Snow Falling on Cedars (15 page)

Alvin Hooks, the prosecutor – he appeared more nimble than ever in her presence – was keenly interested in Etta’s finances. He
paced in front of her with his left elbow cradled in his right palm neatly and his chin resting on his thumb. Yes, she said, she’d kept the books for the farm. No, it had never been very profitable, but the thirty acres had gotten them by for twenty-five years – better some years than others, she added: depended what the cannery was paying out. They’d cleared their debts by ’29, that helped, but then the Depression came along. The price of berries dropped, the Farmall needed a rod bearing from Anacortes, the sun didn’t shine every year. One spring a touch of night cold ruined the fruit, another you couldn’t get the fields to dry out and the low-hanging berries rotted. One year the fungus got you, another you couldn’t keep the spit bugs down. On top of all that Carl broke his leg in ’36 and spent his time hobbling up and down the rows, chasing after posts or buckets he couldn’t carry on account of his homemade crutches. Then he went and put five acres into raspberries and dumped money into
that
experiment – wire and cedar posts, labor to build trellises – it set them back until he figured how to cull the canes and train them to produce. Another time he tried a new variety – Rainiers – that wouldn’t take because he used too much nitrogen: lots of green, plants high and fluffy, but small hard fruit, a piddling harvest.

Yes, she’d known the defendant, Kabuo Miyamoto, for a good long time, she figured. It was more than twenty years since his family came to pick – the defendant, his two brothers, his two sisters, his mother and father – she remembered them well enough. They were hard workers, kept to themselves mostly. They brought their caddies in mounded up, she marked them off and paid out. They lived in one of the pickers’ cabins at first: she could smell the perch they cooked there. She saw them some evenings sitting under a maple tree eating rice and fish off of tin places. They would have their laundry strung between two saplings in a field of fireweed and dandelions. They had no automobile for getting about, she didn’t know how they did it. In the mornings, early, two or three of their children went down to Center Bay with hand lines and fished from the pier or swam out to the rocks and tried for cod. She’d seen them on the road at
seven in the morning coming home with their strings of fish or with mushrooms, with fern tendrils, butter clams, searun trout if they got lucky. They walked barefoot; they kept their faces down. All of them wore woven straw pickers’ hats.

Oh, yes, she remembered them well. How was it she was supposed to forget such people? She sat in the witness stand staring at Kabuo, and tears pooled in her eyes.

Judge Fielding called for a recess then, seeing that her emotions had overwhelmed her, and Etta followed Ed Soames into the anteroom, where she sat in silence, remembering.

Zenhichi Miyamoto had appeared at her door at the end of his family’s third picking season. Etta had been at the kitchen sink, and from there, looking through the parlor, she saw him watching her. He nodded at her, and she stared at him and then went back to her dishes. Then Carl – her husband – came to the door and spoke to Zenhichi with his pipe between his thumb and forefinger. It was difficult to hear exactly what they were saying so she turned the water off. Etta stood quietly and listened.

In a little while the two men left the doorway and went out into the fields together. From the window over the sink she could see them: they would stop, one of them would point, they would move on. They stopped again, pointed, swept their arms this way and that. Carl lit his pipe and scratched behind his ear, and Zenhichi pointed with his hat to the west, made a sweep, put his hat on his head. The two men walked between the rows some more, made the crest of the rise, and turned west behind some raspberry canes.

When Carl returned she’d put coffee on the table. ‘What did
he
want?’ she said.

‘Land,’ said Carl. ‘Seven acres of it.’

‘Which seven?’

Carl had set his pipe on the table. ‘Due west seven, middle west seven. Leaves plots north and south. I told him better the northwest seven. If I was going to sell. It’s hilly anyway.’

Etta poured coffee for both of them. ‘We ain’t going to sell,’
she said firmly. ‘Not in such times as these, when land is cheap. Not until better times come.’

‘It’s hilly,’ repeated Carl. ‘Hard to work. Good sun, bad drainage. Least productive acres on the property. He knows that. That’s why he asked for it. Knows it’s the only piece I’d think of letting go.’

‘He wanted the
middle
seven,’ Etta pointed out. ‘Figured he might get a good two acres ’thout your noticing it.’

‘Maybe,’ said Carl. ‘Anyway, I noticed.’

