Snow Falling on Cedars (11 page)

Sometimes in the afternoons, Hatsue fell asleep on a sofa. While she slept these other women cared for her children, and she didn’t neglect to thank them for it; but in the past she would never have done such a thing, fall asleep, drop away in the middle of a visit while her children ran about recklessly.

She was a woman of thirty-one and still graceful. She had the flat-footed gait of a barefoot peasant, a narrow waist, small breasts. She very often wore men’s khaki pants, a gray cotton sweatshirt, and sandals. It was her habit in the summer to work at picking strawberries in order to bring home extra money. Her hands were stained in the picking season with berry juice. In the fields she wore a straw hat low on her head, a thing she had not done consistently in her youth, so that now around her eyes there were squint lines. Hatsue was a tall woman – five foot eight – but nevertheless able to squat low between the berry rows for quite some time without pain.

Recently she had begun to wear mascara and lipstick. She was not vain, but she understood that she was fading. It was all right with her, at thirty-one, if she faded, for it had come to her slowly over the years, an ever-deepening realization, that there was more to life than the extraordinary beauty she had always been celebrated for. In youth she had been so thoroughly
beautiful that her beauty had been public property. She had been crowned princess of the Strawberry Festival in 1941. When she was thirteen her mother had dressed her in a silk kimono and sent her off to Mrs. Shigemura, who taught young girls to dance
odori
and to serve tea impeccably. Seated before a mirror with Mrs. Shigemura behind her, she had learned that her hair was
utsukushii
and that to cut it would be a form of heresy. It was a river of iridescent onyx – Mrs. Shigemura described it in Japanese – the salient feature of her physical being, as prominent and extraordinary as baldness might have been in another girl of the same age. She had to learn that there were many ways to wear it – that she might tame it with pins or weave it in a thick plait hanging over one breast or knot it intricately at the nape of her neck or sweep it back in such a manner that the broad, smooth planes of her cheeks declared themselves. Mrs. Shigemura lifted Hatsue’s hair in her palms and said its consistency reminded her of mercury and that Hatsue should learn to play her hair lovingly, like a stringed musical instrument or a flute. Then she combed it down Hatsue’s back until it lay opened like a fan and shimmered in unearthly black waves.

Mrs. Shigemura, on Wednesday afternoons, taught Hatsue the intricacies of the tea ceremony as well as calligraphy and scene painting. She showed her how to arrange flowers in a vase and how, for special occasions, to dust her face with rice powder. She insisted that Hatsue must never giggle and must never look at a man directly. In order to keep her complexion immaculate – Hatsue, said Mrs. Shigemura, had skin as smooth as vanilla ice cream – she must take care to stay out of the sun. Mrs. Shigemura taught Hatsue how to sing with composure and how to sit, walk, and stand gracefully. It was this latter that remained of Mrs. Shigemura: Hatsue still moved with a wholeness of being that began in the balls of her feet and reached right through to the top of her head. She was unified and graceful.

Her life had always been strenuous – field work, internment, more field work on top of housework – but during this period
under Mrs. Shigemura’s tutelage she had learned to compose herself in the face of it. It was a matter in part of posture and breathing, but even more so of
soul.
Mrs. Shigemura taught her to seek union with the Greater Life and to imagine herself as a leaf on a great tree: The prospect of death in autumn, she said, was irrelevant next to its happy recognition of its participation in the life of the tree itself. In America, she said, there was fear of death; here life was separate from Being. A Japanese, on the other hand, must see that life embraces death, and when she feels the truth of this she will gain tranquillity.

Mrs. Shigemura taught Hatsue to sit without moving and claimed that she would not mature properly unless she learned to do so for extended periods. Living in America, she said, would make this difficult, because here there was tension and unhappiness. At first Hatsue, who was only thirteen, could not sit still for even thirty seconds. Then later, when she had stilled her body, she found it was her mind that would not be quiet. But gradually her rebellion against tranquillity subsided. Mrs. Shigemura was pleased and claimed that the turbulence of her ego was in the process of being overcome. She told Hatsue that her stillness would serve her well. She would experience harmony of being in the midst of the changes and unrest that life inevitably brings.

