Snow Falling on Cedars (38 page)

Ishmael stopped in at the Amity Harbor Restaurant and asked Elena Bridges to put two cheese sandwiches in a paper sack for him; he didn’t have time to stay and eat. The restaurant, though half-dark, was full and loud with conversation – people sat in booths and at the counter wrapped in coats and scarves, with bags of groceries underfoot, and turned their glances toward the snowfall beyond the windows. They were glad to have found a place to come in from the storm. Later, when they were done eating, it would be difficult for them to go outside again. Ishmael, waiting, listened to the conversation of two fishermen hunkered down at the counter. They were lapping up tomato soup that had been warmed on the gas stove and speculating on when the power might come on again. One wondered if high tide, with the wind behind it at fifty-five knots, might not swamp the town docks. The other said that a wind out of the northwest would bring down a lot of trees that were used to southerlies, including a white fir he feared mightily that grew on a bluff behind his cabin. He had gone out that morning and tied his boat off to a mooring buoy with tripled lines and through his binoculars could see it from his living room swinging about when the wind gusted down the bay. The first man cursed and said he wished he’d done me same with his boat, which would have to take its chances moored on slack lines with a dozen fenders out, six on either side; it was too tricky in these winds to move it.

At a quarter to one Ishmael stopped in at the office of the Island County Power & Light Company on the corner of Second Street and Main. He was loaded down now with the sack of sandwiches stuffed into one coat pocket and the new heater wick in the other,
the camera dangling around his neck, and the can of kerosene carried in his hand. The report, which had been posted on the door for San Piedro’s citizens to read, listed Piersall Road, Alder Valley Road, South Beach Drive, New Sweden Road, Mill Run Road, Woodhouse Cove Road, and at least a half-dozen others as blocked by fallen trees that had brought down power lines. It projected that power would be restored to Amity Harbor by eight o’clock the following morning and requested patience on the part of citizens. The repair crew had the help of the volunteer fire department and intended to work through the night, it said; all that could be done was being done as speedily as possible.

Ishmael returned to the courthouse. He ate one of his sandwiches in the second-floor corridor, sitting on a bench with his camera beside him and the can of kerosene on the floor. The corridor, he noticed, was slick with the snow that had melted from the shoes of passersby. Those who came down it did so carefully, treading their way like novice ice-skaters – the only light was whatever passed through the windows of offices and from there through the translucent glass panels of doors. The same was true of the public cloakroom – a damp, slippery, dark place full of dripping coats, bags, hats, and gloves. Ishmael left his kerosene and his camera there on the shelf above his coat. He knew no one would steal the camera, and he hoped no one would steal the kerosene. With the power out, the latter, he supposed, was suddenly a possibility.

Judge Fielding’s announcement to the gathered court was terse. The trial would adjourn until eight o’clock the following morning, at which time the power company expected to have the lights on. There were high seas between San Piedro and the mainland that were preventing the Anacortes ferry from running, so it was not possible to house the members of the jury anywhere but where they had been housed the previous evening – the cold, dark rooms of the Amity Harbor Hotel, where they would have to make the best of things, since circumstances were now beyond Judge Fielding’s control and other accommodations were not available. He hoped that the
elements would not divert the jurors from the crucial and difficult matters at hand. They had an obligation, Judge Fielding said, to brave the storm and power outage as best they could, in order to keep their minds fully on the facts of the trial and the testimony of its witnesses. The judge folded his arms in front of him and leaned from the bench so that the members of the jury could see, through the shadows, his shaggy, exhausted face. ‘The thought of a retrial makes me weary,’ he sighed. ‘I think that with a little effort we can avoid one, can’t we? I hope you will pass a relatively pleasant night at the Amity Harbor Hotel, but if you do not, then be brave about it and return tomorrow with your thoughts centered on the case at hand. This is a murder trial, after all,’ the judge reminded them, ‘and snow or no snow, we have got to keep that foremost in our hearts and minds.’

