Snow Falling on Cedars (26 page)

On Saturday evening, March 28, the Amity Harbor High School senior ball – its theme this year was ‘Daffodil Daze’ –
went forward in the high school auditorium. An Anacortes swing band, Men About Town, played upbeat dance tunes exclusively; during an interlude the captain of the baseball team stood in front of the microphone on the bandstand and cheerfully handed out honorary letters to the seven team members departing Monday morning. ‘We don’t have much chance without you,’ he said. ‘Right now we don’t even have enough guys to field a team. But any wins we do get, they’re for you guys who are leaving.’

Evelyn Nearing, the animal lover – she was a widow who lived without a flush toilet or electricity in a cedar cabin on Yearsley Point – took goats, pigs, dogs, and cats from a half-dozen Japanese families. The Odas leased their grocery to the Charles MacPhersons and sold Charles their car and two pickup trucks. Arthur Chambers made arrangements with Nelson Obada to act as a special correspondent for his newspaper and to send reports to San Piedro. Arthur ran four articles on the imminent evacuation in his March 26 edition: ‘Island Japanese Accept Army Mandate to Move,’ ‘Japanese Ladies Praised for Last-Minute PTA Work,’ ‘Evacuation Order Hits Prep Baseball Nine,’ and a ‘Plain Talk’ column called ‘Not Enough Time,’ which roundly condemned the relocation authority for its ‘pointless and merciless speed in exiling our island’s Japanese-Americans. ’The next morning, at seven-thirty, Arthur fielded an anonymous phone call – Jap lovers get their balls cut off,’ a shrill tenor voice had explained. They get their balls stuffed down – ’ Arthur had hung up and gone on typing a story for the next edition of his newspaper: ‘Faithful to Praise Christ Easter Mom.’

On Sunday afternoon, at four o’clock, Hatsue told her mother she was going for a walk; her last walk before leaving, she pointed out. She wanted to sit in the forest, she said, and think about matters for a while. She left as if headed toward Protection Point, then circled through the woods to the South Beach trail and followed the path to the cedar tree. Ishmael, she found, was waiting for her there with his head propped up on
his jacket. ‘This is it,’ she said to him, kneeling for a moment in the entry. ‘Tomorrow morning we leave.’

‘I’ve got something figured out,’ answered Ishmael. ‘When you get where you’re going you write to me. Then when the school newspaper comes out I’ll send you a copy with a letter from me inside it and put Journalism Class for a return address. What do you think of that plan? You think that will be safe?’

‘I wish we didn’t even need a plan,’ said Hatsue. ‘Why do we have to do this?’

‘Write me at my house,’ said Ishmael, ‘but put Kenny Yamashita’s name for the return address – my parents know I’m friendly with Kenny, you can write me at home with no problems.’

‘But what if they want to see Kenny’s letter? What if they ask how he’s doing?’

Ishmael thought about this for a moment. ‘What if they want to see Kenny’s letter? What if you collect maybe half a dozen letters and stick them all in one envelope? One from Kenny, one from you, one from Helen, one from Tom Obata – tell them it’s a request from the school newspaper. I’ll call Kenny tonight and tell him about it so it doesn’t sound suspicious when you bring it up. Collect them all, stick yours in last, send them all to me, I’ll pull yours out and take the rest to school. That should work out perfectly.’

‘You’re like me,’ said Hatsue. ‘We’ve both gotten good at being devious.’

‘I don’t think it’s devious,’ said Ishmael. ‘It’s just what we have to do.’

Hatsue undid the belt on her coat, a herringbone wraparound from the Penney’s in Anacortes. Underneath she wore an austelle dress with a broad embroidered collar. On this day she’d brushed her hair out long and tossed it to flow down the length of her back, unfettered by plaits, braids, or ribbons. Ishmael pressed his nose against it. ‘It smells like cedar,’ he said.

‘So do you,’ said Hatsue. ‘It’s your smell I’ll miss as much as anything.’

They lay on the moss, not touching, in silence, Hatsue with her hair coiled over one shoulder now, Ishmael with his hands in his lap. The March wind came up outside the tree and they heard it tossing the ferns together and the suspiration of the wind joined with the sliding of the water in the little creek just below. The tree muted and softened these sounds, and Hatsue felt herself at the heart of things. This place, this tree, was safe.

