Snow Falling on Cedars (40 page)

Hatsue looked at him a moment longer, then turned toward Eleanor Hill again and opened up her coin purse. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ishmael immediately. ‘I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean what I said.’ But she showed no sign of having heard, and so he put down the crackers and milk and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said a second time, but she still didn’t turn to look at him, and she moved away from his hand. ‘I’m more than sorry. I’m miserable. Do you understand? I don’t mean what I say. You can’t trust me when I speak anymore. I just say things. I – ’

Eleanor Hill was pretending, busily, that Ishmael, a war veteran, wasn’t standing in her presence speaking the words he was speaking. It was what he’d gotten when he spoke about himself, when he’d tried to say what he had to say; there was nothing he could easily explain to anyone, and nobody who wanted to listen. There were other boys who had been to the war, and he found that on occasion he could speak to them, but that didn’t mean anything. ‘I’m sorry, Hatsue,’ he said one more time. ‘I’m sorry about everything. All of it.’

He’d left without buying the milk and crackers. He went home and wrote an apologetic letter, explaining at length that
he was not himself, that he sometimes said what he did not mean, that he wished he had never said
Jap
in front of her, that he would never do so again. The letter sat in his desk drawer for two weeks before he threw it away.

Despite himself he knew where she lived and which car she drove and when he saw her husband, Kabuo Miyamoto, he felt something tighten around his heart. He felt himself grow tight inside, and for a long time he could not sleep at night. He would lie awake until two o’clock in the morning, then turn a light on and attempt to read from a book or magazine. Gradually dawn came and he would not have slept. He would go out to wander the island’s trails in the early morning, at a slow pace. Once, so doing, he came across her. She was down on the beach at Fletcher’s Bay, raking for steamer clams busily. Her baby slept on a blanket beside her, underneath an umbrella. Ishmael had come up the beach deliberately, and squatted beside Hatsue while she raked clams free and dropped them into a bucket. ‘Hatsue,’ he’d pleaded. ‘Can I talk to you?’

‘I’m married,’ she’d said, without looking at him. ‘It isn’t right for us to be alone. It will look bad, Ishmael. People will talk.’

‘There’s no one here,’ answered Ishmael. ‘
I’ve got
to talk to you, Hatsue. You owe me that much, don’t you? Don’t you think you do?’

‘Yes,’ said Hatsue. ‘I do.’

She turned away from him and looked at her baby. The sun had crept up onto the child’s face; Hatsue adjusted the beach umbrella.

‘I’m like a dying person,’ Ishmael said to her. ‘I haven’t been happy for a single moment since the day you left for Manzanar. It’s like carrying a weight around in my gut, a ball of lead or something. Do you know how that feels, Hatsue? Sometimes I think I’m going to go crazy, end up in the hospital in Bellingham. I’m crazy, I don’t sleep, I’m up all night. It never leaves me alone, this feeling. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it. I tell myself this can’t go on, but it goes on anyway. There isn’t anything I can do.‘

Hatsue pushed the hair from her eyes with the back of her left wrist. ‘I’m sorry for you,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t want your unhappiness. I never meant for you to suffer. But I don’t know what I can do for you now. I don’t know how I can help you.‘

‘You’ll think this is crazy,’ Ishmael said. ‘But all I want is to hold you. All I want is just to hold you once and smell your hair, Hatsue. I think after that I’ll be better.’

Hatsue had looked at him, hard, for a long moment, the clamming rake clutched in her hand. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘You know I can’t. I can never touch you, Ishmael. Everything has to be over between us. We both have to put it all behind us and go on, live our lives. There’s no halfway, from my point of view. I’m married, I have a baby, and I can’t let you hold me. So what I want you to do right now is get up and walk away from here and forget about me forever. You have to let go of me, Ishmael.’

‘I know you’re married,’ Ishmael had said. ‘I want to forget about you, I do. I think if you hold me I can start, Hatsue. Hold me once, and I’ll walk away and never speak to you again.’

‘No,’ she’d said. ‘It can’t be. You’ll have to find some other way. I’m not going to hold you, ever.’

‘I’m not talking about love,’ he said. ‘I’m not asking you to try to love me. But just as one human being to another, just because I’m miserable and don’t know where to turn, I just need to be in your arms.’

Hatsue sighed and turned her eyes from his. ‘Go away,’ she’d said. ‘I hurt for you, I honestly do, I feel terrible for your misery, but I’m not going to hold you, Ishmael. You’re going to have to live without holding me. Now get up and leave me alone, please.’

The years had passed, and now her husband was on trial for the murder of a man at sea. It dawned on Ishmael, in the coast guard record room, that perhaps something pertinent to Kabuo’s case could be found right here among these files. And suddenly he put aside his weather records and
began to search the cabinets, and a strange excitement grew in him.

