Snow Falling on Cedars (34 page)

‘I have no idea,’ said Sterling Whitman. ‘I’m a hematologist, not a detective.’

‘I’m not asking you to be a detective,’ Nels said. ‘I just want to know which is more
probable.’

‘The hand, I suppose,’ Sterling Whitman confessed. ‘The hand, I guess, would be more probable than the head.’

‘Thank you,’ answered Nels Gudmundsson. ‘I appreciate your having battled the elements to come here and tell us so.’ He turned away from the witness, made his way to Ed Soames, and handed him the fishing gaff. ‘You can put that away, Mr. Soames,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much. We’re done with that.’

Three fishermen – Dale Middleton, Vance Cope, and Leonard George – all testified for the court that on the evening of
September 15 they’d seen Carl Heine’s boat, the
Susan Marie
, with her net set on the fishing grounds at Ship Channel Bank; furthermore they’d seen Kabuo Miyamoto’s boat, the
Islander
, in the same vicinity at approximately the same time. Ship Channel, Leonard George explained, was like many other places island men netted salmon: a narrow and limited seafloor topography which forced you to fish within sight of other men and to move about with care lest, in the night fog general to Island County in early autumn, you motor across a set net and destroy it by winding it up in your propeller. That was why, even in the fog, Leonard had made out both the
Susan Marie
and the
Islander
between eight and eight-thirty at Ship Channel Bank: he recalled that as he cruised past he’d seen the
Islander
come about, that ten minutes later he’d come across the
Susan Marie
and seen that Carl Heine was backing net off his drum by motoring away from his jacklight. They’d been fishing, in short, the same waters, with Carl a bit farther toward the north and down current: a thousand yards closer to the shipping lanes that gave Ship Channel Bank its name.

Nels Gudmundsson asked Leonard George if it was common among gill-netters to board another’s boat at sea. ‘Absolutely not,’ replied Leonard. ‘There aren’t many reasons why a guy’d do that. If you’re stalled out and somebody’s bringing you a part maybe – that’s about it, no other reason. Maybe if you was hurt or broke down or somethin’. Otherwise you don’t tie up to nobody. You do your job, keep to yourself.’

‘Do men argue at sea?’ said Neb. ‘I’ve heard they do. That gill-netters do. Are there arguments out there, Mr. George?’

‘You bet there are,’ said Leonard. ‘A guy gets corked off he – ’

‘Corked off?’ interrupted Nels. ‘Can you explain that for us briefly?’

Leonard George answered that a gill net was constructed to have a top and a bottom; that the bottom of the net was called the lead line – bits of lead were crimped onto it in order to weight
it down – and that the top was known as the cork line: cork floats allowed it to stay on the surface, so that from a distance a gill net appeared as a line of cork with the stern of the boat at one end and a warning jacklight at the other. When a man set his wall of net up current from your own he’d ‘corked you off,’ stolen your fish by getting to them before they could get to you. It meant trouble, said Leonard: you had to pick up, motor past him, and set your net somewhere up current, in which case the other guy might decide to play leapfrog and force both of you to waste your fishing time. Still, in all of this, Leonard pointed out, no man ever boarded another’s boat. It wasn’t done; he’d never heard of it. You kept to yourself unless you had some kind of emergency and needed another man’s help.

Alvin Hooks called Army First Sergeant Victor Maples to the stand after that morning’s recess. Sergeant Maples wore his green dress uniform and the insignia of the Fourth Infantry Division. He wore his expert marksmanship and combat infantryman’s badges. The brass buttons on Sergeant Maples’s coat, the insignia on his collar, and the badges on his chest all caught the meager courtroom light and held it. Sergeant Maples was overweight by thirty-five pounds but still looked distinguished in his dress uniform. The extra weight was nicely distributed; Maples was a powerful man. He had short, thick arms, no neck, and a pudgy, adolescent face. His hair stood up in a razor cut.

First Sergeant Maples explained to the court that since 1946 he had been assigned to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, where he specialized in the training of combat troops. Prior to that he’d trained troops at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, before taking part in the Italian campaign in 1944 and ’45. Sergeant Maples had been wounded in fighting on the Arno River – he’d taken a German round in the small of his back which narrowly missed his spine – and had been awarded the Silver Star on account of it. He’d also, he said, been at Livorno and Luciana and seen the 442nd – the Nisei regiment to
which the defendant had been attached – in action along the Gothic Line.

