Snow Falling on Cedars (3 page)

Abel Martinson, one hand on the launch’s throttle, the other on his knee, told Art that a Port Jensen fisherman, Erik Syvertsen – Erik the younger, he pointed out – had come across the
Susan Marie
adrift off the south side of White Sand Point with her net set and, it appeared, no one on board. It was more than an hour and a half past dawn and the running lights had been left on. Abel had driven to White Sand Point and walked out to the end of the community pier with his binoculars dangling from his neck. Sure enough, the
Susan Marie
lay drifting on the tide well into the bay on an angle north by northwest, he’d found, and so he’d radioed the sheriff.

In fifteen minutes they came abreast of the drifting boat and Abel turned back the throttle. In the calm of the bay their approach went smoothly; Art set the fenders out; and the two of them made fast their mooring lines with a few wraps each around the forward deck cleats. ‘Lights’re
all
on,’ observed Art, one foot on the
Susan Marie’s
gunnel. ‘Every last one of ’em, looks like.’

‘He ain’t here,’ replied Abel.

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said Art.

‘Went over,’ Abel said. ‘I got this bad feeling.’

Art winced at hearing this. ‘Let’s hope not,’ he urged. ‘Don’t say that.’

He made his way just abaft of the cabin, then stood squinting up at the
Susan Marie’s
guys and stays and at the peaks of her stabilizer bars. The red and white mast lights had been left on
all morning; the picking light and the jacklight at the end of the net both shone dully in the early sun. While Art stood there, pondering this, Abel Martinson dragged the hatch cover from the hold and called for him to come over.

‘You got something?’ Art asked.

‘Look here,’ answered Abel.

Together they crouched over the square hold opening, out of which the odor of salmon flew up at them. Abel maneuvered his flashlight beam across a heap of inert, silent fish. ‘Silvers,’ he said. ‘Maybe fifty of ’em.’

‘So he picked his net least once,’ said Art.

‘Looks like it,’ answered Abel.

Men had been known to fall into empty holds before, crack their heads, and pass out even in calm weather. Art had heard of a few such incidents. He looked in at the fish again.

‘What time you figure he put out last night?’

‘Hard to say. Four-thirty? Five?’

‘Where’d he go, you figure?’

‘Probably up North Bank,’ said Abel. ‘Maybe Ship Channel. Or Elliot Head. That’s where the fish been running.’

But Art already knew about these things. San Piedro lived and breathed by the salmon, and the cryptic places where they ran at night were the subject of perpetual conversation. Yet it helped him to hear it aloud just now – it helped him to think more clearly.

The two of them crouched by the hold a moment longer in a shared hiatus from their work. The still heap of salmon troubled Art in a way he could not readily articulate, and so he looked at it wordlessly. Then he rose, his knees creaking, and turned away from the dark hold.

‘Let’s keep looking,’ he suggested.

‘Right,’ said Abel. ‘Could be he’s up in his cabin, maybe. Knocked out one way or t’other.’

The
Susan Marie
was a thirty-foot stern-picker – a standard, well-tended San Piedro gill-netter – with her cabin just abaft of midship. Art ducked through its stern-side entry and stood
to port for a moment. In the middle of the floor – it was the first thing he noticed – a tin coffee cup lay tipped on its side. A marine battery lay just right of the wheel. There was a short bunk made up with a wool blanket to starboard; Abel ran his flashlight across it. The cabin lamp over the ship’s wheel had been left on; a ripple of sunlight, flaring through a window, shimmered on the starboard wall. The scene left Art with the ominous impression of an extreme, too-silent tidiness. A cased sausage hanging from a wire above the binnacle swayed a little as the
Susan Marie
undulated; otherwise, nothing moved. No sound could be heard except now and again a dim, far crackle from the radio set. Art, noting it, began to manipulate the radio dials for no other reason than that he didn’t know what else to do. He was at a loss.

‘This is bad,’ said Abel.

‘Take a look,’ answered Art. ‘I forgot – see if his dinghy’s over the reel.’

Abel Martinson stuck his head out the entry. ‘It’s there, Art,’ he said. ‘Now what?’

For a moment they stared at one another. Then Art, with a sigh, sat down on the edge of Carl Heine’s short bunk.

‘Maybe he crawled in under the decking,’ suggested Abel. ‘Maybe he had some kind of engine trouble, Art.’