At two thirty-five that afternoon, Ishmael Chambers put his can of kerosene, the heater wick, and two bags of groceries into the trunk of his DeSoto. Tom Torgerson’s high school kid had gotten the chains on his tires, and Ishmael, bending low, checked now to see that they were tightly bound. He scraped ice from the DeSoto’s windows and ran the defroster before inching out into the snow. The trick, he knew, was to stay off the brake and to keep his traveling speed low and steady, backing off the accelerator at the crests of hills and evenly gaining momentum in the dips. On First Hill he heard his chains, felt them biting, and made his way down cautiously, in first gear, leaning forward in his seat. He did not stop when he got to Main but turned immediately left instead, skidding a little, in the direction of Center Valley Road. He was less worried now. The snow had compacted under the wheels of other cars. The roads were passable if you were patient and paid attention. His chief concern was not the snow but other, more careless drivers. It would be important to watch his rearview mirror and to pull over, if that was possible, when he was being gained on.

Ishmael took Lundgren Road out of Amity Harbor because it made a steady ascent, without curves or coils, on a grade more
reasonable than Mill Run’s or Piersall’s, and because it had not been listed on the power company door as blocked by fallen trees. He did see, at George Freeman’s place, a Douglas fir that had toppled over so that its root wad now stood twelve feet high beside George’s mailbox. The top section of the tree had crushed a piece of George’s split-rail cedar fence. George was out there with a chisel-toothed bucksaw, his wool hat perched on top of his balding head, working on it in the storm.

Ishmael pushed on down the back side of Lundgren and turned onto Scatter Springs Drive. In the first curve a Hudson was nosed into a ditch; in the second a Packard Clipper sedan had flipped onto its roof and sat in the brambles beside the road with its undercarriage facing toward the sky. Ishmael stopped and took photographs of it, setting his tripod on the road verge. The straight lines of the alders and maples behind the Packard, blunt and clean against a sea of snow, the hard, grayish quality of the snowstorm light, the forlorn and helpless car itself with its upturned tires gathering soft mounds of white, its passenger compartment nuzzled into the frozen undergrowth so that only the bottom halves of the windows showed – this was a storm scene if ever there was one, and Ishmael shot it with an eye toward its pathetic aspect and because it seemed to him to embody what the storm was about: a world in which a Packard Clipper lost its meaning and became unmoored from whatever purpose it originally had; it had no more practical value now than a ship on the bottom of the sea.

Ishmael was glad to see that the driver’s side window had been rolled down and that no one was still in the car. He thought he recognized it as Charlie Torval’s – Charlie lived on New Sweden Road and made his living building bulkheads and docks and anchoring mooring buoys. He owned a lot of driving equipment, a barge on which a crane had been mounted, and – if Ishmael remembered it right – this rust brown Packard. Perhaps it would be an embarrassment to him if an image of his upturned car appeared in the pages of the
Review.
Ishmael decided to talk to him about it before going ahead with the photograph.

In the third bend in Scatter Springs Drive – a hairpin turn where the road rolled down out of cedar woods and onto the breaks over Center Valley – Ishmael saw three men busying themselves with a snowbound Plymouth half in the road: one jumped up and down on its bumper, another squatted and kept an eye on its spinning tires, a third sat behind the wheel with his door thrown open and worked the accelerator. Ishmael threaded past without stopping and swiveled, skidding – a little gleefully, his stomach leaping – onto Center Valley Road. An odd enthusiasm for this drive and its dangers had been growing in him ever since he’d left First Hill.

The DeSoto, he knew, was a dubious snow car. Ishmael had mounted a cherry wood knob on its steering wheel in order to case the difficulties driving presented to a man with only one arm. He had changed nothing else, though, and didn’t intend to. The DeSoto, strictly an island car for more than a decade, had been purchased by Ishmael’s father fifteen years before, a four-speed with a semiautomatic transmission, hypoid rear axle, and column shift. Arthur had traded in his Ford Model A plus five hundred dollars cash for it in 1939 at a lot in Bellingham. It was a modest vehicle, square and bulky in the manner of a Dodge, so long in front as to look out of balance and with its radiator grille low over the bumper. Ishmael had hung on to it in part from sheer inertia, in part because driving it reminded him of his father. Sitting behind the wheel he felt his father’s contours in the way the seat molded under him.

