Snow Falling on Cedars (51 page)

The white fir’s root wad had pulled out of the ground and stood now like a wall more than twenty feet high with a tuft of
snow-laden ferns and ivy sprouting over the top of it. Whitecaps roiled among the capsized boats and caused them and the docks to surge and roll, and the tops of the cabins and drum reels and gunnels were loaded down with snow. Occasionally sea foam broke across the boats and water washed through their cockpits. The tide and the wind were pushing in hard now, and the current funneled through the mouth of the harbor; the green boughs and branches of the fallen trees lay scattered across the clean snow.

It occurred to Ishmael for the first time in his life that such destruction could be beautiful.

The reckless water, the frenzied wind, the snow, the downed trees, the boats dashed against their sunken docks – it was harsh and beautiful and disorderly. He was reminded for a moment of Tarawa atoll and its seawall and the palms that lay in rows on their side, knocked down by the compression from the naval guns. It was something he remembered too often. He felt inside not only an aversion to it but an attraction to it as well. He did not want to remember and he wanted to remember. It was not something he could explain.

He stood there looking at the destruction of the harbor and knew he had something inviolable that other men had no inkling of and at the same time he had nothing. For twelve years, he knew, he had waited. He had waited without knowing he was waiting at all, and the waiting had turned into something deeper. He’d been waiting for twelve long years.

The truth now lay in Ishmael’s own pocket and he did not know what to do with it. He did not know how to conduct himself and the recklessness he felt about everything was as foreign to him as the sea foam breaking over the snowy boats and over the pilings of the Amity Harbor docks, now swamped and under water. There was no answer in any of it – not in the boats lying on their sides, not in the white fir defeated by the snow or in the downed branches of the cedars. What he felt was the chilly recklessness that had come to waylay his heart.

* * *

It was a boat builder who lived out on Woodhouse Cove Road – a gray-bearded man named Alexander Van Ness – who was primarily responsible for holding up a verdict in the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto. For three hours – until six o’clock – he persisted in the same inexorable vein: that Judge Fielding’s admonitions should be heeded with the utmost seriousness and that reasonable doubt existed. The twelve jurors had argued over the meaning of the word
doubt,
then over the meaning of the term
reasonable,
then over both put together. ‘Well,’ Alexander Van Ness had concluded, ‘I guess it comes down to a feeling, doesn’t it? If I feel uncertain, if I feel that I doubt, that’s all that matters, right?’

It had seemed to the others that he would not budge, and they had prepared themselves, by five forty-five, for another long night at the Amity Harbor Hotel and for the necessity of taking the matter up with Alexander Van Ness at eight o’clock the next morning.

‘Now look here,’ Harold Jensen argued desperately. ‘Nobody ain’t ever sure about nothing. It’s
un
reasonable to be so dog-headed stubborn. What’s reasonable comes out of the rest of us, right here. You’re what’s unreasonable, Alex.’

‘I can see what you’re driving at,’ Roger Porter added. ‘I know what you’re trying to say, Alex, and I’ve thought that way about it myself. But look here and think about the straight-off evidence. That mooring line come off his boat. That blood was on his fishing gaff. Mostly he lied about replacing his batt’ry, things like that, it was
fishy.
He just didn’t show me nothin’.’

‘Me neither,’ put in Edith Twardzik. ‘Didn’t show me a thing, either. It was just suspicious how he sat there like that and said one thing about it to the sheriff one time and then later changed his melody. A person can’t go changing his tune ’thout the rest of us thinking on it, Mr. Van Ness – don’t you believe that man’s a liar?’

Alex Van Ness agreed amiably; the defendant had indeed lied. But that made him a liar, not a murderer. He wasn’t accused of lying.

‘Now look again,’ said Harold Jensen. ‘What do you figure
drives a man to lie? You think a man’s got to go and lie when he ain’t done nothin’ worth lying about? A lie’s a cover-up every time, it’s something a man says when he don’t want the truth out. The lies that man’s been telling about this, they tell us he’s got to be hiding something, don’t you agree with that?’

‘All right,’ answered Alexander Van Ness. ‘Then the question is, what’s he hiding? Is he necessarily hiding the fact he’s a murderer? Does that follow for sure and nothing else? I’m telling you I have my doubts, and that’s all I’m trying to tell you. Not that you’re wrong, just that I have my doubts.’

