Moloka'i (48 page)

They weren’t alone for long. Within half an hour David and his girlfriend Helen were at her door, inviting her to supper; she gratefully turned the offer around and insisted on making dinner for them, losing herself in the busy routine of cooking. Hokea showed up not long after and Rachel welcomed him too; soon she found herself eating among friends, grateful for their concern and their
aloha
. But there was still a bottomless hole inside her, and she began to think that there always would be.

That night she fell asleep only after much difficulty, with H
ku draped across her legs like a comforter.

At two in the morning she suddenly woke, a shaft of moonlight lighting her bedroom like a beacon. She got up; went to the window; looked out at the house next door, its rolled shades exposing empty rooms that filled her with sudden rage. On impulse she pulled on a bathrobe, hurried out of the house and up the steps to Crossen’s. She pushed open the unlocked door. The living room smelled of stale beer and cigarettes; broken glass littered the floor. Among the glass splinters were red-brown spatters from Felicia’s injuries, but as Rachel turned she saw what she feared most, a dark red bloodstain on the doorjamb. Her husband’s blood. The blood of his life, of her life, dried and wasted. She felt her jaws clench and suddenly she was hurrying back to her cottage, turning on an outside faucet, dragging a quickly uncoiling garden hose back to Crossen’s house in time for the rush of water out the nozzle. She aimed the hard spray at the door, at the jamb, at the floor, blasting away at Kenji’s blood, a stream of water running red through the crack between door and
l
nai
; and when that ugly stain had been erased from the doorjamb she turned the hose on the living room floor, washing away Felicia’s blood, the splintered glass, purging all traces of hate and madness from this house. When the water finally ran clear and the wounds on the wood had disappeared, she calmly shut the front door, took the hose back to her yard, turned off the faucet, and went back to bed; and slept soundly, if not peacefully, the rest of the night.

U

nder martial law, justice in Hawai'i was swift if not always sure. Crimes for which the punishment did not exceed five years in prison were tried in military provost courts by a single judge advocate, often decided within five minutes—and that decision was usually “guilty.” More serious felonies were tried by military commissions, and the members of one such commission arrived in Kalaupapa within days of Crossen’s arrest and imprisonment. Major Ballard, the trial judge advocate (TJA) prosecuting the case, interviewed Rachel promptly and thoroughly; he was sympathetic to Rachel’s loss and kept her abreast of the case’s progress. Crossen was arraigned on, among other charges, two counts of assault with intent to commit bodily harm, against Felicia and Rachel, and one count of manslaughter in Kenji’s death. Already Rachel was worried: she had assumed Crossen would be charged with murder. She didn’t like the way this was starting.

The procedure of a trial before a military commission followed that of a special court-martial, and under those rules Rachel, as a witness, could hear neither the opening statement nor the testimony of other witnesses, at least not until her own testimony was concluded. She could only watch as the five commission members—a colonel, a major, and three lieutenant colonels—entered Kalaupapa’s tiny courthouse alongside Major Ballard and Crossen’s defense advocate. She waited outside closed doors as Ballard gave his opening statement, and when the courtroom doors opened an MP ushered in the constable who had arrested Crossen. His testimony was short. Felicia was next, and she was inside for close to an hour. Rachel knew what she must have been testifying to—Crossen’s many assaults on her, the broken ribs and bruised kidney she suffered in the last attack and how Dr. Sloan told her that any further trauma might have resulted in uncontrolled hemorrhaging and death. It frustrated Rachel that she couldn’t be in the courtroom observing the fate of the man who killed her husband, but soon enough it was her turn to enter.

A subdued Crossen sat at the defendant’s table with his TJA, a white patch over his blind eye and the other scrupulously avoiding Rachel’s gaze as she headed toward the bench. If she was hoping to see him looking nervous and afraid, she was disappointed: he seemed calm, even confident. And as Rachel looked around at the room filled with Army and Navy uniforms, her stomach churned with the realization that Crossen, though discharged, was still among friends here. How eager, she wondered, would they be to convict one of their own?

She put her fears aside as Major Ballard smoothly led her into her testimony. She recounted the many instances she and Kenji had called the police over Crossen’s disturbances, then how they’d been awakened last Thursday night by Crossen’s cursing and Felicia’s cries, which sent them to the house next door. “And when your husband intervened in the defendant’s assault on Miss Hernandez,” Ballard asked, “what did you hear the defendant say?”

“He said, ‘You Japs are good at sneak attacks.’ ”

“And had you heard other racial epithets from him previous to that?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“So even before this night you suspected that the accused harbored hostility toward your husband?”

Crossen’s TJA objected. “Colonel, we’re at war with Imperial Japan. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who
hasn’t
spoken such epithets.”

“Sustained,” said the colonel serving as president of the commission. Rachel was shocked, and silently indignant. Sustained? This man’s bigotry and hate is
sustained?
She tried not to show her anger as they went through the rest of her direct testimony; then Ballard thanked her, reserved the right to redirect, and handed her over to the defense.

