Snow Falling on Cedars (41 page)

Helen Chambers was homely and dignified in the manner of
Eleanor Roosevelt. Her homeliness composed a form of beauty; she was quite impressive to look at. Her nose was broad and her forehead stately. For her shopping trips to town she wore a camel’s-hair coat and a boater festooned with ribbon and striped lace. Her husband’s death had inspired in her a greater attentiveness to her books and flowers and a greater need for people. Ishmael had stood beside her at church while she greeted her friends and acquaintances with the sort of cordiality and genuine feeling he couldn’t muster in himself. Often he ate lunch with her afterward. He had explained to his mother, when she asked him to say grace, that like his father before him he was an incorrigible agnostic and suspected God was a hoax. ‘Suppose you had to choose right now,’ his mother had once replied. ‘Supposing somebody put a gun to your head and forced you to choose, Ishmael. Is there a God or isn’t there?’

‘Nobody has a gun to my head,’ Ishmael had answered her. ‘I don’t
have
to choose, do I? That’s the whole point. I don’t have to know for certain one way or the other if – ’

‘Nobody
knows
, Ishmael. What do you
believe’

‘I don’t believe anything. It isn’t in me. Besides, I don’t know what you mean by God. If you tell me what he is. Mom, I’ll tell you if I think he exists.’

‘Everybody knows what God is,’ said his mother. ‘You feel what God is, don’t you?’

‘I don’t feel what God is,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I don’t feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me – it’s not something I have a choice about. Isn’t a feeling like that supposed to
happen?
Isn’t it just supposed to happen? I can’t make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us – we can’t feel Him.’

‘You felt Him as a child,’ his mother said. ‘I remember, Ishmael. You felt Him.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Ishmael answered. ‘What a child feds – that’s different.’

Now, in the twilight, he sat in the kitchen of his mothers house with Philip Milholland’s notes in his coat pocket and
tried to feel that intimation of God he had felt as a younger person. It was not something he could conjure up again. After the war he had tried to feel God, to take solace in Him. It hadn’t worked, and he had dismissed the attempt when he could no longer ignore that it felt like a pathetic falsehood.

The wind shuddered against the window behind him and the snow outside fell fast. His mother had a soup they could eat, she said: five kinds of beans, onions and celery, a ham shank, two small turnips. Was he hungry now or did he want to wait? She was happy cither way, she could eat or not eat, it didn’t matter to her. Ishmael pushed two slabs of fir heartwood into the fire in the cook stove. He put a kettle of water on, then sat down again at the table. ‘It’s plenty warm in here,’ he pointed out. ‘You don’t have to worry about-getting cold.’

‘Stay,’ replied his mother. ‘Spend the night. I’ve got three extra comforters. Your room will be cold, but your bed should be fine. Don’t go back out into all of that snow. Stay and be comfortable.’

He agreed to stay and she put the soup on. In the morning he would see about printing his newspaper, for now he was warm where he was. Ishmael sat with his hand in his coat pocket and wondered if he shouldn’t just tell his mother about the Coast Guard notes he had stolen from the lighthouse and then drive carefully back into town to hand the notes over to Judge Fielding. But he did nothing. He sat watching the twilight fade beyond the kitchen windows.

‘That murder trial,’ his mother said finally. ‘I suppose you’ve been busy with that.’

‘It’s all I think about,’ said Ishmael.

‘It’s a shame,’ said his mother. ‘I have to think it’s a travesty. That they arrested him because he’s Japanese.’

Ishmael made no reply to this. His mother lit one of the candles on the table and placed a saucer under it. “What do you think?’ she asked him. ‘I haven’t been there listening, so I’m interested in what you have to say.

‘I’ve covered every minute,’ Ishmael answered. And he felt
himself growing cold now, and the depth of his coldness was not a surprise, and he closed his hand around Milholland’s notes.

‘I have to think he’s guilty,’ lied Ishmael. ‘The evidence is very solidly against him – the prosecutor has a good case.’