‘I’m sitting on top of his engine,’ Art pointed out. “There’s no room for anyone to crawl around down there.’

‘He went over,’ said Abel, shaking his head.

‘Looks like it,’ answered the sheriff.

They glanced at each other, then away again.

‘Maybe somebody took him off,’ suggested Abel. ‘He got hurt, radioed, somebody took him off. That – ’

‘They wouldn’t let the boat drift,’ put in Art. ‘Besides, we’d a heard about it by now.’

‘This is bad,’ repeated Abel Martinson.

Art tucked another stick of Juicy Fruit between his teeth and wished this was not his responsibility. He liked Carl Heine, knew Carl’s family, went to church with them on Sundays.
Carl came from old-time island stock; his grandfather, Bavarian born, had established thirty acres of strawberry fields on prime growing land in Center Valley. His father, too, had been a strawberry farmer before dying of a stroke in ’44. Then Carl’s mother, Etta Heine, had sold all thirty acres to the Jurgensen clan while her son was away at the war. They were hard-toiling, quiet people, the Heines. Most people on San Piedro liked them. Carl, Art recalled, had served as a gunner on the U. S. S.
Canton,
which went down during the invasion of Okinawa. He’d survived the war – other island boys hadn’t – and come home to a gill-netter’s life.

On the sea Carl’s blond hair had gone russet colored. He weighed two hundred and thirty-five pounds, much of it carried in his chest and shoulders. On winter days, picking fish from his net, he wore a wool cap knitted by his wife and an infantryman’s battered field jacket. He spent no time at the San Piedro Tavern or drinking coffee at the San Piedro Cafe. On Sunday mornings he sat with his wife and children in a back pew of the First Hill Lutheran Church, blinking slowly in the pale sanctuary light, a hymnbook open in his large, square hands, a calm expression on his face. Sunday afternoons he squatted on the aft deck of his boat, silently and methodically untangling his gill net or knitting its flaws up patiently. He worked alone. He was courteous but not friendly. He wore rubber boots almost everywhere, like all San Piedro fishermen. His wife, too, came from old island people – the Varigs, Art remembered, hay farmers and shake cutters with a few stump acres on Cattle Point – and her father had passed away not so long ago. Carl had named his boat after his wife, and, in ’48, built a big frame house just west of Amity Harbor, including an apartment for his mother, Etta. But – out of pride, word had it – Etta would not move in with him. She lived in town, a stout, grave woman with a slight Teutonic edge to her speech, over Lottie Opsvig’s apparel shop on Main. Her son called at her door every Sunday afternoon and escorted her to his house for supper. Art had watched them trudge up Old Hill together, Etta with her umbrella turned against the winter
rain, her free hand clutching at the lapels of a coarse winter coat, Carl with his hands curled up in his jacket pockets, his wool cap pulled to his eyebrows. All in all, Art decided, Carl Heine was a good man. He was silent, yes, and grave like his mother, but the war had a part in that, Art realized. Carl rarely laughed, but he did not seem, to Art’s way of thinking, unhappy or dissatisfied. Now his death would land hard on San Piedro; no one would want to fathom its message in a place where so many made their living fishing. The fear of the sea that was always there, simmering beneath the surface of their island lives, would boil up in their hearts again.

‘Well, look,’ said Abel Martinson, leaning in the cabin door while the boat shifted about. ‘Let’s get his net in, Art.’

‘Suppose we better,’ sighed Art. ‘All right. We’d better do it, then. But we’ll do it one step at a time.’

‘He’s got a power takeoff back there,’ Abel Martinson pointed out. ‘You figure he hasn’t run for maybe six hours. And all these lights been drawing off the battery. Better choke it up good, Art.’

Art nodded and then turned the key beside the ship’s wheel. The solenoid kicked in immediately; the engine stuttered once and then began to idle roughly, rattling frantically beneath the floorboards. Art slowly backed the choke off.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Like that?’

‘Guess I was wrong,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘She sounds real good and strong.’

They went out again, Art leading. The
Susan Marie
had veered off nearly perpendicular to the chop and angled, briefly, to starboard. With the thrust of the engine she’d begun to bobble a little, and Art, treading across the aft deck, stumbled forward and grabbed at a stanchion, scraping his palm at the heel of the thumb, while Abel Martinson looked on. He rose again, steadied himself with a foot on the starboard gunnel, and looked out across the water.