Crossen’s TJA began, “So it’s your testimony, Mrs. Utagawa, that you and your husband entered the accused’s home without permission?”

“We were responding,” Rachel said evenly, “to a woman’s screams.”

“Couldn’t you have called the police?”

“We’d tried that.”

“So when legal remedies failed you, you entered his home illegally, and your husband provoked Mr. Crossen with a physical attack?”

“It looked as if Mr. Crossen was already provoked when we got there.”

“Please answer yes or no, Mrs. Utagawa. Did your husband initiate the conflict with the defendant?”

Fuming, Rachel replied, “Yes.”

“And then you yourself assaulted Mr. Crossen, didn’t you—deliberately gouging out his left eye?”

“I certainly did! He was trying to kill my husband.”

The TJA objected to this speculation on his client’s intent and the colonel sustained it. “Please limit yourself to what you know, Mrs. Utagawa,” he directed Rachel.

“You deliberately gouged the defendant’s eye, hoping to inflict serious injury on him, did you not?”

“Hell yes.”

“And when your husband fell and struck the doorjamb—wasn’t that just an accident?”

“He didn’t just stumble into it,” Rachel said, raising her voice. “Mr. Crossen hit him and he fell.”

“But the defendant could hardly have foreseen that, could he? Mr. Utagawa struck the door accidentally?”

Rachel snapped, “Accidentally while the defendant was trying to beat him to death!” This brought another, sterner admonition from the colonel.

Both cross-examination and redirect were long and wearying, and as Rachel left the stand she began to see where this was going. It was Kenji who was being painted as the criminal, not the man who had killed him. She was blindingly angry, but what else could she have expected?

At Ballard’s request Rachel was permitted to stay for the remainder of the proceeding, with the stipulation that she would not be called back for rebuttal testimony that could be tainted by her observation. Ballard didn’t think they’d need her anymore anyway—or did he just not care?

The defense entered into evidence several affidavits by Crossen’s superiors on the
Nevada
, all testifying to his generally fine service record, but called only one witness: Crossen himself. The colonel advised him that he was under no obligation to testify, and Crossen nodded. “Yes sir, I know. But I want to.”

Quietly chagrined on the stand, Crossen admitted that he’d been drinking that night. “I had one too many, I admit that. And something Felicia said got me going. It was wrong, and I’m not proud of what I did to her; but it wasn’t really me, it was the liquor. I don’t hold my liquor well. If that’s a crime then I’m guilty of it.”

Rachel seethed at his politeness, his sobriety.

His TJA said, “And when Mr. Utagawa broke into your house and struck you—”

“I defended myself.”

“And when
Mrs
. Utagawa attacked you?”

“I saw red. Last thing I ever did see out of that eye.”

“Mr. Crossen, did you intend to kill Mr. Utagawa?”

Crossen shook his head emphatically. “No sir, I did not. He broke into my home, threw a punch at me—I fought back. I guess one of my punches sent Mr. Utagawa into the doorjamb, but I didn’t see it—his wife half-blinded me, I couldn’t hardly see what I was doing.”

“So you didn’t plan it that way?”

“No sir; it was an accident. I regret that it happened, but I did
not
intend to kill Mr. Utagawa.”

When it was his turn to cross-examine, Major Ballard asked, “Mr. Crossen, do you hate the Chinese?”

Crossen’s TJA immediately objected, but Ballard pointed out that this question concerned not the Japanese, as was previously ruled on, but another Asiatic race with which America was
not
at war. The colonel overruled the objection and instructed Crossen to answer the question.

“No sir,” Crossen replied. “I don’t hate nobody.”

“Then why did you assault a Chinese prostitute in Honolulu on June 7th of 1940?”

Crossen flushed red. “That was a personal matter. And again, I’d had a little too much to drink.”

“The assault wasn’t racially motivated?”

“No.”

“You just like to beat up women.”

Predictably Crossen’s TJA cried,
“Objection.”

The colonel sighed and sustained it.

“You seem to be an angry man, Mr. Crossen,” Ballard noted.

Crossen shook his head. “That’s not true.”

“You’re not angry because of what’s happened to you?”

“No,” Crossen said.

“Didn’t you once tell Mr. Brady that you—quote—should’ve been on the deck of the
Nevada
instead of in this goddamn shithole settlement—unquote?”

Crossen looked at him a long moment, and when he finally spoke his tone lost its polite affectation; for the first time a bitter melancholy seeped through.

“Yes sir,” he said quietly. “I should’ve died on the
Nevada
when the Japs bombed her. It would’ve been a mercy.”

For an instant Rachel glimpsed the young sailor who’d sat with her on the heights of Kauhak
, and she found it harder to hate him. For an instant.

“Nothing further,” Ballard said.

In his closing argument Crossen’s TJA argued that the considerable amount of alcohol his client had consumed that night had compromised his judgment, and that Kenji’s provocation had precipitated “a sudden heat of passion” that led to “the terrible accident that claimed Mr. Utagawa’s life.” He stressed again Private Crossen’s exemplary service record, omitting mention of the attack on the Chinese prostitute.