Snow Falling on Cedars (43 page)

The gallery was as crowded as it had been throughout the trial. Many of the citizens gathered there wore overcoats, shoe rubbers, and woolen scarfs, having elected not to leave these things in the cloakroom: there’d been a rush to find a place to sit. They’d carried the smell of wet snow into the room – it had melted against the wool in their coats – and were grateful to be in a warm place where something of interest was going forward. Stuffing their mittens and wool caps into their pockets, they settled in conscious of their extraordinary good fortune in having escaped temporarily from the snowstorm. As always their demeanor was formally respectful; they took the law seriously and felt its majesty emanating toward them from the bench where Lew Fielding sat with his eyes halfshut, inscrutable and meditative, and from the way in which the jurors sat ruminating in rows on their elevated podium. The reporters, for their part, had focused their attention on the wife of the accused man, who wore a knife-pleated skirt on this day and a blouse with long darts through the shoulders. Her hand where it lay atop the Bible was graceful, and the planes of her face were smooth. One of the reporters – he’d lived in Japan just after the war, training automotive engineers to write manuals – was reminded of the calm of a geisha he’d witnessed performing the tea ceremony at Nara. The sight of Hatsue’s face in profile elicited in him the smell of pine needles strewn in the courtyard outside the tearoom.

But inwardly Hatsue felt no serenity; her calm was a practiced disguise. For her husband, she knew, was a mystery to her, and
had been ever since he’d returned from his days as a soldier nine years before. He’d come home to San Piedro, and they’d rented a cottage out on Bender’s Spring Road. It was a dead-end road overhung with alders; they could see no other homes. At night Kabuo was subject to disturbing dreams that sent him to the kitchen table in his slippers and bathrobe, where he sat drinking tea and staring. Hatsue found that she was married to a war veteran and that this was the crucial fact of her marriage; the war had elicited in him a persistent guilt that lay over his soul like a shadow. For her this meant loving him in a manner she hadn’t anticipated before he’d left for the war. There was nothing of charity in it and she did not step lightly around his heart or indulge his sorrow or his whims. Instead she brought herself to his sorrow completely, not to console him but to give him time to become himself again. Without regrets she honored the obligation she felt to him and was happy to efface herself. This gave her life a shape and meaning that were larger than her dream of farming strawberries from island soil, and at the same time giving herself over to his wounds was both disturbing and rewarding. She sat across from him at the kitchen table at three o’clock in the morning, while he stared in silence or talked or wept, and she took when she could a piece of his sorrow and stored it for him in her own heart.

The advent of her pregnancy had been good for Kabuo; he’d taken a job at the cannery, where he packed salmon beside his brother Kenji. He began to talk about buying a farm and drove her up and down island roads where property was for sale. Something was wrong with each, however – drainage, sunlight, clay soil. Kabuo pulled into a turnout one rainy afternoon and explained to her in grave tones that he intended to repurchase his parents’ property as soon as the chance arose. He told the story, once again, of how they had been within one last payment of owning the seven acres outright. How Etta Heine had pulled out from under them and sold their land to Ole Jurgensen. How the land was to have gone over into his name, because he was the eldest son and the first of the Miyamotos to become a citizen.
They’d lost everything because of Manzanar. His father had died of stomach cancer, his mother had gone to live in Fresno, where Kabuo’s sister had married a furniture merchant. Kabuo struck the steering wheel with the side of his fist and cursed the injustice of the world. ‘They stole from us,’ he said angrily, ‘and they got away with it.’

One night six months after his return from the war she woke up to find him gone from their bed and nowhere to be found in the house. Hatsue sat in the dark of the kitchen, where she waited for seventy-five minutes uneasily; it was raining outside, a windy night, and the car was gone from the garage.

She waited. She ran her hands across her belly, imagining the shape of the baby inside, hoping to feel it move. There was a leak in the shed roof over the pantry, and she got up to empty the pan she’d placed under it. Sometime after four
A.M.
Kabuo came in with two burlap sacks; he was rain soaked, there was mud on his knees. He turned on the light to find her there, sitting motionless at the kitchen table, staring at him in silence. Kabuo, staring back, set one sack on the floor, hauled the other up onto a chair, and took the hat from his head. ‘After Pearl Harbor,’ he said to her, ‘my father buried all of this.’ Then he began to pull things out – wooden swords,
hakama
pants, a
bokken,
a
naginata,
scrolls written in Japanese – and placed each carefully on the kitchen table. ‘These are my family’s,’ he said to her, wiping the rain from his brow. ‘My father hid them in our strawberry fields. Look at this,’ he added.

