Snow Falling on Cedars (35 page)

The Japanese man passed her, turned to his left, and perched on the edge of the bench sofa. His back was straight, his demeanor formal. It was as if he considered making himself comfortable an insult of some kind. With a deliberation that bordered, to her thinking, on something stylized, he folded his hands together and waited at attention. ‘I’ll go after Carl,’ said Susan Marie. ‘It’ll only take me a minute.’

‘Fine,’ said the Japanese man. ‘Thank you.’

She left him there. Carl and the boys were out culling raspberry canes, and she found them down among the southward trellises, Carl cutting free the older stock, the boys filling the wheelbarrow. She stood at the end of the row and called to them. ‘Carl!’ she said. ‘There’s someone to see you. It’s Kabuo Miyamoto. He’s waiting.’

They all turned to look at her, the boys shirtless and small against the walls of raspberries, Carl bent at the knees, his knife in hand. He, a giant with a russet beard, closed the knife, and slipped it into the sheath at his belt. ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Kabuo?’

‘In the living room. He’s waiting.’

‘Tell him I’m coming,’ said Carl. And he swung both boys into the wheelbarrow and planted them on top of the culled canes. ‘Watch out for thorns,’ he said. ‘Here we go.’

She went back to the house and informed the Japanese man that her husband would be with him shortly; he’d been out
among the raspberry canes working. ‘Would you care for coffee?’ she added.

‘No, thank you,’ replied Kabuo Miyamoto.

‘It’s no trouble,’ she urged. ‘Please have some.’

‘It’s very nice of you,’ he said. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘Will you have some, then?’ Susan Marie asked. ‘Carl and I were planning on a cup.’

‘All right, then,’ said Kabuo. Thank you. I will. Thank you.’

He was still seated in the same position, perched on the edge of the worn bench sofa precisely as she’d left him minutes before. Susan Marie found his immobility disquieting and was about to suggest that he sit back and relax, make himself at home, get comfortable, when Carl came through the front door. Kabuo Miyamoto stood up.

‘Hey,’ Carl said. ‘Kabuo.’

‘Carl,’ said the Japanese man.

They came together and locked hands, her husband half a foot taller than his visitor, bearded and heavy through the shoulders and chest and wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt. ‘What do you say we go out,’ he suggested. ‘Take a walk ‘round the property or something? Get out of the house, go outside?’

‘That sounds fine,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I hope this is a good time,’ he added.

Carl turned and looked at Susan Marie. ‘Kabuo and me are going out,’ he said. ‘Be back after a while. Going to walk.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll put coffee on.’

When they were gone she went upstairs to check her baby. She leaned over the side of the crib and smelled the girl’s warm breath and let her nose brush against the girl’s check. From the window she could see her boys in the yard, the tops of their heads as they sat in the grass beside the overturned wheelbarrow. They were tying knots in the culled raspberry canes.

Susan Marie knew Carl had spoken with Ole Jurgensen and had put down earnest money on Ole’s farm; she knew how Carl felt about the old place at Island Center and his passion for
growing strawberries. Still, she didn’t want to leave the house on Mill Run Road with its bronze light, varnished pine boards, and exposed roof rafters in the upstairs room, its view of the sea beyond the raspberry canes. From the window of her baby’s room, looking out across the fields, it was more clear to her than ever that she didn’t want to move. She’d grown up the daughter of a hay farmer and shake cutter, a man who couldn’t get ends to meet; she’d cut thousands of shakes, had hunched over a cedar block with a froe and a mallet, her blond hair hanging in her eyes. She was the second of three daughters and remembered how her younger sister had died of tuberculosis one winter; they’d buried her on Indian Knob Hill in the Lutheran part of the cemetery. The ground had been frozen, and the men had difficulty digging Ellen’s grave. It had taken the better part of a December morning.

She’d met Carl Heine because she’d wanted to meet him. On San Piedro a woman with her looks could do such a thing if she did it with the proper innocence. She’d been twenty and employed at Larsen’s Pharmacy, where she clerked from behind an oak sales counter. One Saturday evening at eleven-thirty, on a hill above the dance pavilion at West Port Jensen, she stood beneath the branches of a cedar tree while Carl ran his hands up under her blouse and caressed her breasts with his fisherman’s fingers. The woods were lit with lanterns, and far below in the bay, through the interstices of trees, she could make out the deck lights of moored pleasure boats. Some of the light came to where they stood so that his face was visible to her. This was their third dance together. By now she knew definitely that she admired his face, which was large, weathered, and durable. She held his face between her hands and looked at it from a distance of six inches. It was an island boy’s face and at the same time mysterious. He’d been to the war, after all.