Sergeant Maples had in his time trained thousands of men in hand-to-hand combat. Hand-to-hand was his specialty, he said; he’d worked in other areas of basic training but generally found his way back to it. Sergeant Maples recollected for the court his astonishment in early 1943 when the 442nd – composed of Nisei boys – began training at Camp Shelby. These were boys from the internment camps, enlistees headed for the European theater, and among them, Sergeant Maples recalled, was the defendant, Kabuo Miyamoto.

He remembered Kabuo from among the thousands who’d come his way because of a … peculiar episode. Ten squads of trainees had surrounded Sergeant Maples on the drill field at Camp Shelby one February afternoon – ten squads composed of Nisei boys, so that he found himself in the midst of a hundred Japanese faces while he explained the particulars of the bayonet. Sergeant Maples informed his trainees that it was the policy of the United States Army to preserve their lives until they reached the battlefield; that was why a wooden staff would be substituted for an actual weapon during drill sessions. Helmets would be worn as well.

The sergeant began to demonstrate bayonet thrusts, then asked for a volunteer. It was at this point, he told the court, that he came face to face with the defendant. A young man stepped forward into the ring of trainees and presented himself to the sergeant, bowing slightly before saluting and calling out loudly, ‘Sir!’ ‘First off,’ Sergeant Maples scolded him, ‘you don’t have to salute me or call me sir. I’m an enlisted man, just like you – a sergeant, not a warrant officer or a major. Second, nobody in this army bows to nobody. There’s plenty of officers who’ll expect a salute, but a bow? It isn’t
military.
Not
American
military. It isn’t done.’

Sergeant Maples gave Miyamoto a wooden staff and tossed him a sparring helmet. There was something aggressive in the way the boy had spoken, and Sergeant Maples had heard it.
He was vaguely aware of this particular young man, who had built a reputation during basic training as a thoroughly eager warrior, ready to kill and businesslike every bit of the time. Maples had seen many such boys come his way and was never cowed by their youthful swagger; he was only on rare occasions impressed or prepared to view them as his equal. ‘In combat your enemy won’t be stationary,’ he said now, looking the boy in the eye. ‘It’s one thing to work out on a dummy or a bag, another to spar with a trained human being who represents more accurately live movement. In this case,’ he told the gathered recruits, ‘our volunteer will seek to avoid the model bayonet thrusts put to him this afternoon.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto.

‘No more “sir,”’ Sergeant Maples replied. ‘That’s the last time with that.’

He explained to the court how astonished he was – how thoroughly astonished – to find he couldn’t hit the defendant. Kabuo Miyamoto hardly moved, and yet he slipped every thrust. The one hundred Nisei trainees looked on in silence and gave no indication that they approved of either man. Sergeant Maples fought on with his wooden staff until Kabuo Miyamoto knocked it from his hands.

‘Excuse me,’ said Miyamoto. He knelt, picked up the staff, and handed it to the sergeant. Once again, he bowed.

‘There’s no need to bow,’ the sergeant repeated. ‘I already told you about that.’

‘I do it out of habit,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I’m used to bowing when I’m sparring somebody.’ Then, suddenly, he brought his wooden staff up. He looked Sergeant Maples in the eye and smiled.

Sergeant Maples acquiesced to the inevitable and did combat with the defendant that afternoon. It lasted all of three seconds. On his first rush the sergeant was swept off his feet, then felt his head pinned to the ground with the point of the staff, then the staff was withdrawn, the defendant bowed and picked him
up. ‘Excuse me, sergeant,’ he’d said afterward. ‘Your staff, sergeant.’ He’d handed it to him.