It took Ishmael all of fifteen minutes to find what it was he wanted. It was in a file cabinet to the right of the door, near the front of the third drawer down – records for September 15 and 16 of 1954. No wind, moderate tides, thick fog, balmy. One ship through at 0120 hours, the S.S.
West Corona
, Greek owned, Liberian flag; she’d called in her position from out to the west, headed southbound toward Seattle. The radio transmissions were in shorthand: the
Corona
had put in a call from northwest of sounding board 56, looking for a fix from the lighthouse radio signal. She’d come down the strait plotting soundings as she went, but the pilot would not put his faith in this, and at 0126 hours that morning, in heavy fog, had radioed the lighthouse for assistance. There was interference and the signal was weak, so the radioman on duty had advised the
Corona
’s navigator to take a reading off sounding board 56, which lay on the north shore of Lanheedron Island, and to plot his position accordingly. The
Corona
’s navigator had ordered a whistle blast and timed the interval of the echo. He did his division and his multiplication and relayed his position to the radioman. The
Corona
was out of the lane, he reported, somewhere south of buoy 56, and would have to dogleg to the northeast, bisecting Ship Channel Bank.

Ship Channel Bank.
Where Dale Middleton, Vance Cope, and Leonard George had all seen Carl Heine with his net out on the night he went into the sea. On that night an enormous freighter had plowed right through the fishing grounds, throwing before it a wake large enough to knock even a big man overboard.

At 0142, on pilot’s orders, the
Corona
made its corrective dogleg while the navigator fixed twice more on the sounding board. Later the navigator took three more insurance readings – boards 58, 59, and 60. It seemed to the
Corona
’s radioman that they were safely back in the shipping lane. In the vicinity of White Sand Bay he picked up the lighthouse’s radio beacon and, gaining confidence by the moment, made the big swing to the
south. The
Corona
locked onto the lighthouse radio signal and made headway for Seattle.

Everything was in triplicate – military standard carbon copies. They were signed by the radioman’s assistant, a Seaman Philip Milholland – he’d transcribed the radio transmissions. Ishmael slipped three center pages of Seaman Milholland’s notes free and folded them into quarters. The pages fit neatly into his coat pocket, and he let them sit there, feeling them, composing himself a little. Then he grabbed one of the lanterns and went out.

At the bottom of the stairs, in an anteroom, he found Levant slowly paging through the
Saturday Evening Post
beside a kerosene floor heater. ‘I’m done,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s just one more thing. Is Philip Milholland around somewhere? I want to talk to him.’

Levant shook his head and put the magazine on the floor. ‘You know Milholland?’ he said.

‘Sort of,’ said Ishmael. ‘An acquaintance.’

‘Milholland’s gone. He got transferred out to Cape Flattery, Milholland and Robert Miller. That’s when we moved up.’

‘We?’ asked Ishmael. ‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Smoltz, the two of us, we started in together. Smoltz.’

‘When was that? When did Milholland leave?’

‘That was back in September,’ said Levant. ‘Me and Smoltz started in September 16 as dogwatch radio team.’

‘Dogwatch? Like at night?’

‘Night shift, yes,’ Levant said. ‘Me and Smoltz work the night shift.’

‘So Milholland’s gone,’ said Ishmael. ‘He left September 15?’

‘He couldn’t have left the fifteenth,’ said Levant. ‘’Cause he worked the night of the fifteenth. So he must have left on the sixteenth – that’s it. He and Miller went out to Flattery the sixteenth of September.’

Nobody knows
, thought Ishmael. The men who’d heard the
Corona
’s radio transmissions had gone somewhere else the next
day. They’d done their watch on the night of the fifteenth, slept through the morning of the sixteenth, and then they’d left San Piedro. The transcribed transmissions had gone into a manila folder, and the folder had gone into a file cabinet in a room stuffed full of coast guard records. And who would find them there? They were as good as lost forever, it seemed to Ishmael, and no one knew the truth of the matter: that on the night Carl Heine had drowned, stopping his watch at 1:47, a freighter plowed through Ship Channel Bank at 1:42 – just five minutes earlier – no doubt throwing before it a wall of water big enough to founder a small gillnetting boat and toss even a big man overboard. Or rather one person, he himself, knew this truth. That was the heart of it.