They drank their coffee. Carl ate a slice of bread spread with butter and sugar. He ate another. He was always hungry. Feeding him was a challenge. ‘So what did you tell him?’ she asked.

‘Told him I’d think on it,’ answered Carl. ‘I was getting ready to let five of them west acres go to weeds, you know, they’re so choresome to keep the thistle out of.’

‘Don’t sell,’ said Etta. ‘You do, you’ll regret it, Carl.’

‘They’re decent folks,’ answered Carl. ‘You can bet it’d be quiet over there. Nobody carousing or carrying on. Somebody you can work with when you have to. Better than a lot of other people that way.’ He picked up his pipe and fiddled with it; he liked the feel of it in his hand. ‘Anyway, I told him I’d think on it,’ said Carl. ‘Doesn’t mean I have to sell to him, does it? Just means I’m going to think.’

‘Think hard,’ warned Etta. She got up and started in clearing the coffee things. She felt willing to push and pull about this; seven acres was near one-quarter of the property, one-quarter of their holdings. ‘That seven will be worth plenty more later,’ she advised. ‘You’re better off keeping a good hold to it.’

‘Maybe,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll have to think about that, too.’

Etta stood at the sink with her back to him. She did her dishes hard.

‘Sure be nice to have the money, though, wouldn’t it?’ Carl said after a while. ‘There’s things we’ve been needing and – ’

‘If you’re going to get on to
that,’
Etta told him, ‘it won’t do any good by
me.
Don’t try waving new church clothes at me,
Carl. I can get myself clothes when I need them. We’re not such paupers as to sell to Japs, are we? For new clothes? For a pouch of fancy pipe tobacco? I say you’d better keep hold of your land, keep a tight hold, Carl, and a new frilly hat from Lottie’s won’t change that. Besides,’ she added, turning toward him now and wiping her hands on her apron, ‘you think that man’s got a treasure chest or something buried in the fields somewhere? That what you think? You think he’s going to slap it down all at once in front of you or some such like? Do you? He doesn’t have a thing but what we give him for picking and what he gets cutting firewood for Thorsens and those Catholic people – who are they? – on South Beach, by the pier. He doesn’t
have
it, Carl. He’s going to pay up two bits at a time, and you’re going to carry it for pocket change to town. Pipe tobacco aplenty. Magazines to read. Your seven acres is going to be swallowed up by the dime store in Amity Harbor.’

‘Them Catholic people is the Hepplers,’ returned Carl. ‘Miyamoto don’t do any work for them anymore, I don’t think. Last winter he cut cedar bolts for Torgerson, made good money would be my guess. He works hard, Etta. You know that. You’ve seen him in the fields. Don’t have to tell you that. He don’t spend none of it either. Eating sea perch all the time, big sack wholesale rice from Anacortes.’ Carl scratched beneath his arm, massaged his chest with his thick, heavy fingers, picked up his pipe again and fiddled with it. ‘Miyamotos live clean,’ he pressed on. ‘You never been in their cabin? Person could eat off the floor in there, kids sleep on mats, somebody even been scrubbing mildew off the walls. Kids don’t run around their faces all stained. Laundry all strung out neat with clothespins somebody
carved.
Don’t wake up late, don’t holler, don’t complain, don’t ask for nothing – ’

‘Like the Indjuns do,’ put in Etta.

‘Don’t treat the Indians like dirt, neither,’ Carl said. ‘Kind to ’em. Showed ’em to the latrine, showed them new ones the trail to the salt chuck, showed ’em the best place for butter clams. Now,’ said Carl, ‘to me it don’t make one bit of difference which
way it is their eyes slant. I don’t give a damn ’bout that, Etta. People is people, comes down to it. And these are clean-living people. Nothing wrong with them. So the question is, do we want to sell? Because Miyamoto, what he said, he’s got five hundred to put down
now.
Five
hundred.
And the rest we can spread over ten years.’

