Snow Falling on Cedars (7 page)

Horace had been at his desk doing paperwork on the morning of September 16. The evening before, a woman of ninety-six had died at the San Piedro Rest Home, and another of eighty-one had expired while splitting kindling wood and had been discovered sprawled across her chopping block, a milk goat nuzzling her face, by a child delivering apples in a wheelbarrow. And so Horace was filling in the blanks on two certificates of death,
and doing so in triplicate, when the phone beside him rang. He brought the receiver to his ear irritably; since the war he could not do too many things at once and at the moment, busier than he liked to be, did not wish to speak to anyone.

It was under these circumstances that he heard about the death of Carl Heine, a man who had endured the sinking of the
Canton
and who, like Horace himself, had survived Okinawa – only to die, it now appeared, in a gill-netting boat accident.

The body, on a canvas stretcher, its booted feet sticking out, had been borne in by Art Moran and Abel Martinson twenty minutes later, the sheriff wheezing under his end of the load, his deputy tight-lipped and grimacing, and laid on its back on Horace Whaley’s examination table. It was wrapped by way of a shroud in two white wool blankets of the type issued to navy men and of which there was a great surplus nine years after the war, so that every fishing scow on San Piedro Island seemed to have half a dozen or more. Horace Whaley peeled back one of these blankets and, fingering the birthmark on the left side of his forehead, peered in at Carl Heine. The jaw had set open, he saw, and the vast mouth was a stiffened maw down which the dead man’s tongue had disappeared. There were a large number of broken blood vessels in the whites of the deceased’s eyes.

Horace pulled the blanket over Carl Heine again and turned his attention to Art Moran, who stood immediately at his side.

‘Goddamn,’ he said. ‘Where’d you find him?’

‘White Sand Bay,’ Art replied.

Art told the coroner about the drifting boat, the silence and the lights on board the
Susan Marie
and about bringing the dead man up in his net. How Abel went to fetch his pickup truck and the canvas stretcher from the fire station and how together, while a small crowd of fishermen looked on and asked questions, they’d loaded Carl up and brought him in. ‘I’m going over to see his wife,’ Art added. ‘I don’t want word to reach her some other way. So I’ll be back, Horace. Real soon. But I’ve got to see Susan Marie first.’

Abel Martinson stood at the end of the examination table
exerting himself, Horace observed, to grow accustomed to this idea of conversing in the presence of a dead man. The toe of Carl Heine’s right boot poked out of the blankets just in front of him.

‘Abel,’ said Art Moran. ‘Maybe you better stay here with Horace. Give him a hand, if he needs it.’

The deputy nodded. He took the hat he held in his hand and placed it beside an instrument tray. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

‘Fine,’ said the sheriff. ‘I’ll be back soon. Half an hour to an hour.’

When he was gone Horace peered in at Carl Heine’s face again – letting Art’s young deputy wait in silence – then washed his glasses at the sink. ‘Tell you what,’ he said at last and shut the water off. ‘You go on across the hall and sit in my office, all right? There’s some magazines in there and a radio and a thermos of coffee if you want it. And if it comes about I’ve got to shift this body around and I need your help, I’ll call for you. Sound fair enough, deputy?’

‘Okay,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘You call me.’

He picked up his hat and carried it out with him.
Damn kid,
Horace said to himself. Then he dried his steel-rimmed glasses on a towel and, because he was fastidious, got his surgical gown on. He pulled on his gloves, removed the shroud of blankets from Carl Heine, and then, methodically, using angled scissors, cut away the rubber bib overalls, dropping pieces of them in a canvas bin. When the overalls were gone he began on the T-shirt and cut away Carl Heine’s work pants and underwear and pulled off Carl’s boots and socks, out of which seawater ran. He put all the clothes in a sink.

There was a pack of matches, mostly used, in one pocket, and a small shuttle of cotton twine stuffed in another. A knife sheath had been knotted to a belt loop on his work pants, but no knife was in it. The sheath had been unsnapped and left open.

In Carl Heine’s left front pocket was a watch that had stopped at one forty-seven. Horace dropped it into a manila envelope.

