, and hers approved, and he was happy to leave for the war in the knowledge that she was waiting for him and would be there when he returned. And then he had returned, a murderer, and her fear that he would no longer be himself was realized.

He remembered, too, his father’s face, and the sword his father kept inside a wooden chest in the days before Pearl Harbor. A
katana
made by the swordsmith Masamune, it had been in the Miyamoto family, it was said, for six centuries. His father kept it sheathed and rolled in cloth, an undecorated and highly useful weapon. Its beauty lay in its simplicity, the plainness of its curve; even its wooden scabbard was spare and plain. His father had taken it, along with other things – his wooden
kendo
practice swords, his
sageo,
his
obi,
his
naginata,
his
hakama
pants, his
bokken –
and buried them one night in a strawberry field, laid them carefully wrapped in a hole along with the dynamite he’d used to clear stumps, a case full of books and scrolls written in Japanese, and a photograph taken of Kabuo at the San Piedro Japanese Community Center dressed in the feudal costume of a
bugeisha
and wielding a
kendo
stick.

Kabuo’s training at
kendo
had begun when he was seven. His father had taken him one Saturday to the community center hall, where a
dojo
had been established in a corner of the gym. They knelt before an alcove at the back of the room and contemplated a shelf on which small bowls of uncooked rice had been neatly arranged. Kabuo learned to bow from a seated position. While he sat on his heels his father explained softly the meaning of
zenshin,
which the boy understood to mean a constant awareness of potential danger. His father finished by repeating the word twice –
‘zenshin! zenshin!’ –
then took down a wooden pole from the wall and, before Kabuo knew what had happened, slammed him with it in the solar plexus.

‘Zenshin!’
said Zenhichi, while the boy caught his breath. ‘Didn’t you say you understood?’

His father said that if he was to learn
kendo
more would be
expected of him than of the average person. Did he wish to learn anyway? The choice was his. He should take some time to consider it.

When Kabuo was eight his father put a weapon in his hands for the first time – a
bokken.
They stood in the strawberry fields early one July morning just after picking season was finished. The
bokken,
a curved piece of cherry wood three feet long, had been Kabuo’s great-grandfather’s, a man who had been a samurai before the Meiji Restoration and later – after the wearing of swords was outlawed – a farmer of government rice lands on Kyushu for ten days before he joined two hundred other rebellious samurai in Kumamoto. They formed themselves into the League of the Divine Tempest and attacked an imperial garrison with swords aloft, having fasted for three days. Its defenders, wielding rifles, killed all but twenty-nine with their opening volley; the survivors committed suicide on the battlefield, including Kabuo’s great-grandfather.

‘You come from a family of samurai,’ Kabuo’s father said to him in Japanese. ‘Your great-grandfather died because he could not stop being one. It was his bad fortune to live at a time when the samurai were no longer necessary. He could not adapt to this, and his anger at the world overwhelmed him. I remember what an angry man he was, Kabuo. He lived for revenge against the Meiji. When they told him he could no longer wear his sword in public he conspired to kill men he hardly knew – government officials, men with families who lived near us, who were kind to us, whose children we played with. He became irrational in his behavior and spoke of purifying himself in such a manner that he would afterward be invulnerable to the Meiji rifles. He was always gone at night. We didn’t know where he went. My grandmother bit her nails. She argued with him when he came home in the mornings, but he wouldn’t change his ways or explain. His eyes were red, his face rigid. He sat eating from his bowl in silence, wearing his sword in the house. It was said that he had joined other samurai who had been displaced by the Meiji. They roamed the roads disguised, swords in hand,
killing government officials. They were bandits, thieves, and renegades. My grandfather – I remember this – was happy to hear of Okubo Toshimichi’s assassination, the man who had been responsible for the confiscation of his master’s castle and the destruction of his master’s army. He smiled, showed his teem, and drank.

‘My grandfather was an expert swordsman,’ Zenhichi had explained, ‘but his anger overwhelmed him in the end. It is ironic, because how often did he tell me, when I was your age and he was a contented and peaceful man, of the kind of sword a man should wield? “
The sword that gives life, not the sword that takes life, is the goal of the samurai,”
my grandfather said then. The goal of the sword is to give life, not to take it.

‘You can be very good with the
bokken
if you concentrate,’ said Kabuo’s father. ‘You have it in you. You have only to decide to learn – now, when you are eight.’

‘I want to,’ replied Kabuo.

‘I know you do,’ his father said. ‘But look, your hands.’

Kabuo adjusted them.

‘Your feet,’ said his father. ‘The front turned in more. Too much weight on the back.’

They began to work on the vertical stroke, moving along between the strawberries, the boy advancing, the man retreating, the two of them together in it. ‘The
bokken
strikes,’ Kabuo’s father said. ‘The hips and stomach cut. You must tighten the stomach muscles as the stroke advances. No, you’re locking your knees – they must give when you strike. Elbow soft, too, or there is no follow-through, the
bokken
is cut off from the power of the body. Hips sink, knees and elbows go soft, stomach is hard, cut, turn, again, strike … ’