The morning light had broadened, gained greater depth, and lay in a clean sheet across the bay, giving it a silver tincture. Not
a boat was in sight except a single canoe traveling parallel to a tree-wreathed shoreline, children in life jackets at the flashing paddles a quarter mile off.
They’re innocent,
thought Art.

‘It’s good she’s come about,’ he said to his deputy. ‘Well need time to get this net in.’

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ answered Abel.

For a moment it occurred to Art to explain certain matters to his deputy. Abel Martinson was twenty-four, the son of an Anacortes brick mason. He had never seen a man brought up in a net before, as Art had, twice. It happened now and then to fishermen – they caught a hand or a sleeve in their net webbing and went over even in calm weather. It was a part of things, part of the fabric of the place, and as sheriff he knew this well. He knew what bringing up the net really meant, and he knew Abel Martinson didn’t.

Now he put his foot on top of the beaver paddle and looked across at Abel. ‘Get over there with the lead line,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll bring her up real slow. You may need to pick some, so be ready.’

Abel Martinson nodded.

Art brought the weight of his foot down. The net shuddered for a moment as the slack went out of it, and then the reel wound it in against the weight of the sea. Surging, and then lowering a note, the engine confronted its work. The two men stood at either end of the gunnel roller, Art with one shoe on the beaver paddle and Abel Martinson staring at the net webbing as it traveled slowly toward the drum. Ten yards out, the float line fell away and hobbled in a seam of white water along the surface of the bay. They were still moving up the tide about north by northwest, but the breeze from the south had shifted just enough to bring them gently to port.

They had picked two dozen salmon from the net, three stray sticks, two dogfish, a long convoluted coil of kelp, and a number of ensnarled jellyfish when Carl Heine’s face showed. For a brief moment Art understood Carl’s face as the sort of illusion men are prone to at sea – or hoped it was this, rather, with a fleeting
desperation – but then as the net reeled in Carl’s bearded throat appeared too and the face completed itself. There was Carl’s face turned up toward the sunlight and the water from Carl’s hair dripped in silver strings to the sea; and now clearly it
was
Carl’s face, his mouth open – Carl’s
face
– and Art pressed harder against the beaver paddle. Up came Carl, hanging by the left buckle of his rubber bib overalls from the gill net he’d made his living picking, his T-shirt, bubbles of seawater coursing under it, pasted to his chest and shoulders. He hung heavily with his legs in the water, a salmon struggling in the net beside him, the skin of his collarbones, just above the highest waves, hued an icy but brilliant pink. He appeared to have been parboiled in the sea.

Abel Martinson vomited. He leaned out over the transom of the boat and retched and cleared his throat and vomited again, this time more violently. ‘All right, Abel,’ Art said. ‘You get ahold of yourself.’

The deputy did not reply. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He breathed heavily and spat into the sea a half-dozen times. Then, after a moment, he dropped his head and pounded his left fist against the transom. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

‘I’ll bring him up slow,’ answered Art. ‘You keep his head back away from the transom, Abel. Get ahold of yourself. Keep his head back and away now.’

But in the end they had to rattle up the lead line and pull Carl fully into the folds of his net. They cupped the net around him like a kind of hammock so that his body was borne by the webbing. In this manner they brought Carl Heine up from the sea – Abel yarding him over the net roller while Art tapped gingerly at the beaver paddle and squinted over the transom, his Juicy Fruit seized between his teeth. They laid him, together, on the afterdeck. In the cold salt water he had stiffened quickly; his right foot had frozen rigidly over his left, and his arms, locked at the shoulders, were fixed in place with the fingers curled. His mouth was open. His eyes were open too, but the pupils had disappeared – Art saw how they’d revolved backward and now
looked inward at his skull. The blood vessels in the whites of his eyes had burst; there were two crimson orbs in his head.

Abel Martinson stared.

Art found that he could not bring forward the least vestige of professionalism. He simply stood by, like his twenty-four-year-old deputy, thinking the thoughts a man thinks at such a time about the ugly inevitability of death. There was a silence to be filled, and Art found himself hard-pressed in the face of it to conduct himself in a manner his deputy could learn from. And so they simply stood looking down at Carl’s corpse, a thing that had silenced both of them.