But Hatsue feared, walking home over forest trails from Mrs. Shigemura’s, that despite her training she was not becalmed. She dallied and sometimes sat under trees, searched for lady’s slippers or white trilliums to pick, and contemplated her attraction to the world of illusions – her craving for existence and entertainment, for clothes, makeup, dances, movies. It seemed to her that in her external bearing she had succeeded only in deceiving Mrs. Shigemura; inwardly she knew her aspiration for worldly happiness was frighteningly irresistible. Yet the demand that she conceal this inner life was great, and by the time she entered high school she was expert at implying bodily a tranquillity that did not in fact inhabit her. In this way she developed a secret life that disturbed her and that she sought to cast off.

Mrs. Shigemura was open and forthright with Hatsue about matters of a sexual nature. With all the seriousness of a fortune-teller she predicted that white men would desire Hatsue and seek to destroy her virginity. She claimed that white men carried in their hearts a secret lust for pure young Japanese girls. Look at their magazines and moving pictures, Mrs. Shigemura said. Kimonos, sake, rice paper walls, coquettish and demure geishas. White men had their fantasies of a passionate Japan – girls of burnished skin and willowy long legs going barefoot in the wet heat of rice paddies – and this distorted their sex drives. They were dangerous egomaniacs and utterly convinced that Japanese women worshiped them for their pale skin and for their ambitious courage. Stay away from white men, said Mrs. Shigemura, and marry a boy of your own kind whose heart is strong and good.

Her parents had sent Hatsue to Mrs. Shigemura with the intent that the girl would not forget that she was first and foremost Japanese. Her father, a strawberry farmer, had come from Japan, from people who had been pottery makers for as long as anyone in his prefecture could remember. Hatsue’s mother, Fujiko – the daughter of a modest family near Kure, hardworking shopkeepers and rice wholesalers – had come to America as Hisao’s picture bride on board the
Korea Maru.
The marriage was arranged by a
baishakunin
who told the Shibayamas that the potential groom had made a fortune in the new country. But the Shibayamas were owners of a respectable house, and it seemed to them that Fujiko, the daughter in question, could do better than to marry a hired hand in America. Then the
baishakunin,
whose work was to procure brides, showed them twelve acres of prime mountain land, which, he said, the potential bridegroom intended to purchase upon his return from America. There were peach and persimmon trees there, and slender, tall cedars, and a beautiful new home with three rock gardens. And finally, he pointed out, Fujiko
wanted
to go: she was young, nineteen, and wished to see something of the world beyond the sea before settling into her married life.

But she had been sick all the way across the ocean, prostrate, clench bellied, and vomiting. And once in the new country, arriving in Seattle, she found she had married a pauper. Hisao’s fingers were callused and sun blistered, and his clothing smelled powerfully of field sweat. He had nothing, it turned out, but a few dollars and coins, for which he begged Fujiko’s forgiveness. At first they lived in a Beacon Hill boardinghouse where the walls were plastered with pictures from magazines and where the white people on the streets outside treated them with humiliating disdain. Fujiko went to work in a waterfront cookhouse. She, too, sweated beneath her clothes and cut her palms and knuckles working for the
hakujin.

Hatsue was born, the first of five daughters, and the family moved to a Jackson Street boardinghouse. It was owned by people from Tochigiken prefecture who had done astoundingly well for themselves: the women among them wore silk crepe kimonos and scarlet, cork-soled slippers. Jackson Street, though, smelled of rotting fish, cabbages and radishes fermenting in sea brine, sluggish sewers and diesel streetcar fumes. Fujiko cleaned rooms there for three years, until one day Hisao came home with the news that he had procured jobs for them with the National Cannery Company. In May the Imadas boarded a boat for San Piedro, where there was work to be had in the many strawberry fields.

It was hard work, though – Hatsue and her sisters would do a lot of it in their lives – stoop labor performed in the direct sun. But despite that it was infinitely better than Seattle: the neat rows of strawberries flowed up and down the valleys, the wind brought the smell of the sea to their nostrils, and in the morning the gray light evoked something of the Japan Hisao and Fujiko had left behind.