‘Now listen to this,’ snapped Edith Twardzik. ‘Supposing a man’s got his gun to your son’s head and ’nuther one at your wife. He tells you to take yourself exactly one minute and decide whether he ought to shoot your son or your wife, which should he shoot, and if you don’t decide, he’ll shoot them both. ’Course you’re going to have some doubts no matter which way you decide. There’s always something to fret about. But meanwhile, while you’re fretting, the man’s getting ready to pull both triggers, and that’s all there is to it, all right? You aren’t ever going to get past your doubt so you have to face it head-on.’

‘It’s a good example,’ answered Alex Van Ness. ‘But I’m not really in that situation.’

‘Well, try looking at it another way, then,’ said Burke Latham, a schooner deckhand. ‘A big old comet or a chunk of the moon could come crashing down through the roof just now and fall on top of your head. So maybe you’d better move yourself case such a thing might happen. Maybe you’d better have your doubts ’bout whether your chair is safe. You can doubt everything, Mr. Van Ness. Your doubt ain’t reasonable.’

‘It’d be unreasonable for me to move to another chair,’ Alex Van Ness pointed out. ‘I’d run the same risk anywhere in the room – same risk you run from your seat, Burke. It’s not worth worrying about.’

‘We’re not talking about the evidence anymore,’ Harlan McQueen told them. ‘All these hypothetical examples aren’t
getting us anywhere. How’re we going to convince him what’s reasonable without talking about the facts presented by the prosecutor, step by step, each one? Now, look here, Mr. Van Ness, don’t you think that mooring line has to tell you something?’

‘I think it does,’ said Alex Van Ness. ‘It tells me that Kabuo Miyamoto was probably on board Carl Heine’s boat. I don’t have much doubt about that.’

‘That’s one thing,’ noted Edith Twardzik. ‘That’s something, anyway.’

‘That fishing gaff,’ said Harlan McQueen. ‘It had a man’s blood on it, Carl Heine’s blood type. Can that slip past your doubt?’

‘I don’t much doubt it was Carl’s blood,’ Alex Van Ness agreed. ‘But chances are it came from his hand. I think there’s a chance of that.’

‘There’s a chance of everything. But you add a chance from here and a chance from there, too many things get to being a chance, they can’t all be that way. The world ain’t made a coincidences only. If it looks like a dog and walks like a dog,’ Burke Latham asserted, ‘then most prob’ly it is a dog, that’s all there’s going to be to it.’

‘Are we talking about dogs now?’ asked Alex Van Ness. ‘How did we get on to dogs?’

‘Well, what about this?’ said Harlan McQueen. ‘The defendant heard about Carl’s body being found, but did he go to the sheriff and tell him how the night before he’d seen Carl out fishing? Even after they arrested him, he just kept saying he didn’t even know a single thing about it. Then, later, he changed his story, came up with this battery explanation. Then he even altered that, said he put in a spare battery, but only on cross-examination. At this point it’s his story against the prosecution’s, and I’m finding him a little hard to believe.’

‘I don’t believe anything about him, either,’ Ruth Parkinson said angrily. ‘Let’s get this done and over with, Mr. Van Ness. Stop being so unreasonable.’

Alex Van Ness rubbed his chin and sighed. ‘It’s not that I can’t
be convinced,’ he said. ‘I’m not so stubborn I can’t be made to see the light. There’s eleven of you and one of me. I’m all ears and I’ll listen to anything. But I won’t be in such a hurry as to go in there while I still have what I think are reasonable doubts and condemn the defendant to the hangman’s rope or fifty years in prison. You ought to sit back and relax, Mrs. Parkinson. We can’t hurry this.’

‘Been here almost three hours,’ said Burke Latham. ‘You saying there’s a way to move slower?’

‘The mooring line and the fishing gaff,’ Harlan McQueen repeated. ‘Are you with us on those things, Mr. Van Ness? Can we push forward from there?’

‘The mooring line, okay, I’ll give you that. The fishing gaffs a maybe, but assume I’ll go with you. Where do you take me from there?’

‘The different stories he told. Prosecutor really cornered him on having two batteries on board. If he’d really loaned one to Carl Heine, there should have only been one.’

‘He said he replaced it. He explained that well enough. He – ’

‘He added it in at the last minute,’ cut in McQueen. ‘Made it up only when he was cornered, didn’t he? He had his story pretty well lined up, but he left that detail out.’

‘True,’ said Alexander Van Ness. ‘There should have only been one battery. But let’s suppose he did board Carl’s boat – maybe it was to talk about the land business, maybe Carl attacked him, maybe it was selfdefense or manslaughter, an argument that got out of hand – how do we know this was murder in the first degree, planned out ahead of time? All right, it could be the defendant’s guilty of something, but maybe not what he’s charged with. How do we know he boarded Carl’s boat with the intention of killing him?’

