Snow Falling on Cedars (21 page)

Kabuo’s father showed him how to hold the wooden sword so that the wrists were flexible and liberated. An hour went by, and then it was time for field work and they put the
bokken
away. Thereafter, each morning, Kabuo practiced his
kendo
strokes – the vertical slash that would split a man’s head down the bridge of the nose, leaving one eye on each side, the skull
cleaved into two parts; the four diagonal strokes – from left and right, upward and downward – that would cleave a man beneath a rib or disjoin an arm deftly; the horizontal stroke swinging in from the left that could sever a man just above the hips; and, finally, the most common of
kendo
strokes, a horizontal thrust a right-handed man could propel with great force against the left side of his enemy’s head.

He practiced these until they were natural to him, part of who he was, the
bokken
an extension of his hands. By the time he was sixteen there was no one any longer at the community center who could defeat him, not even the half-dozen grown men on the island for whom
kendo
was a serious hobby, not even his father, who acknowledged his son’s triumph without shame. It was said by many in the Kendo Club that Zenhichi, despite his years, remained the superior practitioner, the more pure between father and son, but that the boy, Kabuo, had the stronger fighting spirit and a greater willingness to draw on his dark side in order to achieve a final victory.

It was only after he’d killed four Germans that Kabuo saw how right they were, how they had seen deeply into his heart with the clarity of older people. He was a warrior, and this dark ferocity had been passed down in the blood of the Miyamoto family and he himself was fated to carry it into the next generation. The story of his great-grandfather, the samurai madman, was his own story, too, he saw now. Sometimes, when he felt his anger rising because he had lost his family’s strawberry land, he gathered it up into the pit of his gut and stood in the yard with his
kendo
stick rehearsing the black choreography of his art. He saw only darkness after the war, in the world and in his own soul, everywhere but in the smell of strawberries, in the good scent of his wife and of his three children, a boy and two girls, three gifts. He felt he did not deserve for a moment the happiness his family brought to him, so that late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he imagined that he would write them a note explicating his sin completely. He would leave them and go to suffer alone, and his unhappiness would overwhelm his anger. The violence
might at last die out of him and set him free to contemplate his destiny and his next life on the Great Wheel.

Sitting where he sat now, accused of the murder of Carl Heine, it seemed to him he’d found the suffering place he’d fantasized and desired. For Kabuo Miyamoto was suffering in his cell from the fear of his imminent judgment. Perhaps it was now his fate to pay for the lives he had taken in anger. Such was the nature of cause and effect, such was the impermanence of all things. What a mystery life was! Everything was conjoined by mystery and fate, and in his darkened cell he meditated on this and it became increasingly clear to him. Impermanence, cause and effect, suffering, desire, the precious nature of life. Every sentient being straining and pushing at the shell of identity and distinctness. He had the time and the clarity about suffering to embark on the upward path of liberation, which would take him many lives to follow. He would have to gain as much ground as possible and accept that the mountain of his violent sins was too large to climb in this lifetime. He would still be climbing it in the next and the next, and his suffering inevitably would multiply.

Outside the wind blew steadily from the north, driving snow against the courthouse. By noon three inches had settled on the town, a snow so ethereal it could hardly be said to have settled at all; instead it swirled like some icy fog, like the breath of ghosts, up and down Amity Harbor’s streets – powdery dust devils, frosted puffs of ivory cloud, spiraling tendrils of white smoke. By noon the smell of the sea was eviscerated, the sight of it mistily depleted, too; one’s field of vision narrowed in close, went blurry and snowbound, fuzzy and opaque, the sharp scent of frost burned in the nostrils of those who ventured out of doors. The snow flew up from their rubber boots as they struggled, heads down, toward Petersen’s Grocery. When they looked out into the whiteness of the world the wind flung it sharply at their narrowed eyes and foreshortened their view of everything.

lshmael Chambers was out walking aimlessly in the snow, admiring it and remembering. The trial of Kabuo Miyamoto had brought that world back for him.