At first they lived in the corner of a bam they shared with an Indian family. Hatsue, at seven, cut ferns in the forest and pruned holly trees beside her mother. Hisao sold perch and made Christmas wreaths. They filled a grain sack with coins and bills, leased seven acres of stumps and vine maple, purchased a plow
horse, and started clearing. Autumn came, the maple leaves curled into fists and dropped away, and the rain ground them into an auburn paste. Hisao burned piles and pried stumps from the earth in the winter of 1931. A house of cedar slats went up slowly. The land was tilled and the first crop planted in time for the pale light of spring.

Hatsue grew up digging clams at South Beach, picking blackberries, collecting mushrooms, and weeding strawberry plants. She was mother, too, to four sisters. When she was ten a neighborhood boy taught her how to swim and offered her the use of his glass-bottomed box so that she could look beneath the surface of the waves. The two of them clung to it, their backs warmed by the Pacific sun, and together watched starfish and rock crabs. The water evaporated against Hatsue’s skin, leaving a residue of salt behind. Finally, one day, the boy kissed her. He asked if he might, and she said nothing either way, and then he leaned across the box and put his lips on hers for no more than a second. She smelled the warm, salty interior of his mouth before this boy pulled away and blinked at her. Then they went on looking through the glass at anemones, sea cucumbers, and tube worms. Hatsue would remember on the day of her wedding that her first kiss had been from this boy, Ishmael Chambers, while they clung to a glass box and floated in the ocean. But when her husband asked if she had kissed anyone before, Hatsue had answered
never.

‘It’s coming down hard,’ she said to him now, lifting her eyes to the courtroom windows. ‘A big snow. Your son’s first.’

Kabuo turned to take in the snowfall, and she noticed the thick sinews in the left side of his neck above where his shirt was buttoned. He had not lost any of his strength in jail; his strength, as she understood it, was an inward matter, something he tuned silently to the conditions of life: in his cell he had composed himself to preserve it.

‘Check the root cellar, Hatsue,’ he said. ‘You don’t want anything to freeze.’

‘I’ve been checking,’ she answered. ‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Good,’ said Kabuo. ‘I knew you would.’

He watched the snow for a silent moment, the needles of it blurring past the leaded panes, then turned again to look at her. ‘Do you remember that snow at Manzanar?’ he said. ‘Whenever it snows I think of that. The drifts and the big wind and the potbellied stove. And the starlight coming through the window.’

It was not the sort of thing he would normally have said to her, these romantic words. But perhaps jail had taught him to release what otherwise he might conceal. ‘That was jail, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘There were good things, but that was jail.’

‘It wasn’t jail,’ Kabuo told her. ‘We thought it was back then because we didn’t know any better. But it wasn’t jail.’

She knew, as he spoke, that this was true. They’d been married at the Manzanar internment camp in a tar paper Buddhist chapel. Her mother had hung woolen army blankets to divide the Imadas’ cramped room in half and had given them, on their wedding night, two cots adjacent to the stove. She had even pushed the cots together to form one bed and smoothed their sheets with her palms. Hatsue’s sisters – all four of them – had stood beside the curtain watching while their mother went about her silent business. Fujiko loaded coal into the potbellied stove and wiped her hands on her apron. She nodded and said they should close the damper when forty-five minutes had gone by. Then she took her daughters out with her and left Hatsue and Kabuo behind.

They stood beside the window in their wedding clothes and kissed, and she smelled his warm neck and throat. Outside snow had drifted against the barracks wall. ‘They’ll hear everything,’ Hatsue whispered.

Kabuo, his hands at her waist, turned and spoke to the curtain. ‘There must be something good on the radio,’ he called. ‘Wouldn’t some music be nice?’

They waited. Kabuo hung his coat on a peg. In a little while a station from Las Vegas came on – country-and-western music. Kabuo sat down and removed his shoes and socks.
He put them under the bed neatly. He unknotted his bow tie.

Hatsue sat down beside him. She looked at the side of his face for a moment, at the scar on his jaw, and then they kissed. ‘I need help with my dress,’ she whispered. ‘It unhooks in the back, Kabuo.’

Kabuo unclasped it for her. He ran his fingers along her spine. She stood and pulled the dress from her shoulders. It dropped to the floor, and she picked it up and hung it on the peg beside his coat.

Hatsue came back to the bed in her bra and slip and sat down beside Kabuo.