Snow Falling on Cedars (25 page)

‘I could say,’ her mother went on, ‘that living among the
hakujin
has tainted you, made your soul impure, Hatsue. This
lack of purity envelops you – I see it every day. You carry it with you always. It is like a mist around your soul, and it haunts your face like a shadow at moments when you do not protect it well. I see it in your eagerness to leave here and walk in the woods in the afternoon. I cannot translate all of this easily, except as the impurity that comes with living each day among the white people. I am not asking you to shun them entirely – this you should not do. You must live in this world, of course you must, and this world is the world of the
hakujin –
you must learn to live in it, you must go to school. But don’t allow living
among
the
hakujin
to become living
intertwined
with them. Your soul will decay. Something fundamental will rot and go sour. You are eighteen, you are grown now – I can’t walk with you where you are going anymore. You walk alone soon, Hatsue. I hope you will carry your purity with you always and remember the truth of who you are.’

Hatsue knew then that her pretense had failed her. For four years now she had taken her ‘walks’ and come home offering fuki tendrils, watercress, crawfish, mushrooms, huckleberries, salmonberries, blackberries – even clusters of blue elderberries for making jam – anything to conceal her purpose. She had gone to dances with other girls and stood in a corner refusing requests, while Ishmael stood among his friends. Her girlfriends had sought to concoct dates for her; she was widely encouraged to make use of her beauty and to emerge from the shell of her apparent shyness. It had even been rumored for a while last spring that she had a secret boyfriend who was extraordinarily handsome, somebody she visited in Anacortes, but that rumor gradually evaporated. Through all of it Hatsue had struggled with the temptation to reveal the truth to her sisters and school friends, because the truth was a burden to carry in silence and she felt the need, like most young girls, to speak about love with other girls. But she never did. She persisted in the pretense that her shy demeanor in the presence of boys prevented her from dating them.

Now her mother seemed to know the truth, or to have some
inkling of it. Her mother’s black hair was bound severely into a gleaming knot pinned to the back of her head. Her hands were folded majestically in her lap – she’d set her husband’s letter on the coffee table – and she was perched with great dignity on the edge of her chair, blinking calmly at her daughter. ‘I know who I am,’ said Hatsue. ‘I know exactly who I am,’ she asserted again, but they were just more words to feel uncertain about; they were just more words to regret. Silence would have been better.

‘You’re fortunate,’ said Fujiko evenly, in Japanese. ‘You speak with great assurance, oldest daughter. The words fly from your mouth.’

Hatsue found herself walking in the woods later that afternoon. It was getting on toward the end of February, a time of only bleak light. In spring great shafts of sun would split the canopy of trees and the Utter fall of the forest would come floating down – twigs, seeds, needles, dust bark, all suspended in the hazy air – but now, in February, the woods felt black and the trees looked sodden and smelled pungently of rot. Hatsue went inland to where the cedars gave way to firs hung with lichen and moss. Everything was familiar and known to her here – the dead and dying cedars full of punky heartwood, the fallen, defeated trees as high as a house, the upturned root wads hung with vine maple, the toadstools, the ivy, the salal, the vanilla leaf, the low wet places full of devil’s club. These were the woods through which she had wandered on her way home from Mrs. Shigemura’s lessons, the woods where she had cultivated the kind of tranquillity Mrs. Shigemura had demanded. She’d sat among sword ferns six feet tall or on a shelf above a vale of trilliums and opened her eyes to the place. As far back as she could recall the content of her days there had always been this silent forest which retained for her its mystery.

There were straight rows of trees – colonnades – growing out of the seedbed of trees that had fallen two hundred years before and sunk and become the earth itself. The forest floor was a map of fallen trees that had lived half a thousand years before
collapsing – a rise here, a dip there, a mound or moldering hillock somewhere – the woods held the bones of trees so old no one living had ever seen them. Hatsue had counted the rings of fallen trees more than six hundred years old. She had seen the deer mouse, the creeping vole, the green-hued antlers of the white-tailed deer decaying underneath a cedar. She knew where lady fern grew and phantom orchids and warted giant puffballs.