Carl began to kiss her throat so that Susan Marie had to throw back her head to make room for him – him with his russet beard. She looked up into the branches of the cedars and breathed in their perfume, and he moved his lips over her
collarbones and then down into the space between her breasts. She let him. She remembered clearly how she had let him, how it was not resignation as it had been with two other boys – one near the end of her senior year of high school, the other during the summer before this one – but instead intensely and deeply what she wanted, this bearded fisherman who had been to the war and on occasion, if she pressed him, spoke about it without exaggerating. She stroked the top of his head with her fingers and felt the odd sensation of his beard against her breasts. ‘Carl,’ she whispered, but there was nothing to follow that with, she didn’t know what other words she wanted to speak. After a while he stopped and pressed his hands against the bark of the cedar tree behind her so that his blunt muscled arms passed on either side of her head. He looked at her closely, with an intimacy and seriousness that did not seem to embarrass him – this somber man – then tucked a strand of blond hair in behind her ear. He kissed her and then, still looking into her eyes, unbuttoned two of the buttons on her blouse and kissed her again so that she was caught gently between Carl and the tree. She pushed back against him with the muscles of her pelvis, something she’d never done with a man before. It was an admission of her desire, a revealing of it, and it surprised her to the root of her being.

Yet in another way she was not surprised at all to find herself, at the age of twenty, pressing herself against Carl Heine beneath a cedar above the West Port Jensen dance pavilion. After all, she had brought this about, willed it into being. She had discovered when she was seventeen that she could shape the behavior of men with her behavior and that this ability was founded on her appearance. She was no longer astonished to look in the mirror and find she had developed the breasts and hips of an attractive, grown-up woman. Her astonishment gave way quickly to happiness about it. There was a roundness and firmness to her, a clean, strong roundness, and her heavy blond hair cast a glow over her shoulders when she wore a bathing suit. Her breasts turned just slightly away from one another and brushed against the insides of her arms when she walked. They
were large, and when she got over her embarrassment about them she was able to take pleasure in the fact that boys became unnerved in their presence. Yet Susan Marie never flirted. She did not let on she knew she was attractive. She went out with two boys before meeting Carl and insisted on their politeness and reserve. Susan Marie did not want to be foremost a pair of breasts, but on the other hand she was proud of herself. This pride remained with her into her mid-twenties, until she’d given birth to a second child and her breasts were no longer so important to her as the most visible locus of her sexuality. Two sons had tugged at them with their gums and lips, and her breasts appeared different to her now. She wore a bra with stiff wire along its base in order to lift them up.

Susan Marie knew within three months of marrying Carl that she’d made an excellent choice. In his grave, silent veteran’s way he was dependable and gentle. He was gone nights fishing. He came home in the morning, ate and showered, and then they got into bed together. He kept his hands smooth with a pumice stone, so that even though they were fishermen’s hands they felt good stroking her shoulders. The two of them moved from position to position, trying everything, the sunlight just behind the pulled shade, their bodies moving in morning shadow but plainly visible. She found she had married an attentive man whose pursuit as a lover was to ensure her satisfaction. He read all her movements as signs and when she was close to coming retreated just enough so that her excitement became more desperate. Then it was necessary for her to put him on his back and rock high with her spine arched while he, half-sitting now, his stomach muscles clenched, stroked her breasts and kissed them. She often came this way, in control of her sensations, guiding herself along Carl’s body, and Carl timed matters so as to begin to come while she was and thus carry her back up so that when she was through she did not feel satisfied and was compelled to press on toward a second coming that the pastor at the First Hill Lutheran Church could neither approve nor disapprove of
because – she felt certain of this – he had no idea that it was possible.