They began to kiss and touch each other, but the emptiness she felt pervaded it and she found she couldn’t put her thoughts away. She placed an index finger against Ishmael’s lips and shut her eyes and let her hair fall back against the moss. The smell of the tree was his smell, too, and the smell of the place she was leaving the next day, and she began to understand how she would miss it. The ache of it filled her; she felt sorry for him and sorry for herself and began to cry so quietly that it was only behind her eyes, a tautness in her throat, a tightening of her rib cage. Hatsue pressed against him, crying in this silent way, and breathed in the smell of Ishmael’s throat. She buried her nose beneath his Adam’s apple.

Ishmael moved his hands beneath the hem of her dress, then slowly up her thighs and over her underpants to the curves of her waist, where they stayed. He held her lightly in the curves of her waist and after a while lower, at her hips, and pulled her hard against him. She felt herself lifted, and she felt how hard he was and she pressed back into his hardness. The length of it pushed against his trousers, and his trousers pressed against her underpants and their smooth, wet silk pushed pleasantly. They kissed harder now, and she began to move as if to gather him in. She could feel the hard length of him and the silk of her underpants and his cotton trousers between. Then his hands left her hips and traced the line of her waist and traveled along up under her dress to the clasp on her bra. She arched off the moss to make room for his hands, and he undid the clasp without struggling and pulled the shoulder straps down onto her arms and softly kissed her earlobes. His hands traveled down her body again, coming out from the dress to hold her neck under
her hair, then her shoulder blades. She let her weight rest against his hands and arched her breasts to meet him. Ishmael kissed the front of her austelle dress and then began, from just below the embroidered collar, to undo its eleven buttons. It took time. They breathed into one another, and she took his upper lip between her lips while he worked on the buttons carefully. After a while the front of her dress came open, and he pulled her bra up onto her chest and moved his tongue against her nipples. ‘Let’s get married,’ he whispered. ‘I want to marry you, Hatsue.’

She was far too empty to answer this; there was no way she could speak. Her voice felt buried underneath her crying, and there was no way to bring it to the surface. So instead she ran her fingertips along his spine and against his hips, and then with both hands she felt his hardness through the fabric of his pants and felt how, for a moment, he seemed to stop breathing altogether. She squeezed with both hands and kissed him.

‘Let’s get married,’ he said again, and she understood what he meant. ‘I just … I want to marry you.’

She made no move to stop him when he slid his hand inside her panties. Then he was peeling them down her legs, and she was still crying silently. He was kissing her and pulling his own pants to his knees, the tip of his hardness was against her skin now and his hands were cupped around her face. ‘Just say yes,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell me yes, tell me yes. Say yes to me. Say yes, oh God say yes.’

‘Ishmael,’ she whispered, and in that moment he pushed himself inside of her, all the way in, his hardness filling her entirely, and Hatsue knew with clarity that nothing about it was right. It came as an enormous shock to her, this knowledge, and at the same time it was something she had always known, something until now hidden. She pulled away from him – she pushed him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Ishmael. No, Ishmael. Never.’

He pulled himself out, away. He was a decent boy, a kind boy, she knew that. He pulled his trousers up, buttoned them,
and helped her back into her panties. Hatsue straightened her bra and clasped it again and buttoned up her dress. She put her coat on and then, sitting up, began meticulously to brush the moss from her hair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t right.’

‘It seemed right to me,’ answered Ishmael. ‘It seemed like getting married, like being married, like you and me were married. Like the only kind of wedding we could ever have.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hatsue, picking moss from her hair. ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy.’

‘I am unhappy. I’m miserable. You’re leaving tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m unhappy, too,’ said Hatsue. ‘I’m sick with it, I feel worse than I’ve ever felt. I don’t know anything anymore.’

He walked her home, to the edge of her fields, where they stood for a moment behind a cedar tree. It was nearly dusk and a March stillness had seized everything – the trees, the rotting deadwood, the leafless vine maple, the stones littering the ground. ‘Good-bye,’ said Hatsue. ‘I’ll write.’

‘Don’t go,’ said Ishmael. ‘Stay here.’