Ishmael’s mother had the woodstove in the kitchen going – he could see the smoke rising thick from the chimney, a ghostly white against the hard-falling snow – and was standing at the sink in her overcoat and scarf when Ishmael passed in front of her window carrying his can of kerosene. A fog of condensation had formed on the inside of the pane, so that her image appeared to him as a kind of silhouette, a vague impression of his mother at the sink, refracted and fragmented, a wash of color. As he passed by, peering through the window mist and snowfall, he saw her hand work with sudden clarity to wipe a circle of the pane dry, and then her eye met his and she waved. Ishmael held up the can of kerosene, still moving steadily toward the kitchen door. His mother had shoveled clear a path to the woodshed, but the snowfall was already covering it. Her shovel stood propped against the fence railing.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, set the kerosene down, and felt the place in his coat pocket where Philip Milholland’s coast guard notes lay folded against his leg. He took his hand out and then returned it and touched the notes again. Then he picked up the kerosene and went in.

His mother had on rubber boots, unbuckled, and had used small finishing nails to tack a wool blanket across the entry to the living room. The light in the kitchen came opaquely through the wet windows; the room was warm, and on the table, neatly arranged, lay a collection of candles, a kerosene lantern, two flashlights, and a box of wooden matches. His mother had set a soup kettle full of snow on the woodstove; it hissed and snapped as Ishmael shut the door behind him. ‘I’ve got some food in the
car,’ he said, setting the can of kerosene against the wall, ‘and a new wick for the heater.’ He put it on the table beside the candles. ‘Did you freeze last night?’ he asked.

‘Not at all,’ replied his mother, ‘I’m really glad to see you, Ishmael. I tried to call, but the phone is out. The lines must all be down.’

‘They are,’ said Ishmael. ‘Everywhere.’

She finished pouring snowmelt water from a second kettle into jugs in the sink, then dried her hands and turned to him.

‘Are people stranded?’ she said.

‘I must have seen fifty cars along the roads between here and town,’ said Ishmael. ‘I saw Charlie Torval’s car upside down in the blackberry stickers up on Scatter Springs. Trees are down all over the place; there’s no power anywhere. They’re trying to get town back up by morning – they’re doing town first, like always. If they do get it lit again you should come stay with me; we’ll shut this place up and move to town, there’s no need to stay out here and freeze to death. I – ’

‘I’m not freezing,’ his mother said, pulling the scarf from her head. ‘In fact, it’s a little
too
hot just now. I just got done shoveling and bringing stove wood around. I’m perfectly comfortable except for my worry about what’s going to happen when the plumbing thaws out. The last thing I need is a burst pipe.’

‘We’ll open the taps,’ answered Ishmael. ‘You shouldn’t have any problems. There’s a pressure valve in the line on the east wall in the cellar – Dad put it in, remember?’ He sat down at the table and cupped the stump of his amputated arm in his hand, then rubbed and squeezed it gently. ‘Thing aches when it gets this cold,’ he said.

‘It’s twelve degrees,’ said his mother. ‘Are those groceries up in your car going to freeze? Maybe we should go for them.’

‘All right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Let’s.’

‘When your arm is ready,’ said his mother.

They brought the two bags of groceries down, as well as Ishmael’s camera. His mother’s flower beds were all covered
over, and the snow was lining up on her holly trees and mulberry and frosting the tops of her rhododendrons. She was, she said, worried about her flowers, whether the less hardy of them would survive the freeze – she’d lost flowers in lesser weather, she pointed out. Ishmael saw where she had worked with the wheelbarrow at bringing cordwood from the shed to the kitchen door; there were splinters around the wood block where she’d cut kindling.

His mother, at fifty-six, was the sort of country widow who lives alone quite capably; he knew that she rose at a quarter after five every morning, made her bed, fed her chickens, showered, dressed, cooked herself a poached egg and toast, steeped strong tea and sipped it at the table, then got immediately at her breakfast dishes and whatever housework needed doing. By nine o’clock, he speculated, there was nothing left she felt obligated to do, and so she read or tended her flowers or drove in to Petersen’s Grocery. It was unclear to him, though, exactly how she passed her time. He knew she read incessantly – Shakespeare, Henry James, Dickens, Thomas Hardy – but he did not think this could fill her days. On Wednesday evenings twice a month she attended a meeting of her book circle, five other women who enjoyed discussing
Benito Cereno, Flowers of Evil, The Importance of Being Earnest
, and
Jane Eyre.
She was on friendly terms with Lillian Taylor, with whom she shared a passion for flowers and for
The Magic Mountain
and
Mrs. Dalloway.
The two of them would stoop or stand in the garden picking the seeds from the feathery spires of astilbes a few weeks past their prime, then sit at a garden table shaking the seeds clean and collecting them in small manila packets. They drank lemon-scented water and ate sandwiches with the crusts cut off at three o’clock in the afternoon. ‘We’re dainty old ladies,’ he heard Lillian exclaim once. ‘We’ll wear painters’ smocks and blue berets and do watercolors next – what do you say to that, Helen? Arc you ready to be an old biddy with her paints?’