Deep among the trees she lay on a fallen log and gazed far up branchless trunks. A late winter wind blew the tops around, inducing in her a momentary vertigo. She admired a Douglas fir’s complicated bark, followed its grooves to the canopy of branches two hundred feet above. The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.

She drew up for herself, in the silence of her mind, a list of the things now cluttering her heart – her father was gone, arrested by the FBI for keeping dynamite in his shed; there was talk going around that before too long everyone with a Japanese face on San Piedro would be sent away until the war was done; she had a
hakujin
boyfriend she could see only in secret, who in a few short months was sure to be drafted and sent to kill the people of her blood. And now, on top of these insoluble things, her mother had only hours before probed into the pit of her soul and discovered her deep uncertainty. Her mother seemed to know about the gulf that separated how she lived from what she was. And what was she anyway? She was of this place and she was not of this place, and though she might desire to be an American it was clear, as her mother said, that she had the face of America’s enemy and would always have such a face. She would never feel at home here among the
hakujin,
and at the same time she loved the woods and fields of home as dearly as anyone could. She had one foot in her parents’ home, and from there it was not far at all to the Japan they had left behind years before. She could feel how this country far across the ocean pulled on her and lived inside her despite her wishes to the contrary; it was something
she could not deny. And at the same time her feet were planted on San Piedro Island, and she wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the cedar trees, and to live simply in this place forever. And then there was Ishmael. He was as much a part of her life as the trees, and he smelled of them and of the clam beaches. And yet he left this hole inside of her. He was not Japanese, and they had met at such a young age, their love had come out of thoughtlessness and impulse, she had fallen into loving him long before she knew herself, though it occurred to her now that she might never know herself, that perhaps no one ever does, that such a thing might not be possible. And she thought she understood what she had long sought to understand, that she concealed her love for Ishmael Chambers not because she was Japanese in her heart but because she could not in truth profess to the world that what she felt for him was love at all.

She felt a sickness overtake her. Her late-afternoon walks had not concealed her meetings with a boy her mother had long had intuition of. Hatsue knew she had not fooled anybody, she had not fooled herself, as it turned out, either, she had never felt completely right. How could they say, she and Ishmael, that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love’s illusion. And yet – on the other hand – what was love if it wasn’t the instinct she felt to be on the moss inside the cedar tree with this boy she had always known? He was the boy of this place, of these woods, these beaches, the boy who smelled like this forest. If identity was geography instead of blood – if living in a place was what really mattered – then Ishmael was part of her, inside of her, as much as anything Japanese. It was, she knew, the simplest kind of love, the purest form, untainted by Mind, which twisted everything, as Mrs. Shigemura, ironically, had preached. No, she told herself, she’d merely followed her instincts, and her instincts did not make the kinds of distinctions having Japanese blood demanded. She didn’t know what else love could be.

One hour later, inside the cedar tree, she brought this matter
up with Ishmael. ‘We’ve known each other forever,’ she said. ‘I can hardly remember not knowing you. It’s hard to remember the days before you. I don’t even know if there were any.’

‘My memory is like that, too,’ said Ishmael. ‘Do you remember that glass box I had? The one we took into the water?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember it.’

‘That must have been ten years ago,’ said Ishmael. ‘Hanging onto that box. Being out there in the ocean – that’s what I remember.’

‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ said Hatsue. ‘A box in the ocean – what kind of a start is that? What, really, did we have in common? We didn’t even know each other.’

‘We knew each other. We’ve always known each other. We’ve never been strangers the way most people are when they meet and start going out.’

‘That’s another thing,’ said Hatsue. ‘We don’t go out – that isn’t the right word – we
can’t
go out, Ishmael. We’re trapped inside this tree.’

‘We’re going to graduate in three months,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I think we should move to Seattle after that. It’ll be different in Seattle – you’ll see.’