It was a photograph of Kabuo dressed like a
bugeisha
and wielding a
kendo
stick in both hands. In the photograph he was only sixteen years old, but he already looked wrathful and fierce. Hatsue studied the photograph for a long time, particularly Kabuo’s eyes and mouth, to see what she might discern there. ‘My great-grandfather,’ said Kabuo, pulling off his coat, ‘was a samurai and a magnificent soldier. He killed himself on the battlefield at Kumamoto – killed himself with his own sword,
seppukku’ –
Kabuo pantomimed disemboweling himself, the imaginary sword plunged deep into his left side
and drawn steadily to the right. ‘He came to battle wielding a samurai’s sword against the rifles of an imperial garrison. Try to imagine that, Hatsue,’ said Kabuo. ‘Going to battle with a sword against rifles. Knowing you are going to die.’

He’d knelt beside the wet sack on the floor then and took a strawberry plant from it. The rain bellowed against the roof and struck against the side of their house. Kabuo took out another strawberry plant and brought them both into the light over the table where she could look at them closely if she wanted to. He held them out to her, and she saw how the veins and arteries in his arms flowed in ridges just beneath his skin and how strong his wrists and fingers were.

‘My father planted the fathers of these plants,’ Kabuo said to her angrily. ‘We lived as children by the fruit they produced. Do you understand what I am saying?’

‘Come to bed,’ answered Hatsue. ‘Take a bath, dry yourself, and come back to bed,’ she said.

She got up and left the kitchen table. She knew that he could see in profile the new shape their baby was making. ‘You’re going to be a father soon,’ she reminded him, halting in the doorway. ‘I hope that will make you happy, Kabuo. I hope it will help you to bury all of this. I don’t know how else I can help you.’

‘I’ll get the farm back,’ Kabuo had answered over the din of the rain. ‘We’ll Eve there. We’ll grow strawberries. It will be all right. I’m going to get my farm back.’

That had been many years ago – nine years, or nearly. They’d saved their money insofar as that was possible, putting away as much as they could, until they had enough to buy their own house. Hatsue wanted to move from the dilapidated cottage they rented at the end of Bender’s Spring Road, but Kabuo had convinced her the better move was to purchase a gill-netting boat. Within a year or two, he said, they would double their money, own the boat outright, and have enough left over for a land payment. Ole Jurgensen was getting old, he said. He would want to sell before long.

Kabuo had fished as well as he could but he was not really born to fish. There was money in fishing and he wanted the money, he was ambitious, strong, and a zealous worker, but the sea, in the end, made no sense to him. They had not doubled their money or even come close, and they did not own the
Islander
outright. Kabuo only pressed himself harder and measured his life according to his success at bringing salmon home. On every night that he did not catch fish he felt his dream recede before him and the strawberry farm he coveted moved further into the distance. He blamed himself and grew short with her, and this deepened the wounds in their marriage. Hatsue felt she did him no favors by indulging his self-pity, and he resented her for this. It was difficult for her to distinguish these moments from the deeper anguish of his war wounds. Besides, she had three children now, and it was necessary to turn her attention toward them and to give to them a part of what she had once given to her husband. The children, she hoped, would soften him. She hoped that through them he might become less obsessed with the dream of a different life. She knew that had happened in her own heart.

Yes, it would be nice to live in a nicer house and to walk out into the perfume of berries on a June morning, to stand in the wind and smell them. But this house and this life were what she had, and there was no point in perpetually grasping for something other. Gently she tried to tell him so, but Kabuo insisted that just around the corner lay a different life and a better one, that it was simply a matter of catching more salmon, of waiting for Ole Jurgensen to slow down, of saving their money, of waiting.