The body – despite the two hours it had spent in transport
from White Sand Bay to the dock east of the ferry terminal and from there in the back of Abel Martinson’s truck up First Hill and into the alley behind the courthouse (where the morgue and the coroner’s office could be found beyond a set of double doors that gave onto the courthouse basement) – had not thawed perceptibly, Horace noted. It was pink, the color of salmon flesh, and the eyes had turned back in the head. It was also blatantly and exceedingly powerful, stout and thick muscled, the chest broad, the quadriceps muscles of the thighs pronounced, and Horace Whaley could not help but observe that here was an extraordinary specimen of manhood, six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds, bearded, blond, and built in the solid manner of a piece of statuary, as though the parts were made of granite – though, too, there was something apelike, inelegant, and brutish in the alignment of the arms and shoulders. Horace felt a familiar envy stirring and despite himself noted the girth and heft of Carl Heine’s sexual organs. The fisherman had not been circumcised and his testicles were taut and hairless. They had pulled up toward his body in the frigid seawater, and his penis, at least twice as large as Horace’s own, even frozen, lay fat and pink against his left leg.

The Island County coroner coughed twice, dryly, and circum-navigated his examination table. He began, consciously, for this would be necessary, to think of Carl Heine, a man he knew, as
the deceased
and not as Carl Heine. The deceased’s right foot had locked itself behind the left, and Horace now exerted himself to free it. It was necessary to pull hard enough to tear ligaments in the deceased’s groin, and this Horace Whaley did.

A coroner’s job is to do certain things most people would never dream of doing. Horace Whaley was ordinarily a family physician, one of three on San Piedro. He worked with fishermen, their children, their wives. His peers were unwilling to examine the dead, and so the job had fallen to him, by default as it were. Thus he’d had these
experiences;
he’d seen things most men couldn’t look at. The winter before he’d seen a crabber’s body recovered out of West Port Jensen Bay after two full
months’ immersion. The crabber’s skin resembled soap more than anything; he seemed encased in it, a kind of ambergris. On Tarawa he had seen the bodies of men who had died facedown in shallow water. The warm tides had washed over them for days, and the skin had loosened from their limbs. He remembered one soldier in particular from whose hands the skin had peeled like fine transparent gloves; even the fingernails had come away. There were no dog tags, but Horace had been able to obtain excellent fingerprints and make an identification anyway.

He knew a little about drowning. He had seen a fisherman in ’49 who had been eaten about the face by crabs and crayfish. They’d fed steadily on the softest portions – the eyelids, the lips, to a lesser extent the ears – so that in these areas the face was intensely green. This he had seen in the Pacific war, too, along with other men who had died in tidal pools, astonishingly intact beneath the waterline but entirely eaten – to the bone – by sand flies wherever flesh lay exposed to air. And he had seen a man half-mummy, half-skeleton, floating in the waters of the China Sea, eaten from below while his back side, sun dried, gradually turned brown and leathery. After the sinking of the
Canton
there were parts of men floating around for miles that even the sharks had forsaken. The navy had not taken time to collect these parts; there were living men to attend to.

Carl Heine was the fourth deceased gill-netter Horace had examined in five years. Two others had died in a fall storm and washed up on the mud flats of Lanheedron Island. The third, recalled Horace, was an interesting case – the summer of ’50, four years earlier. A fisherman named Vilderling – Alec Vilderling. His wife typed for Klaus Hartmann, who sold real estate in Amity Harbor. Vilderling and his partner had set their net and underneath the summer moon had shared in the lee of their bow-picker’s cabin a bottle of Puerto Rican rum. Then Vilderling, it seemed, had decided to empty his bladder into the salt water. With his pants undone he had fallen in and, to his partner’s horror, had thrashed once or twice before disappearing altogether beneath the surface
of the moon-addled sea. Vilderling, it appeared, could not swim.

His partner, a boy of nineteen named Kenny Lynden, hurled himself in after him. Vilderling, hung up in his net, struggled as the boy tried to free him. Though bleary with rum, Kenny Lynden somehow managed to cut Vilderling loose with a pocketknife and haul him back to the surface. But that was all he could do. Vilderling had ceased to live.