‘You heard what all them fishermen said,’ Roger Porter answered. ‘No one ever boards a boat at sea except in an emergency. He wouldn’t have come aboard just to talk, you see. Fishermen don’t do things that way.’

‘If they only board in an emergency,’ said Alex, ‘then the
battery story makes good sense to me. A dead battery – that’s an emergency. It kind of shores up his story.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Edith Twardzik. ‘Harlan’s right about the battery story. Miyamoto didn’t anytime loan one to Carl Heine, otherwise he’d only a had one himself. That battery story just won’t wash.’

‘It was a sucker’s ruse,’ Burke Latham explained. ‘Just like the prosecutor said. Miyamoto pretended he was dead in the water, drifted right down on top of Carl and took advantage of him. That’s exactly what happened.’

‘Wouldn’t put it past him,’ said Roger Porter. ‘The man looks damn sly to me.’

‘That sucker’s ruse story,’ said Alex Van Ness. ‘To me that’s just a stretch too far. Drifting down out of the fog like that and exactly into the very man you’ve got it in your mind to kill. Here it is the middle of the night, fog as thick as pea soup, thicker, and you’re expecting you’ll just neatly drift in and find the boat you’re looking for? That, to me, is a stretch.’

At six o’clock Ed Soames made the announcement: the jurors had adjourned for the night. No verdict had been reached thus far. The courthouse was going to be closed, he added. Everybody should go on home and get a good night’s rest, turn up their electric heaters. They could return at nine o’clock in the morning if they wished to know where matters stood.

The jurors ate dinner at the Amity Harbor Hotel and talked of other matters. Alexander Van Ness ate meticulously, wiping his hands on his napkin often and smiling at the others, saying nothing.

The power was not yet on along South Beach, and as Ishmael Chambers drove through the snow he glanced into the candlelit windows of the homes he’d known since childhood. The Englunds, Gunnar Torval, Verda Carmichael, Arnold Kruger, the Hansens, the Syvertsens, Bob Timmons, the Crows, Dale Papineau, Virginia Gatewood and the Etheringtons from Seattle who seven years ago had moved to the island for good; he supposed they regretted it now. Foot-long icicles hung from their eaves and the snow lay in drifts against the north side of their house: they should have gone on being summer people. The Crows had both passed away years before, and now their son Nicholas inhabited the place, steadfastly carrying on the border war with Bob Timmons, who had phlebitis in his legs these days and walked stiffly to clear the branches from where they fell among his cedar trees. Nothing had changed and everything had changed. Dale Papineau still drank too much and had no money to speak of. Verda Carmichael was gone.

Ishmael found his mother at her kitchen table once again, reading the last chapter of
Sense and Sensibility
by lantern light and drinking tea with sugar and lemon concentrate. She wore a coat and boots in the house, and her face looked bland and old with no mascara, for which she asked Ishmael’s forgiveness. ‘I’m getting to be so old,’ she admitted. ‘There just isn’t any way around it.’ Then just as before she gave him soup to eat, and he told her how the jurors had not reached a verdict and how the lights were on once more in town and how the docks had been destroyed by storm winds. His mother railed against the possibility that the jurors would be driven by hatred and
prejudice; she hoped that in such an eventuality Ishmael would write an editorial. His newspaper, she said, had a responsibility at such times; his father before him had known that. Ishmael nodded and agreed with her; he would write a strong editorial. Then he suggested they pass the night at his apartment with its electric heat and hot water. His mother shook her head and claimed she was content to stick it out at South Beach; they could go to Amity Harbor in the morning if they wanted. So Ishmael loaded the cookstove with firewood and hung his coat in the hall closet. Philip Milholland’s notes stayed in his pants pocket.

At eight o’clock the power came on again, and he flipped the furnace switch. He roamed through the house turning off lights and turning up the baseboard heaters. The pipes, he knew, would begin to thaw now, and he decided to sit and listen to the house while it came back to itself. He made tea and took it into his father’s old study, a room with a view of the water in daylight and of his father’s much-loved rhododendrons. And he sat in silence at his father’s desk, in his father’s chair, with a single light on. He waited while the furnace gradually warmed the house, and then Ishmael heard water moving in the pipes and the drip from the taps he’d left open. He waited awhile longer before moving through the house again to see that the pressure was strong everywhere, and then he shut down the taps. Everything seemed to have held up.