Center Valley’s strawberry fields lay under nine inches of powder and were as fuzzy through the snowfall as a landscape in a dream, with no discernible hard edges. On Scatter Springs Drive the trees had closed the road in so that the sky was little more than an indistinct, drab ribbon overhead, but down here the dramatic expanse of it was visible, chaotic and fierce. Looking out past the windshield wipers Ishmael saw billions of snowflakes falling in long tangents, driven southward, the sky shrouded and furious. The wind propelled the snow against the sides of barns and homes, and Ishmael could hear it whistling
through the wing window’s rubber molding, which had been loose now for many years: it had been loose back when his father was alive, one of the car’s small idiosyncrasies, part of the reason he was loath to part with it.

He passed Ole Jurgensen’s house, where white wood smoke furled from the chimney and disappeared on the wind – Ole, apparently, was keeping warm. The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto’s long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense – though Ishmael knew that such things happened. He had been to war, after all.

At the intersection of Center Valley Road and South Beach Drive Ishmael spied, ahead of him in the bend, a car that had failed to negotiate the grade as it coiled around a grove of snow-hung cedars. Ishmael recognized it as the Willys station wagon that belonged to Fujiko and Hisao Imada; in fact, Hisao was working with a shovel at its rear right wheel, which had dropped into the roadside drainage ditch.

Hisao Imada was small enough most of the time, but he looked even smaller bundled up in his winter clothes, his hat pulled low and his scarf across his chin so that only his mouth, nose, and eyes showed. Ishmael knew he would not ask for help, in part because San Piedro people never did, in part because such was his character. Ishmael decided to park at the bottom of the grade beside Gordon Ostrom’s mailbox and walk the fifty yards up South Beach Drive, keeping his DeSoto well out of the road while he convinced Hisao Imada to accept a ride from him.

Ishmael had known Hisao a long time. When he was eight years old he’d seen the Japanese man trudging along behind his swaybacked white plow horse: a Japanese man who carried a machete at his belt in order to cut down vine maples. His family lived in two canvas tents while they cleared their newly purchased property. They drew water from a feeder creek and
warmed themselves at a slash pile kept burning by his children – girls in rubber boots, including Hatsue – who dragged branches and brought armfuls of brush to it. Hisao was lean and tough and worked methodically, never altering his pace. He wore a shoulder strap T-shirt, and this, coupled with the sharp-honed weapon at his belt, put Ishmael in mind of the pirates he’d read about in illustrated books his father had brought him from the Amity Harbor Public Library. But all of this was more than twenty years ago now, so that as he approached Hisao Imada in the South Beach Drive, Ishmael saw the man in another light: hapless, small in the storm, numb with the cold and ineffective with his shovel while the trees threatened to come down around him.

Ishmael saw something else, too. On the far side of the car, with her own shovel in hand, Hatsue worked without looking up. She was digging through the snow to the black earth of the cedar woods and throwing spadefuls of it underneath the tires.

Fifteen minutes later the three of them walked down the road toward his DeSoto. The Willys station wagon’s rear right tire had been perforated by a fallen branch still wedged up under both axles. The rear length of exhaust pipe had been crushed, too. The car wasn’t going anywhere – Ishmael could see that – but it took Hisao some time to accept this truth. With his shovel he’d struggled defiantly, as if the tool could indeed change the car’s fate. After ten minutes of polite assistance Ishmael wondered aloud if his DeSoto wasn’t the answer and persisted in this vein for five minutes more before Hisao yielded to it as an unavoidable evil. He opened his car door, put in his shovel, and came out with a bag of groceries and a gallon of kerosene. Hatsue, for her part, went on with her digging, saying nothing and keeping to the far side of the car, and throwing black earth beneath the tires.

At last her father rounded the Willys and spoke to her once in Japanese. She stopped her work and came into the road then, and Ishmael was granted a good look at her. He had spoken to her only the morning before in the second-floor hallway of the
Island County Courthouse, where she’d sat on a bench with her back to an arched window just outside the assessor’s office. Her hair had been woven then, as now, into a black knot against the nape of her neck. She’d told him four times to go away.