Etta turned to her sink again. If this wasn’t Carl all over! She thought. Liked to wander in his fields, chat with his pickers, taste his berries, smack his lips, smoke his pipe, go to town for a sack of nails. Put himself on the board for the Strawberry Festival Association, judged the floats, helped barbecue the salmon. Got himself all involved buying up the new fairgrounds, getting folks in Amity Harbor to donate lumber and whatnot for the dance pavilion at West Port Jensen. Joined the Masons and the Odd Fellows both, helped out with the record keeping at the Grange. Stood around evenings up at the pickers’ cabins jawing with the Japs and taking pains with the Indians, watching the women weave sweaters and such, drawing the men out on the subject of the old days before the strawberry farms went in. Carl! Come end of picking season, he’d wander out to some old lonely place they’d told him about and look for arrowheads and bits of old bones, clamshell, and whatnot. Once some old chief went with him; they came back with arrowheads and sat on the porch smoking pipes until two o’clock in the morning. Carl gave the man rum to drink – she could hear them going at it from the bedroom, the both of them getting tipsy. She lay there with her eyes open and her ears tuned to the night and listened to Carl and his chief do their rum, some horse laughs, all the while the chief telling stories about totem poles and canoes and an old potlatch he’d been to where some other chief’s daughter had gotten married and the old chief himself had won a spear-throwing contest and the next day the other chief died suddenly in his sleep, just like that he was dead and his daughter married, and the others went and punched a hole in his canoe and stuck him in it and put it up in a tree for some god-awful reason.

Etta had come to the door at two
A.M.
in her robe and told the chief to get on home, it was late, there were stars to walk by, she didn’t like the smell of rum in her house.

‘Well,’ she said to Carl now, folding her arms in the kitchen doorway, where she knew she would have the last word. ‘You’re the man of the house, you wear the pants, go ahead and sell our property to a Jap and see what comes of it.’

The arrangement, she explained at the behest of Alvin Hooks when the court had been called into session again, included a five-hundred-dollar down payment and an eight-year ‘lease-to-own’ contract. Carl to collect two hundred and fifty dollars every six months, June 30 and December 31, with six and a half percent interest figured annually. Papers to be held by Carl, another set by Zenhichi, a third set for any inspector wanted to see them. The Miyamotos – this was back in ’34, said Etta – couldn’t really own land anyway. They were from Japan, both of them
born
there, and there was this law on the books prevented them. Carl’d kept the title in his own name, held it for them, called it a lease in case they got checked.
She
hadn’t figured it, Carl had – she just kept track, was all. Watched the money come and go, made sure the interest was right.
She
didn’t ever arrange no such thing.

‘One moment,’ Judge Fielding interrupted. He smoothed his robe and blinked at her. ‘Excuse me for interrupting, Mrs. Heine. The court has a few things to say about these matters. Pardon me for interrupting.’

‘All right,’ said Etta.

Judge Fielding nodded at her, then turned his attention toward the jury. ‘We’ll skip all the whispering at the bench,’ he began. ‘Mr. Hooks and I might discuss matters for a bit, but if we did, no doubt it would come down to this – I’m going to have to interrupt the witness in order to explain a point of law.’

He rubbed his eyebrows, then drank some water. He put down his glass and began again. ‘The witness makes reference to a currently defunct statute of the State of Washington which
made it illegal at the time of which she speaks for an alien, a noncitizen, to hold title to real estate.

This same statute furthermore stipulated that no person shall hold title
for
an alien – a noncitizen – in any way, shape, or form. Furthermore, in 1906, I believe it was, the U.S. attorney general ordered all federal courts to deny naturalized citizenship to Japanese aliens. Thus it was impossible, in the strict legal sense, for Japanese immigrants to own land in Washington state. Mrs. Heine has told us that her deceased husband, in joint
conspiracy
with the defendant’s deceased father, entered into an agreement which, shall we say, was predicated on a rather liberal, albeit mutually satisfying, interpretation of these laws. They quite simply made their way
around
them. At any rate, the witness’s husband and the defendant’s father entered into a so-called “lease” agreement that concealed an actual purchase. A substantial down payment changed hands, false papers were drawn up for state inspection. These papers, in fact – along with the others Mrs. Heine has described, the ones her husband and his “buyer” held – were entered, as you may recall, as state’s evidence in this trial. The
perpetuators
of all this, as Mrs. Heine has taken pains to point out, are no longer among us, so their culpability is not at issue. If counsel or witness feel any further explanation is required they may inquire further,’ the judge added. ‘However,’ he said, ‘let it be known that this court is not concerned with any perpetuators of violations against our state’s now – blessedly so – defunct Alien Land Law. Mr. Hooks, you may proceed.’

‘One thing,’ said Etta.