He explained to her about the blood on the fishing gaff, the wound on the left side of Carl Heine’s head, the sergeant who had testified that Kabuo Miyamoto was an expert when it came to killing with a stick. He told her about Ole Jurgensen’s testimony and the long dispute over land. He told her how three different fishermen had reported seeing Kabuo Miyamoto fishing near Carl Heine on the night the murder happened, and he told her about the length of mooring rope. The accused man sat so rigorously in his chair, so unmovable and stolid. He did not appear remorseful. He did not turn his head or move his eyes, nor did he change his expression. He seemed to Ishmael proud and defiant and detached from the possibility of his own death by hanging. It reminded him, he told his mother, of a training lecture he’d listened to at Fort Benning. The Japanese soldier, a colonel had explained, would die fighting before he would surrender. His allegiance to his country and his pride in being Japanese prevented him from giving in. He was not averse to dying at war in the way Americans were. He did not have the same feeling about death on the battlefield that American soldiers felt. To the Japanese soldier a life in defeat was not for a moment worth living; he knew he could not return to his people having suffered the humiliation of losing. He could not meet his Maker afterward, either – his religion demanded he die with honor. Understand, the colonel added: the Jap preferred to die with honor intact, and in this the infantryman should indulge him. In other words, take no prisoners: shoot first and ask questions later. The enemy, you see, has no respect for life, his own or anyone else’s. He doesn’t play by the rules. He’ll put up his hands, pretend to surrender, and all the while he’s rigged himself to booby-trap as you approach. It’s characteristic of the Jap to be sly and treacherous. He won’t show what he’s thinking in his face.

‘It was all propaganda,’ added Ishmael. ‘They wanted us to be able to kill them with no remorse, to make them less than people. None of it is fair or true, but at the same time I find myself thinking about it whenever I look at Miyamoto sitting there staring straight ahead. They could have used his face for one of their propaganda films – he’s that inscrutable.’

‘I know who he is,’ said Ishmael’s mother. ‘He’s a striking man, his face is powerful. Like you, Ishmael, he served in the war. Have you forgotten – that – that he fought in the war? That he risked his life for this country?’

‘All right,’ said Ishmael, ‘he served. Is that a fact pertinent to the murder of Carl Heine? Is it relevant to the case at hand? I grant you the man is “striking”, as you say, and that he served in the war – are those things relevant? I don’t understand what makes them relevant.’

‘They’re at least as relevant as your propaganda lecture,’ Ishmael’s mother replied. ‘If you’re going to remember something like that and connect it in some way to the defendant’s expression – well then, you’d better be remembering other things, too, just to keep yourself fair. Otherwise you’re being subjective in a way that is not at all fair to the accused. You’re allowing yourself an imbalance.’

‘The defendant’s expression isn’t part of it,’ said Ishmael. ‘Impressions aren’t part of it; feelings aren’t part of it. The facts are all that matter,’ said Ishmael, ‘and the facts weigh in against him.’

‘You said yourself the trial isn’t over,’ Ishmael’s mother pointed out. ‘The defense hasn’t made its case yet, but you’re all ready to convict. You’ve got the prosecutor’s set of facts, but that might not be the whole story – it never is, Ishmael. And besides, really, facts are so cold, so horribly cold – can we depend on facts by themselves?’

‘What else do we have?’ replied Ishmael. ‘Everything else is ambiguous. Everything else is emotions and hunches. At least the facts you can cling to; the emotions just float away.’

‘Float away with them,’ said his mother. ‘If you can remember
how, Ishmael. If you can find them again. If you haven’t gone cold forever.’

She got up and went to the woodstove. He sat in silence with his forehead in his hand, breathing through his nose and suddenly empty – a great, airy space had blown up inside of him, a bubble of ether expanding against his rib cage – he was empty now, emptier than he had been just a moment earlier, before his mother had spoken. What did she know about the vast region of emptiness that inhabited him all of the time? What did she know about him anyway? It was one thing for her to have known him as a child; it was another for her to come to terms with the nature of his adult wounds. She didn’t know, finally; he couldn’t explain himself. He did not want to explain to her his coldness or reveal himself in any way. He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband’s death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence – something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.