Inside their cedar tree, for nearly four years, he and Hatsue had held one another with the dreamy contentedness of young lovers. With their coats spread against a cushion of moss they’d stayed as long as they could after dusk and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The tree produced a cedar perfume that permeated their skin and clothes. They would enter, breathe deeply, then lie down and touch each other – the heat of it and the cedar smell, the privacy and the rain outside, the slippery softness of their lips and tongues inspired in them the temporary illusion that the rest of the world had disappeared;
there was nobody and nothing but the two of them. Ishmael pressed himself against Hatsue while they held each other, and Hatsue pressed back, her hips leaving the moss, her legs open beneath her skirt. He felt her breasts and grazed the waistband of her underwear, and she stroked his belly and chest and back. Sometimes when he was walking home through the forest Ishmael would stop in some lonely place and, because he had no choice in the matter, take himself in his hand. He would think about Hatsue while he touched himself. He would shut his eyes and lean his head against a tree; afterward he felt better and worse.

Sometimes at night he would squeeze his eyes shut and imagine how it might be to marry her. It did not seem so farfetched to him that they might move to some other place in the world where this would be possible. He liked to think about being with Hatsue in some place like Switzerland or Italy or France. He gave his whole soul to love; he allowed himself to believe that his feelings for Hatsue had been somehow preordained. He had been meant to meet her on the beach as a child and then to pass his life with her. There was no other way it could be.

Inside their cedar tree they spoke of everything in the intense and overwrought manner of teenagers and he found that she had many moods. There were times when she went cold and silent and he felt her distance from him so completely that it seemed impossible to reach her. Even when he held her it seemed to him there was a place in her heart he couldn’t get to. At times he worked himself up to discussing this, gradually revealing to her how it hurt him to feel there was a part of her love she withheld. Hatsue denied that this was so and explained to him that her emotional reserve was something she couldn’t help. She had been carefully trained by her upbringing, she said, to avoid effusive displays of feeling, but this did not mean her heart was shallow. Her silence, she said, would express something if he would learn to listen to it. Yet his suspicion that he loved more deeply than
she did nevertheless remained with him, and he worried about it perpetually.

Hatsue, he found, had a religious side he had only sensed when they’d been younger. He drew her out in conversation on this matter, and she told him how she tried to keep in mind certain basic articles of her faith. All of life was impermanent, for example – a thing she thought about every day. It was important for a person to act carefully, for every action, Hatsue explained, had consequences for the soul’s future. She confessed to experiencing a moral anguish over meeting him so secretly and deceiving her mother and father. It seemed to her certain that she would suffer from the consequences of it, that no one could maintain such deceit for so long without paying for it somehow. Ishmael argued at length about this, asserting that God could not possibly view their love as something wrong or evil. God, replied Hatsue, was personal; only she could know what God wanted from her. Motive, she added, was very important: what was her motive in concealing from her parents the time she spent with Ishmael? This was the question that worried her most: determining for herself her motive.

Ishmael, at school, feigned detachment in her presence and ignored her in the casual way she gradually taught him to use. Hatsue was a master of the art of false preoccupation; she would pass him in the hallway, in her plaid blouse with its neat tucks, puffed sleeves, and ruffled collar, with a bow in her hair, pleats in her skirt, and books hiked up against her breast, and move on with an apparently artless indifference that in the beginning painfully astonished him. How was it possible for her to feign such coldness without feeling it at the same time? By degrees he learned to enjoy these encounters, though his indifference always appeared more studied than hers and he was always anxious, in a barely concealed way, to meet her gaze. He even said hello to her now and again as one element in his pretense. ‘Hard test,’ he’d say at the end of a class. ‘How’d you do, anyway?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t study enough.’

‘Did you do the essay for Sparling?’

‘I tried. It’s about a page long.’

‘Mine, too. A little longer.’

He would move on, collect his books, and leave the room with Sheridan Knowles or Don Hoyt or Denny Horbach.