After that Sergeant Maples availed himself of the opportunity to study
kendo
with an expert. Sergeant Maples wasn’t stupid – he told the court this about himself without a trace of irony – and so he learned all he could from Miyamoto, including the importance of bowing. Sergeant Maples became a master with time and after the war taught
kendo
techniques to the army rangers at Fort Sheridan. From his point of view as an expert in the ancient Japanese art of stick fighting, Sergeant Maples could say with certainty that the defendant was eminently capable of killing a man far larger than himself with a fishing gaff. In fact, there were few men known to him who could ably defend themselves against such an attack by Kabuo Miyamoto – certainly a man with no training in
kendo
had little chance of warding him off. He was, in Sergeant Maples’s experience, a man both technically proficient at stick fighting and willing to inflict violence on another man. He had made, the record showed, an excellent soldier. No, it would not surprise Sergeant Victor Maples to hear that Kabuo Miyamoto had killed a man with a fishing gaff. He was highly capable of such a deed.

Susan Marie Heine had been a widow for nearly three months by the time of Kabuo Miyamoto’s murder trial but had not grown very much accustomed to it yet and still passed long hours – especially at night – during which she could think of nothing but Carl and the fact that he had gone out of her existence. In the gallery, with her sister on one side and her mother on the other, dressed in black from head to foot and with her eyes shrouded behind a chenille-dot veil, Susan Marie looked mournfully attractive: she exuded a blond, woeful distress that caused the reporters to turn in her direction and ponder the propriety of speaking intimately with her under the guise of professional necessity. The young widow’s thick hair had been plaited and pinned up beneath her hat so that the alabaster neck Art Moran so much admired when Susan Marie poured coffee at church socials lay exposed to the crowded courtroom. The neck and the plaits of hair and the white hands folded decorously in her lap all stood in sharp contrast to her black mourning outfit and gave Susan Marie the air of an unostentatious young German baroness who had perhaps just recently lost her husband but had not in the face of it forgotten how to dress well, even when she dressed to suggest grief. And it was grief, foremost, that Susan Marie suggested. Those who had known her for a long while recognized that even her face had changed. The superficial among them attributed this to the fact that she’d neglected to eat heartily since Carl died – shadows had formed just under her cheekbones – but others recognized it as a deeper alteration, one that involved her spirit. The pastor at the First Hill Lutheran Church had on four successive Sundays asked his congregation
to pray not only for Carl Heine’s soul but for Susan Marie’s ‘deliverance from grief in the course of time’ as well. In pursuit of this latter end, the church women’s auxiliary had provided Susan Marie and her children with a straight month’s worth of hot suppers in casserole dishes, and Einar Petersen had seen to it that groceries were delivered to her kitchen door. It was through food that the island expressed its compassion for Susan Marie in her widowhood.

Alvin Hooks, the prosecutor, knew well the value of a Susan Marie Heine. He had called to the witness box the county sheriff and the county coroner, the murdered man’s mother and the bent-over Swede from whom the murdered man had planned to buy his father’s old farm. He had proceeded to a variety of secondary witnesses – Sterling Whitman, Dale Middleton, Vance Cope, Leonard George, Sergeant Victor Maples – and now he would finish matters by presenting the wife of the murdered man, a woman who had already done much good merely sitting in the gallery where the jurors could view her. The men especially would not wish to betray such a woman with a not-guilty verdict at the end of things. She would persuade them not precisely with what she had to say but with the entirety of who she was.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 9, Kabuo Miyamoto had stood at her doorstep and asked to speak with her husband. It was a cloudless day of the sort San Piedro rarely saw in September – this year there’d been an early string of them, though – a day of deep heat but with an onshore breeze that tossed the leaves in the alders and even ripped a few loose to fall earthward. One minute it was silent, the next a rush of wind came up from off the water smelling of salt and seaweed, and the roar of the leaves in the trees was as loud as waves breaking on a beach. A gust caught Kabuo Miyamoto’s shirt as he stood on the porch so that the collar of it brushed his neck for a moment and the shoulders ballooned out, filled with air. Then the wind died and his shirt settled, and she asked him to come in and sit in the front room; she would go, she said, to find her husband.

The Japanese man had seemed uncertain about entering her house that afternoon. ‘I can wait on the porch, Mrs. Heine,’ he suggested. ‘It’s a nice afternoon. I’ll wait outside.’

‘Nonsense,’ she replied, and stepped aside from the door. She gestured in the direction of the living room. ‘You come in and make yourself comfortable. Get out of the sun and sit, why don’t you? It’s nice and cool inside.’

He looked at her, blinked, but took only one step. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful house.’

‘Carl built it,’ Susan Marie answered. ‘Please come in now. Sit.’