Snow Falling on Cedars (42 page)

He opened the taps in the sink and bathtub and went out to check on her chickens. There were twelve of them, all Rhode Island Reds, huddled into a ball at one end of the chicken house his father had built years before. For a moment Ishmael caught them in the beam of his flashlight, then he reached in and took up a nearby egg left untended in the cold. It was hard to the touch and he knew that inside the embryo was solidly frozen. He warmed it for a moment in the palm of his hand, then rolled it gently in the direction of the chickens. They rearranged themselves in the face of this, panicking and fluttering just a little.

He went back in and, still wearing his coat and hat, wandered through the rooms of the cold house. His breath came forth in jets of fog and disappeared into the darkness. Ishmael put his hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairway, then removed it and shone the flashlight beam upward. Shallow moons had been worn into the risers; the bannister, he saw, had lost its luster. Upstairs, the room he’d slept in as a boy had been converted by his mother into a place to sew and iron and to store her clothes. Ishmael went up and, sitting on his old bed, tried to remember how it had once been. He recollected that on a good day in winter, when the maple trees stood bare, he could look through his dormer window out beyond the trees and see the green salt water to the southwest.

He’d had a button and a pennant collection, a thousand pennies in a large mason jar, a fishbowl, and a model tin lizzie hung from a strand of wire in one corner. They were all gone now, he didn’t know where. He’d kept his glass underwater box in the corner of the closet, his mitt on top of it. On certain nights the moonlight had flooded through his dormer window and bathed everything in blue, beguiling shadows that prevented him from sleeping. He’d sit up listening to crickets and frogs and on some nights to the radio at his bedside. He’d listened mostly to baseball games –
the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League – and he could still remember the voice of Leo Lassen barely audible beyond a field of static: ‘
White leads off first, dancing, dancing, ready to break, he’s driving Gittelsohn ab-so-lute-ly crazy.
.
. . Strange is at the plate now after taking his practice cuts … hum, baby, hear this fine crowd on hand at Side’s Stadium greet Strange as he digs in, he’s a real favorite, isn’t he? Oh, you should be here tonight! Mount Rainier is out beyond the rightfield fence looming up like a great big ice cream cone. Gittelsohn is into his windup now and
…
there goes White no time for a throw White is standing up safe at second base hoooo boy! White is safe! He’s stolen second base! White is safe at second base!’

His father, too, had liked baseball. Ishmael had sat with him by the Bendix in the living room, and they had both been mesmerized by the urgency Leo Lassen imparted to a battle so many miles away in Seattle, Portland, or Sacramento. The voice from the radio – it had dropped an octave, altered pitch, slowed and lengthened measurably – was now that of someone’s wayward uncle confiding the secrets of his golf game; now it miraculously glided through a tongue twister; now it suddenly sensed great depths of meaning in an ordinary double play. Arthur would slam the armrest of his chair in satisfaction at a fortunate turn of events; he was saddened when errors in judgment or carelessness cast the team into a hole. At lulls in the game he would stretch his legs out, twine his hands across his lap, and stare at the radio as it spoke to him. Eventually he slept with his head lolled forward and stayed that way until Leo Lassen went shrill again in ecstasy about the game. Freddy Mueller had hit a double.

Ishmael remembered his father half-asleep, the crescent of warm light thrown by the table lamp containing only his figure, that of the radio, and the turned-back pages of a magazine in his lap –
Harper’s
or
Scientific Agriculture.
By the late innings of the game the rest of the room – a few laggard coals glowed orange beneath the fireplace grate – lay sleeping in soft, quiescent shadows. Coats hung from polished brass hooks in the foyer, and his father’s books, arranged by
size, stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of two vaultlike oak bookcases. When something momentous came to pass – a home run, a stolen base, a double play, a run batted in – his father would stir, blink two or three times, and by dint of habit bring his hand to rest on the spectacles sitting atop his magazine. His hair lay close to his skull in gray twists, and his chin tilted slightly heavenward. Gray hairs sprouted from his ears and nostrils, and more straggled forth from his eyebrows. When the game was over he would shut off the radio and fix his spectacles carefully in place by curling their , stems behind his ears. They were antique steel full moons, and when he put them on he invariably underwent a quiet transformation, becoming suddenly professorial, handsome in the way that some outdoorsmen are yet scholarly at the same time. He would pick up his magazine and begin to read as if the game had never happened.