Now Hatsue sat upright with her hands in her lap in order to give her testimony. ‘I’m going to ask you to think back,’ said Nels, ‘to events that occurred about three months ago, in early September of this year. Would it be fair to say that at that time your husband became interested in purchasing land that was for sale at Island Center? Do you recollect, Mrs. Miyamoto?’

‘Oh, yes,’ answered Hatsue. ‘He was very interested in buying land out there. He had always been interested in buying land out there. It had been his family’s land – strawberry land – and he badly wanted to farm it again. His family had worked very hard to buy it, and then, during the war, they lost everything, their land was taken from them.’

‘Mrs. Miyamoto,’ said Nels. ‘Think back specifically now to Tuesday, September 7, if you will do that for me. A Mr. Ole Jurgensen, you might recall, a retired strawberry farmer from out at Island Center, has testified that your husband came to see him on that date to inquire about purchasing seven acres of his land, the strawberry land you mentioned. Does this ring a bell with you?’

‘It does,’ said Hatsue. ‘I know about it.’

Nels nodded and began to knead his forehead; he sat down on the edge of the defendant’s table. ‘Did your husband mention he’d gone out there? Did he tell you about his conversation with Mr. Jurgensen regarding the purchase of these seven acres?’

‘Yes,’ said Hatsue. ‘He did.’

‘Did he say anything about this conversation? Anything you can remember?’

‘He did,’ said Hatsue. ‘Yes.’

Hatsue recounted that on the afternoon of September 7 she’d driven with her children past the old farm at Island Center and seen Ole Jurgensen’s sign. She’d turned the car around and driven over Mill Run into Amity Harbor, where she used the public telephone booth beside Petersen’s to call her husband and tell him. Then she’d gone home and waited for an hour until Kabuo returned with the unhappy news that Carl Heine had purchased Ole’s farm.

‘I see,’ said Nels. ‘This unhappy news – this was on the evening of September 7 that your husband told you about this?’

‘Afternoon,’ said Hatsue. ‘We talked about it in the late afternoon, I remember, before he went out fishing.’

‘Late afternoon,’ Nels repeated. ‘Did your husband seem
disappointed, Mrs. Miyamoto, that he had not succeeded in purchasing his seven acres? Did he seem to you disappointed?’

‘No,’ said Hatsue. ‘He was not disappointed. He was hopeful, Mr. Gudmundsson, as hopeful as I’d seen him. To his way of thinking the important thing was that Ole Jurgensen had decided to retire from farming strawberries and sell off all his holdings. Something, he said, had been set in motion – there’d been no opportunity, now there was one. He’d waited many years for this moment to arrive – now the opportunity was at hand. He was very eager, very hopeful?’

‘Let’s skip forward one day,’ said Nels, raising his head from his hand. ‘On the next day, September 8, did he talk about it? Was he still feeling, as you say, hopeful?’

‘Oh, yes,’ answered Hatsue. ‘Very much so. We talked about it again the following day. He’d decided to go have a talk with Carl Heine, to see him about purchasing the seven acres.’

‘But he didn’t go. Until the next day. He waited a day, is that right?’

‘He waited,’ said Hatsue. ‘He was nervous about it. He wanted to plan what he would say.’

‘It’s now Thursday, September 9,’ Nels Gudmundsson said to her. ‘It’s two days since your husband spoke with Ole Jurgensen; two long days have passed. What, as you recall it, happened?’

‘What happened?’

‘He went to talk to Carl Heine – am I correct? – as Susan Marie Heine testified yesterday. According to Susan Marie Heine’s testimony your husband showed up at their residence on the afternoon of Thursday, September 9, asking to talk to Carl. According to Susan Marie Heine they spoke for thirty or forty minutes as they walked about the property. She did not accompany them or overhear their words, but she has testified as to the content of a conversation she held with her husband after your husband left that day. She said that the two of them had discussed the seven acres and the possibility that your husband might purchase them. Susan Marie Heine has testified under cross-examination that Carl did not give your
husband an unequivocal no answer regarding the purchase of these seven acres. Carl did not lead your husband to believe no hope existed for reclaiming his family’s property. It was her understanding that Carl had encouraged your husband to believe that a possibility existed. Now, does that seem accurate to you, Mrs. Miyamoto? On the afternoon of September 9, in the aftermath of his talk with Carl Heine, did your husband still seem hopeful?’