At the Strawberry Festival in 1941 he’d watched while the mayor of Amity Harbor had crowned Hatsue Strawberry Princess. The mayor had placed a tiara on her head and hung a sash over her left shoulder. Hatsue and four other girls made a promenade through the crowd and tossed strawberry-flavored candy to the children. Ishmael’s father – owner, publisher, editor, chief reporter, photographer, and printer of the
San Piedro Review –
had a special interest in these proceedings. Year after year they provided a lead story, complete with a portrait of the crowned and comely maiden, candids of picnicking families (‘The Maltons of Protection Point enjoy Saturday’s strawberry festival’), and a beneficent editorial or boilerplate column approving the efforts of local organizers (‘ … Ed Bailey, Lois Dunkirk, and Carl Heine, Sr., without whom none of this would have been possible … ’). Arthur wandered the picnic grounds in bow tie and suspenders, a porkpie hat pulled low over his forehead and the enormous weight of his camera slung from a thick leather thong around his neck. Ishmael stood beside him while he photographed Hatsue-he winked at her when his father put one eye to the camera, and she gave back the faint trace of a smile.

‘Neighbor girl,’ his father said. ‘South Beach ought to be proud.’

He followed his father that afternoon, and they joined in the tug-of-war and the three-legged race. The strawberry floats, festooned with staghorn ferns, zinnias, and forget-me-nots – and with the royal court of the Strawberry Festival draped theatrically under cherry sprays and spruce boughs trained to wire guy lines – passed like ships before the somber eyes of the Strawberry Festival Association, which included the mayor, the chairman of the chamber of commerce, the fire chief, and Arthur Chambers. Again Ishmael stood beside his father while Hatsue,
on board her float, passed by waving to everybody majestically with her crepe paper scepter in hand. Ishmael waved back and laughed.

September came; they were high school seniors. A gray green stillness settled into things, and the summer people left for their city homes again: soft overcast, night fog, low mists in the dips between hills, road mud, vacant beaches, empty clamshells scattered among rocks, silent shops folded in on themselves. By October San Piedro had slipped off its summer reveler’s mask to reveal a torpid, soporific dreamer whose winter bed was made of wet green moss. Cars slumped along the mud and gravel roads at twenty or thirty miles an hour like sluggish beetles beneath the overhanging trees. The Seattle people passed into memory and winter savings accounts; stoves were stoked, fires banked, books taken down, quilts mended. The gutters filled with rust-colored pine needles and the pungent effluvium of alder leaves, and the drainpipes splashed with winter rain.

Hatsue told him, one fall afternoon, about her tutelage under Mrs. Shigemura and the directive she’d been given as a girl of thirteen to marry a boy of her own kind, a Japanese boy from a good family. She repeated that it made her unhappy to deceive the world. Her secret life, which she carried with her in the presence of her parents and sisters at every moment, made her feel she had betrayed them in a way that was nothing less than
evil –
there was no other word for it, she told Ishmael. Outside, the rain dripped from the canopy of cedar boughs down into the under-growth of ivy. Hatsue sat with her cheek against her knees, looking out through the opening in the cedar tree, her hair a single braid down her spine. ‘It isn’t evil,’ Ishmael insisted. ‘How can this be evil? It wouldn’t make any sense for this to be evil. It’s the world that’s evil, Hatsue,’ he added. ‘Don’t pay it any mind.’

‘That isn’t so easy,’ said Hatsue. ‘I lie every day to my family, Ishmael. Sometimes I think I’ll go crazy with it. Sometimes I think this can’t go on.’

Later they lay side by side against the moss, looking up into
the darkened cedar wood with their hands folded behind their heads. ‘This can’t go on,’ whispered Hatsue. ‘Don’t you worry about that?’

‘I know,’ answered Ishmael. ‘You’re right.’

‘What will we do? What’s the answer?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ishmael. ‘There isn’t one, it looks like.’

‘I heard a rumor,’ Hatsue replied. ‘There’s a fisherman who claims to have seen a German submarine just off Amity Harbor. A periscope – he followed it for half a mile. Do you think that can be true?’

‘No,’ said Ishmael. ‘It isn’t true. People will believe anything – they’re scared, I guess. It’s just fear, is all. They’re afraid.’

‘I’m afraid, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘Everybody’s afraid right now.’

‘I’m going to be drafted,’ answered Ishmael. ‘It’s something I just have to face.’