When she finally did leave it was well past dusk, and she walked out of the woods and into the open with the intention of not looking back again. But after ten steps she did so despite herself – it was too hard not to turn around. It was in her to say good-bye forever and tell him she would never see him again, to explain to him that she’d chosen to part because in his arms she felt unwhole. But she didn’t say it, that they had been too young, that they had not seen clearly, that they had allowed the forest and the beach to sweep them up, that all of it had been delusion all along, that she had not been who she was. Instead, unblinking, she looked at him, unable to hurt him in the way that was demanded and in some undefined way still loving what he was, his kindness, his seriousness, the goodness in his heart. He stood there, Ishmael, looking at her desperately, and that was the way she would remember him. Twelve years later
she would still see him this way, standing at the edge of the strawberry fields beneath the cover of the silent cedars, a handsome boy with one arm outstretched, beckoning her to come back.

An army truck took Fujiko and her five daughters to the Amity Harbor ferry dock at seven o’clock on Monday morning, where a soldier gave them tags for their suitcases and coats. They waited among their bags in the cold while their
hakujin
neighbors stood staring at them where they were gathered on the dock between the soldiers. Fujiko saw Ilse Severensen there, leaning against the railing with her hands clasped in front of her; she waved at the Imadas as they passed by. Ilse, a Seattle transplant, had for ten years purchased strawberries from Fujiko and spoke to her as if she were a peasant whose role in life was to make island life pleasantly exotic for Ilse’s friends who visited from the city. Her kindness had always been condescending, and she had always paid a bit extra for her berries with the air of doling out charity. And so, on this morning, Fujiko could not meet her eyes or acknowledge her despite the fact that Ilse Severensen had waved and called out her name in a friendly way – Fujiko studied the ground instead; she kept her eyes cast down.

At nine o’clock they were marched on board the
Kehloken
, with the white people gaping at them from the hill above, and Gordon Tanaka’s daughter – she was eight years old – fell on the dock and began to cry. Soon other people were crying, too, and from the hill came the voice of Antonio Dangaran, a Filipino man who had married Eleanor Kitano just two months before. ‘Eleanor!’ he shouted, and when she looked up he let go a bouquet of red roses, which sailed gently toward the water in the wind and landed in the waves below the dock pilings.

They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp – the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the
horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine
P.M.
they were confined to their stalls; at ten
p.m.
they were made to turn out their lights, one bare bulb for each family. The cold in the stalls worked into their bones, and when it rained that night they moved their cots because of the leaks in the roof. The next morning, at six
A.M
., they slogged through mud to the transit camp mess hall and ate canned figs and white bread from pie tins and drank coffee out of tin cups. Through all of it Fujiko maintained her dignity, though she’d felt herself beginning to crack while relieving herself in front of other women. The contortions of her face as she moved her bowels deeply humiliated her. She hung her head as she sat on the toilet, ashamed of the noises her body made. The roof leaked in the latrine, too.

After three days they boarded another train and began a languid crawl toward California. At night the MPs who roamed from car to car came through telling them to pull down their window shades, and they passed the dark hours twisting in their seats and exerting themselves not to complain. The train stopped and started and jolted them toward wakefulness, and there was a constant line at the door to the toilet. Many people had lost control of their bowels altogether as a result of eating in the Puyallup transit camp, including Fujiko. Her rectum burned as she sat in her train seat, her brain felt light and unmoored inside her skull, and a cold sweat beaded on her forehead. Fujiko did her best not to give in to her discomfort by speaking of it to her daughters. She did not want them to know that she was suffering inwardly and needed to lie down comfortably somewhere and sleep for a long time. For when she slept at all it was with her hearing tuned to the bluebottle flies always pestering her and to the crying of the Takami baby, who was three weeks old and had a fever. The wailing of this baby ate at her, and she rode with her fingers stuffed inside her ears, but this did not seem to change things. Her sympathy for the baby and for all of the Takamis began to slip as sleep evaded her, and she secretly began to wish for the baby’s death if such a thing could mean silence. And at the
same time she hated herself for thinking this and fought against it while her anger grew at the fact that the baby could not just be flung from the window so that the rest of them might have some peace. Then, long past the point when she had told herself that she could not endure another moment, the baby would stop its tortured shrieking, Fujiko would calm herself and close her eyes, retreat with enormous relief toward sleep, and then the Takami baby would once again wail and shriek inconsolably.