His mother had gone cold when Arthur died; her grief for him was fixed. But this had not stopped her from taking pleasure in life, it now occurred to Ishmael. There she stood at the stove ladling soup with the calm ease of one who feels there is certainly such a thing as grace. She took pleasure in the soup’s smell, in the heat of the woodstove, in the shadow of herself the candlelight now cast against the kitchen wall. The room had gone dark and tranquil now, the one warm place in all the world, and he felt empty in it.

‘I’m unhappy,’ he said. ‘Tell me what to do.’

His mother made no reply at first. Instead she came to the table with his bowl of soup and set it down in front of him. She brought her own bowl to the table, too, and then a loaf of bread on a cutting board and a dish of creamery butter and spoons. ‘You’re unhappy,’ she said, seating herself. She put her elbows down on the table and rested her chin against her palms.
‘That you are unhappy, I have to say, is the most obvious thing in the world.’

‘Tell me what to do,’ repeated Ishmael.

‘Tell you what to do?’ his mother said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do, Ishmael. I’ve tried to understand what it’s been like for you -having gone to war, having lost your arm, not having married or had children. I’ve tried to make sense of it all, believe me, I have – how it must feel to be you. But I must confess that, no matter how I try, I can’t really understand you. There are other boys, after all, who went to war and came back home and pushed on with their lives. They found girls and married and had children and raised families despite whatever was behind them. But you – you went numb, Ishmael. And you’ve stayed numb all these years. And I haven’t known what to do or say about it or how I might help you in some way. I’ve prayed and I’ve talked to Pastor – ’

‘There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,’ said Ishmael. ‘They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn’t pray. It didn’t matter either way.’

‘But just the same I’ve prayed for you. I’ve wanted you to be happy, Ishmael. But I haven’t known what to do.’

They ate their soup and bread in silence while the kettle on the wood-stove hissed. The candle on the table cast an arc of light across their food, and outside, through the misty windowpane, the snow on the ground caught the moonlight beyond the clouds and held it so that it suffused everything. Ishmael tried to enjoy the small pleasures of warmth and light and bread. He did not want to tell his mother about Hatsue Miyamoto and how he had, many years ago, felt certain they would be married. He did not want to tell her about the hollow cedar tree where they’d met so many times. He had never told anybody about those days; he had worked hard to forget them. Now the trial had brought all of that back.

‘Your father fought at Belleau Wood,’ his mother told him suddenly. ‘It took him years to get over it. He had nightmares
and he suffered just as you do. But it didn’t stop him from living.’

‘He didn’t get over it,’ said Ishmael. ‘Getting over it isn’t possible.’

‘It didn’t stop him from living,’ his mother insisted. ‘He went right on with his life. He didn’t let self-pity overwhelm him – he just kept on with things.’

‘I’ve kept on,’ said Ishmael. ‘I’ve kept his newspaper going, haven’t I? I – ’

‘That isn’t what I mean,’ his mother said. ‘That isn’t what I’m getting at. You know as well as I do what I’m trying to say. Why on earth don’t you go out with someone? How can you stand your loneliness? You’re an attractive man, there are a lot of women who – ’

‘Let’s not go over all of this again,’ said Ishmael, putting down his spoon. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

‘For you, what else is there?’ said his mother. ‘When it comes down to it – to answer your question – here’s what you should do about being unhappy: you should get married and have some children.’

‘That isn’t going to happen,’ said Ishmael. ‘That’s not the answer to the question.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said his mother, ‘It genuinely, surely is.’

After dinner he lit the kerosene heater and put it in her bedroom. His parents’ grandfather clock still ticked away after all these years with a maniacal endurance. It reminded him now of Saturday mornings when his father would read to him under the sheets with the clock thundering in the background. They’d read
Ivanhoe
together, taking turns, and then
David Copperfield.
Now, he saw in his flashlight beam, his mother slept under eiderdown quilts that were just beginning to yellow. He was surprised to find beside her bed the antique RCA turntable that had, until recently, resided in his father’s old study. She’d been listening to Mozart’s
Jupiter
Symphony as performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in 1947, and Ishmael, seeing it on
the turntable, imagined her in bed with that melancholy music playing and a cup of tea beside her. He imagined her with the Mozart on at nine o’clock at night.