Ishmael’s father had died in Seattle at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He’d had cancer of the pancreas and in the end of the liver, and Ishmael had not been there at the final moment. One hundred and seventy islanders turned out for Arthur’s funeral, which was held on a warm, cloudless day in June at the San Piedro Memorial Cemetery. Masato Nagaishi, Ishmael recalled, had presented himself in the funeral’s aftermath to offer condolences on behalf of the Japanese-American Citizens’ League and the Japanese Community Center. ‘I wish to say,’ said Masato Nagaishi, ‘that the Japanese people of San Piedro Island are saddened by the death of your father. We have always had great respect for him as a newspaperman and as a neighbor, a man of great fairness and compassion for others, a friend to us and to all people.’ Masato Nagaishi took Ishmael’s hand and gripped it in his own tightly. He was a large man with a broad face and no hair on his head, and he blinked often behind his spectacles. ‘We know you will follow in your father’s footsteps,’ Mr. Nagaishi said forcefully, shaking Ishmael’s hand. ‘We are certain you will honor his legacy. For now, like you, we are all sad. We
mourn with you and honor your father. We think of you in your grief.’

Ishmael opened the closet door and looked in at the boxes stacked there. He had not gone through the things he’d packed in them in more than eight years’ time. He was no longer very interested in what they contained – his books, his arrowheads, his essays from high school, his pennant collection, his penny jar, his buttons and sea glass and beach stones; they were the things of another time. He had it in mind, though, to dig out the letter Hatsue had written him from Manzanar and read it again after all these years in the spirit of an indulgence. Ever since he’d stopped to pick her up in the snowstorm he’d been indulging himself foolishly. Beneath the surface of everything else he’d been thinking about her with pleasure.

It was buried in a box, just where he’d left it, between the pages of a book on boatmanship he’d been given on his thirteenth birthday. The return address on the envelope was Kenny Yamashita’s, and the stamp, curiously, was upside down. The envelope, now brittle with age, felt dry and cold to the touch. Ishmael tucked the flashlight under his armpit and sat down again on the edge of the bed with the envelope held between his fingers. The letter inside had been written on rice paper that after all these years was fast deteriorating, and he held it with the care he felt it deserved, moving it now into the flashlight beam, where he saw her delicate handwriting.

Dear Ishmael
,

These things are very difficult to say – I can’t think of anything more painful to me than uniting this letter to you. I am now more than five hundred miles away, and everything appears to me different from what it was when I was with you last on San Piedro. I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I’ve discovered.

I don’t love you, Ishmael. I can think of no more honest way to say it. From the very beginning, when we were little children, it
seemed to me something was wrong. Whenever we were together I knew it. I felt it inside of me. I loved you and I didn’t love you at the very same moment, and I felt troubled and confused. Now, everything is obvious to me and I feel I have to tell you the truth. When we met that last time in the cedar tree and I felt your body move against mine, I knew with certainty that everything was wrong. I knew we could never be right together and that soon I would have to tell you so. And now, with this letter, I’m telling you. This is the last time I will write to you. I am not yours anymore.

I wish you the very best, Ishmael. Your heart is large and you are gentle and kind, and I know you will do great things in this world, but now I must say good-bye to you. I am going to move on with my life as best I can, and I hope that you will too.

Sincerely
,

Hatsue Imada

He read it over a second time, and then a third, and then he turned off the flashlight. He thought of how she’d had her revelation at the very moment he’d entered her, how the invasion of his penis had brought with it a truth she could discover in no other way. Ishmael shut his eyes and thought back to that moment in the cedar tree when he had moved, briefly, inside of her and how he had not been able to predict how pleasurable that would feel. He had no way of knowing what it would feel like to be inside, all the way in where he could feel the heat of her, and his surprise at the sensation had been overwhelming, and then she had suddenly pulled away. He had not come, he had been there for less than three seconds altogether, and in that time – if her letter was right – she’d discovered she didn’t love him anymore while he’d come to love her even more. Wasn’t that the strangest part? That by entering her he’d granted her the means to understand the truth? He’d wanted to be inside of her again, and he’d wanted her to ask him to be there again, and on the next day she’d gone away.