‘They’re arresting people like me there, too, just like here, Ishmael. A white and a Japanese – I don’t care if it’s Seattle – we couldn’t just go walking down the street together. Not after Pearl Harbor. You know that. Besides, you’re going to be drafted in June. That’s the way it’s going to be. You won’t be moving to Seattle, either. Let’s be honest with ourselves.’

‘Then what will we do? You tell me. What’s the answer, Hatsue?’

‘There isn’t one,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, Ishmael. There isn’t anything we can do.’

‘We just have to be patient,’ Ishmael replied. ‘This war won’t go on forever.’

They sat in silence inside their tree, Ishmael propped up against one elbow, Hatsue with her head perched against his
ribs and her legs up against the glossy wood. ‘It’s nice in here,’ said Hatsue. ‘It’s always nice in this place.’

‘I love you,’ answered Ishmael. ‘I’ll always love you. I don’t care what else happens. I’m always going to love you.’

‘I know you do,’ said Hatsue. ‘But I’m trying to be realistic about this. It isn’t that simple, is what I’m saying. There are all these other things.’

They don’t really matter,’ said Ishmael. ‘None of those other things make a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we’re safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is.’

He spoke with such confidence and drama about it that Hatsue allowed herself to be convinced by him that nothing was greater than love. She wanted to believe this, and so she indulged herself and tried to be swept up in it. They began to kiss against the moss inside the tree, but the touch of it felt to her false somehow, an attempt to obliterate the truth of the world and to deceive themselves with their lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, drawing away. ‘Everything is complicated. I can’t forget about things.’

He held her in his arms and stroked her hair. They didn’t speak anymore. She felt safe there, as though she were hibernating at the heart of the forest with time suspended and the world frozen – the temporary safety of a quiet way station one must leave in the morning. They fell asleep with their heads against the moss until the light in the tree went from green to gray, and then it was time to go home.

‘Everything is going to work out,’ said Ishmael. ‘You’ll see – it’ll work out.’

‘I don’t see how,’ answered Hatsue.

The problem was resolved for them on March 21 when the U. S. War Relocation Authority announced that islanders of Japanese descent had eight days to prepare to leave.

The Kobayashis – they’d planted a thousand dollars’ worth of rhubarb on five acres in Center Valley – negotiated an
agreement with Torval Rasmussen to tend and harvest their crop. The Masuis weeded their strawberry fields and worked at staking peas in the moonlight; they wanted to leave things in good condition for Michael Burns and his ne’er-do-well brother Patrick, who’d agreed to take care of their farm. The Sumidas decided to sell at cut-rate and close their nursery down; on Thursday and Friday they held all-day sales and watched pruning tools, fertilizer, cedar chairs, birdbaths, garden benches, paper lanterns, fountain cats, tree wrap, caddies, and bonsai trees go out the door with whoever was willing to take them. On Sunday they put padlocks on the greenhouse doors and asked Piers Petersen to keep an eye on things. They gave Piers their flock of laying chickens as well as a pair of mallard ducks.

Len Kato and Johnny Kobashigawa traveled island roads in a three-ton haying truck hauling loads of furniture, packing crates, and appliances to the Japanese Community Center hall. Filled to the rafters with beds, sofas, stoves, refrigerators, chests of drawers, desks, tables, and chairs, the hall was locked and boarded up at six
p.m.
on Sunday evening. Three retired gill-netters – Gillon Crichton, Sam Goodall, and Eric Hoffman, Sr. – were sworn in as deputies by San Piedro’s sheriff for the purpose of guarding its contents.

The War Relocation Authority moved into musty offices at the old W. W. Beason Cannery dock, just outside Amity Harbor. The dock housed not only the Army Transport Command but representatives of the Farm Security Administration and the Federal Employment Service. Kaspars Hinkle, who coached the high school baseball team, stormed into the war relocation office on a late Thursday afternoon – everyone was just then preparing to leave – and slammed his roster on the secretary’s desk: his starting catcher, second baseman, and two outfielders, he said – not to mention his two best pitchers – were going to miss the whole season. Couldn’t this matter be thought through again? None of these kids were spies!