Carl would sleep until one o’clock in the afternoon, then eat again and go out to work on the property. He was happy when she told him she was pregnant. He did not stop making love to her until she asked him to stop at the beginning of the ninth month. Sometime after their first son was born Carl bought his own boat. When he named it for her she was pleased and came aboard, and they took the baby out into the bay and west until the island was nothing but a low black line on the horizon. She sat on the short bunk nursing their son while Carl stood at the wheel. She sat there looking at the back of his head, his short, tousled hair, the broad muscles in his back and shoulders. They ate a can of sardines, two pears, a bag of filberts. The baby slept on the bunk, and Susan Marie stood on a pallet board piloting the boat while Carl, behind her, massaged her shoulders and the small of her back and then her buttocks. She gripped the wheel more tightly when he lifted her skirt and slid her under-pants out of the way, and then, leaning forward against the boat’s wheel and reaching back to slide her hands along her husband’s hips, she shut her eyes and rocked.

These were the things Susan Marie remembered. In her estimation of it, their sex life had been at the heart of their marriage. It had permeated everything else between them, a state of affairs she sometimes worried over. If it went bad, would they go bad? Somewhere down the road, when they were older and less passionate, when their desire for one another had staled and worn out – then where would they be? She didn’t even want to think about that or to mull how one day they might have nothing except his silence and his obsession with whatever he was working on – his boat, their house, his gardens.

She could see her husband and Kabuo Miyamoto walking the border of the property. Then they went over a rise out of view, and she leaned downstairs again.

In twenty minutes’ time Carl returned alone, changed into a
fresh T-shirt, and hunkered down on the front porch with his head in his hands.

She came out with a cup of coffee in each hand and sat down next to him, on his right. ‘What did he want?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ answered Carl. ‘We had some things to talk about. Nothing much. No big deal.’

Susan Marie handed him a coffee cup. ‘It’s hot,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

‘All right,’ said Carl. ‘Thanks.’

‘I made him some,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I thought he was going to stay.’

‘It was nothing,’ said Carl. ‘It’s a long story.’

Susan Marie put her arm around his shoulder. ‘What’s the problem?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ sighed Carl. ‘He wants seven of Ole’s acres. He wants me to let Ole sell them to him. Or sell them to him myself. You know, step out of his way.’

‘Seven acres?’

‘The ones his family had. He wants them back. That thing my mother talks about.’

‘That,’ said Susan Marie. ‘I had a feeling it was that when he showed up.
That,’
she added grimly.

Carl said nothing. It was like him at a moment like this not to say very much. He did not like to explain or elaborate, and there was a part of him she couldn’t get to. She attributed this to his war experiences, and for the most part she let it be, this silence of his. But it irritated her at times.

‘What did you tell him?’ she asked now. ‘Did he go off angry, Carl?’

Carl set down his coffee. He leaned his elbows against his knees. ‘Damn,’ he answered. ‘What could I tell him? There’s my mother to think about, you know her, I have to think about that business. If I let him get back in out there … ’ He shrugged and seemed hapless for a moment. She saw the lines the sea wind had etched at the corners of his blue eyes. ‘I told him I’d have to think it over, have a talk with you. Told him
how upset my mother was with him – ’bout his dirty looks and mean faces. He froze when I brought that up. Real polite, but frozen. Wouldn’t look at me no more. Wouldn’t come back up to the house for coffee. I don’t know, I guess it was my fault. We got into a scrap, I guess. I couldn’t
talk
with him, Susan. I just … didn’t … know how to do it. I didn’t know what to say to him … ’

He trailed off. She recognized it as one of his
moments
, thought it over, and held her tongue. It had never been very clear to her if Carl and Kabuo were friends or enemies. This was the first time she had seen them together, and it seemed to her – it was her impression – that there remained some measure of kind feelings between them, that after all this time they held inside at least the memory of their friendship. But there was no way, truly, of telling. It could be that their cordiality and hand-shaking had been nothing but stiff formality, that underneath they hated each other. She knew, anyway, that Carl’s mother had nothing but ill feelings for all the Miyamotos; she sometimes spoke of them at the dinner table on Sundays, rattling on obsessively. Carl generally fell silent when she did, or agreed with her in a perfunctory fashion, afterward dismissing the subject. Susan Marie had grown accustomed to these dismissals and to Carl’s reluctance to speak about the matter. She was accustomed to it, but it pained her, and she wished she could clear it all up right now, while they sat together on the porch.