The interesting thing, Horace Whaley recalled, was that in the purely technical sense Alec Vilderling had not drowned. He had inhaled a large volume of seawater, yet his lungs were entirely dry. Horace had at first offered the conjecture in his notes that the deceased’s larynx had clamped down – a spastic closure – to prevent liquid from reaching the deeper air passages. But this could not explain the clear distension of the lungs, which had to have been caused by the pressure of the sea, and so he revised his initial hypothesis and entered in his final report that the salt water swallowed by Alec Vilderling had been absorbed into his blood-stream while he yet lived. In this case the official cause of death, he wrote, was anoxia – a deprivation of oxygen to the brain – as well as an acute disturbance to the composition of the blood.

Chief among his current considerations as he stood brooding over Carl Heine’s naked form was to determine the precise cause of Carl’s demise – or rather to determine how the deceased had become the deceased, for to think of the slab of flesh before him as
Carl,
Horace reminded himself, would make doing what he had to do difficult. Only the week before, the deceased, in rubber boots and a clean T-shirt – perhaps the T-shirt just now cut to pieces with a pair of angled surgical scissors – had carried his eldest, a boy of six, into Horace’s office in Amity Harbor and pointed out a cut on the boy’s foot, sliced open against the metal strut of an overturned wheelbarrow. Carl had held the boy against the table while Horace put in the sutures. Unlike other fathers to whom this task had fallen, he gave no instructions to his son. He did not allow the boy to move, and the boy cried
only when the first stitch went in and thereafter held his breath. When it was over Carl lifted the boy from the table and held him in the cradling manner one holds an infant. Horace had said that the foot must be elevated and went for a set of crutches. Then, as was his habit, Carl Heine paid for the work in cash, taking neat bills from his wallet. He was not profusely thankful and there was that silence about him, that bearded, gruff, and giant silence, that unwillingness to engage the protocols of island life. A man of his size, Horace thought, must take it as a duty to imply no menace or risk that his neighbors will be wary of him. Yet Carl did little to assuage the natural distrust an ordinary man feels for a man of physical stature. He went about his life deliberately instead, taking no time and making no gestures to suggest to others his harmlessness. Horace remembered seeing him one day flicking his lock blade open and then shutting it against the flank of his leg, flicking and shutting it again and again, but as for whether this was a habit or a threat, a nervous tic or an announcement of his prowess, Horace Whaley couldn’t tell. The man seemed to have no friends. There was no one who could insult him in jest or speak lightly with him about unimportant matters, though on the other hand he was on courteous terms with almost everyone. And furthermore other men admired him because he was powerful and good at his work, because on the sea he was thoroughly competent and even in his rough way elegantly so; still, their admiration was colored by their distrust of his size and his brooding deliberation.

No, Carl Heine was not amiable, but neither was he a bad sort. He had once, before the war, been a boy on the football team, like other schoolboys in most ways: he’d had a large group of friends, he’d worn a letterman’s jacket, he’d spoken when there was no reason to speak, for fun. He had been that way and then the war had come – the war Horace himself had been to. And how to explain? What could he say to others? There was no longer any speaking for the hell of it, no opening one’s mouth just to have it open, and if others would read darkness into his silence, well then, darkness was there, wasn’t it? There’d been
the darkness of the war in Carl Heine, as there was in Horace himself.

But –
the deceased.
He must think of Carl as the deceased, a bag of guts, a sack of parts, and not as the man who had so recently brought his son in; otherwise the job could not be done.

Horace Whaley placed the heel of his right hand against the solar plexus of the dead man. He placed his left hand over it and began to pump in the manner of someone attempting to resuscitate a drowning victim. And as he did so a foam, something like shaving cream though flecked with pink-hued blood from the lungs, mushroomed at the deceased’s mouth and nose.

Horace stopped and inspected this. He leaned down over the deceased man’s face, scrutinizing the foam closely. His gloved hands were still clean, they had touched nothing except the chilled skin of the deceased’s chest, and so he took from beside his instrument tray a pad and pencil and noted for himself the color and texture of this extruded foam that was abundant enough to cover the deceased’s bearded chin and his mustache almost entirely. It was a result, Horace knew, of air, mucus, and seawater all mingled by respiration, which meant the deceased had been alive at submersion. He had not died first and then been cast beneath the waves. Carl Heine had gone in breathing.