In his Seattle years he’d slept with three different women, two of whom he felt briefly hopeful about, wondering if he might in fact fall in love with them, but this had never happened. The women he slept with asked often about his arm, and he told them about his war experiences, and he decided before long that he didn’t respect them and a kind of disgust developed. He was a war veteran with a missing arm, and this fascinated a certain type of woman in her early twenties who fancied herself mature beyond her years and was serious about herself. He slept with each for a few more weeks after deciding he wanted nothing to do with them – he slept with them angrily and unhappily and because he was lonely and selfish. He came inside them hard and often, keeping each up until the middle of the night, and in the late afternoons, too, before dinner. He knew that when he asked them to walk out of his life he would be even lonelier than he’d been before, and so he waited for a few weeks, both times, just to have someone around at night, just to come inside someone, just to hear someone breathing under him while he moved his hips with his eyes shut. Then his father came down to the city because he was dying, and Ishmael forgot about women. His father died one afternoon while Ishmael was in the newsroom at the
Seattle Times
banging away with his five fingers at a typewriter. Ishmael went back to San Piedro for the funeral and to tie up his father’s business affairs; he stayed to run his father’s paper. He lived in an apartment in Amity Harbor and kept to himself insofar as that was possible for a newspaperman on a small island. Once every two weeks or so he masturbated into the folds of his handkerchief, and that was the extent of his sex life.

Yes, he decided, he would write the article Hatsue wanted him to write in the pages of the
San Piedro Review.
It was perhaps not the manner in which his father would proceed, but so be it: he was not his father. His father, of course, would have gone hours earlier directly to Lew Fielding in order to show him the coast guard shipping lane records for the night of September 15. But not Ishmael, not now – no. Those records would stay in his
pocket. Tomorrow he would write the article she wanted him to write, in order to make her beholden to him, and then in the trial’s aftermath he would speak with her as one who had taken her side and she would have no choice but to listen. That was the way, that was the method. Sitting by himself in the cold of his old bedroom, her letter held uneasily in his hand, he began to imagine it.

At eight in the morning on the third day of the trial – a dozen tall candles now lighting the courtroom in the manner of a chapel or sanctuary – Nels Gudmundsson called his first witness. The wife of the accused man, Hatsue Miyamoto, came forward from the last row of seats in the gallery with her hair tightly bound to the back of her head and tucked up under an unadorned hat that threw a shadow over her eyes. As she passed through the swinging gate Nels Gudmundsson held open for her she stopped to look for a moment at her husband, who sat at the defendant’s table immediately to her left with his hands folded neatly in front of him. She nodded without altering her calm expression, and her husband nodded back in silence. He unclasped his hands, laid them on the table, and watched her eyes intently. The wife of the accused man appeared, briefly, as if she might turn in his direction and go to him, but instead she proceeded without hurry toward Ed Soames, who stood in front of the witness stand proffering the Old Testament patiently.

When Hatsue Miyamoto had seated herself, Nels Gudmundsson coughed three times into his fist and cleared the phlegm from his throat. Then he passed in front of the jury box with his thumbs once again hooked inside of his suspenders and his one good eye leaking tears. The arteries in his temples had begun to pulse, as they often did when he’d been sleepless. Like others there he’d passed a difficult night with no electricity or heat. At two-thirty, bitter with cold, he’d struck a match and held it close to the face of his pocket watch; he’d padded in his socks to the unlit bathroom and found the toilet water frozen in its bowl. Nels, flailing, his breath issuing forth in vaporous grunts, had
broken out the ice with the handle of his toilet plunger, propped himself against the wall – his lumbago plagued him mercilessly – and dribbled night water unsteadily. Then he’d climbed into bed again, curled up like an autumn leaf, every blanket in the house thrown over him, and lain without sleeping until dawn came. Now, in the courtroom, the jurors could see that he had not shaved or combed his hair; he looked at least ten years older. His blind left pupil seemed especially transient and beyond his control this morning. It traveled in its own eccentric orbit.